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In-Depth Information
6
S T A F F O R D B E E R
F R O M T H E C Y B E R N E T I C F A C T O R Y
T O T A N T R I C Y O G A
Our topic changes character here. Grey Walter and Ross Ashby (and Gregory
Bateson) were first-generation cyberneticians, born in the 1900s and active
until around 1970. Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask were central figures in the
second generation of British cybernetics, twenty years younger and active in
cybernetics until their deaths in 2002 and 1996, respectively. What the two
generations had in common was the defining interest in the adaptive brain.
Where they diverged was in the question of how the brain fitted into their
cybernetics. To a degree, Beer and Pask carried forward the attempt to build
synthetic brains that they inherited from Walter and Ashby, in their work on
biological and chemical computers discussed in this chapter and the next.
Even there, however, the emphasis in Beer and Pask's work was not on under-
standing the brain per se, but in putting these “maverick machines,” as Pask
called them (Pask and Curran 1982, chap. 8), to work in the world. More gen-
erally, psychiatry was not a central concern for either Beer or Pask. Instead,
they found inspiration in ideas about the adaptive brain in their extensions
of cybernetics into new fields: Beer in his work in management and politics
and even in his spiritual life; Pask in his work on training and teaching ma-
chines, and in the arts, entertainment, theater, and architecture. This is what
interests me so much about the cybernetics of both men: the many projects
they engaged in help us extend our range of examples of ontology in action.
What also interests me is that, like Bateson and Laing, and unlike Ashby in his
understanding of clinical psychiatry, Beer and Pask took the symmetric fork
