CHAPTER FIVE



CHAPTER FIVE

A CLASH OF METAPHORS: SITUATING MEN AMONG MACHINES IN PHYSIOLOGICAL CYBERNETICS[1]

Only the lack of physiologists’ attention to the achievements

of their own discipline can explain the presence of the false opinion

that the idea of “feedback” has allegedly come to physiology from

cybernetics. In fact, I repeat, we thoroughly elaborated this idea

long ago on the basis of concrete experimental models.

Physiologist Petr Anokhin, 1957[2]

Man-Machine Metaphors in Physiology and Technology

Any metaphor is double-sided: by tying together two different conceptual systems, it urges us to look at both concepts at a new angle. As Kenneth Burke put it, the metaphor asserts not only the “thisness of a that,” but also the “thatness of a this.”[3] With man-machine metaphors, the prospect of such inversion is particularly striking. The reverse side of a machine metaphor applied to a human being is an anthropomorphic metaphor applied to a machine.

Each epoch of human history had its own machines and its own man-machine metaphors. The history of anthropomorphic mechanisms—from the “automatic theater” of Heron of Alexandria to Jacques de Vaucanson’s “piano player” to Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “speaking machine”—went in parallel with the history of machine metaphors employed in physiology—from hydraulic-pneumatic metaphors in Galenic medicine to the Cartesian notion of “reflex,” inspired by the phenomenon of optical reflection, to Edward Frankland’s comparison of the muscle to a steam-engine.[4] Man-machine metaphors constantly traveled back and forth between the spheres of physiology and technology. Technical devices imitated human body functions, then organisms were described in technological terms, following which new machines appeared based on the “mechanisms” of the functioning of these technologically perceived bodies, and so on. Man-machine metaphors created a loop with positive feedback (to use an apt cybernetic metaphor): the more anthropomorphic looked the machines, the more machine-like appeared the human beings.

Man-machine metaphors traveled between technology and physiology by a spiral rather than a circle: at each stage new, more complex machines provided metaphors for yet more sophisticated physiological concepts, and vice versa. Old machine metaphors often looked too crude and primitive in contrast with new, more appealing machine metaphors. La Mettrie ridiculed the Cartesian “dead mechanism” and instead conceptualized the human body as a “machine that winds its own springs” and compared human thinking to harpsichord playing.[5] What on the surface appeared as a struggle between “organicists” and “mechanists,” often proved to be a battle between the old and the new machine metaphors. The fundamental reversibility of the man-machine metaphor affected and to some extent shaped the development of both technology and physiology. Perhaps, one could look at the history of technology as a succession of anthropomorphic metaphors and the history of the life sciences as a metaphorical reflection of the development of machines.

The long interplay of man-machine and machine-man metaphors culminated in cybernetics. Mathematician Norbert Wiener suggested that purposeful behavior was governed by the same feedback mechanism that was employed in contemporary control devices—servomechanisms.[6] Neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch and mathematician Walter Pitts put forward a network of switch-like logical elements as a formal model of nervous activity.[7] Mathematician John von Neumann designed a stored program computer as a functional analogue to the human brain with its memorizing ability.[8]

Mathematicians and engineers took such common physiological and psychological concepts as “memory,” “homeostasis,” or “purpose” and attached to them strict technical meanings. Physiologists, on the other hand, recognized the reverse side of cybernetic metaphors and began using such concepts as “information,” “programming” and “feedback” out of their technical context. New cybernetic metaphors suggested parallels between nervous impulses and information exchange, between performing a movement and executing a program, and between thinking and computing.[9]

Cybernetics and the corresponding man-machine metaphors—a servomechanism for the human body and a computer for the human brain—entered Soviet academic discourse at the time of a sharp debate between the orthodox followers of Ivan Pavlov’s physiological school and their opponents. The former remained faithful to Pavlov’s telephone-switchboard metaphor of human higher nervous activity and vehemently opposed cybernetic man-machine metaphors. The Pavlovians internalized the switchboard metaphor so deeply that could no longer see its mechanical nature; forgetting the roots of their own approach, they scorned the very idea of comparing man to a machine and called cyberneticians “mechanists.”

To cyberneticians, on the other hand, the technical devices that served as an inspiration for Pavlov looked rather primitive in comparison with more sophisticated cybernetic control devices. Cybernetic metaphors opened new vistas for research; they dealt with purposeful behavior, which was bracketed out by Pavlovian orthodoxy. Cyberneticians and cybernetically-minded physiologists were fascinated with the complexity and subtlety of the new machine analogies; on the other hand, they identified reflex theory with “classical mechanism” and believed that old metaphors degraded the organism and reduced it to a “reactive automation.” The struggle between the orthodox Pavlovians and the adherents of physiological cybernetics, where each side accused the other in “mechanism” but saw nothing “mechanical” in their own man-machine analogies, could thus be viewed as a conflict between two machine metaphors: the switchboard, or a device with flexible conditional connections, and the servomechanism, or a self-controlling cybernetic machine.

Reinterpreting Pavlov I: A Michurinist and Anti-Cybernetician

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) occupied an exceptional place in Soviet science—both as a man and as a symbol.[10] He enjoyed a great international fame and was named the “leading physiologist of the world” at the Fifteenth International Psychological Congress in 1935; until the middle 1950s, he remained the only Nobel Laureate among Soviet scientists. Pavlov widely used his administrative authority as the head of several laboratories and political influence as an expert advisor to the government with personal access to Soviet leaders to advance his ambitious agenda of experimental and theoretical research. After Pavlov’s death in 1936, his theory of conditional reflexes became an officially canonized conceptual framework for both animal and human physiology.

As with many other canons, Pavlov’s legacy proved amenable to innumerable reinterpretations at various points in the history of Soviet physiology. According to historian Nikolai Krementsov, the myth of “Pavlov the Michurinist” was fabricated in the course of the Lysenkoist campaign against genetics.[11] Despite Pavlov’s personal support of genetic research in the 1930s and even his order to erect a monument to Gregor Mendel in front of his laboratory, some of his disciples, willing to capitalize on the campaign supported by the Party authorities, claimed the full compatibility of Pavlov’s teachings with Lysenkoism and compared Pavlov to Ivan Michurin, the accredited “founding father” of Lysenkoism. Campaign activists portrayed Pavlov’s early hypothesis (which he later rejected) about the inheritance of conditional reflexes and their transformation into unconditional ones as Pavlov’s central dogma and stressed its links with Lysenko’s claim of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Lysenko’s notorious triumph over Soviet geneticists at the July-August 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) served as a model for the 1950 special joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences in Moscow “on the problems of Pavlov’s physiological doctrine.” Pavlov’s successor and most talented disciple Leon Orbeli, who did not support the myth of “Pavlov the Michurinist,” was accused of “perversions of Pavlov’s line” and “idealism” and dismissed from all administrative positions he occupied in the two academies. This meeting, known as the “Pavlov session,” became itself a model for subsequent meetings and campaigns in various fields of Soviet science. Krementsov has argued that in each case the Pavlovian doctrine was accommodated to advance particular group interests:[12]

Psychologists and pedagogues, psychiatrists and linguists, immunologists and biochemists fought for “true” Pavlovian directions in their own disciplines. Even microbiologists found a way to attach “Pavlovian doctrine” to their work. As had been the case two years earlier with Michurinist biology, numerous interest groups and individuals used the Pavlovian campaign to pursue their own institutional and career objectives and to demonstrate their rhetorical conformity to the approved party line.

