The Cybernetic Brain

aw_product_id: 
32525484001
merchant_image_url: 
https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9780/2266/9780226667904.jpg
merchant_category: 
Books
search_price: 
32.00
book_author_name: 
Andrew Pickering
book_type: 
Paperback
publisher: 
The University of Chicago Press
published_date: 
09/12/2011
isbn: 
9780226667904
Merchant Product Cat path: 
Books > Science, Technology & Medicine > Mathematics & science > Science: general issues > Impact of science & technology on society
specifications: 
Andrew Pickering|Paperback|The University of Chicago Press|09/12/2011
Merchant Product Id: 
9780226667904
Book Description: 
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this surprising book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. "The Cybernetic Brain" explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R.D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics' impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering argues, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering suggests, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.

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