The Ratio Club
Between 1949 and 1955 a group of UK medics, scientists, mathematicians and engineers met regularly for beer and sandwiches, and to discuss the new field of cybernetics (information and systems theory) and its application to their work. They called their meetings the ‘Ratio Club’ (‘ratio’ being the latin for reasoning). The meetings were mostly held in the basement of a nurses home in Queen Square, London, next to the hospital were two of the members worked.
Several club members had worked on projects during the recent war in which information theory proved useful – developing automatic pilots for planes, more accurate gun aiming etc.. After the war they began to apply the approach, named ‘cybernetics’ by Weiner in the US, in many fields, including neuroscience, robotics and computing.
Research for this project initially focussed on five individuals who were to become particularly influential, Grey Walter, Alan Turing, Ross Ashby, Horace Barlow, and Kenneth Craik. The latter died in a bicycling accident in 1945, but was included because his ideas influenced the creation of the club and, according to one member, cast a ‘luminous shadow’ over proceedings. Sources included biographical and historical material, academic papers and books. Much useful information was also gleaned from Phil Husbands, an academic writing a book about the club who was more than generous with his time.
This material, these stories, are the starting point for creative work in a variety of media. Creating portraits based on contemporary photographs was the beginning, followed by collaborations that are in process.
Why choose cybernetics/information processing? Why not? And, 40 years ago my doctoral thesis was on brain indicators of information processing so this stuff wasn’t entirely unfamiliar.
RATIO SUITE – Five cyber songs.
Music to be composed by Stephen Brown, text prepared by Ken Barrett.
In 1911 Vaughan Williams published his Five Mystical Songs, settings of a text by 17th century priest-poet George Herbert. That gave us the idea….
Text for these ‘cyber songs’ was assembled from key words and phrases, drawn from books and papers of the five, reconfigured to give a flavour (however partial) of them, and their ideas.
The assistance of Andy Platman is also gratefully acknowledged.
Walter
Creatures of sorcery, owning
earthborn, vital, beauty…
neurotic molecules
cybernetic loops,
incomputable assemblies,
beholding
electrobiologic futures,
vast and strange,
deeper than we know.
Superhuman nous-
not atomised but fertile,
brings fallacious intimacies
to nature’s prodigality
notorious with
anonymous hecatombs…
W Grey Walter (1910-1967) clinical neurophysiology, robotics, cyberbetics
Turing
Shall I compare thee
To a winter’s day?
Utopian dreamer
Calculating
To bemuse?
Thought machine
Instigator,
Myopic
Investigator
Of space-time.
Digital prophet
Outside of then
And steps ahead
Of next.
Alan M Turing (1912 -1954) mathematics, cryptography, computer science.
Ashby
The chisel
in a sculptor’s hand…
the bones of her arm…
are part of the
turbulant
biophysical
mechanism
her nervous system
is trying
to govern…
her brain’s
myriad variables
tumble away from
chaos to
stablility and
control.
Whence came
this serially adapting
ultrastable
nervous system?
Faultless answers…
elude.
W Ross Ashby (1903-1972) psychiatry, cybernetics.
Barlow
Student cybernaut
you roamed the
preconscious..
casting neurones,
heavy with inputs,
as bean counters,
natural statisticians
sifting sensory torrents
for salience…
tireless artists
surfing entropy,
carving worlds
from fragments.
Horace H Barlow (1921-2020) vision science. neurophysiology.
Craik
Evanescent,
yet still so
luminous,
sublimely free,
you modelled
the mind….
A world of
symbols
impartially sampled,
transmute to
synaptic patterns,
impressionable,
interacting,
excited…
neural states
that model,
that parallel,
reality.
Kenneth J W Craik (1914-45) philosophy, psychology
The portraits are in charcoal pencil and white pastel.
The texts from which the songs are derived are listed below.
Sources for text
W. Grey Walter, The Living Brain, Pelican edition, 1961. (Originally published in 1953, reprinted by Penguin with a new long preface. Most of his text was selected from that preface and the final chapter, ‘The Brain Tomorrow’)
Alan M Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence, Mind 49:433-460.
Alan M Turing, Lecture to the London Mathematical Society, 20 February 1947, quoted in Hodges 2014, pp 299-401.
https://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf
W Ross Ashby, Design for a Brain, 1954 (read at archive .org)
https://archive.org/details/designforbrainor0000ashb/mode/2up
Horace B Barlow, Sensory mechanism, the reduction of redundancy and intelligence, National Physical Laboritory, 1959.
Horace B Barlow, Possible principles udnerlying the transformation of sensory messages, 1961.
Kenneth J W Craik, The Nature of Explanation, 1943 9read at archive.org)
https://archive.org/details/natureofexplanat0000crai
History and biography.
Husbands P & Holland O, The Ratio Club:A Hub of British Cybernetics. In The Mechanical Mind in History, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008.
Husbands P. Robots: What everyone needs to know, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2021.
Hodges A. Alan Turing: the Enigma, Vintage Books, London, 2014.
Turing D, Reflections of Alan Turing, The History Press, London, 2021.
Turing S, Alan M Turing, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Rid T, The Rise of the Machines, Scribe: London, 2016.
Bartlett F C, Obituary Notice Kenneth J W Craik, 1914-1945, British journal of Psychology, May 1946, 34, 109-116
Zangwill O L, Kenneth Craik: The man and his work, British Journal of Psychology,(1980), 71, 1-16.
This is a digital archive of material from W Ross Ashby, including over 7000 pages of hand written journals.
Interview with Horace Barlow from 2014 in two parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBAdK0fdTdY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sujg21H2dzc