The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2011), "The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future", Kybernetes, Vol. 40 No. 3/4, pp. 611-616. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684921111133773

This is an extremely interesting, well‐written and important book. It contains an impressive amount of material, both factual and thoughtfully discursive. The author acknowledges opportunities for research and writing given by sabbatical periods in Edinburgh, Illinois and Stanford, as well as shorter ones in Berlin, and any feeling of envy of his good fortune in securing these must be tempered by the reflection that he clearly made very good use of them.

He also acknowledges help given by a great many people currently associated with cybernetics, some of them notable as exponents of the second‐order variety, who might not be pleased with the critical comments on their approach made in the first chapter (p. 26):

Tortoises, homeostats, biological computers, Musicolour machines, adaptive architecture – all of these are just history as far as second‐order cybernetics is concerned. We used to do things like that in our youth; now we do serious epistemology.

Pickering goes on to say that he feels this attitude is a mistake, with its stress on epistemology rather than what he terms ontology, and he remarks that the word “ontology” has largely disappeared from the literature. It is perhaps worth noting in passing that the word has been used recently in a particular context (Andrew, 2003; Berners‐Lee et al., 2001; Fensel, 2004) seen also in papers in a new Semantic Web journal (http://iospress.metapress.com/content/j8748565511j), but with connotations that Pickering would probably class as epistemology. He uses the word with a wider meaning that might also be denoted by such terms as “general approach” or “methodology” or by his own of “ontological theatre” that is the heading of his second chapter.

The author accepts that cybernetics is a wide field and he makes no pretence of covering anything like all of it. The book has eight chapters in all, two giving the introductory discussions already touched on, and a final one summing up and defending a position under the heading: “Sketches of another future”. The five intervening chapters focus on the work of particular individuals, starting with W. Grey Walter, then Ross Ashby, then one jointly on Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing, and then Stafford Beer and finally Gordon Pask. All of these people can be considered British even though Grey Walter was born in the USA and Gregory Bateson did much of his work there.

All the people mentioned are “household names” with the exception, for me at least, of R.D. Laing. I was surprised to find that he was associated with the Department of Psychological Medicine in Glasgow University at the same time as I was in the 1950s (as I confirmed by a phone call to the lady who was department secretary at the time) but I have no recollection of our paths having crossed. Cybernetics was a topic of general interest in the department, but with a strong connection with Warren McCulloch, with whom it appears Laing had some disagreement.

Clear examples of “ontological theatre” are the “tortoise” robot and conditioned reflex analogue of Grey Walter, and the homeostat and dispersive and multistable system (DAMS) of Ashby. Both of these workers wanted to understand the inner working of the brain and regarded their gadgets as models of significant aspects. A connection is noted between the tortoise initiative and the later work of Rodney Brooks in MIT. Walter was of course, a pioneer of electroencephalography and was involved in experiments with biofeedback and altered states of consciousness induced by, for example, flickering light. A theme that runs throughout the book is the link between cybernetics and a variety of esoteric topics including “counterculture” and mysticism and spirituality.

Ashby declared himself an atheist but eventually seemed to accept the passage of time as something akin to a deity. His thoughts, including vacillations, are available in enormous detail (for a researcher as assiduous as Pickering) in a journal that he maintained. He became aware of the limitations of the homeostat, of which Minsky and Papert (1969) remarked that: “It would be hard to justify the term ‘learning’ for a machine that so relentlessly ignores its experience”, but his solution represented by his DAMS did not provide an answer, as he eventually realised. Comparison is made with later studies by Kauffman, epitomized as simplicity‐from‐complexity and by Wolfram, epitomized as complexity‐from‐simplicity.

Both Ashby and Walter speculated about the inner working of the brain, or as Pickering puts it, the “go of it”. At the same time, they were both concerned with therapy and attention is drawn to an important difference between their attitude to this and that of Bateson and Laing as reviewed later. Both Walter and Ashby saw psychiatric illness as something to be conquered by such means as electro‐convulsive therapy, psychoactive drugs and hypnotherapy, whereas Bateson and Laing approached it without this harsh distinction of abnormal from normal.

