Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
likewise make clear that this aspect of Ashby's work had its own dynamic. I
nevertheless want to suggest that this reading is untenable, and that there
were in fact interesting and constitutive relationships between the two
branches of Ashby's oeuvre—that psychiatry was a surface of emergence and
return for Ashby's cybernetics, as it was for Walter's.
We can start by noting that in the 1920s Englishmen took up many hob-
bies, and theorizing the adaptive brain is hardly the first that comes to mind.
If in 1928 Ashby had taken up stamp collecting, there would be nothing more
to say. But it is evident that his professional interests structured his choice of
hobby. If his cybernetics, as discussed so far, was an attempt to understand
the go of the normal brain, then this related to his professional concerns with
mental illness, at minimum, as a direct negation rather than a random es-
cape route. More positively, Ashby's materialism in psychiatry, shared with
Golla and Walter, carried over without negation into his hobby. The hobby
and the professional work were in exactly the same space in this respect. And
we should also remember that in medicine the normal and the pathological
are two sides of the same coin. The pathological is the normal somehow gone
out of whack, and thus, one way to theorize the pathological is first to theorize
the normal. The correlate of Ashby's interest in adaptation, in this respect,
is the idea going back at least to the early twentieth century, that mental ill-
nesses can be a sign of
maladaptation
(Pressman 1998). Simply by virtue of
this reciprocal implication of the normal and the pathological, adaption and
maladaptation, it would have been hard for Ashby to keep the two branches of
his research separate, and he did not.
The most obvious link between the two branches of Ashby's research is that
most of Ashby's early cybernetic publications indeed appeared in psychiatric
journals, often the leading British journal, the
Journal of Mental Science
. And,
as one should expect, all of these papers gestured in one way or another to the
problems of mental illness. Sometimes these gestures were largely rhetorical.
Ashby would begin a paper by noting that mental problems were problems
of maladaptation, from which it followed that we needed to understand ad-
aptation, which would lead straight into a discussion of tilted cubes, chicken
incubators, beads and elastic, or whatever. But sometimes the connections
to psychiatry were substantial. Even Ashby's first cybernetic publication, the
1940 essay on dynamic equilibrium, moves in that direction. Ashby there dis-
cusses the “capsule” which controls the fuel flow in a chicken incubator and
then asks what would happen if we added another feedback circuit to control
the diameter of the capsule. Clearly, the capsule would not be able to do its
job as well as before, and the temperature swings would be wilder. Although