References to Pavlov became a valuable currency along with the “classical” quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin. The hammer of Pavlov’s quotations was most effectively used in the anti-cybernetics campaign in the early 1950s. According to the 1954 edition of the Short Philosophical Dictionary, cybernetics identified the work of a human brain with the work of a calculating machine and was therefore directed against “contemporary scientific physiology, firmly established by I.P. Pavlov.”[13] One critic alleged that cybernetics was based on a “mechanist conception of higher nervous activity” and was directed against Pavlov’s “teaching of genius.” “Whereas the principles discovered and comprehensively studied by I.P. Pavlov are based on the dialectical understanding of higher nervous activity and on the study of the brain as an organ functioning as a whole,” he wrote, cyberneticians “regard the brain as an aggregate, a mechanical assembly of cells.”[14] Another author criticized cyberneticians’ attempts to identify Pavlov’s conditional reflexes with the cybernetic mechanism of feedback. They made this “nonsensical conclusion,” he wrote,[15]

on the basis of a maximally simplified scheme of reflex arc from a school biology textbook and the notorious tripartite feedback chain, ‘signal—calculation—command.’ . . . in a vulgar fashion, cyberneticians mix together unconditional reflexes, i.e., inborn ones, which had been formed over the long evolution of a species, and conditional reflexes, which are acquired during the individual lifetime of a given animal.

In his 1953 article in La Pensée, the French Marxist André Lentin called cybernetics a “weapon of the Cold War against Pavlov”;[16] this epithet was readily quoted by the author of the most vicious attack against cybernetics, published in the journal Problems of Philosophy under the title, “Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?” The author, who used the pseudonym Materialist, also portrayed cybernetics as a deliberate attack on Pavlov’s doctrine:[17]

The most progressive teaching of contemporary natural knowledge confronts the rabid opposition of the reactionaries of science. Since they are not in a position to find scientific arguments against the teaching of I.P. Pavlov, they are left with the path of falsification and distortion of this teaching. Unequivocally, they endow the computer with properties of the central nervous system. . . . Nevertheless, it is only a mechanism, operated by acoustic, light, and mechanical signals, and it has nothing in common with the reflexes of a man.

In support of his argument, the author Materialist cited Pavlov: “on our planet, the nervous system is inexpressibly the most complex and delicate instrument of relations and connections among the numerous parts of an organism and between an organism as a most complex system and an infinite number of external influences.” As it turned out, the critic skillfully cut out this quotation from the middle of a paragraph. Right above these words, Pavlov wrote: “Thus, in the central nervous system two different central apparatuses are present: one that conducts the nervous flow and one that connects and disconnects it.” Right below the quotation cited by the critic, Pavlov said: “When the connecting and disconnecting of electric circuits is now our daily technical device, can anyone really object to the implementation of this same principle in relation to this amazing instrument [i.e., the nervous system]?”[18]

In his writings, Pavlov constantly referred to technology as a source of legitimate metaphors for the nervous system. Pavlov compared the human nervous system to a central telephone switchboard, which connected its users through temporary channels (conditional reflexes), as opposed to a network of permanent channels (unconditional reflexes) connecting each user with all others.[19] He wrote: “In technology, as in our daily life, the principle of connection is applied so often that it would be odd not to expect the implementation of the same principle within the higher nervous system mechanism, which establishes most complex, subtle connections.”[20] For Pavlov, modern technology was the embodiment of sophistication and he aspired to “elevate” the theory of nervous activity to an equally high level of complexity.

Reinterpreting Pavlov II: A Precursor to Cybernetics

Soviet cyberneticians faced a dilemma: how to deal with Pavlov’s legacy? One obvious answer was to refashion him as a cybernetician and make him a patron saint of their discipline. Thus cybernetics would share in the legitimacy of Pavlovian physiology.

The appropriation of Pavlov into Soviet cybernetic discourse was made easier by Wiener’s personal attention to Pavlov’s work. Cybernetics curiously combined very different physiological theories, in particular, Walter Cannon’s conception of homeostasis and Pavlov’s reflex theory. Wiener called Pavlov a “great scholar”[21] and viewed his experiments with dogs as an important source for cybernetics. In particular, Wiener introduced the concept of “affective tone” and argued that Pavlov’s conditional reflexes were based on a feedback mechanism:[22]

An increase in affective tone favors all processes in a nervous system that are under way at the time and gives them a secondary power to increase affective tone; and . . . a decrease in affective tone tends to inhibit all processes under way at the time and gives them a secondary ability to decrease affective tone. . . . Note that the mechanism of affective tone is itself a feedback mechanism.

Wiener cautiously remarked, “I wish to emphasize that I do not say that the process of the conditioned reflex operates according to the mechanism I have given; I merely say that it could so operate.”[23] The boundary between could and does quickly eroded, however, when he discussed systems with the so-called “anticipatory feedback,” which included an effector with a lagging characteristic and a compensator that acted as a predictor. Anti-aircraft fire control presented an example of such system. “Feedbacks of this general type,” Wiener wrote, “are certainly found in human and animal reflexes.”[24]

Soviet cyberneticians focused on the main charge advanced by the critics of cybernetics—the claim that any parallels between human beings and machines were incompatible with the letter and the spirit of Pavlov’s teaching. Utilizing the same tactics of authoritative quotation as employed by their opponents, cyberneticians set out to advance a new interpretation of Pavlov’s views, directly opposite to the one offered by the critics of cybernetics. The collection, Cybernetics Must Serve Communism (vol. 1, 1961), edited by the chairman of the Academy of Sciences Council on Cybernetics Aksel’ Berg, was saturated with Pavlov’s quotations. One article, for example, declared:[25]

The approach to the study of physiological processes by using methods of exact sciences and finding functional analogies—the approach characteristic of cybernetics—finds a confirmation in this materialist statement by Pavlov: “Man is certainly a system (crudely speaking, a machine), which, like any other system in nature, obeys the inescapable and uniform laws of all nature; but this system, in the horizon of our contemporary scientific view, is unique in its highest degree of self-regulation. Among the products of man’s hands, we are already sufficiently familiar with machines that regulate themselves in various ways. From this point of view, the method of studying the man-system is the same as for any other system: decomposing into parts, studying the meaning of each part, studying the connections of the parts, studying the relations with the environment, and finally, understanding on this basis the general functioning of this system and, if within human capacity, controlling it.”

Soviet cyberneticians were anxious to enlist Pavlov as a cybernetics supporter, even if this involved interpretation of dreams. The authors of another article in the same collection, for example, argued that cybernetics was a fulfillment of Pavlov’s “dream”:[26]

Pavlov dreamed about deep interpenetration of exact sciences, particularly mathematics, and physiology, when as early as 1902 he said in his speech, “Natural Science and the Brain”: “all life—from the most elementary to the most complex organisms—is a long chain of more and more complex balances with the environment. The time will come—maybe in the distant future—when mathematical analysis based on natural-scientific research will embrace all these balances (eventually including itself) with magnificent formulas of equations.”

Trying to portray Pavlov as an inborn cybernetician, Soviet authors refashioned his doctrine of the primary and secondary “signal systems” as a model of information exchange; in his experiments, they wrote, animals reacted “not to the stimulant itself but to its signaling (informational) meaning.”[27]

Control engineers argued that Pavlov’s reflex theory found its direct implementation in cybernetic control devices. Engineer Galperin, for example, wrote: “Automatic control systems fulfil the same defense function in machines as does reflex in living organisms, for these systems respond with an expedient and exactly measured reaction to external influences.”[28] Citing Pavlov’s definition of the conditional and unconditional reflexes, Galperin argued that “the notion of ‘reflex’ in this definition does not contain anything specifically physiological and can be extended to any systems capable of reacting to external influences in the same way.”[29] He maintained that physiological processes of excitation and inhibition were “reproduced” in control devices with positive and negative feedback, respectively. Conditional reflexes, in particular, could be simulated by adding new—temporary—connections to the permanent connections (“unconditional reflexes”) between receptors and effectors of a control device. Galperin stressed that cybernetics was not only fully compatible with Pavlov’s teaching, but also logically followed from it: “It was the greatest triumph of Pavlov’s ideas that they indicated a model for the designers of control devices to follow. To say that reflexes cannot be reproduced in control devices would mean to reject some of the most far-reaching implications of his teaching.”[30]

