The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society Study Guide

The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener

There is a complex of ideas related to the theory of messages that Weiner has named Cybernetics. Cybernetics is the science of communication and control over our environment. Leibniz is the intellectual ancestor of the idea of this science, primarily for his contribution of the Characteristica Universalis and the Calculus Ratiocinator . The lineage is traced through the history of the development of optics. Einstein's work with the theory of relativity shifted the perspective from one of the way the exists, to one in which the world exists for an observer.

Absolute motion of an object is not observable as a consequence of the structure of matter, but is a postulate of physics. The universe as a whole is no longer the study of physics. Instead, physics is the study of the universe as it is observed. This study is cast in terms of messages by cybernetics. "Messages are ... a form of pattern and organization." (p. 21) The information carried in a sets of messages can be measured as the negative of its entropy. A message that is always the same regardless of its environment contains much more entropy than a message that varies in response to its environment.

One may see the relationship between organization and feedback when one considers machines made to act on the external world. Such machines have mechanisms to receive messages from the outside world. The messages received by the machine are input. The machine produces some effect in the world, some output. The steps between input and output can be based not only on immediate input but also on past stored data, memory in the machine.

Machines may be made to vary their operation based on certain kinds of special input called taping . Machines that act on the world with some degree of sophistication must also measure there own performance as feedback , and vary their output accordingly.

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