Wiener, Norbert

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Wiener, Norbert

Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, in 1894 and died while visiting Stockholm, Sweden, in 1964. A child prodigy, he became a widely respected mathematician and teacher. During the last twenty years of his life, he became known throughout the world as a founder of and spokesman for the new science that he had named “cybernetics.”

Cybernetics, in a narrow sense, is the study of the relationship between information processing and purposeful behavior, both in machines and in animals. In a wider sense the concepts of cybernetics apply to social systems as well and suggest new ways to analyze complex social organizations in terms of the flow and processing of information. However, the more fundamental promise of cybernetics lies not in its ability to help explain the behavior of complex systems, but rather in the fact that the explanations are framed in the new language of information and control. Because of this, the real revolution stimulated by Wiener’s notions on cybernetics is a conceptual one that reaches deep into the foundation and structure of the sciences.

Wiener’s education and intellectual outlook were enormously influenced by his father, Leo Wiener, who himself had been an intellectually precocious child. Leo Wiener, who was born in Russia and educated in Europe, arrived in the United States at the age of 21 and later became a teacher. Eventually he became professor of Slavic languages and literature at Harvard, where he taught for thirty years before his retirement. Leo Wierner, like James Mill, the father of an earlier child prodigy, had his own theories about educating children. Under his father’s rigorous tutelage and discipline, Norbert Wiener at the age of seven was reading books on biology and physics that were beyond even his father’s scope. He entered high school at the age of nine and graduated three years later. He then entered Tufts College and graduated—cum laude in mathematics—at 15. After a false start toward advanced work in biology, Wiener studied philosophy; he received his PH.D. from Harvard in 1913, at the age of 18.

Upon leaving Harvard, Wiener secured a postdoctoral fellowship that allowed him to travel to Cambridge University, where he studied epistemology and logic with Bertrand Russell and mathematics with G. H. Hardy. After his stay at Cambridge, he went to Gottingen, where he studied mathematics with Landau and David Hilbert and philosophy with Husserl. During a brief period following his return to America he was a writer for the Encyclopedia Americana, a mathematician computing ballistic tables for the U.S. Army at the Aberdeen proving grounds, and also a journalist for the Boston Herald. Then, in the spring of 1919, Wiener accepted a position in the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he remained, eventually to become a full professor and later Institute professor.

His first work at M.I.T. was on the theory of Brownian motion. This work, which was influenced by the notions of J. Willard Gibbs on statistical mechanics and Lebesgue on probability, shaped his subsequent statistical treatment of the problems of information and communication. Wiener’s early mathematical work on harmonic analysis had a later impact on his notions about the filtering and predicting of time series. Thus, much of the mathematical work that he developed during the first part of his career later influenced his ideas on cybernetics.

About 1940, when the United States was gearing itself for a possible war, Wiener became involved in the problem of designing fire control equipment. It was around this complex set of problems that his ideas on information processing and control coalesced to form the basis of cybernetics. The problem of fire control is to design a machine that, when fed radar tracking data, will compute how to aim a gun so that its projectile will intersect the path of the moving target at the appropriate time. This involves not only a theory of prediction and a mechanism to embody the theory but also a theory of stability and control.

In the course of this work, Wiener and his colleague Julian Bigelow (who was later to direct the construction of the first von Neumann-type electronic computer at Princeton University) recognized the critical role of feedback in the organization of a control system. This recognition led to the conjecture that the kinds of information processing and feedback loops necessary to control a mechanical system might resemble those in the cerebellum that control purposeful human behavior. If this conjecture was true, then similar kinds of breakdowns in the internal information-processing mechanisms of a man and of a mechanical control system would produce similar pathological behavior. These ideas were recorded in a paper jointly authored by Wiener, Bigelow, and A. Rosenblueth called “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” which was published in 1943. It makes explicit the thesis that the brain can be viewed, in a mechanical way, as a kind of computing machine, and that the concepts of information and control are adequate to explain purposeful motor behavior. Left implicit, however, is the further conjecture that the concepts of information and control will be adequate to explain the mechanisms and processes underlying the behavioral correlates of so-called “higher mental functions” involved in thinking. Wiener was not able to publish a fuller treatment of these ideas until the end of World War ii .

