115: A Motion and a Spirit, that Impels All Thinking Things

It is finally here: the cybernetics episode! We go over the origins and basic concepts of the 20th century science of cybernetics, looking specifically at the work of Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson. We  draw on Stu's 2025 article "Cybernetics or the Evolution of Philosophy" from Do Not Research. 

We open the episode discussing Donald Trump's continuing bewildering comments on the Iran War.

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Transcript

Stu 0:21

All right, everyone, welcome back. This is the end of the world with Michael and Stu. I'm Michael. And I'm Stu. And today we are talking about a topic we have touched on many times before, but have not explored in greater depth until now. That's right. It is at long last, the cybernetics episode.

Michael 0:42

It's not how I thought you were going to introduce it. I figured you'd say uh today we're talking about 2025 masterpiece, Stu Watson, Cybernetics and the Evolution of Philosophy.

Stu 0:56

Well, we're not, I mean, we're we're that will be one of the bases of our discussion. But I'm as it should be.

Michael 1:04

We're very fortunate to have the author today of Stu Watson, Cybernetics and the Evolution of Philosophy.

Stu 1:11

I'm gonna riff on that. I'm not just gonna rehash my old work.

Michael 1:15

Which is which is fine, except I should I should let you know that uh the entirety of my knowledge about the topic comes from an article from March 2024, March 24, 2025 called Stu Watson. Cybernetics and the evolution of philosophy.

Stu 1:32

That's not true. You've heard enough other stuff from me in the last two and a half years or whatever. Uh I'm sure your your your information is far greater. That's what I say.

Michael 1:42

When I'm when I'm out at a bar talking cybernetics, I'm like, you wouldn't you wouldn't know that I'm actually uh pretty good friends with the esteemed cybernetics thinker, Stu Watson. Or we should say Dr. Watson at this point, by the way. Again, congratulations again.

Stu 1:56

Oh yes, yes, thank you. Yeah. Anyway, uh before we get into all that, we should just touch base with politics briefly because it's been going so well. Uh did you see there was another press conference today on this is Monday, April 6th, uh after the rousing speech last Wednesday, the address to the nation about the future of the war in Iran.

Michael 2:22

Uh-huh. And the Truth Social heard around the world recently. On Easter Sunday. On Easter Sunday, yeah.

Stu 2:30

The holiest day in the Christianity.

Michael 2:35

Historians are uh comparing it to Churchill's uh this is not the beginning or the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.

Speaker 2:43

Yes, yes. Or one of uh Rosalind's crazy bastards. One of his fireside chats. I think this was I don't know the uh this is almost fireside chat level, I would I would argue. Yes. But yeah, so Trump has threatened uh tomorrow night, I guess, the day of this podcast's release, so tonight if you're listening on the day of release, fingers crossed, as they say to uh obliterate the infrastructure entire nation. Which uh people have said, do you think he's going to nuke Iran? And what do you think, Michael?

Speaker 1 3:25

I'm not sure he's fully connected to the words he is saying at this point. So it would be hard to say, yet in classic Trump fashion, impossible to rule out. So yeah. I actually heard uh I was I was listening to the news on the drive down back to the city. I went away for Easter, and um, you know, it's so many of these, whatever, you know, the daily or the BBC Global story where it's just these continually befuddled hosts and um guests just being like, well, you know, I mean, uh, could there be some uh could there be some method to the madness with Trump's unpredictability? And you know, the one guy was today was like, um, but you know, it might look like he's crazy, but could it be said that perhaps maybe, like almost hopefully, like desperately? Like, what if he's crazy like a fox? And the other guy's like, well, yeah, except to be crazy like a fox would imply that he has some idea what he's doing. You know, I do you know, still to this day, uh these people still have to give lip service to well, you know, um, the level of impro unpredictability does uh it makes it difficult to get your footing diplomatically. It's like, but to what end? You know what I mean? Yeah, like for what? What is any of this doing that achieves anything?

Speaker 4:46

Well, Nixon famously pioneered the so-called madman theory. Are you familiar with this? Where he was like, Well, if I act as crazy as possible, it'll keep the the Russians and the Viet Cong or whoever he's the Chinese, it'll keep them on their toes because they'll think, oh my god, he's really gonna push the bomb and they'll back, you know, push the push the button and he'll back, they'll back off, you know. But Nixon, whatever you want to say about him, I mean, evil guy, you know, racist, bigot, the tapes are an incredible treasure trove of obscenity and monstrosity. Uh much smarter than Donald Trump, right? I mean, a much more canny operator.

Speaker 1 5:25

I assume, I mean, I I'm not too familiar with it, but I would assume that he wasn't saying the opposite thing every day, like same day, same hour type thing. You know what I mean? Like, there's one thing to be unpredictable, there's another to be completely incoherent, right?

Speaker 5:40

Right. I mean, I think Trump has entered the Dadaist phase of his political life, right?

Speaker 1 5:46

Where he's literally just doing nonsense poetry every time he I mean, he was I mean, the it's the scenes are just again, like uh if it weren't so serious, it would be uh the funniest thing you've ever seen. When he's he's talking about obliterating Iran beside a costume rabbit. Yeah, I saw that too. Like, what what where are we?

Speaker 6:17

You know, a little bit of personal lore. You know, back in the late 80s, during the first Bush administration, I actually attended the White House Easter role. Um, really? We were living in Maryland at the time, and my parents were friends with uh George H.W. Bush's ne'er do well cousin, uh Randy Walker. He actually sold them their house. And so he got us like VIP access to the Easter. Yeah, and we got to like go and you get you got all we had we they used to be all over our house, a bunch of little eggs that have like White House, Easter egg, little wooden eggs that are painted. Uh and it was the first time in my life that I saw a president with my own eyes. My dad hoisted me up on his shoulders and I I peered across to see the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. See taking visage, yeah. Uh so I I uh in watching the Easter Bunny thing, I had a strange flashback to my own childhood experience at the egg roll, and happy to report that uh, you know, again, another evil man, George HW, but uh nothing nearly so insane occurred.