Petr Anokhin: An Attempted Synthesis of Reflex Theory and Cybernetics

The evolution of Soviet physiologists’ attitudes toward cybernetic ideas was most vividly reflected in the work of the prominent physiologist Petr Kuzmich Anokhin (1898-1974). His career followed numerous twists and turns in the history of Soviet physiology.[31] The son of a railroad worker, in 1918 he joined the Bolshevik Party and fought in the Civil War. In 1921, as Anokhin wrote in his memoirs, he decided to study the human brain and philosophy in order to “understand the mechanisms of human soul.”[32] With the help of the commissar of enlightenment Anatolii Lunacharskii, Anokhin secured an assignment from the Party Central Committee to move to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and soon enrolled at the State Institute of Medical Knowledge to study under the prominent psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev. The same year, during one of the regular “purges of the ranks,” Anokhin was expelled from the Party for not providing required documents.[33] In 1926-30, he worked in Pavlov’s laboratory and studied mechanisms of inhibition. Already in 1926, he tried to combine Pavlov’s teaching with dialectical materialism.[34] He even attempted to convince Pavlov that the relation between excitation and inhibition was dialectical and represented the struggle and unity of opposites. According to Anokhin, Pavlov was amused: “There you are, it turns out that I am a dialectician!”[35]

Anokhin quickly made a meteoric career. In 1930, he became the head of the Physiology Department at the Medical Institute in Gor’kii (Nizhnii Novgorod). Being himself on a relative periphery of the physiology community, Anokhin focused his efforts on the problem of “center and periphery in the physiology of nervous activity.” In this period, he developed his vision of human physiology as an assembly of “functional systems,” i.e., physiological systems responsible for a particular function (e.g., breathing, swallowing, locomotion, etc.). “Each functional system is to some extent a closed system and functions on the basis of constant connection with peripheral organs, specifically, the constant afferentation from these organs,” he wrote in 1935.[36] In his experiments, Anokhin cut nervous channels of a dog and intercrossed them, observing how various centers of nervous activity adapted to the change and restored their functions. In his interpretation, signals from the peripheral organs “sanctioned” those patterns of excitation in the center that caused favorable effects (“sanctioning afferentation”) and thus facilitated the adaptation of the center.[37] In 1935, he presented a paper on the “unity of center and periphery” at the XV International Physiology Congress in Moscow and himself moved to the center of physiological action: the same year he was appointed the head of the Neurophysiology Department at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Moscow. In 1945, Anokhin became a full member and chief of the secretariat of the prestigious Academy of Medical Sciences. In this capacity, he actively promoted Lysenkoism in physiology and medicine and evidently tried to oust Pavlov’s closest disciples, who were opposed to Lysenkoism, from their administrative posts. Anokhin insisted that Pavlov’s teaching supported the idea of hereditary transmission of conditional reflexes and called for ever wider application of these ideas in medical science.[38]

In the same period as the Lysenko controversy, Anokhin contributed to the ongoing anti-cybernetics campaign. Asked by The Literary Gazette to review an article on cybernetics written by two computer specialists from Kiev—Ekaterina Shkabara and Lev Dashevskii—Anokhin joined in the two authors’ condemnation of the cybernetic analogy between the human brain and the automatic functioning of control devices. He wrote that the two authors were “absolutely justified” in calling this analogy “methodologically harmful,” “based on a reactionary scheme,” and “aimed at reducing the human being involved in socially-minded activity to the status of a mechanical automation, a ‘robot.’”[39] Anokhin maintained that cyclical regulatory mechanisms and the idea of feedback had already been thoroughly studied in the Russian school of physiology, particularly, in the work of the nineteenth-century physiologist Ivan Sechenov; these mechanisms, however, failed to explain more complex phenomena of higher nervous activity such as mental disorders. “Having picked up the law of cyclical and chain-like relations in reflex activity of the nervous system, a law long well-known to physiologists,” he wrote, “the proponents of ‘cybernetics’ apply this law in a crude mechanical fashion to the processes of higher order and different quality.”[40] Pavlov’s doctrine, he argued, was “absolutely incompatible with the mechanist ideas of this absurd ‘teaching.’”[41] “In short,” summarized Anokhin, “the acquaintance with ‘cybernetics’ leads to the conclusion that it stands on a flawed methodological foundation, includes a whole series of illiterate neurological assumptions and speculations, and lastly, serves reactionary goals of the capitalist society.”[42]

An active critic of all possible “deviations” from the Pavlovian orthodoxy, Anokhin was unexpectedly criticized at the 1950 “Pavlov session” for precisely this “deviationist” sin, lost his directorship of the Institute of Normal Physiology in Moscow, and had to move to a peripheral institution in Riazan. Anokhin’s colleagues had apparently resented his political hyperactivity. Based on their reports, an evaluation of Anokhin’s activity prepared by officials from the Party Central Committee in 1946 read:[43]

Comrade Anokhin repeatedly complained that he was overloaded and, for this reason, his scientific work had notably weakened for the last few years. At the same time, comrade Anokhin does not decline any new responsibilities offered to him, especially if they allow him to be in the limelight of the medical community. Comrade Anokhin sometimes somewhat overestimates his powers and capabilities and does not fulfil his scientific obligations.

Anokhin returned to Moscow after Stalin’s death in 1953, and in 1955, with his appointment as chairman of the Department of Normal Physiology at the First Medical Institute in Moscow, he again assumed a central position in the physiology community. He equipped his Department’s laboratory with newest electric stimulators, amplifiers, and encephalographs; the general direction of his research, however, at first remained largely Pavlovian—the study of conditional reflexes related to the activity of the salivary gland—only now, instead of collecting saliva, Anokhin registered electric potentials of a dog’s brain.[44]

Anokhin’s comeback coincided with the rise of cybernetics, and he did not miss the opportunity to take advantage of the new trend. He revived his early ideas about functional systems and claimed that they were now confirmed and validated by cybernetics:[45]

We proposed the notions of a functional system and return afferentation eleven years before the advent of cybernetics. . . . For many years, however, the principle of a functional system remained a guiding one for our laboratory only. . . . The development of cybernetics with its fundamental principle of “regulation with feedback” has changed the situation drastically. The fundamental principle of automatic regulation with feedback as the basis of cybernetics proved strikingly identical with our ideas about a “closed functional system.”

Anokhin believed that it was physiology that should provide guidance for cybernetics, not vice versa. Accordingly, he avoided cybernetic language in his writings and warned against “the tendency to substitute physiological terms and concepts with terms borrowed from the arsenal of cybernetics,” such as “information,” “coding,” and “programming.”[46] Instead, he attempted to build a physiological theory even more universal than cybernetics and provided a new physiological vocabulary for it. He replaced his earlier term “sanctioning afferentation” with more general “return afferentation” (obratnaia afferentatsiia), which, in his view, was somewhat similar to but richer in content than “feedback” (obratnaia sviaz’).[47] He also introduced the terms “afferent synthesis” (the integration of all signals about the results of previous actions and the formation of the next action’s goal)[48] and “acceptor of action” (the “apparatus that accepts return afferentation and compares it to the goal of a given action”).[49] These three physiological mechanisms—afferent synthesis, return afferentation, and acceptor of action—in Anokhin’s view, were present “not only in conditional reflex, but also in any complete behavioral act, especially in goal-directed behavior.”[50] These three mechanisms also comprised a new, improved concept of “functional system.” If the earlier version described a process of reaching a specific goal, compensation of lost physiological functions, the new one suggested a mechanism of physiological adaptation to any kind of goal.

