---
tags: cybernetics
---

# The Human Use of Human Being

About Cybernetics

## Forewords
* 标志一个时代的基础文本：information and communication
* Cybernetics - a very general science of "control and communication in the animal and machine"
* Wiener：" If the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control."
* 这本书中，诺伯维纳针对普通读者提出他的理论，并反思由技术与科学所带来的社会问题

## Biographical Notes
* born in 1894, was educated at Tufts College, Massachusetts, and Harvard University, Massachusetts, where he received his Ph.D. at **the age of nineteen**.
* He continued his studies at Cornell, Columbia, in England at Cambridge University, then at Gottingen and Copenhagen. He taught at Harvard and the University of Maine and **in 1919 joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was Professor of Mathematics**.
* Dr Wiener served as Research Professor of Mathematics at the **National Tsing Hua University in Peking in 1935-36**, while on leave from MIT.
* During World War II he developed improvements in **radar and Navy projectiles and devised a method of solving problems of fire control**.
* In the years after World War II Wiener worked with the Mexican physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth on **problems in biology**, and formulated the set of ideas spanning several disciplines which came to be known as '**cybernetics**'. He worked with engineers and medical doctors to develop devices that could replace a lost sensory mode. He analysed some non-linear mathematical problems and, with Armand Siegel, reformulated quantum theory as a stochastic process. He also became an articulate commentator on the social implications of science and technology. In 1964 Wiener was recipient of the US National Medal of Science.

## Introduction by Steve J. Heims

* 维纳与他的老师G.H.Hardy之争
Hardy: Real mathematics has no effects on war
Wiener: no matter how innocent he may be in his inner soul and in his motivation, the effective mathematician is likely to be a powerful factor in changing the face of society. Thus he is really as dangerous as a potential armourer of the new scientific war of the future.

* 维纳在二战后直到1964年去世，都在尽力发展和识别对人类较为温和的高科技 - benign to human vs inhuman (use of human beings).因此，维纳在战后并未受到欢迎，只是被爱因斯坦等同样处境的人认为Wiener's attitude towards the military as exemplary

* 维纳试图在他的哲学关怀上建立深刻且实际的技术态度，并用清楚明白的语言表达出来。Unlike most of these critics, Wiener was simultaneously an irrepressibly original non -stop thinker in mathematics, the sciences and high technology and equally an imaginative critic from a social, historical and ethical perspective of the uses of his own and his colleagues' handiwork.
维纳无论是对未来以communication为主导方向的社会发展的预言，还是他对于科技发展的人文思考，都已经成为现实。

* 《Human use of human being》的两个主题：
1、The interrelation between science and society via technologies
2、

* 维纳的挣扎与马克思主义者（阶级）或者佛洛依德（个人与社会）信徒的挣扎不同，融合了物理理论与个人哲学，他的个人哲学是存在主义式的。

> We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness described in the second law of thermodynamics. What Maxwell, Bolzmann and Gibbs meant by this heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethic of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system. These enclaves will not remain there indefinitely by any momentum of their own after we have once established them . .. We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been .. . This is no defeatism, it is rather a sense of tragedy in a world in which necessity is represented by an inevitable disappearance of differentiation. The declaration of our own nature and the atte mpt to build an enclave of organization in the face of nature's ove rwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lie s glory too.

* 维纳的学说受时代所限，就目前而言（80s)已经有了新发展。
Ilya Prigogine and his co-workers in Belgium have more recently made a convincing case that natural systems which are either far from thermodynamic equilibrium initially, or which fluctuate, may not return to equilibrium at all. Instead they continue to move still further away from equilibrium towards a different, increasingly complex and orderly, but nevertheless stable pattern - not necessarily static, but possibly **cyclic**.
...
this suggests a shift in emphasis from 'the human fight against the increase of entropy to create local enclaves of order' to a more co-operative endeavour which to a considerable extent occurs naturally and of its own accord.

* 维纳被认为是独立科学知识分子，不接受任何来自政府或者机构的赞助，也不参与任何政治、社会和哲学团体。他仅以个人发言，坚持知识分子的传统是"speak truth to the power"

* <Human Use of Human beings> 首次出版于1950年，是一篇论文<Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine>的后续。
这篇论文的开创性在于：
1、它是对于1940年代科技发展的汇报，尤其关于信息理论、传播理论和技术、大脑模式与通用计算机。
2、它将探讨的对象从物理和电子工程中延展并类比到神经病理学、政治、社会、学习以及时间的本质。
维纳在战后参与了很多跨学科的讨论，奠定了这一基础。

* 本书是1954年对于原书的重印，在结构上更为紧密和圆满，而在细节上以及个人政治观点上进行了许多删节。
> I wish to devote this book [fir st edition] to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings.
The second edition, in contrast, as stated in the Preface, is organized around Wiener's other major theme, 'the impact of the Gibbsian point of view on modern life, both through the substantive changes it has made in working science, and through the changes it has made indirectly in our attitude to life in general.

