ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 125

Figure 4.9. the gating mechanism. source: w. r. ashby, Design for a Brain:
The origin of adaptive Behaviour , 2nd ed. (london: chapman & Hall, 1960),
144, fig. 10/9/1. (with kind permission from springer science and business
media.)
selection is responsible for all the selections shown so abundantly in the bio-
logical world. Ultimately, therefore, these ancillary mechanisms [the gating
mechanism and, in fact, some others] are to be attributed to natural selection.
They will, therefore, come to the individual (to our kitten perhaps) either by
the individual's gene-pattern or they develop under an ultrastability of their
own. There is no other source.” Within the general framework of Ashby's ap-
proach to the brain and adaptation, these remarks make sense. We need a gat-
ing mechanism if multiple adaptations are to be achieved in a finite time; we
do adapt; therefore evolution must have equipped us with such a mechanism.
But what Ashby had been after with DAMS was the go of multiple adaptation.
What he wanted was that DAMS should evolve its own gating mechanism in
interacting with its environment, and it is clear that it never did so. To put the
point the other way around, what he had discovered was that the structure of
the brain matters —that, from Ashby's perspective, a key level of organization
had to be built in genetically and could not be achieved by the sort of trial-and-
error self-organization performed by DAMS. 28
Though DAMS failed, Ashby's struggles with it undoubtedly informed his
understanding of complex mechanisms and the subsequent development of
his cybernetics, so I want to pursue these struggles a little further here. 29 First,
I want to emphasize just how damnably complicated these struggles were.
DAMS first appeared in Ashby's journal on 11 August 1950 (pp. 2953-54) with
the words “First, I might as well record my first idea for a new homeostat [and,