In Anokhin’s view, his theory of functional systems was broader and more universal than either Pavlov’s reflex theory or cybernetics. He maintained that the conditional reflex was just a “particular case” of the workings of a functional system, while the latter represented a “universal principle, encompassing both the highest functions of the brain and the most elementary life functions, including molecular processes.”[51] In an attempt to incorporate cybernetics into his overarching theory, he formulated a “cardinal law of life, which determines all forms of human adaptation, including complex automatic regulating machines”: “any functional system, mechanical or living, created or developed by itself to produce a useful effect, must necessarily have a cyclical character and cannot exist without receiving return signals about the utility of the produced effect.”[52]

Anokhin closely collaborated with the Academy of Sciences Council on Cybernetics, and its chairman Aksel’ Berg supported Anokhin’s candidacy for full membership in the USSR Academy of Sciences in the 1960 elections. Anokhin’s works, Berg wrote, “made a most essential impact on the development of contacts between biology and cybernetics, which proved equally fruitful for both fields.”[53] This time Anokhin did not succeed, however; only in 1966 he finally was elected, again with Berg’s support.[54]

Nikolai Bernshtein: Physiology of Purposeful Activity

The leader of Soviet cybernetic physiology Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernshtein (1896-1966) was one of the few Soviet physiologists who throughout his career spoke consistently and openly about his disagreement with Pavlov’s teaching, even when the latter became officially canonized.[55] Pavlov’s experiments principally focused on correlation of the activity of a dog’s salivary gland with various stimuli; he dealt neither with locomotion, nor with human experimental subjects. Bernshtein, on the contrary, studied precisely what Pavlov left out—human motor activity—and argued that reflex theory did not apply there.

In 1922-24, Bernshtein conducted a series of “biomechanical” experiments at the Central Institute of Labor in Moscow, where he measured the trajectories and speeds of human limbs’ movements for various types of manual labor.[56] “Biomechanics” conceptualized the human body as a mechanical system of muscular masses and forces. Classical neurophysiology assumed that each muscle had a singular representation in the corresponding area of the brain; a central impulse from a given area was thought to direct a determined movement of the corresponding muscle. Bernshtein called this “the push-button control-board model of the cortex, similar in plan to an organ keyboard.”[57] In contrast, Bernshtein’s experiments showed that one and the same labor task was performed differently—with varying tension of various muscles—at different times; muscular movements were “constructed” anew, so to speak, each time the task was performed.[58] Since a given “habit of movement” (i.e., a conditional motor reflex) could no longer be associated with a single group of neurons, Bernshtein argued that the hypothesis of cellular localization of muscle control centers necessarily led to the denial of cellular localization of conditional reflexes. “One of the two chess pieces must here be taken,” he wrote.[59] He suggested to view body movements not as a sequence of determined actions, but as a cycle of actions and corrections.[60] As early as 1934, he proposed to replace the classical concept of “reflex arc” with “reflex circle,” which he compared with the functioning of a servomechanism.[61] In a 1940 paper, he argued that “the motor effect of central impulse cannot be decided at the center but is decided entirely at the periphery” and concluded:[62]

the structure of the co-ordinational reflex differs considerably in principle from the sensory reflexes known to us from other areas; the co-ordinational reflex is not an arc but a closed circle with functional synapses at both ends of the arcs. In this reflex the centripetal impulses as in all other reflexes are transformed [at the center] into centrifugal ones, but the centrifugal impulses going out to the periphery are there rapidly converted into new centripetal impulses.

During the Second World War, while working at the Moscow Scientific Research Institute of Prosthetics, Bernshtein applied his biomechanical theory to the development of new methods of restoring damaged motor functions. His 1947 book, On the Construction of Movements, received the prestigious Stalin Prize.

The July-August 1948 session of VASKhNIL signaled the beginning of a series of campaigns against “reactionary” and “idealist” deviations in various fields of science. Bernshtein came under attack for mentioning Pavlov’s name in his book only once and thus “belittling” Pavlov’s importance, for “idealism,” and even for his alleged adherence to the “false theory of mutations.”[63] As a Jew, Bernshtein was also a target in the ongoing anti-Semitic campaign against “cosmopolitanism.” At the 1950 “Pavlov session,” critics charged that Bernshtein knew “neither the letter nor the spirit of Pavlov’s teachings.”[64] Bernshtein had to abandon his experimental work at the Institute of Prosthetics and the Institute of Physical Culture and had virtually no opportunity for research and publication.[65]

The end of the Stalinist era and the advent of cybernetics radically changed the situation. Bernshtein returned to spotlight and actively entered the debate over the vitality of Pavlov’s doctrine. He argued that the rigid scheme of conditional reflexes, based on experimental studies of animals confined in cages and subjected to measured stimuli, depicted the organism as merely responsive, “passive.” He called for the creation of “physiology of activity,” which would study purposeful behavior. While Pavlov thoroughly guarded “scientific” physiology from such psychological (presumably, “non-scientific”) notions as “purpose,” Bernshtein insisted that a scientific physiological study of purposeful behavior was possible, if only the notion of purpose was conceptualized as “material codes in the central nervous system . . . such that both forecasts and programs of the future may be programmed into the nervous system.”[66] The use of cybernetic instead of psychological terms made it possible to avoid accusations of “idealism,” “vitalism,” and alike. Bernshtein’s “physiology of activity,” it seems, could only be written in cybernetic language.

In a 1957 paper, Bernshtein translated his theory into cybernetic language without any difficulty: he spoke of “control” and “programming” of movements instead of their “construction,” changed “impulses” to “informations” (in plural), and likened the entire organism to a servomechanism:[67]

The motor apparatus of the organism, in all its functions and in the very essentials of its biodynamics, is organized on the principle of a [self-regulating system] of the tracking type with a continuous program of changes for successive regulations of [the required value] in each case.

Reading Wiener’s Cybernetics furnished Bernshtein with a new language but conceptually Bernshtein did not depend on Wiener. Bernshtein found Wiener’s model of purposeful behavior interesting, but immediately redefined some of its parameters.[68] Bernshtein pushed the cybernetic analogy between men and control devices much farther than Wiener and arrived eventually at a comprehensive model of the organism as a self-regulating machine, which received information from the external world, encoded it in a model, programmed its actions, and constructed its movements.[69]

Bernshtein made a clear distinction between adaptation to the environment and purposeful activity aimed at changing the environment. The former could be achieved via the mechanism of Pavlovian reflexes, while the latter could not be reduced to reflexes. To explain the mathematical meaning of this distinction, he employed the conceptual apparatus of “well-organized functions,” elaborated by Izrail’ Gel’fand and Bernshtein’s close friend Mikhail Tsetlin.[70] Gelfand and Tsetlin worked at the Division of Applied Mathematics, a closed institution engaged in space research and problems of nuclear physics; they originally developed this apparatus for solving physical problems. They called a multi-variable function “well-organized” if its arguments could be separated into “essential” and “non-essential” variables. The latter could cause abrupt local changes and discontinuities but exerted little influence on the function as a whole, over large ranges and at the extremes; the former, on the contrary, determined the main characteristics of a function. Bernshtein argued that the coordination of movements (for example, writing) and the construction of models in the brain in the process of perception could both be described by those “remarkable functions.” A handwriting style, for example, could vary in its “non-essential” parameters, depending on the position of a hand, but still possessed “essential” features characteristic of a particular person. Bernshtein used this distinction to delineate the difference between the Pavlovian model of the reactions of a passive organism and his own model of the actions of an active organism:[71]

It has already been observed how differently an organism behaves under the influence of its surroundings with reference to essential and non-essential variables. As regards the latter type, it is reactive and, so to speak, yieldingly adaptable: if one leaf on a tree receives more food than another, then that leaf grows more vigorously than the other one . . . But essential characteristics of structure and shape such as those which determine the plan of the flower . . . are only relinquished by an organism if it is subjected to very violent interference . . . Thus the function, that is the organism, may be said to be reactive as far as its non-essential variables are concerned, but highly non-reactive, or active, with regard to its essential ones.

