Gnostic Norbert Wiener

[Richard Fiero]

"Machine Dreams" by Philip Mirowski is subtitled '"Economics 
Becomes a Cyborg Science" and explores threads running from 
Hilbert, Slizard, von Neumann, Wiener, Shannon, Turing and 
others through the militarized '40s and '50s to current fads, 
research projects and accepted wisdoms.

" . . . the saga of Maxwell's Demon. Eventually the quest to 
render intelligence commensurate with entropy rapidly 
dovetailed with the development of the computer, with 
consequences . . . But this particular 'solution' to the 
problem of the Meaning of Life harbored within itself a very 
nasty possibility, first noticed by Norbert Wiener, the coiner 
of the term 'cybernetics': If mankind is endowed with this new 
kind of intelligence,' this ability to process information 
about the world, then why wouldn't it also be the case that 
Nature also possessed that capacity? And if Nature also had the 
capacity to exert intelligence, then how would we ever know 
whether Nature was merely indifferent to the fate of mankind 
or, more distressing, was both malevolent and misleading with 
regard to the supposed triumph of mankind over dissolution? 
Wiener inadvertently raised the issue that perhaps 
'intelligence' was not the vaunted solution to man's privileged 
place in the universe that it had first seemed; later thinkers 
merely reinterpreted malevolence as the natural state of 
intelligence. This subjection of Nature to a hermeneutics of 
suspicion was later easily extended to Society."



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September 1752
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