Need, for example, is a negative feedback that acts retrospectively upon its cause: the scarcity of products. It leads to an increase in demand, which, once satisfied, diminishes the need, and reverses the trend. We are thus witnessing the birth of a new cycle.
For the Ancients, economic equilibrium seemed ‘miraculous’. The physiocrats celebrated it in dithyrambic language, as a providential order willed by God for the happiness of men. ‘In view of this harmony’, writes Bastiat in Les harmonies économiques, ‘the economist may well exclaim, like the astronomer or physiologist: Digitus Dei est hic! (Here is the finger of God!)’. ‘Today’, writes Professor Rougier, ‘we know that no providential order, no theological finalism, presides over these economic harmonies which so enchanted Bastiat. The secret agent of adapting supply to solvent demand is a cybernetic mechanism, the mechanism of price, which relies on feedback that subjects the formation of price in a free market to the decisions of the buyers and sellers’.
We still find the notion of feedback in the life of societies. Politically, a force, when it is in opposition, benefits from the deterioration of power that the regime in place undergoes. But, if it succeeds to this regime, it creates, by the very fact of its success, the conditions under which a new opposition will appear and develop at its expense. (It is therefore no exaggeration to say that one begins to lose power the day that one attains it).
Most of the larger processes of interaction, alternation, ‘oscillation’, and so on, thus seem to be linked to ‘cybernetic’ movements. This may be the reason why history seems ‘cyclical’ or ‘discontinuous’, rather than unilinear.
Physiological Regulations
In his book on the history of cybernetics, Léon J. Delpech, president of the French Society of Cybernetics, Professor at the Sorbonne, cites the names of the great ancestors of cybernetics: Raymond Lulle, Leonardo da Vinci, Mersenne, Descartes (Traité de l’homme, 1635),339 Leibniz, Vaucanson, and above all, Claude Bernard.
‘The name of Claude Bernard’, writes Delpech, ‘ought to be placed on the same rank as the greatest in the history of science: Archimedes, Newton, or Einstein. But it took almost a century for the true significance of his work to be understood’.
Claude Bernard (1813–1878), a theoretician of experimental medicine, was the first to bring to light the importance of ‘physiological regulation’: thanks to regulating organs (lungs, liver, kidneys, digestive organs) the ‘internal environments’, that is to say, the set of physiological conditions for a given organism, are kept constant. In this way, the organism of man and other warm-blooded animals retains a certain independence from the variations of the external environment. And it is these cybernetic mechanisms that give physiology its unity.
‘As varied as they are’, writes Claude Bernard, ‘all acts have but one aim: to maintain the conditions of life in the interior’.
When there is an external variation, the ‘pilot’ of the organism immediately brings the necessary ‘corrections’ to maintain internal temperature, blood pressure, hormonal regulation, oxygen regulation in the blood, and so on.
‘If we move from a hot room to a cold room, notes Professor Rougier, the drop detected by our nervous system triggers an immediate correction; for example, it accelerates the respiration, which activates combustion, which has the retroactive effect of causing an increase in the internal temperature: or else the thermal control center triggers a corrective effect, a shiver. The shiver, like the increase in breathing, releases a surplus of heat which raises the temperature of the body to its normal level.
In the twentieth century, Charles Henry (1859–1926), director of the laboratory for the psychology of the senses at the Sorbonne, attempted to translate psychological and biological facts into the language of mathematics.
‘I will only be understood in fifty years’, he said.
Finally, in 1948, the English psychiatrist Gray Walther, a specialist in conditioned reflexes, succeeded in building small synthetic animals: ‘electronic tortoises’. He obtained surprising results with them.
These ‘tortoises’ had two sensory organs: an organ of sight (photoelectric cell) and an organ of touch (electrical contact). It moves itself on motorised wheels. The cell, incorporated in the ‘head’, scanned the horizon while turning the steering wheel, looking for light rays. The electrical contact closed whenever the shell struck an obstacle.
