ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 141

open eyes and (2) setting his hands around my throat & feeling what he is going
to do. Obviously the difference is due to the fact that effects from the throat-
gripping hands go rapidly & almost directly to the essential variables, whereas
the effects from the retina go through much neural network & past many effec-
tors before they reach the E.V.'s. In war, then, as discussed by Clausewitz, we
must assume that the systems have essential variables. Is this true of the cortical
sub-systems? Probably not if we are talking about purely cortical sub-systems. . . .
It would, however, be true of subsystems that have each some of the body's es-
sential variables and that are interacting: [see fig. 4.12]. Now we have something
like two armies struggling. . . . Summary : The art of war—in the cortex.
What should we make of these ruminations? The first point to note is the
extension of Ashby's ontological vision: here warfare and brain processes are
understood on the same basic plan, as the interaction of adaptive entities. But
second, an asymmetry has entered the picture. Warfare, on Ashby's reading of
Clausewitz, is not a process of reciprocal adaptation: in war each party seeks to
remain constant and to oblige the other to adapt. 46 Third, it is evident that in
the early 1950s Ashby's cybernetics evolved in a complex interplay between his
thinking on war and brain science and his struggles with DAMS. And, further-
more, we can get back to the topic of the previous section by throwing psychia-
try back into this heady mix. Figure 4.12, for example, is almost identical to a
circuit diagram that Ashby drew four days later, except that there the central
box was labeled “DAMS.” This latter figure was reproduced above as figure
4.10, which I labeled with a quotation from Ashby, “how DAMS can be made
neurotic.” We thus return very directly to the topics of psychiatry, once more in
the heartland of Ashby's journal. In this phase of his research, then, it is fair to
say that DAMS, adaptation, war, and neurosis were bound up together. Ashby's
thinking on each was productively engaged with his thoughts on the other.
This line of thought on Clausewitz and war never made it explicitly into
Ashby's published writings, and I have not tracked its evolution systematically
through his journal, but it makes a striking reappearance seven years later,
in the entry immediately following the note that he had just been appointed
director of the Burden. On 3 November 1958 he remarked (pp. 6061-2) that
treating a patient is an imposition of the therapist's will on the patient's; it is
therefore a form of war. The basic principles of war are therefore applicable.
They may actually be very useful, for an opposing army is like a patient in that
both are [very complex, inherently stable, etc.]. A basic method much used in
war is to use a maximal concentration of all possible forces on to a small part,