Norbert Wiener

1:To live effectively is to live with adequate information. ~ Norbert Wiener,

2:I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what' ~ Norbert Wiener,

3:Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor this will produce an unemployment situation in comparison with which the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.
~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954,

4:I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith. ~ Norbert Wiener,

5:At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people. This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of Golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of God. In the time of Newton, the automaton becomes the clockwork music box, with the little effigies pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth century, the automaton is a glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of the human muscles. Finally, the present automaton opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns to the place at which a radar beam picks up an airplane, or computes the solution of a differential equation.
~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, 1961,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Am I really a good mathematician? ~ Norbert Wiener,

2:There are no answers, only cross references. ~ Norbert Wiener,

3:Information is information, not matter or energy. ~ Norbert Wiener,

4:To live effectively is to live with adequate information. ~ Norbert Wiener,

5:To live effectively is to live with adequate information. ~ Norbert Wiener,

6:Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy. ~ Norbert Wiener,

7:the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine ~ Norbert Wiener,

8:The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat. ~ Norbert Wiener,

9:We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns
that perpetuate themselves. ~ Norbert Wiener,

10:A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes. ~ Norbert Wiener,

11:Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. ~ Norbert Wiener,

12:Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith. ~ Norbert Wiener,

13:communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers. ~ Norbert Wiener,

14:Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. ~ Norbert Wiener,

15:To live effectively is to live with adequate information. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

16:We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment. ~ Norbert Wiener,

17:Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree. ~ Norbert Wiener,

18:A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent. ~ Norbert Wiener,

19:We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. ~ Norbert Wiener,

20:The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave. ~ Norbert Wiener,

21:The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness. ~ Norbert Wiener,

22:Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

23:There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-"scientific' narrative method of the professional historian. ~ Norbert Wiener,

24:I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what' ~ Norbert Wiener,

25:I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what' ~ Norbert Wiener,

26:One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics. ~ Norbert Wiener,

27:Any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste. ~ Norbert Wiener,

28:In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy ~ Norbert Wiener,

29:The simplest type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked. ~ Norbert Wiener,

30:The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. ~ Norbert Wiener,

31:The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. ~ Norbert Wiener,

32:What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead. ~ Norbert Wiener,

33:Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. ~ Norbert Wiener,

34:Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. ~ Norbert Wiener,

35:As to the inventions of printing and of paper, we generally consider these in the wrong oredr, attributing too much importnace to printing and too little to paper. ~ Norbert Wiener,

36:If the human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being. ~ Norbert Wiener,

37:The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival. ~ Norbert Wiener,

38:The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past. ~ Norbert Wiener,

39:There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be. ~ Norbert Wiener,

40:We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

41:It is possible to believe in progress as a fact without believing in progress as an ethical principle; but in the catechism of many Americans, the one goes with the other. ~ Norbert Wiener,

42:At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people. ~ Norbert Wiener,

43:A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent' ~ Norbert Wiener, I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953),

44:Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor. ~ Norbert Wiener,

45:A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation. ~ Norbert Wiener,

46:The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. ~ Norbert Wiener,

47:It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior. ~ Norbert Wiener,

48:Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor. ~ Norbert Wiener,

49:A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors. ~ Norbert Wiener,

50:The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

51:Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime. ~ Norbert Wiener,

52:Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape. ~ Norbert Wiener,

53:The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a student of gravitational relativity on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, he is praying... that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views. ~ Norbert Wiener,

54:A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it. ~ Norbert Wiener,

55:Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor this will produce an unemployment situation in comparison with which the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.
~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1954,

56:The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. ~ Norbert Wiener,

57:The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information. ~ Norbert Wiener,

58:Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

59:We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated. ~ Norbert Wiener,

60:Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

61:In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity. ~ Norbert Wiener,

62:A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

63:The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

64:May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom. The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belong to acquiescence and hence to weakness. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

65:I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith. ~ Norbert Wiener,

66:I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith. ~ Norbert Wiener,

67:Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians. ~ Norbert Wiener,

68:The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. ~ Norbert Wiener,

69:We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

70:Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognize this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

71:Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves ~ Norbert Wiener,

72:In a similar way, when we consider a problem of nature such as that of atomic reactions and atomic explosives, the largest single item of information which we can make public is that they exist. Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty per cent of his way toward that answer. ~ Norbert Wiener,

73:It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part. ~ Norbert Wiener,

