The Nature of the Machine and the Collapse of Cybernetics by Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson

Author:Alcibiades Malapi-Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

As we can see, Ashby expectably regarded this behavior as being one and the same with that of a living entity surviving. Following his previous understanding of a dynamical machine as conformed by both animal and environment, part of the homeostat’s configuration would be the organism per se, and the other would be its threatening milieu.34 In fact, the titles of the first mainstream publications that featured the machine were “The Electronic Brain”35 and the “The Thinking Machine”36—in Radio Electronics, a contemporary popular electronics magazine and the famed Time, respectively.

Three years later, Ashby’s book Design for a Brain (first edition 1952a) gave a preeminent role to his machine, locating it almost at the axis of how and why we should see the machine-based hypothesis as very likely true: it is presented as an instantiation of a theorem. That same year, equipped with his “cybernetic monster”,37 he was finally invited by the “cybernetic group” to the Macy conferences in New York. This occasion will turn out to be the first and last time that he had the opportunity to attend the cybernetic Mecca of intellectual exchange. As mentioned in Chapter 3, of the ten conferences that took place in a span of less than a decade (1946–1953), only the last five enjoyed published proceedings. Since this was the penultimate one, we have a fairly detailed account of what happened on the day of his presentation.38 It is helpful to complement it with Ashby’s personal diary entries,39 in an effort to shed light on what took place that day. What happened in there represents a somewhat strange and unique occurrence in what regards twentieth-century science gatherings.

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