The Cybernetic Brain

by Andrew Pickering

  Tantrism

  YOGA MEANS UNION, WHETHER OF SELF AND COSMOS, MAN AND WOMAN, THE DIFFERENT CHAMBERS OF THE MIND. . . . IN THE LIMIT, THEREFORE, OF THE A AND THE NOT-A.

  STAFFORD BEER,"I SAID, YOU ARE GODS" (1994 [1980], 385)

  The second spiritual topic I need to discuss has to do with esoteric knowledge and practice, and here we can also begin with Beer's 1965 essay "Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God." One might think that having named existence as the ultimate mystery and having defined God as its explanation, Beer would have reduced himself to silence. Instead, the essay opens up a discursive space by thinking along the same lines as Beer did in his management cybernetics. In the latter he insisted that the factory's economic environment was itself ultimately unknowable, but he also insisted that articulated models of the economy were useful, as long as they were treated as revisable in practice and not as fixed and definitive representations of their objects, and the essay follows much the same logic in the spiritual realm.

  Just as the factory adapts to its economic environment in a performative fashion without ever fully grasping it, so it might be that, while our finite brains can never rationally grasp the essence of God, nevertheless, the spiritual bears upon us and leaves marks upon the "human condition" (Beer 1965, 294). Beer gives the example of suffering. "The child of loving parents is suddenly seized by them, bound and gagged and locked in a dark cellar. What is the child to make of that? It must be evident to him that (i) his parents have turned against him; but (ii) they have done so without any cause, and therefore (iii) the world is a place where things can happen without causes." In fact, in this story, "what has actually happened is that the home has suddenly been raided by secret police, seeking children as hostages. There was no time to explain; there was too much risk to the child to permit him any freedom" (296). Like the parents in this story, then, Beer had the idea that God moves in a mysterious way which has effects on us, though, as child analogues, we cannot grasp God's plan. The marks of God's agency are evident in history.

  That means that we canaccumulate knowledge, though never adequate, of God, just as factory managers learn about their environments. And that, in turn, implies, according to Beer in 1965, that there are two authorities we should consult in the realm of the spiritual. One is the Catholic Church—the "admonitory church" (Beer 1965, 300)—as the repository of our accumulated wisdom in brushing up against and adapting to the spiritual. But since Beer later renounced Catholicism, his second source of authority bears emphasis. It is "the total drift of human knowledge. Though compounded of the work of individual brains . . . the totality of human insight can conceivably be greater than the insight of one brain. For people use their brains in markedly different, and perhaps complementary ways." In cybernetic terms, many brains have more variety than one and thus are better able to latch onto the systems with which they interact. And the reference to "complementary ways" here asserts that there is even more variety if we pay attention to the historical drift of knowledge over a range of spiritual traditions rather than within a single one (301): "Anthropologist friends point out so many alien cultures produce so many similar ideas about God, about the Trinity, about the Incarnation. They expect me to be astonished. They mean that I ought to realise there is something phoney about my specifically Christian beliefs. I am astonished, but for opposite reasons. I am cybernetically impressed . . . by Augustine's precept: 'securus judicat orbis terrarum'—the world at large judges rightly." Beer perhaps verges on heresy in his willingness to find spiritual truths across the range of the world's religions, but he saves himself, if he does, by seizing in this essay on just those truths that the church itself espoused: God, the Trinity, the incarnation of God in Christ. Later, when he had left the church, he seized on other ones, as we will see. For the moment, let me repeat that here Beer had developed a cybernetic rhetoric for smuggling all sorts of positive spiritual knowledge past the ontology of unknowability, and it is worth noting that one example of this figures prominently in the "Knowledge of God" essay (Beer 1965, 297): "In fact, we—that is men—have a whole reference frame, called religion, which distinguishes between orders of creation precisely in terms of their communication capacity. The catalogue starts with inanimate things, works up through the amoeba and jellyfish to the primates, runs through monkeys to men—and then goes gaily on: angels, archangels, virtues, powers, principalities, dominations, thrones, seraphim, cherubim." So here, in the writings of the world's greatest management cybernetician, then director of one of the world's first OR consulting groups, we find the medieval Great Chain of Being, running continuously from rocks and stones to angels and God. There is, of course, no integral connection between this and cybernetics, but, at the same time, it is hard not to read it back into the development of Beer's cybernetics. The recursive structure of the VSM, as discussed so far, is nothing but the Great Chain of Being, sawn off before the angels appear—and, as we shall shortly see, Beer subsequently insisted on recontinuing the series, though in non-Christian terms.