Speaker 1 7:31

I mean, when it comes to what he might do, I think that the most dangerous territory is sort of that all he seems to be doing, yeah, I mean, he's doing uh huge amounts of damage at great cost in both people's lives and and well-being. Um, obviously, we don't want to um sugarcoat any of that. But in terms of his greater strategy of I could destroy everything, I can, you know, take them back to the Stone Age. It's like I think the most dangerous thing is that if Iran get increasingly comfortable sort of calling his bluff in terms of going to that level, that he might end up calling his own bluff, if that makes sense, you know?

Speaker 8:11

Yeah, uh I yeah, I just don't even know what to predict at this point. It's it's it's distressing, it seems bad, it doesn't bode well for America, Iran, the world, anyone, right? And the idea that this is just gonna keep happening for the next three years, pretty much, is is uh one of the more blackpilling, you know, kind of just realizations to dawn. Because you start saying things like, well, surely the next president can uh well if we take back Congress, you know. Yeah. Anyway.

Speaker 1 8:59

If the voters send a strong message in the midterm, Stu, it could all perhaps turn around.

Speaker 9:04

You know, Michael, I think if we just call our Congress people, that would be probably the best answer as we as we learned last week from the AI doc. Um, anyway, let's let's get on to the main topic. Uh we'll keep we'll keep our fingers on the pulse of uh the Iran situation. I guess we'll know by the next time we record what what has happened.

Speaker 1 9:29

Um, or we'll be having this exact same conversation again.

Speaker 9:33

Or we'll be in hell because somehow we've become irradiated by a nuke misfire that landed in Brooklyn. Uh seems very possible. Anyway, uh on to cybernetics. So we've talked about cybernetics off and on throughout the history of the show. It is one of my areas of academic focus. My dissertation was about the intersection of cybernetics and the 19th century artistic movement known as romanticism. Uh my argument was essentially that many of the ideas of cybernetics were in one way or another anticipated by the concerns of the romantic poets, in particular Wordsworth, uh whose poem Tintern Abbey lends uh us the title of this week's episode. Uh flows through all things, right? Uh that's the uh impels all thinking things. Uh this idea of a kind of I mean cybernetics is interesting. It's a hard science, but it's also has a mystical element, I would argue. There's an aspect of it that you can kind of attach to more woo-woo beliefs, which we'll talk about in the second half of the episode, uh, when we get to Bateson in particular. But essentially from its origin point, cybernetics is the study of is a the study of information. And the idea that, you know, most of the events that happen in life, in the world, can be understood as exchanges of um messages between, you know, the human body and the world around it through our sense organs, right? So sort of everything that you encounter in your day-to-day life, whether it's meaningful or not, can be understood as a message. Now, not in a message like a schizophrenic sees meaning in everything, right? But message in in the sense of just it's sensory information that is available to us for interpretation. Does that make sense? Okay.

Speaker 1 11:33

So it's like if you get a text, can you be like, oh, there it is, cybernetics?

Speaker 11:36

Well, that's a little that's very literal. I I mean like you look over there and there is a wall, you know, and like that wall has features. That you're the the light reflecting off that wall into your eyes is a message on the most basic level. It's not a message that conveys any meaning per se, but it's an informational message. All right. And that life cannot uh humans in particular, but also machines, can be understood as these like sensory message receiving entities who are shaped not just by our capacity to receive messages, but by our capacity to remember and interpret those messages moving forward. And if you think about your life from a very early stage, you understand that this is true, right? Like an example. An example I often bring up with my students is like there's a child, right? You're a child, you're very small, you don't understand anything about the world, you see your parent is cooking something on a stove, it smells good, you're getting the message good food is there. You're just tall enough to like reach up and try and grab at the food, not understanding that in the process of cooking, the pan that is cooking the food gets extremely hot, right? So when you receive the message of pain from the burning hot pan, you're you're learning, in essence, oh don't touch the pan. Right. Well, but also just in more in general, like be careful about just the world, the world, there's the possibility of danger. You're like petting a strange dog, the dog bites you. You know, a lot of these messages we receive in a stage of life before we are able to articulate thoughts, right? So, for instance, we learn to speak by imitation. A parent says a word, you you babble, babble, babble, eventually you mimic the word. There's a mimetic process. This is a you learn to speak by imitation. Exactly, right? And we learn almost everything by imitation, right? I think this is one of the reasons. Well, we'll get to this in more depth at the end of the episode, but uh, this is not how large language models learn the world, right? They learn by they don't have a body is a big reason why it's very different. Uh and they their sense organs are very different as well, right? You you they have a sense, they have an ability to like break down text into patterns and then of ones and zeros, right? Well, maybe something like that is happening on some level in our brains, although neuroscience is like the jury's still out about this, but there seems to be evidence that our our neurons don't function as binary on-off switches, they have a kind of analogic nature, an analog nature. That's above my pay grade. But in any case, uh cybernetics is a system by which you know we interpret the world, and the key element though is that factor of memory, right? So you reach out, you touch the hot pan, you burn, you get burned, you feel pain. Thereafter, you have the memory encoded in your mind. Oh, when I reach out and touch the pan, I can get hurt. I don't want to do that, right? There's also positive re-in. That's that's an example of negative feedback, right? There's also positive feedback where you know you do something nice, you're polite, your parents say, Good, Michael, you did the you know, you held the door for granny or whatever, and you feel good, and so you learn that, you associate that. Uh, it's a very like primordial way of looking at the world, and and it breaks down everything, like all living things essentially are united on a spectrum of learning through feedback, right? And machines, the most complicated machines, the the machines that have access to memory, can also be seen on this spectrum, right? Because, you know, one of the primordial insights of the cybernutitians was to realize that life can be understood as an ever as an unending battle against entropy, which is to say the tendency of things to move from an organized and ordered state, a warm, energetic state, to uh a tepid, dull state, or in the case of like to move from order to disorder, right? That that's that's like one of the primordial laws of the universe. That always happens.

