Cybernetics

The ideas and methods of cybernetics are increasingly penetrating the biological and medical sciences, and today we are justified in speaking of a new branch of science: biological and medical cybernetics. This branch already has a number of important and encouraging subfields.

This paper aims to show how recent cinematic representations reveal a far more pessimistic and essentialised vision of Human/Cyborg hybridity in comparison with the more enunciative and optimistic ones seen at the end of the twentieth century. Donna Haraway’s still influential 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” saw the combination of the organic and the technological as offering new and exciting ways beyond the normalised culturally constructed categories of gender and identity formation. However, more recently critics see her later writings as (...) embodying a Faustian deal between the individual and hegemony, where technology does not enhance but merely returns the subject to a level of normalisation. As such cybernetics is only configured as a form of prosthetic rehabilitation, to ‘re’-able the ‘dis’-abled, that ultimately re-establishes earlier essentialised subject positions through that same evolutionary process. The Six Million Dollar Man, which ran from 1974 to 1978, exampled a symbiosis between the organic and the technological where the broken human body is not just re-made via mechanical prosthesis but through a process of Cyborg hybridity which actually makes it better, faster, stronger than before. In contrast, contemporary films such as Avatar (Cameron 2009), Transformers II: Revenge of the Fallen (Bay 2009) and Iron Man II (Faveraeu 2010) portray an inherent anxiety toward the cyborg body disavowing of any human/cyborg interaction beyond re-establishing their own discrete and separate subject positions. Although human/cyborg symbiosis constructs the possibility for potentialised bodies beyond those previously imagined, contemporary, popular, film represents them as separated and essentialised. This article looks at what cultural anxieties might produce such an about turn in such representations how this positions human identity in a time of increasing technology and, as a result, asks “whatever happened to The Six Million Dollar Man?”. (shrink)

Upshot: Ranulph Glanville’s musings about cybernetics are statements of wonder as much as careful reconstructions of the core ideas of cybernetics. In Vol. III of his Black Boox all 39 of them are collected, which appeared between 1994 and 2009 in the Journal, Cybernetics and Human Knowing. If Heinz von Foerster said that the ideas of second-order cybernetics are nowadays to be found just about?everywhere in everyday life, Glanville is not that sure about this.

The year 1943 is customarily considered as the birth of cybernetics. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was officially born thirteen years later, in 1956. This chapter is about two theories on human cognitive processes developed in the context of cybernetics and early AI. The first theory is that of the cyberneticist Donald MacKay, in the framework of an original version of self-organizing systems; the second is that of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (initially with the decisive support of Clifford Shaw) and is (...) known as information-processing psychology (IPP). The latter represents the human-oriented tendency of early AI, in which the three authors were pioneers. I shall not discuss this topic with the intention, common in this type of reconstruction, of seeking contrasts between opposing paradigms (classical AI vs. cybernetics, symbolic vs. subsymbolic, symbolic vs. situated, and so forth). Randall Beer, referring to one of these battles, the ‘‘battle between computational and dynamical ideologies,’’ decried the fact that the subjects usually examined are not ‘‘experimentally testable predictions, but rather competing intuitions about the sort of theoretical framework that will ultimately be successful in explaining cognition.’’ He concluded, ‘‘the careful study of concrete examples is more likely to clarify the key issues than abstract debate over formal definitions’’. I believe this is a conclusion that should be endorsed. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

The expression ‘‘artificial intelligence’’ (AI) was introduced by John McCarthy, and the official birth of AI is unanimously considered to be the 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Thus, AI turned fifty in 2006. How did AI begin? Several differently motivated analyses have been proposed as to its origins. In this paper a brief look at those that might be considered steps towards Dartmouth is attempted, with the aim of showing how a number of research topics and controversies that marked the short history (...) of AI were touched on, or fairly well stated, during the year immediately preceding Dartmouth. The framework within which those steps were taken was the development of digital computers. Earlier computer applications in areas such as complex decision making and management, at that time dealt with by operations research techniques, were important in this story. The time was ripe for AI’s intriguingly tumultuous development, marked as it has been by hopes and defeats, successes and difficulties. (shrink)

