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mature cybernetics, where, it turns out, the key question is that of selection . 57
Just as the homeostat might be said to select the right settings of its uniselec-
tors to achieve its goal of homeostasis, so, indeed, should all forms of human
cultural production be considered likewise (210):
To illustrate, suppose that Michelangelo made one million brush strokes in
painting the Sistine Chapel. Suppose also that, being highly skilled, at each
brush stroke he selected one of the two best, so that where the average painter
would have ranged over ten, Michelangelo would have regarded eight as infe-
rior. At each brush stroke he would have been selecting appropriately in the
intensity of one in five. Over the million brush strokes the intensity would have
been one in 5 1,000,000 . The intensity of Michelangelo's selection can be likened
to his picking out one painting from five-raised-to-the-one-millionth-power,
which is a large number of paintings (roughly 1 followed by 699,000 zeroes).
Since this number is approximately the same as 2 3,320,000 , the theorem says that
Michelangelo must have processed at least 3,320,000 “bits” of information, in
the units of information theory, to achieve the results he did. He must have done
so, according to the axiom, because appropriate selections can only be achieved
if enough information is received and processed to make them happen.
Ashby and Walker go on to deduce from this that Michelangelo must have
worked really hard over a long period of time to process the required amount
of information, and they produce a few historical quotations to back this up.
They also extend the same form of analysis to Newton, Gauss, and Einstein
(selecting the right scientific theories or mathematical axioms from an enor-
mous range of possibilities), Picasso (back to painting), Johann Sebastian
Bach (picking just the right notes in a musical composition), and even Adolf
Hitler, who “had many extraordinary successes before 1942 and was often ac-
claimed a genius, especially by the Germans” (207).
What can one say about all this? There is again something profoundly
wrong about the image of “selection” that runs through Ashby's epistemology
and even, before that, his ontology. There is something entirely implausible
in the idea of Michelangelo's picking the right painting from a preexisting set
or Einstein's doing the same in science. My own studies of scientific practice
have never thrown up a single instance that could be adequately described in
those terms (even if there is a branch of mainstream philosophy of science
that does conceive “theory choice” along those lines). What I have found in-
stead are many instances of open-ended, trial-and-error extensions of scientific
culture. Rather than selecting between existing possibilities, scientists (and
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