THE ADAPT IVE BRAIN - The Cybernetic Brain - page 6

of the world, people and things, myself in it, and so on. If I know something,
I have my brain (and not my kidneys, say) to thank for it. Of course, I did
not get this image of the brain from nowhere. It is certainly congenial to us
academics, professional knowers, and it (or an equivalent image of mind) has
been stock-in-trade for philosophy for centuries and for philosophy of science
throughout the twentieth century. From the mid-1950s onward this image has
been instantiated and highly elaborated in the branch of computer science
concerned with artificial intelligence (AI). AI—or, at least, the approach to AI
that has become known as GOFAI: good, old-fashioned AI—just is traditional
philosophy of science implemented as a set of computer algorithms. The key
point that needs to be grasped is that the British cyberneticians' image of the
brain was not this representational one.
What else could a brain be, other than our organ of representation? This
question once baffled me, but the cyberneticians (let me take the qualifier
“British” for granted from now on unless needed) had a different answer. As
Ashby put it in 1948, “To some, the critical test of whether a machine is or is
not a 'brain' would be whether it can or cannot 'think.' But to the biologist the
brain is not a thinking machine, it is an acting machine; it gets information
and then it does something about it” (Ashby 1948, 379). The cyberneticians,
then, conceived of the brain as an immediately embodied organ, intrinsically
tied into bodily performances. And beyond that, they understood the brain's
special role to be that of adaptation. The brain is what helps us to get along
and come to terms with, and survive in, situations and environments we have
never encountered before. Undoubtedly, knowledge helps us get along and
adapt to the unknown, and we will have to come back to that, but this simple
contrast (still evident in competing approaches to robotics today) is what we
need for now: the cybernetic brain was not representational but performative ,
as I shall say, and its role in performance was adaptation .
As a preliminary definition, then, we can regard cybernetics as a postwar
science of the adaptive brain, and the question then becomes: What did cyber-
netics look like in practice? Just how did the cyberneticians attack the adap-
tive brain? The answer is, in the first instance, by building electromechanical
devices that were themselves adaptive and which could thus be understood
as perspicuous and suggestive models for understanding the brain itself. The
simplest such model was the servomechanism—an engineering device that
reacts to fluctuations in its environment in such a way as to cancel them out.
A domestic thermostat is a servomechanism; so was the nineteenth-century
steam-engine “governor” which led Wiener to the word “cybernetics.” Work-