Home · Book Reports · 2018 · Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

General

This was a wonderful read. It was extremely insightful when it comes to the early development of modern cybernetic theory and how it paralleled the construction of the first modern computing machines.

The word cybernetics is derived from the Greek word for steersman, which is derived from the corrupt Latin for governor. This stands in stark contrast to the way it is thought of by many people today. The cyber- aspect of it leads many to believe it has some connection with computers, as in cyberspace, and technology in general. While it is, in our modern time, quite prevalent to see cybernetic concepts applied in the technological realm, it is of the utmost importance to realize that it is a GENERAL systems theory and can, was, and is applied as correctly to biological, ecological, economic, and any other kind of system.

One of the core concepts in general systems theory, or cybernetics, is feedback, both positive and negative. While positive feedback is rare, leading to runaway systems, negative feedback is used by our thermostats, cruise control, and even our very own nervous systems.

I find it interesting that phrases like “you’re pushing my buttons” are probably derived from the kind of thinking put forth in this book. While this phrase usually means someone is making you angry, it could easily be interpreted that, by pushing the right buttons on the human organ you can make it play whatever tune you desire. The pied piper comes to mind.

Alice in Wonderland is presented no less than three times throughout the book. This is mentioned only because Carroll was a friend of Salisbury who worked with Milner and Rhodes to establish what Quiglley called ‘The Round Table’. This might seem unrelated to cybernetics, but The Round Table and Milner Groups are the epitome of using the press as an input to control the social systems of their day. These ideas are still used presently. Additionally Weiner is a self proclaimed “student of Russell and owe much to his influence.” There is only so much coincidence one can accept give the nature of all of these individuals.

We see that the development of control engineering and communication were inseparable and how this revelation should give us pause when we consider modern communication techniques, like the internet, cell-phones, text messages, etc might be, in fact I would say most certainly are, control mechanisms to reign in the masses. Couple this with ideas that statistical predictions about the short term can be applied to culture, and we can see that the data we so willingly part with, in the name of being social, is being used to construct these statistical models to predict everything about our society - from the clothing we wear, the food we eat, the leaders we elect, and anything else of little or great importance.

A few chapters were heavy on math. Chapter 3 was particularly difficult for me to follow.

Macy

In the early to mid 1940s a series of meetings and conferences were held, initially informally at Princeton and later under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation. These conferences came to be known as the Macy Conferences. The main thrust of these meetings, put forth by Bigelow, Rosenblueth,and Wiener, was to write a joint paper on the problems of central inhibition in the nervous system. Others that were present when this idea was formulated include Rosenblueth and McCulloch.

Dr. McCulloch and Dr. Lorente de No of the Rockefeller Institute represented the physiologists. in a joint meeting 1943-44 at Princeton.

The later meetings were organized by Dr. Frank Fremont-Smith, included at around twenty people, and consisted of two all-day series of informal presentations, discussions, and meals.

McCulloch and Fremont-Smith quickly understood the psychological and sociological implications of the subject and have since called forth a number of leading psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists to contribute towards understanding the importance of information and communication mechanisms of organization that goes beyond the individual and into the community.

One of the first problems the group was to tackle was that of Gestalt, or of the perceptual formation of universals. For example, how are humans able to identify a square, no matter its size, color, or orientation, without difficulty. Kluver, Ericsson, and Lewin were among the psychologists enlisted to solve this problem.

Morgenstern was the main advisor of social economic theory, while Bateson and Mead were brought into the group to explore how the communication system of the individual, for example the nervous system, could be extrapolated to understand the communication in other social systems, such as games or economics. At the time, Weiner did not believe that there was enough long term statistical analysis of society to make much progress. This can no longer be said to be the case.

Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of the work.

Biology Machines

Cybernetics theory has built on the view that engineering and biology can be seen in the same light. Organic machines if you will. There are some diseases that affect the brain’s feedback mechanism that end up producing wild oscillations that can appear as seizures of sorts. Consider how much feedback you get when trying to do something as simple as picking up a pencil. Beyond the visual feedback, you will be able to sense where you arm is in relation to the target pencil. As you get closer you automatically slow down your arm and use the more intricate mechanism of you fingers. When you finally make contact with the pencil you unconsciously receive feedback telling you how hard or soft to grip.

This view of the biological system gives rise to the comparison of the brain being like a computer to that runs continuously, without ever reseting. This is even more acceptable a comparison in an age when simple learning machines were finally produced (checkers playing computers that could defeat their programmer within about 20 hours of ’learning’). Both computers and animals can now learn from their environments and adjust their actions accordingly within their individual lifespans.

The human and animal nervous system is subsequently seen as a computation and control system, with neurons being mimicked in the computer’s mechanical relays. In both cases it is a binary signal.

These perspectives, for better or worse, have opened up a whole new world of tinkering with the nervous system and brain. “The various forms of shock treatment-electric, insulin, metrazol-are less drastic methods of doing a very similar thing [pre frontal lobotomy]. They do not destroy brain tissue or at least are not intended to destroy it,but they do have a decidedly damaging effect on the memory.”

