Source/credit

Shared by Sean Menion, @TheUnjournaling:
https://x.com/TheUnjournaling/status/2096067877493211220

His accompanying framing:

“Cybernetics is interested in matter and energy only insofar as they are bearers of information.”

In 1951, Barrett and Shepard of MIT did a rather comprehensive bibliography of cybernetics with hundreds of citations across half a dozen subcategories. Interesting framing.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CYBERNETICS

by F. Dermot Barrett and Herbert A. Shepard
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

Norbert Wiener defines cybernetics as “the study of messages, and in particular of the effective messages of control,” and as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” His book, Cybernetics, is the central work to which other items in this bibliography are related.

Cybernetics owes many of its elements to the practical science of communication engineering. In recent years the demand for complex communication devices such as television, automatic control systems, and large-scale computing machines made the need for an adequate theory of communication evident. Wiener, Shannon, and many others have contributed to a general theory of communication and control, which Wiener calls cybernetics. For communications engineers, therefore, there is nothing revolutionary in cybernetics as it applies to their own work. For biological and social scientists, however, cybernetics presents a new point of view and system of concepts for studying the organism and its relations with other organisms and the inorganic environment.

The prime concept in cybernetics is information. The term information refers to the representation of an event. If information is transmitted without loss from a transmitter to a receiver, then the pattern which existed among the elements at the transmitter will be represented in the arrangement of other elements at the receiver. Patterns, not elements, are transmitted. Most physical sciences are primarily concerned with the transmission of matter and energy. Cybernetics is interested in matter and energy only insofar as they are bearers of information.

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The central interest of cybernetics is in the way information is used for controlling processes. A control mechanism is a system which uses information from other systems for continuously determining its own action relative to them. Control systems include all those which can be called adjustive or adaptive: servomechanisms, organisms, and social organizations. Thus cybernetics provides conceptual apparatus applicable to an enormous range of phenomena.

In addition, cybernetics provides a new frame of reference for considering some longstanding philosophical problems. The construction of machines which reproduce a set of functions hitherto restricted to organisms has called for a re-examination of such matters as free will, teleology, consciousness and scientific method. Some of the most noteworthy explorations of the metascientific aspects and philosophical implications of cybernetics have been those undertaken by Karl W. Deutsch and by D. M. MacKay.

The bibliography has been selected with the interests of social scientists in mind and engineering applications have been omitted, except for general material on servomechanisms and communication systems. For convenience, the bibliography has been classified under six headings, although some works properly belong in more than one category. The first class, “Popular Expositions” is intended for the casual or lay reader who seeks a non-technical treatment. The core literature is included under the heading “Cybernetics.” The third and fourth categories, “Information Theory and Communication Theory” and “Servomechanisms” represent two major foundations or branches of the science. The fifth class, “Cybernetics Concepts in the Biological and Social Sciences” consists of the literature concerned with applying the viewpoint of cybernetics to the life sciences.

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The rate of output of such literature is increasing rapidly, but the total quantity is still small enough that most of it could be included. It is likely, however, that within a short time some of the material included here will be seen as inferior in quality and of secondary importance. The sixth class, “Relevant Works in Social Science, Biology, and Philosophy” represents a somewhat arbitrary selection. The very relevance of cybernetic notions to many scientific fields has made this necessary. Thus Cannon’s The Wisdom of the Body, written nearly thirty years ago, is undoubtedly a “relevant” work since its viewpoint is in such close harmony with that of cybernetics, whereas Barnard’s Functions of the Executive is a much less clear-cut case, and has been included for the sake of scattered insights, rather than for its general approach.