Speaker 1 16:14

And that it is true. I mean, things do feel like they get a lot duller, like life, for example.

Speaker 16:19

No, I mean our bodies experience this, right? Part of the reason that we experience that is because our senses are less acute as we age, right? We don't feel our reflexes get worse, right? Is it also dull because we have the information or so much of it? I think there's a part of it that's like that as well, right? That there is less newness, that the excitement of newness is gone. We have we become root, we become set in our ways, we become less willing to adapt to new influxes of information unless they're forced upon us, right? So cybernetics is the study of feedback, you know, put to putting it in the most basic terms possible. Feedback meaning you send out a message into the world, and part of that message you send out returns to you. Now that could it could be you text your friend, your friend texts you back, or in my case, your friend leaves you on red.

Speaker 1 17:17

Um but even I already apologized for that off camera.

Speaker 17:24

But even when you are left on red, you're still getting feedback, right? It's just again, it's oh yeah, you're getting feedback doesn't want to talk to me. Right, it's negative feedback. It's like a non-answer is still an answer. Uh to paraphrase rush, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Your hated Canadian brothers, Rush.

Speaker 1 17:48

Um and then I see the feedback and I respond by getting rid of red receipts so I don't have to deal with this nightmare ever again.

Speaker 17:56

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 17:57

Or classic cybernetics.

Speaker 18:00

Well, or like it depends on the nature of your relationship with the person you're texting with, but maybe you think, oh, you know, maybe I pus pissed them off or I did something to annoy them. And then another part of your rational brain is like, they're probably busy, right? Or whatever, right? And they'll get back to you.

Speaker 1 18:17

Have you ever I've done I've done this? Have you ever like told a friend that their their red receipts, their read receipts are like on and they weren't before? You know what I mean? Like it feels like it it feels to me almost invasive when somebody like when I can see that someone's re like read my message, I get less offended by a non-response and more like, hey, just so you know, I don't know if this was a mistake, but your read receipts are on, you know. If you turn that you know off, I don't have to deal with this terrible nightmare that you hate me and never want to speak to me again.

Speaker 18:50

Right. Uh if you're paranoid, that is a nightmare. Uh I guess I'm at the stage of life where I still have those thoughts, but I've gotten very good at ignoring them. Because like you said, adult. Well, as we get older, we don't care as much. When I was in college and I felt like I was being excluded from something, I mean, it was a a nightmare, you know. But as I've aged, that sort of primordial sense of outrage and uh and fear, really panic that oh my god, my friends don't like me anymore.

Speaker 1 19:25

I I don't really it's like FOMO, it's like FOMO flips to like, yes, I'm missing out.

Speaker 19:34

Thank God I've missed out again. I wouldn't go so far as to say that, but yeah, I mean, I it just it's like when I first started submitting to poetry magazines, for instance. This is another form of feedback, right? Are people's response to your art? You can think of when you started doing stand-up, for instance. Like if I sent out a poem I thought was really good and it got like rejected really quickly, I'd be like, I'd be offended. I'd be like, this journal is.

Speaker 1 20:01

Yeah, whereas for me, it's like I, you know, I had friends at a younger age uh get married fairly quickly, right? And in the early days when like a wedding would come up and I would kind of a borderline, you know, do I make the cut? What's the size of the wedding? I would I would be like, oh my god, I didn't get invited to the wedding, like this big life moment. And now when there's like a borderline friend and I don't make it, I'm just like, Yes, like I don't have to do any of the wedding things other than say like congrats after on like an Instagram post. Totally.

Speaker 20:32

Yeah, I I also know sometimes when I'm invited to weddings, I also just decline. Really? Oh wow. Well, I mean if it's far away, if there's I've had a bunch where it's like we're getting married in the middle of a jungle, I just leave it around.

Speaker 1 20:48

I don't I don't say yes or no at all, I just leave them swinging in the wind. Well, you shouldn't do that because then you know I don't really do that.

Speaker 20:55

They're trying to plan the logistics anyway. All right, this is all roundabout, but this is like actually what cybernetics is. You know, when I say cybernetics in as I'm talking at the bar, as I'm constantly at bars, as you know, since I don't drink. But um uh well, I actually am at bars fairly frequently for a person who doesn't drink now that I think about it.

Speaker 1 21:18

Funneling non-alcoholic loggers.

Speaker 21:21

Well, you gotta fit in, you know. You don't want to be re you don't want to feel rejected now that I've talked about how mature I am. In any case, uh when you think of cybernetics, you think immediately of the 90s use of cyber, right? Cyber sex, cyber crime, cyber stalking. And then of course the uh I say this in the article, but like that arch comic genius, Elon Musk's brilliant cyber truck, right?

Speaker 1 21:50

Yes, a touch of irony, right?

Speaker 21:52

Yeah, throwback name for a futuristic thing. But and in fact, as I've tried to argue, cybernetics is operates on a whole higher level, right? It doesn't have it doesn't necessarily have to do with technology at all. It can just be a way of interpreting your existence in the world. And I would say that like the kind of response where you're um where you react like negatively to touching the hot pot these are sort of like tier one cybernetic react responses. Where you're like kind of learning through instinctual responses. But there are higher order uh cybernetic responses that we learn as well. So famous example I always use in class for some reason is when I was a kid and I was skiing, I I remember deciding I'm like, I'm really gonna go for this run. I was pretty young. I was like five and I just like I was like I'm gonna throw off all caution. So of course what happens? I fall, I break my leg immediately. And you know in the months that followed recovering, I'm like haunted by that choice of like throwing off all caution.

Speaker 1 23:05

So you you're saying when you're telling the story you're saying that you did have a moment before where you were like fuck it I'm going for it.

Speaker 23:11

Yeah and if it wouldn't be a useful story if I didn't right sure if you just get hurt in a random accident that's not like you don't learn anything from that right but if you're saying you could still you could still crash while skiing and then you could just say don't don't ski sure don't ski but it but if you but if you have the if you have the instead the insight like I'm gonna just go for it completely no holds barred this time and the result is immediate serious injury ever since then I've been a very cautious person like in all areas of life.

