REGULATING THE VERY LARGE SYSTEM 13/15 



(In the transformation, dots represent values that do not matter.) 

 If now ju is chosen, one part gives the machine 



I a b 

 b a 



the other components being ignored; while if v is chosen, the other 

 part gives 



r q r 

 Thus the initial formulation is really quite general. 



13/14. Design in a Black Box. It will be noticed that the operation 

 of "design", as understood here, can be carried out within a Black 

 Box, if it has an input. In fact, the owner of the radio set (S.13/12), 

 if he knows nothing of its contents, but does know how the output 

 is affected by the switch, does perform the act of "design in a Black 

 Box" when he sets the switch and gets the desired behaviour. 



Other examples extend the range of the same theme. The Black 

 Box, or the radio set, may be dominated by another machine, whose 

 activities and values determine the switch's position. If so, we can 

 say (provided we remember the sense in which we are using the 

 words) that the dominating machine, when it sets the switch at a 

 particular position, "designs" the radio set. What is important is 

 that the dominating machine shows to the radio set those properties 

 that are objectively shown by the behaviour of a designer. 



The same point of view may be applied to the brain, and we can 

 see how one part of a brain can show towards another part the 

 objective behavioural relationship of designer to machine. We can 

 begin to see how one part — a basal structure perhaps — can act as 

 "designer" towards a part it dominates, towards a neural network, 

 say. 



Thus the idea of one machine designing another can be stated in 

 exact and general terms — exact in the sense that experiment can be 

 used to show objectively whether or not this relationship holds. 



QUANTITY OF SELECTION 



13/15. This aspect of design — of the reduction in numbers that 

 occurs when the many initial possibilities are reduced to the final 

 few or one — can easily be measured. We can use the same scales 



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