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  As I said, these maneuvers in "Knowledge of God" open the way for a positive but revisable domain of spiritual knowledge, and we can learn more of where Beer came to stand in this domain from a book that he wrote that was never published, "Chronicles of Wizard Prang" (Beer 1989b).56 Wizard Prang is the central character in the twenty chapters of the book and clearly stands for Beer himself: he lives in a simple cottage in Wales, has a long beard, wears simple clothes, eats simple food, describes himself as "among other things . . . a cybernetician" (133) and continually sips white wine mixed with water, "a trick he had learned from the ancient Greeks" (12). The thrust of the book is resolutely spiritual and specifically "tantric" (103). Its substance concerns Prang's doings and conversations, the latter offering both cybernetic exegesis of spiritual topics and spiritually informed discussions of topics that Beer also addresses in his secular writings: the failings of an education system that functions to reproduce the world's problems (chap. 2); the sad state of modern economics (chap. 15); the need to beware of becoming trapped within representational systems, including tantric ones (chap. 15).57 We are entitled, then, to read the book as a presentation of the spiritual system that Beer lived by and taught when he was in Wales, albeit a fictionalized one that remains veiled in certain respects. And with the proviso that I am out of my depth here—I am no expert on the esoteric doctrines and practices to follow—I want to explore some of the resonances and connections between Beer's tantrism and his cybernetics.

  Figure 6.19.Beer meditating. (Photo: Hans-Ludwig Blohm. © Hans-Ludwig Blohm, Canada.)

  Tantrism is a hard concept to pin down. In his book Stafford Beer: A Personal Memoir, David Whittaker notes that "the word 'tantra' comes from the Sanskrit root tan meaning 'to extend, to expand.' It is a highly ritualistic philosophy of psycho-physical exercises, with a strong emphasis on visualization, including concentration on the yogic art of mandalas and yantras. The aim is a transmutation of consciousness where the 'boundary' or sense of separation of the self from the universe at large dissolves" (Whittaker 2003, 13).58 And we can begin to bring this description down to earth by noting that meditation was a key spiritual practice for Beer.

  Here, then, we can make contact with the discussion from earlier chapters—of meditation as a technology of the nonmodern self, aimed at exploring regions of the self as an exceedingly complex system and achieving "altered states of consciousness" (Beer 1989b, 41).59 Like the residents in the Archway communities, but in a different register, Beer integrated this technology into his life. Beyond that we can note that, as Whittaker's definition of tantrism suggests, Beer's style of meditation involved visual images. He both meditated upon images—mandalas, otherwise known as yantras (fig. 6.20)—and engaged in visualization exercises in meditation. In the tantric tradition this is recognized as a way of accessing a subtle realm of body, energy, and spirit—experiencing the body, for example, as a sequence of chakras ascending from the base of the
spine to the top of the head, and eventually aiming at union with the cosmos—"yoga means union," as Beer was wont to put it.60

  Figure 6.20.A yantra. Source: Beer 1989b, chap. 14, 105.

  Three points are worth noting here. First, we again find a notion of decentering the self here, relative both to the chakras as lower centers of consciousness and to the higher cosmos. As discussed before, we can understand this sort of decentering on the model of interacting homeostats, though the details, of course, are not integrally cybernetic but derive specifically from the tantric tradition. Second, we should recognize that yantras are, in a certain sense, symbolic and representational. Interestingly, however, Beer has Perny, his apprentice, stress their performativerather than symbolic quality when they first appear in Beer's text. Perny remarks on the yantra of figure 6.20 that "I was taught to use this one as a symbol on which to meditate." Another disciple replies, "It's sort of turning cartwheels." "I know what you mean," Perny responds. "This way of communicating, which doesn't use words, seems to work through its physiological effects" (Beer 1989b, 106). We thus return to a performative epistemology, now in the realm of meditation—the symbol as integral to performance, rather than a representation having importance in its own right.

