IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 57

by Walter, Wiener, and others [37, pp. 41ff]. Rather
than set on a course to a predetermined goal, these
tortoise-type devices had on-board capabilities to, for
example, continuously respond to the light conditions
they encountered as they moved around. These devices
were not only state-of-the-art engineering challenges
in sensorimotor mechatronics whose implementations
can be appreciated regardless of the processes that produced them. Engaging with their environments directly
and performatively (and, non-representationally) [37, pp.
21], cybernetic "tortoises" and "bugs" were capable of
letting go of old goals in favor of new goals, with goals
thus becoming variable objects to the forward-looking
search. With such capabilities "on board," these devices
can also be seen as metaphors for the adaptive creative
processes performed by their designers, whereas some
of these processes, in a self-referential fashion, resulted
in the design of these devices.

Further Concepts of a Cybernetic Design Theory
Besides the coupling of efficient and final causality to
achieve purposeful systems, there are further indications in Wiener's writings that he was not only one of
the inventors of cybernetics, but also an early cybernetician of invention (i.e., design) - both in terms of his
concepts and in terms of his values. They indicate that
Wiener prefigured today's cybernetic design theory to a
greater extent than is generally acknowledged. Some of
these concepts and values are listed and discussed in
the following.

Ethics
Numerous instances of Wiener's work are far from the
scientific ideal of objective neutrality, being influenced
by his convictions, values and ethics. The essentially
humanist tone of, for example The Human Use of
Human Beings [34] and Wiener's detestation of the
use of nuclear weapons [39, p. 127] attest to this. His
exclusion from the U.S. Government's mobilization of
scientists for the Manhattan Project was (according to
Conway and Siegelman [39, p. 126]) due to his stance
against the secrecy required for such work, and thus
also based on his ethics. Wiener discussed the notion
of ethics, which emerged as a fundamental concept of
second-order cybernetics [12, pp. 287ff.] and of design
theory [9, pp. 228ff.] several decades later, in a 1914
paper titled "The Highest Good" [41]. In it, he disputes
the major (hedonist and perfectionist) ethicist camps
who both maintain that an absolute and unchanging
"highest good" of some sort exists, by which the rightness or wrongness of human action could be measured.
Wiener states that "[t]here is no highest good." [41, p.
520]. He explains that if such an external ideal would
exist and could be attained "then on its attainment

september 2015

∕

moral progress ceases and [..] if [it] cannot be attained,
then [..] morality is a perpetual failure" [41, p. 513].
Instead of an absolute external ideal, Wiener sees ethics
as based on a process of internal guidance: "[I]t is only
the instinctive feeling within which urges us to respect
the consciences and prejudices of other human beings

Cybernetics is known for transcending
scientific disciplines by developing
meta-theory and meta-language
that allow scientists from varied
disciplines to talk to one another
about matters they can now recognize
as shared interests.

which ever prevents us from overriding the consciences
and prejudices of others when they conflict with our
own." [41, p. 519].

Performance (Practice) Before Description
Transgressing the boundaries of natural science in
some regards, Wiener nonetheless remained committed to the descriptive agenda of science and mathematics where they served him and others well. He refers to
invention primarily as the production of mathematical
methods or models (i.e., descriptions), rather than as
the production of novelty in the phenomenal world
(which he noted can be left to craftspersons and artisans once the required mathematical invention has
been established [1]). Performing invention, he also
theorized about (i.e., described) invention, thus operating self-referentially on what appears to have been
the edge between his tacit and his explicit knowledge.
Already before the war, he described his own practice
of inventing mathematical methods and models in
terms of forward-looking search: "The practicing mathematician knows very well that mathematics as a living
investigation is inductive and experimental, whatever it
may be when stuffed and mounted in text-books. When
I want an auxiliary function to do a definite job, I try
one after another, finding the first too big here, the second too small there, until by grace of luck and a familiarity with the habits of the species, I come on an exact
fit. Nine-tenths of the possibilities are eliminated on
the basis of a general feeling for the situation before it
comes to a matter of any real deductive logic whatever.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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