With only these elements of ‘assessment’, the turtles already offered an impressive variety of behaviours: prospecting for light sources, discernment, stability, seeking optimal conditions for ‘activity’, and so on. They could even ‘recognize’ themselves in a mirror. ‘This’, notes Delpech, ‘allowed them to distinguish between effective and ineffective behaviours. For example, they could circumvent obstacles blocking their path towards a light source — whereas butterflies, unequipped with this ability, will fly a whole day against a windowpane next to an open door’.
By adding to the ‘system’ an organ for hearing (microphone), Walther also succeeded in mechanising the processes of learning and memorisation. For the first time in history, machines have been endowed with the power to learn.
‘We can then conceive of some experiments of the following nature: (1) we whistle and nothing happens; (2) we whistle and show a light: the turtle comes. This operation is repeated a certain number of times; (3) we whistle without showing the light: the turtle still comes. It has learned that a whistle means the likely presentation of light. But if one ‘teases’ the animal by making it come ‘for nothing’, memorisation acts negatively, and the call can be repeated: the animal no longer comes’.
Such behaviours involve only two elements, which correspond to seven ‘mental experiences’. But the system can be improved.
‘We can imagine’, continues Delpech, ‘how to give turtles language, and to provoke the appearance of various feelings in them (joy, sadness, generosity), or at the very least the external signs that relate to these feelings. Nothing would oppose the construction of turtles with artistic tastes, which would be sensitive to the harmony of sounds, lines, or colors. Nothing would prevent the mechanisation, in the same way that life does, of the processes of growth and death, etc. It is only the difficulties of practical realisation that limit the field of possible achievements, and rarely questions of principle’.
The human brain, however, contains some ten billion ‘elements’ (that is, nerve cells or neurons), each of which can have up to 10,000 different connections! The number of mental experiences and behaviors that can be furnished by such a system exceeds our understanding. Especially since ‘the calculation produces this astounding observation: that ten elements alone would suffice to furnish to the whole of humanity, at the rate of twelve per second for each individual, different mental experiences during an extent of time figuring in the billions of years!’
In contemporary times, Pierre de Latil, Nicolas Schöffer, Stéphane Lupasco, Henri Laborit, and Raymond Ruyer have all been interested in cybernetics.
Authors and Great Doctrines
Numerous models of cybernetics have been conceived (that is to say, artificial mechanisms bearing certain analogies with real mechanisms, with the aim of developing others), as well as applications of cybernetics to pedagogy (Louis Couffignal, Les machines à penser, 1951), psychology (Abraham Moles, Sociodynamique de la culture, 1967), anthropology (P. Vendryès, Déterminisme et autonomie, 1956), biology (E. Huant, Biologie et cybernétique, 1954), economics, sociology, and so on.
Léon J. Delpech reviews these authors, whose names are sometimes ignored by the general public.
E. Huant, whose work is particularly interesting, has brought new light on the fundamental regulations among living beings. ‘One of them’, says Professor Delpech, ‘results from genetic opportunities for the emergence of particular values of thought, provided that they can develop in a sufficiently evolved environment: it is the regulation of biological aristocratism, concomitant with the reception of the environment’. This
regulation ‘is the great opportunity that exists in the social environment to escape the entropic leveling. It therefore obliges man to constantly ensure sufficient differentiation, a sufficiently receptive and diversifying character for the biosocial environment’.
Previously, Delpech had already remarked: ‘Human equality is a recent ideology (two centuries), founded on resentment, as Schiller has clearly shown. And all those who, like myself, have examined several thousand subjects, either biologically or medically, do not believe in it’ (cited by Aurel David, La cybernetique et l’humain, Gallimard, 1965).
In a second work, yet to be published, Delpech will examine other cybernetic ‘doctrines’, including a particularly original one by Stéphane Lupasco.
In cybernetics, information occupies an essential place, in contrast to the other sciences, where this role generally comes back to energy. Yet, as Raymond Ruyer writes, ‘there is never more information in the brain’s output than in its input’ (La cybernétique et l’origine d’information. Flammarion, 1954). Also it is not the ‘gross’ volume that counts most, but rather the way in which the information is processed, and then restored.
