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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from teleology
from Gordon Pask
  • One of many odd figures in cybernetics . I met him once (via Ted Nelson) and he offered me a little pink pill which I assume was LSD. Unfortunately at the time I was pretty straight (this was when I was still in high school in Chicago) and so I flushed it.
from Infrastructure of intention
from Gregory Bateson
from Agency Made Me Do It
  • I'm using "agency" as kind of a magic word to open up the contested terrain where physical causality and the mental intersect. This is not new, this is pretty much the same function that "cybernetics" and "artificial intelligence" serve – but despite the hopes of their founders, they haven't really unified these domains. I don't really have the ambition of solving a problem that has bedeviled western thought for millennia, but I kind of want to take my own personal stab at it.
from Weird Studies/Patreon/Animism
  • Converging on Spinoza, who sounds like my kind of guy (have to admit while I have read bits here and there I have no coherent model of his thought). Made me wonder if there was any connection between him and cybernetics, particularly the Gregory Bateson branch, and found k-punk: Spinoza, k-Punk, neuropunk,
    • Mark Fisher thought Spinoza was the opposite of Bergson interestingly enough
      • “Emotions don’t just happen, they emerge out of fields of cause and effect which can be analysed. This means that feelings can be engineered, in a hyperstitional spiral, which has more to do with what Justin Barton calls “lucidity” than with what academic philosophers call Reason. I’m using the term “emotion” rather than “affect” here, very deliberately. Affect as it is now routinely used by academics is pretty much completely opposed to what Spinoza meant by it. The problem begins with Deleuze, and the fatal splicing of Spinoza’s project of emotional engineering with Henri Bergson’s vitalist cult of creativity and unpredictability. It’s hard to think of thinkers more opposed in their fundamental presuppositions and orientations than Spinoza and Henri Bergson — and more or less everything that is wrong with Deleuze, in my view, is tied up with his infatuation with Henri Bergson. It is Henri Bergsonism, rather than Spinozism, which is the true ideology of late capitalism.”
from Introduction to Inventive Minds
  • The importance of goals and the design of goal-directed machinery was one of the founding principles of AI and its ancestor, cybernetics. Essay 6 contains a short explanation of the General Problem Solver (GPS), an early goal-directed AI architecture. Marvin’s psychological theories (SOM/TEM) may be seen as designs for how minds could contain and manage systems of goals: innate drives, learned goals, sub-goals, interpersonal goals, and meta-goals, all interoperating to produce intelligent behavior.
from Weird Studies/Request List
from Weird Studies/Colin Wilson
  • Wilson is future-oriented rather than past-oriented, sees the occult as blending with science to produce the knowledge of the future. Mentions cybernetics as a start.
from On Purpose
  • I flipped the bozo-bit on this book when I realized that it did not mention cybernetics or any adjacent fields or thinkers. This kind of confused me to be honest – I would think that it would at least rate a mention in a book that purports to be a survey of thinking about purpose. Just seems kind of weird to ignore it. But another prominent book by a philosopher that covered purposefulness in general had the same gap, despite long sections on teleology. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity by Korsgaard. I guess these fields don't talk to each other.
from Agency: notes and references
  • cybernetics may be definitionally the science of how agency emerges from a mechanical world.
from weird computer science
  • cybernetics, which is sort of AIs dark-horse cousin, was kind of inherently weird, it was almost a science of the weird. Gordon Pask, who I met once, was a pretty weird dude.
from Marvin Minsky/on Cybernetics
  • MINSKY: Well, surely it was extremely important in an evolutionary way. cybernetics developed many ideas that were powerful enough to challenge the religious and vitalistic traditions that had for so long protected us from changing how we viewed ourselves. These changes were so radical as to undermine cybernetics itself. So much so that the next generation of computational pioneers—the ones who aimed more purposefully toward Artificial Intelligence—set much of cybernetics aside.
from Protocols/Symposium 2025
  • The field seems to echo the mid-20th-century cybernetics movement in many ways, most obviously sharing an emphasis on systems and a focus on ideas that can cut across natural, social, and technological domains. Also in its somewhat nebulous goals, which include revisioning the world by seeing patterns that already exist, understanding how they work, and ultimately learning to control and create them. The basic subject matter is overlapping if not exactly the same (processes, control, systems). The connection is acknowledged.
from The purpose of second-order cybernetics, Glanville
  • It may turn out that the cybernetics of cybernetics requires us to radically rethink the meaning of goal and purpose so that systems become ineffable.
    • Yeah too much rapture about the ineffable in this field.
from Weird Studies/Borges
  • Idealism: could it be like a virus? The universe is materialist, but idealism comes along...that is still metaphysical materialism as far as I am concerned. Oh the term cybernetics and emergence comes up, that's good. (around 19:00)
    • Does this change "the nature of reality"? There's no time without consciousness (questionable) so the world is idealist from the beginning (cite of Ægypt, interesting).
    • Do fossils exist? (Sigh, this discussion sounds dumb)
from agency
from Marvin Minsky/on Cybernetics
  • MINSKY: Yes, indeed. Those new ideas were already starting to grow before computers created a more urgent need. Before programming languages, mathematicians such as Emil Post, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing already had many related ideas. In the 1940s these ideas began to spread, and the Macy Conference publications were the first to reach more of the technical public. In the same period, there were similar movements in psychology, as Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Jean Piaget also tried to imagine advanced architectures for "mental computation." In the same period, in neurology, there were my own early mentors—Nicholas Rashevsky, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, Norbert Wiener, and their followers—and all those new ideas began to coalesce under the name "cybernetics." Unfortunately, that new domain was mainly dominated by continuous mathematics and feedback theory. This made cybernetics slow to evolve more symbolic computational viewpoints, and the new field of Artificial Intelligence headed off to develop distinctly different kinds of psychological models.
from pantheism
  • cybernetics as an attempt at a scientific pantheism, sort of? Esp the Bateson variety.
from Protocols/2025

