GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 55

investigation of the former. One point to bear in mind is that Walter did have
a steady job throughout his working life, spending the thirty-one years prior to
his scooter accident at the Burden Neurological Institute. As I said, however,
his career there revolved around his EEG work and electrophysiological re-
search more generally, and the question that I want to focus on here concerns
the social basis for his cybernetics as exemplified by the tortoises.
In the quotation above on Craik and the origins of the tortoise, I skipped
over a phrase, “long before the home study was turned into a workshop,” which
precedes “the two ideas, goal-seeking and scanning, had combined.” Walter
built the first tortoises at home, in his spare time. 21 Hence, for example, the
practical advice to readers on tortoise construction just quoted. Walter's key
contribution to cybernetics was, then, the work of an amateur, a hobbyist. And,
as we will see, this was true of all four of our principals. In this sense, then, we
can say that at its origins British cybernetics had no social basis . It emerged from
nowhere as far as established fields and career paths were concerned. The cy-
berneticians and their projects were outsiders to established fields of endeavor.
Some discussion is appropriate here. First, it is worth emphasizing that the
amateur and hobbyist roots of British cybernetics are a marker of its oddity:
there was no obvious field for it to grow from. Perhaps the most likely matrix
would have been experimental psychology (one thinks of Kenneth Craik) but
in fact cybernetics did not originate there. Second, we should go back to the
standard origin story of cybernetics, connecting it to Norbert Wiener's mili-
tary research. There is, as I said in chapter 1, a contrast here between British
and American cybernetics. As I have already indicated, the primary referent
of Walter's tortoise work was not some piece of military technology such as
Wiener's antiaircraft predictor; it was the brain. Walter always presented the
tortoise precisely as a model brain, and though I just quoted him on the tor-
toise as a self-guided missile, this was a passing remark. And, of course, it
makes sense that a brain researcher working at a neurological institute would
have the brain rather than weapons systems on his mind. 22
This, then, is the other origin story of cybernetics that I can develop further
as we go on, the story of cybernetics as emerging from and as brain science
rather than military research. This story requires some nuance, needless to
say. Little research in the 1940s and 1950s was immune to military influence,
and it was Craik, the British Wiener, who gave Walter the idea of scanning.
Nevertheless, it would be misleading to try to center the story of British cy-
bernetics on war; it is much more illuminating to focus on the brain. 23 That
said, there is another connection to warfare that is worth mentioning, which
in fact deepens the contrast with Wiener.