W. Ross Ashby's
An Introduction to Cybernetics
Notes
Chapter 1: What is New
Cybenetics was defined by Wiener as "the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine" -- the art of steersmanship.
The peculariarities of cybernetics:
- A theory of machines, but treats, not things, but ways of behaving
- Deals with all forms of behaving in so far as they are regular, or determinate, or reproducible.
- The materiality (the material of which a system is constructed) is irrelevant, and so is the holding or not holding of the ordinary laws of physics. (We can invent arbitrary laws and then deduce how a system that followed them would behave.)
The approach of cybernetics:
- Cybernetics treats any given machine by asking not "what individual act will it produce here and now?", but "what are all the possible behaviors that it can produce?"
- Cybernetics envisages a set of possibilities much wider than usual and then asks why the particular case should conform to its usual particular restriction.
- Cybernetics might be defined as the study of systems that are open to energy but closed to information and control -- systems that are "information-tight."
The uses of cybernetics:
- Offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system. Cybernetics offers one set of concepts that, by having exact correspondences with each branch of science, can thereby bring them into exact relation with one another. It is thus likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. It can provide a common language by which discoveries in one branch can be readily made use of in the others.
- Offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored. (Such are common in biology.) Cybernetics offers the hope of providing effective methods for the study, and control, of systems that are intrinsically extremely complex.