A less invasive, but still jarring conclusion can be seen in the fact that flickering lights and alternating currents can induce rhythms in the body. “If a light is flickered into the eye at intervals with a period near 1/10 second, the alpha rhythm of the brain is modified until it has a strong component of the same period as the flicker.” Additionally, “some direct evidence that a purely electrical flicker may produce an effect similar to that of the visual flicker. This experiment has been carried out in Germany. A room was made with a conducting floor and an insulated conducting metal plate suspended from the ceiling. Subjects were placed in this room,and the floor and the ceiling were connected to a generator producing an alternating electrical potential which may have been at a frequency near 10 cycles per second. The experienced effect on the subjects was very disturbing, in much the same manner as the effect of a similar flicker is disturbing.”

Social, Psychology, Sociology

A comparison between the individual and the community which they are apart of has been put forth. While the individual is essentially permanent with respect to their nervous system and sense organs, the community has a far more mutable topography. Where the nervous system acts to coordinate and communicate inside the body, the relationships between individuals coordinate and communicate within the community. In terms of the commonly used example: “All the nervous tissue of the beehive is the nervous tissue of some single bee. How then does the beehive act in unison, and at that in a very variable, adapted, organized unison? Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members.” These would-be gods do love their beehives as a symbol for a regulated society.

By observing each others reactions to what the are interested in. “[the] social animals may have an active, intelligent,flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”

The common man, herein called the fool, has been studied thoroughly enough to, as of the 1940s, be understood as acting in a completely predictable manner - like a rat in a maze. The manipulators use, not lies but, non-truths to guide the fool this way or that. The tools of the manipulator include religion, pornography, pseudo-science, wheedling, bribery, intimidation, radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, statistics, and more. While these techniques had not yet been mastered, by fast forwarding to the present day we can see that they have progressed stunningly, if not to the level of mastery.

When these concepts are applied to larger swaths, communities, by the “Lords of Things as They Are” (oligarchy), entire societies can be brought to bear. Through wealth the oligarchy obtains a monopoly on the means of communication. These means of communication, the press, both as it concerns books and as it concerns news-papers, the radio, the telephone system, the telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, the church, and all of the more modern outcropping of these, can be seen collectively as the sole channel by which information is transmitted. The control of this channel is how the oligarchy maintains and extends its influence.

Once the proverbial ball gets rolling, momentum exerted by economic forces keeps it in motion. The book that does not sell will not get printed. The radio depends on advertisers and, “as everywhere, the man who pays the piper calls the tune.”

This confluence of forces, the favoring of profitable communiques, the control in the hands of the wealthy class, and lastly that this power in and of itself attracts those ambitious, unscrupulous, individuals who would wield it. Thus, the public channels of communication end up being one of the most manipulative forces in the community, whereas they should, theoretically, be a source of illumination for those within the community.

Conclusion

These studies are governed only by the period they are studied in. Magic of yesteryear has given way to empirical science of today. Where once the Golem was described, now the general system is expounded.

Man studies himself and might conclude that the complex of abilities the brain is capable of might be nullified in part by considering it highly specialized nature. Compare the extremely developed brain to the great nose horns of the titanotheres, whose effectiveness waned to the point of encumbrance and eventual extinction. Could the human brain be following this same boundless path of self destruction?

The weakness of the human, intrinsic or psychological in nature, can be overcome, Weiner believes. “It is thus advantageous, as far as possible, to remove the human element from any elaborate chain of computation and to introduce it only where it is absolutely unavoidable, at the very beginning and the very end.” Essentially offloading the performance to the machine and saving ourselves from overspecializing or irrational conclusions. Still, it seems that the overspecialization would continue, in the creation and understanding of the very machines we hope to create.

Many scientists hope that this field of study might lead to societal contributions that will outweigh the glaring abuses it will [has] wrought when placed in the hands of those that strive for control. Weiner concludes by stating, “I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.”

These scientists, driven by either curiosity or benefactor, laid the foundations of what can, in no uncertain terms, be called mind control.

Misc

Is Dr. John S. Barlow of the Massachusetts General Hospital any connection to John Perry Barlow?

Is Dr. F. C. S. Northrup, who was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work connected to the firm Northrup Grummen? (sp)

Books of interest

• Gabor, D., “Electronic Inventions and Their Impact on Civilization,” Inaugural Lecture, March 3, 1959, Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, England.

• Sarnuel, A. L., “Some Studies in Machine Learning, Using the Game of Checkers,“I BM Journal of Research and Development, 3, 210-229 (1959).

• Stanley-Jones, D., and K. Stanley-Jones, Kybernetics of Natural Systems, A Study in Patterns of Control, Pergamon Press, London. 1960.

• Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, on Quantitative Biology, Volume XXV (Biological Clocks), The Biological Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., N.Y., 1960.

Exceptional Excerpts

“Now that the concept of learning machines is applicable to those machines which we have made ourselves, it is also relevant to those living machines which we call animals, so that we have the possibility of throwing a new light on biological cybernetics."

