1.08 - Information, Language, and Society

classes ::: Cybernetics, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener, chapterThe concept of an organization, the elements of which are them-,
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object:1.08 - Information, Language, and Society
subject class:Cybernetics
book class:Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
author class:Norbert Wiener
class:chapterThe concept of an organization, the elements of which are them-
selves small organizations, is neither unfamiliar nor new. The
loose federations of ancient Greece, the Holy Roman Empire
and its similarly constituted feudal contemporaries, the Swiss
Companions of the Oath, the United Netherlands, the United
States of America, and the many united states to the south of
it, the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, are all examples of
hierarchies of organizations on the political sphere. The Levi-
athan of Hobbes, the Man-State made up of lesser men, is an
illustration of the same idea one stage lower in scale, while Leib-
niz’s treatment of the living organism as being really a plenum,
wherein other living organisms, such as the blood corpuscles,
have their life, is but another step in the same direction. It is,
in fact, scarcely more than a philosophical anticipation of the
cell theory, according to which most of the animals and plants
of moderate size and all of those of large dimensions are made
up of units, cells, which have many if not all the attributes of
independent living organisms. The multicellular organisms
may themselves be the building bricks of organisms of a higher
stage, such as the Portuguese man-of-war, which is a complex
structure of differentiated coelenterate polyps, where the several216
Chapter VIII
individuals are modified in different ways to serve the nutrition,
the support, the locomotion, the excretion, the reproduction,
and the support of the colony as a whole.
Strictly speaking, such a physically conjoint colony as that
poses no question of organization which is philosophically
deeper than those which arise at a lower level of individuality.
It is very different with man and the other social animals—with
the herds of baboons or cattle, the beaver colonies, the hives of
bees, the nests of wasps or ants. The degree of integration of the
life of the community may very well approach the level shown
in the conduct of a single individual, yet the individual will
probably have a fixed nervous system, with permanent topo-
graphic relations between the elements and permanent connec-
tions, while the community consists of individuals with shifting
relations in space and time and no permanent, unbreakable
physical connections. All the nervous tissue of the beehive is the
nervous tissue of some single bee. How then does the beehive
act in unison, and at that in a very variable, adapted, organized
unison? Obviously, the secret is in the intercommunication of
its members.
This intercommunication can vary greatly in complexity and
content. With man, it embraces the whole intricacy of language
and literature, and very much besides. With the ants, it probably
does not cover much more than a few smells. It is very improba-
ble that an ant can distinguish one ant from another. It certainly
can distinguish an ant from its own nest from an ant from a
foreign nest, and may cooperate with the one, destroy the other.
Within a few outside reactions of this kind, the ant seems to
have a mind almost as patterned, chitin-bound, as its body. It
is what we might expect a priori from an animal whose growing
phase and, to a large extent, whose learning phase are rigidlyInformation, Language, and Society
217
separated from the phase of mature activity. The only means
of communication we can trace in them are as general and dif-
fuse as the hormonal system of communication within the body.
Indeed, smell, one of the chemical senses, general and undi-
rectional as it is, is not unlike the hormonal influences within
the body.
Let it be remarked parenthetically that musk, civet, castoreum,
and the like sexually attractive substances in the mammals may
be regarded as communal, exterior hormones, indispensable,
especially in solitary animals, for the bringing the sexes together
at the proper time, and serve for the continuation of the race. By
this I do not mean to assert that the inner action of these sub-
stances, once they reach the organ of smell, is hormonal rather
than nervous. It is hard to see how it can be purely hormonal in
quantities as small as those which are readily perceivable; on the
other hand, we know too little of the action of the hormones to
deny the possibility of the hormonal action of vanishingly small
quantities of such substances. Moreover, the long, twisted rings
of carbon atoms found in muskone and civetone do not need
too much rearrangement to form the linked ring structure char-
acteristic of the sex hormones, some of the vitamins, and some
of the carcinogens. I do not care to pronounce an opinion on
this matter; I leave it as an interesting speculation.
The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly stan-
dardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus,
such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only
on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the
whole nervous constitution of the sender and the receiver of the
stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an
intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose
language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language218
Chapter VIII
common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All
I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the
signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps
paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix
in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I
discover the things which seem important to him, not because
he has communicated them to me by language, but because I
myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an
intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he
observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by
what I observe at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the
moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as
varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two
of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an
active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before
the development of language.
Whatever means of communication the race may have, it is
possible to define and to measure the amount of information
available to the race and to distinguish it from the amount of
information available to the individual. Certainly no informa-
tion available to the individual is also available to the race unless
it modifies the behavior of one individual to another, nor is even
that behavior of racial significance unless it is distinguishable by
other individuals from other forms of behavior. Thus the ques-
tion as to whether a certain piece of information is racial or of
purely private availability depends on whether it results in the
individual assuming a form of activity which can be recognized
as a distinct form of activity by other members of the race, in the
sense that it will in turn affect their activity, and so on.
