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aptation was possible, and he was very clear that this depended not just on how
the brain functioned but also on what the world was like. Thus, he was led to
distinguish between “easy” environments “that consist of a few variables, inde-
pendent of each other,” and “difficult” ones “that contain many variables richly
cross-linked to form a complex whole” (1952, 132). There is a sort of micro-
macro correspondence at issue here. If the world were too lively—if every en-
vironmental variable one acted on had a serious impact on many others—a
sparsely interconnected brain could never get to grips with it. If when I cleaned
my teeth the cat turned into a dog, the rules of mathematics changed and the
planets reversed their courses through the heavens, it would be impossible for
me to grasp the world piecemeal; I would have to come to terms with all of it in
one go, and that would get us back to the ridiculous time scale of
T
1
.
25
In contrast, of course, Ashby pointed out that not all environmental vari-
ables are strongly interconnected with one another, and thus that sequential
adaptation within the brain is, in principle, a viable strategy. In a long chapter
on “Serial Adaptation” he first discusses “an hour in the life of
Paramecium
,”
traveling from a body of water to its surface, where the dynamics are different
(due to surface tension), from bodies of water with normal oxygen concen-
tration to those where the oxygen level is depleted, from cold to warm, from
pure water to nutrient-rich regions, occasionally bumping into stones, and so
on (1952, 180-81). The idea is that each circumstance represents a different
environment to which
Paramecium
can adapt in turn and more or less inde-
pendently. He then discusses the business of learning to drive a car, where one
can try to master steering on a straight road, then the accelerator, then chang-
ing gears (in the days before automatics, at least in Britain)—though he notes
that at the start these tend to be tangled up together, which is why learning to
drive can be difficult (181-82). “A puppy can learn how to catch rabbits only
after it has learned to run; the environment does not allow the two reactions
to be learned in the opposite order. . . . Thus, the learner can proceed in the
order 'Addition, long multiplication, . . .' but not in the order 'Long multipli-
cation, addition, . . .' Our present knowledge of mathematics has in fact been
reached only because the subject contains such stage-by-stage routes” (185).
26
There follows a long description of the steps in training falcons to hunt (186),
and so on.
So, in thinking through what the brain must be like as a mechanism, Ashby
also further elaborated a vision of the world in which an alchemical corre-
spondence held between the two terms: the microcosm (the brain) and the
macrocosm (the world) mirrored and echoed one another inasmuch as both
were sparsely connected systems, not “fully joined,” as Ashby put it. We can
