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The term Cybernetics tends to be associated with computer control systems and AI these days, but when the term was first coined it was originally about how systems of any kind – social systems – governed themselves.

It was back in 2002 I read Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s work on the origins of cognitive science “The Mechanization of the Mind“. It was the first I’d heard of the Macy meeting in New York in 1946. Although I’d been on the systems engineering and information science track in my psychological research for some time, and the name Psybertron clearly shared some of the same roots, it was the first time I’d been able to put the name Cybernetics to my interests.

Mechanisation of mind was the very problem being lamented in retrospect by Dupuy. Since I was already investigating what was wrong with “classical” science and logic at the metaphysical level, I quickly latched onto this string of comparative quotes from Dupuy:

“Beyond the dualism; the schizophrenia …

between
American Neo-Positivism
and French Post-Structuralism

between
Hidebound Savants
and Cultured Ignorami (or Foggie Froggies)

between
the philosophies of science, mathematics and logic
and the philosophies of the human and social “sciences”

between
the analytic, rigorous, democratic, shallow and tedious
and the rich and meaningful on the other

between
knowing everything about almost nothing
and knowing almost nothing about everything

between
the need for formal models
and the nevertheless deeply held belief that ….
literature is a superior
form of knowledge than science.

Especially that last highlighted quote. Remember I was a techy geek who’d barely read a book that wasn’t a technical manual for the previous 35 years. All different now, as a born-again reader of literature with any philosophical content.

Inevitably in philosophical discussions the basis for ontology, epistemology and ethics lead to real world political cases and I was forever, after Causation itself, concluding that Governance was the overriding practical concern, whether talking at fundamental physical, biological or higher psychological and intellectual decision-making levels, or social / group management and government levels.

At root, Governance =  Kybernetes = Cybernetics, by definition – supervisory control levels as well as operational feedback levels, albeit one emergent (supervenient?) on the other. Free-won’t as the best model of conscious will and freedoms in the complex systems of individual humans and human societies. Etc.

Anyway, somewhere recently, (the IP thread, and the most recent Edge edition with a piece on the agent himself, John Brockman, I picked-up a reference to Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics“ being most influential (*), and recalled it was a book I’d still never read, despite many references. One of the key recurring references was of course the BCS Cybernetics special interest group, and the view of information as fundamental to all other levels.

So I put that right and obtained a copy of “Cybernetics“.

I’ve so far read the 1961 preface to the second edition and the original 1947 introduction. The full title is “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine“. I’m very impressed:

The pre-war discussions, the wartime projects, and immediate post-war exchanges that led to the multi-disciplinary Macy meeting in 1946, make-up the bulk of the introduction. The names are a pantheon –  Wiener and his long-term associate Rosenblueth; Shannon and Turing; Bose and Gabor; Heisenberg and Schroedinger; von-Neumann and Haldane; Carnap and Russell (Wiener was a student of Russell’s) ; Bateson and Mead;  and many more … FCS Northrop included !!! Wow.

Facing the new world of Belsen and Hiroshima, (see also Durrenmatt’s Die Physiker, and Bronowski’s Science and Human Values) the “evil” mis-use of science is an unsurprising topic, but so are the potential evils of markets and industrialised corporate war-based economies – recalled by Eisenhower in 1961 as the military-industrial complex.  Blake’s “dark satanic mills”. Wiener wrote:

“The answer is to have a society
based on human values
other than buying and selling.”

And …

“… there are those who hope that the good of a better understanding of man and society which is offered by [cybernetics] may anticipate and outweigh the incidental contribution [it makes] to the concentration of power – which is always concentrated by its very conditions of existence – in the hands of the most unscrupulous.

I write [in 1947] that it is a very slight hope.”

Since these days, my agenda has been much influenced by Dan Dennett’s – Turing meets Darwin – information evolution view of the world, but that’s another story.

[See also The Second Cybernetics.]

=====

(*) It was Brockman, back in his Whole Earth Catalogue days with Stewart Brand
” … he started having weekly ‘shroom dinners with John Cage, who gave him a copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, a book that forever informed his intellectual sensibilities.”