The rise and some more recent developments of the machine-simulation methodology of living-organism behavior are discussed in this paper. In putting forward these issue, my aim is that of isolating recurring themes which help understanding the development of such a machine-simulation methodology, from its, so to speak, discovery during the first half of the twentieth century up to the present time. The machine designed by the engineer S. Bent Russell in 1913 seems to share the core of at least some (...) points of such a methodology. This machine was designed with the aim of embodying certain hypotheses on the plasticity of nervous connections, pointed out at the time by psychologists in order to explain the physical bases of learning. I would like to suggest that this machine might be viewed as a case-study of the discovery of the above mentioned simulative methodology, further on developed by cyberneticians beginning from the 1940s. Certain present-day steps toward such a methodology are briefly touched upon in the concluding section of the paper. (shrink)

Since the second half of the XXth century, researchers in cybernetics and AI, neural nets and connectionism, Artificial Life and new robotics have endeavoured to build different machines that could simulate functions of living organisms, such as adaptation and development, problem solving and learning. In this book these research programs are discussed, particularly as regard the epistemological issues of the behaviour modelling. One of the main novelty of this book consists of the fact that certain projects involving the building of (...) simulative machine models before the advent of cybernetics are been investigated for the first time, on the basis of little known, and sometimes completely forgotten or unpublished, texts and figures. These pre-cybernetics projects can be considered as steps toward the “discovery” of a modelling methodology that has been fully developed by those more recent research programs, and that shares some of their central goals and key methodological proposals. -/- More info in Springer link: http://www.springer.com/new+%26+forthcoming+titles+%28default%29/book/978-1-4020-0606-7 -/- This book is the English translation of La scoperta dell'artificiale, Dunod/Masson, Milan, 1998. (shrink)

The book provides a valuable text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the historical and theoretical issues of Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, Neuroscience, and the Philosophy of Mind. The book should also be of interest for researchers in these fields, who will find in it analyses of certain crucial issues in both the earlier and more recent history of their disciplines, as well as interesting overall insights into the current debate on the nature of mind.

In this chapter the early history of Computer Science, Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence is sketched. More recent developments of AI and the philosophy of Cognitive Science are also discussed.

In this paper I start from a definition of “culture of the artificial” which might be stated by referring to the background of philosophical, methodological, pragmatical assumptions which characterizes the development of the information processing analysis of mental processes and of some trends in contemporary cognitive science: in a word, the development of AI as a candidate science of mind. The aim of this paper is to show how (with which plausibility and limitations) the discovery of the mentioned background might (...) be dated back to a period preceding the cybernetic era, the decade 1930–1940 at least. Therefore a somewhat detailed analysis of Hull's “robot approach” is given, as well as of some of its independent and future developments. -/- Reprinted in R.L. Chrisley (ed.), Artificial Intelligence: Critical Concepts in Cognitive Science, vol. 1, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, pp. 301-326. (shrink)

In this paper several reformulations of William Ross Ashby and Norbert Wiener’s classical claims on purposive behavior are examined. Next restatements of this issue are then discussed, particularly as regards the following question: is it possible to extend the concepts and methods of mechanical (physical) explanation to psychological explanation, in order to explain human (and animal) purposive behavior? This question was restated in the 1950s as follows: are negative feedback and homeostatic mechanisms really explanatory of adaptive and purposive behavior, or (...) are they tautological re-formulations of older notions? Another notion of adaptive and purposive behavior is also examined in this paper, which was developed in that very period by Herbert A. Simon. (shrink)

In this paper some applications and methodological developments of mechanical models in psychology in the 1950s are examined. During that period, a new conception of the theory-model relationship in psychology become evident, which had been proposed earlier by the mechanistic trend in psychology in the 1930s. Such a conception allowed psychologists a new approach to many problems in theoretical psychology, such as the role of hypotheses and neurophysiology in psychological explanation and the positions of psychologists concerning neobehavioristic theories of behaviour (...) and the operational method. The ideas of psychologists who accepted mechanical model (and had also been influenced by the advancement of cybernetics) were not homogeneous in that period. Two trend are examined in this paper: the first (in turn not a homogeneous one), which prevailed during the previous decade and was more influenced by cybernetics, was developed during the first half of the 1950s (Deutsch’ machine with insight, Wyckoff model for learning, Broadbent’s model for attention); the second, which originated around the middle of the 1950’s and was dominant in in the next decades, is Newell and Simon’s Information Processing Psychology. Several methodological principles that characterize those two trends are discussed in this paper, along with their similarities and above all their differences. (shrink)

