Ashby Says

W. Ross Ashby · unpublished classroom handout

Aphorisms from a typescript handout Ashby circulated to his students, reprinted in Mechanisms of Intelligence (1981), pp. 425–427.

On Science

  • Science is the Observer's Digest.
  • The Cyberneticist observes what might have happened but did not.
  • A System is a set of variables sufficiently isolated to stay constant long enough for us to discuss it.

On Man

  • The division of the World's system into Natural and Man-made died with Darwin.
  • Man is not the measure: First comes the measure, then we see where he falls; so far the result has always been humiliating.

On Evolution

  • The brain is merely nature's latest means of self-preservation.
  • The goals of a species, such as homo, are what natural selection has driven it to.
  • Poor M. Jourdain! He now has to understand that he has been behaving homestatically [sic] all his life, when he thought he was merely minding his business.

On Psychology

  • For two thousand years psychology was a simple description of man's highest faculties - most of which he does not possess.
  • The scientist does not believe in effects without causes; not even when they happen in the brain.

On Introspection

  • A man no more knows how he thinks, just because he has a brain in his skull, than he knows how he makes blood, because he has marrow in his bones.

On the Brain

  • The brain has no brain inside to guide it.
  • To think is to act - inside the brain.
  • The brain controls nothing - it transmits.
  • The brain organizes nothing - it acts.
  • The brain has no gimmick, just five billion years of research and development.

On Neurophysiology

  • Natural selection insists that the nature of the parts shall be irrelevant for the behavior of the whole.
  • The neuron is the one unit that, in behavior, is quite devoid of interest today; it is too small to be noticeable in a man's action, and too gross to carry a trace of memory.
  • No mammal will ever understand the mammalian brain completely.
  • The man who talks today of probability in the brain is usually trying to return to the days when everything in the brain was so delightfully vague.

On Learning

  • No man knows what to do against the really new.
  • All wisdom is wisdom after the event.
  • Every system changes its mind by breaking.
  • The educated brain is the wreckage left after the experiences of training.

On Memory

  • Don't appoint, as the President's driver, and [sic] Englishman who has spent thirty years learning to drive on the left.
  • A system that stores its memories away from their site of action must do much work remembering where it put that memory.

On Intelligence

  • Today, those who don't know what "intelligence" means must give way to those who do.
  • A mechanism is "brain-like" so far as it is effective.
  • The only people who talk today of "real" intelligence are those who hope to find a meaning for the adjective later.
  • Intelligent is as intelligent does.
  • That the brain matches its environment is no more surprising than the match between the two ends of broken stick [sic].
  • Change the environment to its opposite and every piece of wisdom becomes the worst of folly.
  • For every bump of the phrenologist there exists an environment that demands a depression.
  • Everyone is world champion at some game (although some of the games have not yet been recognized.)
  • An intelligence test measures the degree to which tester and subject think alike.
  • Is there a general intelligence? - A universal weapon is as likely.

On Logic

  • A man can be a pure logician only if it makes him feel good.
  • Every skilled dramatist understands the inexorable logic of the emotion.

On Artificial Intelligence

  • He who would design a good brain must first know how to make a bad one.
  • Pattern-recognition is a throwing away of information.
  • Any Device that can lose information can generalize.

On Deduction

  • Deduction is the running-down of a determinate mechanism.
  • Newton arrived at F=MA after a part-random search; the apple arrived at the ground by pure deduction.

On Computers

  • The general purpose computer is freer than the trained brain.
  • Today's digital computer is organized like an army of a million men that can only get two into action at a time.

On Organization

  • It is an open question which has the richer organization: A living cow or a working silo.
  • Which biological organization proved more resistant to the Spaniards: The Aztecs of Mexico, or the jungle of the Amazon?
  • Can a system be self-organizing? - No system can permanently have the property that it changes its properties.

On Requisite Variety

  • Man adapts by conquering the reducible; the irreducible is impregnable.
  • We have broken into the Aladdin's cave of brain-like mechanisms; we find we can have anything we like - provided we pay for it!

Source

W. Ross Ashby, “Ashby Says”, unpublished classroom handout, reprinted in Roger Conant (ed.), Mechanisms of Intelligence: Ross Ashby’s Writings on Cybernetics (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1981), pp. 425–427. Transcribed from the reprint; the typescript’s spelling and punctuation are preserved, with [sic] where it departs from the standard form.