The transmission
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who founded cybernetics, naming the field in his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
Drawing on wartime work on automatic gun-control systems, he generalized the principle of feedback—a system sensing the gap between its goal and its current state and acting to close it—into a unifying account that spanned machines, organisms, and societies.
By treating information, control, and feedback as the common currency of living and non-living self-regulating systems, Wiener helped inaugurate the information age and a new way of thinking about mind and purpose. Wiener is the headwaters of the entire cybernetics-and-systems stream this Atlas traces.
His reframing of mind and behavior in terms of information, feedback loops, and goal-seeking control gave later thinkers—Bateson, von Foerster, Maturana, and ultimately predictive-processing theorists like Friston—the conceptual vocabulary that now underwrites the “reality as information” and “brain as feedback/prediction system” framings central to modern consciousness culture.
Wiener was a rigorous mathematician deeply concerned with the human consequences of his ideas; the spiritualized “the universe is information / mind constructs reality” extrapolations come downstream, but the founding move that made mind think-able as information is his.
What they gave
Founded cybernetics: Established feedback and information as a unifying lens across machines, organisms, and minds.
- Feedback loop: Made goal-seeking self-correction the core model later applied to the brain and consciousness.
- Reality-as-information root: Seeded the framing that mind and world are describable as information processing.
- Lineage source: Provided the vocabulary inherited by Bateson, von Foerster, Maturana, and predictive-processing theorists.
In their words
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Mathematics and statistics; control and communication engineering; the Macy Conferences; the physiology of feedback.
- Influenced: The entire cybernetics tradition; Gregory Bateson; Heinz von Foerster; the information-and-feedback view of mind.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine1948
- The Human Use of Human Beings1950