67. On self-organization as a key concern at the BCL, see Asaro (2007). The idea that organisms have structures that can be understood without reference to the specific vicissitudes of evolution echoes most notably the work of D'Arcy Thompson (1961 [1917]). Though Kauffman's style of theoretical biology remained marginal to the field while the emphasis was on the reductive unraveling of genomes, in these days of postgenomics it appears now to be coming to the fore: see Fujimura (2005) (making interesting connections between theoretical biology and Walter/Brooks-style robotics) and O'Malley and Dupré (2005).
68. As usual I, am extracting the ontological features I want to draw attention to. The behavior of any finite state-determined network must eventually be cyclical, but this is not a feature I would recommend for ontological generalization. Neither should we generalize the idea that objects can exist in a denumerably finite number of states (or that such states possess a knowable matrix of transition probabilities). Kauffman (n.d.) himself reads the moral of his later work in terms of an ontology of unknowability: "This truth is a radical departure from our image of science from physics. It literally means that we cannot know beforehand how the biosphere will evolve in its ceaseless creativity. . . . The growth of the economic web may NOT be algorithmic. It may be fundamentally unknowable, but nevertheless livable. Life, after all, is not deduced, it is lived."
69. www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/.
70. We can note also some of the tensions within science that have led to the establishment of institutions like the SFI. Wise and Brock (1998, 386) quote remarks on complexity fromorthodox physicists at a meeting at Princeton University in 1996: "One really can't help feeling childish fascination looking at this picture of different beautiful systems. But switching to my adult mode, I start thinking about what I can really do as a theorist apart from going to my kitchen and trying to repeat these experiments"; "It seems to me that you are viewing the patterns in non-equilibrium systems like a zoo, where we view one animal at a time, admire it and describe it, and then go on to the next animal." The opposition between "adult" and the string "child-kitchen-zoo-animal" is interesting in many ways, but, at the least, it registers the difficulty that modern scientists have in taking seriously what lies outside the modern circle, and it functions as a warning not to venture beyond that circle.
71. For a popular account of the SFI and complexity theory, including Kauffman's work, see Waldrop (1992), and on work there on artificial life see Helmreich (1998). For an overview of the SFI, see www.santafe.edu/aboutsfi/mission.php. "About a quarter of our activities are funded through the corporate affiliates program, another quarter through private donations, and the remaining half via government and foundational grants. We do have a small amount of endowed funds, and would warmly welcome anyone wishing to make that a large amount. We also welcome smaller private donations. Ultimately, we want to define and understand the frontiers of science, and the very nature of such a quest often requires us to rely on non-traditional funding sources." www .santafe.edu/aboutsfi/faq.php. The SFI does offer postdoctoral fellowships, which enable young researchers to work with established faculty members. The SFI website also currently lists two graduate students working with SFI faculty on their dissertation research.
72. www.biosgroup.com/company_history.asp (25 April 2007).
73. This information is taken from an unpublished document, "StephenWolfram: A Time Line," which was on Wolfram's website in 1999 but is no longer to be found there. I am not going to reconstruct Wolfram's historical route to CAs and his "new kind of science" here; unlike Alexander's and Kauffman's, Wolfram's early intellectual development did not pass through cybernetics (interview, 19 May 1999). Many different trajectories have fed into current work on complexity theory. I am grateful to StephenWolfram for several opportunities to discuss his work over recent years; I regret that I cannot go further into its substance here.
74. "Sometimes I feel a bit like a naturalist, wandering around the computational world and finding all these strange and wonderful creatures. It's quite amazing what's out there" (Wolfram 2005, 8).
75. The source on all of these applications and more is Wolfram (2002).
76. www.wolframscience.com/summerschool/2005/participants/.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. On Bateson, see Harries-Jones (1995), Lipset (1980), M. C. Bateson (1984), and Heims (1991, chap. 4); for a variety of contemporary perspectives on and extensions of Bateson work, see Steier and Jorgenson (2005). This outline of Bateson's life is drawn from Harries-Jones (1995, xi–xiii), and I thank him for very useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. Bateson overlapped with Ashby as an undergraduate at Cambridge; there is no evidence that they knew each other then, but Bateson was one of the first people Ashby wrote to when attempting to make contacts about his cybernetics in the mid-1940s. Bateson described his early entanglement with cybernetics thus (G. Bateson 2000, xix–xx): "In 1942 at a Macy Foundation conference, I met Warren McCulloch and Julian Bigelow, who were then talking excitedly about 'feedback.' The writing of Naven had brought me to the very edge of what later became cybernetics, but I lacked the concept of negative feedback. When I returned from overseas, I went to Frank Fremont-Smith of the Macy Foundation to ask for a conference on this then-mysterious matter. Frank said that he had arranged such a conference with McCulloch as chairman. It thus happened that I was privileged to be a member of the famous Macy conferences on cybernetics. My debt to Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Evelyn Hutchinson, and other members of these conferences is evident in everything I have written sinceWorldWar II." I thank David Hopping for encouraging me to take an interest in Bateson, and him and Judith Pintar for stimulating discussions of psychotherapy and madness. Before Hopping, Emily Ignacio and Richard Cavendish tried unsuccessfully to interest me in Bateson.
