Cybernetics (original) (raw)
Last update: 04 Dec 2024 18:32
Old draft from the 1990s, last touched some time before 16 October 2002
A science which seems to have dissolved into the others. A lot of good science was done under this banner; it just doesn't seem to hold together. Cybernetics helped give rise to some new fields, like cognitive science; it disseminated about a dozen ideas and bits of applied math which have proved useful (in, e.g., neurobiology); but what else? As a study of abstract machines in general, it becomes identical with dynamics, or computation theory, or some amalgam of both; algebra, even. As a more limited science of "communication and control" it suffers from the fact that communication and control in animals is, when you get down to blood and guts, rather different from communication and control in machines, and neither resembles the mechanisms of C&C in society. This is not to say that there are no similarities; of course there are; but they're at the very general level of things like "feedback" and "you must have an information channel," and pretty much exhausted by ideas which are now common currency in many particular fields. And even then, animals have control without feedback. It may be that we haven't exhausted the potential of a science of communication and control, but I think at this point the burden of proof would be on the optimists.
Dissolved? Not entirely. There's an old joke that if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate, and not everything associated with cybernetics has gone into solution. Caked on the bottom of the reaction vessel we find: A prefix which seems indispensible to marketroids; the occassion for a great deal of vaporizing in the social sciences and humanities; and a peculiarly navel-gazing sub-sect of systems theory, which isn't exactly God's gift to the advancement of learning in the first place.
History: leading figures (see below). Origins in mathematical logic, physiology, engineering, statistical mechanics. Predecessors --- Rashevsky, Lotka, Cannon, Sherrington (?). Popular and semi-popular views. Metaphorical uses. Appropriation. Descendants (see below).
Reflections, 6 August 2021
Well, that was a little harsh, wasn't it? But the place where it might be unfair was my conviction that ideas like "you need an efficacious feedback channel" were, in fact, internalized common currency wherever they were useful. This was, in retrospect, overly optimistic.
See also:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial Life
- W. Ross Ashby
- Complexity [a series of footnotes]
- Control
- Ethical and Political Issues in Data Mining
- Physical Principles in Biology
- Physics of Computation and Information
- Arturo Rosenblueth
- Herbert Simon
- Systems Theory
- Whole Earth Catalog
- Norbert Wiener Recommended, big picture, primary sources:
- W. Ross Ashby
- Introduction to Cybernetics
- Design for a Brain
- Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind
- Claude Shannon and John McCarthy (eds.). Automata Studies
- Norbert Wiener
- Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
- The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society Recommended, close-ups, primary sources:
- Michael Arbib, Brains, Machines and Mathematics [has one of the best expositions of Gödel's Theorem I've seen]
- H. B. Barlow, "Sensory Mechanisms, the Reduction of Redundancy, and Intelligence" [in Mechanisation of Thought Processes; PDF scan via Prof. William Bialek]
- D. B. Blake and A. M. Uttley (eds.), Mechanisation of Thought Processes
- Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology", Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18--24
- Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior", Philosophy of Science 17 (1950): 318--326
- Fred Rieke, David Warland, Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck and William Bialek, Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code [To illustrate what I mean about these ideas being absorbed into the disciplines, here is an excellent book that back in the day would've been hailed as a masterwork of biological cybernetics, but now is just good neuroscience which uses some tools from information theory and systems-identification.] Recommended, close-ups, secondary sources:
- Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile Not altogether recommended:
- David Berlinski, On Systems Analysis [There are some good, and wonderfully caustic, criticisms; also some not so good but equally caustic ones] Dis-recommended:
- Paul Ryan, The Cybernetics of the Sacred [A supremely bad pecee of drivel about videotape and knots and "cybernetic guerilla warfare" making no sense whatsoever. Anchor Doubleday, 1975] To read, primary sources:
- Stafford Beer
- Brain of the Firm
- Cybernetics and Management
- Designing Freedom
- C. West Churchman and R. L. Ackoff, "Purposive Behavior and Cybernetics", Social Forces 29 (1951): 32--39 [JSTOR]
- Nicolas Rashevsky, Mathematical Biophysics
- Transactions of the Conference on Cybernetics To read, secondary:
- Tara Abraham, Rebel Genius: Warren S. McCulloch's Transdisciplinary Life in Science [Favorable review in Nature by CMU's own Manuel Blum (whom I didn't realize was a former McCulloch student)]
- Bently B. Allen, Scientific Cosmology and International Orders [one of the combinations of cosmologies and orders being "cybernetic-systems thinking and economics in the World Bank and American liberal order, 1945--2015"]
- Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Feedback: Ecological Thinking in Seventies America
- Bennett, History of Control Engineering
- Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics
- Daniel Davies, The Unaccountability Machine
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind
- Eveliegh, Introduction to Control Systems Design
- Stefano Franchi and Guven Guzeldere (eds.), Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs
- Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision", Critical Inquiry 21(1994): 228--266 [JSTOR]
- Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory [May have to get the library to shell out for this]
- Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
- Max Hancock, "Spontaneity and Control: Friedrich Hayek, Stafford Beer, and the Principles of Self-Organization",Modern Intellectual History forthcoming (2024+)
- Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
- Heims, The Cybernetics Group [So PC it puts me off, so I haven't finished it, but I ought to.]
- Phil Husbands, Owen Holland, and Michael Wheeler (eds.), The Mechanical Mind in History
- John Jonston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI
- Lily Kay
- "Cybernetics, Information, Life", Configurations (1997) 5:23
- Who Wrote the Book of Life?
- Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization [Has lots on the history of cybernetics; but from just skimming it appears that Kelly's math is very limited, which puts him in a damn poor position to pontificate about these matters. Certainly he cites with respect some books (e.g. Evolution as Entropy) which no one with enough math not to be intimidated by phrases like "evolution has a topological structure, and consequently an entropy" would bother with. I really ought to finish it, though, and shoot it after a fair trial. Mr. Kelly is the executive editor of Wired, which gave this book an ecstatic review, and a blurb for the cover of the paperback. There's no promotion like self-promotion. Cf. a review by one of my former bosses, Melanie Mitchell]
- Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment [Review by David Auerbach]
- Stanislaw Lem, Dialogues
- Otto Mayr, Origins of Feedback Control
- David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics
- Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future
- Guglielmo Tamburrini and Edoardo Datteri, "Machine Experiments and Theoretical Modelling: from Cybernetic Methodology to Neuro-Robotics",Minds and Machines 15 (2005): 335--358