Penguin Press publishes my book today: “POSSIBLE MINDS: 25 Ways to Look at AI”. In 1965, John Cage handed Norbert Wiener’s CYBERNETICS, and said “This is for you” https://t.co/z1H4yiWh1v 54 years later, POSSIBLE MINDS is #1 on Amazon in Cybernetics. https://t.co/ki90Aj9bdz pic.twitter.com/z71Q3DKEK4

John Brockman (@edge) February 19, 2019

[Note that, as well as The Edge / Brockman publishing environment influences, Stewart Brand remains these days a prime mover in The Long Now movement.]

(Aside, talking of The Edge, didn’t one of the writers in the past year – the 2011 question – suggest Supervenience was the concept that we would most benefit from appreciating more widely? It was Joshua Greene who suggested Supervenience in 2011. Which reminds me it’s time to read The Edge 2012 Q&A. But I digress.)

[And Post Note : Of course, the connections arose through me noticing Daniel Kahneman’s response (first) to the 2011 Q&A … I had bought Kahneman’s Fast & Slow Thinking book at the same time I ordered Cybernetics last week. I found myself with ten or a dozen web-pages all open at the same time and couldn’t recall why they were connected, when I had to do a shut-down for various updates. Now I know.]

Being surrounded on three sides by a church graveyard and on the fourth by agricultural land is the setting for daily life here at our new home & office location. All life is here.

In 5 or 6 weeks so far we’ve seen at least 3 burials, so we’ve been doing some calculations. The three sides of graveyard comprise, the original old churchyard whose residents rest long undisturbed, the municipal  burial ground in current use, and an extension to that, currently without any occupants. It was suggested when we moved in it might be a hundred years before the extension had residents – we’re beginning to doubt that. Not that it concerns us, with or without good fences, they make good neighbours.

One reason is the amount of life. The garden itself is pretty undisciplined, so the premature spring we’re having, is a source of discovery as mature plants show themselves for the first time. Snowdrops by the thousand, many other spring bulbs poking through, plus hellebore’s, cyclamen with many flower buds ready to spring up through their dense leaf cover, and more yet to give themselves away no doubt – it is only January.

And trees; the adjoining properties and our boundary contain many of them – obvious Scots Pines, Poplars and Ash, and at least a dozen others, Beeches maybe, I’ll need to wait until in leaf before I can recognise them all.

The result is so much other wildlife. Rabbits and Weasel, so far and Foxes are expected, but no Moles presumably thanks to good site selection by the church for a graveyard. And because none of the deceased neighbours keep cats, the garden is a profusion of bird life. The birds give the Weasel a hard time when he turns up.

Pigeons; Feral, Wood and Collared Doves, plus Jackdaws and other Crows and Gulls. (Found half a dozen Jackdaw and Gull corpses in the chimney sweepings too.) All the usual Great, Blue and Coal Tits, Green and Chaffinches, Wren, Dunnock, Blackbirds male and female and Tree-Creeper. Territorial cock-Robins standing sentry at strategic points, the Pheasants, the biggest of which happily jumps up on the bird-feeders to help himself.

A spectacular female Greater Spotted Woodpecker, and a second occasional companion I believe. She’s very noisy in this emergent spring – calling at the top of her voice from the highest branches in between rat-tat-tatting, hardly pausing for breath for half an hour at a time, when not attacking the peanuts.

My favourites – the Long Tailed Tits – turning up 10 to 20 en-masse 3 or 4 times a day. I love their behaviour at the feeders. The other tits are very skittish when more than one other of their own species even flits into view, even more so if a second species appears, particularly if larger – there is a clear pecking order amongst them all – it’s amazing how they recognize each other from the merest glimpse. All constantly rushing back to the nearest bush or hedge until clear to return to the feeder – constantly alert to who’s where and ready for flight at any time.

