The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  Like the VSM, syntegrity can be described as a form of subpolitics, this time at a microscale of small groups. Like the VSM, syntegrity had at its heart a diagram, though now a geometric figure rather than a neurophysiological chart. Again like the VSM, syntegrity, Beer argued, staged an inherently democratic organization, an arrangement of people in which concrete, substantive, political programs could be democratically worked out—indeed, he often referred to syntegration as "complete," idealized," and "perfect democracy" (Beer 1994b, 12; 1990b, 122). And, unlike the VSM, in this case it is hard to dispute Beer's description. Beer's critics were right that the VSM could easily be converted to a system of surveillance, command, and control, but it is hard to contrive such fears about syntegrity. By construction, there are no privileged positions in the syntegration icosahedron, and there is no evident way any individual could control the syntegration process (short of wrecking it beyond recognition).

  Once more, too, we can see how ontology and subpolitics are bound up together in syntegrity. As exceedingly complex systems, the participants cannot know in advance what topics will emerge from the syntegration process, and this emergence is orchestrated as a process of multihomeostat-like reciprocal vetoing and creative mutual accommodation between participants and statements of importance. Of course, there is some prestructuring entailed in the assembly of an infoset around a broad topic and in the geometric arrangement of persons and topics, but here we can note two points. First, the syntegration process was even more fully open ended than that of the VSM. If a set of formal if revisable mathematical models were intrinsic to the latter, no such formalisms intervened in syntegration: topics, statements, and goals were all open-endedly revisable in discussion as they reverberated around the icosahedron. Second, the icosahedral structure did undeniably constitute an infringement on individual freedom: individuals could only contribute to the discussion of topics to which they had been assigned. In this sense, and as usual, syntegrity staged a hybrid ontology, partially thematizing and acting out an ontology of becoming, but within a fixed framework. Beer would no doubt have remarked, as he did of the VSM, that any form of organization exacts its price, and that the price here was worth paying for the symmetric openness to becoming that it made possible. One can also note that syntegration was a finite and limited process; participants were not locked into it, in the way that they might be within a business or a nation. So, in the next syntegration participants could take other positions within the diagram, and, of course, the entire general topic could shift.

  _ _ _ _ _

  Throughout this book we have been concerned with the socio-ontological mismatch between cybernetics and modern institutions, with the amateurism of Beer's work on biological computing as our latest example. In the earlier chapters we also ran into examples of a constructive response to the mismatch: Kingsley Hall, for example, as providing a model for a new social basis for cybernetic forms of life, the germ of a parallel social universe as Alexander Trocchi envisaged it. Beer, too, contributed to this constructive project. As we saw, he played a key role in the establishment of the Department of Cybernetics at Brunel University—a partly successful attempt to implant a sustainable cybernetic presence in the established academic order. From another angle, the VSM can be seen as an attempt to reconfigure the world of organizations along cybernetic lines, to make that world an explicitly and self-consciously cybernetic place. And we can understand the team syntegrity approach to decision making similarly—not now as the construction of enduring institutions, but as making available a finite and ephemeral social form lasting for just a few days, that could be mobilized ad hoc by groups at any scale for any purpose, from reorganizing the British OR society up to world governance.48 One does not have to subscribe to the details of the VSM or team syntegrity; the point here is that Beer's work can further enrich our imaginations with concrete examples of what Trocchi's parallel universe might look like, and that those forms would indeed be importantly different in specific ways from the hegemonic forms of our present social, political, and subpolitical arrangements. Again, ontology makes a difference, here in the domain of subpolitics.

  Cybernetics and Spirituality

  IN INDIA THERE ARE MANDALAS—PICTURES CONVEYING SACRED INSIGHTS NOT EXPRESSED IN WORDS. OUR MODERN CHIPS MAY NOT BE SACRAMENTALS, BUT THEY USE NO FORM OF WORDS. COME NOW (SOMEONE MIGHT PROTEST), WE KNOW WHAT THE CHIP DOES, THE FUNCTIONS IT PERFORMS. SO (IT SHOULD BE REPLIED) DID THE YOGIS OF INDIA, THE LAMAS OF TIBET, ALSO UNDERSTAND THEIR OWN MANDALAS.

