Excerpt

Published during World War II, this short and straightforward essay was central to the foundation of cybernetics, a new field of work on complex systems that flourished from the late 1940s into the 1960s and has continued to mutate up to the present (Kline 2015). “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (BPT) grew out of Norbert Wiener’s war work with Julian Bigelow in the United States, attempting to build an anti-aircraft predictor (Galison 1994). The point of this device was to extrapolate from tracking data in order to forecast where an enemy aircraft would arrive in the time it took a shell to reach it. The project was not a success, but it led Wiener to think about purposeful behavior in terms of negative feedback and systems that act to minimize the gap between a current state of affairs and an intended state (in this case, between the location of a target and exploding shells).

Negative feedback and servomechanisms had long been important in engineering (going back to nineteenth-century steam-engine governors as well as domestic thermostats), but the founding move in cybernetics was to generalize the picture as far as it would go. Reflecting the thinking of Wiener’s friend Arturo Rosenblueth, a leading Mexican physiologist (Burbano and Reyes 2022), BPT erased the difference between machines, animals, and, indeed, humans. The authors argued that the same analysis of purposeful behavior could run the gamut from servomechanisms to organisms and intentional action in general. Wiener further expanded the picture in his 1948 book, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, to include the information flows and processing central to feedback mechanisms like the anti-aircraft predictor, bringing in fields such as digital computing, information theory, psychology, and psychiatry. (In later years, relations between these elements became complicated. For example, in the 1950s computer science gave rise to symbolic AI, a model of the cognitive brain quite different from the performative cybernetic image of the brain as geared into the world via feedback loops.)

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