Context: W. R. Ashby’s work on homeostasis as the basic mechanism underlying all kinds of physiological as well as cognitive functions has aroused renewed interest in cognitive science and related disciplines. Researchers have successfully incorporated some of Ashby’s technical results, such as ultrastability, into modern frameworks (e.g., CTRNN networks). Problem: The recovery of Ashby’s technical contributions has left in the background Ashby’s far more controversial non-technical views, according to which homeostatic adaptation to the environment governs all aspects of all forms of life. This thesis entails that life is fundamentally “heteronomous” and it is conceptually at odds with the autopoiesis framework adopted by Ashby’s recent defenders as well as with the primacy of autonomy in human life that most of the Western philosophical tradition upholds. The paper argues that the use of computer simulations focused on the more conceptual aspects of Ashby’s thought may help us recover, extend and consequently assess an overall view of life as heteronomy. Method: The paper discusses some computer simulations of Ashby’s original electro-mechanical device (the homeostat) that implement his techniques (double-feedback loops and random parameter-switching). Results: First simulation results show that even though Ashby’s claims about homeostatic adaptivity need to be slightly weakened, his overall results are confirmed, thereby suggesting that an extension to virtual robots engaged in minimal cognitive tasks may be successful. Implications: The paper shows that a fuller incorporation of Ashby’s original results into recent cognitive science research may trigger a philosophical and technical reevaluation of the traditional distinction between heteronomous and autonomous behavior. Constructivist content: The research outlined in the paper supports an extended constructionist perspective in which agency as autonomy plays a more limited role.

Key words: Second-order cybernetics, autonomy and agency, general homeostasis thesis, W. R. Ashby, homeostat, concept simulation

The paper argues that the conception of life as generalized homeostasis developed by W. R. Ashby in Design for a Brain and his other writings is orthogonal to the traditional distinction between autonomy and heteronomy that underlies much recent work in cellular biology, evolutionary robotics, ALife, and general AI. The distinction is well-entrenched in the Western philosophical canon but it fails to do justice to Ashby’s conception of life. We can assess the philosophical and technical viability of the general homeostasis thesis Ashby advocated, the paper argues, through the construction of virtual cognitive agents (i.e. simulated robots in a physically plausible environment) that replicate the architecture of Ashby’s original homeostat through a Ctrnn-like network architecture, whose outline implementation is then discussed.

Key words: homeostasis, w. r. ashby, life, autonomy, heteronomy.

Excerpt: Alternatives to the dominant approach of symbol manipulation in cognitive science were already proposed and widely discussed during the early, formative years of cybernetics. At the Macy Conferences, for example, extensive discussion occurred concerning the point that in actual brains there seem to be no rules, no central logical processor, nor does information appear to be stored in precise addresses. Rather, brains can be seen to operate on the basis of massive interconnections in a distributed form, so that the actual connections among ensembles of neurons change as a result of experience. In brief, these ensembles present us with a self-organizing capacity that is nowhere to be found in the paradigm for symbol manipulation. In 1958 Frank Rosenblatt built the “Perceptron,” a simple device with some capacity for recognition, purely on the basis of the changes of connectivity among neuronlike components; similarly, W. R. Ashby did the first study of the dynamics of very large systems with random interconnections, showing that they exhibit coherent global behaviors.