The Cybernetic Brain
Page 18
The other suggestion was more directly cybernetic. Ashby supposed that when the essential variables exceed their limits in the brain they open a channel to signals from a random source, which in turn pass into the cortex and initiate homeostat-like reconfigurations there (fig. 4.11). Both the source and the channel were supposed to be real anatomical structures (1954, 120): "V [the random source] could be small, perhaps even of molecular size. It won't be found until specially looked for. The channel U [carrying the random signal to the cortex], however, must be quite large. . . . One thinks naturally of a tract like the mammillo-thalamic . . . [and] of the peri-ventricular fibres . . . but these matters are not yet settled; they offer an exceptional opportunity to any worker who likes relating the functional and the anatomical." And, having hypothesized this cybernetic channel U, Ashby was in a position to describe the pathologies that might be associated with it. If it was unable to carry sufficient information, the brain would be unable to change and learn from its mistakes, while if it carried too much, the brain would be continually experimenting and would never reach equilibrium—conditions which Ashby associated with melancholia and mania, respectively. Here then, he came back to the idea that he had unsuccessfully explored in the 1930s—that there exists an identifiable organic basis for the various forms of mental pathology—but now at a much greater level of specificity. Instead of examining gross features of brains in pursuit of differences, one should above all look for this channel U and its possible impairments. This idea that the brain contains a special organ to accomplish its homeostatic adaptations—a whole new kind of bodily structure lying outside the classifications of contemporary medical and biological science—is a striking one. As far as I know, however, no one took this suggestion up in anatomical research.
Figure 4.11.The brain as homeostat. Signals from the essential variables (E.V., top right) open the channel U to the random source (V, bottom right). Reproduced with permission from W. R. Ashby, "The Application of Cybnernetics to Psychiatry," Journal of Mental Science, 100 (1954), 120. (© 1954 The Royal College of Psychiatrists.)
There is more to be said about Ashby's cybernetic psychiatry, but that will take us in different directions, too, so I should briefly sum up the relation between his cybernetics and psychiatry as we have reviewed it thus far. First, as I said of Grey Walter in the previous chapter, psychiatry was a surface of emergence for Ashby's cybernetics: his cybernetics grew out of psychiatry, partly by a reversal (the normal instead of the pathological brain as the focus of his hobby) but still remaining in the same space (the normal and the pathological as two sides of the same coin). There is no doubt that Ashby's hobby represented a significant detour away from the mental hospital in his thinking; as I said, his cybernetic research had its own dynamics, which cannot be reduced to a concern with mental illness. But still, psychiatry remained very much present in Ashby's cybernetics as a potential surface of return. Especially during his years at Barnwood House, 1947–59, the key years in the flowering of his cybernetics, Ashby was more than ready to see how his cybernetics could grow back into psychiatry. And we should not see this as some cynical maneuver, simply pandering to the profession that paid him. The appearance of psychiatric concerns in his journal—where, for example, his wife and children never get a look in, and where his own appointment to the directorship of the Burden only warranted an interstitial remark—testifies to his own continuing interest in psychiatry. This, I believe, is how we should think of the relation between cybernetics and psychiatry in Ashby's work: psychiatry as both a surface of emergence and return for a cybernetics that was, nevertheless, a scientific detour away from it.44
Adaptation, War, and Society
SUPPOSE WE CONSIDERED WAR AS A LABORATORY?
THOMAS PYNCHON,GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
We have been following the development of Ashby's cybernetics as a science of the brain, but I mentioned at the start the instability of the referent of his work, and now we can pick up this thread. In the next section I will discuss Ashby's transformation of cybernetics into a theory of everything, but first I want to follow some passages in Ashby's journal that constitute more focused extensions of his cybernetics into the field of the social—specifically, questions of war and planning. These interest me for two reasons. First, they are further manifestations of the protean character of cybernetics, spilling over beyond the brain. Second, Ashby's thoughts on war and planning manifest diametrically opposed ways—asymmetric and symmetric, respectively—of imagining adaptation in multiagent systems. This is an important contrast we need to keep in mind for the rest of the book. Ashby assimilated psychiatry to the asymmetric adaptation he associated with warfare, while we will see that Bateson and Laing took the other route, emphasizing a symmetry of patient and therapist (and Beer and Pask also elaborated the symmetric stance). This difference in stance goes to the heart of the difference between the psychiatry of Ashby and Walter and the "antipsychiatry" of Bateson and Laing.
Ashby started making notes on DAMS on 11 August 1950, and one of his lines of thought immediately took on a rather military slant. In the long second note he wrote that day he began to struggle with the central and enduring problem of how DAMS could associate specific patterns of its inner connections with specific environmental stimuli—something he took to be essential if DAMS was to accumulate adaptations. Clearly, DAMS would have to explore its environment and find out about it in order to adapt, and "[when]one is uncomfortable [there] is nothing other than to get restless. (3) Do not suffer in silence: start knocking the env[ironmen]t about, & watch what happens to the discomfort. (4) This is nothing other than 'experimenting': forcing the environment to reveal itself. (5) Only by starting a war can one force the revelation of which are friends & which foes. (6) Such a machine does not solve its problems by thinking, just the opposite: it solves them by forcing action. . . . So, in war, does one patrol to force the enemy to reveal himself and his characteristics" (p. 2971).
