Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
lated stimulus, at the cost of some forgetting. ? Action of E. C. T. (Corollary
p. 3464)” (pp. 3434-3437).
This is the argument Ashby relied upon above but did not provide in his
1953 essay on the functioning of ECT, but here we find it right in the heartland
of his hobby, engaging directly with his major cybernetic project of the early
1950s, DAMS. And it is revealing to follow this story a little further in his
journal. The reference forward from the last note takes us to a journal entry
dated 12 September 1951, which begins, “From p. 3464, it is now obvious how
we make DAMS neurotic: we simply arrange the envt. so that it affects two
(or more) essl. variables so that it is impossible that both should be satisfied.”
Page 3464 in fact takes us to a discussion of Clausewitz, which I will come
back to in the next section. In this entry, though, Ashby draws a simple circuit
diagram for DAMS as subject to the conflicting demands of adapting to two
different voltages at once (fig. 4.10)
and comments that “both E.V.'s will now
become very noisy,” seeking first to adapt to one voltage and then the other,
“and the system will be seriously upset. It is now very like a Masserman cat
that must either starve or get a blast in the face. The theme should be easily
developed in many ways” (pp. 3462-63). We thus find ourselves explicitly
back in the psychiatric territory I associated in the previous chapter with Grey
Walter and the CORA-equipped tortoise, now with DAMS as a model of neu-
rosis as well as normality and of the functioning of ECT.
40
Ashby's journal entry refers forward to another dated 22 September 1951,
where Ashby remarks that DAMS will simply hunt around forever when posed
an insoluble problem, but that “the animal, however, . . . will obviously have
some inborn reflex, or perhaps several, for adding to its resources. . . . A snail
or tortoise may withdraw into its shell. . . . The dog may perhaps simply bite
savagely. . . . A mere total muscular effort—an epileptic fit—may be the last
resort of some species. . . . My chief point is that the symptoms of the un-
solvable problem, whether of aggression, of apathy, of catatonia, of epilepsy,
etc are likely to be of little interest in their details, their chief importance
clinically being simply as indicators that an unsolvable problem has been set”
(pp. 3479-81). Here Ashby covers all the bases, at once addressing a whole range
of pathological clinical conditions, while dismissing the importance of symp-
toms in favor of his cybernetic analysis of the underlying cause of all of them—
and, in the process, perhaps putting down Grey Walter, for whom epilepsy—“a
mere total muscular effort”—was a major research field in its own right.
Habituation and dehabituation, then, were one link between Ashby's
cybernetics and his psychiatry, and, indeed, it is tempting to think that the
