Cybernetics Quotes

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”
― Albert Einstein

“The map is not the territory.”
― Alfred Korzybski

“Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.”
― Scarlett Thomas, The End of Mr. Y

“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, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
― Donna Haraway

“The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains.

Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.”
― Timothy Leary, Chaos & Cyber Culture

“Big whirls have little whirls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whirls have lesser whirls,
And so on to viscosity.”
― Lewis Fry Richardson

“Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free”
― Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.”
― Arthur S. Eddington

“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 Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.”
― John Stuart Mill

“Life is not made of atoms,it is merely built out of them. What life is actually 'made of' is cycles of cause and effect, loops of causal flow. These phenomenon are just as real as atoms - perhaps even more real. If anything, the entire universe is actually made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences.”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.”
― Stuart Kauffman

“Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.”
― Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

“Technology - with all its promise and potential - has gotten so far beyond human control that its threatening the future of humankind.”
― Kim J. Vicente

“IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.”
― Stafford Beer

“Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing.”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.”
― Freeman Dyson, FROM EROS TO GAIA

“cause and effect act in webs, not chains.”
― Steve Grand, Creation: Life and How to Make It

“It bears emphasizing: our traditional ways of thinking have ignored - and virtually made invisible - the relationship between people and technology.”
― Kim J. Vicente

“What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value.

This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness.

In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“Management, a science? Of course not, it's just a waste-paper basket full of recipes which provided the dish of the day during a few years of plenty and economic growth. Now the recipes are inappropriate and the companies which persist in following them will disappear.”
― Leon Courville

“Everything tends to become a satellite - even our brains may be said to be outside us now, floating around us in the countless Hertzian ramifications of waves and circuits.
This is not science fiction, merely a generalization of McLuhan's theory of the 'extensions of man' . Every aspect of human beings - their bodies in their biological, mental, muscular or cerebral manifestations - now floats free in the shape of mechanical or computer-aided replacement parts. McLuhan, however, conceives of all this as a positive expansion - as the universalization of man - through media. This is a very sanguine view. The fact is that all the functions of man's body, so far from gravitating around him in concentric order, have become satellites ordered excentrically with respect to him. They have gone into orbit on their own account; consequently it is man himself, in view of this orbital extraversion of his own functions, his own technologies, who is now in a position of ex-orbitation and ex-centricity. Vis-a-vis the satellites that he has created and put into orbit, it is man with his planet Earth, with his territory, with his body, who is now the satellite. Once transcendent, he has become exorbitate.
It is not just the functions of man's body which, by becoming satellites, make man himself into a satellite. All those functions of our societies - notably the higher ones - which break off and go into orbit, contribute to the process.
Loan, finance, the technosphere, communications - all have become satellites in an inaccessible space and left everything else to go to rack and ruin.
Whatever fails to achieve orbital power is left in a state of abandonment which is permanent, since there is now no way out of it via some kind of transcendence.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Machines produce only machines. The texts, images, films, speech and programmes which come out of the computer are machine products, and they bear the marks of such products: they are artificially padded-out, face-lifted by the machine; the films are stuffed with special effects, the texts full of longueurs and repetitions due to the machine's malicious will to function at all costs (that is its passion), and to the operator's fascination with this limitless possibility of functioning.
Hence the wearisome character in films of all this violence and pornographied sexuality, which are merely special effects of violence and sex, no longer even fantasized by humans, but pure machinic violence.
And this explains all these texts that resemble the work of 'intelligent' virtual agents, whose only act is the act of programming.
This has nothing to do with automatic writing, which played on the magical telescoping of words and concepts, whereas all we have here is the automatism of programming, an automatic run-through of all the possibilities.
It is this phantasm of the ideal performance of the text or image, the possibility of correcting endlessly, which produce in the 'creative artist' this vertige of interactivity with his own object, alongside the anxious vertige at not having reached the technological limits of his possibilities.
In fact, it is the (virtual) machine which is speaking you, the machine which is thinking you.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

“Such is 'real time', the time of communication, information and perpetual interaction: the finest deterrence-space of time and events. On the real-time screen, by way of simple digital manipulation, all possibilities are potentially realized - which puts an end to their possibility. Through electronics and cybernetics, all desires, all play of identity and all interactive potentialities are programmed in and auto-programmed. The fact that everything here is realized from the outset prevents the emergence of any singular event.
Such is the violence of real time, which is also the violence of information.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Yet this new form of virulence is ambiguous, and AIDS is an example of it. AIDS provides an argument for a new sexual prohibition, but it is no longer a moral prohibition: it is a functional prohibition on the circulation of sex. This breaks all the commandments of modernity . Sex, like money , like information , must circulate freely. Everything must be fluid, and acceleration is inevitable. To revoke sexuality on the grounds of a viral danger is as absurd as stopping international trade on the grounds that it is fuelling the cancerous rise of th e dollar. No one seriously envisages such a thing. Now , at a stroke with AIDS: a stopping of sex. A contradiction in the system? Perhaps this suspension has some enigmatic purpose, linked contradictorily to the equally enigmatic purpose of sexual liberation?
The spontaneous self-regulation of systems is something well-known. We know how they produce accidents of their own , put a brake on their own operation , in order to survive on a basis contrary to their own principles. All societies survive against their own value-systems: they have to have such a system, but they also have to deny it and operate in opposition to it. Now , we live by at least two principles: the principle of sexual liberation and that of communication and information . But it is entirely as though the species were , through the AIDS threat, producing an antidote to its principle of sexual liberation, and, through cancer, which is a disruption of the genetic code and therefore a pathology of information, a resistance to the all-powerful principle of cybernetic control. What if all this signified a rejection of the obligatory flows of sperm, sex, signs and words, a rejection of forced communication , programmed information and sexual promiscuity? What if all this were a vital resistance to the expansion of flows, circuits and networks - admittedly, at the cost of a new lethal pathology, but a pathology which would in the end protect us from something even more serious? With AIDS and cancer, we might be said to be paying the price for our own system: we are exorcising its banal virulence in a fatal form.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out

“Love is always a cybernetics of addiction. Ending up with an addiction to someone, for someone, making someone the object of the addiction, or becoming addicted to a third substance for someone. To her, to me, to testosterone. Testosterone and I. She and I. She or the testosterone. She = the testosterone. Producing or consuming testosterone. Stopping testosterone for her. Absorbing her testosterone.”
― Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

“Most binds involve metaphors, emotions, feelings, human qualities. Thus, the binds mostly prompt us to be rational, push us to decide one way or another, to declare when something is wrong or good; this reflexive spark is generated by a bind. Reasoning is a secondary process, and exists only to reinforce the initial bind.”
― Ştefan Serşeniuc, Gregory Bateson Variations: A View of Complex Ideas: Binds, Double Binds, Schismogenesis, Second- and Third-Order Cybernetics, René Girard, and More