Bateson and Laing studied external interactions and did not speculate about the internal workings of the brain. Bateson is well known for his treatment of the “double bind” situation, as a basis for schizophrenia, with a further link to mysticism in the observation that Zen Koans have a similar blind‐alley or Catch‐22 character but are seen as routes to Nirvana. The approach of these workers to therapy, practiced especially by Laing, required prolonged association between therapists and patients, which often produced noticeable changes in the attitudes of the therapists as well as in the patients. Laing set up a house in a suburb of London where nurses gave 24‐hour attention to difficult patients who were however free to leave and for instance visit shopping areas in a state of undress. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, the facility was shut down following complaints from neighbours.

The next chapter is about Stafford Beer and his work is reviewed historically, pointing out connections that I have to admit I had not previously appreciated. His early work with Gordon Pask on learning schemes with a biological flavour, such as daphnia swarms, is presented as aimed at a management scheme which later became the viable system model (VSM) with human managers replacing the daphnia. The VSM has of course, been highly influential (Schwaninger and Pérez Rios, 2010) with important features drawn from neurophysiology, and the later invention of team syntegrity offers a more obviously democratic means of group activity.

These contributions of Stafford Beer are nicely reviewed, as also in Pickering (2004), but the author clearly struggles to relate them to what Stafford described as his spiritual development. This was partly in association with the Roman Catholic Church, to which he was a convert, and partly in his interest in eastern mysticism and yoga. One expression of the former was a display of paintings, with music, in the R.C. Cathedral in Liverpool (Beer, 1993) and an enigmatic account of the latter is in his “Chronicles of Wizard Prang”, an unpublished work that can however be viewed at: www.chroniclesofwizardprang.com. On the occasion of the display of Requiem in Liverpool, Stafford gave me a copy of the “Chronicles”, with the comment that Gordon Pask had said it was the best thing he (Stafford) had ever written. I have to say that I did not make much sense of it and was also put off by what I felt to be an inappropriate use of RAF slang in the title.

The chapter on Beer is followed by one reviewing the work of Gordon Pask, with emphasis on its more theatrical and artistic features such as Musicolour rather than the formal treatment of Conversation Theory, and with reference to related projects by others including a proposal for a Fun City that is said to have paved the way for creation of the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

These seven chapters give the main factual contributions of the book and they result from an impressive amount of research. Besides, the main text, there are no fewer than 75 pages of additional notes, linked by numerical references. The development of ideas culminates in the final chapter entitled: “Sketches of another future” in which the author acknowledges that his own exploration of these topics was a journey that was both fun and edifying. The linking of studies of, for example, psychiatry, to religion and mysticism was for him a strange idea, but made more tenable when considered in the light of the work of, in particular, Stafford Beer. (He refers to his background of acquaintance with the standard viewpoints of the Church of England compulsorily ingrained in his schooling. I can mention that my background is similar, but with reference to the not‐dissimilar standard viewpoints of the Church of Scotland.)

Cybernetics is defended as a science of the unknowable, allowing the devising of systems with sufficient flexibility to operate and survive in an incompletely known environment. It also includes a philosophical viewpoint that accepts there are things that are somehow “in principle” unknowable. It would of course, be wrong to suggest that uncertainty has been recognized only by workers describing themselves as cyberneticians, since it is implicit in the standard theory of probability and statistics and more recently in the vast literature stemming from fuzzy set theory and other approaches explored notably by George Klir, and Chinese studies of grey systems.

These approaches tend to focus on uncertainty of numerical values embedded in fixed structures, though uncertainty can obviously extend also to structure. An observation made repeatedly by Stafford Beer was that the network of communication that allowed an enterprise to function had little connection with the hierarchical “organization chart” displayed in the boardroom, and had, in effect, grown organically.

