Philosophy and Cybernetics: Questions and Issues (original) (raw)
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Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, 2020
The main purpose of this special issue is to show some intersections and/or relationships between the fields of Philosophy and Cybernetics (including Second Order Cybernetics). Philosophy and Cybernetics are, implicitly or explicitly, cybernetically related. The more explicit these relationships are made the more is the probability of emergent properties between them with the respective synergies generated by co-regulative negative feedback (or feed-forward) and potential co-amplificatory positive feedback. This forward also shows, briefly and schematically, the cybernetic relationships between 'reflections' and 'reflexion'. The latter is based on Second Order Cybernetics which, in turn, is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, mainly supported by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle.
Cybernetics and Contemporary Philosophies of Technology
The interdisciplinarity of Cybernetics has been both its strength and its weakness: a strength in that it enabled an originality of thought and a breadth of application not possible within conventional scholarly structures, but a weakness in that it never truly found a home that might institutionalise it, and from which it might reach out to the established disciplines. Its peripatetic constituents and porous, shifting borders makes the direct influence of Cybernetics on contemporary philosophies of technology difficult to establish, though some direct lines of influence can be traced. But any presence of parallels, or overlaps, provides circumstantial evidence of prescient status, if not influence, and such status is indicative of the intellectual significance of Cybernetics, regardless of influence. In this paper we identify key characteristics of Cybernetics that find parallels in contemporary philosophies of technology. These imbrications include: the constructed ontology of beings (and their performances) through information flows; beings as heterogeneous assemblages; the immaterial materiality of being; being and performing as reflexive, recursive and relational; beings seeking homeostasis; and the universality of all of the above.
Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 2008
In the history of cybernetics there have been several attempts by cyberneticians to put themselves into the circularities of their theories and designs, invoking a shift from the cybernetics of mechanisms to a cybernetics of cybernetics. The latter is the title of a book chapter by Margaret Mead (1968) and of Heinz von Foerster's (1974) edited compilation of articles on cybernetics. Foerster introduced the concept of second-order cybernetics which may have overshadowed or sidelined other reflexivities. I am attempting to recover four reflexive turns, describe their origin, implications, and suggest ways in which they continue what Karl Müller (2007) calls an unfinished revolution. These turns are not discussed here in their historical succession but as conceptual expansions of cybernetics.
L. Floridi (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Computing and Information, 2004
The term cybernetics was first used in 1947 by Norbert Wiener with reference to the centrifugal governor that James Watt had fitted to his steam engine, and above all to Clerk Maxwell, who had subjected governors to a general mathematical treatment in 1868. Wiener used the word “governor” in the sense of the Latin corruption of the Greek term kubernetes, or “steersman.” Wiener defined cybernetics as the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine” (Wiener 1948). This definition captures the original ambition of cybernetics to appear as a unified theory of the behavior of living organisms and machines, viewed as systems governed by the same physical laws. The initial phase of cybernetics involved disciplines more or less directly related to the study of such systems, like communication and control engineering, biology, psychology, logic, and neurophysiology. Very soon, a number of attempts were made to place the concept of control at the focus of analysis also in other fields, such as economics, sociology, and anthropology. The original ambition of “classical” cybernetics thus seemed to involve also several human sciences, as it developed in a highly interdisciplinary approach, aimed at seeking common concepts and methods in rather different disciplines. In classical cybernetics, this ambition did not produce the desired results and new approaches had to be attempted in order to achieve them, at least partially. In this chapter, we shall focus our attention in the first place on the specific topics and key concepts of the original program in cybernetics and their significance for some classical philosophic problems (those related to ethics are dealt with in Chapter 5, COMPUTER ETHICS, and Chapter 6, COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION AND HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION). We shall then examine the various limitations of cybernetics. This will enable us to assess different, more recent, research programs that are either ideally related to cybernetics or that claim, more strongly, to represent an actual reappraisal of it on a completely new basis.
Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction
2024
Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject – which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew – and yet we hardly know – and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics. With texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, Katherine Hayles, Yuk Hui, Dylan Levi King, Michał Krzykawski, David Maulen de los Reyes, Andrew Pickering, Dorion Sagan and Mathieu Triclot.
Remarks on the foundations of cybernetics and cognitive science
Kybernetes, 2004
Despite its successes and its impact on a host of other disciplines, Cybernetics failed to live up to its dream as an interdisciplinary field unifying all the phenomena within the vast space of animals and machines. The reason, I submit, was twofold. First, it ignored one of its two fundamental concepts, namely, communication. Second, it adopted an inadequate Class of Systems for Theory Construction (CSTC).
institutions who assisted me during the decade and a half I spent researching and writing this book. I especially want to thank Terry Fine and Christina Dunbar-Hester for their advice, assistance, and support over the years. Terry, a professor emeritus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Cornell University, a friend and colleague whose office was down the hall from mine for many years (in my joint appointment between ECE and the Science and Technology Studies Department in the Arts College), helped me understand the basic principles of information theory, discussed the often testy relationships between that field and cybernetics during his career, and critiqued my account of the field he loves. As a Ph.D. student in science and technology studies, Christina, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, served as a sounding board and friendly critic of the ideas in this book when she was at Cornell, particularly when she took my seminar on cybernetics and helped me teach an undergraduate course on the history of information technology. In combing through the massive Warren McCulloch Papers at the American Philosophical Society as a research assistant, Christina deepened the research for the book at a critical time. Her comments on several chapters were insightful. I would also like to thank other former students for their research assistance: Alec Shuldiner, for finding material on the development of information theory in the extensive AT&T archives; Albert Tu, for copying newspaper and magazine articles on cybernetics and information theory; Lav Varshney, for researching the acceptance of information theory in American electrical engineering journals and for alerting me to obscure published sources on Claude Shannon; and Daniel Kreiss at Stanford University, for gathering material on NASA's cyborg project at the Ames Research Center. Thanks also to Glen Bugos at NASA, for helping navigate the Ames Research Center archives, and to Rachel Prentice at Cornell and David Hounshell at Carnegiex Acknowledgments Mellon University, for providing copies of archival material from their own research. Rick Johnson at Cornell and Julian Reitman, a former officer of the IEEE Society on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, shared their recollections of that society in the 1960s and 1970s. The late Dick Neisser, a founder of cognitive psychology, painted a vivid picture for me of information studies in the 1950s. In addition to Terry and Christina, I wish to thank Bill Aspray,