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Cybernetics Linda Spain/Joe’l Lewis
What Is Cybernetics? • Cybernetics began as the science of communication and control in the animal, machine, and society; i.e. special types of systems. It operates on two levels: study of an observed system & study of the people studying a system. Originated from R & D process in the development of the atomic bomb- applied scientific theory & principles in real-world setting.
What Are the Main Points? • Theoretical-sciences of complexity--including AI, neural networks, dynamical systems, chaos, and complex adaptive systems. • Practical-Many of the concepts used by system scientists come from the closely related approach of cybernetics: information, control, feedback, communication. • There was also a return from the machine to the living organism, which accelerated progress in neurology, perception, the mechanisms of vision In the sixties MIT saw the extension of cybernetics and system theory to industry, society, and ecology.
Who Were the Main People? • Three men can be regarded as the pioneers of great breakthroughs (in cybernetics): the mathematician Norbert Weiner, who died in 1964, the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch, who died in 1969; and Jay Forrester, professor at the Sloan School of Management at MIT.
How It relates to IDD • The fundamental concepts of cybernetics have proven to be enormously powerful in a variety of disciplines: computer science, management, biology, sociology, thermodynamics, etc. Cybernetics and Systems Science combine the abstraction of philosophy and mathematics with the concreteness of dealing with the theory and modeling of "real world" evolving systems.
How It Relates to IDD (Continued) • Although there are many exceptions, researchers in cybernetics and systems science tend to be trained in a traditional specialty (like biology, management, or psychology) and then come to apply themselves to problems in other areas, perhaps a single other area. Thus their exposure to cybernetics and systems science concepts and theory tends to be somewhat ad hoc and specific to the two or three fields they apply themselves to.
Specific Ways Cybernetics Incorporated Into Dick & Carey • Dick & Carey shows evidence of an underlying system and approach to instruction. Dick & Carey’s model highlights the principle that is applicable to solve any kind of problem. The approach can be broken apart and each part examined. ALSO, it has a linear structure.
Dick & Carey Continued • If we would uncover those general laws, we would be able to analyze and solve problems in any domain, pertaining to any type of system. Following D & C all steps are incorporated.
Five Websites 1.pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CYBSYSTH.html 2. link.springer.de/link/service/journals/0042 3. cyvision.if.sc.usp.br 4. www.evolutionaryethics.com 5. www.xmission.com/~cyberman
Associated Books • How we became posthuman : virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics / N. Katherine Hayles. • The computer and the brain / John von Neumann ; with a foreword by Paul M. Churchland and Patricia S. Churchland. • The foundations of cybernetics / F. H. George.
Associated Books • The soft machine : cybernetic fiction / David Porush. • How colleges work : the cybernetics of academic organization and leadership / Robert Birnbaum
Something New • Cybernetics should be understood as a key tool or cognitive methodology for the observer who would know himself and his world. • Understanding Cybernetics is similar to finding ways of navigating between the many islands of discourse that explore relations between disciplines in the sciences and humanities.
