vol III Development:
Chapter 3: Cybernetics
page 0: Introduction
The idea of this site is very simple: we are exploring the idea that God and the Universe are identical. This is contrary to the position taken by most churches including the Catholic Church, which sees God as a mysterious being completely other than the visible world.
I imagine that this position is incomprehensible to a traditional Catholic theologian. If nothing else, God is absolutely simple and eternal. The world is extremely complex and never at rest. This view dates from thousands of years ago, and is very deeply entrenched. It places an absolute gulf between God and the world.
But what if it is false? God, says Aquinas, is pure act, or as Aristotle would say pure energeia, the most dynamic being of all. Over the last few centuries, physicists and mathematicians have realized that dynamic systems have fixed points. These points are not outside the dynamics, as the ancients like Parmenides thought, but part if the dynamics, dynamic points that do not move. This idea opens the way to reconciling the unity of a purely dynamic God with the multiplicity of fixed points, including ourselves, that we observe in our world. Aquinas 13: Whether God exists?
Traditional religions tacitly or explicitly rely on the creator outside to have designed and built the Universe. Here we take the view that what we see are fixed points of the living God whose deterministic relationships (such as they are) are guaranteed by the dynamic consistency of God. Kauffman: At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity
We see mathematics and science as the study of these fixed points. The transfinite computer network is a formal structure which is large enough to provide a memory space for all consistent structure. There is no limit to the complexity or size of the transfinite numbers. Further, the most powerful way to make deterministic transformations is a formal computer, modelled mathematically as the universal Turing machine.
We now begin the task of understanding the general dynamics of this model and exploring the relationship between this formal model and the world of our experience. We do this in two stages. First we explore the dynamics of transfinite network in this chapter on cybernetics, then we apply this to the observable Universe beginning with the lower layers of the universal structure studied by physics and moving up through biology and psycholgy to theology. Cybernetics - Wikipedia, Physics - Wikipedia
From the formal point of view, what we experience are messages from our environment, internal and external, since our own bodies are part of our environment. We use these messages to steer our paths through life. Cybernetics is the science of communication and control. These are in effect duals of one another, insofar as for one system to communicate with another is to control it, by 'putting ideas into its head'. Wiener: Cybernetics
For sentient beings, movement is an answer to pain. Pain is the experience associated with error. To be trapped (as by social forces in an unsatisfactory relationship) is to be trapped in pain, as is to be incarcerated, tied up, tortured or in any other form of physical or mental bondage. Organizations like the Roman Catholic Church and despotic governments trap people with unrealistic dogma and prevent motion by promising even greater pain if their victims object. Change is necessary to correct error, a position fundamentally denied by fundamentalism. Pain - Wikipedia
The transfinite computer network describes an enormous space of
possibility. In applying this model to the real world, we may see that the 'laws' of physics and biology represent symmetries (ie fixed points) in this gigantic space. Our purpose in this chapter is to find ways to navigate in this space and the limits to navigation arising from ignorance, uncertainty and want of power. Model page 7: A transfinite computer network
Cybernetics (from the Greek word for steering, government or control) is the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Since control and communication are present everywhere, and every level of complexity, cybernetics applies to the whole world. This application is the essence of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Cybernetics has
much to teach us about guiding ourselves through peaceful and prosperous life. Lovelock
Living things are clearly capable of effective control of themselves and parts of their environment. Their survival depends upon it. Controlled biological processes range from molecular events (typical duration 1 picosecond) to the evolution of creatures like ourselves (typical duration 3 billion years).
Cybernetics looks at control and communication in an abstract way that applies to any entity, be it a physical particle, a person or a galaxy. Cybernetics as part of engineering began, we might say, when James Watt (1736-1819) sought a way to control the speed of his steam engines in the face of varying loads and boiler pressures. His answer was the mechanical governor.
Centrifugal
governor - Wikipedia, Ashby
The governor
measures the speed of the engine and compares it to an ideal speed. If the speed is too low, it provides more steam to speed the engine up. If the speed is too high, the governor reduces steam to slow the engine down. James Clerk
Maxwell made a mathematical analysis of the governor, and determined
the conditions under which it would be maintain a constant speed. American Society for Cybernetics
A common fault with controlled systems is that they oscillate in
an undesirable fashion and sometime break down entirely. When the
engine is going too fast, the governor may shut the steam down so much
that the engine begins to run too slow. This causes the governor to turn
the steam up so much that it goes too fast. If the demand for power
is too great, the engine may not be able to meet it even at full
throttle. Control theory seeks to discover the conditions for stable control, and to show, where possible, the best way to achieve it.
