Cybernetics

16 Oct 2002 15:27

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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 --- Wiener, Ashby, Herbert Simon. Origins in mathematical logic, physiology, engineering, statistical mechanics. Predecessors --- Rashevsky, Lotka, Cannon, Sherrington (?). Popular and semi-popular views. Metaphorical uses. Appropriation. Descendants --- artificial intelligence, systems theory, dynamics, complexity, Prigoginism. And the Whole Earth Catalog.

See:
• Michael Arbib, Brains, Machines and Mathematics [has one of the best expositions of Gödel's Theorem I've seen]
• W. Ross Ashby
• David Berlinski, On Systems Analysis [There are some good, and wonderfully caustic, criticisms; also some not so good but equally caustic ones]
• Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind
• In the old days, Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code would've been hailed a masterwork of biological cybernetics; now it's just good neuroscience which uses some tools from information theory. [Review: Cells That Go ping, or, The Value of the Three-Bit Spike]
• Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology", Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18--24 [JSTOR]
• Paul Ryan, The Cybernetics of the Sacred [A supremely bad peice of drivel about videotape and knots and "cybernetic guerilla warfare" making no sense whatsoever. Anchor Doubleday, 1975]
• Claude Shannon and John McCarthy (eds.). Automata Studies
• Norbert Wiener

To read:
• Stafford Beer
  • Brain of the Firm
  • Cybernetics and Management
  • Designing Freedom
• Bennett, History of Control Engineering
• Roberto Cordeschi, The Discovery of the Artificial: Behavior, Mind and Machines Before and Beyond Cybernetics
• Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind
• Eveliegh, Introduction to Control Systems Design
• Peter Galison, "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision", Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 228--266 [JSTOR]
• Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
• Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
• Heims, The Cybernetics Group [So PC it puts me off.]
• John Jonston, The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI [blurb]
• 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]
• Otto Mayr, Origins of Feedback Control
• David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics [Blurb]
• Rashevsky, Mathematical Biophysics
• Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, "Purposeful and Non-Purposeful Behavior", Philosophy of Science 17 (1950): 318--326 [JSTOR]
• Guglielmo Tamburrini and Edoardo Datteri, "Machine Experiments and Theoretical Modelling: from Cybernetic Methodology to Neuro-Robotics", Minds and Machines 15 (2005): 335--358
• Transactions of the Conference on Cybernetics