Ross Ashby: Design for a Brain: The Origin of Adaptive Behavior

W. Ross Ashby argues that the brain’s genius lies not in mystical purpose, but in mechanism. It is a self-tuning machine, a web of feedback loops constantly testing and correcting itself—adapting not by foresight but by iteration, by trial, by the quiet mathematics of survival. Through ideas like essential variables, homeostasis, and adaptive mechanisms, Ashby shows how the mind sustains its delicate balance amid chaos—how order, astonishingly, can arise from pure mechanics.