The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick by Jessica Riskin

Author:Jessica Riskin [Riskin, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
ISBN: 9780226303086
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-03-07T06:00:00+00:00

9

Outside In

Cyberneticists reenacted and so updated the old struggle between the intelligent-egg and the dead-sparrow models of the science of living beings. Cybernetics was a new field of research and engineering that emerged fully in the wake of World War II, with beginnings stretching back to the late 1910s and ’20s. It was devoted to pursuing analogies between living creatures and machines, especially robots.

In pursuit of these analogies, the cyberneticists developed new mechanical systems, and also new ways of understanding mechanism, surrounding the key concepts of feedback and self-regulation. Using these concepts, cyberneticists claimed to be able to build the living agency of an organic being into artificial machinery. They represented their projects as constituting a new approach, not only to the design of machines, but also to the sciences of life, an approach that would include even living agency under the rubric of mechanism. In the end, however, cybernetics did not so much explain the agency of a living creature as explain it away.

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