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hensible. What the tortoise stages us for us is that, even if that were true, we
might still have to find out about the world in real-time performative interac-
tion. For such people, it might be helpful to start by imagining the world as
full of tortoiselike entities—unknowable in any predictive sense and always
capable of surprising us, as the tortoise proved to be. This is another way to
begin getting the hang of the ontology of cybernetics.
In his first publication on the tortoises, in Scientific American in May 1950,
Walter (1950a, 44) emphasized this discovery of complexity in a striking
extrapolation beyond the two-neuron tortoise brain: “It is unlikely that the
number of perceptible functional elements in the brain is anything like the
total number of the nerve cells; it is more likely to be of the order of 1,000. But
even if it were only 10, this number of elements could provide enough variety
for a lifetime of experience for all the men who ever lived or will be born if
mankind survives a thousand million years.” At stake here are not Walter's
precise numbers (see Walter 1953, 118-20, for the calculation)—though cy-
bernetic combinatorics readily generates enormous numbers, as we will see
later. Walter was not suggesting that given ten elements he could predict the
future of the human race in classically scientific fashion. His point concerned,
rather, I think, the unimaginable richness of performance that could be gener-
ated by a few simple parts articulated with one another. Even if we knew what
the ten functional elements of the brain are and how they are interconnected,
we would not be able to “solve” the system and thus calculate and predict all
possible forms of human behavior over the next billion years. We would just
have to build the system and run it, like the tortoise, to see what it would
do—or we could just let history run its course and find out. In general, even if
we know all that there is to know about the primitive components of a Black
Box, we might still not know anything about how the ensemble will perform.
At this level of aggregation, the box remains black, and this is what Walter
learned from his tortoises.
Thus my sense of the tortoise as ontological theater—as variously conjuring
up and playing out an ontological vision of performance and unknowability.
We will see this ontology elaborated in all sorts of ways in the pages to fol-
low. But here I should note two qualifications concerning just how much the
tortoise can enlighten us. First, the tortoise was indeed adaptive, but only to a
degree. Especially, it had fixed goals hard wired into it, such as pursuing lights.
The tortoise did not evolve new goals as it went along in the world. This fixity
of goals was a common feature of early cybernetic engineering, going back
 
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