ROSS ASHBY - The Cybernetic Brain - page 147

life on earth must thus not be seen as something remarkable. On the contrary,
it was inevitable” (233)—foreshadowing the sentiments of Stuart Kauffman's
topic At Home in the Universe (1995) four decades in advance. Ashby's single
venture into the field of economics is also relevant. In 1945, the third of his
early cybernetic publications was a short letter to the journal Nature , entitled
“Effect of Controls on Stability” (Ashby 1945b). There he recycled his chicken-
incubator argument about “stabilizing the stabilizer” as a mathematical
analysis of the price controls which the new Labour government was widely
expected to impose, showing that they might lead to the opposite result from
that intended, namely a destabilization rather than stabilization of the Brit-
ish economy. 48 This reminds us that, as we have just seen, in his journal he
was also happy to extend his analysis of the multistable system to both social
planning and warfare.
Almost without intending it, then, in the course of his research into nor-
mal and pathological brains, Ashby spun off a version of cybernetics as a
supremely general and protean science, with exemplifications that cut right
across the disciplinary map—in a certain kind of mathematics, engineering,
chemistry, evolutionary biology, economics, planning, and military science
(if one calls it that), as well as brain science and psychiatry. And as obstacles
were encountered in his specifically brain-oriented work, the brain lost its
leading position on Ashby's agenda and he turned more and more toward the
development of cybernetics as a freestanding general science. This was the
conception that he laid out in his second topic, An Introduction to Cybernetics ,
in 1956, and which he and his students continued to elaborate in his Illinois
years. 49 I am not going to go in any detail into the contents of Introduction or
of the work that grew out of it. The thrust of this work was formal (in con-
trast to the materiality of the homeostat and DAMS), and to follow it would
take us away from the concerns of this topic. I will mention some speciic
aspects of Ashby's later work in the following sections, but here I need to
say a few words specifically about An Introduction to Cybernetics , partly out
of respect for its author and partly because it leads into matters discussed in
later chapters. 50
An Introduction to Cybernetics presents itself as a textbook, probably the
first and perhaps the last introductory textbook on cybernetics to be written.
It aims to present the “basic ideas of cybernetics,” up to and including “feed-
back, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, [and] noise”
(Ashby 1956, v). Some of the strangeness of Ashby's rhetoric remains in it.
Repeatedly and from the very start, he insists that he is writing for “workers in
the biological sciences—physiologists, psychologists, sociologists” (1960, v)