Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
What should we make of this? Clearly, this branch of cybernetics was a hy-
brid of the modern and the nonmodern, staging very different acts of ontolog-
ical theater depending on the angle one watched them from. I could therefore
say that the invitation in what follows is to look at them from the nonmodern
angle, since this is the aspect of our imagination most in need of stimulation.
But, as we will see in more detail later, it is, in fact, also instructive to look
more closely at them from the modern angle too. We can distinguish at least
three aspects in which Walter and Ashby's cybernetics in fact departed from
the paradigms of modern science.
First, sciences like physics describe a homogeneous field of entities and
forces that lacks any outside—a cosmos of point masses interacting via an
inverse-square law, say. Cybernetic brain modelling, in contrast, immediately
entailed an external other—the unknown world to which the brain adapts.
So even if early cybernetic brain models can be placed in a modern lineage,
they necessarily carried with them this reference to performative engagement
with the unknown, and this is what I will focus on in the following chapters.
Second, we can think not about the outside but about the inside of cyber-
netic brain models. The tortoise and the homeostat were instances of what
theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman (1971) called “articulation of parts ex-
planation.”
10
Kauffman's examples of this were taken from work in develop-
mental biology in which one appeals to the properties of single cells, say, to
explain morphogenesis at a higher level of cellular aggregation. Ashby's and
Walter's brain models had just this quality, integrating atomic parts—valves,
capacitors, and so on—to achieve higher-level behavior: adaptation. This is a
very different style of explanation from that of modern physics, which aims
at a calculable representation of some uniform domain—charged particles
responding identically to an electric field, for example. And it is worth noting
that articulation of parts explanation immediately thematizes performance.
One is more concerned with what entities
do
than what they
are
. Ashby and
Walter were not exploring the properties of relays and triodes; they were in-
terested in how they would behave in combination. From this angle, too, cy-
bernetic brain modelling once more dramatized performative engagement,
now within the brain.
And third, we can take this line of thought further. This is the place to
mention what I think of as a cybernetic
discovery of complexity
. At an “atomic”
level, Walter and Ashby understood their machines very well. The individual
components were simple and well-understood circuit elements—resistors, ca-
pacitors, valves, relays, some wires to make the connections. But the discovery
