Norbert Wiener has some zingers in this one. Also some surprising, borderline on weird ideas, as old books do. Perhaps the essence behind these ideas aren’t that weird?

I read the 2nd edition revised, 1954. You can find it on Internet Archive.

I, Cybernetics in History

The word “cybernetics” comes from the Greek word κυβερνήτες, which we derive the name of a popular open-source container orchestration system from.

Wiener characterizes cybernetics as the study of “control and communication” and argues for why:

When I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him, and when he com­municates back with me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me. When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. Furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed. (p.16)

…Feels icky to think of a casual chat with friends as control.

II, Progress and Entropy

…in which Wiener contemplates good and evil, and discusses the end of the world.

If you read one chapter from this book, read this one.

Maxwell’s demon decreases local entropy by utilizing information. We are similar. Even though the total entropy of the universe can only increase, and heat death is inevitable, we can create islands of locally decreasing entropy, of order, progress, heaven on earth.

Thus the question of whether to interpret the second law of thermodynamics pessimistically or not depends on the importance we give to the universe at large, on the one hand, and to the islands of locally decreasing entropy which we find in it, on the other. (p.39)

In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity. (p.40)

Those entropy talks might remind you of e/acc. However, unlike techno-optimists today, his introspection on progress and technology is rather somber:

We are the slaves of our technical improvement… We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Prog­ress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. (p.46)

Does progress inevitably lead to ruin? Only if we are blind and passive to the new challenges progress bring us. Here’s the rest of the beautiful final paragraph of chapter 2.

…I am convinced that once we become aware of the new needs that a new environment has imposed upon us, as well as the new means of meeting these needs that are at our disposal, it may be a long time yet be­ fore our civilization and our human race perish, though perish they will even as all of us are born to die. How­ever, the prospect of a final death is far from a com­plete frustration of life and this is equally true for a civilization and for the human race as it is for any of its component individuals. May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction be­longing to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness. (p.47)

These reflections on progress are evergreen. They must also have been quite relevant for Wiener’s time, right after WW2, when men committed atrocities with the flames of progress.

III, Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior

Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be ex­pected from it.

This chapter argues for this view by pointing out that humans are more intelligent than ants due to physiological differences. (paraphrasing) Differences include: humans are soft with hard bones inside, while ants are surrounded by exoskeleton which hardens after they reach adulthood; humans are neotenic, i.e. retain more traits of a young human, while ants go through metamorphosis.

IV, The Mechanism and History of Language

Fun chapter if you are into language, or NLP, or language models, or are reading this in 2024, which makes it safe to assume you are into language models.

the process of transmitting information may involve several consecutive stages of transmission following one an­ other in addition to the final or effective stage; and between any two of these there will be an act of trans­lation, capable of dissipating information. That infor­mation may be dissipated but not gained, is, as we have seen, the cybernetic form of the second law of thermodynamics. (p.78)

Wiener discussed different levels / aspects of language: Phonetic, and semantic.

…the English of an intelligent foreigner whose pronunciation is marked by the country of his birth, or who speaks literary English, will be semantically good and phonetically bad. On the other hand, the average synthetic after-dinner speech is phonetically good and semantically bad. (p.79)

…and one more thing.

There is a third level of communication, which rep­resents a translation partly from the semantic level and partly from the earlier phonetic level. This is the trans­lation of the experiences of the individual, whether conscious or unconscious, into actions which may be observed externally. We may call this the behavior level of language. (p.81)

This behavior level seems to point to e.g. body language. Or really any language that doesn’t rely on phonetics and semantics? I’m not sure. Does the “body language of cars” count? These behaviors do have semantic meanings (i.e. hug means affection) so is it really a separate thing from semantics?

Anyways -

Wiener then discusses how humans have the gift of the power of speech. The gift to learn language, instead of follow a preprogrammed system of communication as other species do. (Note that this is different from Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: Wiener here only argued for human’s innate ability to acquire language, whereas Universal Grammar hypothesizes innate constraints on the grammar of possible human languages)

To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most dis­tinctive achievement of man. (p.85)

Wiener then discusses a history of philology (study of language). Interesting bit here: Darwinianism motivated philologist to find a common root language for all languages, but that’s not how language works: language is whatever people speak.

Next up, society:

Among primitive groups the size of the community for an effective communal life is restricted by the diffi­culty of transmitting language. (p.91)

It is even possible to maintain that modern communication, which forces us to adjudicate the in­ternational claims of different broadcasting systems and different airplane nets, has made the World State inevitable. (p.92)

You don’t say!

On p.93 Wiener has an interesting framing of different types of language evolution as a game. For normal communicative discourse, the enemy is the natural tendency for communication to be noisy. For forensic discourses (e.g. the law), the enemy are agents who actively work to erase meaning.

V, Organization as the Message

…In which Wiener contemplates the nature of our souls and the feasibility of teleportation.

The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis. (p.95)

We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpet­uate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message. (p.96)

So, we are not the material that makes up of us; these molecules come and go. We are a pattern of information in homeostasis, maintaining some kind of consistency.

At the same time I suppose we are also not completely in stasis; we learn, change, to adapt to new environments.

I find this a compelling view, fitting into many observations of ourselves nicely. For example, when I describe my teenage self as “a different person”, I’m not referring to how past and present me are made up of different molecules, but to how we have different thoughts, behaviors, preferences. We are two different patterns of information. Another example is that when I fall asleep, I lose consciousness, but this is not death, for there are mechanisms that perpetuate the pattern that is myself after awakening.

What this view did not discuss is the origin of subjective experiences; the pattern is described as self-reinforcing, but not self-referential. Douglas Hofstadter’s work seems to be about this.

To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being every­where. (.p97)

The individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. (p.102)

Such a cool line. I wonder if this is what inspired the cosmology of my favorite webcomic, Kill Six Billion Demons.

VI, Law and Communication

Justice is only possible when there is no ambiguity in the interpretation of laws and contracts. The ambiguity can come from different people having different interpretation, for example when Native Americans and the European settlers understand land right differently. The ambiguity can also come from the law itself having confused purposes: the same criminal punishment law serves to deterrent, removal, expiation, or reform, four very different purposes.

The problem of law is cybernetic:

The technique of the interpretation of past judgments must be such that a lawyer should know, not only what a court has said, but even with high probability what the court is going to say. Thus the problems of law may be con­sidered communicative and cybernetic-that is, they are problems of orderly and repeatable control of certain critical situations. (p.110)