W. Ross Ashby, 1903--1972

25 Nov 2024 20:15

British psychiatrist, one of the brighter lights of the early days of cybernetics. He did excellent work, some of which I describe below. He also influenced a remarkable range of better-known figures: Norbert Wiener, Herbert Simon, Miller, Galanter & Pribram, Stafford Beer, Stuart Kauffman, Robert M. May, etc. Despite this, when I wrote the first version of this notebook in the 1990s, it was virtually impossible to find anything substantial written about him (e.g., he gets only a passing mention in Heims's The Cybernetics Group). The situation has improved substantially since then, so much so that my old complaints are no longer appropriate. There's still no proper biography,

Two ideas of his which I keep coming back to:

The "law of requisite variety", which is a very simple theorem of information theory, but one with truly profound consequences;
The idea that any deterministic system will eventually evolve its "own sort of life and intelligence, possibly in the zero degree."

Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behavior. [I really like this book. It is, I think, wrong in places (see below), but it's clear, persuasive, even elegant in a way, and turns up in the oddest places. It is, for instance, one of the inspirations of Stuart Kauffman's The Origins of Order (though Design is much more fun to read). In one sense it's very advanced, since Ashby began incubating the ideas in the '40s, published the first version as a paper in '48, and the second edition of the book in '60: yet it's still very informative. On the other hand, his references to dynamical systems are thirty or forty years out of date, and at times I have to stop and consciously translate what he's saying into the modern language.
It remained in print through the early 1990s at least (London: Chapman and Hall, ISBN 0-412-20090-2), and perhaps is still; it is now (2013) available through archive.org. I may perhaps quote the "Summary" on p. 238:
The primary fact is that all isolated state-determined dynamic systems are selective: from whatever state they have initially, they go towards states of equilibrium. These states of equilibrium are always characterised, in their relation to the change-inducing laws of the system, by being exceptionally resistant.
(Specially resistant are those forms whose occurrence leads, by whatever method, to the occurrence of further replicates of the same form --- the so-called 'reproducing' forms.)
If the systems permits the formation of local equilibria, these will take the form of dynamic subsystems, exceptionally resistant to the disruptive effects of events ocuring locally.
When such a stable dynamic subsystem is examined internally, it will be found to have parts that are co-ordinated in their defence against disturbance.
If the class of disturbance changes from generation to generation but is constant within each generation, even more resistant are those forms that are born with a mechanism such that the environment will make it act in a regulatory way against the particular evnironment --- the "learning" organisms.
This book has been largely concerned with the last stage of the process. It has shown, by consideration of specially clear and simple cases, how the gene-pattern can provide a mechanism (with both basic and ancillary parts) that, when acted on by any given environment, will inevitably tend to adapt to that particular environment.
Clearly, there are some parts of this which are over-statements (for instance, chaotic Hamiltonian systems can wander over essentially all of their phase space indifferently, i.e. they do not go to equilibria). I think it's equally clear that Ashby really was on to something, and one of my longer-term projects is to re-do the essential portions of Design for a Brain in modern terms (replacing "equilibrium" with "attractor", for instance), showing where Ashby's results break down and how they must be modified. Ideally, I'd preface this by a sketch of his life and of his influence.]
Introduction to Cybernetics (1956) [PDF]
"Principles of Self-Organizing Systems" in Heinz von Foerster and George W. Zopf, Jr., eds., Principles of Self-Organization, 1962. [Remarkably enough, for such a paper, it claims that there's really no such thing as self-organization. The argument runs as follows. By the "organization" of a system, Ashby means the rule which takes present states into future states. A self-organizing system, at the very minimum, must change its organization. One could try to represent this by making the evolution-rule depend on the current state, but obviously this just means you have a different, unchanging rule than you first thought. You could make the rule depend on some external input: then the organization would change with the input; but then it isn't really self-organizing; and if you include the input-device in the system, you're back where you started. Now, I don't think this is what most people have in mind when the speak about "self-organization". But what people do mean, or should mean, is something I have written about at great length.]
"Principles of the Self-Organizing Dynamic System", Journal of General Psychology (1947) 37: 125--128 [First sustained used of "self-organizing" in print. (I've found a few older, passing mentions.) Uses the same notion of organization as the above, and shows how it can apparently change if some of the variables are step-functions of the others.]
"Design for an Intelligence-Amplifier", pp. 215--234 in Claude Shannon and John McCarthy (eds.), Automata Studies (Princeton University Press, 1956)
The W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive [Complete archive of his research journal, plus bibliography, biographical information, etc.]

Peter M. Asaro, "From Mechanisms of Adaptation to Intelligence Amplifiers: The Philosophy of W. Ross Ashby", ch. 7 in Phil Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler (eds.), The Mechanical Mind in History
WRA, Mechanisms of Intelligence: Ross Ashby's Writings on Cybernetics [ed. Roger Conant]
Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics
Max Hancock, "Spontaneity and Control: Friedrich Hayek, Stafford Beer, and the Principles of Self-Organization", Modern Intellectual History forthcoming (2024+)
George J. Klir, "W. Ross Ashby" [Originally Klir's introduction to Mechanisms of Intelligence]
Andrew Pickering
- "Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask", Social Studies of Science 32 (2002): 413--437
- The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future [Chapter 4 is specifically about Ashby, but the whole book looks relevant]

First (?) version, 1999-11-29; substantial revisions, 2024-11-25.