The key insight of the new kind of science, which Wolfram abbreviates to NKS, is that "incredibly simple rules can give rise to incredibly complicated behavior" (Wolfram 2005, 13), an idea grounded in Wolfram's explorations of simple, one-dimensional cellular automata. "Cellular automaton" is a forbidding name for a straightforward mathematical system. A onedimensional CA is just a set of points on a line, with a binary variable, zero or one, assigned to each point. One imagines this system evolving in discrete time steps according to definite rules: a variable might change or stay the same according to its own present value and those of its two nearest neighbors, for example. How do such systems behave? The relationship of this problematic to Ashby's, Alexander's, and Kauffman's is clear: all three of them were looking at the properties of CAs, but much more complicated ones (effectively, in higher dimensions) than Wolfram's. And what Wolfram found—"playing with the animals," as he once put it to me—was that even these almost childishly simple systems can generate enormously complex patterns.74 Some do not: the pattern dies out after a few time steps; all the variables become zero, and nothing happens thereafter. But Wolfram's favorite example is the behavior of the rule 30 cellular automaton shown in figure 4.14 (one can list and number all possible transformation rules for linear CAs, and Wolfram simply ran them all on a computer).
If Kauffman was surprised that his networks displayed simple behavior, one can be even more surprised at the complexities that are generated by Wolfram's elementary rules. He argues that rule 30 (and other rules, too) turn out to be "computationally irreducible" in the sense that "there's essentially no way to work out what the system will do by any procedure that takes less computational effort than just running the system and seeing what happens." There are no "shortcuts" to be found (Wolfram 2005, 30). And this observation is the starting point for the new kind of science (31):
In traditional theoretical science, there's sort of been an idealization made that the observer is infinitely computationally powerful relative to the system they're observing. But the point is that when there's complex behavior, the Principle of Computational Equivalence says that instead the system is just as computationally sophisticated as the observer. And that's what leads to computational irreducibility. And that's why traditional theoretical science hasn't been able to make more progress when one sees complexity. There are always pockets of reducibility where one can make progress, but there's always a core of computational irreducibility.
Figure 4.14.Rule 30 cellular automaton. Time steps move from the top downward; 1s are denoted by black cells, starting from a single 1. The transformation rule is shown at the bottom. Source: Wolfram 2005, 4. (Image courtesy of Wolfram Research, Inc. [] and Stephen Wolfram LLC, as used in Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science © 2002.)
The classical sciences thus address just those "pockets" of the world where the traditional shortcuts can be made to work, while the reference of NKS is to all of the other aspects of the world where brute complexity is the rule, and much of Wolfram's work has been devoted to bringing this ontological perspective down to earth in all sorts of fields: mathematics; a sort of crystallography (e.g., snowflake structures); studies of turbulence; biology, where Wolfram's discussion echoes Kauffman's.75 Having compared the patterns on mollusc shells to those generated by various CAs, Wolfram notes that (22)
it's very much as if the molluscs of the Earth are little computers—sampling the space of possible simple programs, and then displaying the results on their shells. You know, with all the emphasis on natural selection, one's gotten used to the idea that there can't be much of a fundamental theory in biology—and that practically everything we see must just reflect detailed accidents in the history of biological evolution. But what the mollusc shell example suggests is that that may not be so. And that somehow one can think of organisms as uniformly sampling a space of possible programs. So that just knowing abstractly about the space of programs will tell one about biology
And, of course, reflecting his disciplinary origins, Wolfram also sees the NKS as offering a "truly fundamental theory of physics." Space, time and causality are merely appearances, themselves emerging from a discrete network of points—and the ultimate task of physics is then to find out what rule the system is running. "It's going to be fascinating—and perhaps humbling—to see just where our universe is. The hundredth rule? Or the millionth? Or the quintillionth? But I'm increasingly optimistic that this is all really going to work. And that eventually out there in the computational universe we'll find our universe. With all of our physics. And that will certainly be an exciting moment for science" (27).