Pickering draws conclusions impinging on education, with the observation that teaching of most subjects is knowledge based, with an implication that everything could in principle be known. There is of course, no such implication if the scientific theories are seen as hypotheses that best fit the available data, according to a viewpoint associated with Karl Popper and epitomized by saying that a theory can never be proved, only disproved. At the same time, it is undeniable that much of science as taught is based on theories that have stood the test of time and seem unlikely to be significantly revised, and are taught as established fact. Pickering feels that this emphasis on knowledge is misleading and would like to see all education include material that indicates mystery, possibly extending to mysticism.

Although Pickering makes no pretence of exhaustive coverage a “plug” should be given for Cybernetics in Reading University, which is acknowledged very briefly in the book but in fact was established a few years ahead of the institute in Brunel stemming from the initiative of Stafford Beer. It has to be admitted that the Reading approach was initially comparatively down‐to‐earth, with emphasis on control theory, measurement and computing, and probably not impinging very strongly on the theme of the present book. Nevertheless, some imaginative projects were undertaken, for instance with James Lovelock as a visiting professor and project supervisor while he developed several ideas including his famous Gaia hypothesis.

It is not difficult to find intersections of religion and cybernetics additional to those listed in the book, though mostly without the same extension into mysticism. Warren McCulloch, according to his own account (McCulloch, 1960), was training for the Quaker ministry when he formed basic ideas of what was later termed cybernetics. He afterwards parted from the Quakers because he disagreed with their pacifist stance during the First World War, but acquaintance with religious ideas, or at least with related philosophical ones, is evident in his writings and in his support of philosophers including Gotthard Günther.

A member of the Ratio Club with strong religious convictions was Donald MacKay, who belonged to a Scottish sect much stricter than the established Church of Scotland, and who was a pioneer of cybernetic thinking. He was a close friend of Warren McCulloch, from well before the association of the latter with Pask or Beer. Warren was known for his “Bohemian” outlook, and many people remarked on the incongruity of his association with the fastidious MacKay. A list of MacKay's early publications is at: http://cybsoc.org/wosc/MacKay(early)Refs.html, and there are obituaries by Longuett‐Higgins (1987) and Andrew (1987). In the latter, a close friendship with the Hungarian Neuroanatomist Janos Szentágothai is noted, said by him to have been strengthened by shared religious faith (despite a difference of affiliations).

Donald MacKay repeatedly offered what he saw as reconciliations between his scientific and religious views, and in the obituary in Nature, Longuett‐Higgins refers to aspects that might qualify him as an early originator of second‐order cybernetics:

His gentle insistence on the categorical distinction between “I‐language” and “it‐language” in discussions of the mind and the brain was often, however, too subtle for his hard‐nosed colleagues, who felt more at home with “wet” neuroscience (as they called it) than with the “dry” variety that MacKay seemed to be peddling.

I have a feeling that there are arguments here that I have been too hard nosed to appreciate, and I should look again at some of MacKay's work. He did not deny the value of “wet” neuroscience, only its inadequacy when considered exclusively. Projects that would come under the heading were among those that he initiated in the department he headed in Keele University.

Some links to religion were explored by Wiener (1964) himself and by a nun, Mary (1970), who attended several WOSC Congresses including that of 1975 in Bucharest (Rose, 1989). Both she and Wiener declared that they deliberately avoided issues of mysticism in their essays.

There is also a reference to religion where Turing (1950) discusses objections to the suggestion that machines might be regarded as “thinking”. He dismisses the theological objection quite briefly, but there is something akin to it in the insistence by Heinz von Foerster (von Foerster and Poerksen, 2002), that AI programs should be seen only as metaphors for brain activity and that the brain belongs to a class of systems that by their very nature cannot be analysed.

The fact that some extra names can be mentioned, in the spirit of “suggestions for further reading”, is no criticism of Pickering's impressively well‐researched and thought‐provoking treatment of his topic. The book can be thoroughly recommended.