“The central nervous system no longer appears as a self-contained organ, receiving inputs from the senses and discharging into the muscles. On the contrary, some of its most characteristic activities are explicable only as circular processes,"

“control engineering and of communication engineering were inseparable, and that they centered not around the technique of electrical engineering but around the much more fundamental notion of the whether message, this should be transmitted by electrical, mechanical, or nervous means. … The prediction of the future of a message is done by some sort of operator on its past, whether this operator is realized by a scheme of mathematical computation, or by a mechanical or electrical apparatus."

“We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek XVI3Epvl]T’YJ or steersman."

“First, the ideas of the joint paper by Bigelow, Rosenblueth,and Wiener were disseminated by Dr. Rosenblueth at a meeting held in New York in 1942, under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation, and devoted to problems of central inhibition in the nervous system."

“As to sociology and anthropology, it is manifest that the importance of information and communication as mechanisms of organization proceeds beyond the individual into the community."

“For the similar problems of human organization, we sought help from the anthropologists Drs. Bateson and Margaret Mead; while Dr. Morgenstern of the Institute for Advanced Study was our adviser in the significant field of social organization belonging to economic theory. His very important joint book on games with Dr. von Neumann, by the way, represents a most interesting study of social organization from the point of view of methods closely related to, although distinct from,the subject matter of cybernetics. Dr. Lewin and others represented the newer work on the theory of opinion sampling and the practice of opinion making, and Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work."

“one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and of sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas."

“There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions."

“This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of the Golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of God."

“We have already seen that it is the run rather than the entire existence of the, mechanical structure of the computing machine which corresponds to the life of the individual."

“The degree of integration of the life of the community may very well approach the level shown in the conduct of a single individual, yet the individual will probably have a fixed nervous system, with permanent topographic relations between the elements and permanent connections, while the community consists of individuals with shifting relations in space and time and no permanent, unbreakable physical connections. All the nervous tissue of the beehive is the nervous tissue of some single bee. How then does the beehive act in unison, and at that in a very variable, adapted, organized unison? Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members."

“community extends only so far as there extends an effectual trans-mission of information."

“Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies-or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth-will so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate-any candidate-or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo science will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have_our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings,and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists,and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings."

“It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important."

“One of the lessons of the present book is that any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. In a society too large for the direct contact of its members, these means are the press, both as it concerns books and as it concerns news-papers, the radio, the telephone system, the telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, and the church. Besides their intrinsic importance as means of communication, each of these serves other, secondary functions. The newspaper is a vehicle for advertisement and an instrument for the monetary gain of its proprietor, as are also the movies and the radio. The school and the church are not merely refuges for the scholar and the saint: they are also the home of the Great Educator and the Bishop. The book that does not earn money for its publisher probably does not get printed and certainly does not get reprinted."

“The radio depends on its advertisers for income, and,as everywhere, the man who pays the piper calls the tune."

“Thus on all sides we have a triple constriction of the means of communication: the elimination of the less profitable means in favor of the more profitable; the fact that these means are in the hands of the very limited class of wealthy men, and thus naturally express the opinions of that class; and the further fact that, as one of the chief avenues to political and personal power, they attract above all those ambitious for such power. That system which more than all others should contribute to social homeostasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned in the game of power and money, which we have already seen to be one of the chief anti-homeostatic elements in the community."

“a study of reaction times for visual signals. As is well known, when a visual signal arrives, the muscular activity which it stimulates does not occur at once, but after a certain delay. Professor Lindsley has shown that this delay is not constant, but seems to consist of three parts. One of these parts is of constant length, whereas the other two appear to be uniformly distributed over about 1/10 second. It is as if the central nervous system could pick up incoming impulses only every 1/10 second, and as if the outgoing impulses to the muscles could arrive from the central nervous system only every 1/10 second. This is experimental evidence of a gating; and the association of this gating with 1/10 second, which is the approximate period of the central alpha rhythm of the brain, is very probably not fortuitous."

“If a light is flickered into the eye at intervals with a period near 1/10 second, the alpha rhythm of the brain is modified until it has a strong component of the same period as the flicker. Unquestionably the flicker produces an electrical flicker in the retina,and almost certainly in the central nervous system.There is, however, some direct evidence that a purely electrical flicker may produce an effect similar to that of the visual flicker. This experiment has been carried out in Germany. A room was made with a conducting floor and an insulated conducting metal plate suspended from the ceiling. Subjects were placed in this room,and the floor and the ceiling were connected to a generator producing an alternating electrical potential which may have been at a frequency near 10 cycles per second. The experienced effect on the subjects was very disturbing, in much the same manner as the effect of a similar flicker is disturbing."

“The pulling together of these short-time oscillations into a continuing oscillation has been observed in other bodily rhythms, as for example the approximately 23 1/2-hour diurnal rhythm which is observed in many living beings.[2] This rhythm is capable of being pulled into the 24-hour rhythm of day and night by the changes in the external environment."

