Cybernetics

Ancient

Since ancient times one finds written evidence of system-oriented thinking. The Greek ependichter Homer wrote κυβερνήτης kybernetes, meaning the helmsman of a ship. Plato used the term figuratively when he spoke of a "man at the helm of a government." The apostle Paul, in turn, uses the Greek term κυβέρνησις kybernesis in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 12:28 EU) to address the "ability to lead."

In 1834, the physicist André-Marie Ampère developed the idea of a science he called cybernétique.

Field of expertise since the 1940s

The roots of the science of cybernetics emerged in the 1940s, when commonalities between the brain and computers were investigated and interfaces of various individual disciplines were recognized, looking at human behavior, message transmission, control engineering, decision and game theory, and statistical mechanics. Toward the end of the winter of 1943/44, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann organized a joint meeting at Princeton with engineers, neuroscientists, and mathematicians on this topic. Another catalyst for this development was the Macy Conferences from 1946 to 1953, with the theme Circular causal, and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems. Norbert Wiener finally derived the term "cybernetics" from the Greek kybernétes for "helmsman" in the summer of 1947, thus honoring James Clerk Maxwell's significant contribution to feedback mechanisms with a centrifugal governor. The English name governor is derived from the Latin gubernator "helmsman", a Latin loanword of the ancient Greek kybernétes.

In print, the term was first used by Norbert Wiener in 1948 in Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. In the same year, he published a fundamental review article on cybernetics in the journal Scientific American.

Beginning in 1948, John von Neumann brought further additions to cybernetics in his lectures: Von Neumann cellular automata and their logical continuation - the von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of these thought experiments was the theory of self-reproducing automata or self-replication in 1953. These concepts transferred properties of genetic reproduction to social memes and living cells and, since the 1970s, to computer viruses. Norbert Wiener added two more chapters to his cybernetics basics book in 1961: On Learning and Self-Reproducing Machines and Brainwaves and Self-Organizing Systems.

The philosopher and logician Georg Klaus established the subject of cybernetics at the Chair of Logic and Epistemology at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1953. Later, he was involved in the founding of a cybernetics commission at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR.

Conferences and Chairs

The Cybernetics conference proceedings of the Macy Conferences of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation (Macy Foundation), published by Heinz von Foerster in the USA from the 1950s onwards, were decisive for the development of the field. Further developments after the Macy Conferences can be seen in the history of the application fields (see table on the right).

The founder of cybernetics in Germany is Hermann Schmidt, who developed this body of thought at the same time and independently of Norbert Wiener and was appointed to the first chair of control engineering in Germany at the TH Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1944. In 1957, against the same background of the history of science, the study Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen - Eine Metaphysik der Kybernetik (The Consciousness of Machines - A Metaphysics of Cybernetics) by the philosopher Gotthard Günther was published in Germany. Furthermore, in 1961 the book Cybernetics in Philosophical Perspective by the mathematician and philosopher Georg Klaus was published, which reached four editions until 1964. Several more books on cybernetics in its social and intellectual implications followed from this author. Among the popular science books, the publications of Karl Steinbuch, who also coined the term computer science in 1957, are particularly noteworthy. In contrast to cybernetics, this term describes a more formalistic and technical orientation.

Today, classical objects of cybernetics are treated in a more differentiated way:

• in the technical field, e.g. in control engineering and control theory under the generic term technical cybernetics,
• in the humanities under the name of systemics or second-order cybernetics,
• in the social and economic sciences under sociocybernetics, economic cybernetics, management cybernetics or corporate cybernetics,
• in the life sciences under biocybernetics and
• in the construction industry, the Baukybernetics.

A philosophical interest in cybernetics also goes back to the fact that it opens up the possibility of understanding the concept of "purpose" recursively: The purpose of a complex system, such as a living being or a system of work and action, is thus considered to be itself. A purpose would no longer need an instance separate from the system to set it.

In the context of control engineering, a special powerful mathematical system theory is available today with which the behavior of systems and control loops can be described and calculated. Network theory, on the other hand, searches for general principles of networked structures of action. Decision theory and game theory, which deal with decision processes in sometimes complex situations of multidimensional target spaces, are gaining increasing importance, especially in medicine, the military, and economics.

Other recent examples of the application of cybernetics in the social sciences include the concepts of volition in psychology and management.

Essential core concepts of cybernetics are:

• System (open and closed systems)
• Feedback (or feedback)
• Self-regulation
• Self-organisation
• Homeostasis
• Hysteresis
• Flow equilibrium (or steady state)
• Adaptation (or adaptive control)
• Release, control
• Actual value and setpoint
• Receptor and effector
• Variety