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Adaptation, War, and society
suppose we considered war as a laboratory?
ThoMAs PyNChoN, graViTy'S rainBow
We have been following the development of Ashby's cybernetics as a science
of the brain, but I mentioned at the start the instability of the referent of his
work, and now we can pick up this thread. In the next section I will discuss
Ashby's transformation of cybernetics into a theory of everything, but first I
want to follow some passages in Ashby's journal that constitute more focused
extensions of his cybernetics into the field of the social —speciically, ques-
tions of war and planning. These interest me for two reasons. First, they are
further manifestations of the protean character of cybernetics, spilling over
beyond the brain. Second, Ashby's thoughts on war and planning manifest
diametrically opposed ways—asymmetric and symmetric, respectively—of
imagining adaptation in multiagent systems. This is an important contrast
we need to keep in mind for the rest of the topic. Ashby assimilated psychia-
try to the asymmetric adaptation he associated with warfare, while we will
see that Bateson and Laing took the other route, emphasizing a symmetry
of patient and therapist (and Beer and Pask also elaborated the symmetric
stance). This difference in stance goes to the heart of the difference between
the psychiatry of Ashby and Walter and the “antipsychiatry” of Bateson and
Laing.
Ashby started making notes on DAMS on 11 August 1950, and one of his
lines of thought immediately took on a rather military slant. In the long sec-
ond note he wrote that day he began to struggle with the central and enduring
problem of how DAMS could associate specific patterns of its inner connec-
tions with specific environmental stimuli—something he took to be essential
if DAMS was to accumulate adaptations. Clearly, DAMS would have to ex-
plore its environment and find out about it in order to adapt, and “[when]one
is uncomfortable [there] is nothing other than to get restless. (3) Do not suffer
in silence: start knocking the env[ironmen]t about, & watch what happens
to the discomfort. (4) This is nothing other than 'experimenting': forcing
the environment to reveal itself. (5) Only by starting a war can one force the
revelation of which are friends & which foes. (6) Such a machine does not
solve its problems by thinking, just the opposite: it solves them by forcing
action. . . . So, in war, does one patrol to force the enemy to reveal himself and
his characteristics” (p. 2971).
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