Introduction to Cybernetics

Rob Ninowski
Presented in the Embryo Physics Course, April 17, 2013

Abstract

This talk will give a historical overview of the emergence and design of Cybernetics as an approach to a variety of problems confronting science and philosophy in the early 20th century. It will examine the processes which led to it’s coalescing, and it’s continued development and integration with extant structures since. It will end with a short discussion on what cybernetic study has revealed philosophically and scientifically, and possible applications for the future.

Presentation

/files/presentations/Ninowski2013.pdf

Biography

Rob Ninowski (B.A. Anthropology & Sociology, Oakland University) has a 15+ year career in information technology, & is an independent researcher in the philosophy & systems of control & communication. His interest is the interaction at the intersection of culture, genetics, & the mind.

There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypotheticodeductive process. It is not even distinctively intellectual. It is merely a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all regulative processes or processes of continuous control, namely feedback, the control of performance by the consequences of the act performed. In the hypotheticodeductive scheme the inferences we draw from a hypothesis are, in a sense, its logical output. If they are true, the hypothesis need not be altered, but correction is obligatory if they are false. The continuous feedback from inference to hypothesis is implicit in Whewell’s account of scientific method; he would not have dissented from the view that scientific behaviour can be classified as appropriately under cybernetics as under logic.“ Peter Manewar


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