O’Rourke’s “stuff” ranges from frequent releases on Bandcamp under the “Steamroom” label, including hushed, avant-garde instrumentation and complex mosaics of sound in all its beautiful and messy forms. In that same interview, O’Rourke explained his process for creating one of those works — “Steamroom 47” — culling from a wide range of touchstones including data points in music information retrieval, cybernetics and Glenn Gould’s “Goldberg Variations.” Heady stuff.

Walter Pitts was pivotal in establishing the revolutionary notion of the brain as a computer, which was seminal in the development of computer design, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and theoretical neuroscience. He was also a participant in a large number of key advances in 20th-century science.

See it as an experiment where failure yields valuable insights 🔬.

first-order cybernetics is “the science of observed systems,” while second-order cybernetics is “the science of observing systems.

If shared conceptual models applicable to solving problems in many sciences could be found, then “by agreeing on the usefulness of these models, we get glimpses of a new lingua franca of science....

at the Second Cybernetic Conference, Pitts announced that he was writing his doctoral dissertation on probabilistic three-dimensional neural networks.

Thus formed the beginnings of the group who would become known as the cyberneticians, with Wiener, Pitts, McCulloch, Lettvin, and von Neumann its core.

ybernetics

The Practice of Change Joi's Keio University Graduate School of Media and Governance PhD Dissertation.

I was surprised to encounter empathy again in the context of cybernetics. This rediscovery happened thanks to a Twitter exchange with @seungchan​. Cybernetics tells us that, in order for any one or any thing to function, it must have a relationship with other people and/or things.