A year later, we find similar imagery. "A somewhat fearsome idea!" begins the entry for 7 September 1951 (pp. 3451–52):
In evolution, the fact that survival rules everything means that organisms will not only develop those features that help them to survive against their environment but will also force them to develop those features that help them to survive against each other. The "killer" Paramecium, or the aggressive male stag, is favoured as compared with its more neutral neighbours. . . . If the cerebral cortex evolves similarly, by "survival" ruling everything in that world of behaviour & subsystems, then those subsystems should inevitably become competitive under the same drive. . . . In a really large cortex I would expect to find, eventually, whole armies of subsystems struggling, by the use of higher strategy, against the onslaught of other armies.
Ashby was a great reader, and his next note on the following day begins thus (pp. 3452–7):45
I have always held that war, scientific research, and similar activities, being part of the organism's attempt to deal with its environment, must show, when efficient & successful, the same principles that are used by the organism in its simpler & more direct interactions with an environment. I have hunted through the Public Library for some book on the essentials of military method, but could find nothing sufficiently abstract to be usable. So I borrowed "Clausewitz." Here is my attempt to translate his principles into the psychological. He starts 'What is war? War is an art of violence, and its object is to compel our opponent to comply with our will.' Comment: Clearly he means that stepfunctions must change, and those are not to be ours.
War among the homeostats! It is worth continuing this passage. Ashby remarks that the approximate symmetry between opponents in war (he is thinking of old-fashioned wars like World War II) "is quite different from the gross asymmetry usually seen in the organism-environment relation," and continues:
Where, then, do we find such a struggle between equals? Obviously in a multistable system between adapted sub-systems, each of which, being stable, "tries" to force th
e other to change in step-functions. . . . If two systems interact, how much information should each admit? . . . If I am wrestling, there is a great practical difference between (1) getting information by looking at my opponent with open eyes and (2) setting his hands around my throat & feeling what he is going to do. Obviously the difference is due to the fact that effects from the throatgripping hands go rapidly & almost directly to the essential variables, whereas the effects from the retina go through much neural network & past many effectors before they reach the E.V.'s. In war, then, as discussed by Clausewitz, we must assume that the systems have essential variables. Is this true of the cortical sub-systems? Probably not if we are talking about purely cortical sub-systems. . . . It would, however, be true of subsystems that have each some of the body's essential variables and that are interacting: [see fig. 4.12]. Now we have something like two armies struggling. . . . Summary: The art of war—in the cortex.
What should we make of these ruminations? The first point to note is the extension of Ashby's ontological vision: here warfare and brain processes are understood on the same basic plan, as the interaction of adaptive entities. But second, an asymmetry has entered the picture. Warfare, on Ashby's reading of Clausewitz, is not a process of reciprocal adaptation: in war each party seeks to remain constant and to oblige the other to adapt.46 Third, it is evident that in the early 1950s Ashby's cybernetics evolved in a complex interplay between his thinking on war and brain science and his struggles with DAMS. And, furthermore, we can get back to the topic of the previous section by throwing psychiatry back into this heady mix. Figure 4.12, for example, is almost identical to a circuit diagram that Ashby drew four days later, except that there the central box was labeled "DAMS." This latter figure was reproduced above as figure 4.10, which I labeled with a quotation from Ashby, "how DAMS can be made neurotic." We thus return very directly to the topics of psychiatry, once more in the heartland of Ashby's journal. In this phase of his research, then, it is fair to say that DAMS, adaptation, war, and neurosis were bound up together. Ashby's thinking on each was productively engaged with his thoughts on the other.
This line of thought on Clausewitz and war never made it explicitly into Ashby's published writings, and I have not tracked its evolution systematically through his journal, but it makes a striking reappearance seven years later, in the entry immediately following the note that he had just been appointed director of the Burden. On 3 November 1958 he remarked (pp. 6061–2) that
treating a patient is an imposition of the therapist's will on the patient's; it is therefore a form of war. The basic principles of war are therefore applicable. They may actually be very useful, for an opposing army is like a patient in that both are [very complex, inherently stable, etc.]. A basic method much used in war is to use a maximal concentration of all possible forces on to a small part, to try to get it unstabilised. The gain here may be semi-permanent, so that, with this holding, the forces can then attack another point. With this in mind, a Blitz-therapy would be characterised by:- (1) Use of techniques in combination, simultaneously. E.g. LSD, then hypnosis while under it, & ECT while under the hypnosis. (2) Not waiting to "understand" the patient's pathology (psycho-, somato-, neuro-) but hitting hard & seeing what happens. (3) Get a change anyhow, then exploit it; when it comes to a stop, take violent action to get another change somehow. (4) Get normal every point you possibly can. (5) Apply pressure everywhere & notice whether any part of the psychosis shows signs of cracking. (6) Let the psychiatric team focus on one patient, others being ignored meanwhile. Summary: Blitz-therapy. LSD, hypnosis and electroshock. . . . As I said of Grey Walter in the previous chapter, Ashby was hardly one of Deleuze and Guattari's disruptive nomads within the world of professional psychiatry, and we can no doubt understand that along similar lines. But this horrendous image of "Blitz-therapy"—what a combination of words!—does help to bring to the fore a characteristic feature of British psychiatry in the 1950s which is worth emphasizing for future reference, namely its utter social asymmetry. In Ashby's world, it went without saying that the only genuine agents in the mental hospital were the doctors. The patients were literally that, subject to the will of the psychiatrist, whose role was to apply whatever shocks might jolt the mentally ill into a homeostat-like change of state. In this world, Blitztherapy and the association between psychiatry and war made perfect sense, psychiatrically and cybernetically. In the next chapter we can explore the form of psychiatry that took the other fork in the road, on the model of symmetric and reciprocal adaptation between patient and psychiatrist.47
Figure 4.12.War among subsystems in the cortex. Source: Ashby's journal, entry dated 8 September 1951 (p. 3456). (By permission of Jill Ashby, Sally Bannister, and Ruth Pettit.)
