= Cybernetics =

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= Cybernetics =
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Introduction
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Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causal
processes such as feedback and recursion, where the effects of a
system's actions (its outputs) return as inputs to that system,
influencing subsequent action. It is concerned with general principles
that are relevant across multiple contexts, including in engineering,
ecological, economic, biological, cognitive and social systems and
also in practical activities such as designing, learning, and
managing. Cybernetics' transdisciplinary character has meant that it
intersects with a number of other fields, leading to it having both
wide influence and diverse interpretations.

The field is named after an example of circular causal feedback--that
of steering a ship (the ancient Greek κυβερνήτης ('kybernḗtēs') refers
to the person who steers a ship). In steering a ship, the position of
the rudder is adjusted in continual response to the effect it is
observed as having, forming a feedback loop through which a steady
course can be maintained in a changing environment, responding to
disturbances from cross winds and tide.

Cybernetics has its origins in exchanges between numerous disciplines
during the 1940s. Initial developments were consolidated through
meetings such as the Macy Conferences and the Ratio Club. Early
focuses included purposeful behaviour, neural networks, heterarchy,
information theory, and self-organising systems. As cybernetics
developed, it became broader in scope to include work in design,
family therapy, management and organisation, pedagogy, sociology, the
creative arts and the counterculture.

Definitions
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Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, reflecting "the
richness of its conceptual base." One of the best known definitions is
that of the American scientist Norbert Wiener, who characterised
cybernetics as concerned with "control and communication in the animal
and the machine." Another early definition is that of the Macy
cybernetics conferences, where cybernetics was understood as the study
of "circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social
systems." Margaret Mead emphasised the role of cybernetics as "a form
of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of
many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language
which all could understand."

Other definitions include: "the art of governing or the science of
government" (André-Marie Ampère); "the art of steersmanship" (Ross
Ashby); "the study of systems of any nature which are capable of
receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for
control" (Andrey Kolmogorov); and "a branch of mathematics dealing
with problems of control, recursiveness, and information, focuses on
forms and the patterns that connect" (Gregory Bateson).

Etymology
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The Ancient Greek term κυβερνητικός ('kubernētikos', '(good at)
steering') appears in Plato's 'Republic' and ''Alcibiades'', where the
metaphor of a steersman is used to signify the governance of people.
The French word 'cybernétique' was also used in 1834 by the physicist
André-Marie Ampère to denote the sciences of government in his
classification system of human knowledge.

According to Norbert Wiener, the word 'cybernetics' was coined by a
research group involving himself and Arturo Rosenblueth in the summer
of 1947. It has been attested in print since at least 1948 through
Wiener's book 'Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine'. In the book, Wiener states:

Moreover, Wiener explains, the term was chosen to recognize James
Clerk Maxwell's 1868 publication on feedback mechanisms involving
governors, noting that the term 'governor' is also derived from
κυβερνήτης ('kubernḗtēs') via a Latin corruption 'gubernator'.
Finally, Wiener motivates the choice by steering engines of a ship
being "one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback
mechanisms".

First wave
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The initial focus of cybernetics was on parallels between regulatory
feedback processes in biological and technological systems. Two
foundational articles were published in 1943: "Behavior, Purpose and
Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian
Bigelowbased on the research on living organisms that Rosenblueth did
in Mexicoand the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in
Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The
foundations of cybernetics were then developed through a series of
transdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr.
Foundation, between 1946 and 1953. The conferences were chaired by
McCulloch and had participants included Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson,
Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Norbert
Wiener. In the UK, similar focuses were explored by the Ratio Club, an
informal dining club of young psychiatrists, psychologists,
physiologists, mathematicians and engineers that met between 1949 and
1958. Wiener introduced the neologism 'cybernetics' to denote the
study of "teleological mechanisms" and popularized it through the book
'Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine'.

During the 1950s, cybernetics was developed as a primarily technical
discipline, such as in Qian Xuesen's 1954 "Engineering Cybernetics".
In the Soviet Union, Cybernetics was initially considered with
suspicion but became accepted from the mid to late 1950s.

By the 1960s and 1970s, however, cybernetics' transdisciplinarity
fragmented, with technical focuses separating into separate fields.
Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at
the Dartmouth workshop in 1956, differentiating itself from the
broader cybernetics field. After some uneasy coexistence, AI gained
funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the
study of artificial neural networks were downplayed. Similarly,
computer science became defined as a distinct academic discipline in
the 1950s and early 1960s.

Second wave
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The second wave of cybernetics came to prominence from the 1960s
onwards, with its focus inflecting away from technology toward social,
ecological, and philosophical concerns. It was still grounded in
biology, notably Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis, and built on
earlier work on self-organising systems and the presence of
anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings. The Biological
Computer Laboratory, founded in 1958 and active until the mid-1970s
under the direction of Heinz von Foerster at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a major incubator of this trend in
cybernetics research.

