The Enlightenment Cyborg

[Richard Fiero]

Dave Monroe wrote:
>The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in
>the Human Machine, 1660-1830
>By Allison Muri
>University of Toronto Press
>240 Pages
>Cloth
>ISBN 9780802088505
>Published Jan 2007
>$64.00
>. . .
>History, Continuity, and Discontinuity: Cyborgs and the Eighteenth Century
>
>http://ecti.english.illinois.edu/reviews/49/mitchell-muri.html

There are a number of threads here which appear impossible to 
disentangle: Man-Machine and Maxwell's Demon for starters. The 
man-machine can be easily traced back to maybe the early 1940's with 
the contest among science shops to develop gun-laying mechanisms to 
effectively shoot airplanes using negative feedback to dampen gun 
movements yet get ahead of an airplane's movements and evasions. The 
goal there is to get the human out of the decision-making loop. That 
was also the goal of systems analysis (C3I) in running large 
enterprises-see Robert McNamara at the DoD and at Ford for instance.

I cannot buy Allison Muri's book at $75 but it does sound good. Her site:
http://headlesschicken.ca/

Humans seem to reify phenomena as things: Electrick and Caloric for 
instance.  M&D plays these reifications very well. We do not 
currently even have useful definition for force other than F=m(dv/dt) 
since what we heard in elementary school is bunk. One might wonder 
why mathematics appears to describe the natural world pretty well. 
That is mostly the "foundational crisis in mathematics" which did and 
didn't appear in AtD.

I suggest one cyborg for review, R W Hamming, a founder of the 
Association for Computing Machinery and a collaborator of Claude Shannon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hamming
http://www-lmmb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/Hamming.unreasonable.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unreasonable_effectiveness_of_mathematics
". . . discover if the detonation of an atomic bomb would ignite the 
atmosphere. The result of the computation was that this would not 
occur, and so the United States used the bomb, first in a test in New 
Mexico, and then twice against Japan."