GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 322

continues with a definition of “control” which, like Beer's, differs sharply from
the authoritarian image often associated with cybernetics (76): “ 'Control,' in
this symbolic domain, is broadly equivalent to 'problem solving' but it may
also be read as 'coming to terms with' or 'explaining' or 'relating to an existing
body of experience.' ” Needless to say, that Pask was in a position to relax these
definitions went along with the fact that he was theorizing and exploring hu-
man adaptive behavior, not attempting to build a machine that could mimic
it. Musicolour, for example, was a reactive environment; it did not itself for-
mulate new goals for its own performances.
Pask's opening argument was, then, that “man” is essentially adaptive, that
adaptation is integral to our being, and to back this up a footnote (76n1) cites
the work of “Bartlett . . . Desmond Morris . . . Berlyn . . . Bruner . . . social
psychologists, such as Argyll,” and, making a connection back to chapter 5,
“the psychiatrists. Here, the point is most plainly stated by Bateson, and by
Laing, Phillipson and Lee [1966].” Of course, Bateson and Laing and his col-
leagues were principally concerned with the pathologies of adaptation, while
throughout his career Pask was concerned with the pleasures that go with
it, but it is interesting to see that he placed himself in the same space as the
psychiatrists. 12
Pask's essay then focused on a discussion of “aesthetically potent environ-
ments, that is, . . . environments designed to encourage or foster the type of
interaction which is (by hypothesis) pleasurable” (Pask 1971, 76):
It is clear that an aesthetically potent environment should have the following
attributes:
a It must offer sufficient variety to provide the potentially controllable variety
[in Ashby's terms] required by a man (however, it must not swamp him with
variety—if it did, the environment would be merely unintelligible).
b It must contain forms that a man can learn to interpret at various levels of
abstraction.
c It must provide cues or tacitly stated instructions to guide the learning
process.
d It may, in addition, respond to a man, engage him in conversation and adapt
its characteristics to the prevailing mode of discourse.
Attribute d was the one that most interested Pask, and we can notice that
it introduces a metaphor of “conversation.” An interest in conversation,
understood very generally as any form of reciprocally productive and open-
ended exchange between two or more parties (which might be humans or