Table of Contents

• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 01: Newtonian and Bergsonian Time
• 02: Groups and Statistical Mechanics
• 03: Time Series, Information, and Communication
• 04: Feedback and Oscillation
• 05: Computing Machines and the Nervous System
• 06: Gestalt and Universals
• 07: Cybernetics and Psychopathology
• 08: Information, Language, and Society
• 09: On Learning and Self-Reproducing Machines
• 10: Brain Waves and Self-Organizing Systems

• Pages numbers from pdf.

· Preface to the Second Edition

page 6:

• The role of feed-back both in engineering design and in biology has come to be well established. The role of information and the technique of measuring and transmitting information constitute a whole discipline for the engineer, for the physiologist, for the psychologist, and for the sociologist.

page 12:

• we have developed a theory of non-linear prediction which can at least conceivably be mechanized in a similar manner with the use of long-time observations to give the statistical basis for short-time prediction.

• Watch culture for a long time to make predictions about it short term.

page 13:

• Now that the concept of learning machines is applicable to those machines which we have made ourselves, it is also relevant to those living machines which we call animals, so that we have the possibility of throwing a new light on biological cybernetics.

page 14:

• Similar ideas can be used in many other places in physiology and can make a real contribution to the study of the fundamentals of life phenomena. In this field, what I am giving is more a program than work already achieved, but it is a program for which I have great hopes.

page 15:

• Dr. John S. Barlow of the Massachusetts General Hospital.

• Connection to John Perry Barlow?

Part 1

· Introduction

page 22:

• I had known fora considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it would be determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of computing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr. Yuk Wing Lee on the design of electric networks.

page 24:

• At the start of the war, it was deemed necessary to formulate a new way to target the high speed aircraft.

page 25:

• I had become engaged in the study of a mechanico-electrical system which was designed to usurp a specifically human function-in the first case, the execution of a complicated pattern of computation, and in the second, the forecasting of the future.

page 27:

• Using physiological terms, feedback can be broken by either too little or too much. In the idea of picking up a pencil, you can lack feedback and not be able to pick it up or you can have too much feedback, resulting in ataxia.

• An ataxia of this type is familiar in the form of syphilis of the central nervous system known as tabes dorsalis, where the kinesthetic sense conveyed by the spinal nerves is more or less destroyed.

• Is there any pathological condition in which the patient, in trying to perform some voluntary act like picking up a pencil, overshoots the mark, and goes into an uncontrollable oscillation? Dr. Rosenblueth immediately answered us that there is such a well-known condition, that it is called purpose tremor,and that it is often associated with injury to the cerebellum.

• The central nervous system no longer appears as a self-contained organ, receiving inputs from the senses and discharging into the muscles. On the contrary, some of its most characteristic activities are explicable only as circular processes, emerging from the nervous system into the muscles, and re-entering the nervous system through the sense organs, whether they be proprioceptors or organs of the special senses.

• On the communication engineering plane, it had already become clear to Mr. Bigelow and myself that the problems of control engineering and of communication engineering were inseparable, and that they centered not around the technique of electrical engineering but around the much more fundamental notion of the whether message, this should be transmitted by electrical, mechanical, or nervous means. The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time-precisely what is called a time series by the statisticians. The prediction of the future of a message is done by some sort of operator on its past, whether this operator is realized by a scheme of mathematical computation, or by a mechanical or electrical apparatus.

• We thus have replaced in the design of wave filters processes which were formerly of an empirical and rather haphazard nature by processes with a thorough scientific justification.In doing this, we have made of communication engineering design a statistical science, a branch of statistical mechanics. The notion of statistical mechanics has indeed been encroaching on every branch of science for more than a century.

page 30:

• Thus, as far back as four years ago, the group of scientists about Dr. Rosenblueth and myself had already become aware of the essential unity of the set of problems centering about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in living tissue.

• We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek XVI3Epvl]T’YJ or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868_3 and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of xvf3€pv77J’.

page 31:

• We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms.

• Although the term cybernetics does not date further back than the summer of 1947, we shall find it convenient to use in referring to earlier epochs of the development of the field.

• First, the ideas of the joint paper by Bigelow, Rosenblueth,and Wiener were disseminated by Dr. Rosenblueth at a meeting held in New York in 1942, under the auspices of the Josiah Macy Foundation, and devoted to problems of central inhibition in the nervous system. Among those present at that meeting was Dr. Warren McCulloch of the Medical School of the University of Illinois, who had already been in touch with Dr. Rosenblueth and myself, and who was interested in the study of the organization of the cortex of the brain.

page 32:

• I am myself a former student of Russell and owe much to his influence.

page 33:

• Binary and vacuum tubes were ideal means for building calculating machines and modeled the all or nothing of synapses well.

• The problem of interpreting the nature and varieties of memory in the animal has its parallel in the problem of constructing artificial memories for the machine.

page 34:

• Dr. McCulloch and Dr. Lorente de No of the Rockefeller Institute represented the physiologists. [in a joint meeting 1943-44 at Princeton]

page 37:

• These meetings have been conducted in the traditional Macy way, worked out most efficiently by Dr. Frank Fremont-Smith, who organized them on behalf of the Foundation. The idea has been to get together a group of modest size, not exceeding some twenty in number, of workers in various related fields, a,nd to hold them together for two successive days in all-day series of informal papers,discussions, and meals together, until they had had the opportunity to thresh out their differences and to make progress in thinking along the same lines.

