Cybernetics, κυβερνετης, Gr. steersman.

God and Golem, Inc., Norbert Wiener, MIT Press

A tiny book about the social consequences of cybernetics
— the study of control and communication
(in the animal and the machine).

Alright, who put science in my religion? I mean, seriously.

Well, anyway, because these questions simply have to be answered, because God knows there's always someone in the back row who has to point out how the theory of cybernetics is heretical. And, you know, maybe it is — cybernetics is always in connection with Darwinian evolution, (oh, Dawkins.) And in response Wiener asks the back row, "Are you willing to be damned for the greater glory of God?" [GGI 5] Yes, really.

So yes, threes. Everything always revolves around threes. There happen to be three thematic elements to G&GI:

1. Knowledge — Communication — Learning Machines — Ontogeny

2. Power — Control — Reproducing Machines — Phylogeny

3. Evaluation of Purposes — Ethics — Man/Machine Coordination — Technology

A brief history of physics: pre-Aristotlean "principle-based" physics anthropomorphizes some underlying principle into generating the diversity of the world → Aristotlean "telos-based" physics sublimates the principle by focusing instead on the "final cause," juxtaposing the usual cause-effect relationship → Newtonian mechanics does away with telos and replaces it with a mechanism, but such a mechanism leaves us unable to comprehend a single mole of water¹, let alone a human being. So cybernetics suspends the injunction against purpose in order to reapproach the question of humanity — of having ends and using means.

Pity G&GI didn't come out before transhumanism and the singularity became popular ubiquitous well-publicized. Really, that's what dates G&GI, Cybernetics, and most of Wiener's writings — he's still at the stage concerned with supplanting trigonometric time series with random number generators in order to study non-linear circuits. I'm sure people still do this — virtually all electronics behave non-linearly, more or less — but cybernetics today should be concerned with searching (search engine optimization, for instance), social networking, and interface design.

"Is the computer a submissive tool or is it
something that dictates to us how we must interact with it,
something that is in fact very powerful?" [FAC 2, 17:30]

So even though we're in the future and Wiener's in the past the thing that we've missed by passing over the end of Wiener and into the future of search epistemology is the asymmetrical relationship between the two halves of the human-machine relationship. And even Wiener glosses over it in G&GI in the title; it is God and Golem, Inc., when the asymmetry favours the Golem², not the God.

You see, it's the evolutionary advantage of technology that binds us to it. Even though the human enables the machine to act (since the human presumably has free will, and the machine has none), evolutionary pressure forces us to enable the machine, but a "forced enabling" isn't really an act of one in control.

Internal References

1. "Newton's laws, the basic equations of classical physics, can be solved easily and exactly for the case of two interacting particles. With some effort they can be solved for three particles. As of yet, there exists no general solution for the four-body problem. So what happens when we want to characterize systems with 10²³ particles? The "brute force" method of computer simulation even fails us now."

   — chomps, statistical mechanics

2. The lake has risen up to heaven:
   The image of Break-through.
   Thus the superior man
   Dispenses riches downward
   And refrains from resting on his virtue.

   — Kuai, break-through (resoluteness)

External References

• [FAC] Podcast of UC Berkeley's Foundations of American Cyberculture, Fall 2007