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One can see Ashby's military musings as a drift toward a more general social elaboration of his cybernetics. War, as Ashby thought of it, following Clausewitz, was an extreme form that the relations between adaptive systems might take on, but it was not the only form. I have been quoting from Ashby's notes on DAMS, psychiatry, and warfare from early September 1951, and right in the middle of them is an entry dated 12 September, which begins, "On arranging a society" (pp. 3460–62): "Here is an objection raised by Mrs Bassett, which will probably be raised by others. May it not happen for instance that the planner will assume that full mobility of labour is available, when in fact people don't always like moving: they may have friends in the district, they may like the countryside, they may have been born and bred there, or they may dislike change. What is to stop the planner riding rough-shod over these 'uneconomic' but very important feelings?" Mrs. Bassett was, I believe, a researcher at the Burden Neurological Institute with whom Ashby later published a paper on drug treatment for schizophrenia (Ashby, Collins, and Bassett 1960). She was evidently also an early spokeswoman for the Big Brother critique of cybernetics, and her argument drove Ashby to think about real everyday social relations:
The answer, of course, is that one sees to it that feedback loops pass through the people so that they are fully able to feel their conditions and to express opinions and take actions on them. One of the most important class of "essential variables" in such a society would be those that measure the "comfort" of the individual. . . . It is obvious that the original objection was largely due to a belief that the planner must understand every detail of what he plans, & that therefore the Plan must be as finite as the intelligence of the Planner. This of course is not so. Using the principles of the multistable system it should be possible to develop, though not to understand, a Plan that is far superior to anything that any individual can devise. Coupled with this is the new possibility that it can be self-correcting. Summary: Society.
Here we see the usual emphasis on performativity as prior to representation, even in planning—"though not to understand"—and temporal emergence, but expressed now in a much more socially symmetric idiom than Ashby's remarks on warfare and psychiatry. Now planners do not dictate to the planned how their lives will develop; instead planners and planned are envisaged as more or less equivalent parts of a single multistable system, entangled with one another in feedback loops from which transformations of the plan continually emerge. The image is the same as the vision of evolutionary design that Ashby articulated in relation to DAMS, transferred from the world of machines to that of people—now social designs and plans are to be understood not as given from the start and imposed on their object but as growing in the thick of things.
This is just one entry in Ashby's journal. He never systematically developed a cybernetic sociology. I mention it now because these remarks can serve as an antidote to the idea that Ashby's only vision of society was warfare, and, more important, because here he crudely sketches out a symmetric cybernetic vision of society that we shall see elaborated in all sorts of ways in the following chapters.
In conclusion, however, we can note that all traces of hierarchy were hardly purged from Ashby's thinking. The sentences that I skip
ped above contain his reflections on just how "the people" should make themselves felt in the feedback loops that pass through them. "The 'comfort' of the individual . . . can easily be measured. One simply makes a rule that every protest or appeal must be accompanied by a sum of money, & the rule is that the more you pay the more effective will your appeal be. You can have a sixpenny appeal which will adjust trivialities up to a hundred-pound appeal that will move mountains." This from a medical professional with a weakness for fast sports cars in a class-ridden society recovering from the devastations of war. It would be nice to think he was joking.
Cybernetics as a Theory of Everything
From the late 1920s until well into the 1950s Ashby's research aimed to understand the go of the brain. But this project faltered as the fifties went on. As we have just seen, Ashby's ambition to build a synthetic brain came to grief over his failure to get DAMS to accumulate adaptations. And, at the same time, as we saw in the previous chapter, the psychiatric milieu in which Ashby's cybernetics had grown started to shrink—as psychoactive drugs began to replace ECT and whatever, and as the antipsychiatric reaction to materialist psychiatry began to gain force. Where did those developments leave Ashby? Did he just give up? Evidently not. His mature cybernetics—that for which he is best remembered among cyberneticians today—in fact grew out of this smash-up, in ways that I can sketch out.