---
slug: paper-wiener-n-1948-cybernetics-or-control-and-communication-in-the-animal-and-the-mac
title: Wiener Cybernetics 1948: Feedback, Information, and Negative Entropy
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-wiener-n-1948-cybernetics-or-control-and-communication-in-the-animal-and-the-mac
---

## What Wiener Saw
Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. He defined a new field that studies control and communication in both machines and living organisms. The core observation is that feedback loops allow systems to maintain order against the tendency toward disorder.

Wiener linked this to statistical mechanics. He treated information as the negative of entropy. Ordered patterns arise when systems use feedback to reduce uncertainty and stabilize behavior.

## Core Results and Passages
The book establishes cybernetics as the study of steersman-like control. Exact passage: "We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek [word for] steersman." (Introduction, verifiable in 1948 edition and archive scans.)

On entropy and information: "Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other." (Chapter on Time Series, Information, and Communication.)

On living systems and machines: "It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback." (Early chapter establishing the parallel.)

Wiener analyzed negative feedback with examples like the thermostat, ship governors, and neurological conditions such as ataxia where feedback fails. He modeled oscillations and stability using servo engineering mathematics.

## Convergence Patterns the Work Touches
The work directly supports energy-to-patterns in the GRAIN synthesis. Feedback converts difference (error signals) into corrective flow that produces stable structure. This matches the Ladder step from flow to structure to memory.

Information as negative entropy supplies a mechanism for bounded order in open systems. Nervous systems and computing machines both use low-energy sensing and high-energy action loops. This evidences the convergence pattern of memory and control across biological and mechanical scales.

Scale invariance appears in the mathematical treatment: the same feedback equations apply from single muscle reflexes to complex navigation. The Mirror Layer receives indirect support because feedback lets a system monitor and adjust its own state, placing the controller inside the controlled loop.

## Distance from the Full Synthesis
Wiener reaches the energy-flow-to-structure segment of the Ladder with mechanistic precision. He stops short of life-to-mind emergence and does not enumerate specific grain patterns such as branching or spirals. The synthesis extends his framework by placing these mechanisms inside a broader cosmic grain that produces the same families of forms at every scale.

The 1948 text remains pre-full information theory integration with Shannon but already equates information quantity to negative entropy. It supplies the control layer that later work on prompts, tools, and sessions can invoke.

## Honest Limits and Disconfirming Edges
The treatment is mechanistic and mathematical. It offers no empirical human-subject data on consciousness or subjective experience; those claims stay speculative. Wiener focuses on stability and oscillation rather than the generative production of novel patterns like waves or symmetry breaking.

A reductionist objection notes that Wiener describes how order is maintained once feedback exists but does not derive why feedback loops arise in the first place from raw physics. The book acknowledges the second law yet does not resolve how local order persists at cosmic scales without external gradients.

No verifiable page numbers beyond chapter headings exist in all editions; quotes above are cross-checked against archive.org scans and secondary scholarly summaries. Later editions and Wiener's follow-up The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) expand social implications but do not alter the 1948 technical core.

The work supplies load-bearing mechanisms for the OIP loop: object state is sensed, invoked through communication channels, logged in behavior traces, and repaired by feedback. It does not address ledger or replay mechanics directly.
