Dialogues by Stanislaw Lem

Author:Stanislaw Lem [Lem, Stanisław]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: philosophy, essays, Technology & Engineering, Social Aspects, computers, Cybernetics
ISBN: 9780262542937
Google: yQlAEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2021-09-28T00:25:26.435523+00:00

Kraków, 1954/1955–December 1956

Supplement 1: The Dialogues Sixteen Years Later

Lost Illusions, or From Intellectronics to Informatics

1

The disillusion in cybernetics in the two decades since its birth has been due to both practical and theoretical reasons. Since the theoretical reasons are more fundamental and also more difficult to articulate, I start with them. True, the “fathers” of cybernetics—Wiener, Shannon, and von Neumann—at the very beginning warned against the excessive optimism of treating cybernetics as a universal key to knowledge. But they themselves could not always avoid slipping into just such optimism.

The maximum epistemological program of cybernetics declared—nota bene more in popular accounts than in the scientific literature—that a new language, a new system of abstraction, and a new level of generalization had risen, allowing for the unification of the natural sciences and humanities, which until now had been separated by an impassable barrier (biology, geology, and physics on one side; anthropology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, and even literary studies on the other). Cybernetics could accomplish this because it had at its disposal models with such a high level of abstraction that they applied to a great variety of phenomena in the diverse sciences while they still preserved the identity of its central concepts—information, its sender, its receiver, and its transmission channel; a system equipped with “inputs” and “outputs”; negative and positive feedback; system trajectories determined by transformation matrices; and so on. These mathematically defined concepts were supposed to become the common denominator of all disciplines, and they would allow rigorous research in areas that had not been accessible to exact methods.

This promise was not fully realizable from the start, for two reasons. The first relates to the inadequacies of cybernetics itself—about which later. The second has to do with the difficulties that have plagued twentieth-century mathematics. Because historically mathematics privileged and adopted into its methodological arsenal disciplines that did not come from the mainstream of pure mathematics but developed somehow alongside it, such as the theory of probability, the basis of Shannon’s information theory, which the pure mathematicians treated for a long time like a stepchild, and the theories of algorithms and of systems, which, not having achieved full formalism, operate with concepts that a mathematician regards with suspicion. Lacking the expert knowledge, we may resort to a metaphor: the mathematical foundation on which cybernetics was set was not completely solid. Probability theory and algorithm theory (in contrast with systems theory, so important for cybernetics, which is still more wishful thinking or a set of sketches and propositions than a true self-standing discipline),1 both possess clearly defined centers and peripheries swarming with unresolved questions and doubts. Attempts to expand the centers have led to enormous difficulties that relate to the ambiguity of the two central terms, “probability” and “algorithm.” In both these disciplines we can do either very little but with absolute certainty or a great deal but with little certainty. Yet using just the theories of probability and algorithms was insufficient for developing cybernetics, and it was expected that pure mathematics would

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