SOME REFLECTIONS ON CYBERNETICS AND ITS SCIENTIFIC HERITAGE

抄録

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.