• The nucleus of our meetings has been the group that had assembled in Princeton in 1944, but Drs. McCulloch and Fremont-Smith have rightly seen the psychological and sociological implications of the subject, and have co-opted into the group a number of leading psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

• From the beginning, we have anticipated that the problem of the perception of Gestalt, or of the perceptual formation of universals, would prove to be of this nature. What is the mechanism by which we recognize a square as a square, irrespective of its position,its size, and its orientation? To assist us in such matters and to inform them of whatever use might be made of our concepts for their assistance, we had among us such psychologists as Professor Kluver of the University of Chicago, the late Dr. Kurt Lewin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. M. Ericsson of New York.

• As to sociology and anthropology, it is manifest that the importance of information and communication as mechanisms of organization proceeds beyond the individual into the community.

• For the similar problems of human organization, we sought help from the anthropologists Drs. Bateson and Margaret Mead; while Dr. Morgenstern of the Institute for Advanced Study was our adviser in the significant field of social organization belonging to economic theory. His very important joint book on games with Dr. von Neumann, by the way, represents a most interesting study of social organization from the point of view of methods closely related to, although distinct from,the subject matter of cybernetics. Dr. Lewin and others represented the newer work on the theory of opinion sampling and the practice of opinion making, and Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work.

page 38:

• In the summer of 1946, I returned to Mexico with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation and the hospitality of the Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia to continue the collaboration between Dr.Rosenblueth and myself. This time we decided to take a nervous problem directly from the topic of feedback and to see what we could do with it experimentally. We chose the cat as our experimental animal, and the quadriceps extensor femoris as the muscle to study.

page 40:

• The Rockefeller Foundation had already given Dr. Rosenblueth a grant for the equipment of a new laboratory building at the Instituto Nacional de Cardiologia.

page 41:

• problem of the perception of form, of Gestalt, which allows us to recognize a square as a square

page 42:

• chiefly as a guest of my old friend Professor J. B. S. Haldane.

page 43:

• one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and of sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics. [but Weiner does not agree because of lack of long term statistical analysis of society]

page 46:

• There is no rate of pay at which a United States pick-and-shovel laborer can live which is low enough to compete with the work of a steam shovel as an excavator. The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions.

page 47:

• taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy. The answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying or selling. To arrive at this society, we need a good deal of planning and a good deal of struggle,

page 48:

• those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by this new field of work may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution we are making to the concentration of power (which is always concentrated, by its very conditions of existence, in the hands of the most unscrupulous). I write in 1947, and I am compelled to say that it is a very slight hope.

· 01: Newtonian and Bergsonian Time

page 56:

• We have already spoken of the tidal evolution of Sir George Darwin, Charles Darwin’s son.

• The third of the dynasty of Darwins, Sir Charles, is one of the authorities on modern quantum mechanics.

• Newton and Planck-Bohr [atomic] formed, respectively, the thesis and antithesis of a Hegelian antinomy. The synthesis is the statistical theory discovered by Heisenberg in 1925,

page 57:

• The realization that the Newtonian physics was not the proper frame for biology was perhaps the central point in the old controversy between vitalism and mechanism; although this was complicated by the desire to conserve in some form or other at least the shadows of the soul and of God against the inroads of materialism.

page 58:

• This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of the Golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of God.

page 61:

• the newer study of automata, whether in the metal or in the flesh, is a branch of communication engineering, and its cardinal notions are those of message, amount of disturbance or"noise “-a term taken over from the telephone engineer-quantity of information, coding technique, and so on.

· 02: Groups and Statistical Mechanics

page 69:

• For the existence of any science, it is necessary that there exist phenomena which do not stand isolated. In a world ruled by a succession of miracles performed by an irrational God subject to sudden whims, we should be forced to await each new catastrophe in a state of perplexed passiveness. We have a picture of such a world in the croquet game in Alice in Wonderland; where the mallets are flamingos; the balls, hedgehogs, which quietly unroll and go about their own business; the hoops, playing-card soldiers, likewise subject to locomotor initiative of their own; and the rules are the decrees of the testy, unpredictable Queen of Hearts.

• Interesting to reference Alice in Wonderland, known work of a pedophile and friend of Lord Salisbury of the Milner Group.

page 70:

• There exist certain sets of transformations where every trans-formation belonging to the set has an inverse, likewise belonging to the set; and where the resultant of any two transformations belonging to the set itself belongs to the set. These sets are known as transformation groups. The set of all translations along a line, or in a plane, or in a three-dimensional space, is a transformation group; and even more, it is a transformation group of the special sort known as Abelian, where any two transformations of the group are permutable. The set of rotations about a point, and of all motions of a rigid body in space, are non-Abelian groups.

page 75:

• In other words, the whole theory of measure-preserving transformations can be reduced to the theory of ergodic transformations.