Human societies thrive on stability. We
seek to damp out the cycles of feast and famine, wealth and poverty,
war and peace and and replace them with a steady and predictable
environment that enables us to feel secure. Of course, the chances
of life upset our best laid plans, but cybernetic methods help to
reveal how much control is possible, and how to improve the
governance of our selves and our communities. Barnes
We also enjoy change and the excitement it may bring, but change without disaster, bounded change. We enjoy the excitement riding a roller coaster, but the vast majority of us don't want the pain of a crash should the roller coaster go out of control. Here the control system must allow the desired changes while preventing the undesirable.
It is clear that much of the current human situation is in need of change. How can we achieve such change without disasters like the war, famine and disease which often accompany revolutions? This is the cybernetic question at the theological scale. Gaddis
(revised 6 January 2019)
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Further readingBooks
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Ashby, W Ross, An Introduction to Cybernetics, Methuen 1956, 1964 'This book is intended to provide [an introduction to cybernetics]. It starts from common-place and well understood concepts, and proceeds step by step to show how these concepts can be made exact, and how they can be developed until they lead into such subjects as feedback, stability, regulation, ultrastability, information, coding, noise and other cybernetic topics.'
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Axelrod, Robert, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton University Press 1997
Amazon
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Barnes, Peter, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2006 Amazon Editorial Reviews
Book Description
'In Capitalism 3.0, Peter Barnes redefines the debate about the costs and benefits of the operating system known as the free market. Despite clunky features, early versions of capitalism were somewhat successful. The current model, however, is packed with proprietary features that benefit a lucky few while threatening to crash the system for everyone else. Far from being "free," the market is accessible only to huge corporations that reap the benefits while passing the costs on to the consumer. Barnes maps out a better way. Drawn from his own career as a highly successful entrepreneur, the author's vision of capitalism includes alternatives to the current profit-driven corporate approach, new legal entities, and a more responsible use of markets and property rights. Capitalism 3.0 offers viable solutions to some of the country's most pressing economic, environmental, and social concerns.'
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Barnett, S, and R G Cameron, Introduction to Mathematical Control Theory, Clarendon Press 1985 Jacket: '... This book remains the concise readable account of some basic mathematical aspects of control, concentrating on state-space methods, and emphasizing points of mathematical interest. ... '
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Beale, R, and T Jackson, Neural Computing: An Introduction, Adam Hilger 1991 Jacket: '. . . starts from basics and goes on to cover all the most important approaches to the subject. . . . The capabilities, advantages and disadvantages of each model are discussed as are possible applications of each. The relationship of the models developed to the brain and its functions are also explored.'
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Brillouin, Leon, Science and Information Theory, Academic 1962 Introduction: 'A new territory was conquered for the sciences when the theory of information was recently developed. . . . Physics enters the picture when we discover a remarkable likeness between information and entropy. . . . The efficiency of an experiment can be defined as the ratio of information obtained to the associated increase in entropy. This efficiency is always smaller than unity, according to the generalised Carnot principle. . . . '
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Dalenoort, G J, The Paradigm of Self-Organisation: Current Trends in Self Organisation, Gordon and Breach 1989 Jacket: 'This volume discusses the principles and mechanisms of self-organisation in a range of processes and disciplines, providing a unique and characteristic multidisciplinary approach.
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Gaddis, John Lewis, The Cold War: A New History, The Penguin Press 2005 Jacket: 'Many will remember what it was like to live under the shadow of the Cold War: the ever-present anxiety that at some point, because of some miscalculation or act of hubris, we might find ourselve sin the middle of a nuclear holocaust . . . How did this terrible conflict arise? How did wartime allies so quickly become deadly foes after 1945 and divide the world into opposing camps, each armed to the teeth? And how, suddenly, did it all come to an end? Only now that the Cold War has been over for fifteen years can we begin to find a convincing perspective on it. John Lewis Gaddis's masterly book is the first full, major history of the whole conflict and explains not just what happened, but why it happened . . . Gaddis has synthesized all the most recent scholarship, but has also used minutes from Politburo meetings, startling information from recently opened Soviet and Asian archives, ... and above all the words of the leading participants themselves -- showing what was realy on the mind of each, with a very dramatic immediacy. . . .'
