Norbert Wiener's Animal/Machine

When approaching such metaphorical connections as computers to minds, another member of the scientific community comes to light. Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, conceived around the same time as von Neumann's Monte Carlo simulation, contributed to the conceivability of humans as machines. Here again, the War and the roots of the Cold War are seen as expressions of the same epistemological movement.

In 1943, von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, along with Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Walter Pitts, and others, met over several months in Boston to establish a new interdisciplinary study concerning the role of information in systems. In these Macy meetings (named for their sponsor), Wiener dubbed the new science cybernetics, whose root carries with it the intention of the science. The Greek, kybernotos, means "pilot" or "steersman," and the Latin equivalent refers to governance. Cybernetics, then, was a science devoted to describing the controller in all systems of information, including the mind that steers human behavior and communication. That behavior could include everything from the regulation of a heart beat to the governance of foreign policy.

In 1948 Wiener published a book for the general public on the feasibility and philosophy of machines that learn. The book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, went through four printings in the United States in its first six months, selling 21,000 copies during its first decade. As Wiener's ideas were embodied in computer models and developed by other theorists, cybernetics gradually achieved a quality of governance (This is especially true when computer simulations, taken as intelligent machines, are used in an advising or even executive role in policy making decisions.) As a result of Wiener's work, the notion of feedback penetrated almost every aspect of technical culture. Though the central concept was both old and commonplace in specialized circumstances, Wiener gave the idea strength by generalizing the effect into a universal principle. Lifelike self-control became a simple engineering job. The general engineering problem became: If all the variables are tightly coupled, and if you can truly manipulate one of them in all its freedom, then you can indirectly control all other variables. This principle plays on the holistic and unified nature of systems.

In a later description of cybernetics, Wiener made it clear that he was von Neumann's collaborator. He, too, was repelled by uncertainty. In The Human Use of Human Beings he wrote:

[In] recognition of a fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe itself these men [Freud, Gibbs, and Heisenberg] are close to one another and close to the tradition of St. Augustine. For this random element, this organic incompleteness, is one without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil; the negative evil which St. Augustine characterizes as incompleteness . . . (1950, p. 11).
In Wiener's explanation, cybernetics was conceived (as with Von Neumann) as an answer to the unholy delivery of uncertainty into science. Wiener continued his metaphysical conception of cybernetics:
The machine, like the living organism, is . . . a device which locally and temporarily seems to resist the general tendency for the increase of entropy. By its ability to make decisions, it can produce around it a local zone of organization in a world whose general tendency is to run down.

The scientist is always working to discover the order and organization, and is thus playing a game against the arch-enemy, disorganization. Is this devil Manichaean or Augustinian? Is it a contrary force opposed to order or is it the very absence of order itself? . . . The Manichaean devil is playing a game of poker against us and will resort readily to bluffing; which as von Neumann explains in his Theory of Games, is intended not merely to enable us to win on a bluff, but to prevent the other side from winning on the basis of a certainty that we will not bluff.

Compared to this Manichaean being of refined malice, the Augustinian devil is stupid. He plays a difficult game, but he may be defeated by our intelligence as thoroughly as by a sprinkle of holy water . . . (pp. 49-50).

Wiener recapitulated the saints of determinism and game metaphors. To exorcise the Augustinian devil, Wiener took the Maxwell-Boltzmann atomic hypothesis and its formula for entropy in a closed heat system and applied it to information. He even adopted the same terms: The assortment of possible states was the devilish entropy in a system; the good information extracted from that noise was negentropy, a measure of the amount of sense made by a communications system. Thus Maxwell's demon, more a Manichaean trickster, could be reduced in Wiener's mind to a manageable Augustinian demon by defining the amount of disorder created as equivalent to the information needed to do the evil work of directing hot atoms into one chamber and cold atoms into another. Such is the phantasm on which the idea of quantifying information is established in pursuit of the hope that the actions of a human observer can also be quantified.

After this spurious foundation is established, everything in cybernetics logically follows. The notion of the binary unit, or bit (elsewhere proposed by both von Neumann and Turing), was enormously refined and given a larger context under the influence of Wiener's definition. The crucial notions of positive and negative feedback — especially as applied to organic and mechanical systems — now could be rationalized by the application of a formula for information. The idea of a controlling servo-mechanism, the design for a mechanical brain, and the assumption that nerves hold information, all make logical sense only following Wiener's leap of faith.

Again, the bomb as it was to be understood during the Cold War enters the epistemological shift. Wiener's work during World War II contributed to one of the most advanced features of the bomb. He assisted in developing a cybernetic servo-mechanism for delivering a warhead from remote, safe bunkers across the ocean. This sterilized version of human destruction was made possible by advances in guidance systems and ballistics that evolved from Wiener's involvement. Wiener's first application of cybernetics and Wiener numbers (set numbers to replace the stochastic) was the development of a feedback mechanism used in the tracking system for anti-aircraft gunnery, and by extension, the guidance and delivery systems for rockets and missiles. These guidance servo-mechanisms were the first primitive cybernetic computers. They were "thinking machines" that responded to their environment; black boxes that became standard in all missiles of the Cold War.

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