GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 334

1965, 962). Pask thus switched gestalt entirely, in favor of an image of mind
as an all-pervading medium, with human minds as inflections within the
overall flow.
This decentered image of mind as all pervasive, and of individual brains as
finite localized nodes, is common to much Eastern philosophy and spiritual-
ity, though Pask did not quite put it like that: “There is little originality in the
view put forward. The McCluhans [ sic ] (both Marshall and Eric in different
style) say that media are extensions of the brain; poets, mystics, and sorcerers
have expressed similar sentiments for ages” (Pask 1977, 40). It bears emphasis,
however, that like the other cyberneticians, Pask did not simply equate cyber-
netics with Buddhist philosophy or whatever. We could say that he added to
Buddhist philosophy an engineering aspect. If Eastern philosophy has been
presented for millenia in the form of a reflection on the mind, this lineage of
Paskian machines running from Musicolour to Thoughtsticker staged much
the same vision in the mundane material world of entertainment and teach-
ing machines. In this sense, we could think of Pask's work, like Beer's, as a sort
of spiritual engineering. 21
Chemical Computers
self-orgaNiziNg systems lie all arouNd us. there are quagmires, the
fish iN the sea, or iNtractable systems like clouds. surely we caN
make these work thiNgs out for us, act as our coNtrol mechaNisms, or
PerhaPs most imPortaNt of all, we caN couPle these seemiNgly uNcoN-
trollable eNtities together so that they caN coNtrol each other. why
Not, for examPle, couPle the traffic chaos iN chicago to the traffic
chaos of New york iN order to obtaiN aN accePtably self-orgaNiziNg
whole? why Not associate iNdividual braiNs to achieve a grouP
iNtelligeNce?
Gordon Pask, “the Natural history of Networks” (1960b, 258)
Much of Pask's cybernetics grew straight out of Musicolour: the trajectory
that ran through the trainers and educational machines just discussed and the
work in the arts, theater, and architecture discussed later in this chapter. But
in the 1950s and early 1960s there was another aspect to his cybernetics that
was not so closely tied to Musicolour and that I want to examine now. 22 This
was the work on “biological computers” already mentioned in the previous