The Long Tailed Tits on the other hand, jostle 6 or 8 at time to one feeder, a tangle of fluttering tails, wings, legs and beaks, sideways, upside down, anyhow. They seem to recognize approaches from out of view of any other – whether of their own or another, only actually leaving the feeder if the approach is a more dominant species like the Great Tit or the Woodpecker, otherwise it’s every man for himself in the communal melee, whether you’re a Long Tail, a Blue or a Coal Tit or whatever.

(No Sparrows or Thrushes evident so far ? Probably need to make the property more Sparrow-friendly, they seem so rare these days ? I’m also going to have to dig the camera out.)

Reading Kinsella as suggested by Victor in the earlier SOPA / PIPA thread …

The usual “property value based on scarcity / replacement cost / value” doesn’t apply to IP since the creator / owner is not in any sense deprived of the IP however many copies others make. True, but the natural reduction in scarcity caused by the free copying reduces the value of the IP to its creator / owner. So as Kinsella continues, it is a matter of “contract” by the creator at time of publication – and what is “fair value” in return at that point. Fairness is a good concept – from both moral and utilitarian perspectives – though remember, for me, correctly applied, pragmatism IS morality (another story).

I have to conclude that most of the rest of Kinsella’s case is about difficulties (*) in fair application of copyright “contracts” to future people not party to original contracts directly, and where the “essence” of the copyrighted idea is patterned at some level below any physical artefact “copy” owned legitimately by a third-party in future. All of which says to me we should be taking exactly what is copyrighted and patented very seriously, not simply dismissing it as “untenable”. Strengthening (fair) legal arrangements not rejecting them.

Good to be reminded that for IP the questions are in fact about contracts for fair use, not ownership per se, as would be the case for property rights generally. The distinction is very important. Property is the wrong word, copyright is right.

No surprise, morally, fair value lies in multiple levels of patterns. What is surprising is how quickly Kinsella’s IP debate leads straight to metaphysical fundamentals of value. Wow. Double wow.

(*) Examples of problems include : Patents with unfair assertion of creative copyrights, occupation and “homesteading” etc … the idea of a light-bulb, things discovered (in science) not “created”, not being distinct about the actual thing created. I remember doing a master’s paper on this on Pharmceutical patenting back in the late 80’s. (Creation is the key concept here, in an aontic world-view, all reality is in fact created, a view I only recognized in the noughties.)

PS love the example character “Galt-Magnon” – magic, I hope Kinsella copyrighted it 😉 I’m guessing Kinsella rejects (Ayn) Rand as strongly as I do.

[Post Note : Here is an example “guinea-pig” case.]

Yes, democratized web-publishing is a great force for change, for good. That’s why I blog. That’s why I use WordPress (and a dozen other social publishing tools).

But that doesn’t mean SOPA / PIPA are a bad thing. Creative people publishing content can choose their preferred IP model. Creative musicians and artists can work outside the corporate mainstream if they want, with cheap distribution and easy access to their customer base, with a larger share of a smaller revenue stream – if they want. (That is an example of what is enabled by the democratized publishing capabilities.)

And we can all choose to ignore the offerings of mainstream publishing, not contribute to their corporate coffers. But, unless you’re a “property-is-theft” extremist, IP needs copyright protection, to the extent that its owner wants to assert that copyright (again the owner is free to choose what rights to assert, or not).

The problem as ever is potential abuse of powers of enforcement, and conspiracy theories whipped-up to focus on “censorship” and infringements against freedoms. But theft is no-one’s right. We should focus on practical implementation and safeguards against abuses, not throw out common sense.

Of course Abbott’s comment was racist.

The point is was it racist with positive moral intent ? Or was it done with ignorance or negative intent ? Colour-blindness is a red-herring too. Sometimes race/colour is germane to the topic, sometimes it isn’t.

Obviously her intent was positive and race/colour was more than just relevant, it was the subject. No problem there. Her mistake was to generalize “the whites” as some group with one set of qualities & motives vis-a-vis “blacks”, even though she used the expression in the context of a particular conversation. That was clearly racist. Diane on the whole is not I’d suggest – a lack of common sense maybe, given her profile as a politician. Get over it, she’s apologised..