Bernshtein saw his mission in “liberating the organism from the role of a ‘reactive automation.’”[72]

In Bernshtein’s view, the concepts of equilibrium and homeostasis were applicable only to non-essential variables; when, on the other hand, external influences affected an organism’s essential variables, this organism “respond[ed] with the most active counteraction and [did] not yield without serious struggle, sometimes with the help of a counterforce, sometimes with evasive tactics.”[73] Perhaps, somewhere between the lines Bernshtein reflected here on the passive social tactics of the conformists who looked for an “equilibrium” with the authorities and were willing to adapt “yieldingly.” Personally, he was ready to use a “counterforce” and “evasive tactics” to defend his “essential variables.”

Reinterpreting Pavlov III: A Mechanist or a Cybernetician?

In May 1962, over one thousand physiologists, psychologists, philosophers, and psychiatrists gathered in Moscow for the All-Union Conference on Philosophical Questions of the Physiology of Higher Nervous Activity and Psychology.[74] At this conference, the supporters and the opponents of “physiological cybernetics” clashed in an open debate. Anokhin and Bernshtein had been attacked many times before; this time, however, the situation was radically different: in 1959, the Academy of Sciences established the Council on Cybernetics, which coordinated cybernetics research throughout the country; the 1961 Program of the Communist Party called for wider application of cybernetic methods; many works of foreign cyberneticians were published in Russian translation; such publications as Problems of Cybernetics and Cybernetics Must Serve Communism were coming out; cybernetics institutes and departments mushroomed. In a series of publications in physiological and philosophical journals Anokhin and Bernshtein questioned the validity of some of Pavlovian dogmas and called for the incorporation of cybernetic ideas into physiology. The orthodox Pavlovians, who triumphed over the “deviationists” at the 1950 “Pavlov session,” felt that their position of authority was under threat.

Bernshtein contended that reflex theory, including both Cartesian teaching and Pavlov’s doctrine, treated an organism as a “highly organized reacting machine.”[75] “The chief methodological fallacy” of the “adherents of mechanistic materialism,” he maintained, was the termination of reflex arc at the periphery, instead of closing it as a circle. Another major fault was “atomism, the firm belief that the whole is always the sum of its component parts and nothing more.”[76] Accordingly, he argued, “the organism’s vital activity and behavior were treated as assemblies or chance sequences of reflexes.”[77] While Wiener considered homeostasis a cybernetic process, Bernshtein viewed it as a concept of the pre-cybernetic past:[78]

The process of life does not “seek a balance with the environment,” as the representatives of the classical period of mechanism thought, but to conquer this environment. This striving for conquest is not directed toward maintaining status or homeostasis, but toward an unceasing advance in the direction of the inborn program for development and security.

In opposition to the “atomism” of reflex theory, Bernshtein insisted that initial perceptions did not simply launch corresponding reflexes but were transformed by mathematical “operators” to form a well-structured mental “model of the world.” “We may reaffirm with confidence,” he wrote, that in the brain a representation (or representations) of the world is constructed along the principles of a model.”[79]

Some of the more orthodox opponents of Bernshtein responded with an old argument against using mathematics in the life sciences and charged that “models of the world” appeared not as the reflection of real objects but as a product of some spontaneously organized neurophysiological processes, “detached from their material substance, i.e., the nervous structures.” Alluding to Lenin’s “classical” critique of the interpretations of relativity theory where matter disappeared and only equations remained, one of the conference participants argued that in Bernshtein’s theory, “physiological processes in the brain are substituted by the technology of mathematical thinking . . . Reflex mechanisms of the functioning of the nervous system totally disappear, only mathematical transformations remain.”[80] Other critics repeated old accusations of teleology, which were traditionally mounted against cyberneticians’ attempts to deal with purposeful behavior. One of them inquired: “What is this ‘inborn program of development’? Who compiled this program and put it into living matter, like in a cybernetic machine? There is a strong smell of Aristotle’s entelechy here.”[81]

The more sophisticated partisans of Pavlov’s doctrine did not attack cybernetics itself, for it had been legitimized on a higher level of authority. Instead, their strategy was to demonstrate that Pavlov’s doctrine was perfectly compatible with cybernetics, and therefore, did not deserve the accusation of dogmatism. One of the conference participants read into Pavlov’s remarks about “arbitrary movements” a proto-cybernetic hypothesis that conditional stimuli led to the formation of “goal-directed alignments” in the brain:[82]

It is precisely such alignments in the course of reaction—alignments formed on the basis of experience—that will apparently provide further transformation of return signals from receptors into adequate regulation signals until the reaction achieves a given “goal.” . . . This hypothesis of Pavlov most comprehensively embodies the broad (we would say, biological-cybernetic) content of the feedback principle.

One of Pavlov’s orthodox disciples Iurii Frolov even maintained that Pavlov had a priority in the application of probability theory to physiology. Frolov cited the 1934 study by mathematician N.A. Romanov—a researcher at Pavlov’s laboratory—who applied the theory of probabilities to reflex theory.[83] “Of course, this does not mean that cybernetics was ‘discovered’ in Pavlov’s laboratory,” wrote Frolov, “but this testifies to the fact that mathematician Romanov . . . was the first to point out the closest connection between the teaching of Pavlov and the theory of probabilities as the core of modern cybernetics.”[84]

Ironically, in the past orthodox Pavlovians claimed that cybernetics contradicted Pavlov’s teaching and accused cyberneticians of mechanism, while cyberneticians were trying to enroll Pavlov as a founding father; now the two groups switched their roles: the cyberneticians were claiming total incompatibility of (now legitimized) cybernetics with some of Pavlov’s dogmas and accused Pavlovians of mechanism, while the Pavlovians were scrambling to read cybernetics into Pavlov’s teaching.

Life as a Cybernetic Problem

Giving a public lecture on “Automata and Life” at Moscow University in April 1961, the famous Soviet mathematician Andrei Kolmogorov proclaimed: “I belong to the clan of those desperate cyberneticians who see no principal limitations on a cybernetic approach to the problem of life and believe that one can analyze life in its entirety, including all the complexity of the human mind, with cybernetic methods.”[85] The audience responded to Kolmogorov’s words with great enthusiasm. Cyberneticians—largely mathematicians and engineers—now viewed life as their professional domain and no longer the exclusive realm of the life sciences.

The renowned mathematician academician Sergei Sobolev, who played a prominent role in the Soviet atomic project and rendered his support to cybernetics, unequivocally stated:[86]

In cybernetics, a machine is defined as a system capable of accomplishing actions that lead to a certain goal. Therefore, all living organisms, and human beings in particular, are in this sense machines. Man is the most perfect of all known cybernetic machines . . . There is no doubt that all human activity manifests the functioning of a mechanism, which in all its parts obeys the same laws of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, as does any machine.

Cyberneticians claimed that current physiological knowledge was inadequate for cybernetic tasks, for it did not provide a clear picture of the mechanisms of physiological processes. Engineers Artobolevskii and Kobrinskii, for example, charged that physiological theories of human thinking lacked foundation and were nothing more than conventions. They wrote: “It is necessary to understand how man thinks, to understand the whole mechanism of his thinking in its entirety—to understand and not just agree that we would call thinking such-and-such!”[87]

Cyberneticians aspired to repair this problem themselves. The deputy chairman of the Academy of Sciences Council on Cybernetics mathematician Aleksei Liapunov included physiology in his grand project of cybernetization of science, summarized in an impressive human-size table, which featured twelve methods of cybernetic analysis each applied to eight scientific fields. Among the specific cybernetic problems in the field of physiology, Liapunov listed the follows:[88]

1) the study of information flows in the nervous system and the receptors;

2) the study of the methods of encoding information in the nervous system and the receptors;

3) the study of reactions, reflexes, and behavior of animals;

4) the evaluation of the amount of information and the channel capacity of the nervous system;

5) the study of hierarchical functioning and collective behavior;

6) the algorithmic description of the nervous system and the receptors.