The machine, in this respect, far exceeds man, but it remains to be seen how far this machine (the artificial ‘brain’, the robot) will be able to imitate man and replace him.
Man in Equation?
Some cyberneticians seem to feed excessive expectations in this regard. Even by mechanising in the highest degree the phenomena of regulation and the behavioural-reflexes, and by taking account of the most statistically random elements, it is strongly doubtful whether a machine can ever reproduce on a strictly non-organic basis all the specific functions of living systems.
Nageotte said that ‘the living being is a machine one of whose functions is to increase the machine’ (L’organisation de la matière par la vie).340
Pierre Auger adds: ‘We can easily imagine machine tools that could build similar machines by using the necessary potential for order (raw materials, energy). But here is where an insurmountable frontier appears: when we must recognise that the descendants of one of our living beings are not alike, but identical, while our machines along with their manufactured children, must inevitably degrade little by little without remedy. The machine can only reproduce a machine conforming to the plan, to the ‘blueprint’, that it contains, and as this is gradually altered, undergoing the common law of the masses of material subjected to statistics, they will alter themselves. In other words, the sons of our machines will necessarily be less perfect, no matter how little the amount. After a few generations, this drift towards disorder will render their functioning impossible and the lineage will die’ (L’homme microscopique. Flammarion, 1951 and 1966).341
Pierre de Laid, who had planned to write a book called L’homme en équation,342 in the end abandoned it. Professor Delpech, moreover, does not disguise the fact that, in many fields, Cybernetics appears ‘without sail or compass’. This is the case in the field of reflexive consciousness: a machine can never justify in a critical way the principles which make it exist. ‘It cannot, because it has no hypercritical knowledge of truth’. This is also the case in the domain of affective life, of aesthetic and moral judgments: a machine simulates feelings, but does not experience them. ‘The work of art’, notes Delpech, ‘expresses itself in an affective conduct or behaviour of which it is the symbol, but it does not define itself’.
Whatever its power, the machine can never will. Only man, when he has created, can explain his creation by his motivations. To be the only one to define values, to observe an ethic, he is also the only one to manifest a will and to put the world in form according to his desire.
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Cybernétique et ses théoriticiens, a study by Leon J. Delpech.343 Casterman, 140 pages.
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In The Thinking Computer. Mind Inside Matter (W. H. Freeman Co., San Francisco, 1976), Bertram Raphael addresses the problems of cybernetics from the perspective of artificial intelligence (the possibility for machines to recognise shapes, understand natural languages, solve problems, etc.). Unfortunately, he treats the problem without any critical distance, and is often content to express his faith in the beneficent virtues of the computer. Such an attitude has provoked criticism, sometimes fundamental, to which the laboratories have been sensitive. See, for example, the studies by H. Dreyfus (What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason) and J. Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason, W. H. Freeman Co., San Francisco, 1975), which are currently provoking interesting debates among specialists.
Biological
Chance and Necessity
Le hazard et la nécessité,344 by Jacques Monod sold more than 150,000 copies. In 1965, Monod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology, together with André Lwoff and François Jacob. Since then, Lwoff has published L’ordre biologique (Laffont),345 and Jacob, La logique du vivant (Gallimard).346 These two titles were also a success. This is a new occurrence.
Jacques Monod: thin lips, fine and sleek hands, the cold elegance of the clinician. He was a professor at the Collège de France where François Jacob also teaches. André Lwoff, 74, holds the Chair of Microbiology in the Faculty of Sciences in Paris. All three worked at the Institute Pasteur, where Monod led the cellular biochemistry department, Jacob the microbial genetics department, and Lwoff, since 1938, the microbial physiology department. Their Nobel Prize revealed the importance of the French School of Molecular Biology. He also brought this knowledge to the general public.