74:It's interesting that the greatest minds of computer science, the founding fathers, like Alan Turing and Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, they all looked at chess as the ultimate test. So they thought, "Oh, if a machine can play chess, and beat strong players, set aside a world champion, that would be the sign of a dawn of the AI era." With all due respect, they were wrong. ~ Garry Kasparov,

75:What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen. ~ Norbert Wiener,

76:The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

77:It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

78:Although Leonardo, for example, invented the submarine, he deliberately suppressed this invention "on account of the evil nature of men, who would practice assassination at the bottom of the sea." That reservation marks a moral sensitiveness equal to his inventive abilities: only a relative handful of scientists, like the late Norbert Wiener or Leo Szilard in our day, have shown any parallel concern and self-control. ~ Lewis Mumford,

79:I may remark parenthetically that the modern apparatus of the theory of small samples, once it goes beyond the determination of its own specially defined parameters and becomes a method for positive statistical inference in new cases, does not inspire me with any confidence unless it is applied by a statistician by whom the main elements of the dynamics of the situation are either explicitly known or implicitly felt. ~ Norbert Wiener,

80:Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems. ~ Norbert Wiener,

81:What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

82:Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent. It has been well said that the modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is praying. . . that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views. ~ Norbert Wiener, I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953),

83:[T]he future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. ~ Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc. (1964),

84:There are fields of scientific work...which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology...in which every single notion receives a separate and different name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field. ~ Norbert Wiener,

85:Perception thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but it has to focus on one area of the world after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television, and Norbert Wiener and his colleagues found some evidence that there is a similar process in the brain. ~ Alan W Watts,

86:Science is better paid than at any time in the past. The results of this pay have been to attract into science many of those for whom the pay is the first consideration, and who scorn to sacrifice immediate profit for the freedom of development of their own concept. Moreover, this inner development, important and indispensable as it may be to the world of science in the future, generally does not have the tendency to put a single cent into the pockets of their employers. ~ Norbert Wiener,

87:The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation. ~ Norbert Wiener,

88:How to immunize yourself against the great D.P. (Demoralization Process) which is inexorably reaching its plateau? 1) Recognize it for what it is: a collective phenomenon, self-perpetrating according to Malthusian law. The separation of the strong from the weak, the reactors from the perceivers. Norbert Wiener would be delighted at current examples of human thermostats and their behavior. Never before has man been so controllable and easily programmed while foolishly considering himself more sophisticated than at any time in his development. ~ Anonymous,

89:The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation. ~ Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy - My Childhood and Youth (1964),

90:What Homestead-Miami also made clear was that there are two separate paths forward in defining the approaching world of humans and robots, one moving toward the man-machine symbiosis that J. C. R. Licklider had espoused and another in which machines will increasingly supplant humans. Just as Norbert Wiener realized at the onset of the computer and robotics age, one of the future possibilities will be bleak for humans. The way out of that cul-de-sac will be to follow in Terry Winograd’s footsteps by placing the human in the center of the design. ~ John Markoff,

91:That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it—the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it. In other words, no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

92:What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

93:We mathematicians who operate with nothing more expensive than paper and possibly printers' ink are quite reconciled to the fact that, if we are working in an active field, our discoveries will commence to be obsolete at the moment that they are written down or even at the moment they are conceived. We know that for a long time everything we do will be nothing more than the jumping off point for those who have the advantage of already being aware of our ultimate results. This is the meaning of the famous apothegm of Newton, when he said, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants". ~ Norbert Wiener, I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953),

94:The success of mathematical physics led the social scientist to be jealous of its power without quite understanding the intellectual attitudes that had contributed to this power. The use of mathematical formulae had accompanied the development of the natural sciences and become the mode in the social sciences. Just as primitive peoples adopt the Western modes of denationalized clothing and of parliamentatism out of a vague feeling that these magic rites and vestments will at once put them abreast of modern culture and technique, so the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus. ~ Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy - My Childhood and Youth (1964),

95:Let it be remarked ... that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

96:The terms "black box" and "white box" are convenient and figurative expressions of not very well determined usage. I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed. On the other hand, a white box will be similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

97: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. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

98:In the 1990s, Miraca Gross studied children who were radically accelerated, starting college between eleven and sixteen. None regretted the acceleration, and most had made good and lasting friendships with older children. By contrast, gifted children stuck with age peers experienced rage, depression, and self-criticism. Today, most gifted programs keep children in an age-based setting some of the time and a skills-based setting the rest of the time. Neither affords a perfect fit. The mathematical prodigy Norbert Wiener wrote that the prodigy knows “the suffering which grows from belonging half to the adult world and half to the world of the children about him.” He explained, “I was not so much a mixture of child and man as wholly a child for purposes of companionship and nearly completely a man for purposes of study. ~ Andrew Solomon,