* Cybernetics起源于生物行为与电子机械系统之间的类比，而今天流行的人工智能（？旧）正强调了这一点。控制论机器，如通用计算机，表明了一种与心灵本质相似的可能性。因此身心二元论被一种包含了组织（organization）、消息（message)和信息（information) 的物质主义所克服。但主观性 - 个人所积累的经验、感知和感觉，在其中被维纳忽视了。
因此，如果继续忽视了维纳所提出的对人类温和的哲思，那么控制论就会成为一种冷冰冰的机械的非人的理论。这具有很大的危险性。 讨论及其对人的影响而不是营销用语“a new machine”就显得非常重要了。
Joseph Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976)
David Noble (Forces of Production, 1984)

* Cybernetics与战争关系紧密。冷战期间，里根政府花费巨资建立一个有效的 C-cubed Syetem(command, control and communication),来对抗苏联，保证美国的生存。

* 战后美国的社会学、人类学和政治学争相走向一种“科学”的道路，从数学或者工程那里随意借用术语。欧洲学术则更倾向于人的主体性，但不可能在短期内影响美国主流的发展。时下最主流和被资助的心理学分支，即认知科学，发展建立在计算机模型和信息处理的概念之上，这可以溯源至最早的控制论讨论（Kenneth Craik）。这一学科彻底忽视人的主观性，遭到了诸多批评。

* 如果检视今天的诸多学科 - 细胞生物学、医学、人类学、生态学和经济学，我们都会发现被控制论所影响的分支。来源于50年智识讨论的控制论，已经潜移默化地进入了人类知识体系，成为了一种传统。

## Preface: The Idea of A Contingent Universe
20世纪的一种历史性观念转折
* 牛顿物理的问题。Newtonian physics, which had ruled from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth with scarcely an opposing voice, described a universe in which everything happened precisely according to law, a compact, tightly organized universe in which the whole future depends strictly upon the whole past.
The Newtonian view, however, was compelled to state and fonnulate physics as if it were, in fact, subject to such laws.

* 统计引入物理学。
Bolzmann and Gibbs做出的变革是将统计引入物理学，不仅是通过统计理解复杂而庞大的系统，甚至是对于单一场中的粒子。
No physical measurements are ever precise; and what we have to say about a machine or other dynamic system really concerns not what we must expect when the initial positions and momenta are given with perfect accuracy (which never occurs), but what we are to expect when they are given with attainable accuracy. This merely means that we know, not the complete initial conditions, but something about their distribution.The functional part of physics, in other words, cannot escape considering uncertainty and the contingency of events.

* Gibbs第一次提出一种科学方法来考虑偶然的问题
The intuition on which he based his work was that, in general, a physical system belonging to a class of physical systems, which continues to retain its identity as a class, eventually reproduces in almost all cases the distribution which it shows at any given time over the whole class of systems. In other words, under certain circumstances a system runs through all the distributions of position and momentum which are compatible with its energy, if it keeps running long enough.
但是Gibbs的想法仅适用于简单系统。

* 另一条路：Borel and Lebesgue.
Borel and Lebesgue in Paris were devising the theory of integration which was to prove apposite to the Gibbsian ideas.
维纳在1920年代将勒贝格积分应用于布朗运动。

* Gibbs的想法超前于时代，且缺乏适当的理论支持（统计学发展），但却被证明是跨时代的，维纳认为他才是20世纪的转折点。

* One interesting change that has taken place is that in a probabilistic world we no longer deal with quantities and statements which concern a specific, real universe as a whole but ask instead questions which may find their answers in a large number of similar universes. Thus chance has been admitted, not merely as a mathematical tool for physics, but as part of its warp and weft.
这种对于决定论的否定，与佛洛依德的非理性等思想在某种程度上是类似的，都承认一种宇宙织构中偶然性的存在。

* 这本书的要旨，就在于呈现Gibbs对于现代生活的影响，从科学到我们对于生活的态度。因此，以下的章节既含有技术描述，也含有我们如何面对这个新世界的哲学思考。

* Gibbs的创新在于，他不止思考一个世界，而是基于我们周围有限环境所提出问题的全部可能答案的世界。他的概念所关心的是，我们对于一组世界所给出的答案，在另一组更大世界中的可能性如何？

* 而Gibbs还提出，当宇宙逐渐变老的时候，这些概率是在逐渐增加的。这种概率的度量就是熵（entropy)，熵的典型特征就是会不断增加。
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.**

## Chapter One: Cybernetics in History

* Cybernetics, Greek word "kubernetes" or "Steerman", just as "governor"
* 维纳先是在1948年发表了a technical book <Cybernetics>. 后来为了大众，又写了这本《人有人的用处》. 随后这一领域就在Claude Sahnnon, Warren Weaver以及维纳的推动下发展起来。

> Warren Weaver, (born July 17, 1894, Reedsburg, Wisconsin, U.S.—died November 24, 1978), American mathematician. He studied at the University of Wisconsin, taught there (1920–32), and directed the Rockefeller Foundation’s Natural Science Division (1932–55). He is considered the first person to propose using electronic computers for the translation of natural languages. In a 1949 memo, he proposed that statistical techniques from the field of information theory could be used to enable computers to translate text from one natural language to another automatically. His proposal was based on the assumption that a document in a human language can be viewed as having been written in code, which can be broken like other codes.