In 1948 Wiener published his book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which became a best seller and was reprinted many times and translated into many languages. In that now-famous book, Wiener attempted to bring together the concepts underlying information processing, communication, and control. He described the relationship of these cybernetic concepts to other disciplines ranging from neurophysiology, mathematical logic, and computer science to psychology and sociology. His book had an impact on many scientists in these fields, stimulating them to take a fresh look at their own work from a cybernetic point of view. It suggested to psychologists that the behavioral correlates of thinking, remembering, learning, and so forth could be analyzed in terms of the underlying information processes. And much work on the computer simulation of behavior has emerged from that suggestion. The notion of viewing the brain as a kind of computing machine stimulated neurophysiologists not merely to make comparisons between components and coding in both systems but also to try to interpret the logical organization of the brain in terms of information processing and control mechanisms.

The diversity of cybernetic applications in different fields sheds light on the unifying aspect of its basic concepts. Traditionally, a chasm has separated work on the psychology of complex behavior from work on those physiological mechanisms that produce behavior. The gap between these two fields is, in fact, a communication gap caused by the semantic mismatch of concepts from the languages of physiology and psychology. The concepts of behavioristic psychology are too gross and elaborate to fit with the more atomistic concepts from the language of physiology. This same kind of gap would make it impossible to explain the behavior of a digital control computer in terms of the basic physics of its switches, wires, and so forth. Because cybernetics deals with a set of concepts intermediate between psychology and physiology it can provide a conceptual bridge to span both disciplines. The deeper meaning of cybernetics, which lies in the structure of its language and its role in analyzing complex systems in terms of information processing, communication, and control, has yet to be fully unfolded by philosophers of science.

The extent to which Wiener himself saw this philosophical dimension of his work is not clear. However, he did see clearly some of the social-scientific implications of cybernetics. He believed, and others have subsequently developed the notion, that the economy can be viewed as a control system aimed at maintaining certain conditions of economic growth and that economic instability in the form of period booms and slumps is similar to oscillations in a poorly designed mechanical control system. In a similar vein Wiener argued that society can be examined and understood in terms of the flow and processing of information between individuals and social groups.

Wiener was particularly fearful of the expanding role of the computing machine. He recognized very early that machines could and would eventually displace an increasing number of workers both in the factory and in the office, and he thought that if economic incentives pushed automation ahead of our understanding of its consequences, technological unemployment could shatter social and economic stability. He was also concerned about the potential misuse of computers in decision making and feared that as machines became increasingly complex their users would be less aware of the consequences of their instructions to the machines. As a result, a decision maker might cause a machine to initiate some action the consequences of which might, in fact, be contrary to his actual desires. During the last ten years of his life Wiener traveled widely, lecturing and writing about cybernetics and the potential dangers to a society vastly influenced by computers and automation.

Earlier in his life Wiener had received recognition for his contributions to mathematics, and shortly before his death he was awarded the National Medal of Science by the president of the United States.

M. E. Maron

[See alsoconcept formation; cybernetics; information THEORY; SIMULATION; SYSTEMS ANALYSIS;and the biographies ofbabbage; von neumann.]

WORKS BY WIENER

1943 ROSENBLUETH, A.; WIENER, Norbert; and BlGElow, J. Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1:18-24.

(1948) 1961 Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 2d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

(1950) 1954 The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

1953 Ex-prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. New York: Simon & Schuster.

1956 I Am a Mathematician; The Later Life of a Prodigy: An Autobiographical Account of the Mature Years and Career of Norbert Wiener and a Continuation of the Account of His Childhood in Ex-prodigy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. ? A paperback edition was published in 1964 by M.I.T. Press.