The Cybernetic Revolution
What is Cybernetics, what kind of discipline can be at the origin of the changes that challenge humanity today, changes in the everyday world, in the way we interrelate and communicate, as well as profound changes that have come to affect the way we do science?
When Time magazine conducted a survey to determine the one hundred most influential people of the twentieth century, there were names such as: Einstein, Fleming, Freud, and the Wright brothers, among the most known, and other great scientists and thinkers not so well known to the general public. It is striking that Norbert Wiener’s name did not appear on this list; it is striking because there is much talk that we live in the midst of the cyber revolution, it is often compared with the industrial revolution and it is often associated with the technological developments of computers and the Internet. Indeed, science fiction writer William Gibson has popularized the term cyberspace to denote the virtual reality environment represented by the use of digital telecommunications. Little is known of the original meaning of the word Cybernetics, little is known of Norbert Wiener, considered by scholars as its father and the most important scientist of the twentieth century. On the contrary, the great majority of the educated public has chosen Albert Einstein as the most influential thinker of the century.
On the other hand, the cybernetic revolution is not exclusively related to information technologies, robotics or the Internet; thanks to this revolution unprecedented in the history of our civilization, the way we understand the world and our history is changing, along with the way we do science, the way we understand religion and, in general, the fundamental guidelines on which our cultures are built at the beginning of the new millennium.
But what is Cybernetics, what kind of discipline can be at the origin of the changes that challenge humanity today, changes in the everyday world, in the way we interact and communicate, as well as profound changes that have come to affect the way we do science?
The word cybernetics is of Greek origin and originally meant helmsman. But it was a very peculiar kind of helmsman, he was an expert who had to control and coordinate oars, rudder and sail to drive a ship through the Mediterranean. Wiener rescued this word to denote what he defined as “the science of control and communication in the machine and the animal”.
The development and application of Cybernetics during the 1950s and 1960s allowed the advent of car washing machines, automatic doors, computers, internet, robotics and almost all the inventions of the last five decades. That is why the cybernetic revolution is frequently compared to the industrial revolution, but its contribution is not limited to the world of technology; on the contrary, its most radical and profound contribution is that which allows us to compare it with another period of intellectual revolution: the Renaissance.
Wiener defined cybernetics as the science of control in the machine and the animal, with the implicit purpose of proposing a logical-mathematical-systemic-interdisciplinary science of the mind. Along with Wiener, it is considered that the other fathers of this discipline were John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch and Claude Shannon. The orientation that each one would give to Cybernetics corresponds closely with the areas in which it has been used. John von Neumann, for example, is considered the father of the digital computer. Shannon’s work, for its part, laid the theoretical foundation for the development of digital telecommunications, including the Internet. Finally, Warren McCulloch was the forerunner of the current orientation of cybernetics under the more recent name of “cognitive sciences”. He was interested in the study of nervous systems and cognition, and was the first scientist to propose naming this field of study “experimental epistemology”.
The fact that cybernetics was established by Wiener as the science of control in the machine and the animal, as we have seen, meant in the first place great advances in the field of machines, expanding their potentialities to the levels we know and use daily. On the other hand, on the side of biology, its contribution would be slower but, perhaps, much more important. In relation to this point it is worth mentioning that the Chileans Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela made a transcendental contribution when they formulated, during the ’70s, the Autopoiesis Theory. Maturana had worked closely with McCulloch. Likewise, another renowned cybernetist, Heinz von Foerster, regarded as the father of Second Order Cybernetics, also had a considerable influence on Chileans.
It is revealing that the foreword to the text in which Maturana’s and Varela’s approaches first spread was not written by a biologist but by Stafford Beer, a cybernetist. Beer came to Chile in the early 1970s to advise CORFO on an ambitious Cybernetics project applied to public administration. On that occasion the former Minister of Economy, Fernando Flores, contacted Beer and later Maturana and Varela. The strong influence that the three cybernetists already mentioned exerted on the Chilean thinker and businessman who has applied cybernetics and cognitive sciences in the world of business and management can now be seen.
Another Chilean cybernetist who has developed his work as a researcher in the field of business administration is the professor of the School of Commerce of the Catholic University of Valparaiso, Aquiles Limone. In the late 1970s, Professor Limone formulated the theory that companies, like living beings, are autopoietic systems.
Surely few of our contemporaries have perceived the unprecedented historical phenomenon that took place before our eyes during the twentieth century. Indeed, the concept of science can be defined substantially differently before and after that century. This radical change in the way of understanding science originated in Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s critique of Descartes’ so-called Scientific Method, but was later consolidated, under the influence of Cybernetics, by establishing the need to explicitly introduce the observer as a constituent element of scientific theories. It should be noted that the latter was not considered necessary or not at all clear for the classical science that developed from the times of Descartes to the first half of the twentieth century.
