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But if art is said to imitate nature, so does science. . . . Who will realize when
the bathroom cistern has been filled—someone with a ruler and a button to
press, or the ballcock that floats up to switch the water off?
Nature
is (let it be
clear that)
nature
is in charge.” There is a clear echo here of Beer's work with
biological computers (which, as mentioned earlier, also figure in
Pebbles
):
not only can we not hope to equal nature representationally, but we do not
need to—nature itself performs, acts, is in charge. This idea of nature as ac-
tive as well infused with spirit is the definition of hylozoism, which is why I
describe Beer's ontology as hylozoist. We could even think of Beer's distinctive
approach to biological computing as a form of hylozoist, or
spiritual
, engineer-
ing. Aside from the reference to spirit, we can also continue to recognize in
this emphasis on the endless performativity of matter the basic ontology of
British cybernetics in general.
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And we can make further connections by
looking at Beer's thoughts on mind. In
Pebbles,
he refers to the Buddhist Dia-
mond Sutra: “Think a thought, it says, 'unsupported by sights, sounds, smells,
tastes, touchables, or any objects of the mind.' Can you do that?” (Blohm,
Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 67). The implicit answer is no. Sensations, feelings,
cognition—all emerge from, as part of, the unrepresentable excess of nature,
they do not contain or dominate it. And under the heading “The Knower and
the Known Are One” Beer's text comes to an end with a quotation from
hsin
hsin ming
by Sengstan, the third Zen patriarch (d. 606) (105):
Things are objects because of the mind;
The mind is such because of things.
Understand the relativity of these two
and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.
In this emptiness the two are indistingushable
and each contains in itself the whole world.
I cannot give a fully cybernetic gloss of this quotation; the notion of “empti-
ness” presently eludes me. But one can go quite a way in grasping the Zen
patriarch's sentiment by thinking about Ashby's multihomeostat setups—one
homeostat standing for the brain or mind, the others for its world—or perhaps
even better, of the configuration of DAMS in which a subset of its elements
could be designated the mind and the others that to which the mind adapts.
In the dynamic interplay of mind and world thus instantiated, “objects” and
“mind” do reciprocally condition each other.
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I can sum this section up by saying that there are two perspectives one
might adopt on the relation between cybernetics and Beer's spiritual stance
