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 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"

— http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/2/1/000015/000015.html

• (first-order) cybernetics deals with feedback systems
• John von Neumann extended cybernetics with cellular automata, and then universal constructor concept, which led to the concept of self-replication, adopted by cyberneticians as a core concept:

  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

• notes related to cybernetics:
  • self-cybernetics - application of feedback systems to yourself
  • links - especially machine trails that could remodel the human
  • linguistic determinism in some sense, and how language impacts thinking
  • embodied cognition as the idea that cognition is shaped by the body and happens in feedback from the body (through epistemic actions)
  • metacognition topics, sometimes closer to second-order cybernetics, featuring feedback loops in learning