Page - 10 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

10 • Cyborg Mind including humans, and machines.2 Wiener published a book in 1948 fore- telling a new future entitled Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, which gave an intellectual and practical founda- tion to the idea of highly capable interconnected calculating machines. In his introduction to this volume, Wiener describes a situation in which it is difficult to make progress without a pooling and mixing of knowledge and skills between the various established disciplinary fields. This is because: 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 them- selves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction . . . 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.3 For Wiener, the loss incurred by this restriction of knowledge was tragic, since the most fruitful areas of enquiry lay at the boundaries of different dis- ciplines, which could only be explored by enabling two or more different sets of expertise to come together. Eventually, the Second World War created an impetus and funding stream that enabled Wiener to draw together specialists who normally would not have interacted, enabling them to share their skills. But it was not long before the team realised that it was creating a new world that needed a new name. In this Wiener indicated that he had already become aware of ‘the essential unity of the set of problems centering about communication, control, and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in living tissue . . . We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the same “Cybernetics”’.4 The interdisci- plinary technology of cybernetics was thus born, which included the study of information feedback loops and derived concepts. Wiener was actually convinced that these feedback loops were necessary for the successful functioning of both living biological organisms and machines. This was because they enabled self-regulating and self- organising activities through a continuous updating of information given to the machine or organism with respect to variables such as their environment. In addition, he suggested that since both machines and living organisms equally relied on such feedback processes, they could actually be combined to create a new entity or creature.5 Cybernetics also focused on the manner in which anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processed information and reacted to this informa- tion, as well as the changes that were necessary to improve these tasks.6 This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.