Cybernetics, Society, Science and Technology

The following is taken primarily from “Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science” by Philip Mirowski (2002). Philip Mirowski is Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Mirowski (2002) provides an historical account of the influence of cybernetics and the concept of cybernetic organisms (i.e cyborgs) on a wide variety of sciences that have significant commercial and social impacts. The term cyborg first appeared in a paper in the journal Astronautics in 1960 and refered to “a concept of persons who can free themselves from the constraints of the environment to the extent that they wished” (Clynes, quoted in Mirowski (2002) pg 11).  One of the authors of this paper, Manfred Clynes, was introduced to Cybernetics in the 1950’s.  Clynes was also one of the developers of CAT scanner technology.

Mirowski (2002) states that while this historical note establishes the precedent of the term Cyborg it does not capture its meaning in relation to the sciences.  He suggests that the term should be not be seen as referring to a creature or organism, but rather: “a set of regularities observed in a number of sciences that had their genesis in the postwar period, sciences such as information theory, molecular biology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research, systems ecology, immunology, automata theory, chaotic dynamics and fractal geometry, computational mechanics, socio-biology, artificial life and last, but not least, game theory.”  (pg 12)  Mirowski (2002) claims that most of these sciences shared an incubation period with cybernetics (from the Greek “steersman”), which in the absence of definition can at least be described as follows:

“Cybernetics, then took computer-controlled gun control and layered it in an ontologically indiscriminate fashion across the academic disciplinary board – the world, understood cybernetically, was a world of goal-oriented feedback mechanisms with learning. It is interesting that cybernetics even trumped the servomechanisms line of feedback thought by turning itself into a universal metaphysics, a Theory of Everything, as today’s physicists and cosmologists use the term – a cyborg metaphysics, with no respect for traditional human and nonhuman boundaries, as an umbrella for the proliferation of individual cyborg sciences it claimed to embrace.” (Pickering (1995) cited in Mirowski (2002) pg 12).

Drawing on this Mirowski (2002) goes on to describe cyborg science as follows:

“First and foremost, the cyborg sciences depend on the existence of the computer as a paradigm object for everything from metaphors to assistance in research activities to embodiment of research products … a cyborg science makes convenient use of the fact that the computer itself straddles the divide between the animate and the inanimate, the live and the lifelike, the biological and the inert, the Natural and the Social, and makes use of this fact in order to blur those same boundaries in its target area of expertise.” (pg 13).

Mirowski (2002) states that since World War II:

“Here and there, a cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans and machines, the living and the dead, the active and the inert, meaning and symbol, intention and teleology … Humanity has simultaneously been rendered more machinelike” (pg 13)

Mirowski (2002) argues that with the emergence of cyborg sciences the sharp distinction between “reality” and simulacra (simulation) grows more vague.  Mirowski (2002) talks of the early work of John von Neumann and the application of computers to simulate hydro-dynamics, turbulence and chain-reactions at Los Alamos.  Mirowski (2002) claims that von Neumann vastly extended concepts of mathematical model building believing that he was extracting the logic of systems such that manipulation of the simulation was equivalent to manipulating the phenomenon. He sites as evidence that the computer was changing the very nature of science, and its ambitions, the following quote from the computer scientist R. W Hamming (von Neumann’s contemporary):

“The Los Alamos experience had a great effect on me. First, I saw clearly that I was at best second rate … Second, I saw that the computing approach to the bomb design was essential ... But thinking long and hard on this matter over the years showed me that the very nature of science would change as we look more and more at computer simulations and less at the real world experiments that, traditionally, are regarded as essential … Fourth, there was a computation of whether or not the test bomb would ignite the atmosphere. Thus the test risked, on the basis of a computation, all of life in the known universe (in Duran, 1988, cited by Mirowski (2002) pg 15).

Mirowski also claims that cyborg science “makes ample use of the formalisms of phenomenological thermodynamics as a reservoir of inspiration” (pg 16).  Thus they describe information using the template of entropy and, for example, describe life as a countermand to the tendency to entropic degradation. 