The early examples of self-directing robots attracted the interest of both scientific and military communities. Biologists regarded these devices as material models of animal tropisms. Engineers envisaged the possibility of turning self-directing robots into new “intelligent” torpedoes during World War I. Starting from World War II, more extensive interactions developed between theoretical inquiry and applied military research on the subject of adaptive and intelligent machinery. Pioneers of Cybernetics were involved in the development of goal-seeking warfare devices. But collaboration occasionally turned (...) into open dissent. Founder of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener, in the aftermath of World War II, argued against military applications of learning machines, by drawing on epistemological appraisals of machine learning techniques. This connection between philosophy of science and techno-ethics is both strengthened and extended here. It is strengthened by an epistemological analysis of contemporary machine learning from examples; it is extended by a reflection on ceteris paribus conditions for models of adaptive behaviours. (shrink)

Summary: Because this book has something of the storytelling of cheerful meetings, von Foerster is made more accessible to the novice; however, it does not lose any of its intellectual sharpness. Henri Atlan and Edgar Morin, in particular, greatly influenced by von Foerster and quite famous in French-speaking countries, give a helping hand to those who wish to explore their work further from the perspective of von Foerster's vision and thoughts. And Atlan and Morin take also the credit for the (...) fact that von Foerster has become better known in the French-speaking community. Let us a hope the book will contribute to the further spread of von Foerster's ideas. (shrink)

Summary: The aim of this collection is to provide a two-fold access to von Foerster's legacy and his work at the Biological Computer Laboratory, the institution he founded and directed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1958 to 1976. It represents a precious contribution for the understanding of BCL, a crucial but still not properly understood chapter in the history of cybernetics and, more generally, of cognitive science. It is greatly recommended.

Context: The enactive paradigm in the cognitive sciences is establishing itself as a strong and comprehensive alternative to the computationalist mainstream. However, its own particular historical roots have so far been largely ignored in the historical analyses of the cognitive sciences. Problem: In order to properly assess the enactive paradigm’s theoretical foundations in terms of their validity, novelty and potential future directions of development, it is essential for us to know more about the history of ideas that has led to (...) the current state of affairs. Method: The meaning of the disappearance of the field of cybernetics and the rise of second-order cybernetics is analyzed by taking a closer look at the work of representative figures for each of the phases: Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow for the early wave of cybernetics, Ashby for its culmination, and von Foerster for the development of the second-order approach. Results: It is argued that the disintegration of cybernetics eventually resulted in two distinct scientific traditions, one going from symbolic AI to modern cognitive science on the one hand, and the other leading from second-order cybernetics to the current enactive paradigm. Implications: We can now understand that the extent to which the cognitive sciences have neglected their cybernetic parent is precisely the extent to which cybernetics had already carried the tendencies that would later find fuller expression in second-order cybernetics. (shrink)

In his oft-cited book Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio claims that Descartes is responsible for having stifled the development of modern neurobiological science, in particular as regards the objective study of the physical and physiological bases for emotive and socially-conditioned cognition. Most of Damasio’s book would stand without reference to Descartes, so it is intriguing to ask why he launched this attack. What seems to fuel such claims is a desire for a more holistic understanding of the mind, the brain and (...) the self. For Descartes however, here allowed to answer back, the question of accounting for the whole diversity of human potential experiences was what could not be left out of sight. Concerning the question of his neglect of the mind said to be "abysmally" detached from the body, it is claimed here that, in the light of Descartes' move which was to break with the scholastic practice of putting more and more things under the control of the soul, the program of using the reality of embodiment to understand the mind was one he actually started. An answer is also suggested to counter the charge that Descartes failed to account for the interaction of the two substances, the mind and the material body, by showing why and how Descartes actually believed in the substantial union of mind and body. Yet, he kept in the picture an ingenium, a faculty of pure understanding overarching a cybernetic model of the body-mind, of which we also here seek to appreciate the significance. This project of accounting for the mind-body interaction ended-up in a study the "passions," as emotions were then called. (shrink)

