LIVING LOGIC: SELF-ORGANIZATION AND REPLICATION ARE NOT ENOUGH
ANDREW PICKERING taught for many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; he is now professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter. His field is science and technology studies, and his books include Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science, and most recently The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future. This last focusses on the history, sociology and nonmodern ontology of a distinctly British branch of cybernetics that grew from the strange biomimetic machines, robot tortoises and homeostats, built in the late 1940s by Grey Walter and Ross Ashby.
ANOTHER ANGLE ON MIMETICS AND HYBRIDITY: SCENES FROM THE HISTORY OF CYBERNETICS
The topic is biomimetics and biohybrids in the history of cybernetics, especially the work of Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask. As we can see in fields ranging from robotics, brain science and psychiatry to the arts, philosophy, spirituality, the 1960s counterculture and biological computing, there are important continuities between the late 1940s and now, but in some ways the early cyberneticians lived in a different world from ours. They dreamed of different things and made connections that do not come naturally anymore. Looking backwards might thus open up new angles for the future. It raises the question of just what is the ‘bio’ that we want to imitate or hybridise with, and what difference does it make?