Nice tweet from Mr_Eugenides :

DianeAbbott: Making Other Labour MPs Look Like Intellectuals Since 1987™

“It was a trivial problem …
… that occurs every year,”

Bethlehem police Lt-Col Khaled al-Tamimi told Reuters.

“No one was arrested because …
… all those involved were men of God,”

I don’t really see any worthwhile debate – the buzz of turf-wars may keep the subjects in the headlines, but there is no definitional problem not already adequately sorted by the data > information > knowledge > wisdom stack. (Thanks to David Gurteen’s tweets prompting this post.)

Anyone with strong allegiance to any one part of the stack will widen (blur) their definitions into the adjacent layers, but anyone interested in the whole stack can see worthwhile (pragmatic and valuable) distinctions, each being a layer of patterning built on the previous layer.

• data – is about significant difference – bits and bytes being distinct from one another, at any level of granularity from fundamental physics upwards to whole books and libraries.
• information – is about the significance of those data differences, their semantics – what the patterns of data mean.
• knowledge – is about how that information is applied to add value, valuable patterns of use, applied information.
• wisdom – is about understanding (knowing, experiencing, appreciating) value and the fact that it depends on how the whole stack works, and the pragmatic need to balance interests and priorities across (two-way) interactions between all levels of the stack. A more “holistic” view, if that’s not a dirty word.

Personally, like anyone else who’s given the matter any thought I guess, the aims are always towards the higher level – wisdom – whatever our (current) level of activity as a practitioner. In my particular case as an engineer I started and worked for 20 years in the applied space – learning and using knowledge of how to apply information to specific ends. It’s all about “decision-support” of course – all worthwhile activities involve decisions, so that truism in itself doesn’t add much to any definitions. One of the things you learn – wisdom you gain – is that those practitioners in the data and information layers can, by inadvertent presumptions about decision-making and use-in-action, create constraints on usage in the knowledge layers. So for the last 12 years or so, I shifted my focus down a couple of layers to understand the presumptions and how (unnecessary) constraints can arise.

I have to say in the process, I’ve developed a huge respect for librarians. Anyone who thinks it’s “just” thorough record keeping – some clerical admin task – misses the need for good strategies and architectures for how data, meta-data, information and relations between these are organized. We benefit from some types of “constraint”. The more virtual our libraries become, the more we need to avoid librarianship becoming a dying art.

Ubiquitous, real-time, interactive connectivity is not necessarily entirely good in and of itself.

Piece by Peter Benson in Philosophy Now (posted on Facebook by ex-MoQer David Morey) – Marshall McLuhan on the Mobile Phone.

Unsurprising to find McLuhan on the money when it comes to the social effects of our communications age but, for me, a couple of interesting points on value and memetics.

Print is the technology of individualism” (The Gutenberg Galaxy pp.157-8) whereas with [mobile technology and the net], the tendency is once more towards interconnected thinking in a community of minds, and so perhaps less ‘free ideation’.

Less free, notice. It’s the usual Darwinian call for evolutionary balance between fidelity and fecundity. If it is too easy to copy patterns of information in hi-fidelity it is harder for mutations to be introduced in ways that create new value. Too hard is obvious, but too easy is not good. Less is more. Life’s just complicated enough. McLuhan continues:

It is important to recognize the subtlety of McLuhan’s views. He is not saying that modern technology distorts an original human nature, which must be protected from such distortions. Instead, from the moment humans began to create tools, our nature was shaped by the tools we used. The silent reading of texts proliferated after Gutenberg’s invention. This activity is not ‘natural’, in the sense of resulting through evolution from the necessities of survival; but it can be regarded as having value, conferred on it by our judgement as individuals and as a society. [His emphasis]

It is entirely possible that a future society could reverse this judgement; but in the interim we need to give consideration to the potential change in our values due to actual changes in our dominant communications media. [My emphasis]

Did we ever need a little conservatism to moderate mediation in the mix. The art of editing.

Scientism is a problem, but this is scary – scientists being encouraged to date other scientists.