While it is possible to understand utopias and dystopias as particular kinds of sociopolitical systems, in this text we argue that utopias and dystopias can also be understood as particular kinds of information systems in which data is received, stored, generated, processed, and transmitted by the minds of human beings that constitute the system’s ‘nodes’ and which are connected according to specific network topologies. We begin by formulating a model of cybernetic information-processing properties that characterize utopias and dystopias. It is (...) then shown that the growing use of neuroprosthetic technologies for human enhancement is expected to radically reshape the ways in which human minds access, manipulate, and share information with one another; for example, such technologies may give rise to posthuman ‘neuropolities’ in which human minds can interact with their environment using new sensorimotor capacities, dwell within shared virtual cyberworlds, and link with one another to form new kinds of social organizations, including hive minds that utilize communal memory and decision-making. Drawing on our model, we argue that the dynamics of such neuropolities will allow (or perhaps even impel) the creation of new kinds of utopias and dystopias that were previously impossible to realize. Finally, we suggest that it is important that humanity begin thoughtfully exploring the ethical, social, and political implications of realizing such technologically enabled societies by studying neuropolities in a place where they have already been ‘pre-engineered’ and provisionally exist: in works of audiovisual science fiction such as films, television series, and role-playing games. (shrink)

Classical mechanics cannot naturally accommodate consciousness, whereas quantum mechanics can, but the Heisenberg/Stapp approach, in which consciousness randomly collapses the neural wave function, leaves the conscious function unrestricted by known physical principles. The Umezawa/Yasue approach, in which consciousness offers superposed possibilities to the match with sensory input, is based in the first physical principles of quantum field theory. Stapp thinks of the brain as a measuring device, like a Geiger counter, and overlooks that the brain upholds second-order quantum fields that (...) are symmetry-conserving with respect to reality. Consciousness is cybernetic rather than having a random function. (shrink)

Die philosophischen Folgerungen der Synergetik, einer interdisziplinären Theorie der Evolution und Selbstorganisation komplexer nichtlinearer Systeme, werden in diesem Artikel zur Diskussion gestellt. Das sind der weltanschauliche Sinn des Begriffs von der „Nichtlinearität“, die konstruktive Rolle des Chaos in der Evolution, eine neue Vorstellung von diskreten Spektren evolutionärer Wege in komplexen Systemen, die Prinzipien des Aufbaus von komplexem evolutionärem Ganzen, der Integration von komplexen Strukturen, die sich mit verschiedenen Geschwindigkeiten entwickeln, die Methoden des nichtlinearen Managements komplexer Systeme. Die Synergetik entdeckt allgemeingültige (...) Gesetzmäßigkeiten der Strukturbildung, der Selbstorganisation und der Evolution komplexer Systeme und gehört deswegen zu der Richtung des Universalismus. Sie nimmt eine Mittlerrolle zwischen Reduktionismus und Holismus ein. -/- . (shrink)