• The whole of ergodic theory, let us remark in passing, may be applied to groups of transformations more general than those isomorphic with the translation group on the line. In particular, it may be applied to the translation group in n dimensions. The case of three dimensions is physically important. The spatial analogue of temporal equilibrium is spatia] homogeneity, and such theories as that of the homogeneous gas, liquid, or solid depend on the application of three-dimensional ergodic theory.

page 77:

• indeed, it may well be that enzymes are metastable Maxwell demons, decreasing entropy, perhaps not by the separation between fast and slow particles but by some other equivalent process.

• Certainly the enzyme and the living organism are alike metastable:the stable state of an enzyme is to be deconditioned, and the stable state of a living organism is to be dead.

· 03: Time Series, Information, and Communication

· 04: Feedback and Oscillation

page 114:

• Several real world examples of biological and mechanistic feedback.

page 121:

page 127:

• The effect of a heavy negative feedback, if it is at all stable, will be to increase the stability of the system for low frequencies, but generally at the expense of its stability for some high frequencies.There are many cases in which even this degree of stabilization is advantageous.

page 131:

page 132:

• Feedbacks of this general type are certainly found in human and animal reflexes. When we go duck shooting, the error which we try to minimize is not that between the position of the gun and the actual position of the target but that between the position of the gun and the anticipated position of the target. Any system of anti-aircraft fire control must meet the same problem.

page 133:

· 05: Computing Machines and the Nervous System

page 137:

• In any combined use of means of computation, as in any combination of chemical reactions, it is the slowest which gives the order of magnitude of the time constants of the entire system. It is thus advantageous, as far as possible, to remove the human element from any elaborate chain of computation and to introduce it only where it is absolutely unavoidable, at the very beginning and the very end.

page 139:

• It is a noteworthy fact that the human and animal nervous systems, which are known to be capable of the work of a computation system, contain elements which are ideally suited to act as relays. These elements are the so-called neurons or nerve cells. While they show rather complicated properties under the influence of electrical currents, in their ordinary physiological action they conform very nearly to the” all-or-none” principle; that is, they are either at rest,or when they “fire” they go through a series of changes almost independent of the nature and intensity of the stimulus. There is first an active phase, transmitted from one end to the other of the neuron with a definite velocity, to which there succeeds a refractory period during which the neuron is either incapable of being stimulated, or at any rate is not capable of being stimulated by any normal,physiological process. At the end of this effective refractory period,the nerve remains inactive, but may be stimulated again into activity.

• Thus the nerve may be taken to be a relay with essentially two states of activity: firing and repose.

page 140:

• A very important function of the nervous system, and, as we have said, a function equally in demand for computing machines, is that of memory, the ability to preserve the results of past operations for use in the future.

• Let it be remarked parenthetically that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal,limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs;while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.

page 144:

• The science of today is operational; that is, it considers every statement as essentially concerned with possible experiments or observable processes. According to this, the study of logic must reduce to the study of the logical machine, whether nervous or mechanical, with all its non-removable limitations and imperfections.

• It may be said by some readers that this reduces logic to psychology, and that the two sciences are observably and demonstrably different. This is true in the sense that many psychological states and sequences of thought do not conform to the canons of logic.Psychology contains much that is foreign to logic, but-and this is the important fact-any logic which means anything to us can contain nothing which the human mind-and hence the human nervous system-is unable to encompass. All logic is limited by the limitations of the human mind when it is engaged in that activity known as logical thinking.

page 146:

• Pavlov worked much more with animals than with men, and he reported visible actions rather than introspective states of mind. He found in dogs that the presence of food causes the increased secretion of saliva and of gastric juice. If then a certain visual object is shown to dogs in the presence of food and only in the presence of food, the sight of this object in the absence of food will acquire the property of being by itself able to stimulate the flow of saliva or of gastric juice. The union by continguity which Locke had observed introspectively in the case of ideas now becomes a similar union of patterns of behavior.

page 147:

• Another reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (the Bread-and-Butter Fly)

page 149:

• We have already seen that it is the run rather than the entire existence of the, mechanical structure of the computing machine which corresponds to the life of the individual. We have also seen that in the nervous computing machine it is highly probable that information is stored largely as changes in the permeability of the synapses,and it is perfectly possible to construct artificial machines where information is stored in that way. It is perfectly possible, for example, to cause any message going into storage to change in a permanent or semi-permanent way the grid bias of one or of a number of vacuum tubes, and thus to alter the numerical value of the summation of impulses which will make the tube or tubes fire.

· 06: Gestalt and Universals

page 154:

• we tend to bring any object that attracts our attention into a standard position and orientation, so that the visual image which we form of it varies within as small a range as possible.

page 155:

• We have thus designated several actual or possible stages of the diagrammatization of our visual impressions. We center our images around the focus of attention and reduce them more or less to outlines. We have now to compare them with one another, or at any rate with a standard impression stored in memory, such as” circle” or “square.”