2. For extended accounts of this project and the contribution of different members, see Haley (1976) and Lipset (1980, chap. 12). On its empirical aspect: "We have studied the written and verbal reports of psychotherapists who have treated such [schizophrenic] patients intensively; we have studied tape recordings of psychotherapeutic interviews; we have interviewed and taped parents of schizophrenics; we have had two mothers and one father participate in intensive psychotherapy; and we have interviewed and taped parents and patients seen conjointly" (Bateson et al. 1956, 212).
3. Thus Bateson (1959) introduces a discussion of schizophrenia and the double bind with a discussion of Pavlovian learning.
4. Part of Bateson's understanding of the double bind was also that discussion of it was somehow impossible for those involved in it.
5. One might think here of J. L. Austin on "speech acts" as "performative utterances," but Bateson's distinctly cybernetic take on this was to recognize the interactive and dynamic aspects of performative language.
6. Harries-Jones (1995, 111, 114) notes that Bateson was "so excited" by the homeostat that "he made it the focus of a correction of his former ideas . . . a sort of auto-critique of his prior belief in mechanistic versions of social change," and that he "tried to develop his own homeostat." Shorter (1997, 177) suggests that mothers tend to get demonized in family approaches to madness, and this example from the first schizophrenia paper certainly points in that direction. But the symmetric image of mutually adapting homeostats implies that double binds should not be seen as originating in specific individuals within any system. Bateson was later criticized by feminists and others for refusing to ascribe causality to specific family members: see Dell (1989).
7. Strictly speaking, a koan is a paradoxical verbal formulation upon which one meditates—"the sound of one hand clapping," or whatever—a representation of what seems to be an impossible referent. It is significant that Bateson favors a performative version here.
8. In a 1964 essay Bateson (2000, 304) quotes a Zen master as stating that "to become accustomed to anything is a terrible thing" and continues: "To the degree that a man . . . learns to perceive and act i
n terms of the contexts of contexts, his 'self' will take on a sort of irrelevance. The concept of 'self' will no longer function as a nodal argument in the punctutation of experience." For an extended and systematic exposition of the Buddhist notion of losing the self, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991). They discuss a technology of the self which they call mindfulness/awareness meditation, which can afford direct access to the nonexistence of any enduring self (and likewise the nonexistence of any enduring outer world). Francisco Varela was one of the founders (with Humberto Maturana) of the branch of cybernetics concerned with the autopoiesis of living systems and was also science adviser to the Dalai Lama. The stated aim of Varela et al.'s book is to open up a "dialogue between science and experience" (xix). "Experience" here refers to the mind as known in the Buddhist tradition, and "science" to cognitive science. Within the latter, the book is a critique of mainstream AI research and makes alliances with the branches concerned with performance and embodiment, mentioning the work of Walter and Ashby and concentrating on Rodney Brooks (see chap. 3 above; Varela et al. 1991, 208–12). A discussion of the Buddhist "aggregates" is followed by one of EEG readings in a class of flicker experiments pertaining to the alpha rhythms of the brain, which point to a kind of temporal "chunking" of experience. We saw in chapter 3 that the cyberneticians saw this as pointing to a scanning mechanism in the brain; Varela et al. (1991, chap. 4) take it as evidence for the Buddhist notion that our experience of both the inner and outer worlds is ephemeral, discontinuously arising and passing away.
