Norbert Wiener

mathematician · 18 mentions across 6 readings

In this course

Norbert Wiener is the founder of cybernetics, the mid-twentieth-century framework for understanding information, communication, and control as universal principles operating across mechanical, biological, and social systems. The course readings trace how Wiener's 1948 formulation of digital information as binary signals transmitted through feedback loops established the theoretical ground for first-order cybernetics, though his statistical approach to information deliberately bracketed questions of meaning and human interpretation. His work is being mobilized here to show how early cybernetics abstracted information from its contexts, setting up the later critique that second-order cybernetics and contemporary AI philosophy must reckon with the observer, intentionality, and situated knowledge that the classical framework excluded.

Mentioned in 6 readings

Tiqqun

The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2001)

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

Notes on À bruit secret_ Notes on Duchamp

Cybernetics, CIA, 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…

David Golumbia

from Bitcoin, Software as Rightwing Extremism

1

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Mindy Seu (editor)

Selections from Cyberfeminism Index

1

Through its history, cyberfeminism has often been defined by what it is expressly not. [^87] Coined in the early 1990s by the British cultural theorist Sadie Plant [^122-p6] and VNS Matrix, the word “cyberfeminism” takes on its prefix “cybe…