Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

cannot be ignored in Boyd’s often repeated statement concerning the strategic goal of anorganism:to diminish adversary’s freedom-of-action while improving our freedom-of -action so thatour adversary cannot cope while we can cope with events/efforts as they unfold 137 .Wiener, von Neumann and others such as Alan Turing and Marvin Minksy, appliedcybernetics as a model for the brain. They developed the “computational theory of mind”,one of the great ideas in intellectual history, according to Pinker. This fueled the cognitiveview in psychology. The central idea is that much human behavior can be understood interms of the mental processing of information through mental modules, and patterns ofconnections and patterns of activity among the neurons of the brain 138 . The idea was that themind is like a program, and the brain is the hardware on which the program runs. The mindresembled a computer to the extent that cognition, the process of knowing, can be definedas information processing, a feature included in Boyd’s OODA loop 139 . It led tofunctionalism, i.e. a focus on the functional organization of matter and on the input-outputoperations of the mind. The computer model of mental activity became the prevalent viewof cognitive sciences and dominated all brain research for the next thirty years. Thecybernetic loop was also employed to explain learning, a subject Boyd was keenly interestedin. Learning is defined as a process in which one changes due to experience 140 . This processis generally represented as a simplified single reinforcing cybernetic loop as shown below 141 .Figure 5: model of a reinforcing loopactionsdecisionsFeedback experience &results of your actionsThe fact that a system is goal-oriented is incorporated in the balancing loop shown below 142 .actionsdecisionsFeedback experience& results of your actionsFigure 6: model ofdouble loop learning processDifference betweenwhere you are andwhere you want to beYour goal orpurpose for learning137 Boyd, Patterns of Conflict, p.128.138 Dennis Coon, Essential of Psychology (seventh edition, Brookes/Cole, Pacific Grove, Ca, 1997), p.17.139 Machamer, p.10.; and Rick Grush, 'Cognitive Science', in Machamer and Silberstein (2002), Chapter13.140 O’Connor & McDermott, p.118, and Coon, p.279. See also Gareth Morgan, Images of Organizations(Beverly Hills, Ca, 1986), chapter 4, in particular pp.84-97, which deal with single and double looplearning.141 O’Connor, p.119.142 Ibid, p.120.107