Focuses of the second wave of cybernetics included management
cybernetics, such as Stafford Beer's biologically inspired viable
system model; work in family therapy, drawing on Bateson; social
systems, such as in the work of Niklas Luhmann; epistemology and
pedagogy, such as in the development of radical constructivism.
Cybernetics' core theme of circular causality was developed beyond
goal-oriented processes to concerns with reflexivity and recursion.
This was especially so in the development of second-order cybernetics
(or the cybernetics of cybernetics), developed and promoted by Heinz
von Foerster, which focused on questions of observation, cognition,
epistemology, and ethics.

The 1960s onwards also saw cybernetics begin to develop exchanges with
the creative arts, design, and architecture, notably with the
'Cybernetic Serendipity' exhibition (ICA, London, 1968), curated by
Jasia Reichardt, and the unrealised Fun Palace project (London,
unrealised, 1964 onwards), where Gordon Pask was consultant to
architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood.

Third wave
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From the 1990s onwards, there has been a renewed interest in
cybernetics from a number of directions. Early cybernetic work on
artificial neural networks has been returned to as a paradigm in
machine learning and artificial intelligence. The entanglements of
society with emerging technologies has led to exchanges with feminist
technoscience and posthumanism. Re-examinations of cybernetics'
history have seen science studies scholars emphasising cybernetics'
unusual qualities as a science, such as its "performative ontology".
Practical design disciplines have drawn on cybernetics for theoretical
underpinning and transdisciplinary connections. Emerging topics
include how cybernetics' engagements with social, human, and
ecological contexts might come together with its earlier technological
focus, whether as a critical discourse or a "new branch of
engineering".

Key concepts and theories
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The central theme in cybernetics is feedback. Feedback is a process
where the observed outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further
action in ways that support the pursuit, maintenance, or disruption of
particular conditions, forming a circular causal relationship. In
steering a ship, the helmsperson maintains a steady course in a
changing environment by adjusting their steering in continual response
to the effect it is observed as having.

Other examples of circular causal feedback include: technological
devices such as the thermostat, where the action of a heater responds
to measured changes in temperature regulating the temperature of the
room within a set range, and the centrifugal governor of a steam
engine, which regulates the engine speed; biological examples such as
the coordination of volitional movement through the nervous system and
the homeostatic processes that regulate variables such as blood sugar;
and processes of social interaction such as conversation.

Negative feedback processes are those that maintain particular
conditions by reducing (hence 'negative') the difference from a
desired state, such as where a thermostat turns on a heater when it is
too cold and turns a heater off when it is too hot. Positive feedback
processes increase (hence 'positive') the difference from a desired
state. An example of positive feedback is when a microphone picks up
the sound that it is producing through a speaker, which is then played
through the speaker, and so on.

In addition to feedback, cybernetics is concerned with other forms of
circular processes including: feedforward, recursion, and reflexivity.

Other key concepts and theories in cybernetics include:
* Autopoiesis
* Black box
* Conversation theory
* Double bind theory: Double binds are patterns created in interaction
between two or more parties in ongoing relationships where there is a
contradiction between messages at different logical levels that
creates a situation with emotional threat but no possibility of
withdrawal from the situation and no way to articulate the problem.
The theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and colleagues in
the 1950s with regard to the origins of schizophrenia, but it is also
characteristic of many other social contexts.
* Experimental epistemologyMcCulloch, W.S., 1965b (1964), A Historical
Introduction to the Postulational Foundations
of Experimental Epistemology, in Embodiments of Mind, The MIT Press,
Cambridge,
Massachusetts, pp. 359-373.
* Good regulator theorem
* Heterarchy
* Perceptual control theory: A model of behavior based on the
properties of negative feedback (cybernetic) control loops. A key
insight of PCT is that the controlled variable is not the output of
the system (the behavioral actions), but its input, "perception". The
theory came to be known as "perceptual control theory" to distinguish
from those control theorists that assert or assume that it is the
system's output that is controlled. Method of levels is an approach to
psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory where the therapist
aims to help the patient shift their awareness to higher levels of
perception in order to resolve conflicts and allow reorganization to
take place.
* Radical constructivism
* Second-order cybernetics: Also known as the cybernetics of
cybernetics, second-order cybernetics is the recursive application of
cybernetics to itself and the practice of cybernetics according to
such a critique.
* Schismogenesis
* Self-organisation
* Social systems theory
* Syntegrity
* Variety and Requisite Variety
* Viable system model

Related fields and applications
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Cybernetics' central concept of circular causality is of wide
applicability, leading to diverse applications and relations with
other fields. Many of the initial applications of cybernetics focused
on engineering, biology, and exchanges between the two, such as
medical cybernetics and robotics and topics such as neural networks,
heterarchy. In the social and behavioral sciences, cybernetics has
included and influenced work in anthropology, sociology, economics,
family therapy, cognitive science, and psychology.