Speaker 1 23:42

Right not even just skier.

Speaker 23:43

You're saying it then feeds out of that's a higher order level of feedback that's sort of shaped my behavior ever after which I think is exemplary of like what I'm talking about when I talk about like the the way and and that there's a kind of Freudian dimension to cybernetics when you start approaching it at this level. Cybernetics is both very Darwinian as we'll talk about in a minute but also Freudian because I think it can be used as a way of understanding your own life by looking back at these kind of good and bad moments that shaped you, right? Do you have any memories of like something you a mistake you made I don't know everything bad I do I just do over and over and over again Yeah I mean fair enough uh man I should really quit smoking cigarettes. Oh here's a vape look in a comment look it's a cigarette I think another one that I remember that's more positive is when I was a little bit older I was probably like eight or nine maybe uh we were I was living in Maryland around the time of the dreadful Easter egg hunt at the White House and I I have I told this story on pod before maybe I have maybe I haven't uh I call it the paradox of saintliness it's kind of like the moment when my my when my life was ruined by self-consciousness where I was like coming back from the gym and I just come to this school I think it was in first grade so I was probably like seven I probably wasn't eight or nine and I was coming back from the gym for some reason I like went to leave to go to the bathroom or something and I was coming back and I saw the principal of the school coming and he was like touring a new family in this is in and I realized oh they're coming my way so I slowed myself down deliberately and then like not ostentatiously but like deliver very deliberately like held the door for them as if to demonstrate how polite the students at the school were to this like prospective family or whatever. And the the headmaster looked at me and was like very pleased obviously it's like wow this student like went out of his way to be so polite but in that moment of his recognition I also recognized like how dishonest like how how like oh God I've like done this good deed and I'm receiving a benefit from it.

Speaker 1 26:06

You know I like the I like the idea of like you're hold you're you you're holding the door and the reaction happens and you have the moment and then you look at the family and you're like this does not represent the student body very much.

Speaker 26:18

No but like that in that kind of moment I think about that moment often because it's like you know you you think about doing good deeds for their own sake. And I what you know why was I doing it? Well I'm sure I was doing because I've been trained to be polite right but I was also doing aware on some level that I was doing it for the benefit of like the headmaster's approval or whatever. So we have these little moments in our life you can look back on and you can see the way that like that memory becomes a kind of anchor point that you reflect back on and that maybe shapes your future actions right because is that why you never hold the door for me that is a that is in fact why that's not true though I thought I held the door for you the other day but but this is like these are these are cybernetic ideas right cybernetics is not just tech. It's not just you know giving the guy the robot arm or whatever. But let's get into like where this all comes from right so the cybernetic conferences uh started in 1946 and ran until 1953. They're held mostly in New York and the original title of the conference was Circular Causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems. Beautiful title I don't know why we don't just use that as the name for it. Should have gone with Lollapalooza and this as I said before this is basically like the study of feedback right and it's uh but it's broad it's not just hard sciences also social sciences sciences excuse me so you have people leading figures from biology mathematics psychology sociology physiology computer science anthropology psychoanalysis on and on like this was like a meeting of the minds in the postwar moment to think about this idea of feedback and how it operated across all of these different fields of scientific endeavor.

Speaker 1 28:21

And the guy is just to also help help them communicate across disciplines right that's exactly right.