We can thus see Wolfram's work as a further variant on the theme that Ashby set out in 1952 in his considerations of the time to reach equilibrium of multihomeostat assemblages, but differing from the other variants in interesting and important ways. Unlike Alexander and Kauffman, Wolfram has generalized and ontologized the problematic, turning it into an account of how the world is, as well as respecifying it in the domains mentioned above and more. Beyond that, from our point of view, Wolfram's distinctive contribution has been to focus on systems that do not settle down into equilibrium, that perform in unpredictable ways, and to suggest that that is the world's ontological condition. His NKS thus offers us a further enrichment of our ontological imaginations. Systems like the rule 30 CA genuinely become; the only way to find out what they will do next is run the rule on their present configuration and find out. As ontological theater, they help us to imagine the world that way; they add becoming to our models of what Beer's "exceedingly complex systems" might be like. If we think of the world as built from CA-like entities, we have a richer grasp of the cybernetic ontology.
It remains only to comment on the social basis of Wolfram's work. We have seen already that after a meteoric but otherwise conventional career in academic research Wolfram (like Kauffman) veered off into business, and that this business enabled him to sustain his unusual hobby (like Ashby)—providing both a living and research tools. There is the usual improvised oddity here, evident in the biographies of all our cyberneticians. What I should add is that having launched NKS with his 2002 book, Wolfram has since sought to foster the growth of the field with an annual series of conferences and summer schools. Organized by Wolfram's group, these parallel the Santa Fe Institute in existing outside the usual academic circuits, and one can again see them as an attempt to stabilize a novel social base for a novel kind of science. Nine of the eleven people listed as faculty for the 2005 NKS summer school worked for, or had worked for, Wolfram Research, including Wolfram himself, and the website for the school mentions that, in the past, "some of our most talented attendees have been offered positions at Wolfram Research."76 Wolfram also imagines a permanent NKS research institute, supported, perhaps, by software companies, including his own (personal communication). Bios, the SFI, NKS: a nascent social formation for the latter-day counterparts of cybernetics begins to appear here beyond the frame of the usual instititutions of learning—a parallel world, a social as well as ontological—a socio-ontological—sketch of another future.
5
_ _ _ _ _
GREGORY BATESON AND R. D. LAING
symmetry, psychiatry, and the sixties
I THINK THAT THE FUNCTIONING OF SUCH HIERARCHIES MAY BE COMPARED WITH THE BUSINESS OF TRYING TO BACK A TRUCK TO WHICH ONE OR MORE TRAILERS ARE ATTACHED. EACH SEGMENTATION OF SUCH A SYSTEM DENOTES A REVERSAL OF SIGN, AND EACH ADDED SEGMENT DENOTES A DRASTIC DECREASE IN THE AMOUNT OF CONTROL. . . . WHEN WE CONSIDER THE PROBLEM OF CONTROLLING A SECOND TRAILER, THE THRESHOLD FOR JACKKNIFING IS DRASTICALLY REDUCED, AND CONTROL BECOMES, THEREFORE, ALMOST NEGLIGIBLE. AS I SEE IT, THE WORLD IS MADE UP OF A VERY COMPLEX NETWORK (RATHER THAN A CHAIN) OF SUCH ENTITIES WHICH HAVE THIS SORT OF RELATION TO EACH OTHER, BUT WITH THIS DIFFERENCE, THAT MANY OF THE ENTITIES HAVE THEIR OWN SUPPLIES OF ENERGY AND PERHAPS EVEN THEIR OWN IDEAS OF WHERE THEY WOULD LIKE TO GO.
GREGORY BATESON,"MINIMAL REQUIREMENTS FOR A THEORY OF SCHIZ
OPHRENIA" (1959, 268)
The two previous chapters covered the emergence of cybernetics in Britain from the 1940s onward. At their heart were Walter and Ashby's electromechanical brain models, the tortoise, the homeostat, and DAMS, and the discovery of complexity that went with them—the realization that even simple models can display inscrutably complex behavior. I emphasized that this first-generation cybernetics was born in the world of psychiatry, and that, despite its ramifications outside that field, it left clinical psychiatry itself largely untouched. Walter and Ashby's cybernetics in effect endorsed existing psychiatric practice by modelling and conceptualizing the action of electroshock, lobotomy, and so on. In this chapter, I want to look at a very different approach to psychiatry that grew up in the fifties and sixties that was also identifiably cybernetic, and that I associate primarily with the work of Gregory Bateson and R. D. Laing.
