The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Preface

• This random element, this organic incompleteness, is one which without too violent a figure of speech we consider evil.
• As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs universe order is least probable, chaos most probable.
• But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.

Cybernetics and History

• It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and mad, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
• The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
• Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment.
• Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
• The control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is know as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors - that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

Progress and Entropy

• We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information received.
• In 19th C physics, it seemed to cost nothing to get information. Modern physics, however, recognizes that Maxwell's demon can only gain the information with which it opens or closes the door from something like a sense organ, which for these purposes is an eye.
• In a system which is not in equilibrium, or in part of such a system, entropy need not increase. It may, in fact, decrease locally.
• Machines also contribute to a local and temporary building up of information, notwithstanding their crude and imperfect organization compared with that of ourselves.
• The nervous system and the automatic machines are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the basis of the decisions they have made in the past.
• The synapse in the living organism corresponds to the switching devise in the machine.
• There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.
• What many of us fail to realize is that the last 400 years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased master over nature which, on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.
• 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. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.

Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior

• In these higher forms of communicative organisms the environment, considered as the past experience of the individual, can modify the patterns of behavior into one which in some sense or other will deal more effectively with the future environment.
• In other words, the organism is not like the clockwork monad of Leibnitz with its pre-established harmony with the universe, but actually seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as in the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible.
• Learning, like more primitive forms of feedback is a process which reads differently forward and backward in time. It moves ahead from a known past into an unknown future, and this future is not interchangeable with that past.
• Administrative officials, whether of a government or a university or a corporation, should take part in a two-way stream of communication, and not merely in one descending from the top. Otherwise, the top officials may find that they have based their policy on a complete misconception of the facts that their underlings possess.
• This matter of social feedback is of very great sociological and anthropological interest. The patterns of communication in human societies vary widely.
• It is a thesis of this chapter that this aspiration of the fascist for a human state based on the model of the ant results from a profound misapprehension both of the nature of the ant and of the nature of man.
• Variety and possibility are inherent in the human sensorium - and are indeed the key to man's most noble flights - because variety and possibility belong to the very structure of the human organism.
• These skeletons of bone or cartilage contain a great deal of tissue which is not in any strict sense alive, but throughout this mass of intercellular tissue there is a living structure of cells, cellular membranes, and nutritive blood vessels.
• The behavior of an ant is much more a matter of instinct than of intelligence. The physical straitjacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental straitjacket which regulates its pattern of 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.
• Theoretically, if we could build a machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings.
• If we compare man with the great apes, his closest relatives, we find that mature man in hair, head, shape, body proportions, bony structure, muscles, and so on, is more like the newborn ape than the adult ape. Among the animals, man is a Peter Pan who never grows up.
• Man thus spends what may amount to 40% of his normal life as a learner, again for reasons that have to do with his physical structure. It is as completely natural for a human society to be based on learning as for an ant society to be based on an inherited pattern.
• This form of learning (about whether a whole policy is successful) is most certainly a feedback, but it is a feedback on a higher level, a feedback of policies and not of simple actions.
• If the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.
• The adjustment of the general plan of pointing and firing the gun according to the particular system of motions which the target has made is essentially an act of learning. It is a change in the taping of the gun's computing mechanism, which alters not so much the numerical data, as the process by which they are interpreted. It is, in fact, a very general sort of feedback, affecting the whole method of behavior of the instrument.
• For practical purposes, machines that measure, as opposed to machines that count, are very greatly limited in their precision. Add this to the prejudices of the physiologist in favor of all-or-nothing action, and we see why the greater part of the work which has been done on the mechanical simulacra of the brain has been on machines which are more or less on a digital basis.
• For several centuries, science, dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify, neglected the modern impulse to search for ways in which phenomena functioned.
• It is interesting to know that the sort of phenomenon which is recorded subjectively as emotion may not be merely a useless epiphenomenon of nervous action, but may control some essential stage in learning and other processes.

The Mechanism and History of Language

• In general, one would expect the language of animals to convey emotions first, things next, and the more complicated relations of things not at all.
• Even the most vocal members of the sub-human world fail to complete with man in ease of giving significance to new sounds, in repertory of sounds carrying a specific codification in extent of linguistic memory, and above all in the ability to form symbols for relations, classes, and other entities of Russell's "higher logical type".
• It may seem curious to the reader that we admit machines to the field of language and yet almost totally deny language to the ants. Nevertheless, in constructing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community.
• The process of transmitting information may involve several consecutive stages of transmission following one another 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.
• In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being.
• Three distinct levels of human communication:
  • Phonetic - the ear and that part of the cerebral mechanism which is in permanent and rigid connection with the inner ear.
  • Semantic - concerned with meaning. This apparatus neither receives nor translates the language word by word, but idea by idea, and often still more generally. In a certain sense it is in a position to call on the whole of past experience in its transformations, and these long-time carry-overs are not a trivial part of its work.
  • Behavioral - the translation of the experiences of the individual, whether conscious or unconscious, into actions which may be observed externally.
• If a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.
• In man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming; but that the particular language used is a matter which has to be learned in each special case. It apparently is built into the brain itself, that we are to have a preoccupation with codes and with the sounds of speech and that the preoccupation with codes can be extended from those dealing with speech to those that concern themselves with visual stimuli.
• The gift of speech does not go back to a universal Adamite language disrupted in the Tower of Babel. It is strictly a psychological impulse, and is not the gift of speech, but the gift of the power of speech.
• There is a critical period during which speech is most readily learned; and if this period is passed over without contact with one's fellow human beings, of whatever sort they may be, the learning of language becomes limited, slow, and highly imperfect.
• 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.
• Semantically significant information in the machine as well as in man is information which gets through to an activating mechanism in the system that receives it, despite man's and/or nature's attempts to subvert it. From the point of view of Cybernetics, semantics defines the extent of meaning and controls its loss in a communications system.