I have spoken of the race. This is really too broad a term for
the scope of most communal information. Properly speaking,Information, Language, and Society
219
the community extends only so far as there extends an effec-
tual transmission of information. It is possible to give a sort of
measure to this by comparing the number of decisions enter-
ing a group from outside with the number of decisions made
in the group. We can thus measure the autonomy of the group.
A measure of the effective size of a group is given by the size
which it must have to have achieved a certain stated degree of
autonomy.
A group may have more group information or less group
information than its members. A group of non-social animals,
temporarily assembled, contains very little group information,
even though its members may possess much information as
individuals. This is because very little that one member does is
noticed by the others and is acted on by them in a way that goes
further in the group. On the other hand, the human organism
contains vastly more information, in all probability, than does
any one of its cells. There is thus no necessary relation in either
direction between the amount of racial or tribal or community
information and the amount of information available to the
individual.
As in the case of the individual, not all the information which
is available to the race at one time is accessible without special
effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become
clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a
degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside
his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the
use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of
material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited
by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar
heading unless some particular person has already recognized
the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the220
Chapter VIII
case where two subjects have the same techniques and intel-
lectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still
requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity
of interest.
In connection with the effective amount of communal infor-
mation, one of the most surprising facts about the body politic
is its extreme lack of efficient homeostatic processes. There is a
belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to
the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that
free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free
market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking
to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end
in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest
common good. This is associated with the very comforting view
that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own
interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus
earned the great rewards with which society has showered him.
Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simple-
minded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received
a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly
subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neu-
mann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption
that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then
available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intel-
ligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest
possible expectation of reward. It is thus the market game as
played between perfectly intelligent, perfectly ruthless opera-
tors. Even in the case of two players, the theory is complicated,
although it often leads to the choice of a definite line of play. In
many cases, however, where there are three players, and in the
overwhelming majority of cases, when the number of players isInformation, Language, and Society
221
large, the result is one of extreme indeterminacy and instability.
The individual players are compelled by their own cupidity to
form coalitions; but these coalitions do not generally establish
themselves in any single, determinate way, and usually termi-
nate in a welter of betrayal, turncoatism, and deception, which
is only too true a picture of the higher business life, or the closely
related lives of politics, diplomacy, and war. In the long run,
even the most brilliant and unprincipled huckster must expect
ruin; but let the hucksters become tired of this and agree to live
in peace with one another, and the great rewards are reserved
for the one who watches for an opportune time to break his
agreement and betray his companions. There is no homeostasis
whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and
failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the
wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern
times.
Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a com-
pletely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction
and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number
of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game
together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools;
and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer
a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psy-
chology of the fool has become a subject well worth the seri-
ous attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own
ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters,
the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predict-
able as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or
rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—
will make him
buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the
party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any222
Chapter VIII
candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise
mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an
illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and
intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided
missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our
machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings,
and other psychological investigations, with the common man
as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociolo-
gists, and economists available to sell their services to these
undertakings.
Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gull-
ibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to
have things all their own way. This is because no man is either
all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intel-
ligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention
and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or
private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a
small country community which has been running long enough
to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and
behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for the
unfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facil-
ities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice
against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of
the community must continue to live with them. On the other
hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the
habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making
him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find
it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing
that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.
Thus small, closely knit communities have a very consider-
able measure of homeostasis; and this, whether they are highlyInformation, Language, and Society
223
literate communities in a civilized country or villages of primi-
tive savages. Strange and even repugnant as the customs of
many barbarians may seem to us, they generally have a very
definite homeostatic value, which it is part of the function of
anthropologists to interpret. It is only in the large community,
where the Lords of Things as They Are protect themselves from
hunger by wealth, from public opinion by privacy and anonym-
ity, from private criticism by the laws of libel and the possession
of the means of communication, that ruthlessness can reach its
most sublime levels. Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in
society, the control of the means of communication is the most
effective and most important.
One of the lessons of the present book is that any organism
is held together in this action by the possession of means for
the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of informa-
tion. In a society too large for the direct contact of its mem-
bers, these means are the press, both as it concerns books and
as it concerns newspapers, the radio, the telephone system, the
telegraph, the posts, the theater, the movies, the schools, and
the church. Besides their intrinsic importance as means of com-
munication, each of these serves other, secondary functions.