Another aspect of cyborg science is the use of terms such as “information”, “memory” and “computation” as physical concepts to be used in the explanation of natural sciences. Mirowski (2002) argues that this is much more than an artifact of the computer metaphor, but is bound up with other developments. He discusses how Claude Shannon (the famous information theorist) had to divorce information from any connotations of meaning or semantics in order to forge an alliance between entropy and information.  “Memory” thus became a place for holding messages awaiting processing.  The flushing of such memory due to space constraints became associated with the loss of information and in turn with an increase in entropy.  Mirowski (2002) argues that “perhaps the most pervasive influence of the cyborg sciences in modern culture … is to treat “information” as an entity that has ontologically stable properties, preserving its integrity under various transformations.” (pg 16).

Normal sciences, Mirowski (2002) claims, come from a scientist being struck by a brilliantly novel idea in a serendipitous context. Cyborg sciences, on the other hand, are consciously made. Researchers are recruited, paired with collaborators from the life and/or social sciences and supplied with lavish funding and given a problem to work on.  Cyborg science is Big Science, produced through planned co-ordination with structured objectives and explicitly retailed rationales. Military inspiration extends into the heart of the conceptual structures of these sciences: “The military rationale imposed an imperative of “command, control, communications, and information” (C³I) on the questions asked and the solutions proposed” (pg 17). Mirowski (2002) then argues that: “Ultimately, the blurred ontology of the cyborg sciences derives from the need to subject heterogeneous agglomerations of actors, machines, messages, and (let it not be forgotten) opponents to a hierarchical real-time regime of surveillance and control” (pg 17).

 Consequently Mirowski (2002) identifies some characteristics/hallmarks of Cyborg Sciences, as discussed above:

•  the existence of the computer as a paradigm object
• breaching the ramparts between the Natural and the Social, the Human and the Inhuman.
• the lack of distinction between “reality” and simulation
• the distinctive notions of order and disorder rooted in physical thermodynamics
• terms such as “information”, “memory” and “computation” becoming physical concepts.
• the conscious creation of the science rather than spontaneous haphazard creation.

Mirowski (2002) continues on to talk about the different world-views of neo-classical economists and the emerging cyborg-scientists. This is interesting as the neo-classical economics discipline at that time subscribed (and to a large degree still does) to a behaviouralist model where the states of the mind were unknowable and omitted from their model. Instead they adopted the assumption that market participants had “perfect knowledge”, now while this was hotly debated (and still is) this, and some other notions (such as ur-markets) set them up for conflict with cyborg scientists operating in the economics discipline.  

Rather than deal with the intangible “knowledge” of the neo-classicals, cyborg scientists set off defining “information”. They took this beyond information’s practical base of transmitting signals and decrypting ciphers, as in the war, and extended its context bringing in the concepts of redundancy and noise, which could be used to either degrade or improve a signal.  Neo-classicals could not accept this. Noise was waste and redundancy a symptom of inefficiency, a sign that someone was not optimising.  There were clearly two mind sets at work: The neo-classicals wanted an austere, simple order with invariant a-priori laws, whereas the cyborgs placed order as temporary in relation to a background of chaos and noise, and tended to revel in diversity, complexity and change (Mirowski 2002).  These two mindsets lead to some other interesting differences. Economists were not familiar with biology and revealed little inclination to learn more in this regard. Even the evolutionary rhetoric they indulged in from time-to-time was inadequate at taking into account contemporary understandings of evolutionary theory (Mirowski 2002). Cyborg scientists on the other hand appeared to anticipate that the major action in the twentieth century would be in biology and to some extent conceived and created the arena of “molecular biology”.  The final point of interest, which I pick up on in another post, stems from the desire of neo-classical economists to use formal logic to render their discipline more rigorous and scientific and to improve the levels of mathematical discourse in their field. However, Mirowski (2002) points out that along with this choice, was a concerted effort to avoid the implications of the disturbing paradoxes associated with Gödel’s incompleteness results (which we looked at in an earlier lesson). The cyborg scientists, however, confronted these paradoxes and turned them into something very useful, thus computation itself became a metaphor to be extended to fields outside of mathematics (Mirowski 2002). Meanwhile “Subsequent generations of economists seemed unable to appreciate the theory of computing as a liberating doctrine” (pg 23).   

Reference:

Mirowski, P 2002 Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Cambridge University Press.