The pivot here can be Ashby's contrasting analyses of war and planning. Ashby understood both on the model of interacting homeostats searching for a shared equilibrium, but he thought of war and psychiatry ("blitz therapy") in an asymmetric fashion. The general and the psychiatrist try to stay the same and force the other—the enemy, the patient—to adapt to them: the defeated enemy accedes to the terms of the victor; the patient returns to the world of sanity and normality embodied in the psychiatrist. This asymmetric vision was the key to the reconciliation between early cybernetics and its psychiatric matrix. On the other hand, Ashby envisaged the possibility of a more symmetric relation between planner and planned: each party, and the plan that links them, can adapt homeostatically to the other. In this chapter, we will be exploring what psychiatry looked like when it took the other fork in the road and understood social relations in general on the symmetric rather than the asymmetric model. As we will see, big transformations in practice accompanied this. This chapter can also serve as a transition to the following chapters on Beer and Pask, who also took the symmetric fork in thinking about reciprocal adaptations of people, animals, machines, and nature. It is this symmetric version of the cybernetic ontology of performative adaptation that interests me most in this book.
Four more introductory points are worth making. First, the object of Walter and Ashby's cybernetics was the biological brain: they wanted to understand the material go of it, and the go of existing psychiatric therapies. This was not the case with Bateson and Laing. Neither of them was concerned with the biological brain; the referent of their work was something less well defined, which I will refer to as the self. Their work remained cybernetic inasmuch as their conception of the self was again performative and adaptive, just like the cybernetic brain more narrowly conceived. Second, we will see below how this concern with the performative self provided further openings to the East and accompanied an interest in strange performances and altered states more generally. One can, in fact, specify the connection between madness and spirituality more tightly in Laing and Bateson's work than was possible in the previous chapters. Third, I can mention in advance that while Walter and Ashby's psychiatric interests were not tied to any specific form of mental pathology, Bateson and Laing's work focused in particular on schizophrenia, and the "visionary" quality of schizophrenia was central to their extension of psychiatry in a spiritual direction. And, fourth, we will also have a chance here to examine in more detail connections between cybernetics and the sixties.
Unlike the four principals of this book, Laing and Bateson have been much written about, so this chapter does not explore their work in depth comparable that of the chapters 3 and 4. Bateson was interested in many topics during the course of his life, but I will only cover his psychiatric phase. Laing was a professional psychiatrist throughout his working life, but I focus only on the period of his greatest fame and notoriety, the sixties—partly because I am interested in the sixties, but also because the therapeutic communities established in the sixties by Laing's Philadelphia Association offer us a stark example of what the symmetric version of cybernetics can look like in practice. Neither Bateson nor Laing worked alone, so their names often feature here as a convenient shorthand for groups of collaborators.
Gregory Bateson
THE TRUE CHALLENGE IS HOW NOT TO PLAY THE GAME BY THE RULES OF NATURAL SCIENCE . . . HOW TO ESTABLISH AN AUTHORITY THAT ENABLES THE PURSUIT OF THE POSSIBILITIES OF AN ALTERED SCIENCE, ONE THAT IS FAR LESS DESTRUCTIVE.
PETER HARRIES-JONES,"UNDERSTANDING ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS" (2005, 67)
MY PERSONAL INSPIRATION HAS OWED MUCH TO THE MEN WHO OVER THE LAST TWO HUNDRED YEARS HAVE KEPT ALIVE THE IDEA OF A UNITY BETWEEN MIND AND BODY: LAMARCK . . . WILLIAM BLAKE . . . SAMUEL BUTLER . . . R. G. COLLINGWOOD . . . AND WILLIAM BATESON, MY FATHER, WHO WAS CERTAINLY READY IN 1894 TO RECEIVE THE CYBERNETIC IDEAS.