  • Protocols and cybernetics

    • The protocol movement has some loose resemblance to cybernetics (jointly thinking about natural and artificial systems eg) but definitely from a different era (and if the underlying energy of cybernetics was from WWII, the same from this community is from crypto, the funding comes from the Ethereum Foundation).
    • (from email to a friend – I think this explains my attraction to the field)
Twin Pages

cybernetics

30 Oct 2021 - 27 Aug 2025
Open in Logseq
      • Source: Hexen Tarot Deck
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    • Heidegger complained that cybernetics was replacing philosophy, but I always thought that was a good thing, because cybernetics was effective while philosophy had been stuck on the same stupid problems for thousands of years.
      • Cybernetics for the Twenty-First Century: An Interview with Philosopher Yuk Hui - Journal 102
        • YH: In Recursivity and Contingency, I try to show why Heidegger was right concerning the end of metaphysics and also why it is necessary to think beyond Heidegger. In 1966, journalists from Der Spiegel asked Heidegger what comes after philosophy. He replied: cybernetics. The organic is, for Heidegger, nothing but the mechanical-technological triumph of modernity over nature. This is why I think the organic mode of thinking, and the fields it has given rise to such as ecology, cybernetics, Gaia theory, etc., are manifestations of this “end.” The question is how to think beyond this end.
    • Even cybernetics, the interdisciplinary study of communication and control, is the subject of conflicting interpretations. It is well documented that some of the top scientific minds of the postwar era were drawn to the field and its promise of universality, and that cybernetic ideas on feedback, control, systems analysis, and information transmission shaped work in a number of fields. For example, cybernetic thinking influenced the trajectory of operations research, computer engineering, control engineering, complex systems, psychology, and neuroscience. Yet few scientists today identify themselves as cyberneticians first and foremost. ...Popular misunderstandings of cybenetics have led members of the scientific community to view the term with disdain, and cybernetics is not part of the lexicon used by government funding agencies. Even in the 1950s, arguably the heyday of the field, members of the scientific community viewed it as shallow because of its interdisciplinary reach, criticized it for lacking quantitative rigor, and claimed its methodology consisted of little more than making analogies. It did not help that in the popular imagination cybernetics was often linked to science fiction or fads such as Dianetics, the theory on the relationship of mind and body developed by L. Ron Hubbard in 1950.