  HANS BLOHM,STAFFORD BEER, AND DAVID SUZUKI, PEBBLES TO COMPUTERS (1986, 37)

  And now for something completely different. Well, not completely. The previous chapters have looked at some of the connections between cybernetics and Eastern, nonmodern, forms of spirituality, and we can continue the examination here. Beer rigorously excluded all references to spiritual concerns from his writings on management cybernetics, and one can certainly take the latter seriously without committing oneself to the former—many of Beer's associates and followers do just that. But of our cyberneticians it was Beer who lived the fullest and most committed spiritual life, and I want now to explore the relations between his spirituality and his cybernetics, beginning with an outline of his spiritual career.

  Beer was born into a High Church family and, according to his brother, before the family moved to Wales to escape the bombing of World War II,

  we all attended the Church of St John the Evangelist, Shirley, where our Father and Stafford were Servers in the choir—indeed both were members of the Guild of Servers and wore their medals. . . . Stafford always sat sideways in his choir stall with one side of his glasses over his ear and the other in his mouth and frowned. The glasses, I believe, had plain glass in them as he wanted to look older than he was. At some moments when the vicar said something (I assume outrageous to Stafford) he took the glasses off and turned to glower at the pulpit. I felt very proud of him. . . . To me they were happy times and prepared us both to take the spiritual dimension of our lives seriously, wherever it took us from that traditional Anglo-Catholic Church in the thirties.49

  The spiritual dimension of Stafford's life took him in two directions. Sometime after his military service in India, he converted to Catholicism (1965, 301), but he later "gave up Christianity and discovered Christ," and toward the end of his life he described himself as a Buddhist, a tantric yogi. According to Allenna Leonard, he had been fascinated with Eastern philosophy since he was a small child. In his year at University College London he wanted to study Eastern philosophy, but the subject was not taught: "My dear boy, go to SOAS"—the School of Oriental and African Studies. Instead, as we have seen, he went to India with the British Army in 1944, returning in 1947 "as thin as a rake, a very different person. . . . He was almost totally absorbed in Indian mysticism, had read endless books and had seen death, etc, I recall he told me there was no such thing as pain; it was in the mind and mind over matter and so on. To prove his point he allowed people to press lighted cigarettes onto the inside of his wrist to burn a hole while he felt nothing."50 So, we have these two sides to Beer's life: the scientific (cybernetics) and the spiritual (Catholicism, Eastern mysticism, and strange performances). There is, of course, nothing especially unusual about that. Many physicists, for example, are deeply religious. But in respect of modern sciences like physics, the scientific and the spiritual are usually held apart, existing, as one might say, in different compartments of life, practiced in different places at different times, in the laboratory during the week and in church on Sunday. Bruno Latour (1993) speaks of the "crossed-out God" of modernity—the Christian God as both almighty and absent from the world of science and human affairs. As usual, cybernetics was not like that. Beer's cybernetics and spirituality were entangled in many ways, and that is what I want to explore here, focusing first on Beer's overall perspective on nature and then on the more esoteric aspects of his spiritual understandings and practices. The earliest of Beer's spiritual writings was an es
say published in 1965, "Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God," and this provides a convenient entrée for both topics.

