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21 Cybernetics
1) The Parallel Nature of Feedback in Living Individuals and Communication MachinesIt is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage of their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine.In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. (Wiener, 1954, pp. 26-27)[The job of the cyberneticist] is the study of information transfer: the converting of information from one form to another-the human voice into radio waves and back into sound once more, or a complex mathematical equation into a set of punched holes on a tape, to be fed into a computer and then into a set of traces on reels of magnetic tape in the computer's "memory store."... To him, protein synthesis is just such another case. The mechanism for ensuring the exact replication of a protein chain by a new cell is that of transferring the information about the protein structure from the parent to the daughter cell. (Rose, 1970, p. 162)The theme of all these tales [("Fisherman and the Jinni" in the Thousand Nights and a Night; The Sorcerer's Apprentice; and "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs)] is the danger of magic. This seems to lie in the fact that the operation of magic is singularly literal-minded, and that if it grants you anything at all it grants what you ask for, not what you should have asked for or what you intend....The magic of automation, and in particular the magic of an automatization in which the devices learn, may be expected to be similarly literal-minded. If you are playing a game according to certain rules and set the playing-machine to play for victory, you will get victory if you get anything at all, and the machine will not pay the slightest attention to any consideration except victory according to the rules. If you are playing a war game with a certain conventional interpretation of victory, victory will be the goal at any cost, even that of the extermination of your own side, unless this condition of survival is explicitly contained in the definition of victory according to which you program the machine. (Wiener, 1964, pp. 59-60)Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Cybernetics
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