As an illustration of the potential of cybernetics, Liapunov offered a stochastic algorithm simulating the acquisition of a conditional reflex.[89]

Control engineers argued that automatic control devices were already capable of demonstrating unconditional reflexes, in terms of giving preset responses to diverse inputs, and insisted that conditional reflexes could also in principle be reproduced in modern control devices. Engineer Galperin maintained that “taking the exact sense of Pavlov’s definition [of the reflex], it is impossible to make a distinction between the mechanism of the conditional reflex and the functioning of an automatic control system.”[90] He wrote that “automatic control systems in today’s machines fulfil the function of a nervous system”[91] and announced that automatic control devices brought about a “reevaluation of physiological values.”[92]

Paraphrasing Pavlov, who wrote that the human brain, which had created natural science, was itself becoming a subject of natural science, Galperin contended: “The human brain, which has created technology, now, in control devices, is itself becoming (in its simplest functions) a subject of technology.”[93] This cybernetic “expansionism” left little room for non-cybernetic physiology. If the human brain was becoming a subject of technology, what would be the subject of neurophysiology then?

Cybernetician Mikhail Bongard from the Academy of Sciences Institute of Biophysics further shook the physiological establishment, when at the 1962 conference he announced that from now on cybernetic models would be “unrelenting examiners” of physiological theories and hypotheses. He argued that reflex theory, if subjected to a cybernetic test, failed to explain basic physiological mechanisms, such as learning:[94]

If you claim that you understand the mechanism of learning, this can easily be checked. Engineers will create elements that would be able to acquire conditional reflexes. Try to assemble from such elements a device that would act expediently in a complex changing environment. I have studied this problem myself and learned that it is hopeless to try to assemble such a device from the elements modeling conditional reflexes.

Cybernetics argued that reflex theory was inadequate in explaining higher nervous activity. A conditional reflex could be established on the basis of an unconditional one, reasoned Bongard, only when an unconditional stimulus could be substituted by a conditional stimulus. There were, however, such reactions that could not be caused by any unconditional stimulus—for example, solving an arithmetical problem—and therefore there was nothing to substitute for. “Even a system of very complex conditional reflexes would not suffice to explain the activity of a living organism,” maintained Bongard, “in the same way as statics cannot explain the flight of a rocket.”[95] Instead, he argued, one must look for a solution by building cybernetic models:[96]

In particular, a system is needed that would develop new programs of stimulus analysis in the process of learning. A random choice of tactics is needed with further tests of its expediency. It is principally important that, at least in part, this search would be random and not determined by external conditions. A mechanism is needed that in the process of learning would compare the results of the model’s activity with the expected results. . . . It is possible to implement all this in a computing machine.

Bongard developed an original approach to computer pattern recognition; his program derived its own rules of classification by “learning” from the existing examples of correct classification.[97]

Mathematician and physicist Mikhail L’vovich Tsetlin (1924-1966) was one the most active proponents of a cybernetic approach to the problems of physiology.[98] In 1959, he became a learned secretary of the newly established Council on Cybernetics. A close friend of Nikolai Bernshtein, Tsetlin developed a keen interest in the life sciences. Working at the Division of Applied Mathematics on the problems of mathematical physics, Tsetlin devoted a large portion of his time (and also some scarce resources of computer time) to the development of cybernetic models of physiological processes. What on the surface appeared as an assembly of unrelated activities—the elaboration of an original numerical algorithm for finding the minimum of a multi-variable function, the modeling of various types of “games” played by a group of stochastic automata with “linear tactics,” and the study of the collective action of elements (“centers”) of the nervous system causing a certain movement—comprised in Tsetlin’s mind necessary steps toward a unified theory of emergent purposeful behavior. In all these cases, the combined action of low-level elements, each following very simple rules, resulted in expedient actions of the system as a whole. Tsetlin saw here a general mechanism by which a simple structure could produce complex behavior. The key to this mechanism, he argued, lay in the “principle of minimum interaction”:[99]

For complex control systems, a structure is typical which allows a separation of the individual, relatively autonomous systems. . . . the expediency of the subsystems is revealed in the minimization of the interaction among them, so that in stable states these subsystems function, as it were, independently or autonomously. . . . at each moment the subsystem solves its own “particular,” “personal” problem—namely, it minimizes its interaction with the medium; therefore, the complexity of the subsystem does not depend on the complexity of the entire system. The expediency of the entire system is revealed in the minimization of the total interaction of the system with the medium.

In Tsetlin’s scheme, the subsystems “strive” to minimize the interaction both among themselves and with the system’s environment. This mechanism provides for the simplicity of control: the actions of each part no longer have to be directed from one center; as soon as the “pay function” is defined, the subsystems themselves figure out their individual best strategies, which results in an overall optimal strategy for the system. Such simple subsystems do not have to coordinate their efforts (that would only complicate their actions); all they have to do is to follow simple stochastic rules. If all subsystems were directly connected with one another, the growth of the system would have required more and more complex connections, which would diminish the reliability of the system as a whole. “Our mathematical models,” Tsetlin maintained, “allow us (to a certain degree) to imagine the interaction of the nerve centers without considering the complex system of links and the coordination of their activity.”[100]

Tsetlin’s conceptual framework for understanding complex phenomena of nervous activity came from game theory. He studied a particular type of game, in which stochastic automata did not “know” the pay function of their game in advance and had to develop their tactics during the game. Tsetlin informally compared the tactics of a simple automation facing complex environment to the behavior of a “little animal in the big world.”[101] Echoing this appealing image, his friend Bernshtein viewed the subject of his own physiological theory in a similar way: “To use a metaphor, we might say that the organism is constantly playing a game with its environment, a game where the rules are not defined and the moves planned by the opponent are not known.”[102]

Bernshtein acknowledged that cybernetic metaphors were part of physiologists’ age-old tradition of borrowing models from contemporary technology; he even coined the term “semeromorphism” to denote this type of thinking.[103] “Every new level achieved by technology,” he wrote, “attracted the attention of physiologists and oriented their thinking in certain direction, and they often unwittingly modeled life processes in the image of the contemporary engineering achievements.”[104] The use of cybernetic models, he argued, had to be conscious and self-critical. He criticized Western cyberneticians’ attempts to build devices that simulated individual physiological acts and called for creating comprehensive cybernetic models, which would cover a wide range of physiological functions. He argued that a cybernetic model must demonstrate human-like variations of quality and accessibility over a broad spectrum of functions; only in this case one could say that such a model adequately represented human physiological mechanisms.[105]

When man-machines metaphors travel back and forth between physiology and technology, they return in a new guise, which can render them more acceptable. When in the 1930s Anokhin and Bernshtein put forward the ideas of “reflex circle” and “return afferentation,” which did not fit in the Pavlovian switchboard metaphor, their approach was not accepted by the Soviet physiology community. Only when the idea of feedback was validated by control engineers, generalized by cyberneticians, and legitimized in the Soviet Union as distinctively cybernetic rather than specifically physiological concept, did Soviet physiologists begin to reconsider their dominant metaphor.

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[1] An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology, April 1994, Cambridge, Mass., under the title, “The Man-Machine Metaphor and Ideological Disputes in Soviet Science in the 1950s.”

[2] P.K. Anokhin, “Fiziologiia i kibernetika,” [1957] in Idem, Filosofskie aspekty teorii funktsional’noi sistemy: Izbrannye trudy, eds. F.V. Konstantinov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978), p. 213.

[3] Quoted in J. David Sapir, “The Anatomy of Metaphor,” in J. David Sapir and J. Christopher Crocker, eds., The Social Use of Metaphor: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), p. 11.

[4] See John Cohen, Human Robots in Myth and Science (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966); William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), ch. VI, “Function: The Animal Machine”; John G. Daugman, “Brain Metaphor and Brain Theory,” in Eric L. Schwartz, ed., Computational Neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 9-18; Hermann Haken et al., eds., The Machine as Metaphor and Tool (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993); Nikolai L. Krementsov and Daniel P. Todes, “On Metaphors, Animals, and Us,” Journal of Social Issues 47 (1991): 67-81; Aram Vartanian, “Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer,” in Philip P. Wiener, gen. ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1973), pp. 131-46.

