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the most obvious sense in which Walter's cybernetics, like cybernetics more
broadly, staged a nonmodern ontology.
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Second, we should reflect on the way
the tortoise's brain latched onto its world. The tortoise is our first instantiation
of the performative perspective on the brain that I introduced in chapter 1,
the view of the brain as an “acting machine” rather than a “thinking machine,”
as Ashby put it. The tortoise did not construct and process representations of
its environment (à la AI robotics); it did things and responded to whatever
turned up (cycloidal wandering, locking onto lights, negotiating obstacles).
The tortoise thus serves to bring the notion of a performative brain down to
earth. In turn, this takes us back to the notion of Black Box ontology that I
introduced in chapter 2. The tortoise engaged with its environment as if the
latter were a Black Box, in Ashby's original sense of this word—a system to be
performatively explored.
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As ontological theater, the tortoise staged a version
of this Black Box ontology, helping us to grasp it and, conversely, exemplifying
a sort of robotic brain science that might go with such an ontology.
Now we come to the complication I mentioned in chapter 2. In one sense
the tortoise staged a nonmodern Black Box ontology, but in another it did not.
For Walter, the point of the exercise was to open up one of these boxes, the
brain, and to explore the inner go of it in the mode of modern science. How
should we think about that? We could start by remembering that in Walter's
work the world—the tortoise's environment—remained a Black Box. In this
sense, Walter's cybernetics had a hybrid character: nonmodern, in its the-
matization of the world as a performative Black Box; but also modern, in its
representational approach to the inner workings of the brain. My recommen-
dation would then be to pay attention to the nonmodern facet of this hybrid,
as the unfamiliar ontology that cybernetics can help us imagine. But there is
more to think about here. The question concerns the extent to which Walter's
brain science in fact conformed to the stereotype of modern science. As I
mentioned in chapter 2, cybernetic brain science was an odd sort of science
in several ways. First, the scientifically understood brain had as its necessary
counterpart the world as an unopened Black Box, so that the modern and the
nonmodern aspects of this branch of cybernetics were two sides of a single
coin. Second, the style of scientific explanation here is what I called “explana-
tion by articulation of parts.” Walter's brain science did not emulate physics,
say, in exploring the properties of the fundamental units of the brain (neurons
or their electromechanical analogues); instead, it aimed to show that when
simple units were interconnected in a certain way, their aggregate perfor-
mance had a certain character (being able to adapt to the unknown). Again,