· 07: Cybernetics and Psychopathology

page 163:

• Nevertheless, the realization that the brain and the computing machine have much in common may suggest new and valid approaches to psychopathology and even to psychiatrics.

page 165:

• The Hunting of the Snark: “What I tell you three times is true.” [Another Lewis Carroll reference. In reference to computers using 3 elements and only accepting the result if 2 or more agree.]

page 167:

• The various forms of shock treatment-electric, insulin, metrazol-are less drastic methods of doing a very similar thing [pre frontal lobotomy]. They do not destroy brain tissue or at least are not intended to destroy it,but they do have a decidedly damaging effect on the memory.

page 173:

• In man, the gain achieved by the increase in size and complication of the brain is partly nullified by the fact that less of the organ can be used effectively at one time. It is interesting to reflect that we may be facing one of those limitations of nature in which highly specialized organs reach a level of declining efficiency and ultimately lead to the extinction of the species. The human brain may be as far along on its road to this destructive specialization as the great nose horns of the last of the titanotheres.

· 08: Information, Language, and Society

page 175:

• The degree of integration of the life of the community may very well approach the level shown in the conduct of a single individual, yet the individual will probably have a fixed nervous system, with permanent topographic relations between the elements and permanent connections, while the community consists of individuals with shifting relations in space and time and no permanent, unbreakable physical connections. All the nervous tissue of the beehive is the nervous tissue of some single bee. How then does the beehive act in unison, and at that in a very variable, adapted, organized unison? Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of its members.

• Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent,flexible means of communication long before the development of language.

• By observing each others reactions to what the are interested in.

page 177:

• community extends only so far as there extends an effectual trans-mission of information.

• There is thus no relation in either direction between the amount of racial necessary or tribal or community information and the amount of information available to the individual.

page 178:

• There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible,will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-minded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward. It is thus the market game as played between perfectly intelligent, perfectly ruthless operators. Even in the case of two players, the theory is complicated, although it often leads to the choice of a definite line of play. In many cases, however, where there are three players, and in the overwhelming majority of cases,when the number of players is large, the result is one of extreme indeterminacy and instability. The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to form coalitions; but these coalitions do not generally establish themselves in any single, determinate way, and usually terminate in a welter of betrayal, turncoatism, and deception,which is only too true a picture of the higher business life, or the closely related lives of politics, diplomacy, and war. In the long run, even the most brilliant and unprincipled huckster must expect ruin; but let the hucksters become tired of this and agree to live in peace with one another, and the great rewards are reserved for the one who watches for an opportune time to break his agreement and betray his companions. There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses,which are so real a feature of modern times.

• If one such alliance proves successful though, they can dominate all future competition. This advantage will outweigh any short term advantage to be gained by betrayal of the alliance. Things like barriers to entry and regulator capture afford such advantage that does form a homeostasis.

• Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies-or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth-will so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate-any candidate-or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo science will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have_our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings,and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists,and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.

• Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way.

• Fast forward 70 years and…

page 179:

• It is only in the large community, where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonymity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.

page 180:

• One of the lessons of the present book is that any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. In a society too large for the direct contact of its members, these means are the press, both as it concerns books and as it concerns news-papers, the radio, the telephone system, the telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, and the church. Besides their intrinsic importance as means of communication, each of these serves other, secondary functions. The newspaper is a vehicle for advertisement and an instrument for the monetary gain of its proprietor, as are also the movies and the radio. The school and the church are not merely refuges for the scholar and the saint: they are also the home of the Great Educator and the Bishop. The book that does not earn money for its publisher probably does not get printed and certainly does not get reprinted.

• The radio depends on its advertisers for income, and,as everywhere, the man who pays the piper calls the tune.

• Thus on all sides we have a triple constriction of the means of communication: the elimination of the less profitable means in favor of the more profitable; the fact that these means are in the hands of the very limited class of wealthy men, and thus naturally express the opinions of that class; and the further fact that, as one of the chief avenues to political and personal power, they attract above all those ambitious for such power. That system which more than all others should contribute to social homeostasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned in the game of power and money, which we have already seen to be one of the chief anti-homeostatic elements in the community.

• Again I’ll say that is not anti-homeostatic if a group comes to dominate. They should logically stick together until there is nothing else to exploit but one another. Even in our current system (2018) there are still plenty of opportunities for the oligarchy to exploit the lower classes, even if most of the lower classes can’t see these opportunities. The internet, for example, is touted as giving the common man a platform and a voice, but it is really another intricate system of control in the hands of the oligarchy.

page 181:

• There is another group of those who see nothing good in the anarchy of modern society, and in whom an optimistic feeling that there must be some out has led to an over valuation of the way possible homeostatic elements in the community. much as we may sympathize with these individuals and appreciate the emotional dilemma in which they find themselves, we cannot attribute too much value to this type of wishful thinking. It is the mode of thought of the mice when faced with the problem of belling the cat. Undoubtedly it would be very pleasant for us mice if the predatory cats of this world were to be belled, but-who is going to do it? Who is to assure us that ruthless power will not find its way back into the hands of those most avid for it? I mention this matter because of the considerable, and I think false, hopes which some of my friends have built for the social efficacy of whatever new ways of thinking this book may contain. They are certain that our control over our material environment has far outgrown our control over our social environment and our understanding thereof. Therefore, they consider that the main task of the immediate future is to extend to the fields of anthropology, of sociology, of economics, the methods of the natural sciences, in the hope of achieving a like measure of success in the social fields.From believing this necessary, they come to believe it possible. In this, I maintain, they show an excessive optimism, and a mis-understanding of the nature of all scientific achievement.

