Cybernetics:
For two thousand years psychology was a simple description of Man's highest faculties--most of which he does not posses.
William Ross Ashby
http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/biographies/ashby/ashby.html
Norbert Wiener
photocredit: adeptus
"The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is neither, but is praying to his God that someone, preferably himself, will find the reconciliation between the two views. "
Norbert Wiener
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Wiener_Norbert.html
"Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower. A century ago there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, and a Darwin. Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction.
A man may be a topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy."
- Wiener, Norbert; Cybernetics; 1948.
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_wiener.htm
Cybernetics:
"History --- Wiener, Ashby, Herbert Simon. Origins in mathematical logic, physiology, engineering, statistical mechanics. Predecessors --- Rashevsky, Lotka, Cannon, Sherrington."
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/cybernetics.html
"There are many definitions of cybernetics and many individuals who have influenced the definition and direction of cybernetics.
Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek word meaning "steersman." He defined it as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine.
Ampere, before him, wanted cybernetics to be the science of government.
For philosopher Warren McCulloch, cybernetics was an experimental epistemology concerned with the communication within an observer and between the observer and his environment.
Stafford Beer, a management consultant, defined cybernetics as the science of effective organization.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson noted that whereas previous sciences dealt with matter and energy, the new science of cybernetics focuses on form and pattern.
For educational theorist Gordon Pask, cybernetics is the art of manipulating defensible metaphors, showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.
Cybernetics takes as its domain the design or discovery and application of principles of regulation and communication.
Cybernetics treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask "what is this thing?" but "what does it do?" and "what can it do?" Because numerous systems in the living, social and technological world may be understood in this way, cybernetics cuts across many traditional disciplinary boundaries. The concepts which cyberneticians develop thus form a metadisciplinary language by which we may better understand and modify our world."
http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/cyber_definition.html
- Introduction
- What This Is
- Cybernetics and Systems Theory Defined
- Why We Need Cybernetics and Systems Theory Now
- Where Cybernetics and Systems Theory Came From
- Format
- Books
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- Software
- Action
- Feedback Requested
Alan B. Scrivener
http://www.well.com/user/abs/curriculum.html
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