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Author: Raymond Ruyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786600897
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
The philosophy of Raymond Ruyer was an important if subterranean influence on twentieth-century French thought, and explicitly engaged with by figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze. The Genesis of Living Forms is Ruyer’s most focussed and forceful analysis of a central but apparently paradoxical biological phenomenon that also presents serious problems for philosophy: embryogenesis. When a cat develops from the early stages of fertilization to an adult, what is it that makes it the same cat? How is it that a living being can at once be the same and constantly changing? Ruyer’s answer to these questions unfolds through a detailed set of encounters with major scientific fields, from particle physics to social psychology, arguing that the paradox can only be dissolved by seeing the role that form plays in the ongoing development of living beings. In Ruyer’s view, embryogenesis is a central problem not just in the life sciences; every thing must possess a relation to a form that is characteristic of it, from carbon atoms to embryos, and to embryologists themselves.
Author: Raymond Ruyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786600897
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
The philosophy of Raymond Ruyer was an important if subterranean influence on twentieth-century French thought, and explicitly engaged with by figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze. The Genesis of Living Forms is Ruyer’s most focussed and forceful analysis of a central but apparently paradoxical biological phenomenon that also presents serious problems for philosophy: embryogenesis. When a cat develops from the early stages of fertilization to an adult, what is it that makes it the same cat? How is it that a living being can at once be the same and constantly changing? Ruyer’s answer to these questions unfolds through a detailed set of encounters with major scientific fields, from particle physics to social psychology, arguing that the paradox can only be dissolved by seeing the role that form plays in the ongoing development of living beings. In Ruyer’s view, embryogenesis is a central problem not just in the life sciences; every thing must possess a relation to a form that is characteristic of it, from carbon atoms to embryos, and to embryologists themselves.
Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262512394
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science.
Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537842
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.
Author: Flo Conway
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780465013715
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Book Description
Two award-winning journalists reveal the epic story of one of the 20th century's most brilliant figures--the eccentric mathematical genius Norbert Wiener, who founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and then spent his life warning the world about its dangerous human consequences. photos.
Author: Peter Corning
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226116336
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 555
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Book Description
In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this theory into a much broader framework in Holistic Darwinism, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis.
Author: John Johnston
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262101262
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
An account of the creation of new forms of life and intelligence in cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence that analyzes both the similarities and the differences among these sciences in actualizing life.The Allure of Machinic Life
Author: Ronald R. Kline
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421416719
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 351
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Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age. Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative—an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines. Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment—when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences—in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies. "Nowhere in the burgeoning secondary literature on cybernetics in the last two decades is there a concise history of cybernetics, the science of communication and control that helped usher in the current information age in America. Nowhere, that is, until now . . . Readers have in The Cybernetics Moment the first authoritative history of American cybernetics."—Information & Culture "[A]n extremely interesting and stimulating history of the concepts of cybernetics . . . This is a book for everyone to read, relish, and think about."—Choice "As a whole, the book presents a comprehensive in-depth retrospective analysis of the contribution of the American scientific school to the making, formation, and development of cybernetics and information theory. An unquestionable advantage of the book is the skillful use of numerous bibliographic sources by the author that reflect the scientific, engineering, and social significance of the questions being considered, competition of ideas and developments, and also interrelations between scientists."—Cybernetics and System Analysis "Dr. Kline is perhaps uniquely situated to take on so large and complicated [a] topic as cybernetics . . . Readers unfamiliar with Wiener and his work are well advised to start with this well-written and thorough book. Those who are already familiar will still find much that is new and informative in the thorough research and reasoned interpretations."—IEEE History Center "The most comprehensive intellectual history of cybernetics in Cold War America."—Journal of American History "The book will be most valuable as historical background for the large number of disciplines that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science, communications engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology."—IEEE Technology and Society Magazine "Ronald Kline’s chronicle of cybernetics certainly does what an excellent history of science should do. It takes you there—to the golden age of a new, exciting field. You will almost smell that cigar."—Second-Order Cybernetics "Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date."—Los Angeles Review of Books
Author: James Gleick
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307379574
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 398
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Book Description
From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
Author: D.A Novikov
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319273973
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 115
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Book Description
This book is a concise navigator across the history of cybernetics, its state-of-the-art and prospects. The evolution of cybernetics (from N. Wiener to the present day) and the reasons of its ups and downs are presented. The correlation of cybernetics with the philosophy and methodology of control, as well as with system theory and systems analysis is clearly demonstrated. The book presents a detailed analysis focusing on the modern trends of research in cybernetics. A new development stage of cybernetics (the so-called cybernetics 2.0) is discussed as a science on general regularities of systems organization and control. The author substantiates the topicality of elaborating a new branch of cybernetics, i.e. organization theory which studies an organization as a property, process and system. The book is intended for theoreticians and practitioners, as well as for students, postgraduates and doctoral candidates. In the first place, the target audience includes tutors and lecturers preparing courses on cybernetics, control theory and systems science.
Author: Slava Gerovitch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262572255
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science. The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."