‘Biology is really the science of the second half of the twentieth century’, wrote the mathematician Lichnerowitz, a professor at the Collège de France and a directing member of CNRS. Publishers are not mistaken. The ‘Science nouvelle’ collection at Laffont began by publishing a bestseller called The Double Helix.347 The author, James D. Watson, recounted, not without humor, how he discovered in 1953, with Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick, the secret of the structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), which allowed the genetic code to be deciphered. After this there was Molecular Biology of the Gene,348 also by Watson; La genèse du vivant (Masson),349 by Albert Vandel; La révolution biologique (Laffont),350 by Gordon Rattray Taylor, and so on. The movement was launched.
In Chance and Necessity, Jacques Monod not only speaks of biology. He intends to draw lessons in the order of religion and ideology. The subtitle of his book is ‘Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology’.
‘Modesty’, he says, ‘befits the scholar, but not the ideas which inhabit him, and which he is obliged to defend’.
Immutable and Changing Systems
Chance and necessity develops a number of theses set forth by the author in November 1967, during his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, which he already had occasion to summarise during a conference tour in the United States, as well as in interviews published by magazines such as Raison présente and Atomes. These theses are presented as a dissertation on the great ‘paradox of living systems’: the fact that these systems are both immutable and perpetually changing.
Immutable, because they are the theatre of phenomena that are indefinitely identical to themselves. Perpetually changing, because unforeseen events occur, which modify the course of things.
In the living world, reproduction is the principal operator. For the geneticist, the living being represents the execution of a program inscribed in its heredity. However, within this regular weave, unpredictable variations occur: mutations. On the evolutionary scale, these mutations allow the emergence of new species and branchings. But on the scale of individual life, they are almost always harmful.
‘The mutation’, says the biologist Jean Rostand, ‘is, in sum, comparable to a slip of the tongue, a typo, a printer’s error, which is obviously much more likely to spoil a beautiful text than improve it’.
Mutations occur at random, while heredity obeys laws. To these two properties, chance and necessity, which are defining characteristics of life, Monod gives more
scholarly names: emergence and teleonomy. Emergence is ‘the property of reproducing and multiplying highly complex ordered structures, and of allowing the evolutionary creation of structures of increasing complexity’. Teleonomy has a meaning close to ‘purpose’ or ‘finality’: ‘Everything happens as if living beings were structured, organised, and conditioned for an end: the survival of the individual, but especially that of the species’.
In short, as the Greek philosopher Democritus (5th century BCE) had anticipated: ‘Everything that exists in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity’.
Monod classifies the great explanatory theories of living systems into two groups, according to whether they assert that teleonomy ensures and directs emergence or, to the contrary, that emergence precedes teleonomy.
In the first group are found the vitalist theories (generally abandoned today, which involve a mysterious ‘vital force’ specific to living matter), as well as causal explanations of a metaphysical or ‘animistic’ nature, from the physics of Aristotle to the biology of Teilhard de Chardin. Curiously, Monod asserts that it is also to this ‘ideological family’ that historical materialism is connected. Quoting Engels (Dialectics of Nature)351 and Karl Marx, he attempts to demonstrate that Marxism is but one of the contemporary forms of ‘universal animism’. An idealism all the more dangerous because it glorifies its ‘objectivity’.
Monod reminds us that Engels rejected the second principle of thermodynamics and the selective interpretation of evolution.
‘Marxist societies’, he writes, ‘profess a materialistic religion and dialectic of history. Their system is rooted in animism, outside of objective knowledge, outside of the truth, foreign and ultimately hostile to the science they want to use, but do not respect and serve’.
He adds: ‘Even more than other animisms, historical materialism rests on a total confusion of the categories of value and knowledge. It is this conclusion which enables him, in a profoundly inauthentic discourse, to proclaim that he has ‘scientifically’ established the laws of history, to which man would have no other recourse and no other duty than obedience if he does not wish to enter into nothingness’. He concludes: ‘Let us renounce this once and for all as an illusion, which is only puerile when it is not fatal’.
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