The newspaper is a vehicle for advertisement and an instrument
for the monetary gain of its proprietor, as are also the movies
and the radio. The school and the church are not merely refuges
for the scholar and the saint: they are also the home of the Great
Educator and the Bishop. The book that does not earn money
for its publisher probably does not get printed and certainly does
not get reprinted.
In a society like ours, avowedly based on buying and sell-
ing, in which all natural and human resources are regarded as
the absolute property of the first business man enterprising224
Chapter VIII
enough to exploit them, these secondary aspects of the means
of communication tend to encroach further and further on the
primary ones. This is aided by the very elaboration and the con-
sequent expense of the means themselves. The country paper
may continue to use its own reporters to canvass the villages
around for gossip, but it buys its national news, its syndicated
features, its political opinions, as stereotyped “boiler plate." The
radio depends on its advertisers for income, and, as everywhere,
the man who pays the piper calls the tune. The great news ser-
vices cost too much to be available to the publisher of moderate
means. The book publishers concentrate on books that are likely
to be acceptable to some book club which buys out the whole
of an enormous edition. The college president and the Bishop,
even if they have no personal ambitions for power, have expen-
sive institutions to run and can only seek their money where the
money is.
Thus on all sides we have a triple constriction of the means of
communication: the elimination of the less profitable means in
favor of the more profitable; the fact that these means are in the
hands of the very limited class of wealthy men, and thus natu-
rally express the opinions of that class; and the further fact that,
as one of the chief avenues to political and personal power, they
attract above all those ambitious for such power. That system
which more than all others should contribute to social homeo-
stasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned
in the game of power and money, which we have already seen
to be one of the chief anti-homeostatic elements in the commu-
nity. It is no wonder then that the larger communities, subject to
this disruptive influence, contain far less communally available
information than the smaller communities, to say nothing of
the human elements of which all communities are built up. LikeInformation, Language, and Society
225
the wolf pack, although let us hope to a lesser extent, the State is
stupider than most of its components.
This runs counter to a tendency much voiced among business
executives, heads of great laboratories, and the like, to assume
that because the community is larger than the individual it is
also more intelligent. Some of this opinion is due to no more
than a childish delight in the large and the lavish. Some of it
is due to a sense of the possibilities of a large organization for
good. Not a little of it, however, is nothing more than an eye for
the main chance and a lusting after the fleshpots of Egypt.
There is another group of those who see nothing good in the
anarchy of modern society, and in whom an optimistic feeling
that there must be some way out has led to an overvaluation of
the possible homeostatic elements in the community. Much as
we may sympathize with these individuals and appreciate the
emotional dilemma in which they find themselves, we cannot
attribute too much value to this type of wishful thinking. It is
the mode of thought of the mice when faced with the problem
of belling the cat. Undoubtedly it would be very pleasant for
us mice if the predatory cats of this world were to be belled,
but—who is going to do it? Who is to assure us that ruthless
power will not find its way back into the hands of those most
avid for it?
I mention this matter because of the considerable, and I think
false, hopes which some of my friends have built for the social
efficacy of whatever new ways of thinking this book may con-
tain. They are certain that our control over our material environ-
ment has far outgrown our control over our social environment
and our understanding thereof. Therefore, they consider that
the main task of the immediate future is to extend to the fields
of anthropology, of sociology, of economics, the methods of the226
Chapter VIII
natural sciences, in the hope of achieving a like measure of suc-
cess in the social fields. From believing this necessary, they come
to believe it possible. In this, I maintain, they show an excessive
optimism, and a misunderstanding of the nature of all scientific
achievement.
All the great successes in precise science have been made in
fields where there is a certain high degree of isolation of the
phenomenon from the observer. We have seen in the case of
astronomy that this may result from the enormous scale of cer-
tain phenomena with respect to man, so that man’s mightiest
efforts, not to speak of his mere glance, cannot make the slight-
est visible impression on the celestial world. In modern atomic
physics, on the other hand, the science of the unspeakably min-
ute, it is true that anything we do will have an influence on
many individual particles which is great from the point of view
of that particle. However, we do not live on the scale of the par-
ticles concerned, either in space or in time; and the events that
might be of the greatest significance from the point of view of
an observer conforming to their scale of existence appear to us—
with some exceptions, it is true, as in the Wilson cloud-chamber
experiments—only as average mass effects in which enormous
populations of particles cooperate. As far as these effects are con-
cerned, the intervals of time concerned are large from the point
of view of the individual particle and its motion, and our statisti-
cal theories have an admirably adequate basis. In short, we are
too small to influence the stars in their courses, and too large to
care about anything but the mass effects of molecules, atoms,
and electrons. In both cases, we achieve a sufficiently loose cou-
pling with the phenomena we are studying to give a massive
total account of this coupling, although the coupling may not
be loose enough for us to be able to ignore it altogether.Information, Language, and Society
227
It is in the social sciences that the coupling between the
observed phenomenon and the observer is hardest to minimize.
