The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future

by Andrew Pickering

Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.

The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Psychology, Technology, Artificial Intelligence

536 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2010

Reviews

[Erick Felinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book. Extremely well written and researched, this work provides interesting counter-arguments for some of Katherine Hayles criticisms on cybernetics. More importantly, it describes cybernetics (at least in its British version) as a "nonmodern ontology" that is on par with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. Focused primarily on performativity instead of representationalism, cybernetics display a very clear concern with the materiality of things and the pragmatics of life. I recommend it to all interested in epistemology, object oriented philosophy and actor-network theory.

[Zoonanism · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting account of figures involved in research which couldn't be less alike: Electroconvulsive therapy, Cybersyn and the lunacy of Ronald Laing and his cohorts engaged in biting matches with elderly schizo patients. The account though, is spoiled by repeated imposition of a frame/schema which the author claims will allow us to see the novelty and kinship of these endeavors. So we get annoying and unhelpful labels such as 'ontological theater' or 'non modern performative technologies of the self' or the occasional leaning on a line of Heidegger. That a project as massively centralized and potentially despotic as the one dreamed up by Stafford Beers and a young upstart minister in Allende's regime can then be thought of, as an instance "Nomad Science" makes one cringe. Not only are the Deleuzian terms themselves retarded and do not delineate proper categories but the urge with which they are pasted on such bogus royal failings only reveals their uselessness.

[Cypress Butane]

"There can't be a proper theory of the brain until there is a proper theory of the environment as well... The subject has been hampered by our not paying sufficiently serious attention to the environmental half of the process... The 'psychology' of the environment will have to be given almost as much thought as the psychology of the nerve network itself."
- Ross Ashby, Discussion at the 1952 Macy Conference (Ashby 1953B, 86-87)
As Quoted in 'The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future' pg 116

[Giorgos Mitkidis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book about five years ago, and reread it recently. The first reading had already left a mark, and upon revisiting it I remembered why. An amazing retelling of the history of cybernetics, with some very interesting ontological and meta-philosophical points about the tension of the entire discipline with the modern concept of "knowability", and, ultimately, determinism. Pickering argues that this concept, a descendant of Newtonian physics, clashes with the performance oriented view of cybernetics (that can be very simplistically be boiled down to "build it and see what it does"). I am not entirely convinced by the main argument of the author, but the book is very thoroughly researched, is genuinely fascinating to read, and is a must for anyone interested in history or philosophy of science, the history of cognitive science (on which the influence of cybernetics is genuinely felt even today), and is open to at least reading about a different (if not altogether convincing) model of production of scientific knowledge. I, for a fact, know t that I will be re-reading this book a long way down the line.

[Hossein Fattahi · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's an amazing book and a "must read" for whoever is interested in the history of American psychiatry and the epistemic shifts from cultural and social stand points.......

Chapter 5 is my favorite! Although its really hard to pinpoint one chapter among a bunch of critically and persuasively crafted topics!!

Chapter 5 is for those, like me, who are interested in the 60s counter cultures AS WELL AS a wonderful account of how Bateson and Laing developed their scholarship within the (counter) cultural contingencies.....

Thanks so much Andrew Pickering for such a beautiful and painstaking task!! I did need to rethink the subject matter with a fresh look, which you provided with a beautiful prose!

#psychedelic60s

[Jan D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cybernetics is a mess: I associate it with media arts, design methods and strange machines as well as with management, war and abstracting everything into some simulatable system. It is, in a sense all of that, which already is an important point of the book: Cybernetics is a discipline that is nowhere at home: It has connections to art, academia, medicine, military but its all connection, and not "taught there", "researched here", "applied there". Indeed, the teaching/researching/applying often collapsed into one activity. It also does not focus much on knowledge-as-entity. If at all, it has principles and mechanisms. But it is well aware that some fixed points do in no way predict the outcome, but just provide some helpful ways to think about what happens: You can construct a very simple machine and know all its internal mechanisms and still be surprised how it interacts with the environment. So much for the very brief summary of the content.

My immediate interest in the book was sparked by a section on Alexander’s architectural patterns. Which was short, but nevertheless interesting. And I also read the rest.

I really liked the book itself: The combination of black with bright primary colors is on the dust jacket, but also on the cover and endpapers. The typography is nice in its combination of a serif with a monospace font (not sure why an additional third font was picked for the headlines, it makes some parts of the layout a bit uneasy). Many photos and diagrams accompany the texts, though as usual, they are often the final result of a complex process and not easy to understand by themselves.

The writing style is academic, but for an academic book, its very accessible; the newly-introduced terms are limited and are returned to again and again ("ontological theater"), the sentences can carry the thinking and understanding very well.

[John Ohno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain is full of interesting technical & biographical detail I wasn’t aware of from a lifetime of being casually interested in cybernetics, & makes some interesting meta-philosophical points about cybernetics as a discipline being performance-oriented. He claims that the way that cyberneticians are interested in the performative aspects of processes as opposed to a focus on categorization & situated knowledge is to blame for how difficult it was for early cyberneticians to find permanent slots in academia & that it made a lot of people find cybernetics hard to understand (since cybernetics is not really concerned with how information is stored or formatted, but only with how past experience can be made to influence future action).

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good but petered out at the end.
The focus is really the postwar era and treatment of theme does not extend past the 70's for the most part. If like me, you are looking for a genealogical relationship between cybernetics and what's happening with data and AI right now, then expect to experience some let down. If you're looking for links between cybernetics and, say, the counterculture in the 60's, then this is the book for you.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed learning about the history of the field, but the repetitive use of certain phrases (namely 'ontological theater') and the absolute lack of any discriminating criteria around hypothesis acceptance (e.g. the entrenched interests of the close minded main stream doesn't allow our voices to be heard ... why can't we openly embrace everything new always?) left me thinking that I was reading about someone's spiritual journey into holism rather than a critical analysis of a field of scientific inquiry.

With all of that said, there is something deeply compelling to me about complex adaptive systems theory and this book did not feed or detract from that compulsion. I will continue reading about this field, although I will supplement that with history (of state level cybernetics (communism)) and Austrian economics (emergent market/system behavior under conditions of highly distributed knowledge)

[Denis Romanovsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hardcore cybernetics book, hard to read for a newbie as me, but still quite good and worthy! This is a story about people in cybernetics of the middle 20th century, their ideas, projects, philosophy and impact to the world. A lot of interesting thoughts on success and failures, and how world could be different with more cybernetics-like thinking and acting.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stuff. really happy i found about this book fro the General Intellect Unit podcast. Found this very accessible and a pleasure to read though it is dense with ideas and not a quick read (though there are many pictures!). Highly recommend if you are interested in, well pretty much anything.

[Christian Moore-Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have to say that this is a truly outstanding book. Incredibly well researched and full of deep insight that has irrevocably changed how I see.

It's not really about the brain, but cybernetics and a way of seeing the world, as explained by some very interesting people and work. As a biology teacher I'm very interested in systems thinking and this advanced my understanding more than I could have imagined. When I wrote my own book about teaching biology 'Biology Made Real' I cited this book many times, showing just how much it has changed not just my understanding, but my performance as a teacher.

[Bill White · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the perfect book for me right now. It reviews and expands upon the philosophical implications of a cybernetic perspective. I studied cybernetics in graduate school and wrote my master's thesis on genetic algorithms. Pickering's book embeds this kind of knowledge in the larger social context of performative actions and ontological theater.