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himself visited England, Walter, “as the English exponent of his work . . . had
the privilege of discussing it with him on familiar terms. . . . I asked him if
he saw any relation between the two methods of observing cerebral activity,
his and Berger's [EEG readings]. . . . But Pavlov showed no desire to look be-
hind the scenes. He was not in the least interested in cerebral mechanisms”
(Walter 1953, 51-52). 43 CORA, in contrast, was explicitly a further scientific
attempt to look behind the scenes, to open up the Black Box of the adaptive
brain by building a model that could mimic its performances, just like the
tortoises before that.
CORA did, indeed, make a connection between the electrical rhythms
of the brain and conditioned learning. The key element in connecting one
sense to another was precisely the build up of an oscillating voltage in CORA,
and Walter laid much store by this, even arguing that CORA displayed the
contingent negative variation in electrical potential which was his most im-
portant contribution to neurophysiology (1966, 13), but I cannot explore this
further here. 44 Instead, I want to comment on CORA as brain science from
several angles before connecting it to Walter's psychiatric milieu.
Reversing the earlier order, I begin with a quick comment on the rela-
tion of CORA to the social basis of cybernetics. CORA was a virtuoso piece of
electrical engineering, in both its design and construction. The tortoise was
imitable—by Frazer, Brooks, and many others—but CORA was inimitable.
I know of no attempts to replicate it, never mind take the development of
the tortoise beyond it. 45 Even Walter discontinued his robotics after CORA.
Machina speculatrix pointed to a difficult but, to some—odd schoolboys like
Frazer and Brooks; contributors to the Namur conferences—manageable syn-
thesis of brain science and engineering. Machina docilis upped the ante too far.
Nothing grew specifically from it in the cybernetic tradition. In the late 1980s
revival of Walter-style robotics, machines that learned were indeed built, but
that learning was based on neural networks, not CORA-style electronics, and
the oscillatory features that intrigued Walter were lost (at least, temporar-
ily). In that sense, CORA remains an unexploited resource in the history of
cybernetics.
CORA also invites us to extend the discussion of cybernetic ontology to en-
compass epistemology. The great novelty of M. docilis was that it acquired a
sort of knowledge about the world: it learned what to associate with what.
How should we think about that? The point I would emphasize is that the
knowledge of M. docilis waxed and waned with its performance, integrating
 
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