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Cybernetics as a Theory of everything
From the late 1920s until well into the 1950s Ashby's research aimed to under-
stand the go of the brain. But this project faltered as the fifties went on. As we
have just seen, Ashby's ambition to build a synthetic brain came to grief over
his failure to get DAMS to accumulate adaptations. And, at the same time, as
we saw in the previous chapter, the psychiatric milieu in which Ashby's cyber-
netics had grown started to shrink—as psychoactive drugs began to replace
ECT and whatever, and as the antipsychiatric reaction to materialist psychia-
try began to gain force. Where did those developments leave Ashby? Did he
just give up? Evidently not. His mature cybernetics—that for which he is best
remembered among cyberneticians today—in fact grew out of this smash-up,
in ways that I can sketch out.
We can begin with what I called the “instability of the referent” of Ashby's
cybernetics. Even when his concern was directly with the brain, he very often
found himself thinking and writing about something else. His 1945 publica-
tion that included the bead-and-elastic device, for example, was framed as
a discussion of a “dynamic system” or “machine” defined as “a collection of
parts which (a) alter in time, and (b) interact on one another in some deter-
minate and known manner. Given its state at any one moment it is assumed
we know or can calculate what its state will be an instant later.” Ashby then as-
serted that “consideration seems to show that this is the most general possible
description of a 'machine' . . . not in any way restricted to mechanical systems
with Newtonian dynamics” (1945, 14). Ashby's conception of a “machine”
was, then, from early on exceptionally broad, and correspondingly content-
less, by no means tied to the brain. And the generality of this conception was
itself underwritten by a mathematical formalism he first introduced in his
original 1940 protocybernetic publication, the set of equations describing the
temporal behavior of what he later called a
state-determined system
, namely,
dx
i
/
dt
=
f
i
(
x
1
,
x
2
, . . . ,
x
n
)
for
i
= 1, 2, . . . ,
n
,
where
t
stands for time,
x
i
are the variables characterizing the system, and
f
i
is
some mathematical function of the
x
i
.
Since Ashby subsequently argued that almost all the systems described
by science are state-determined systems, one can begin to see what I mean
by the instability of the referent of his cybernetics: though he was trying to
understand the brain as a machine, from the outset his concept of a machine