Purpose: To argue for the need to generate a third - order cybernetics to deal with the problematics of second- order cybernetics. Problem: The recent exponential increase in the use of the internet and other "media" to influence and shape dominant cultural experiences via "virtual reality" exploits a core facility of human psychology - that of being able to accept " substitutions " for the " Real Thing." In this paper, I want to raise some basic questions and dilemmas for (...) our living in the space of a third - order contextualisation that uses "virtuality" in an ever-increasing manner for the configuring and homogenisation of human experiences. In doing so, I also raise the question of the need for us to develop an adequate model of a " third - order cybernetics" for dealing with the ways in which human experience is contextualised and configured by phenomena that constitute the third - order system. Solution : Ernst von Glasersfeld's work makes it clear that psychologists and others enter into a great deal of confusion when they use terms like "self," "consciousness," "emotions," "memory," "the environment," and even "experience," because, as he points out, there is no convincing model for any of these commonly taken-for-granted phenomena of human living. His writings are taken as a unique source for the generation of an effective third - order cybernetics where the need for constant self-critical monitoring in regard to psychological praxis and third - order phenomena may take place. "Self-critical monitoring" means, in the first place, monitoring in a critical manner our tendencies to take for granted the notion of "self." One of the main problematics to deal with in second- order cybernetics is the way that "subjectivity" is taken for granted. Benefits: The temptation to collapse back down from a second- order cybernetics to first- order cybernetics will be resolved by creating an effective platform for third - order cybernetics that problematises the issue of "subjectivity" of the observer in the second- order cybernetics framework. This involves putting into question many of the common assumptions held about "who" it is that makes the observations at the second- order cybernetics. In other words, I attempt to highlight what is problematic regarding the observer 's subjectivity and how this analysis of what is taken for granted by the second- order cybernetics framework creates the basis of a framework for a third - order cybernetics. (shrink)

The cybernetic definition of a living individual proposed previously (Korzeniewski, 2001) is very abstract and therefore describes the essence of life in a very formal and general way. In the present article this definition is reformulated in order to determine clearly the relation between life in general and a living individual in particular, and it is further explained and defended. Next, the cybernetic definition of a living individual is confronted with the real world. It is demonstrated that numerous restrictions imposed (...) on the cybernetic definition of life by physical reality imply a number of particular properties of life that characterize present life on Earth, namely: (1) a living individual must be a dissipative structure (and therefore a low-entropy thermodynamic system out of the state of equilibrium); (2) spontaneously-originated life must be based on organic compounds; (3) evolutionarily stable self-dependent, free-living individuals must have some minimal level of complexity of structure and function; (4) a living individual must have a record of identity separated from an executive machinery; (5) the identity of living individuals must mutate and may evolve; (6) living individuals may collect and accumulate information in subsequent generations over very long periods of time; (7) the degree of complexity of a living individual reflects the degree of complexity of its environment (ecological niche) and (8) living individuals are capable of supple adaptation to varying environmental conditions. Thus, the cybernetic definition of a living individual, when confronted with the real physical world, generates most of the general properties of the present life on Earth. (shrink)

Cyborgs are ongoing becomings of a doubly “in-between” temporality of humans and machines. Materially made from components of both sorts of beings, cyborgs gain increasing function through an interweaving in which each alters the other, from the level of “neural plasticity” to software updates to emotional breakthroughs of which both are a part. One sort of temporal in-between is of the progressive unfolding of a deepening becoming as “not-one-not-two” and the other is a “doubling back” of time into itself in (...) which moments that were once disparate are conjoined or enjambed. Tracing the experience of Michael Chorost during a four year period of coming to terms with his cochlear implant, related in Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human , the essay pinpoints shifts in awareness, perceptual belief, and being-with others that unfold within the in-between of person and machine. (shrink)

From the perspective of biological cybernetics, “real world” robots have no fundamental advantage over computer simulations when used as models for biological behavior. They can even weaken biological relevance. From an engineering point of view, however, robots can benefit from solutions found in biological systems. We emphasize the importance of this distinction and give examples for artificial systems based on insect biology.

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in (...) order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body. (shrink)

Many years after the publication of “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Warren McCulloch gave Walter Pitts credit for contributing his knowledge of modular mathematics to their joint project. In 1941 I presented my notions on the flow of information through ranks of neurons to Rashevsky’s seminar in the Committee on Mathematical Biology of the University of Chicago and met Walter Pitts, who then was about seventeen years old. He was working on a mathematical theory of (...) learning and I was much impressed. He was interested in problems of circularity, how to handle regenerative nervous activity in closed loops....For two years Walter and I worked on these problems whose solution depended upon modular mathematics of which I knew nothing, but Walter did.. In this paper, we will fill in some of the details regarding Pitts’s interest in problems of circularity, regenerative activity in closed loops of neurons, and modular mathematics, and the way in which they relate to “A Logical Calculus.”. (shrink)