Chapter 1: Cybernetics

Cybernetics is a broad discipline that studies feedback and other forms of cyclical causation. The field was given its name by Norbert Wiener, who used the process of steering a ship as an illustration of circular causal feedback.

Because cybernetics is concerned with circular causal processes in whatever form they take, it has influenced and been interpreted in a wide variety of contexts.

Different attempts at defining cybernetics reflect "the richness of its conceptual base."

The Ancient Greek term ??ße???t???? (kubernetikes, '(good at) steering') appears in Plato's Republic The French word cybernétique was also used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge.

Norbert Wiener claims that he and Arturo Rosenblueth created the research team that came up with the term "cybernetics" in the summer of 1947. Wiener writes in the book:

After a great deal of thought, We have concluded that the current terminology is too heavily biased in one direction to adequately serve the field's continued evolution; and this is a common occurrence among scientists, To bridge the gap, we've created our own neo-Greek expression.

All of control and communication theory will henceforth be referred to as, whether it be mechanical or organic, referred to as Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek ??ße???t?? or steersman.

Moreover, Wiener explains, This name was chosen to honor James Clerk Maxwell's 1868 paper on gubernatorial feedback mechanisms, noting that the term governor is also derived from ??ße???t?? (kubern?tes) via a Latin corruption gubernator.

Finally, Ship steering engines are "one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms," according to Wiener, so it makes sense to use them.

In a feedback loop, one observes the effects of one's actions and uses those results as inputs for subsequent actions that either further the pursuit and maintenance of the desired conditions or disrupt them. When at the helm of a ship, the captain keeps the vessel on a steady course despite the ever-shifting conditions outside by constantly adjusting the wheel in response to the effect it is seen to be having.

Cybernetics' initial emphasis was on the similarities between the feedback regulatory processes of biological and technological systems. In 1943, two seminal articles, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow (based on Rosenblueth's research on living organisms in Mexico), and "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, were published. Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of inter-disciplinary conferences that laid the groundwork for what would become known as cybernetics. McCulloch presided over these conferences, at which luminaries like Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener spoke. The Ratio Club, an informal dining club of young British psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians, and engineers who met from 1949 to 1958, discussed topics with similar focuses. Wiener's book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine popularized the term he coined, cybernetics, to describe the study of teleological mechanisms. but gained popularity after the mid-1950s.

However, cybernetics' transdisciplinary nature began to break down in the 1960s and 1970s as its technical foci diverged into new disciplines. The Dartmouth workshop in 1956 marked the beginning of artificial intelligence (AI) as a separate academic subfield from cybernetics. AI eventually received funding and public attention after an initially tense coexistence. As a result, fields like cybernetics and artificial neural network research were marginalized.

Beginning in the 1960s, a new school of cybernetic thought emerged with an emphasis on social, ecological, and philosophical issues rather than technological ones. Based on previous work on self-organising systems and the participation of anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings, it was still firmly rooted in biology (most notably Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis). Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign played a pivotal role in the development of this line of inquiry within cybernetics from its inception in 1958 until the middle of the 1970s. The central concept of circular causality in cybernetics was expanded to include considerations of reflexivity and recursion in addition to goal-oriented processes. Heinz von Foerster's second-order cybernetics (also known as the "cybernetics of cybernetics"), which centered on issues of observation, cognition, epistemology, and ethics, exemplifies this trend.

Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1968 curated by Jasia Reichardt, is a prime example of how cybernetics began to foster exchanges with the creative arts, design, and architecture in the 1960s and beyond, Multiple fields have shown newfound enthusiasm for cybernetics since the 1990s. The pioneering cybernetic work on artificial neural networks is once again being used as a standard model for AI and machine learning. Feminist technoscience and posthumanism have been involved in discussions about how society is becoming increasingly entangled with emerging technologies. Recent historiographical analyses of cybernetics have focused on the unique characteristics of cybernetics as a scientific discipline, such as the discipline's "performative ontology.".

Autopoiesis

Black box

Feedback, feedforward, recursion, and reflexivity are all forms of circularity.

Conversation Theory

According to the double bind theory, this phenomenon occurs when there is a contradiction between messages on different logical levels, resulting in a situation where the recipient feels emotionally threatened but has no way to withdraw from the situation or express their frustration.

Experimental epistemology

Good regulator theorem

Based on perceptual control theory, the method of levels in psychotherapy encourages patients to raise their level of consciousness in order to resolve conflicts and make room for reorganization.

The theory of perceptual control is a behavioral model predicated on the characteristics of cybernetic negative-feedback control loops. PCT's main insight is that the system's input, "perception," rather than its output (the behavioral actions), is the controlled variable. The term "perceptual control theory" was coined to differentiate it from the work of control theorists who focus on the system's output rather than its input.

Radical Constructivism

Cybernetics applied in a recursive manner to itself and the practice of cybernetics in accordance with such a critique is known as second-order cybernetics. There has been growth in the application of cybernetics to fields like family therapy, the social sciences, the arts, design research, and philosophy.

Requisite Variety

Self-organisation

Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory is influenced by cybernetic concepts like autopoiesis.

Viable System Model

The central concept of cybernetics, circular causality, has broad applicability, which has resulted in numerous connections to and applications from other disciplines.

Many of the earliest uses of cybernetics, like medical cybernetics and robotics, focused on engineering, biology, and the exchanges between the two, as well as topics like neural networks and heterarchy. and the growth of metadesign and systemic design techniques.

Because of cybernetics' wide applicability and propensity to violate disciplinary norms, the field's boundaries have shifted over time and can be hard to define.

Systems science, systems theory, and systems thinking are common frameworks for comprehending cybernetics. Some examples of cybernetically inspired systemic approaches are::

The work of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model is incorporated into critical systems thinking.

Cyberneticians Ranulph Glanville, Klaus Krippendorff, and Paul Pangaro have all been influential on the field of systemic design.

The study of causal feedback loops is called system dynamics.

Many other disciplines either directly or indirectly can trace their roots back to cybernetics research and development. Robotics, computing, information theory, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, control theory, complexity science, and other related fields. Some aspects of contemporary AI are frequently couched in cybernetic terms, especially the concept of the social machine.

Cybernetics-related academic publications include:

Constructivist Foundations

Insights into Cybernetics and Human Cognition

Cybernetics and Systems

Cybernetics in action. The Cybernetics Society's open-access journal, hosted by Ubiquity Press.

Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems: Transactions of the IEEE Transactions on

Human-Machine Systems: IEEE Transactions

Cybernetics: A Transactions of the IEEE

Computational Social Systems: IEEE Transactions

Kybernetes

The following is a list of academic societies whose primary focus is on cybernetics or related fields::

Cybernetics and Systems Society of America

Cybernetics Society

IEEE Society for Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

Metaphorum was founded in 2003 by a group of people dedicated to continuing Stafford Beer's work in the field of...