99:Norbert Wiener,” Tillingford said. “You recall his work in cybernetics. And, even more important, Enrico Destini’s work in the field of theophonics.” “What’s that?” Tillingford raised an eyebrow. “You are a specialist, my boy. Communication between man and God, of course. Using Wiener’s work, and using the invaluable material of Shannon and Weaver, Destini was able to set up the first really adequate system of communication between Earth and Heaven in 1946. Of course, he had the use of all that equipment from the War Against the Pagan Hordes, those damned Wotan-Worshiping, Oak-Tree-Praising Huns.” “You mean the—Nazis?” “I’m familiar with that term. That’s sociologist jargon, isn’t it? And that Denier of the Prophet, that Anti-Bab. They say he’s still alive down in Argentina. Found the elixir of eternal youth or something. He made that pact with the devil in 1939, you remember. Or was that before your time? But you know about it—it’s history.” “I ~ Philip K Dick,

100: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 the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

101:We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.

This is no defeatism...The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too...

All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of...the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but...with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. ~ Norbert Wiener,

102:We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us.

This is no defeatism...The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too...

All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of...the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but...with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it. ~ Norbert Wiener,

103:At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people. This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of Golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of God. In the time of Newton, the automaton becomes the clockwork music box, with the little effigies pirouetting stiffly on top. In the nineteenth century, the automaton is a glorified heat engine, burning some combustible fuel instead of the glycogen of the human muscles. Finally, the present automaton opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns to the place at which a radar beam picks up an airplane, or computes the solution of a differential equation.
~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, 1961,

104:Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards. These rewards are of exactly the same character as those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion, whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic. To see meaning and understanding come where there has been no meaning and no understanding is to share the work of a demiurge. No amount of technical correctness and no amount of labour can replace this creative moment, whether in the life of a mathematician or of a painter or musician. Bound up with it is a judgement of values, quite parallel to the judgement of values that belongs to the painter or the musician. Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician. ~ Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy - My Childhood and Youth (1964),

105:As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

106: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 simpleminded 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 Neumann 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 intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward. ~ Norbert Wiener,

107:As to sociology and anthropology, it is manifest that the importance of information and communication as mechanisms of organization proceeds beyond the individual into the community. On the other hand, it is completely impossible to understand social communities such as those of ants without a thorough investigation of their means of communication, and we were fortunate enough to have the aid of Dr. Schneirla in this matter. For the similar problems of human organization, we sought help from the anthropologists Drs. Bateson and Margaret Mead; while Dr. Morgenstern of the Institute for Advanced Study was our adviser in the significant field of social organization belong to economic theory. His very important joint book on games with Dr. von Neumann, by the way, represents a most interesting study of social organization from the point of view of methods closely related to, although distinct from, the subject matter of cybernetics. Dr. Lewin and others represented the newer work on the theory of opinion sampling and the practice of opinion making, and Dr. F. C. S. Northrup was interested in assaying the philosophical significance of our work. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

108:This, however, is not the case. The load on a generating system depends on many variable factors. Among these are the fluctuating industrial demand; emergencies which may remove a part of the system from operation; and even passing clouds, which may make tens of thousands of offices and homes turn on their electric lights in the middle of the day. It follows that the automatic stations, as well as those operated by a working crew, must be within constant reach of the load dispatcher, who must be able to give orders to his machines; and this he does by sending appropriately coded signals to the power station, either over a special line designed for the purpose, or over existing telegraph or telephone lines, or over a carrier system making use of the power lines themselves. On the other hand, before the load dispatcher can give his orders intelligently, he must be acquainted with the state of affairs at the generating station. In particular, he must know whether the orders he has given have been executed, or have been held up through some failure in the equipment. Thus the machines in the generating station must be able to send return messages to the load dispatcher. Here, then, is one instance of language emanating from man and directed toward the machine, and vice versa. ~ Norbert Wiener,

109:Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower... Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy... There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

110:It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together. ~ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950),

111:The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized 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 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 language 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 observed 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. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

112:It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, then physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologists ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand... A proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look. We had dreamed for years of an institution of independent scientists, working together in one of these backwoods of science, not as subordinates of some great executive officer, but joined by the desire, indeed by the spiritual necessity, to understand the region as a whole, and to lend one another the strength of that understanding. ~ Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics - Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948),

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