Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
follow invite, in effect, a redirection of cybernetics. I think the field might be
far more lively and important in the future if it paid attention to my descrip-
tion of its past.
Now for the trickiest point in this chapter. I began with Black Boxes and the
differing stances toward them of modern science and cybernetics: the former
seeking to open them up; the latter imagining a world of performances in
which they remained closed. This distinction works nicely if we want to think
about the work of the second-generation cyberneticians, Beer and Pask, and
also Bateson and Laing. Nothing more needs to be said here to introduce
them. But it works less well for the first generation, Walter and Ashby, and
this point needs some clarification.
I quoted Ashby earlier defining the problematic of the Black Box in terms
of an engineer probing the Box with electrical inputs and and observing its
outputs. Unfortunately for the simplicity of my story, the quotation continues:
“He is to deduce what he can of its contents.” This “deduction” is, needless to
say, the hallmark of the modern scientific stance, the impulse to open the box,
and a whole wing of Ashby's cybernetics (and that of his students at Illinois in
the 1960s) circled around this problematic. Here I am tempted to invoke the
author's privilege and say that I am not going to go into this work in any detail
in what follows. While technically fascinating, it does not engage much with
the ontological concerns which inform this topic. But it is not so easy to get
off this hook. Besides a general interest in opening Black Boxes, Ashby (and
Walter) wanted to open up one particular Black Box, the brain, and it is im-
possible to avoid a discussion of that specific project here—it was too central
to the development of cybernetics.
9
I need to observe the following:
Seen from one angle, the tortoise and the homeostat function well as non-
modern ontological theater. These machines interacted with and adapted
to their worlds performatively, without any representational detours; their
worlds remained unknowable Black Boxes to the machines. This is the picture
I want to contemplate. But from another angle, Walter and Ashby remained
securely within the space of modern science. As brain scientists, they wanted
to open up the brain to our representational understanding by a classically
scientific maneuver—building models of its interior. These models were un-
usual in that they took the form of machines rather than equations on paper,
but their impulse was the same: precisely to get inside the Black Box and to
illuminate the inner go of the adaptive brain.
