GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 52

all the way to the steam-engine governor (which sought to keep the engine
speed constant) and beyond. As ontological theater this has to be seen as a
shortcoming. There is no reason to think that human beings, for example, are
characterized by a fixity of goals, and every reason, in fact, to argue against
it (Pickering 1995). From this angle too, then, we should see the tortoise as
staging a hybrid ontology, part adaptive and part not. 17 As I have said before,
the adaptive aspects of cybernetics are what I want most to get into focus here,
as pointing toward the unfamiliar aspects of nonmodern ontology.
The tortoise's world also left something to be desired. It was a world that, to
a first approximation, never changed, a fixed array of lights and obstacles. The
tortoise adapted to its environment, but the environment did nothing in re-
sponse. 18 There was no place for a dance of agency between the tortoise and its
world. This has to be regarded as another shortcoming of Walter's cybernetics
as ontological theater, and we can see in later chapters how other cybernetic
systems, beginning with Ashby's homeostat, transcended this limitation.
tortoises as not-Brains
IT IS uP TO m. wAlTER TO ExPlAIN THE ImPORTANCE Of HIS mOdElS fOR
PHYSIOlOgY. THE ENgINEER IS INTERESTEd IN THE mACHINE THAT ImITATES
SENSE ORgANS ANd THE mACHINE THAT lEARNS. ONE CAN ImAgINE A dAY wHEN
mACHINES THAT lEARN wOuld HAvE A gENERAl ImPORTANCE IN INduSTRY.
THAT IS wHY wE HAvE REPEATEd HIS APPROACH.
Heinz zemanek, “lA TORTuE dE vIENNE ET lES AuTRES TRAvAux
CYBERNéTIquES” (ZEmANEk 1958, 772, mY TRANSlATION)
In the opening chapter I mentioned the protean quality of cybernetics, that
although the brain was its original referent, the brain could not contain it, and
I can elaborate on that remark now. I have shown how the tortoise took shape
as a model of the brain and as a contribution to brain science; I will shortly
explore its specific connection to psychiatry. But one did not have to see a brain
when contemplating a tortoise. One could simply see a machine, an interesting
example of a particular style of adaptive engineering, a robot. Here is Walter's
own account of the origins of the tortoise from The Living Brain (1953, 125):
“The first notion of constructing a free goal-seeking mechanism goes back to a
wartime talk with the psychologist, Kenneth Craik. . . . When he was engaged
on a war job for the Government, he came to get the help of our automatic
[EEG] analyser with some very complicated curves he had obtained, curves