[From Dan Palmer (2001.02.10.12:07 Melbourne Time)]
Hello PCTers!
I thought I'd drop by and see what was happening.
In light of Bruce's comments, I thought the following extract from a
1976 interview by Stewart Brand with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead
(present at the Macy conferences) might be of interest:
"Gregory Bateson: The link-up between the behavioral sciences spread
very slowly and hasn't really spread yet. The cyberneticians in the
narrow sense of the word went off into input-output.
Stewart Brand: They went off into computer science.
Gregory Bateson: Computer science is input-output. You've got a box, and
you've got this line enclosing the box, and the science is the science
of these boxes. Now, the essence of Wiener's cybernetics was that the
science is the science of the whole circuit. You see, the diagram ...
Margaret Mead: You'd better verbalize this diagram if it's going to be
on the tape.
Gregory Bateson: Well, you can carry a piece of paper all the way home
with you. The electric boys have a circuit like that, and an event here
is reported by a sense organ of some kind, and affects something that
puts in here. Then you now cut off there and there, then you say there's
an input and an output. Then you work on the box. What Wiener says is
that you work on the whole picture and its properties. Now, there may be
boxes inside here, like this of all sorts, but essentially your
ecosystem, your organism-plus-environment, is to be considered as a
single circuit.
Stewart Brand: The bigger circle there ...
Gregory Bateson: And you're not really concerned with an input-output,
but with the events within the bigger circuit, and you are part of the
bigger circuit. It's these lines around the box (which are just
conceptual lines after all) which mark the difference between the
engineers and ...
Margaret Mead: ... and between the systems people and general systems
theory, too"
Quarterly, 10, 32-44.
Cheers,
Dan Palmer
Bruce Nevin wrote:
···
From: Brand, S. (1976). For God's sake, Margaret. CoEvolutionary
[From Bruce Nevin (2001.02.09.1836 EST)]
Chris Cherpas (2001.02.09.1340 PT)
At 01:41 PM 02/09/2001 -0800, Chris Cherpas wrote:
>I don't see
> information as necessarily being a part of cybernetics:
> plain old physical forces combine to form negative feedback
> control without any "information."
>
> What happened?
One legitimate basis for the connection is that the simplest element of
information is a difference that is transformed into another difference.
This is to say (among other things) that the identification of information
with text or language or digital computation is also incorrect, and for the
same reasons. The words are a bit misleading in this, since "a difference"
seems discrete; perhaps rather a change that is transformed into a
different change. A change in room temperature is transformed into a change
in position of an ampoule, is transformed into a (now discrete) change in
position of a blob of mercury, and so on around the loop of a
thermostatically controlled temperature-control system to a (now analog)
change in ambient temperature. This conception of information is of course
Bateson's, as is the associated conception of mind immanent in nature.
Not to say that all of cybernetics-talk has this legimacy.
Bruce Nevin