Review of "Design for a Brain" (2005)
psycnet.apa.org
psycnet.apa.org
When a physiologist wants to investigate the working of the nervous system he normally examines samples of this system, dissects them, traces out all their ramifications, ascertains what physical and chemical changes they undergo while they are working, conducts sundry experiments on them, and thus acquires bit by bit a knowledge of the function of each component part and the way in which it works.
Dr. Ross Ashby's approach is more theoretical. He has constructed a machine, which he calls a homeostat, the mechanism of which makes it behave in one respect somewhat like an animal or a human being adapting itself to its environment.
> The homeostat is one of the first devices capable of adapting itself to the environment; it exhibited behaviours such as habituation, reinforcement and learning through its ability to maintain homeostasis in a changing environment. It was built by William Ross Ashby in 1948.. an adaptive ultrastable system, consisting of four interconnected Royal Air Force bomb control units with inputs, feedback, and magnetically driven, water-filled potentiometers. It illustrated his law of requisite variety — automatically adapting its configuration to stabilize the effects of any disturbances introduced into the system..
> When Alan Turing heard of Ashby's intention to build the homeostat, he wrote to Ashby to suggest that he could run a simulation on Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) instead of building a special machine.. In 1949 Time described it as "the closest thing to a synthetic brain so far designed by man".
Full text of book: https://archive.org/details/designforbrain00ashb