This paper concerns the 'Black Box'. It is not the engineer's 'black box' that can be opened to reveal its mechanism, but rather, one whose operations are inferred through input from (and output to) a companion 'observer'. We are observers ourselves, and we attempt to understand minds through interaction with their host organisms. To this end, Ranulph Glanville, Professor of Design, followed the cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby in elaborating the Black Box. The Black Box and its observer together form a system having different properties than either component alone, making it a 'greater' Black Box to any further-external observer. However, Glanville offers conflicting accounts of how 'far' into this 'greater' box a further-external observer can probe. At first (1982), the further-external observer interacts directly with the core Black Box while ignoring that Box's immediate observer. But in later accounts, the greater Black Box is unitary. Glanville does not explain this discrepancy. Nonetheless, a firm resolution is crucial to understanding 'Black Boxes', so one is offered here. It uses von Foerster's 'machines', abstract entities having mechanoelectrical bases, just like putative Black Boxes. Von Foerster follows Turing, E.F. Moore, and Ashby in recognizing archetype machines that he calls 'Trivial' (predictable) and 'Non-Trivial' (non-predictable). Indeed, early-on Glanville treats the core Black Box and its observer as Trivial Machines, that gradually 'whiten' (illuminate) each other though input and output, becoming 'white boxes'. Later, however, Glanville treats them as Non-Trivial Machines, that never fully 'whiten'. Non-Trivial Machines are the only true Black Boxes. But Non-Trivial Machines can be concatenated from Trivial Machines. Hence, the utter core of any 'greater' Black Box (a Non-Trivial Machine) may involve two (or more) White Boxes (Trivial Machines). White Boxes may be the ultimate source of the mind.
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