  Hylozoism

  First, Beer's perspective on nature. "Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God" begins not with nature itself but with a discussion of the finitude of the human mind. "Each of us has about ten thousand million neurons to work with. It is a lot, but it is thelot. . . . This means that there is a strict mathematical limit to our capacity to compute cerebrally—and therefore to our understanding. For make no mistake: understanding is mediated by the machinery in the skull" (Beer 1965, 294). As a corollary, beyond our cerebral limits there must exist in the world things which we cannot know.51 Here we recognize the cybernetic ontology of unknowability—Beer was writing for a readership of nonspecialists; otherwise, he could simply have said that the cosmos was an exceedingly complex system, as he had defined the term in Cybernetics and Management in 1959. There is, though, a difference in the way in which Beer develops this thought in this essay. One can think of the economic environment of a firm as being exceedingly complex in a mundane fashion: we can readily comprehend many aspects of the economy; it is just impossible to hold all of them and their interrelations in consciousness at once. In the religious context, in contrast, Beer reaches for a more absolute sense of unknowability, invoking repeatedly "an irreducible mystery: that there is anything" (Beer 1965, 298). And this is where God comes in: "Here is another definition [of God], which I would add to the scholastic list of superlative attributes: God is what explains the mystery"(299). This is an odd kind of explanation, since Beer could not offer any independent definition of the explanans. One mystery, God, is simply defined here as that which explains another, existence. In ordinary language, at least, there is no "gap" between the two terms, so I am inclined to read Beer as saying here that matter and spirit are one, or that they are two aspects of an underlying unity. This is part of what I want to get at in describing Beer's appreciation of nature as hylozoist—the understanding that nature is infused, one might say, by spirit.

  At any rate, we can see here that the ontology of unknowability was a straightforward point of linkage, almost of identity, between Beer's worldly cybernetics and his spirituality: the correlated mysteries of existence and of God are simply the mystery of exceedingly complex mundane systems taken to the Nthdegree, where Nis infinite. And along with this ontological resonance, we can find an epistemological one. I have remarked several times on Beer's cybernetic suspicion of articulated knowledge and models, as a not necessarily reliable detour away from performance, and he expressed this suspicion, again to the Nthdegree, in relation to the spiritual (Beer 1965, 294–95, 298):

  To people reared in the good liberal tradition, man is in principle infinitely wise; he pursues knowledge to its ultimate. . . . To the cybernetician, man is part of a control system. His input is grossly inadequate to the task of perceiving the universe. . . . There is no question of "ultimate" understanding. . . . It is part of the cultural tradition that man's language expresses his thoughts. To the cybernetician, language is a limiting code in which everything has to be expressed—more's the pity, for the code is not nearly rich enough to cope. . . . Will you tell me that science is going to deal with this mystery [of existence] in due course? I reply that it cannot. The scientific reference frame is incompetent to provide an existence theorem for existence. The layman may believe that science will one day "explain everything away"; the scientist himself ought to know better.

  Figure 6.18.The Gatineau River, Quebec. Source: Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 51. (Photo: Hans-Ludwig Blohm. © Hans-Ludwig Blohm, Canada.)

  Epistemologically as well as ontologically, then, Beer's cybernetics crossed over smoothly into a spiritually charged hylozoism. And we can follow the crossover further by jumping ahead twenty years, to a book published in 1986, Pebbles to Computers: The Thread, which combines photographs by Hans Blohm with text by Stafford Beer and an introduction by David Suzuki. It is a coffee-table book with lots of color pictures and traces out a longue durée history of computing, running from simple counting ("pebbles") to digital electronic computers. The history is not, however, told in a linear fashion leading up to the present, but as a topologically complex "thread"—drawn by Beer as a thick red line twisting around photographs and text and linking one page to the next—embracing, for example, Stonehenge as an astronomical computer and Peruvian quipus, beautiful knotted threads, as calculational devices. Here Beer develops his ontological vision further. Under the heading "Nature Calculates," he comments on a photograph of the Gatineau River (fig. 6.18) that catches the endless complexity of the water's surface (Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 54): "This exquisite photograph of water in movement . . . has a very subtle message for us. It is that nature's computers are that which they compute. If one were to take intricate details of wind and tide and so on, and use them . . . as 'input' to some computer simulating water—what computer would one use, and how express the 'output'? Water itself: that answers both those questions." And then he goes on to reproduce one of his own poems, written in 1964, "Computers, the Irish Sea," which reads (Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 52; reproduced from Beer 1977):

  That green computer sea

  with all its molecular logic

  to the system's square inch,

  a bigger brain than mine,

  writes out foamy equations from the bow

  across the bland blackboard water.

  Accounting for variables

  which navigators cannot even list,

  a bigger sum than theirs,

  getting the answer continuously right

  without fail and without anguish

  integrals white on green.

