Ecosystems are smarter than we are
Beer thought that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, but in their performative ability to solve problems that exceed our cognitive ones.
The quote above is from Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain.
Somewhere along the line when one tries to get grips with Beer on biological computing, an apparent paradox surfaces. Beer’s goal, all along, was to improve management. The cybernetic factory was supposed to be an improvement on existing factories with their human managers. And yet the cybernetic brain of the factory was supposed to be a colony of insects, some dead leaves for them to feed on, the odd leech. Did Beer really think that his local pond was cleverer than he was? In a way, the answer has to be that he did, but we should be clear what way that was. Recall that Beer thought that the economic environment of the factory was itself an exceedingly complex system, ultimately unknowable and always becoming something new. He therefore felt that this environment would always be setting managers problems that our usual modes of cognition are simply unable to solve. This connects straight back to the above remarks on Beer’s skepticism toward representational knowledge. On the other hand, according to Beer, biological systems can solve these problems that are beyond our cognitive capacity. They can adapt to unforeseeable fluctuations and changes. The pond survives. Our bodies maintain our temperatures close to constant whatever we eat, whatever we do, in all sorts of physical environments. It seems more than likely that if we were given conscious control over all the parameters that bear on our internal milieu, our cognitive abilities would not prove equal to the task of maintaining our essential variables within bounds and we would quickly die. This, then, is the sense in which Beer thought that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not in their representational cognitive abilities, which one might think are nonexistent, but in their performative ability to solve problems that exceed our cognitive ones. In biological computers, the hope was that “solutions to problems simply grow” (1962a, 211).
See also: Outcome over representation, Dubberly on Cybernetics and Counterculture.