Book: The Human Use of Human Beings
Tagline: Cybernetics and Society
Author: Norbert Wiener
Find Online:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Use_of_Human_Beings
Date Read: In progress

Why did I choose to read this book?

I no longer remember how this book caught my attention, but within the first few pages I was hooked. I didn't know anything about cybernetics before jumping into this, and still don't, but I figured it would be best to learn about it from the Father of Cybernetics himself.

Excerpts

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganiza­tion, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness described in the second law of thermo­ dynamics. What Maxwell, Bolzmann and Gibbs meant by this heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethic of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system.

These enclaves will not remain there indefinitely by any momentum of their own after we have once established them… We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been… This is no defeatism, it is rather a sense of tragedy in a world in which necessity is represented by an inevitable disappear­ance of differentiation. The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build an enclave of organization in the face of nature’s overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that lies they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here glory too

As Wiener anticipated, the notions of information, feedback and non­ linearity of the differential equations have become in­ creasingly important in biology.

Wiener’s status, which he strongly prized, was that of an independent scientifically knowledgeable intellectual. He avoided accepting funds from government agencies or corporations that might in any way compromise his complete honesty and independence. Nor did he identify himself with any political, social or philosophical group, but spoke and wrote simply as an individual. He was suspicious of honours and prizes given for scientific achievement. After receiving the accolade of election to the National Academy of Sciences, he resigned, lest membership in that select, exclusive body of scientists corrupt his autonomous status as outsider vis—a-vis the American scientific establishment He was of the tradition in which it is the intellectual’s responsibility to speak truth to power.

Yet in their recognition of a fundamental ele­ment of chance in the texture of the universe itself, these men are close to one another and close to the tradition of St. Augustine. For this random element, this organic incompleteness, is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil; the negative evil which St. Augustine characterizes as in­ completeness, rather than the positive malicious evil of the Manichaeans

I repeat : Gibbs’ innovation was to consider not one world, but al l the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions concerning our environment. His central notion concerned the extent to which an­swers that we may give to questions about one set of worlds are probable among a larger set of worlds. Beyond this, Gibbs h ad a theory that this probability tended naturally to increase as the universe grows older. The measure of this probability is called entropy, and the characteristic tendency of entropy is to in­ crease

As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms ex­ist, to a state of chaos and sameness

It is the purpose of Cybernetics to de­velop a language and techniques that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and communi­cation in general, but also t o find the proper repertory of ideas and techniques to classify their particular manifestations under certain concepts

The commands through which we exercise our con­trol over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any fount of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always · fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and t o destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase

Leibnitz, in the meantime, saw the whole world as a collection of beings called «monads” whose activity consisted in the perception o f 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

Physics now becomes not the discussion of an outside universe which may be regarded as the total answer to all the questions concerning it, but an account of the answers to much more limited questions. In fact, we are now no longer concerned with the study of all possible outgoing and incoming messages which we may send and receive, but with the theory of much more specific outgoing and incoming messages; and it involves a measurement of the no-longer infinite amount of information that they yield us.

Messages themselves a form of pattern and or­ganization. Indeed,- it I s possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy I s a measure of disor­ganization, the information carried by a set of mes­sages Is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative I logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

But modern automatic ma­chines such as the controlled missile, the proximity fuse, the automatic door opener, the control apparatus for a chemical factory, and the rest of the modern armory of automatic machines which perform military or industrial functions, possess sense organs; that is, receptors for messages coming from the outside.

This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sen­sory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors – that is, of elements which indicate a performance.

It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feed­ back. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting infor­mation from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individ­ual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is re­ported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individ­ual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the ex­istence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.

performed vs intended actions

We have seen in this chapter the fundamental unity of a complex of ideas which until recently had not been sufficiently associated with one another, namely, the contingent view of physics that Gibbs introduced as a modification of the traditional, Newtonian con­ventions, the Augustinian attitude toward order and conduct which is demanded by this view, and the theory of the message among men, machines, and in society as a sequence of events in time which, though it itself has a certain contingency, strives to hold back nature’s tendency toward disorder by adjusting its parts to various purposive ends

…energy-less supple­ment of mechanical motion, but shares in the main properties of mechanical motion itself. Light cannot b e received by any instrument unless It hits it , and cannot indicate the position of any particle unless it hits the particle as well. This means, then, that even from a purely mechanical point of view we cannot consider the gas chamber as containing mere gas, but rather gas and light which may or may not be in equilibrium. If the gas and the light are in equilibrium, it can be shown as a consequence of present physical doctrine that the Maxwell demon will be as blind as if there were no light at all. We shall have a cloud of light coming from every direction, giving no indication of the position and momenta of the gas particles. Therefore the Maxwell demon will work only in a system that is not in equi­librium. In such a system, however, it will turn

But we are not yet spectators at the last stages of the world’s death. In fact these last stages can have no spectators. Therefore, in the world with which we are immediately concerned there are stages which, though they occupy an insignificant fraction of eter­nity, are of great significance for our purposes, for in them entropy does not increase and organization and its correlative, information, are being built up.

What I have said about these enclaves of increasing organization is not confined merely to organization as exhibited by living beings. Machines also contribute to a local and temporary building up of information, notwithstanding their crude and imperfect organiza­tion compared with that of ourselves.

…there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a frame­ work in which the large entropy tends to increase.

It is in my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as “life,” “soul,” “vitalism,” and the like, and say merely in connection with machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a frame­ work in which the large entropy tends to increase

This last function, as we have seen, is called feedback, the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance. Feedback may be as simple as that of the common reflex, or it may be a higher order feedback, in which past experience is used not only to regulate specific movements, but also whole policies of be­havior. Such a policy-feedback may, and often does, appear to be what we know under one aspect as a conditioned reflex, and under another as learning

In many cases it is possible to state the basis of these decisions as a threshold of action of the synapse, or in other words, by telling how many incoming fibers should fire in order that the outgoing fibers may fire. This is the basis of at least part of the analogy be­ tween machines and living organisms. The synapse in the living organism corresponds to the switching de­vice in the machine

This distinction between the passive resistance of nature and the active resistance of an opponent sug­gests a distinction between the research scientist and the warrior or the game player. The research physicist has all the time in the world to carry out his experi­ments, and he need not fear that nature will in time discover his tricks and method and change her policy.

The scientist is thus disposed to regard his opponent as an honorable enemy. This attitude is necessary for his effectiveness as a scientist, but tends to make him the dupe of unprincipled people in war and in politics. I t also has the effect of making it hard for the general public to understand him, for the general public is much more concerned with personal antagonists than with nature a s an antagonist.

personal antagonists vs nature as an antagonist

There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these is­ lands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress

The result is that in Ashby’s machine, as in Darwin’s nature, we have the appear­ance of a purposefulness in a system which is not pur­posefully constructed simply because purposelessness is in its very nature transitory

The result of this pruning was to leave a residual pattern of forms of life more or less well adapted to their environment. This residual pattern, according to Darwin, assumes the appearance of universal purposiveness

Thus the question of whether to interpret the second law of thermodynamics pessimistically or not depends on the importance we give to the universe at large, on the one hand, and to the islands of locally decreasing entropy which we find in it, on the other.

In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity

This is partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature which, on a limited…

The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier his­ tory, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature which, on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival

Certain kinds of machines and some living organisms -particularly the higher living organisms-can, as we have seen, modify their patterns of behavior on the basis of past experience so as to achieve specific anti­-entropic ends