Part 2: Supplementary Chapters (1961)

· 09: On Learning and Self-Reproducing Machines

page 188:

• An animal that learns is one which is capable of being transformed by its past environment into a different being and is therefore adjustable to its environment within its individual lifetime.

page 189:

• It has been pointed out by Julian Huxley in his fundamental paper on the mind of birds (1) that birds have a small capacity for ontogenetic learning.

• (1) Huxley, J., Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, Harper Bros., New York, 1943.

• There is an established theory of the playing of games-the von Neumann theory.2 It concerns a policy which is best considered by working from the end of the game rather than from the beginning.

• Reverse planning, commonly taught as a military strategy. If you want to get to point Z, what would be the best point Y to approach from? What would be the best point X to approach Y from? Continue back to point A, your current position, and move forward along that path.

page 193:

• Many forms of the activity of struggle, which we do not ordinarily consider as games, have a great deal of light thrown on them by the theory of game-playing machines. One interesting example is the fight between a mongoose and a snake. As Kipling points out in” Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” the mongoose is not immune to the poison of the cobra, although it is to some extent protected by its coat of stiff hairs which makes it difficult for the snake to bite home. As Kipling states, the fight is a dance with death, a struggle of muscular skill and agility. There is no reason to suppose that the individual motions of the are faster or more accurate than those of the cobra. Yet the mongoose almost invariably kills the cobra and comes out of the contest unscathed. How is it able to do this?

• I am here giving an account which appears valid to me, from having seen such a fight, as well as motion pictures of other such fights. I do not guarantee the correctness of my observations as interpretations. The mongoose begins with a feint, which provokes the snake to strike. The mongoose dodges and makes another such feint, so that we have a rhythmical pattern of activity on the part of the two animals. However, this dance is not static but develops progressively. As it goes on, the feints of the mongoose come earlier and earlier in phase with respect to the darts of the cobra, until finally the mongoose attacks when the cobra is extended and not in a position to move rapidly. This time the mongoose’s attack is not a feint but a deadly accurate bite through the cobra’s brain.In other words, the snake’s pattern of action is confined to single darts, each one for itself, while the pattern of the mongoose’s action involves an appreciable, if not very long, segment of the whole past of the fight. To this extent the mongoose acts like a learning machine, and the real deadliness of its attack is dependent on a much more highly organized nervous system.

· 10: Brain Waves and Self-Organizing Systems

page 217:

• It is desirable, however, to have further evidence that this gating actually takes place. Here some work of Professor Donald B. Lindsley of the psychology department of the University of California at Los Angeles is relevant. He has made a study of reaction times for visual signals. As is well known, when a visual signal arrives, the muscular activity which it stimulates does not occur at once, but after a certain delay. Professor Lindsley has shown that this delay is not constant, but seems to consist of three parts. One of these parts is of constant length, whereas the other two appear to be uniformly distributed over about 1/10 second. It is as if the central nervous system could pick up incoming impulses only every 1/10 second, and as if the outgoing impulses to the muscles could arrive from the central nervous system only every 1/10 second. This is experimental evidence of a gating; and the association of this gating with 1/10 second, which is the approximate period of the central alpha rhythm of the brain, is very probably not fortuitous.

• Now the question arises concerning the mechanism producing this rhythm.Here we must bring up the fact that the alpha rhythm can be driven by flicker. If a light is flickered into the eye at intervals with a period near 1/10 second, the alpha rhythm of the brain is modified until it has a strong component of the same period as the flicker. Unquestionably the flicker produces an electrical flicker in the retina,and almost certainly in the central nervous system.There is, however, some direct evidence that a purely electrical flicker may produce an effect similar to that of the visual flicker. This experiment has been carried out in Germany. A room was made with a conducting floor and an insulated conducting metal plate suspended from the ceiling. Subjects were placed in this room,and the floor and the ceiling were connected to a generator producing an alternating electrical potential which may have been at a frequency near 10 cycles per second. The experienced effect on the subjects was very disturbing, in much the same manner as the effect of a similar flicker is disturbing.

page 219:

• Professor Rosenblith of M.I.T. has in-formed me of the existence of a phenomenon known as the after-discharge.1 When a flash of light is delivered to the eyes, the potentials of the cerebral cortex which can be correlated with the flash do not return immediately to zero, but go through a sequence of positive and negative phases before they die out. The pattern of this potential can be subjected to a harmonic analysis and is found to have a large amount of power in the neighborhood of 10 cycles.

• The pulling together of these short-time oscillations into a continuing oscillation has been observed in other bodily rhythms, as for example the approximately 23 1/2-hour diurnal rhythm which is observed in many living beings.[2] This rhythm is capable of being pulled into the 24-hour rhythm of day and night by the changes in the external environment.

• [2] Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, on Quantitative Biology, Volume XXV (Biological Clocks), The Biological Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, L.I., N.Y.,