On the one hand, the observer is able to exert a considerable
influence on the phenomena that come to his attention. With
all respect to the intelligence, skill, and honesty of purpose of
my anthropologist friends, I cannot think that any community
which they have investigated will ever be quite the same after-
ward. Many a missionary has fixed his own misunderstandings
of a primitive language as law eternal in the process of reducing
it to writing. There is much in the social habits of a people which
is dispersed and distorted by the mere act of making inquiries
about it. In another sense from that in which it is usually stated,
traduttore traditore.
On the other hand, the social scientist has not the advantage
of looking down on his subjects from the cold heights of eter-
nity and ubiquity. It may be that there is a mass sociology of the
human animalcule, observed like the populations of Drosophila
in a bottle, but this is not a sociology in which we, who are
human animalcules ourselves, are particularly interested. We are
not much concerned about human rises and falls, pleasures and
agonies, sub specie aeternitatis. Your anthropologist reports the
customs associated with the life, education, career, and death of
people whose life scale is much the same as his own. Your econo-
mist is most interested in predicting such business cycles as run
their course in less than a generation or, at least, have repercus-
sions which affect a man differentially at different stages of his
career. Few philosophers of politics nowadays care to confine
their investigations to the world of Ideas of Plato.
In other words, in the social sciences we have to deal with
short statistical runs, nor can we be sure that a considerable part
of what we observe is not an artifact of our own creation. An228
Chapter VIII
investigation of the stock market is likely to upset the stock mar-
ket. We are too much in tune with the objects of our investiga-
tion to be good probes. In short, whether our investigations in
the social sciences be statistical or dynamic—and they should
participate in the nature of both—they can never be good to
more than a very few decimal places, and, in short, can never
furnish us with a quantity of verifiable, significant informa-
tion which begins to compare with that which we have learned
to expect in the natural sciences. We cannot afford to neglect
them; neither should we build exaggerated expectations of their
possibilities. There is much which we must leave, whether we
like it or not, to the un-“scientific," narrative method of the pro-
fessional historian.
Note
There is one question which properly belongs to this chapter,
though it in no sense represents a culmination of its argument.
It is the question whether it is possible to construct a chess-
playing machine, and whether this sort of ability represents an
essential difference between the potentialities of the machine
and the mind. Note that we need not raise the question as to
whether it is possible to construct a machine which will play
an optimum game in the sense of von Neumann. Not even the
best human brain approximates to this. At the other end, it is
unquestionably possible to construct a machine that will play
chess in the sense of following the rules of the game, irrespective
of the merit of the play. This is essentially no more difficult than
the construction of a system of interlocking signals for a railway
signal tower. The real problem is intermediate: to construct a
machine which shall offer interesting opposition to a player atInformation, Language, and Society
229
some one of the many levels at which human chess players find
themselves.
I think it is possible to construct a relatively crude but not
altogether trivial apparatus for this purpose. The machine must
actually play—at a high speed if possible—all its own admissible
moves and all the opponent’s admissible ripostes for two or three
moves ahead. To each sequence of moves it should assign a cer-
tain conventional valuation. Here, to checkmate the opponent
receives the highest valuation at each stage, to be checkmated,
the lowest; while losing pieces, taking opponent’s pieces, check-
ing, and other recognizable situations should receive valuations
not too remote from those which good players would assign
them. The first of an entire sequence of moves should receive
a valuation much as von Neumann’s theory would assign it. At
the stage at which the machine is to play once and the opponent
once, the valuation of a play by the machine is the minimum
valuation of the situation after the opponent has made all pos-
sible plays. At the stage where the machine is to play twice and
the opponent twice, the valuation of a play by the machine is
the minimum with respect to the opponent’s first play of the
maximum valuation of the plays by the machine at the stage
when there is only one play of the opponent and one by the
machine to follow. This process can be extended to the case when
each player makes three plays, and so on. Then the machine
chooses any one of the plays giving the maximum valuation
for the stage n plays ahead, where n has some value on which
the designer of the machine has decided. This it makes as its
definitive play.
Such a machine would not only play legal chess, but a chess
not so manifestly bad as to be ridiculous. At any stage, if there
were a mate possible in two or three moves, the machine would230
Chapter VIII
make it; and if it were possible to avoid a mate by the enemy in
two or three moves, the machine would avoid it. It would prob-
ably win over a stupid or careless chess player, and would almost
certainly lose to a careful player of any considerable degree of
proficiency. In other words, it might very well be as good a
player as the vast majority of the human race. This does not
mean that it would reach the degree of proficiency of Maelzel’s
fraudulent machine, but, for all that, it may attain a pretty fair
level of accomplishment.

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