9. Huxley was closer to Walter than Bateson in looking for material explanations of the go of both transcendence and madness. The Doors of Perception mentions two possible mechanisms. One is that our evolutionary history has fitted us to engage with the world from a goal-oriented standpoint; our very senses function as a "reducing valve" appropriate to an alertness to dangers and opportunities but not to other properties and relations. The modern self is thus the product of adaptation over evolutionary time, and Huxley's argument is that psychedelic drugs somehow undercut our innate tendencies to enframe the world, in Heidegger's sense. In terms of inner mechanisms, Huxley refers to ideas on brain chemistry taken from Humphrey Osmond and John Smythies (chap. 3) rather than to electrical properties of the brain. Osmond supplied the mescaline on which Doorswas based.
10. In the late 1960s, Bateson found a model for this higher level of adaptation in experiments on dolphins. In 1969, he referred to a series of experiments in which a dolphin was trained to perform specific tricks for rewards. The experimenter then decided that what was required next was simply to produce some trick the dolphin had never done before. In succeeding trials the dolphin went through its existing repertoire and became exceedingly agitated on getting no reward. Finally, its behavior changed between runs, and at the next opportunity it performed a spectacular series of new displays—as if it had figured out that the required response was something new, and had become a happier dolphin in the process (Bateson 1969,241–42). For more on this work see Lipset (1980, 249–51).
11. Including the analyst within the scope of cybernetic systems is one definition of second-order cybernetics, though, as discussed in chapter 2, second-order cybernetics usually stresses epistemological questions while I want to highlight the performative aspect of Bateson and Laing's work here.
12. The first schizophrenia paper also mentions the therapist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who obtained positive results by imposing a "therapeutic double bind" upon her patients—one that would challenge the conditions of the original double bind (in this case, manifest in the patient's conviction that she was being ordered to perform certain acts by an array of powerful deities), and encourage finding a different avenue of escape (Bateson et al. 1956, 226–27).
13. They also remind me of the octopus which appears at key junctures in Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow(1975). We can now appreciate an allusion that has escaped literary scholars: the name of this numinous creature is Grigori. For a list of pages on which it appears, see www.hyperarts.com/ pynchon/gravity/alpha/o.html#octopus.
14. On the Wenner-Grenn conferences, see Lipset (1980, 26–68), and for a brief survey of cybernetic approaches to ecology, including Bateson's work, and a nuanced discussion of the critique of cybernetics as a machinelike, command-and-control approach to nature, see Asplen (2005).
15. "My own slight experience of LSD led me to believe that Prospero was wrong when he said, 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on.' It seemed to me that pure dream was, like pure purpose, rather trivial. It was not the stuff of which we are made, but only bits and pieces of that stuff. Our conscious purposes, similarly, are only bits and pieces. The systemic view is something else again" (Bateson 1968, 49). TheMental Research Institute in Palo Alto, at which Allen Ginsberg first took LSD (chap. 3), is probably the same as that established by Don Jackson, a member of Bateson's schizophrenia group. Bateson was invited to join the latter MRI, but declined (Lipset 1980, 227).
16. Sensory deprivation is another technology of the nonmodern self. A sensory deprivation tank is a large container full of water to which salts have been added so that the humanbody achieves neutral buoyancy.The tank also excludes noise and light, so that floating in it one is largely deprived of any sensory input. Scientific research on sensory deprivation began with the work between 1951 and 1954 of D. O. Hebb's group at McGill University in Montreal, which "began, actually, with the problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing. What we did say, however, was true—that we were interested in the problem of the effects of monotony. . . . The chief impetus, of course, was the dismay at the kind of 'confessions' being produced at the Russian Communist trials. 'Brainwashing' was a term that came a little later, applied to Chinese procedures. We did not know what the Russian procedures were, but it seemed that they were producing some peculiar changes of attitude. How?" (Hebb, quoted in Heron 1961, 6). For reports on current research from a 1958 symposium, see Solomon et al. (1961). Like LSD, sensory deprivation proved to be a bivalent technology, leading to mental breakdowns in "scientific" settings but, as Lilly and others discovered, giving rise to transcendental states in more congenial ones. For a characteristically sixties version of the effects of sensory deprivation, one has only to look at the account given by Bateson's wife, Lois, of her hour in Lilly's tank: "Roamed and sauntered through a kind of cosmic park, full of density but infinite boundaries . . . a kind of total consciousness. . . . Sudden enlightenment—there is no such thing as separate consciousness. My roamings were a kind of total consciousness of all that was. The dense bits here and there—I was it—it was me—the people—same—there was no boundary between me and them—pronouns are only illusions!" (Lilly 1977, 190). Enlightenment as the loss of the self. For more on Lois Bateson and the counterculture (not named as such), see Lipset (1980). Bateson married Lois Cammack in 1961, and it would be interesting to know more about her biography and relation to the counterculture. Bateson's life certainly seems to have taken a countercultural turn after this date. Lilly developed a theory of mind that was explicitly "cybernetic"—see, for example, chapter 7 of The Deep Self(Lilly 1977), "The Mind Contained in the Brain: A Cybernetic Belief System." I thank Mike Lynch for suggesting that I take an interest in Lilly. Two movies fictionalizing dramatic effects of sensory deprivation are Basil Dearden's The Mind Benders(1963) and Ken Russell's Altered States(1980). I thank Peter Asaro for tracking down both of these. In literature, see Colin Wilson, The Black Room(1971). There the Black Room is a device to break down spies, and the central character discovers that one can defeat this via another technology of the self, developing the will, which leads to a new state of "heightened consciousness," which the human race has always been capable of but never before systematically achieved. EEG readings and flicker also put in appearances in the plot.
