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of complexity was that such knowledge is not enough when it comes to under-
standing aggregate behavior; that explanation by articulation of parts is not
as straightforward as one might imagine; that especially—and in contrast to
paradigmatic instances of modern science— prediction of overall performance
on the basis of an atomic understanding can be difficult to the point of impos-
sibility. Walter reported that he was surprised by the behavior of his tortoises.
Ashby was baffled and frustrated by the homeostat's successor—a machine
called DAMS—so much so that he eventually abandoned the DAMS project
as a failure. We could say, therefore, that Walter and Ashby both discovered in
their scientific attack on the brain that even rather simple systems can be, at
the same time, exceedingly complex systems in Beer's terms. Beer's favorite
examples of such systems were the brain itself, the firm, and the economy, but
even Ashby's and Walter's little models of the brain fell into this class, too.
Two observations follow. First, despite the modern scientific impulse be-
hind their construction, we could take the tortoise and, especially, DAMS as
themselves instances of ontological theater, in a somewhat different sense
from that laid out above. We could, that is, try to imagine the world as popu-
lated by entities like the tortoise and DAMS, whose behavior we can never
fully predict. This is another way in which the modern scientific approach to
the brain of Walter and Ashby in effect turns back into a further elaboration of
the nonmodern ontology that this topic focuses upon. It is also a rephrasing of
my earlier remark on hybridity. Seen from one end of the telescope, the cyber-
netic brain models shed genuinely scientific light on the brain—in adapting
to their environment, they represented an advance in getting to grips with the
inner go of the brain itself. But seen from the other end, they help us imagine
what an exceedingly complex system is. If “toys” like these, to borrow Walter's
description of them, can surprise us, the cybernetic ontology of unknowabil-
ity seems less mysterious, and cybernetic projects make more sense.
Continuing with this line of thought, in chapter 4 we can follow one line
of Ashby's work into the mathematical researches of Stuart Kauffman and Ste-
phen Wolfram. I just mentioned some important philosophical work by Kauff-
man, but at issue here is another aspect of his theoretical biology. In computer
simulations of complex systems in the late 1960s, Kauffman came across the
emergence of simple structures having their own dynamics, which he could
interfere with but not control. These systems, too, might help give substance
to our ontological imaginations. In understanding the work of Bateson, Laing,
Beer, and Pask, the idea of performative interaction with systems that are not
just unknowable but that also have their own inner dynamics—that go their
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