[5] See Vartanian, “Man-Machine,” pp. 139-40.

[6] See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961).

[7] See W.S. McCulloch and W. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115-33.

[8] See John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

[9] See Evelyn Fox Keller, Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), on the “bootstrap process of modeling organisms and machines, each upon the other” (p. 108) in cyberscience.

[10] On Pavlov, see David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Daniel P. Todes, “From the Machine to the Ghost Within: Pavlov’s Transition from Digestive Physiology to Conditional Reflexes,” American Psychologist 52:9 (September 1997): 947-55; Idem, “Pavlov and the Bolsheviks.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17 (1995): 379-418; Idem, “Pavlov’s Physiology Factory,” Isis 88:2 (June 1997): 205-46.

[11] See Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 260-75.

[12] Ibid., pp. 274-75.

[13] “Kibernetika,” in M. Rosental’ and P. Iudin, eds., Kratkii filosofskii slovar’ (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1954), p. 237.

[14] B.E. Bykhovskii, “Kibernetika—amerikanskaia lzhenauka,” Priroda, no. 7 (1952): 125 (emphasis original).

[15] T.K. Gladkov, “Kibernetika—psevdonauka o mashinax, zhivotnykh, cheloveke i obshchestve,” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, no. 1 (1955): 60-61.

[16] André Lentin, “La Cybernétique: Problèmes Réels et Mystification,” La Pensée 47 (1953): 60.

[17] Materialist [pseudonym], “Whom Does Cybernetics Serve?” [1953], trans. Alexander D. Paul, Soviet Cybernetics Review 4:2 (1974): 38.

[18] I.P. Pavlov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. III (2) (Moscow, 1951), pp. 323-24.

[19] I.P. Pavlov, “Estestvoznanie i mozg,” [1909] in Idem, Mozg i psikhika: Izbrannye psikhologicheskie trudy, ed. M.G. Iaroshevskii (Moscow and Voronezh: MODEK, 1996), p. 71.

[20] Pavlov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. IV (Moscow, 1951), p. 39.

[21] Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society [1950, 1954] (New York: Avon Books, 1967), p. 93.

[22] Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 128.

[23] Ibid., p. 129 (emphasis original).

[24] Ibid., p. 113.

[25] A.D. Voskresenskii and A.I. Prokhorov, “Problemy kibernetiki v biologichaskikh naukakh,” in A.I. Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1 (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosenergoizdat, 1961), p. 109; the same passage by Pavlov is quoted in A.V. Khramoi, “Novoe v avtomatike,” Priroda, no. 10 (1959), p. 8, and in many other cybernetics sources. The original quote can be found in I.P. Pavlov, “Otvet fiziologa psikhologam,” [1932] in Idem, Mozg i psikhika, pp. 182-83; see also another translation into Enlgish: I.P. Pavlov, “Reply of a Physiologist,” trans. R.S. Lyman, The Psychological Review 39 (1932): 126-27.

[26] K.B. Arutiunov and D.B. Svecharnik, “Otbor, pervichnaia obrabotka, khranenie i peredacha informatsii o khode proizvodstvennykh protsessov,” in Berg, ed., Kibernetiku—na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1, p. 81. The original quote can be found in Pavlov, “Estestvoznanie i mozg,” p. 77.

[27] V.V. Parin et al., eds., Problemy kibernetiki: Nekotorye itogi i problemy filosofsko-metodologicheskikh issledovanii (Moscow: Znanie, 1969), p. 157.

[28] I.I. Gal’perin, “O reflektornoi prirode upravliaiushchikh mashin (Otvet inzhenera fiziologam),” Voprosy filosofii, no. 4 (1957): 159.

[29] Ibidem.

[30] Ibid., p. 164.

[31] On Anokhin, see N.S. Dvortsina and V.A. Makarov, comps., Petr Kuz’mich Anokhin: Materialy k biobibliografii (Moscow: Nauka, 1987); Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 200-11; P.V. Simonov, ed., Petr Kuz’mich Anokhin: Vospominaniia sovremennikov, publitsistika, (Moscow: Nauka, 1990).

[32] P.K. Anokhin, “Idei, radi kotorykh ia zhivu,” [1968] in Simonov, ed., Petr Kuz’mich Anokhin, p. 220.

[33] See “Lichnoe delo Anokhina Petra Kuz’micha”; the Russian Center for Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii [RTsKhIDNI]), Moscow, f. 17, op. 100, d. 60106, l. 8.

[34] See P.K. Anokhin, “Dialekticheskii materializm i problema ‘psikhicheskogo’,” Chelovek i priroda, no. 1 (1926): 81-90.

[35] Quoted in Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior, p. 162.

[36] Quoted in Dvortsina and Makarov, comps., Petr Kuz’mich Anokhin, p. 18.

[37] See P.K. Anokhin, “Fiziologiia i kibernetika,” p. 213.

[38] See Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 266.

[39] P.K. Anokhin, “Zamechaniia po povodu retsenzii E.A. Shkabara and L.N. Dashevskogo na stat’iu o ‘kibernetike’,” n.d.; the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva [RGALI]), f. 634, op. 3, d. 206, l. 139.

[40] Ibidem.

[41] Ibidem.

[42] Ibid., l. 140.

[43] “Spravka dlia utverzhdeniia na dolzhnost’ pervogo zamestitelia direktora Instituta fiziologii AMN SSSR,” April 11, 1946, in “Lichnoe delo Anokhina Petra Kuz’micha”; RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 100, d. 60106, l. 55. Despite this criticism, Anokhin was appointed deputy director and later director of the Academy of Medical Sciences Institute of Physiology.

[44] See K.V. Sudakov, “P.K. Anokhin na kafedre 1-go MMI im. Sechenova,” in Simonov, ed., Petr Kuz’mich Anokhin, pp. 136-37.

[45] P.K. Anokhin, “Metodologicheskii analiz uzlovykh problem uslovnogo refleksa,” [1963] in Idem, Filosofskie aspekty, pp. 200, 205.

[46] Anokhin, “Fiziologiia i kibernetika,” p. 213.

[47] Ibid., p. 214.

[48] P.K. Anokhin, “Metodologicheskii analiz,” p. 195.

[49] Ibid., p. 193.

[50] Ibid., p. 195.

[51] P.K. Anokhin, “Sistemnyi analiz uslovnogo refleksa,” [1973] in Idem, Filosofskie aspekty, p. 383.

[52] Anokhin, “Fiziologiia i kibernetika,” pp. 222-23.

[53] Berg to the presidium of AMN SSSR, May 4, 1960, in “Lichnoe delo Anokhina Petra Kuz’micha”; RTsKhIDNI, f. 17, op. 100, d. 60106, l. 81.

[54] Ibid., ll. 87-94.

[55] On Bernshtein, see V.E. Demidov, “U istokov fiziologii aktivnosti. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernshtein i razvitie otechestvennykh biokiberneticheskikh issledovanii,” in B.V. Biriukov, ed., Kibernetika: proshloe dlia budushchego. Etiudy po istorii otechestvennoi kibernetiki (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), pp. 108-169; Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior, pp. 192-97; Alex Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), pp. 62-73; Irina Sirotkina, “N.A. Bernshtein: The Years Before and After the ‘Pavlov Session’,” Russian Studies in History 34:2 (1995): 24-36.

[56] On the Central Institute of Labor, see Kendall Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918-1924,” Soviet Studies 29:3 (1977): 373-94; A.V. Smetanin et al., TsIT i ego metody NOT (Moscow: Ekonomika, 1970); Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams : Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 7, “Man the Machine.”

[57] Nicholas Bernstein, “The Problem of the Interrelation of Co-ordination and Localization,” [1935] in Idem, The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements, trans. from Russian and German (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1967), p. 33.

[58] Bernshtein wrote that “ten successive repetitions of the same movement demand ten successive impulses all different from each other,” (Ibidem).

[59] Ibid., p. 34.

