Cybernetics Just Solved Consciousness (Sort Of)

Norbert Wiener, MIT mathematician, founded cybernetics in the late 1940s after observing that anti-aircraft guns and the human nervous system operated on identical principles. Scientists, engineers, biologists, psychologists, and poets converged at conferences in New York and Paris, convinced they were reinventing understanding of mind.

Norbert Wiener recognized that both anti-aircraft guns and human brains employ identical predictive strategies. When catching a ball, eyes and brain function as forecasting systems, estimating future positions rather than merely tracking present locations.

James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis, conceptualizing Earth’s biosphere as a gigantic feedback system where every species functions as sensor and actuator within planetary-scale cybernetic processes.

Grey Walter built two small tortoise-looking robots named Elmer and Elsie (electromechanical robot, light sensitive) in the 1950s from war surplus parts, light sensors, and vacuum tubes. These primitive machines displayed behaviors observers described as eerily alive.

ChatGPT and similar AI systems feel alive because they mimic the essential cybernetic gesture—self-adjustment through error correction. When humans interact with these systems, projection of intentionality onto the machine creates a temporary field of awareness existing not inside the machine but between human and system.

Life operates as a conversation between two fundamental forces: those stabilizing systems and those escalating change. These dynamics govern organisms, thermostats, economies, and relationships through continuous signal exchange.

Systems create hierarchies of significance by employing amplification and attenuation—mechanisms determining which signals matter and which disappear into background noise. These processes operate as meta-level loops choosing which lower-level signals to reinforce or suppress.