Physics was the first branch of the traditional sciences to introduce the epistemological factor into the formulation of both quantum mechanics and relativity theories. Strictly speaking, even before that, some physical theories, such as statistical mechanics, had implicitly introduced this factor by demonstrating, for example, that temperature was not a fundamental property of matter but an emerging property. This means that temperature, “in reality” — that is: physically — does not exist. It does not exist in a deep sense, since its supposed existence is subordinated to the observation that an individual can make; in other words, it does not exist as something independent of the observer. Later it would be demonstrated that all the properties attributed to objects do not exist “in reality”, that is, independently of the observer. There is neither color, nor size, nor shape, nor age, nor taste, nor smell, among others. They do not exist in the conventional sense, since they are mere “mental constructions” made by observers who say they interact with objects. Our language makes it difficult to understand this fact, since grammatical constructions force us to say for example that “water is transparent”, “water is hot”, etc., as if colour or temperature were inherent properties of any object and could exist even when there were no observers. On the contrary, contemporary science has shown that the properties of “objects” emerge through the process of observation. This approach is known as constructivism and is closely linked to second-order cybernetics, as well as to modern physics and the biology of autopoiesis.
Physicist Fritjof Capra argues that the paradigm shift from classical physics to modern physics is part of a general paradigm shift in the sciences, characterized mainly by the epistemological question and by a holistic and ecological approach, which are the foundations of Cybernetics and Systems Theory.
Currently, the contribution of Systems Theory and Cybernetics has resulted in the development of new disciplines. It is worth mentioning as an example the Neuro-Linguistic Programming (P.N.L.) -which manifests the strong influence of the famous cybernetist Gregory Bateson, Chaos Theory, Radical Constructivism — closely linked to cybernetics of the second order- and cognitive sciences -which are the most evident continuation of the original Cybernetics.
By changing the way science is done, the meaning of the word science changes; today’s scientists no longer seek an ultimate, absolute, immutable, objective and distant truth; on the contrary, today’s scientist understands that his work consists of formulating mere transitory explanations that may or may not be useful, depending on the context in which they are applied. For example, it is no longer thought that the law of gravity is a “scientific truth”, but on the contrary, it is thought that gravity is a phenomenon that can be explained by three different mechanisms depending on the context, these mechanisms correspond to classical mechanics, relativity and quantum mechanics.
Nor is it a requirement for scientific theories that they be consistent with each other. In the case of gravity, for example, classical mechanics explains the phenomenon as a force of mysterious origin but somehow related to the mass of two objects and the distance between them; for its part relativity explains it in a radically different way, as a kind of optical illusion that occurs because space-time is curved in the fourth dimension. Finally, for quantum mechanics, on the other hand, gravity occurs as a result of the exchange of subatomic particles called gravitons.
Until recently a scientist would have wondered which of these three explanations was the correct one, or if they were all mere approximations and one day the definitive explanation would be found. With the development and influence that Cybernetics has exerted, more and more scientists believe that the three explanations are equally correct and there is no problem of inconsistency because they are applied in different contexts. Classical mechanics explains in a very simple way what happens in our everyday world, explains why satellites orbit and why things can fall to the ground. In the subatomic world, on the other hand, the laws of classical mechanics do not constitute a good explanation of observable phenomena, that is the domain of quantum. On the other hand, the structure of the universe and black holes can be explained by Einstein’s relativity. The fact that, at present, two or more scientific theories can partially explain the same phenomenon in different ways, represents a radical change in the way of understanding science, a change that was propitiated by Cybernetics.
This revolution of cosmopolitan thought can be perceived from a historical perspective that explains it. The researcher Riane Eisler has popularized an interesting theory that warns in the cybernetic revolution the possibility of a rebirth of the pre-patriarchal civilization that ruled at the dawn of humanity. Indeed, according to her, in contemplating history and prehistory, the revolution that is taking place today may be more radical than the renaissance and industrial revolution combined, it may be comparable only to the revolution that took place during the Neolithic and that gave rise to our most elementary institutions. Notions such as family, homeland, market, armed forces, state and government would not exist or have a radically different organization were it not for this prehistoric revolution. Some symptoms of this possible rebirth of the original civilization are the pacifist, ecologist and feminist movements, the fight against censorship, the change of mentality around sexual matters and the search for spaces for the cultivation of spirituality, as well as the growing evocation of oriental philosophies and the return of perennial wisdom.
The Renaissance of the 15th century was characterized by an evocation of Greek thought from classical antiquity; Francisco Varela maintains that today we have the opportunity to recognize the robust foundation of some millenary traditions. He and a group of cognitive scientists are building the bridge that will connect cybernetics with Buddhism. The conclusions they have reached are already surprising.
What will the future hold for us? That remains to be seen, we have in our hands the possibility of establishing this revolution in which we participate as protagonists, we have the possibility of obtaining a better world, more human and ecological, in short, more spiritual. That is the true scope that the cybernetic revolution can have, now it only depends on us to concretize it.
