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A few years later Gordon was to write [Pask 1960b, 261]:
We have made an ear and we have made a magnetic receptor. The ear can
discriminate two frequencies, one of the order of fifty cycles per second
and the other of the order of one hundred cycles per second. The “train-
ing” procedure takes approximately half a day and once having got the
ability to recognize sound at all, the ability to recognize and discriminate
two sounds comes more rapidly. . . . The ear, incidentally, looks rather
like an ear. It is a gap in the thread structure in which you have fibrils
which resonate at the excitation frequency.
This, then, was the truly remarkable feature of Pask's chemical computers.
One way to put it is to note that the “senses” of all the cybernetic machines
we have discussed so far were defined in advance. At base they were sensitive
to electrical currents, and at one remove to whatever sensors and motors
were hooked up to them. Pask's chemical computers, however, acquired new
senses which were not designed or built into them at all—hence “growing
an ear,” but also acquiring a sensitivity to magnetic fields (a quite nonhuman
“sense”) in other experiments. If the homeostat, say, could adapt to new pat-
terns within a fixed range of input modalities, Pask's chemical computers
went decisively beyond the homeostat in searching over an open-ended range
of possible modalities. If we think of the chemical computers as model brains,
these brains were, at least in this one sense, superior to human brains, which
have not developed any new senses in a very long time.
One possibly confusing point here is that Pask and Beer trained the com-
puter to acquire the faculty of hearing and responding to sound—as if they
somehow inserted the sense of hearing into the computer even if they did not
explicitly design it in from the start. But to think that way would be to miss
a key point. One should imagine the computer not in the training situation
but in use—as hooked up to a factory, say—in which the coupled system was
running to equilibrium. In that event, in its trial reconfigurations, a sound-
sensitive thread structure might come into existence within the chemical
computer and find itself reinforced in its interactions with the factory in the
absence of any intervention from the experimenter whatsoever. In this sce-
nario, the machine could thus genuinely evolve new senses in its performative
interactions with its environment: hearing, a feeling for magnetic fields, or,
indeed, an indefinite number of senses for which we have no name. And, as
both Beer and Cariani have emphasized, no machine that could do this had
been built before—or since, unless very recently: “It could well have been the
