On Cybernetics

“Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machines. Cybernetics was first defined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) and aimed to find a shared universal language which could be used across disciplines. The name drew on an Ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course. Cybernetics saw the world as systems which used loops of information and feedback to adjust their own course of action. Those ideas could be applied to anything from thermostats to the human brain, and arguably laid foundations for the information age.”

Misha Glenny, “Cybernetics” BBC Radio 4 In Our Time - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vmk4. I was recently re-reading Heidegger’s final 1966 Der Spiegel interview “Only a God Can Save Us,” which was published just after his death in 1976. There are various much debated comments on his time as rector of the University of Freiberg and his ethical and political failures during World War II. At one point Heidegger suggested that “Philosophy [today] dissolves into individual sciences: psychology, logic, political scicnce.” The interviewers then ask, “And what now takes thc place of philosophy?” Heidegger replies, “Cybernetics.” Whatever one thinks of Heidegger’s legacy, his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” is still cited as a seminal work in the philosophy of technology and his notion of zuhandenheit or ready-to-hand as inspiration for extended mind theorists such as Andy Clark. My recent work on situated cognition could be called a form of cybernetics. Key is the notion of feedback loops between human beings and technical extensions. A welcome introduction is provided here by the team at In Our Time.