(1894–1964). American mathematician of international stature, born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of 25, and worked extensively on problems in the mathematics of electrical engineering, and especially on non-linear systems. Much of this work was later published in
Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory (1958). His exceptional talents as a mathematician were evident very early; he graduated from Tufts University at the age of 14 and won his doctorate from Harvard at 18. His range of activities included work on assemblages, functions of a real variable, mathematical logic, relativity, quantum theory, and the Fourier integral and many of its applications. Late in the 1930s he became increasingly interested in biological and social problems, and formed a group with Arturo Rosenblueth, who was then at the Harvard Medical School. The group included philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers. Their meetings were concerned with scientific method and the unification of science; they continued until 1944, when Rosenblueth went to Mexico, and from them came the concept of
cybernetics. This dates from 1942 but was not named 'cybernetics' until 1947. It was defined generally as 'the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine', but the clear idea was that 'animal' included the human being.
The idea of cybernetics arose not only from the integration of science to include all aspects of scientific activities; it was inspired also by the development of the computer which was taking place at the same time under the influence of
Von Neumann,
Turing, and others. It was affected too by the development of
information theory, work on which had emanated from the Bell Telephone Company under the influence of C. E.
Shannon and W. Weaver. This work described the principles involved in communication between any 'source' and 'sink'. Meaning was irrelevant to the measurement of information encoded, transmitted, and decoded, in a generally noisy channel. Channel capacity and optimum coding procedures were all considered, and the whole development was incorporated into the cybernetic mode of thought.
Wiener himself made use of time series and other statistical techniques, also involving Gibbsian theory. Information and its processing, in all its aspects, was seen to apply to a wide range of phenomena both organic and inorganic, including human speech, genetics, the nervous system, and the muscular system. Philosophical issues were involved in cybernetics, since vitalism was brought into the cybernetic view and its world was thought of as one of
Bergsonian time rather than
Newtonian. Mathematically, Wiener brought group theory and statistical mechanics into the picture and made it a part of the bulwark of what was primarily an attempt to show that man was a complex 'machine'. The language of the computer (originally binary code) was likened to the language of the nervous system and gave rise to the development of automata known as logical nets. This was carried out by two other members of the cybernetic group,
Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.
Yet another component of the cybernetic viewpoint was that of servo-systems. It was recognized that
feedback was essential to learning, and that the sort of adaptive control typified by a thermostat must operate in all animals, and especially human beings. It was recognized too that there were higher-level feedbacks which, as it were, adjusted the thermostat settings. The idea of man being a 'machine' had existed for years before Wiener's cybernetics. Democritus in early Greek times, Diderot,
Helvétius,
La Mettrie, and many others, including Mark Twain, had thought the same, but Wiener was the first person to give genuine evidence to support such a view. He saw human beings as encompassed by the same basic principles as other animals, and this included self-organization and self-reproduction.
Wiener also wrote a number of articles, with Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow, on the philosophical aspects of cybernetics. The most controversial of these dealt with teleology as purposiveness, and attempts to justify a relatively simple feedback control system as necessary to scientific explanation. That teleological explanation is now widely accepted, as part of scientific explanation, is due mainly to him, even if the precise detail of such a form of explanation is still controversial and goes beyond what he originally envisaged. There are now new subdivisions of cybernetics in which automata theory is more developed mathematically, though the close association with philosophy is maintained. The central core of Wiener's cybernetics has been developed under the label '
artificial intelligence'. This has taken over the concept of 'man as a machine' and, with it, extensive theories of
sensation,
perception,
learning,
thinking,
problem solving, and language have been built up, all in mathematical and 'machine-like' terms. Wiener's most famous book,
Cybernetics (1947; rev. edn. 1961), started a scientific revolution which has, as he would have wished, evolved and grown, and yet retains the central idea that human beings, however highly complex and sophisticated they might be, are 'machines' in that they can, in principle, be built in the laboratory.
(Published 1987)See also mind–body problem: philosophical theories.
— Frank George