the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine
— Norbert Wiener
At MIT in particular, there was a tendency to take "the image of the machine as the basis for the understanding of man"
— Harold Hatt
The concept that the same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells, and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising universality of cybernetic study.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics ↗
The idea that Man and his environment are mechanical systems which can be studied, improved, mimicked and controlled (...) gave way to disciplines such as cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
(...)
Bush not only proposed that the machine might learn from the human via what was effectively a cybernetic feedback loop - he proposed that the human might learn from the machine. As the human mind moulds the machine, so too the machine "remolds" the human mind, it "remolds the trails of the user's brain, as one lives and works in close interconnection with a machine"
— The Technical Evolution of Vannevar Bush’s Memex ↗
The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence:
— The Embodied Mind
- The use of mathematical logic to understand the operation of the nervous system
- The invention of information-processing machines (such as digital computers), thereby laying the basis for artificial intelligence
- The establishment of the metadiscipline of systems theory, which has had an imprint in many branches of science, such as engineering (systems analysis, control theory), biology (regulatory physiology, ecology), social sciences (family therapy, structural anthropology, management, urban studies), and economics (game theory)
- Information theory as a statistical theory of signal and communication channels
- The first examples of self-organizing systems
355 words last tended to on 2024-04-22 — let me know what you think