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
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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.
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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
- relying on self-cybernetics to model ones behaviour could make one completely lost without those external inputs
- reference: "Accelerando" and Manfred's glasses
- influenced by cybernetics, Claude Shannon, communication theory, Birkhoff's semiotics
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related to cybernetics
- interested not in "thinking machines" but "machines that make us think" (tools for thinking, bicycle for the mind)
The work of art is more amenable to cybernetic analysis than a work of science, precisely because its criteria of validity are much less exact and above all much less coherent than those of the latter. Non-representational art in particular claims only that a certain quantity of order is present in the product to give it a consumer value, without indicating the distribution of that quantity of order existing in the different levels of this hierarchy of utilized semantemes.
- related to Cybernetics and Self-Cybernetics
- similar to how I leave physical things I need to take with me near my shoes - self-cybernetics
Do self-cybernetic systems weaken your willpower? Or is an emphasis on willpower less compassionate and understanding of the social environments that affect us? As opposed to self-cybernetics, what are self-agency exercises? Travel is perhaps an exercise where you do not design environments but appreciate them.
- there are issues with self-cybernetics approach - I found out that the way I show the time-tracking data to myself, I change how I act, sometimes subconsciously
- could this be automated with some kind of self-cybernetics system?
- related to Self-Cybernetics concepts
