Cybernetics

Open peer commentary on the article “Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology” by Bernard Scott. Upshot: Scott’s proposal is well-founded and opens interesting possibilities. We selected some critical aspects of his argumentation and discuss them in the context of the constructivist perspective. We highlight as Scott’s “blind spot” his statement - presented without further argument - of the need for a conceptual and theoretical unification of psychology from the perspective of second-order cybernetics. We find this especially worrisome as it is based on (...) only one version of cybernetics. (shrink)

We must, therefore, make a study of mechanism; but some introduction is advisable, for cybernetics treats the subject from a new, and therefore unusual, ...

Upshot: For communicating second-order science, von Foerster’s ethical imperative provides a viable starting point. Proceeding from this, we plead in favour of emphasising the common grounds of diverging scientific opinions and of various approaches in second-order science instead of focussing on the differences. This will provide a basis for communication and stimulate scientific self-reflection.

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.

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science” by Stuart A. Umpleby. Upshot: Connecting Umpleby’s article with Piaget and García’s genetic epistemology, I will argue that the revolution the former discerns is more comprehensive. Additionally, since the latter differ from cybernetic and radical traditions in their philosophical assumptions about society and its conditioning on knowledge, I will suggest that these assumptions must be considered to explain each constructivist program’s achievements and challenges.

No generally accepted, unambiguous definition of the term "cybernetics" yet exists. However, we believe that many disputes about the purpose and spheres of application of cybernetics could be brought to an end if the definition of it as the science of the laws of control of complex dynamic systems were accepted. Such dynamic systems exist in unique forms both in living nature and in human society. These are systems capable of changing their state and comprising a multitude of simpler, interrelated (...) and mutually-influencing elementary systems or elements. The state of a complete dynamic system as a whole, like that of its individual elements, is characterized by the value of one or a number of parameters changing in accordance with various laws. The transition of a complex dynamic system from one state to another is termed a process. The switching of a system from one condition to another by bringing influences to bear upon its parameters is termed control. (shrink)

Systems Theory and Scientific Philosophy constitutes a totally new approach to philosophy, the philosophy of mind and the problems of artificial intelligence, and is based upon the pioneering work in cybernetics of W. Ross Ashby. While science is humanity's attempt to know how the world works and philosophy its attempt to know why, scientific philosophy is the application of scientific techniques to questions of philosophy.

Upshot: Emergence and Embodiment is a highly worthwhile and well-crafted collection of essays on second-order cybernetics that draws together ideas related to self-organization, autopoiesis, organizational closure, self-reference, and neurophenomenology. Chapters include articles by Heinz von Foerster, Francesco Varela, Niklas Luhmann, George Spencer-Brown, and Evan Thompson and external commentaries on them that analyze the relevance of their ideas in the context of social and cultural theory. Despite some projective distortions to cybernetics that arise from the internal imperatives of culture criticism, the (...) book contains many valuable insights and analyses of core ideas of cybernetics that significantly advance our understanding of them. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science” by Stuart A. Umpleby. Upshot: While I agree with most of the thrust of second-order cybernetics, I find the dichotomy of first- vs. second-order cybernetics conceptually and historically problematic because it implicitly conflates the cybernetics of nonhuman systems with realist conceptions of observer-free science. The dichotomy may be divisive and unhealthy for cybernetics by driving natural scientists and engineers out of the movement, thereby undermining the universality (...) of its principles. (shrink)

In the following paper author presents main ideas and difficulties of the philosophy of cybernetics in the east – block countries between 1955 and 1975 year. First, the cybernetics is presented and put in the context of the contemporary ideology. Next, the main areas of investigations on this field are shown, with the emphasis on the mind – body relation as concerns to dialectic materialism. Finally, the role of cybernetics’s philosophy in the development of cybernetics itself is analyzed.

Context: In this empirical and conceptual paper on the historical, philosophical, and epistemological backgrounds of second-order cybernetics, the emergence of a significant pedagogical component to Heinz von Foerster’s work during the last years of the Biological Computer Laboratory is placed against the backdrop of social and intellectual movements on the American landscape. Problem: Previous discussion in this regard has focused largely on the student radicalism of the later 1960s. A wider-angled view of the American intellectual counterculture is needed. However, this (...) historical nexus is complicated and more often dismissed than brought into clear focus. Method: This essay assembles a historical sequence of archival materials for critical analysis, linked to a conceptual argument eliciting from those materials the second-order cybernetic concepts of observation, recursion, and paradox. Results: In this period, von Foerster found the “positive of the negative” in the social and intellectual unrest of that moment and cultivated those insights for the broader constitution of a new cognitive orientation. Implications: As a successful student of his own continuing course on heuristics, von Foerster left the academic mainstream to ally his constructivist epistemology with the systems counterculture. (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 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 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)

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 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 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)

Open peer commentary on the article “Design Research as a Variety of Second-Order Cybernetic Practice” by Ben Sweeting. Upshot: It is suggested that the main arguments of the target article could be constructed in an easier way and would become even more compelling if a radical consideration of the systemic nature of design were taken into account.

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)

Open peer commentary on the article “Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science” by Stuart A. Umpleby. Upshot: Theory without a strong methodology is stranded in philosophy. Principles devolved from theory can be applied to situations in the arena of practice in many ways; however, a continually improving science must refine its theories with feedback from data drawn from the use of continually improving sets of codified methodologies. Second-order cybernetics is contingent upon sense-making within sapient systems. A perspective on (...) cognitive science points toward the requirements for an enabling sense-making methodology for second-order cybernetic science. (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.