Speaker 28:27

Right one of the main goals was to develop a common nomenclature that could cut across um jargon that dominates in different areas right so Warren McCulloch who's a neurophysiologist was the chairman of the conference and he was kind of just the guy who organized he was he was the guy who like did all the grunt work of like pulling the different people he had a lot of uh the Earl Warren sort of it was yeah I mean Warren a little different uh McCulloch McCulloch was involved I mean he was a very smart man he did a lot of really groundbreaking work on theorizing neurons and like what neurons are and laid the groundwork for a lot of advances in neuroscience uh since his death in the late 60s but he also I think was a pretty sociably intelligent guy so could convince a lot of people to to to participate. And some of the people I'm not going to really talk about today but who are very interesting and and who we've mentioned in passing in a few cases include Claude Shannon who uh whose whose image we used as the icon for our episode about Claude uh Claude Shannon was worked at uh Bell Labs he was the guy who essentially invented digital computing he was the person to realize oh we can you know ones and zeros like yeah like he he he did that but you know maybe the most important thing to ever happen like um he was also a pioneer in information science prior to this so he was already thinking about like information should be thought of as like uh something that's subject to the laws of nature right such as the idea of entropy another person Johnny von Neumann who in addition to his work on the Manhattan Project was a pioneer in the realms of both quantum physics and game theory and one of the most brilliant mathematicians and people who ever lived like everyone who when he he died pretty young he died in his 50s in 1957 I believe uh at his funeral everyone's just like John was the smartest person that I ever met like that that was just like Johnny Johnny yeah he went he went by something very interesting and hilarious to me about like the smartest guy of all time just being named Johnny. Well he was Hungarian and like he moved to the US like uh oh so it was like just call me Johnny Yeah I think it was kind of like an assimilationist gesture or something but yeah yeah sovereignetics maybe another important person was Margaret Mead uh one of Margaret Mead you know Margaret Mead oh yeah she was uh anthropologist obviously and did a lot of field work in uh with uncontacted or barely contacted tribes in places like uh Samoa and the South Pacific Indonesia she was actually married to Gregory Bateson who we'll talk about in a minute and but the main people uh and later in life she was on a lot of TV shows and documentaries so if it you might have encountered her on like PBS or something like that. In any case she she's very cool the main people I want to talk about though are Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson who are the people that I write about in my dissertation and that I think are most interesting to uh someone approaching this material from a more uh humanities based perspective okay so Wiener was born in 1894 and died in 1964 he was the guy who came up with the name for the the whole thing cybernetics uh he derived the word from an old Greek uh an ancient Greek word Kubernetes which means the steersman the person that steers the the boat basically and he was a one of these uh child prodigies he graduated high school at the age of 11 and sort of a Doogie Hauser type he was basically a uh your old favorite your your Michael has this has come up on pod before I think right but Michael has an iconic bit about Doogie Hauser how every episode is essentially the same it's like oh this man has a nail driven through his forehead don't worry we have our best people on it and then what's this kid doing here when Doogie Hauser walks in some kind of joke take your kid to work today what's going on here he's actually our he's actually our best doctor that was Wiener. I mean he went to Tufts at age 11 Wow his whole family had to move from St. Louis where he was born uh up to um Massachusetts outside Boston because he couldn't live in the dorm obviously right uh also great social life right I always I always ask my students I'm like can you imagine if we had an 11 year old in the class with us and he was running circles around you're smarter than all of us and the professor yeah yeah I mean completely and he graduated at 13 and uh the media took his time he immediately went to Harvard where he entered a PhD program in zoology of all things. Sure but he wasn't he was really turns out he was incredibly clumsy like a lot of um uh brilliant people he was very much of the mind not of the body shall we say uh I don't think he was on the Tufts lacrosse team shall we say there's an 11 year old goalie just he just dies in any case he um he was terrible in the lab he was really clumsy he like couldn't do like the I don't even know what so he immediately trained he transferred to Cornell for two for two years to do a philosophy PhD never finished it I for a long time I'd assumed he'd also gotten a degree from Cornell but it turns out no he never actually even got a master's from Cornell instead bother right well he transferred back to Harvard instead and got and then completed a PhD in two years in uh mathematical logic where he got his PhD at 19 so he was pretty much the opposite of me who got his PhD at 44 um by 1924 when he was under still under 30 he was at teaching full-time uh tenured at MIT where he would stay for the next 40 years uh I I bring up all this because I think the fact that he wasn't just a mathematician but was also someone who was like interested in like animals and uh philosophy is is really important for his point of view on the world right so he has an element of the interdisciplinary within himself that's right I think that's crucial. Uh he says in his famous book The Human Use of Human Beings which originally came out I believe in 1950 and then was updated in 52 and 54 he says it's the thesis of this book society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it and that the future development of these messages and communication facilities message messages between man and and machines between machines and man and between machines and machine are destined to play an ever increasing part pretty like smart thing to realize 1950 right and like the examples he cites in the book are really funny he he's like the automatic door at Penn Station is like the thing he talks about as like the most one of the more complicated machines that we'll encounter in our day-to-day life right and he's right though because the automatic you know an automatic door we see them everywhere there is one at the grocery store it's really slow that I go to and I'm always like is it gonna open is it gonna open I'm gonna walk into the door and it always opens just at the last possible moment before I smash my head through the damn thing um but what's happening is there's a there's a sensor is emitting a beam right and the human body interrupts that beam and when that interruption occurs the memory bank of the machine has a program that goes into operation which is to open the door usually there's a secondary operation which is if someone's stopping the door from closing open the door right like yeah it's that's it it's not a complicated memory system but it is a cybernetic system because it has a sense organ that is accessing memory when when that sense organ is triggered right so that's like very basic level now we have our Roombas and our uh robots that are going out with Melania Trump to make announcements and you know all these wonderful things that we've all come to know and love in recent days. So basically that's one of his examples but he understood implicitly that like these machines are going to become more and more of a problem in our lives and we should think about our relationship to them and that he understood humans and machines as being on the same spectrum in that they resist entropy right so he says a little later in the book the control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of telltales or monitors right so that ties in to what we were just talking about right there's a sensory organ in a machine and it reacts when that sensory organ is trivial is triggered that is of elements which indicate a performance it is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency towards disorganization. In other words to produce temporary and local reversals of the normal direction of entropy right so what he says unites all living things across all spectrums is this anti-entropic capacity to use feedback to further organization as opposed to using feedback solely to continue getting worse right sure. So like if I learned from my skiing mishap that the the lesson I learned was never have limits. Like and then I was dead by the time I was 10 because I was just going off cliffs, right? It's like no, you learn from the negative as well as the positive you accentuate you adapt you change you shift right and he says that like learning machines can do the same thing essentially right and that large language models which we're constantly talking about today are an example of a very advanced form of this kind of learning different for a variety of reasons but we we don't have time to get into all the technical you know uh last thing we've already talked about was you know he believed cybernetics could be a bridge between the different fields. He says as the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, ten physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologist ignorant of mathematics right so if none of these people who are physiologists know any math and a mathematician is like hey that what about this issue with your and they just don't know what he's talking about, right? Uh this is a problem. And again he says if a physiologist who knows I can I can relate to that well we all can right I mean I know a lot of things but I don't know anything about so many areas of life you know so I'll you'll eavesdrop on like stockbrokers talking on the subway and I'm just like I don't know or like watch an episode of industry like I do not know what is being said right now. Well you can take heart there because the actors don't either and like the writers barely do right they're just like it's unclear if the the word the stuff on industry even means anything. But basically he says like we need to be able to put uh these these problems in terms that we can speak to each other across disciplines right that's his like goal for cybernetics. Now before we move on I just want to talk briefly about how he got to the idea of cybernetics which is interesting. As I've said Wiener is very philosophically minded and he was interested in pacifism he he was a pacifist and like Oppenheimer before him the only reason he set aside his pacifism to aid in the military or uh well like Ockheimer at the same time essentially like the only reason he he volunteered his services to the US government during World War II was because of the Nazis right was Jewish his family had left Russia during the time of the pogroms and stuff right so he was kind of like well these guys are trying to literally exterminate Jews from the world I guess I can aid in like defeating the Nazis interestingly though once he once that was accomplished they were like well the the Reds are after us Wiener Wiener's like yeah I gotta go he refused to help during the Cold War uh which I think just because he actually stuck to his ideological principles unlike a certain uh Killian Murphy character in a film we talked about not too long ago in any case he was working on the problem of anti-aircraft fire and the problem with shooting at a plane is that the plane's moving so you kind of have to shoot where the plane's gonna be right you don't just shoot where it is because if the the rocket or whatever you're shooting is going to just miss, right? So he thought like well what if a gun, say we're you know one of those big howitzers or whatever, what if we could program that that every time it shot at a plane, it could kind of record through a sense a sensory organ the results of that shot and encode those results in its memory thereby building up a repository that it could refer back to for every future shot that it took. So it could be like oh this is a plane coming at this trajectory at this altitude I've done that before this didn't work this didn't work this didn't work this had the best results right if it could like optimize all of its future behavior based on the actual results of its past behavior as opposed to just doing it purely probabilistically but like developing a probabilistic model that was based on empirical evidence. Once he realized he thought of that he was like oh wait this idea works for everything right it was like it was like his it was like his the apple falling on his head moment where he realized that these kind of feedback mechanisms were operative everywhere. Now the second person I'm gonna talk about is very different from uh Wiener Wiener the child prodigy who was at Tufts at 11 right Gregory Bateson can is British. He came from an extremely successful academic family. His father was William Bateson, who is a biologist, who's the guy who actually coined the term genetics. It's a big one, right? He was like, What if we called this? Are you with me? Genetics. And everyone just stood up and applauded and cheered. Um, his grandfather had been a Don and later master at St. John's College. They say St. John's College or do they say St. John's College? Do you know that British thing where someone will be names and it's like St. John is their name, but that's pronounced St Jin? Stin, yeah. Oh man, I love that. That's that's like one of my favorite British things. In any case, we'll say St. John's because we're American or Canadian American, British, whatever you are. Um all of the above. Uh he was the master of St. John's College, Cambridge, where Bateson, Gregory Bateson himself would later be a student. Um, but that was the extent of Bateson's education. After undergrad, he was like, got that, I'm done. He left school. He like worked in so many different fields. Uh, and his parents, he had a really fraught family life. His parents were like, Well, your father invented genetics. What are you going to do? You know, it was like that kind of vibe. His oldest brother um was killed in the first world war. The second brother, after the older brother died, the second brother parents were like, Well, it's up to you now. Kind of like a JFK situation. And the other, but the second brother was like, I want to be a poet. And the parents were like, never, you know, and then he had a bad breakup. So he ended up shooting himself at Piccadilly at Piccadilly Circus, like in public. Whoa. On the on the anarch, on like the day on his brother, his dead brother's birthday when he was like in his early 20s. And then they turned to the third son, Gregory, and we're like, well, well, well. It's like pretty grim, right? Like, yeah. He responded, he rallied. I mean, yeah, he's he he did it. Mission accomplished. Um, he had a variety of different areas he worked. I think they're probably annoyed that he didn't get tenure, that he didn't, you know, get a PhD and get a tenure job somewhere and settle down in the proper British manner. But that wasn't for him. He did a lot of different things. He did field work in the South Pacific in the 30s, and he only left because World War II broke out. He also did work on linguistics and he worked in mental hospitals uh with schizophrenic patients, trying to theorize like what was the reason for schizophrenia. Not something you're probably gonna get to the bottom of without neuroscience, but never mind. Uh so by the time of the post-war period, he'd had all these, he'd led all these different lives and had written about them and was published, you know, acclaimed, well known, uh, well known enough to be invited to the Macy conferences, in part because he was married to Margaret Mead, right? They got married, they stayed married uh, I think from 36 to 50. So they were married at the time of a lot of the conferences, but and they stayed friends after they split up, too. In any case, uh he's kind of the guy at the Macy conferences who's had real-world experience. A lot of the other people, I mean, they'd had experience in various areas and were brilliant people.

