4 ms·

I copped Cybernetics awhile ago and just kinda skimmed it anything about Leibniz in there?

• nanna 8y ago
  Yeah he appears over and over. Eg if i were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics out of the history of science, i should have to choose leibniz. the philosophy of leibniz centers about two closely related concepts-that of a universal symbolism and that of a calculus of reasoning. from these are descended the mathematical notation and the symbolic logic of the present day. now, just as the calculus of arithmetic lends itself to a mechanization progressing through the abacus and the desk computing machine to the ultra-rapid computing machines of the present day, so the calculus ratiocinator of leibniz contains the germs of the machina ratiocinatrix, the reasoning machine. indeed, leibniz himself, like his predecessor pascal, was interested in the construction of computing machines in the metal . it is therefore not in the least surprising that the same intellectual impulse which has led to the development of mathematical logic has at the same time led to the ideal or actual mechanization of processes of thought. - Cybernetics (1961 ed.) Leibnitz, in the meantime, saw the whole world as a collection of beings called "monads" whose activity consisted in the perception of one another on the basis of a pre-established harmony laid down by God, and it is fairly clear that he thought of this interaction largely in optical terms. Apart from this perception, the monads had no "windows," so that in his view all mechanical interaction really becomes nothing more than a subtle consequence of optical interaction. A preoccupation with optics and with message, which is apparent in this part of Leibnitz's philosophy, runs through its whole texture. It plays a large part in two of his most original ideas: that of the Characteristica Universalis, or universal scientific language, and that of the Calculus Ratiocinator, or calculus of logic. This Calculus Ratiocinator, imperfect as it was, was the direct ancestor of modern mathematical logic. Leibnitz, dominated by ideas of communication, is, in more than one way, the intellectual ancestor of the ideas of this book, for he was also interested in machine computation and in automata. My views in this book are very far from being Leibnitzian, but the problems with which I am concerned are most certainly Leibnitzian. Leibnitz's computing machines were only an offshoot of his interest in a computing language, a reasoning calculus which again was in his mind, merely an extention of his idea of a complete artificial language. Thus, even in his computing machine, Leibnitz's preoccupations were mostly linguistic and communicational. - Human Use of Human Beings (1954 ed.) Wiener becomes preoccupied with Leibniz from his youth, writing philosophical entries for the Encyclopedia Americana which are like premonitions of his cybernetics. He wasn't uncritical though, he especially attacked the pre-established harmony of monads. The argument I'm pursuing is that if you get rid of God, if you let monads actually intercommunicate, if you reinvent Leibniz's continuum of infinite confusion and infinite clarity of knowledge as entropy and information, you're pretty close to cybernetics.
• nanna 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what did you make of Cybernetics? It's a pretty unwieldy book, especially today... Did you ever try the Human Use of Human Beings?
  • f00_ 8y ago
    i just thought it was interesting if not just for the subjects it covers. information theory before shannon, Henri Bergson's time philosophy, thermodynamics/statistical mechanics, learning machines (neural networks?) I'll try to get my hands on human use of human beings, probably give cybernetics another run through too