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Could you explain how cybernetics is outside the current paradigm? It's "just" control theory no?
by igorkraw 6y ago
Could you explain how cybernetics is outside the current paradigm? It's "just" control theory no?
- marcosdumay 6y ago> It's "just" control theory no? Cybernetics is about how humans interact with technology, so it doesn't even have a resemblance to control theory (and it's a human science by the way). What makes your impression is probably that the cybernetics literature has a passion to try solving all its problems with control theory. But control theory here is just a tool, not the science.
- igorkraw 6y agoCould you point me to some papers/books available online (maybe on certain hubs of science) you'd consider "seminal"?
- carapace 6y ago> Could you explain how cybernetics is outside the current paradigm? Not easily, but I'll try. And thanks for asking. > It's "just" control theory no? That's the view from the old paradigm looking "forward". From the new paradigm looking "backward" control theory is the beginning of the new paradigm. To me feedback and control theory looks like a slow and painful rediscovery of Wiener and company. Cybernetics grew out of the study of "loops of causality". In logic, "A = not A" is a contradiction, in cybernetics it's an oscillator. It's very difficult to describe the paradigmatic shift. I could point to Shannon and Wiener. Shannon's paper is in many ways the epitome of the scientific paradigm that started with Newton and could be demarcated by Einstein. Already with Quantum Mechanics we're starting to get into the new thing (but the name "mechanics" kind of points to the old way still.) The crux is the change of emphasis from concrete and static to context and relationship, the "verbs" rather than the "nouns". Consider the cannon vs. the heat-seeking missile. In the first case the science is ballistics, in the second it is feedback and control (with ballistics as a kind of substrate) and the physical properties of the mechanism are secondary to the metaphysical properties (the "causal loops" embodied in the mechanism.) Note that the cannon also has its feedback loops. After you fire you measure the result and adjust the aim and so on. The paradigms aren't separate, they all co-exist, it's a change of attention and emphasis. And speed, of course. It almost doesn't matter what the missile is made of, electric circuits, clockwork, fluidics, etc. The crucial aspects of it that define its behaviour are intangible not physical. That's why Cybernetics can be applied to living systems just as well as machines. (FWIW, I never went in much for the "Second-order" cybernetics, it got too metaphysical for my taste.) Anyhow, I hope that makes more (rather than less) sense. :)
- igorkraw 6y agoI hope this doesn't offend you, but I am more confused by your answer than I was before. Could you point me to some papers/books available online (maybe on certain hubs of science) you'd consider "seminal"?
- carapace 6y agoI'm really sorry about that. No offense taken. In re: Cybernetics in general I always recommend "Introduction to Cybernetics" by W. Ross Ashby. It's a whole book but I find it to be the most direct and concrete exposition of Cybernetics. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf In re: paradigm shift, I don't really know of a single good source for that, but the works of Gregory Bateson, specifically "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" and "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity", were useful to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steps_to_an_Ecology_of_Mind https://archive.org/details/mindnaturenecess00baterich https://archive.org/details/mindnaturenecess00baterich