Speaker 1 47:31

But they're more strictly academic.

Speaker 47:33

Yeah, they're more traditionally academic, and he is a little bit more of a wild card. And you can kind of see that when you read the conference transcripts. Uh, only a few of the conference transcripts survive. I'm not sure why they didn't hire a stenographer to do the whole thing. Or if they did, they like left them somewhere. Well, it just like it fell into a like someone left it in a cab or something. I I don't know what happened. Um Bateson he chimes in a lot when these people are giving these really and his his insights are like really potent. Like they're talking about the brain with this British psychoanalyst who's built this artificial brain, Ross Ross Ashby. He has written a book which is known as Design for a Brain. Great title, right? It's like I've read it, it's it's very interesting and very technical in ways I do not understand. But you know, you gotta push yourself into areas you don't know or you'll never change. In any case, he uh he's like, wait a minute, like he has this Eureko moment where he's like, wait a minute, the the brain is one thing, the mind is something that is beyond just the brain. The mind can beyond. What's the difference? Well, that the mind is the thing that's at that you, you know, that's actually thinking. The brain is just the organ in which the thinking occurs, right? And he says the mind is better understood as not just the brain, but as a kind of imminent structure that's partly in the brain, but is also partly in the environment that surrounds that brain. So he says we may say that mind is imminent in those circuits of the brain which are complete within the brain, or that mind is imminent in circuits which are complete within the system, brain plus body, right? So our mind is not just our brain, but like, you know, the expression think on your feet, like you know, or like muscle memory. Well, your muscles don't actually have any memory, the brain has the memory, but you know, there's a there's a where do you delineate between the two, right? Or finally, that mind is imminent in the larger system, man plus environment, right? So that we like basically think we think of the mind as being just in our heads, right? And then our body is something separate. This is Cartesian dualism, right? Like, I think, therefore I am, and it's like as if our thinking is somehow separate from the bodily world, right? This is like the principal philosophical division post you know 1650 or whenever Descartes died. Um Bateson says, no, in principle, if we desire to explain or understand the mental aspect of any biological event, we must take into account the system, that is, the network of closed circuits within which that biological event is determined. But when we seek to explain the behavior of a man or any other organism, this system will usually not just have the same limit as the self, as this term is commonly and variously understood. In other words, you can't understand a person by just looking at them in isolation. You always have to understand a person and their entire mental existence as existing within a world that is not only their personal mind and their personal experiences, but also the environment that shaped those personal experiences. Does that make sense? And then can the environment then be shaped by mind, right? Absolutely. That these two things are constantly flowing into each other and in a dialogue of feedback and response, right? And response to feedback. So he's that's like a big insight that he like had at these conferences, which is funny that like the outsider is like, wait a minute, we've been thinking about like the mind all wrong, like all of all of philosophy is actually wrong. He actually says that. He's like, wait a minute, Aristotle was wrong. And they're like, Yeah, you're right, Aristotle was wrong. Like, damn, like you win, Bateson, you've defeated Aristotle at last. Um he says, uh one thing he's also acutely aware of is that like humans knew this before Descartes and before the sort of modern rationalisms of the Enlightenment came to be. That it's like part of the Enlightenment is the forgetting of like a more primordial awareness of this knowledge. Um and he says this uh this are all these quotes are from his book, Um, Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind, which he published later in life and is a sort of collection of all of his essays that he published from the 30s through the 70s. He says, anthropologically, it would seem from what we know of the early material that man in society took clues from the natural world around him and applied those clues in a sort of metaphoric way to the society in which he lived. That is, he identified with or empathized with the natural world around him and took that empathy as a guide for his own social organizations and his own theories of his own psychology. This is what we call totemism. So basically, like primitive people believed that the trees and the lakes and the rivers had minds, right? I mean, like, think of the ancient Greeks. There's like a god of every object in the world, right?