17. If the focus of this book were on the United States rather than Britain, Brand would be a key figure. He often lurks in the shadows here: he
wrote a wonderfully cybernetic book on architecture called How Buildings Learn(1994) and another (Brand 1987) on the MIT Media Lab, founded by Nicholas Negroponte, who appears in chapter 7 as a collaborator with Gordon Pask. In the next chapter I discuss Brian Eno's relation to Stafford Beer, and Brand appears in Eno's diary as his principal interlocutor (Eno 1996a). For much more on Brand, see Turner (2006).
18. In a phrase, the New Age movement is based on a nonmodern ontology in which mind, body and spirit are coupled to one another in a decentered fashion, much like cybernetics, and hence the crossover. The history of Esalen deserves more attention than I can give it here; see Anderson (2004 [1983]), Kripal and Shuck (2005), and Kripal (2007). Richard Price, one of the two founders of Esalen (the other was MichaelMurphy), took anthropology courses with Bateson at Stanford University (Kripal 2007, 79; Bateson held the position of visiting professor at Stanford while he was working on schizophrenia in Palo Alto, and his grants were administered by the university: Lipset 1980, 196, 237). Price and Murphy consulted Bateson in their planning for the institute (Anderson 2004 [1983], 49). The first seminar at Esalen was offered by Murphy, the second by Bateson (and Joe Adams) under the title "Individual and Cultural Definitions of Reality." "What they were actually up to was an explicit comparison between the present state of the mental health profession and theInquisition of the late medieval period" (Kripal 2007, 101, 170). Erickson describes Esalen's founding in1962as verymuchin the spirit of "antipsychiatry": "Esalen is Price's revenge on mental hospitals" (Erickson 2005, 155, quoting Murphy). A series of informal talks that Bateson gave at Esalen between 1975 and 1980 is available on audiotape at www.bigsurtapes.com/merchant. mv36.htm. On Laing's connection to Esalen, see note 43 below. Stafford Beer was also invited to visit Esalen (Allenna Leonard, email, 8May 2006).
19. Harries-Jones (1995, 11) remarks that Bateson's readers "can see that Bateson points towards an entirely different set of premises about a science of ecology, but find it difficult to distinguish his radical thinking about holistic science from the communal or mother-earth spiritualism of the counter-culture—the 'New Age' approach made familiar through the mass media. Bateson rejected the latter as anti-intellectual."More issues open up here than I can explore, but briefly, if we see the Esalen Institute as an early home of New Age, it is hard to see Bateson's choice to spend his last two years there as a rejection; it is also hard to see Esalen's enfolding of Bateson as a display of anti-intellectualism. But Harries-Jones is right if we take his reference to the mass media as pointing to a subsequent commodification of New Age. New Age has become an industry and a market as well as a form of life in which the intellectual concerns of people like Bateson, Laing, Huxley, Walter, and Beer are conspicuously absent. We could see this, in turn, as a symptom of the walling-off from mainstream culture of the sixties curiosity about strange performances and altered states—a reciprocal purification that mirrors the expunging of the nonmodern from the world of modern science, capital, and militarism. In this history of cybernetics I am trying to remember that our possibilities are not confined to these two alternatives, an anti-intellectual New Age and the world of modern science. To take this line of thought a little further, I could note that New Age has not become entirely anti-intellectual—see, for example, the discussions at Esalen of science and spirituality reproduced in Abraham,McKenna, and Sheldrake (1992). These discussions, however, remain largely at the level of ideas; the performative dimension is largely absent. I thank Jan Nederveen Pieterse for alerting me to the work of these authors.
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