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Norbert Wiener

mathematician · 19 mentions across 7 readings

In this course

Norbert Wiener founded cybernetics in 1948 as a mathematical theory of information, control, and communication grounded in digital signals and feedback loops, establishing the conceptual ground for understanding systems across physical and biological domains. The course readings invoke Wiener to distinguish first-order cybernetics—where information is treated as a statistical property divorced from meaning—from later second-order approaches that reintegrate the observer and human cognition into the theory, showing how his framework evolved from mechanistic to more reflexive models.

Mentioned in 7 readings

Tiqqun

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

 6
Underlying the founding of Cybernetics was a context of total war. It would be in vain to look for some malicious purpose or the traces of a plot: one simply finds a handful of ordinary men mobilized by America during the Second world war. …The cybernetic hypothesis progresses indistinctly as theory and technology, the one always certifying the other. In 1943, Wiener met John Von Neumann, who was in charge of building machines fast and powerful enough to carry out the Manhatta…The way that the systems metaphor evolved towards the network metaphor in social discourse between the 1950s and 1980s points towards the other fundamental analogy constituting the cybernetic hypothesis. It also indicates a profound transfo…

+3 more

Claudia Jacques

Human-Computer Interaction Design and the Cybersemiotic Experience

 5
In 1948, when introducing cybernetics, Norbert Weiner (1965) defined digital information as zeros and ones transmitted by electromagnetic signals with infinite options of decisions, communication and control. Later, Weiner (1954) advanced t…First-order cybernetics understands information as a statistical property of a particular message, but the message itself (what is exchanged and its meaning) is irrelevant to the theory (Vidales 2017). Wiener (1965) continues: One of the si…Looking at information from a systems perspective, Claude Shannon (1949) added entropy to quantify information in any form of communication. “The concept of information applies not to the individual messages (as the concept of meaning would…

+2 more

Scott Benzel

Notes on À bruit secret: on Duchamp, Cybernetics, and Organized Crime

 3
Bateson immediately grasped Duchamp’s line of thinking – it reflected ideas that he had been engaging with at the Macy cybernetics conferences and their precursor, the 1942 Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, where (among other topics but of parti…Diagram from Behavior, Purpose and Teleology by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow in Philosophy of Science, 10 (1943) Both the paper and the Cerebral Inhibition Meeting (Per Bateson “Cerebral inhibition was a respectabl…1963, the year of Duchamp’s Las Vegas trip facilitated by Monte Factor, was also the year that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. While the 1964 Warren Report found Lee Harvey Oswald solely responsible, a decade later The United States House…

Yuk Hui ChatGPT

or the Eschatology of Machines - Journal #137

 2
Cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Wiener around 1943, was developed by a group of scientists and engineers who attended the Macy Conferences on cybernetics in the late forties and early fifties. Cybernetics was intended to be a universa…Cybernetics, a term coined by Norbert Wiener around 1943, was developed by a group of scientists and engineers who attended the Macy Conferences on cybernetics in the late forties and early fifties. Cybernetics was intended to be a universa…

Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Gregory Bateson 5Marcel Duchamp 4Arturo Rosenblueth 3Julian Bigelow 3Carlos Vidales 3Søren Brier 3John von Neumann 2Claude Shannon 2Heinz von Foerster 2Arthur Schopenhauer 1Felix Guattari 1Friedrich Nietzsche 1Georges Bataille 1Gilles Deleuze 1Gustav Metzger 1Illia Polosukin 1Immanuel Kant 1Jasia Reichardt 1John Horton Conway 1Klára Dán von Neumann 1Stanisław Ulam 1Whitney brothers 1Gilbert Simondon 1Henri Bergson 1Isaac Newton 1Charles Sanders Peirce 1Claudia Jacques 1Alexander Cockburn 1Arthur B. Darling 1Benjamin Breen 1

Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0 — ATEK-639/439 — Fall 2025