Speaker 1 53:01

There's interesting, like, does that imply that like the rise of individualism has had a detrimental effect on society and the environment because of a lack of sort of metaphoric respect for it?

Speaker 53:14

Absolutely. I think so. And also just the idea of individualism discards the fundamental truth that we are never alone.

unknown 53:23

Yeah.

Speaker 53:24

Right? I mean, to go back to Heidegger, Heidegger, you know, who famously was a Nazi, uh, did get this aspect of it right, uh, which is to say, you know, Geworfenheit, that thrownness, that we are all thrown into the world, that we learn language, but we that the language constitutes our deepest thoughts, right? When you're like having an anxiety attack about any number of things, the language you're using to to go over the possibilities of doom that await you are is a language you didn't invent. It's a language that in fact existed before you were born. Isn't that strange?

Speaker 3 54:07

Yeah.

Speaker 54:08

It was in fact created by wait for it, other people. So that like even our deepest individuality is in a sense shaped by a common communal effort, that is the creation of language. This is something that Bateson's like acutely attuned to and aware of, and that a lot of people forget.

Speaker 1 54:27

Well, it's interesting to like to compare it to the AI situation, right? Which we talked about last week, where you know, one of the things that we saw in the documentary was that I think I mean it might not have surprised you that there are remarkably few people actually working on it, right? Um, they had mentioned something like 20,000, and there are only about 200 working in AI risk. And I think it's like pretty telling of like contrasting it with this imperative of crossing disciplines, right? Where people in the AI world just kind of announce all of these terrible things or these potentially positive inevitabilities with some sort of transition period, but with no consideration of any of the impacts and any of the process to get from A to B or A to anywhere. Right. You know, and for you know, these people are these people consulting, you know, people who do cybernetics, anthropology, um, you know, people who study the impact of joblessness, you know, I think some of those training.

Speaker 55:25

I think some of those are among the 200, you know. There are some there are some philosophers.

Speaker 1 55:30

Yeah, but your point is well, it's not it's not happening at it's not happening at the There's like a thousand times more people working on just getting this done as fast as possible. Exactly. Right. And so you see all of this, like it's a the classic example of like using up the environmental resources to have the thing happen. You know, what the person in the documentary is like, well, why don't we solve the environmental problems first then? You know, why don't we get it to do that?

Speaker 55:52

Yeah.

Speaker 1 55:52

Um and part of that is because I think like there is this lack of respect for the relationship between the technology that they are now deifying and like the world in which, no matter what they try to say, like exists squarely within it, right?

Speaker 56:06

That's right. No, that's well said. Uh I think another thing Bateson talks about a lot, he has a great essay that I teach in my class about uh civilization and like the end of the world and like the collapse of civilizations. And he's like basically civilizations that survive are those that have enough flexibility, they have enough margins to be flexible. That a civilization collapses when it becomes too rigid to adapt to unexpected changes. Now, whether that change is the Huns coming over the hills with these fancy bows we've never seen before, they can shoot from further in the or whether it's, oh, a volcano just blew up our main island. Like, what do we do? Or whether it's the slow, gradual rise of something like climate change, right? Yeah, and like the need to move away from fossil fuels, for instance. I think one thing that the Trump administration uh is an amazing example of is inflexibility, right? It this refusal to admit that progress has happened, to try and undercut progress at every turn, whether it's trans people kicking them under the bus again, whether it's trying to kick gays out of the military again, or you know, just like any socially progressive thing that's happened in the last 30 years, the Trump administration is guaranteed to be against it, right? He wants to literally outlaw wind power. He doesn't like the way it looks, and also that he makes all these outrageous claims about it. That's untrue. I mean, remember when we were in upstate New York driving up to Canada last summer, and there were all those windmills? Yeah. Well, those are all coming down, I'm afraid. And you know what the the cost of taking them down, that's on the farmers that put them up in the first place. It's only fair. In any case, one last thought about Bateson. He he considered his participation in the cybernetics conferences to be like the most important thing that he was involved in in his career, and that the conferences themselves were he considered them to be one of the two most important things that happened in the 20th century, which is a bold claim. Um the other was the Versailles Peace Conference. Oh wow, which which laid the groundwork, your fate, you're one of your favorite themes, right? Yes, that lay the groundwork, of course, famously for um uh World War II, right? Like the Holocaust, the Manhattan, like none of he, I mean part of his reasons like none of these other things would have happened without Versailles. And I guess in a sense, cybernetics wouldn't have either, because World War II was the impetus for that. But never mind. He says, I include cybernetics as the second historic event of importance in my lifetime because I have at least a dim hope that we can bring ourselves to use this new understanding with some honesty. If we understand a little bit of what we're doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we've created around ourselves. So far, so good.