GREGORY BATESON,STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND (2000, XXI–XXII)
Gregory Bateson (fig. 5.1) was born in Grantchester, near Cambridge, in 1904, the son of the eminent geneticist William Bateson, and died in San Francisco in 1980. He studied at Cambridge, completing the natural science tripos in 1924 and the anthropological tripos in 1926, and was a research fellow at St. John's College from 1931 to 1937. He made his prewar reputation as an anthropologist in Bali and New Guinea, and in 1940 he moved from Britain to the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, from 1943 until 1945. Bateson was married to the American anthropologist Margaret Mead from 1936 until 1950, and together they were among the founding members of the Macy cybernetics conferences held between 1946 and 1953. In the same period Bateson's interests took a psychiatric turn, as he lectured at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco and then worked as an ethnologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California (1949–63).1 What follows seeks to trace out some of the main features of Bateson's psychiatric work as it developed in a ten-year project which formally began in 1952 with a two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Bateson was joined in this project by Jay Haley, John Weakland, and William Fry in 1953 and by Don Jackson in 1954.2
Figure 5.1. Gregory Bateson in the mid-1950s. (Used courtesy of Lois Bateson.)
In 1956 the Bateson group published the first of a series of important papers, "Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia" (Bateson et al. 1956). There Bateson advanced his famous concept of the double bind, and we should note that this is entirely cybernetic. Much like the contradictory conditioning of Pavlov's dogs and Walter's tortoises, the double bind was envisaged as a repeated situation to which the sufferer could find no satisfactory response.3 The first schizophrenia paper gave as an example a mother who encouraged her son to display conventionally loving behavior but froze and repelled him whenever he did, and then asked him what was wrong with him when he moved away. Like Pavlov and Walter, then, Bateson understood schizophrenia as a possible response to this sort of contradictory situation. If there is no normal way to go on, one has to find some abnormal response—total withdrawal from communication, paranoid suspicion, an inability to take anything literally, mistaking inner voices for the outside world, and so on.4
Thus the basic plot, and two points need clarification here. One is the thought that Bateson's interest in communication patterns might seem to move us away from the cybernetic concern with performance and toward the more familiar representational brain and self. He is, however, better seen as again elaborating a performative understanding of communication, both verbal and nonverbal—a notion of speech as a representational detour leading out of and back to performance. The mother and son in the example are not exchanging information so much as eliciting and responding to the behavior of the other.5
This leads to the second point. Bateson did not think that the mother in the example caused her son's schizophrenia in any linear fashion. Instead, as I mentioned earlier, on the model of the homeostat, he thought of all the parties as adapting to one another in a trial-and-error search through the space of performance, and of schizophrenia as an instance of the whole system reaching a state of equilibrium ha
ving bizarre properties.6
SCHIZOPHRENIA AND ENLIGHTENMENT
IN THE EASTERN RELIGION, ZEN BUDDHISM, THE GOAL IS TO ACHIEVE ENLIGHTENMENT. THE ZEN MASTER ATTEMPTS TO BRING ABOUT ENLIGHTENMENT IN HIS PUPIL IN VARIOUS WAYS. ONE OF THE THINGS HE DOES IS TO HOLD A STICK OVER THE PUPIL'S HEAD AND SAY FIERCELY, "IF YOU SAY THIS STICK IS REAL, I WILL STRIKE YOU WITH IT. IF YOU SAY THIS STICK IS NOT REAL, I WILL STRIKE YOU WITH IT. IF YOU DON'T SAY ANYTHING, I WILL STRIKE YOU WITH IT." WE FEEL THAT THE SCHIZOPHRENIC FINDS HIMSELF CONTINUALLY IN THE SAME SITUATION AS THE PUPIL, BUT HE ACHIEVES SOMETHING LIKE DISORIENTATION RATHER THAN ENLIGHTENMENT. THE ZEN PUPIL MIGHT REACH UP AND TAKE THE STICK AWAY FROM THE MASTER—WHO MIGHT ACCEPT THIS RESPONSE, BUT THE SCHIZOPHRENIC HAS NO CHOICE SINCE WITH HIM THERE IS NO NOT CARING ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP, AND HIS MOTHER'S AIMS AND AWARENESS ARE NOT LIKE THE MASTER'S.
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