Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 4.11.
the brain as homeo-
stat. signals from the essential vari-
ables (
E.V.,
top right
) open the chan-
nel
u
to the random source (
V, bottom
right
). reproduced with permission from
w. r. ashby, “the application of cy-
bnernetics to psychiatry,”
Journal of
Mental Science, 100
(1954), 120. (
©
1954
the royal college of psychiatrists.)
pursuit of differences, one should above all look for this channel
U
and its
possible impairments. This idea that the brain contains a special organ to ac-
complish its homeostatic adaptations—a whole new kind of bodily structure
lying outside the classifications of contemporary medical and biological sci-
ence—is a striking one. As far as I know, however, no one took this suggestion
up in anatomical research.
There is more to be said about Ashby's cybernetic psychiatry, but that will
take us in different directions, too, so I should briefly sum up the relation be-
tween his cybernetics and psychiatry as we have reviewed it thus far. First, as I
said of Grey Walter in the previous chapter, psychiatry was a surface of emer-
gence for Ashby's cybernetics: his cybernetics grew out of psychiatry, partly
by a reversal (the normal instead of the pathological brain as the focus of his
hobby) but still remaining in the same space (the normal and the pathological
as two sides of the same coin). There is no doubt that Ashby's hobby repre-
sented a significant detour away from the mental hospital in his thinking; as I
said, his cybernetic research had its own dynamics, which cannot be reduced
to a concern with mental illness. But still, psychiatry remained very much
present in Ashby's cybernetics as a potential surface of return. Especially dur-
ing his years at Barnwood House, 1947-59, the key years in the flowering of
his cybernetics, Ashby was more than ready to see how his cybernetics could
grow back into psychiatry. And we should not see this as some cynical maneu-
ver, simply pandering to the profession that paid him. The appearance of psy-
chiatric concerns in his journal—where, for example, his wife and children
never get a look in, and where his own appointment to the directorship of the
Burden only warranted an interstitial remark—testifies to his own continu-
ing interest in psychiatry. This, I believe, is how we should think of the rela-
tion between cybernetics and psychiatry in Ashby's work: psychiatry as both
a surface of emergence and return for a cybernetics that was, nevertheless, a
scientific detour away from it.
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