[60] Bernshtein wrote: “the cerebral motor area organizes responses by deftly adjusting and balancing between resultant external forces and the manifestations of inertia, constantly reacting to proprioceptive signals and simultaneously integrating impulses from separate central subsystems,” (Ibid., p. 33).

[61] See Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia, pp. 65, 163.

[62] Nicholas Bernstein, “Biodynamics of Locomotion,” [1940] in Idem, The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements, pp. 106-107 (emphasis original).

[63] See Sirotkina, “N.A. Bernshtein,” pp. 30-31.

[64] Quoted in Sirotkina, “N.A. Bernshtein,” p. 31.

[65] On the desperate situation, in which Bernshtein found himself at that time, see Viach.Vs. Ivanov, “Goluboi zver’ (Vospominaniia),” Zvezda, no. 3 (1995): 177; Sirotkina, “N.A. Bernshtein,” p. 32.

[66] N.A. Bernshtein, “Methods for Developing Physiology as Related to the Problems of Cybernetics,” [1962] in Michael Cole and Irving Maltzman, eds., A Handbook of Contemporary Soviet Psychology, trans. Rosa Glickman et al. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), p. 448.

[67] Nicholas Bernstein, “Some Emergent Problems of the Regulation of Motor Acts,” [1957] in Idem, The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements, p. 131.

[68] In particular, in the case of a hand reaching for an object, Bernshtein believed that feedback reflected the magnitude of the deviation from the planned path, rather than the distance between the current position of the hand and the position of the object, as Wiener and Rosenbleuth had suggested; see Bernstein, “Some Emergent Problems,” pp. 129-30.

[69] Bernshtein wrote that the goal of action was “some sort of model of the required future [event], encoded or otherwise represented in the nervous system. . . . we have here two interconnected processes. One of them is a probabilistic prognosis based on the perceived, current situation, and this is some sort of extrapolation for a given interval of time in the future. . . . [The other is] the process of programming actions which should lead to realization of the required future event, . . . some sort of interpolation between the current situation and that which should be achieved in the interests of a given individual,” (Bernshtein, “Methods for Developing Physiology,” pp. 444-45 [emphasis original]).

[70] See I.M. Gel’fand and M.L. Tsetlin, “O nekotorykh sposobakh upravleniia slozhneishimi sistemami,” Uspekhi matematicheskikh nauk 17:1 (1962).

[71] Nicholas Bernstein, “Trends in Physiology and Their Relation to Cybernetics,” [1962] in Idem, The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements, p. 178.

[72] N.A. Bernshtein, “Novye linii razvitiia v fiziologii i ikh sootnoshenie s kibernetikoi,” [1963] in Idem, Biomekhanika i fiziologiia dvizhenii, ed. V.P. Zinchenko (Moscow and Voronezh, 1997), p. 457.

[73] N.A. Bernshtein, “Puti razvitiia fiziologii i sviazannye s nimi zadachi kibernetiki,” in A.M. Kuzin, ed., Biologicheskie aspekty kibernetiki (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1962), p. 62.

[74] See the proceedings of this conference: P.N. Fedoseev et al., eds., Filosofskie voprosy fiziologii vysshei nervnoi deiatel’nosti i psikhologii (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1963).

[75] Bernshtein, “Methods for Developing Physiology,” p. 443.

[76] Ibidem.

[77] Ibidem.

[78] Ibid., p. 448.

[79] Bernshtein continued: “The brain does not receive an impression of the external world in the form of a passive inventory of elements, and does not employ such primitive means of subdividing the world into elements as first come to mind (phrases for words, and plans for drawings), but applies to them such operators as most accurately model the world, casting the models in the most consistent, exact, and comprehensive forms”; see Nicholas Bernstein, “Trends and Problems in the Study of Investigation of Physiology of Activity,” [1961] in Idem, The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements, p.156 (emphasis original).

[80] Ia.B. Lekhtman (the Lesgaft Institute of Physical Culture, Leningrad) in Fedoseev et al., eds., Filosofskie voprosy, p. 558.

[81] A.A. Zubkov (the Medical Institute, Kishinev) in Fedoseev et al., eds., Filosofskie voprosy, p. 584.

[82] B.Kh. Gurevich (the Pavlov Institute of Physiology, Leningrad) in Fedoseev et al., eds., Filosofskie voprosy, p. 610.

[83] Romanov’s paper was submitted to the session of Mathematics Division of the Academy of Sciences on December 23, 1934, by prominent mathematician Nikolai Luzin; it was later published as N.A. Romanov, “O vozmozhnosti kontakta mezhdu teoriei veroiatnostei i ucheniem akademika I.P. Pavlova ob uslovnykh refleksakh,” Doklady Akademii nauk SSSR 1:4 (1935): 193-200.

[84] Iu.P. Frolov, “Dialektika zhivoi prirody i sovremennaia kibernetika,” in V.A. Il’in, et al., eds., Filosofskie voprosy kibernetiki (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoi literatury, 1961), p. 314.

[85] A. Kolmogorov, “Avtomaty i zhizn,’” in A.I. Berg and E. Kol’man, eds. Vozmozhnoe i nevozmozhnoe v kibernetike (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1963), p. 11.

[86] S. Sobolev, “Da, eto vpolne ser’ezno!” in Berg and Kol’man, eds., Vozmozhnoe i nevozmozhnoe, p. 83.

[87] I.I. Artobolevskii and A.E. Kobrinskii, “Zhivoe sushchestvo i tekhnicheskoe ustroistvo,” [1963] in V.D. Pekelis, ed. and comp., Kibernetika—neogranichennye vozmozhnosti i vozmozhnye ogranicheniia: Itogi razvitiia (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 64-65.

[88] See A.A. Liapunov and S. V. Iablonskii, “Teoreticheskie problemy kibernetiki,” in A. A. Liapunov, ed., Problemy kibernetiki, vol. 9 (Moscow: Fizmatgiz, 1963), pp. 5-22.

[89] See A.A. Liapunov, “O nekotorykh obshchikh voprosakh kibernetiki,” [1958] in Idem, Problemy teoreticheskoi i prikladnoi kibernetiki, ed. S.L. Sobolev (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), pp. 68-69.

[90] Ibid., p. 159.

[91] Gal’perin, “O reflektornoi prirode,” p. 162.

[92] Ibid., p. 167.

[93] Ibid., p. 168.

[94] M.M. Bongard (the Institute of Biophysics, Moscow) in Fedoseev et al., eds., Filosofskie voprosy, p. 672.

[95] Ibidem.

[96] Ibid., pp. 672-73.

[97] See Mikhail Bongard, Pattern recognition, trans. from the Russian (New York: Spartan Books, 1970).

[98] On Tsetlin, see Viach.Vs. Ivanov, “Iz istorii kibernetiki v SSSR. Ocherk zhizni i deiatel’nosti M.L. Tsetlina,” in D.A. Pospelov and Ia.I. Fet, eds. and comps., Ocherki istorii informatiki v Rossii (Novosibirsk: OIGGM SO RAN, 1998), pp. 556-80.

[99] I.M. Gel’fand and M.L. Tsetlin, “Mathematical Simulation of the Principles of the Functioning of the Central Nervous System,” in M.L. Tsetlin, Automaton Theory and Modeling of Biological Systems, trans. Scitran (New York, Academic Press, 1973), p. 150.

[100] Ibid., p. 152.

[101] Ibid., p. 132.

[102] Bernstein, “Trends in Physiology,” p. 173.

[103] Derived from the Greek ((((((( (today) and ((((( (the form, the shape), the term “semeromorphism,” according to Bernshtein, stood for “shaping [something] in the image of today”; see N.A. Bernshtein, “Modeli kak sredstvo izucheniia nervno-dvigatel’nykh protsessov,” [1958] in Idem, Biomekhanika i fiziologiia dvizhenii, p. 392.

[104] Ibidem.

[105] Ibid., p. 399.

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