As cybernetics has developed, it broadened in scope to include work in
management, design, pedagogy, and the creative arts, while also
developing exchanges with constructivist philosophies,
counter-cultural movements, and media studies. The development of
management cybernetics has led to a variety of applications, notably
to the national economy of Chile under the Allende government in
Project Cybersyn. In design, cybernetics has been influential on
interactive architecture, human-computer interaction, design research,
and the development of systemic design and metadesign practices.

Cybernetics is often understood within the context of systems science,
systems theory, and systems thinking. Systems approaches influenced by
cybernetics include critical systems thinking, which incorporates the
viable system model; systemic design; and system dynamics, which is
based on the concept of causal feedback loops.

Many fields trace their origins in whole or part to work carried out
in cybernetics, or were partially absorbed into cybernetics when it
was developed. These include artificial intelligence, bionics,
cognitive science, control theory, complexity science, computer
science, information theory and robotics. Some aspects of modern
artificial intelligence, particularly the social machine, are often
described in cybernetic terms.

Journals and societies
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Academic journals with focuses in cybernetics include:
* 'IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems'
* 'IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems'
* 'IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics'
* 'IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems'
* 'Biological Cybernetics'
* 'Constructivist Foundations'
* 'Cybernetics and Human Knowing'
* 'Cybernetics and Systems'
* 'Enacting Cybernetics'. An open access journal published by the
Cybernetics Society and hosted by Ubiquity Press.

* 'Kybernetes'
Academic societies primarily concerned with cybernetics or aspects of
it include:
*American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), founded in 1964
*British Cybernetics Society (CybSoc)
*: The Metaphorum group was set up in 2003 to develop Stafford Beer's
legacy in Organizational Cybernetics. The Metaphorum Group was born in
a Syntegration in 2003 and have every year after developed a
Conference on issues related to Organizational Cybernetics' theory and
practice.
*IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
*RC51 Sociocybernetics: RC51 is a research committee of the
International Sociological Association promoting the development of
(socio)cybernetic theory and research within the social sciences.
*SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation) is a community of
systems practitioners who believe that traditional approaches to
running organisations are no longer capable of dealing with the
complexity and turbulence faced by organisations today and are
responsible for many of the problems we see today. SCiO delivers an
apprenticeship on masters level and a certification in systems
practice.

Further reading
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* Ascott, Roy (1967). Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision.
'Cybernetica', Journal of the International Association for
Cybernetics (Namur), 10, pp. 25-56
*
*
* François, Charles (1999).
"[https://web.archive.org/web/20060616081808/http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/papers/systemics_and_cybernetics_in_a_historical_perspective.pdf
Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective]". In: 'Systems
Research and Behavioral Science'. Vol 16, pp. 203-219 (1999)
*
*
* Hayles, N. Katherine (1999). 'How We Became Posthuman: Virtual
Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics', Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
*
* Heylighen, Francis, and Cliff Joslyn (2002).
"[http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Cybernetics-EPST.pdf Cybernetics and
Second Order Cybernetics]", in: R.A. Meyers (ed.), 'Encyclopedia of
Physical Science & Technology' (3rd ed.), Vol. 4, (Academic Press,
San Diego), p. 155-169.
* Ilgauds, Hans Joachim (1980), 'Norbert Wiener', Leipzig.
* Mariátegui, José-Carlos / Maulen, D. (eds.)
[https://link.springer.com/journal/146/volumes-and-issues/37-3 Special
issue on “Cybernetics in Latin America: Contexts Developments,
Perceptions and Impacts]”, AI & Society, 37, 2022.
*
*
*
*
* von Foerster, Heinz, (1995),
[http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html Ethics and
Second-Order Cybernetics] .
*
*

External links
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General
* [http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Comp/CompJurc.htm Norbert Wiener and
Stefan Odobleja - A Comparative Analysis]
* [http://bactra.org/notebooks/cybernetics.html Reading List for
Cybernetics ]
* [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html 'Principia Cybernetica Web']
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20091213161047/http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/asc/indexasc.html
Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems]
* [http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/slide/s1.html Glossary Slideshow (136
slides)]
*
*

Societies and journals
* [http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/ American Society for Cybernetics]
* [http://www.ieeesmc.org/ IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics
Society]
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150226115753/http://3rd-street.net/Group/index.php/index.php?topic=68.msg216#msg216
International Society for Cybernetics and Systems Research]
* [http://www.cybsoc.org The Cybernetics Society]

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