Speaker 1 59:07

Uh we're like, what if we make way more hallucinations?

Speaker 59:13

Well, what if we have a hallucinating machine that we use to fire everyone in America? Continuing, cybernetics is at any rate a contribution to change, not simply a change in attitude, but even a change in the understanding of what an attitude is. The stance I have taken in choosing what is important history, saying that the important things are moments at which at which attitude is determined, the moment which at which the bias of the thermostat is changed. Thermostat, another famous cybernetic mechanism, right? When you when your house gets too hot, the air conditioning comes on because the sensor tells the thermostat, right? Uh the stance these this stance is derived directly from cybernetics. And he goes on a little later and says, cybernetics has integrity with itself to help us to not to be to not be seduced by it into more lunacy, but we cannot trust it to keep us from sin. And I think that last part has proven to be very true, right? It's like there's the potential here with this new methodological way of thinking about the world and our enmeshment within our environment to keep us from repeating some of the mistakes of the past, but it's not gonna save us. And he was right. Um just to wrap up, like, why talk about cybernetics in a podcast about the end of the world? Well, on the one hand, as I just said, you know, as as positive and I think useful as these ideas are, not only just for understanding ourselves as individuals, but from understanding civilizations, group activity, you know, just how societies should be organized. Absolutely. And I mean, we could we could talk in another episode later about some of the attempts to integrate cybernetic ideas into government, which have been successful and unsuccessful in various ways. Um but another thing is, you know, this is AI does come not directly, but indirectly out of this conference, right? I mean, these are the ideas, these ideas of machines that have memory and can operate, and that's AI. Like you're that's the very beginning stages of AI. You sort of mix up cybernetics with the ideas of Alan Turing and the sort of digital computing revolution of uh Claude Shannon, and you've got the the basics of cybernetics, and in 1956, there was actually another conference on similar lines that had many of the same participants, uh, inaugurated at Dartmouth, which is seen as being the beginning of modern AI research.

Speaker 3 1:01:44

Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:01:45

And that was initiated by Marvin Minsky, and he specifically did not include Bateson or Wiener because he hated Wiener for some personal grudge. I don't entirely understand why. And he Bateson wasn't a scientist, he he wanted to focus solely on the computer science um aspect of it. Marvin Minsky also was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein, went to the island. Yeah, yeah. He was very old, but there's photos of him, like there's photos of him and Hawking at the island and stuff, and like thank God Wiener's not here. Well, yeah, well, thank God Wiener's been dead for 42 years or whatever. He still hates him. Um so Minsky's ideas are the groundwork for you know modern rural networks and like the the things that have led to large language models. Like uh and one suspects one of the problems with this whole approach is the exiling of people like Wiener and Bateson, i.e., people that have, in addition to scientific rigor and intelligence, humanistic aspects to their interests, right?

Speaker 1 1:03:04

And there's that's the you can see that pretty plainly in how little of a little consequence humanistic considerations are when it comes to AI, right? Absolutely. That they are considered completely after the fact, sort of incidental nuisances to be dealt with instead of you know the entire fabric of our existence.

Speaker 1:03:23

Right. It's like, oh, copyright? What artists made stuff that they own? We'll deal with that later, right? I mean, that's right. That was essentially the attitude. And uh, oh no, Chat GPT does not have any copyrighted material in its memory banks, and then it's like a lawsuit just came out where it's like it has like every copyrighted thing ever in its um so I almost think that this points us back to like a primordial mistake in the genesis of AI. That if I and I I'm not I'm not an AI scientist, I don't I don't know what it would have meant to take seriously the ideas of people like Bateson and Wiener in pursuing artificial intelligence, but one can't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been better. Maybe it wouldn't have been you know, maybe we wouldn't be where we are today, but if we weren't where we are today, maybe that would be a good thing. So I don't know. Anyway, was this useful? Was this interesting?

Speaker 1 1:04:28

I mean, I think I think it, yeah, it's great. I think at the very least, right? Like so many times we talk about um how it feels like it's you know, they talked about it in the documentary too, the kind of race element to it, right? Racing to get it done at the cost of all these other things, that perhaps that wouldn't have been the imperative if we had built these ideas um, you know, through uh the cybernetics approach as opposed to sort of the hypercapital individualist approach that, you know, not speaking directly about the Dartmouth conference, but more about the sort of elements that make it so that they have to sort of get there first. And that seems to be at odds with something that prioritizes um the consideration of all things, you know?

Speaker 1:05:16

Yeah, I I I agree, right? Uh these things are these things are related. Um well, so that's a little intro to cybernetics. I'll I'll put a link to my article about this, which goes over some of the same material, has has some stuff about Heidegger, has some other stuff we didn't we didn't cover today, and uh has been well received. I think I think it's a useful article. So check it out if you're interested. Uh next week we are going to be going back to the afterlife. Um barring cat catastrophe in Iran or elsewhere. Uh the plan is to pick up where we left off. I think the last one we did was Zoroastrian Afterlife. So we're still pretty early. We're still back in the uh I haven't decided which which afterlife we'll tackle yet, but we've got a lot on the table. There's a lot of uh lot of fun places we could go with it. And uh, so that'll be good. In the meantime, if you like the show, you can follow us on the podcatcher of your choice. If you really like the show, you can leave us a rating and review on that podcatcher. You could also follow us on Instagram at the end of the worldwms, where we post exciting reels, highlights of the show. Uh so afterlife next week, maybe ancient Greece, maybe ancient China, maybe something in the ancient Americas. We'll see where the spirit takes me. But it'll be fun. Uh I'm looking forward to it. And until then, this has been the end of the world, Michael Stu. I'm Michael. And I'm Stu, and we'll talk to you real soon, you can't do it.