  Cursively writes recursively computes

  that green computer sea

  on a scale so shocking

  that all the people sit dumbfounded

  throwing indigestible peel at seagulls

  not uttering an equation between them.

  All this liquid diophantine stuff

  of order umpteen million

  is its own analogue. Take a turn

  around the deck and understand

  the mystery by which what happens

  writes out its explanation as it goes.

  In effect, this poem is another reexpression of the cybernetic ontology of unknowability, where the unknowability is conceived to reside in the sheer excess of nature over our representational abilities. The water knows what it is doing and does it faultlessly and effortlessly in real time, a performance we could never emulate representationally. Nature does "a bigger sum than theirs"—exceeding our capacities in way that we can only wonder at, "shocked" and "dumbfounded."52 But Beer then adds a further point (Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 54): "The uneasy feeling that [this poem] may have caused derives, perhaps, from insecurity as to who is supposed to be in charge. Science (surely?) 'knows the score.' Science does the measuring after all. . . . But if art is said to imitate nature, so does science. . . . Who will realize when the bathroom cistern has been filled—someone with a ruler and a button to press, or the ballcock that floats up to switch the water off? Natureis (let it be clear that) natureis in charge." There is a clear echo here of Beer's work with biological computers (which, as mentioned earlier, also figure in Pebbles): not only can we not hope to equal nature representationally, but we do not need to—nature itself performs, acts, is in charge. This idea of nature as active as well infused with spirit is the definition of hylozoism, which is why I describe Beer's ontology as hylozoist. We could even think of Beer's distinctive approach to biological computing as a form of hylozoist, or spiritual, engineering. Aside from the reference to spirit, we can also continue to recognize in this emphasis on the endless performativity of matter the basic ontology of British cybernetics in general.53 And we can make further connections by looking at Beer's thoughts on mind. In Pebbles, he refers to the Buddhist Diamond Sutra: "Think a thought, it says, 'unsupported by sights, sounds, smells, tastes, toucha
bles, or any objects of the mind.' Can you do that?" (Blohm, Beer, and Suzuki 1986, 67). The implicit answer is no. Sensations, feelings, cognition—all emerge from, as part of, the unrepresentable excess of nature, they do not contain or dominate it. And under the heading "The Knower and the Known Are One" Beer's text comes to an end with a quotation from hsin hsin ming by Sengstan, the third Zen patriarch (d. 606) (105):

  Things are objects because of the mind;

  The mind is such because of things.

  Understand the relativity of these two

  and the basic reality: the unity of emptiness.

  In this emptiness the two are indistingushable

  and each contains in itself the whole world.

  I cannot give a fully cybernetic gloss of this quotation; the notion of "emptiness" presently eludes me. But one can go quite a way in grasping the Zen patriarch's sentiment by thinking about Ashby's multihomeostat setups—one homeostat standing for the brain or mind, the others for its world—or perhaps even better, of the configuration of DAMS in which a subset of its elements could be designated the mind and the others that to which the mind adapts. In the dynamic interplay of mind and world thus instantiated, "objects" and "mind" do reciprocally condition each other.54

  I can sum this section up by saying that there are two perspectives one might adopt on the relation between cybernetics and Beer's spiritual stance as discussed so far. If one balks at any reference to the spiritual, then one can see Beer's hylozoism as an extension of cybernetics proper, adding something to the secular part that we have focused on elsewhere. Then we could say: This is how one might extend cybernetics into the realm of the spiritual if one wanted to; this is the kind of direction in which it might lead. On the other hand, if one were prepared to recognize that there is a brute mystery of existence, and if one were willing to associate that mystery with the spiritual realm, itself defined by that association, then one could say that Beer's hylozoism just is cybernetics—cybernetics taken more seriously than we have taken it before. Beer's spirituality can thus be seen as either continuous with or identical to his worldly cybernetics—a situation very different from the discontinuity between the modern sciences and the crossed-out God of modernity. Once more we see that ontology makes a difference, now in the spiritual realm—the cybernetic ontology aligning itself with Eastern spirituality rather than orthodox Christianity and, at the same time, eroding the boundary between science and spirit.55