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Kauffman, Stuart, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity, Oxford University Press 1995 Preface: 'As I will argue in this book, natural selection is important, but it has not laboured alone to craft the fine architectures of the biosphere . . . The order of the biological world, I have come to believe . . . arises naturally and spontaneously because of the principles of self organisation - laws of complexity that we are just beginning to uncover and understand.'
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Lovelock, James, Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth, W W Norton 1995 'This book describes a set of observations about the life of our planet which may, one day, be recognised as one of the major discontinuities in human thought. If Lovelock turns out to be right in his view of things, as I believe he is, we will be viewing the Earth as a coherent system of life, self regulating and self-changing, a sort of immense living organism.' Lewis Thomas
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Sigmund, Karl, Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour, Oxford UP 1993 Jacket: 'This book takes us on a tour through the games and computer simulations that are helping us to understand the ecology, evolution and behaviour of real life - from cat and mouse to cellular automata, from the battle of the sexes to artificial life, from poker to prisoner's dilemma.'
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Tanenbaum, Andrew S, Computer Networks, Prentice Hall International 1996 Preface: 'The key to designing a computer network was first enunciated by Julius Caesar: Divide and Conquer. The idea is to design a network as a sequence of layers, or abstract machines, each one based upon the previous one. . . . This book uses a model in which networks are divided into seven layers. The structure of the book follows the structure of the model to a considerable extent.'
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Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press 1996 The classic founding text of cybernetics.
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Links
American Society for Cybernetics, Origin of Cybernetics, 'Many of the concepts included today in cybernetics had their origins long before the word "cybernetics" was associated with them. Self-regulating devices were constructed as early as several hundred years B.C. In the late 1700s Watt's steam engine had a governor. In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published an article on governors. In the 1940s the study of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort. Two key articles were published in 1943 -- "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow and "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.
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Aquinas 13, Summa: I 2 3: Does God exist?, I answer that the existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. . . . The third way is taken from possibility and necessity . . . The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. . . . The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. back |
ASC, American Society for Cybernetics, '"Use the word `cybernetics', Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments."
Widely quoted; attributed to Claude Shannon in a letter to Norbert Wiener in the 1940's.'
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Centrifugal governor - Wikipedia, Centrifugal governor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A centrifugal governor is a specific type of governor that controls the speed of an engine by regulating the amount of fuel admitted, so as to maintain a near constant speed whatever the load or fuel supply conditions. It uses the principle of proportional control.' back |
Cybernetics - Wikipedia, Cybernetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is relevant to the study of systems, such as mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop; that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in that system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change, originally referred to as a "circular causal" relationship.' back |
Emre Telatar, A mathematical theory of communication: Claude E Shannon, 'Claude Shannon's ``A mathematical theory of communication'' was first published in two parts in the July and October 1948 editions of the Bell System Technical Journal. ... Here you can find a PostScript (460 Kbytes), gzipped PostScript (146 Kbytes) and pdf (358 Kbytes) version of Shannon's paper. PDF files can be viewed by Adobe's acrobat reader. Tarred and gzipped contents of the directory (63 Kbytes) that contain the LaTeX code for the paper is also available.' back |
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Computer Society, 'With nearly 100,000 members, the IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading organization of computer professionals. Founded in 1946, it is the largest of the 36 societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The Computer Society's vision is to be the leading provider of technical information and services to the world's computing professionals.'
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Pain - Wikipedia, Pain - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Pain is an unpleasant sensation often caused by intense or damaging stimuli such as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut, and bumping the "funny bone."
It motivates withdrawal from damaging or potentially damaging situations, protection of a damaged body part while it heals, and avoidance of similar experiences in the future.' back |
Physics - Wikipedia, Physics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Physics (from Ancient Greek: φύσις physis "nature") is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.' back |
Santa Fe Institute, Welcome to the Santa Fe Institute, Home page: 'The Santa Fe Institute is a private, non-profit, multidisciplinary research and education center, founded in 1984. ... Operating as a small, visiting institution, SFI seeks to catalyze new collaborative, projects that break down the barriers between the traditional disciplines, to spread its ideas and methodologies to other individuals and encourage the practical applications of its results.' back |
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