  Third, and staying with the theme of performance, we could recall from chapter 3 that Grey Walter offered cybernetic explanations not just for the altered states achieved by Eastern yogis, but also for their strange bodily performances, suspending their metabolism and so on. We have not seen much of these strange performances since, but now we can go back to them. Wizard Prang himself displays displays unusual powers, though typically small ones which are not thematized but are dotted around the stories that make up the book. At one point Prang makes his end of a seesaw ascend and then descend just by intending it: "Making oneself light and making oneself heavy are two of the eight occult powers"; Prang can see the chakras and auras of others and detect their malfunctioning; Perny "change[s] the direction of a swirl [in a stream] by identifying with it rather than by exerting power"; the logs in the fireplace ignite themselves; spilled wine evaporates instantly on hitting the tiles; Prang sends a blessing flying after two of his disciples, "with the result that Toby [slips] and [falls] over with the force of it." More impressively, Perny remarks that "you give me telepathic news and I've seen you do telekinetic acts," and at one point Prang levitates, though even this is described in a humorous and self-deprecating fashion: "The wizard's recumbent form slowly and horizontally rose to the level of where his midriff would be if he were standing up. He stayed in that position for ten seconds, then slowly rotated. His feet described an arc through the air which set them down precisely, smoothly onto the floor. 'My God,' breathed Silica, 'What are you doing?' . . . 'Demonstrating my profession of wizardry, of course.' 'Do you often do things like that?' 'Hardly ever. It's pretty silly, isn't it?' "61 I paid little attention to these incidents in Beer's text until I discovered that the accrual of nonstandard powers is a recognized feature of spiritual progress by the yogi, and that there is a word for these powers: siddhis.62 Beer's practice was securely within the tantric tradition in this respect, too.

  In these various ways, then, Beer's spiritual knowledge and practice resonated with the cybernetic ontology of exceedingly complex performative systems, though, as I said, the detailed articulation of the ontology here derived not from cybernetics but from the accumulated wisdom of the tantric tradition. Having observed this, we can now look at more specific connections that Beer made between his spirituality and his cybernetics.

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  Beer's worldly cybernetics as I described it earlier is not as worldly as it might seem. This is made apparent in Beyond Dispute. For the first ten chapters, 177 pages, this book is entirely secular. It covers the basic ideas and form of team syntegrity, describes various experiments in syntegration and refinements of the protocol, and elaborates many of Beer's ideas that are by now familiar, up to and including his thoughts on how syntegration might play a part in an emergent "world governance." In chapters 11–14, 74 pages in all, the book takes on a different form. As if Beer had done his duty to the worldly aspects of the project in the opening chapters, now he conjures up its spiritual aspects and the esoteric knowledge that informs it. I cannot rehearse the entire content of these latter chapters, but we can examine some of its key aspects.

  Figure 6.21.The enneagram. Source: S. Beer, Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity (New York: Wiley, 1994), 202, fig. 12.4.

  Chapter 12 is entitled "The Dynamics of Icosahedral Space" and focuses on closed paths around the basic syntegration icosahedron, paths that lead from one vertex to the next and eventually return to their starting points. Beer's interest in such paths derived from the idea mentioned above, that in syntegration, discussions reverberate around the icosahedron, becoming the common property of the infoset. In chapter 12, this discussion quickly condenses onto the geometric figure known as an enneagram(fig. 6.21), which comprises a reentrant six-pointed form superimposed on a triangle. Beer offers an elaborate spiritual pedigree for this figure. He remarks that he first heard about it in the 1960s in conversations with the English mystic John Bennett, who had in turn been influenced by the work of Peter D. Ouspensky and George Ivanovich Gurdjieff; that there is also a distinctively Catholic commentary on the properties of the enneagram; and that traces of it can be found in the Vedas, the most ancient Sanskrit scriptures, as well as in Sufism (Beer 1994b, 202–4). Beer also mentions that while working on Project Cybersyn in Chile in the early 1970s he had been given his own personal mandala by a Buddhist monk, that the mandala included an enneagram, and that after that he had used this figure in his meditational practices (205).63 Once more we can recognize the line of thought Beer set out in "Cybernetics and the Knowledge of God." The enneagram appears in many traditions of mystical thought; it can therefore be assumed to be part the common wisdom of mankind, distilled from varied experience of incomprehensible realms; but its significance is performative, as an aid to meditation, rather than purely representational.

