Abstract
The history of British cybernetics offers us a different form of science and engineering, one that does not seek to dominate nature through knowledge. I want to say that one can distinguish two different paradigms in the history of science and technology: the one that Heidegger despised, which we could call the Modern paradigm, and another, cybernetic, nonModern, paradigm that he might have approved of. This essay focusses on work in the 1950s and early 1960s by two of Britain’s leading cyberneticians, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask, in the field of what one can call biological computing. My object is to get as clear as I can on what Beer and Pask were up to. At the end, I will discuss Beer’s hylozoist ontology of matter, mind and spirit. This material is not easy to get the hang of—but that is what one should expect from an unfamiliar paradigm.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ashby W.R. (1948) Design for a brain. Electrical Engineering 20: 379–383
Ashby, W. R. (1952). Design for a brain (2nd ed. 1960). London: Chapman & Hall.
Bear G. (1997) Slant. Tor, New York
Beer S. (1959) Cybernetics and management. English Universities Press, London
Beer, S. (1960). Retrospect—American diary, 1960, In S. Beer (Ed.), How many grapes went into the wine? Stafford Beer on the art and science of holistic management (pp. 229–309). New York: Wiley, 1994.
Beer, S. (1962a). Towards the automatic factory, In H. von Foerster & G. Zopf (Eds.), Principles of self-organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois symposium on self-organization, Robert Allerton Park, 8 and 9 June, 1961 [sic: actually 1960] (pp. 25–89). New York: Pergamon. (Reprinted in Beer, How many grapes went into the wine? Stafford Beer on the art and science of holistic management (pp. 163–225). New York: Wiley, 1994).
Beer, S. (1962b). A progress note on research into a cybernetic analogue of fabric, Artorga, Communication 40, April 1962. (Reprinted in Beer, How many grapes went into the wine? Stafford Beer on the art and science of holistic management (pp. 24–32). New York: Wiley, 1994).
Beer S. (1966) Cybernetics and the knowledge of God. The Month 34: 291–303
Beer, S. (1994). The Falcondale collection: Stafford Beer initiates an audience into the world of systems and managerial cybernetics. Videotapes and transcript. Liverpool: JMU Services Ltd.
Beer S. (2001) A filigree friendship. Kybernetes 30: 551–559. doi:10.1108/03684920110391779
Blohm H., Beer S., Suzuki D. (1986) Pebbles to computers: The thread. Oxford University Press, Toronto
Cariani P. (1993) To evolve an ear: Epistemological implications of Gordon Pask’s electrochemical devices. Systems Research 10: 19–33. doi:10.1002/sres.3850100305
de Latil P. (1956) Thinking by machine: A study of cybernetics. Sidgwick and Jackson, London
Deleuze G., Guattari F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Harnden, R., Leonard, A. (eds) (1994) How many grapes went into the wine? Stafford Beer on the art and science of holistic management. Wiley, New York
Heidegger, M. (1976 [1954]). The question concerning technology, In D. Krell (Ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic writings (pp. 287–317). New York: Harper & Row.
Latour B. (1993) We have never been modern. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
Noble D.F. (1986) Forces of production: A social history of industrial automation. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Pask G. (1958) Organic control and the cybernetic method. Cybernetica 1: 155–173
Pask, G. (1959). Physical analogues to the concept of growth. In Mechanisation of thought processes: Proceedings of a Symposium held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24th, 25th, 26th and 27th November 1958, 2 vols (pp. 877–928). London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Pask G. (1960) The natural history of networks. In: Yovits M., Cameron S. (eds) Self-organizing Systems: Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Conference, 5 and 6 May. Pergamon, New York, pp 232–263
Pask G., Curran S. (1982) Micro man: Computers and the evolution of consciousness. Macmillan, New York
Pickering A. (1995) The mangle of practice: Time, agency, and science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago
Pickering A. (2002) Cybernetics and the mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask. Social Studies of Science 32: 413–437. doi:10.1177/0306312702032003003
Pickering, A. (2004a). The science of the unknowable: Stafford Beer’s cybernetic informatics. In R. Espejo (Ed.), Tribute to Stafford Beer, special issue of Kybernetes, 33 (2004), 499–521.
Pickering, A. (2004b). Mit der Schildkröte gegen die Moderne: Gehirn, Technologie und Unterhaltung bei Grey Walter, (transl. by Gustav Rossler), In H. Schmidgen, P. Geimer & S. Dierig (Eds.), Kultur im Experiment. (pp. 102–119). Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos. (English version: The tortoise against modernity: Grey Walter, the brain, engineering and entertainment. In Experimental cultures: Configurations between science, art, and technology, 1830–1950. pp. 109–122. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, preprint 213, 2002).
Pickering A. (2005) A gallery of monsters: Cybernetics and self-organisation, 1940–1970. In: Franchi S., Güzeldere G. (eds) Mechanical bodies, computational minds: Artificial intelligence from automata to cyborgs. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 229–45
Pickering, A. (2005b). Cybernetics as nomad science. Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Chicago, 10–13 November 2005.
Pickering A. (2007) Science as theatre: Gordon Pask, cybernetics and the arts. Cybernetics & Human Knowing 14(4): 43–57
Pickering, A. (forthcoming). Sketches of another future: The cybernetic brain, 1940–2000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walter, W. G. (1953). The living brain. London: Duckworth. (2nd ed. Penguin, 1961).
Wiener N. (1948) Cybernetics, or control and communication in the animal and the machine. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Presented at an international conference on the philosophy of technology, Copenhagen, 13–15 Oct 2005.
Revised for submission to Synthese.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pickering, A. Beyond design: cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism. Synthese 168, 469–491 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9446-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-008-9446-z