GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 67

over its experience—associations between stimuli would be lost if the robot's
expectations did not continue to be reinforced—and thus functioned as a
heuristic guide, emerging from and returning to performance, not as any kind
of controlling center. Docilis thus offers us a vision of knowledge as engaged
in, and as part of, performance, rather than as a thing itself or as some sort of
external determinant of action—a vision of knowledge as being in the plane of
practice , as I put it in The Mangle of Practice , not above it. Much as speculatrix
acted out for us a performative ontology, then, docilis also staged a performa-
tive epistemology, as I called it in chapter 2—an appreciation of knowledge
not as a hopefully definitive mapping of the world, but as another component
of performance. This is the vision of knowledge that goes with the cybernetic
ontology, and that we will see elaborated in succeeding chapters. 46
Cybernetics and madness
PSYCHIATRISTS uSEd TO BE REPROACHEd wITH THEIR lACk Of THERAPEuTIC
ZEAl; IT wAS SAId THEY wERE RESIgNEd wHEN THEY SHOuld HAvE BEEN HOPE-
ful ANd ENTERPRISINg, ANd TORPId wHEN ENERgY wAS CAllEd fOR. wHETHER
THE REPROACH wAS dESERvEd OR NOT IT SEEmS TO HAvE STuNg THEm INTO
THERAPEuTIC fuRY. CONTINuOuS NARCOSIS, INSulIN SHOCk ANd CARdIAZOl
fITS HAvE PROvEd THAT THE PSYCHIATRIST IS AT lEAST AS dARINg AS THE
SuRgEON NOwAdAYS. THE PAPERS BY kalinowsky IN OuR ISSuE Of dEC. 9, ANd
BY fleming , golla ANd walter IN THIS RECORd ANOTHER BOld STEP. . . . BuT
wE muST NOT lET uNCONSCIOuS ASSOCIATIONS wITH wHAT IS dONE PERIOdI-
CAllY IN A ROOm AT SINg SINg PREJudICE uS AgAINST wHAT mAY wEll TuRN
OuT TO BE A vAluABlE STEP fORwARd.
editoriaL, “mORE SHOCkS,” LAnCEt, 234 , NO. 6070
(30 dECEmBER 1939): 1373
It is tempting to think of the tortoises and CORA as freestanding scientific
and engineering projects, divorced from mundane concerns. Walter may have
mentioned the tortoise's potential as an autonomous weapons system, but he
did nothing to pursue it. On the other hand, one of the first things he did with
CORA was drive his tortoises mad. This points to connections between his
cybernetics and psychiatry that we can explore.
If the CORA-equipped tortoise could be understood as a model of a normal
brain, Walter was keen to show that it was a model for the pathological brain
too. In his first article on the tortoise, Walter (1950a, 45) noted that, with