  So what? Beer recorded that in the syntegration experiments of the early 1990s he had acquired a new colleague in Toronto, Joe Truss, who had once founded a business based on an enneagrammatic model, and that Truss had then succeeded in finding reentrant enneagrammatic trajectories within the syntegration icosahedron.64 Truss and Beer were both exceptionally impressed by the fact that these trajectories were three-dimensional, rather than lying in a single plane as in figure 6.21 (Beer 1994b, 206): "Joe came to my house late at night to show me his discovery, and he was very excited. Well, all such moments are exciting. But I was unprepared that he should say, 'Do you see what this means? The icosahedron is the actual origin of the enneagram, and the ancients knew it. Could it not be possible that the plane figure was coded esoteric knowledge?' Obviously (now!) it could." From this point on, if not before, syntegration took on for Beer an intense spiritual as well as practical significance, especially as far as its reverberations along closed pathways were concerned.65 Here, then, we have an example of the sort of very specific and even, one could say, technical continuities that Beer constructed between his worldly cybernetics and his spiritual life, with the enneagram as a pivot between the everyday geometry of the icosahedron and meditative practice. This immediate continuity between the secular and the spiritual contrasts interestingly, as usual, with the separation of these two realms that characterizes modernity. It points to the unusual "earthy" and hylozoist quality of cybernetic spirituality, as a spirituality that does not recognize any sharp separation between the sacred and the profane.

  Figure 6.22."Theory of recursive consciousness." Source: S. Beer, Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity (New York: Wiley, 1994), 253, fig. 14.2.

  I mentioned earlier the appearance of the Great Chain of Being in Beer's "Knowledge of God" essay, and that this reappeared in a truncated version in his published discussions of the viable system model. We might doubt, however, that t
his truncation had much significance for Beer personally; it seems highly likely that the VSM's recursive structure was always spiritually charged in Beer's imagination—that again in this respect the mundane and the spiritual were continuous for Beer. And in Beyond Dispute, the truncation was explicitly undone, as shown in figure 6.22, displaying nine levels of recursion, running from individual neurons in the brain, through individual consciousness ("cerebrum"), up to Gaia and the cosmos. Chapter 14 of Beyond Dispute is a fascinating cybernetic-political-mystical commentary on these different levels, and I can follow a few threads as illustrations of Beer's thought and practice.

  One point to note is that while the labeling of levels in figure 6.22 is secular, at least until one comes to "Gaia" and "cosmos," Beer's discussion of them is not. It is distinctly hybrid, in two senses. On the one hand, Beer accepts current biological knowledge of the nervous system, as he did in developing the VSM, while, at the same time, conceptualizing it as a cybernetic adaptive system; on the other hand, he synthesizes such biological knowledge with esoteric, mystical, characteristically Eastern accounts of the subtle body accessible to the adept. The connection to the latter goes via a cybernetic analysis of consciousness as the peculiar property of reentrant structures.66 The human brain would be the paradigmatic example of such a structure (containing an astronomical number of reentrant neuronal paths), but Beer's argument was that any reentrant structure might have its own form of consciousness. "Plexus," at the third level of recursion in figure 6.22, refers to various nervous plexuses, concatenations of nerve nets, that can be physiologically identified within the body. Beer regards these as homeostat-like controllers of physiological functions. At the same time, he imputes to them their own form of "infosettic consciousness," remarks that it "is not implausible to identify the six 'spiritual centres' which the yogi calls chakras with plexus activity in the body," and finally asserts that "knowledge of the existence of infosettic consciousness within the other five chakras [besides the chakra associated with brain] is possible to the initiate, as I attest from yogic experience myself" (Beer 1994b, 247). With this move Beer deeply intertwines his management cybernetics and his spirituality, at once linking the subtle yogic body with physiological cybernetic structures and endowing the recursive structure of the VSM with spiritual significance, this double move finding its empirical warrant in Beer's meditational practice.