* Communication and Control
-- 我与另一个人通信时，发送一个信息，他所回传的信息是他所理解，而不是我所理解的，因此，为了控制，我必须在他的信息中得到是否我发的信息被理解，被遵守。
-- 当我给机器发送命令时，与我给人发送并无不同。对于发送者我来说，信号中途所经受的是人还是机器，无关紧要。
-- 当然在通信和控制中还是有很多细微差异，这就需要控制论发展一套语言和技术去解决通用通信的同时，也能找到适当的想法来区分各种不同的表现。
-- 我们控制环境的行为就是发送一种信息，而这种信息必然会在发送途中遭到自然的抵制 - Gibbs的熵增，不可能与我们发送时保持一致，因此，在设计控制和通信中所做的就是尽量降低这种影响。

* Human and Information
-- 人是一种可比拟的信息接收并对环境做出响应的实体
-- 当代世界的复杂性和需求使得人们对信息的需求大大增加。因此，通信成为人类的基本需求。
To live effectively is to live with adequate information.

* 古早通信研究on optics - Fermat, Huygens, and Leibnitz
费马的最小化原理：在光程的任意一段足够短的区间上，光是以最少的时间通过的。
惠更斯原理：光从光源一向外传播，就形成类似于小球面的东西，它由次级光源组成，而次级光源的传播方式与初级光源完全相同。
莱布尼茨的单子（monad):世界由上帝发明的单子组成，每一个单子都在其他的单子视角之内，除此之外没有其它知觉方式，因此它们之间的机械作用就是一种类似光学作用的微妙后果。

* Leibnitz
莱布尼茨对于自动机（automata)和机器计算（machien computation)感兴趣，也是本书智识来源之一。他对于光学和通信的兴趣，主要在于两个话题：通用科学语言（universal scientific language）和计算逻辑（calculus logic）。
莱布尼茨的机器计算只是来自他对于计算语言的兴趣，而计算语言只是他的完整人工语言的一个延伸。所以莱布尼茨的关切首先是通讯和语言的。

* Clerk Maxwell and Faraday
麦克斯韦和法拉第将科学的注意力引到光上面，那时认为光是以太（ether)的力学性能，可以穿透大气层、星际空间和所有透明的材料。麦克斯韦用数学形式表达了法拉第未能用数学表达的想法。

* Einstein
Michelson and Morley的实验证明了不可能通过以太来确定物质的运动，洛伦兹提出如果让物质粘合在一起的力在本质上就被认为是光学的或者电学的，那么M&M的实验就该得出相反的结论。
爱因斯坦在1905年翻改了洛伦兹的想法，即绝对运动的不可观察性是物理学的公理，而不是什么具体的物质结构所决定的。
在爱因斯坦的工作中，光和物质具有同等的地位，与牛顿将万物放入机械和物质的假设不同。
爱因斯坦的相对论中引入了观测者，那就不得不引入通信，从而将物理学又带回到了准莱布尼茨的光学倾向。
爱因斯坦和Gibbs的想法是完全相反的，爱因斯坦基本上还是一种非常严格的动力系统，而Gibbs则从一开始就在讨论概率。二者对于物理世界的撼动都是全新的。

* Information and Entropy

物理学的答案是对于我们对于世界所能给出的问题的有限描述，而我们所关心的也不再是所有输入和输出的消息，而是一些特定的输入和输出消息的理论，这就涉及到去测量这些有限的消息。

消息（messages）自身是一种组织和图样的模式。可以将消息组视为具有“熵”，就像对待外部世界的集合那样。正如熵是无序组织的量度，一组消息所携带的信息，就是一种对于组织的量度。信息实际上正是负熵的，是消息概率的负对数。消息越可能发生，其信息量就越小。Cliche vs poem.

* prearranged behavior of the little figures on the music box and human being

机械小人根据预设好的模式运动，信息从齿轮传递到小人身上，其本身没有与外界沟通的意图；而人或者猫有一系列的器官协同，发送并接受信息。
现代的机器与古早的机器不同，它具有根据外界进行反馈的能力。
Thus the machine which is conditioned by its relation to the external world, and by the things happening in the external world, is with us and has been with us for some time.

* input, output, feedback

A complex action is one in which the data introduced, which we call the **input**, to obtain an effect on the outer world, which we call the **output**, may involve a large number of combinations. These are combinations, both of the data put in at the moment and of the records taken from the past stored data which we call the **memory**.

high-speed electrical computing machines(punch cards/tapes/magnitized wires)

This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as **feedback**, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitor that is, of elements which indicate a performance.

It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in otherwords, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

* gun-pointer to missiles and the driving

* Conclusion
that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into anew form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus.

* On social