Abstract
The scientific research program of Cybernetics, originated by Norbert
Wiener, was mainly concerned with the communication and control whether in living
organisms or machines. The main aim was to get useful and essential information on
the functioning of the brain on which to construct later a science of the mind. This
requires methods and knowledge borrowed from different disciplines including Physics,
Biology, and Humanities. The great novelty of Cybernetics was the introduction of a
new entity called ‘information’ of fundamental importance in the theory of communication.
However, several different formalizations of the intuitive notion of information
exist which depend on the ‘context’, i.e., the characteristic features of the ‘source’,
of the ‘channel’, and of the ‘receiver’. The context is of a particular relevance in the
study of biological systems where there exist sophisticated coding mechanisms which
are essential to the information processing, and underlie the high level functions of
human mind. At present, still lacking is a theory of information and coding that could
be usefully employed for the study of complex biological systems. This was the main
reason for the decline of Cybernetics.
