„Das Gehirn ist ein Computer“
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Zitate von Norbert Wiener
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Norbert Wiener
Geburtstag: 26. November 1894
Todesdatum: 18. März 1964
Andere Namen: نوربرت وینر
Norbert Wiener war ein US-amerikanischer Mathematiker. Er ist als Begründer der Kybernetik bekannt, ein Ausdruck, den er in seinem Werk Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine prägte.
Werk
Zitate Norbert Wiener
„Das menschliche Gehirn mag so weit auf dem Weg zu seiner destruktiven Spezialisierung sein wie die großen Nasenhörner der letzten der Titanotherien.“
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„"Die Ökonomen haben die Angewohnheit entwickelt, ihre ziemlich unpräzisen Ideen in die Sprache der Integral- und Differentialrechnung zu verkleiden … Wann auch immer sie vorgeben, exakte Formeln zu verwenden, handelt es sich um Betrug und Zeitverschwendung." - Gott & Golem, Inc.“
Econ, Düsseldorf 1965; Seite 120 und 122 - zitiert von Andreas Weber in: 'Biokapital. Die Versöhnung von Ökonomie, Natur und Menschlichkeit, Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3827007925, Seite 71
Original engl.: "the economists have developed the habit of dressing up their rather imprecise ideas in the language of the infinitesimal calculus. [...] any pretense of applying precise formulae to these loosly defined quantities is a sham and a waste of time." - God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge M.I.T. Press, 1964. p. 90 http://books.google.de/books?id=yLiSM41pHOwC&pg=PA90 - p. 91 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=yLiSM41pHOwC&pg=PA91
„Die Individualität eines Körpers ist eher die einer Flamme als die eines Steines, eher die einer Form als die eines Teilchens Materie. Diese Form kann übermittelt oder abgeändert oder verdoppelt werden.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings
nach William Voltz, Alphabet des Schreckens, Pabel, Rastatt, 1980, Seite 104
"the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, [...]" - The Human Use of Human Beings - Cybernetics and Society. 1954- p. 102 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=l9l6zquHvZIC&pg=PA102
„Es gibt keine Antworten, nur Querverweise“
Wiener's Law of Libraries, original: "There are no answers, only cross references") - Norbert Wiener 1894-1964 (Vita Mathematica), Seite 337, ISBN: 3764322462
„Information ist Information, weder Materie noch Energie.“
Original engl.:"Information is information, not matter or energy." (Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948. Seite 166
„A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.“
Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964)
Kontext: The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
„We know that for a long time everything we do will be nothing more than the jumping off point for those who have the advantage of already being aware of our ultimate results.“
Quelle: I am a mathematician, the later life of a prodigy (1953), p. 266
Kontext: We mathematicians who operate with nothing more expensive than paper and possibly printers' ink are quite reconciled to the fact that, if we are working in an active field, our discoveries will commence to be obsolete at the moment that they are written down or even at the moment they are conceived. We know that for a long time everything we do will be nothing more than the jumping off point for those who have the advantage of already being aware of our ultimate results. This is the meaning of the famous apothegm of Newton, when he said, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants".
„I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists“
"A Scientist Rebels" Atlantic Monthly (Jan, 1947)
Kontext: The measures taken during the war by our military agencies, in restricting the free intercourse among scientists on related projects or even on the same project have gone so far that it is clear that if continued in time of peace, this policy will lead to the total irresponsibility of the scientist, and, ultimately, to the death of science.... The interchange of ideas, which is one of the greatest traditions of science, must of course receive certain limitations when the scientist becomes an arbiter of life and death.... I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists...
„The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch God & Golem, Inc.
Quelle: God & Golem, Inc. (1964), p. 69
Quelle: The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society
Kontext: [T]he future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
„Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower… Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy… There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.
It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, then physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologists ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand… A proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look. We had dreamed for years of an institution of independent scientists, working together in one of these backwoods of science, not as subordinates of some great executive officer, but joined by the desire, indeed by the spiritual necessity, to understand the region as a whole, and to lend one another the strength of that understanding.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Quelle: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), p. 2-4; As cited in: George Klir (2001) Facets of Systems Science, p. 47-48
„The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Quelle: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), p. 2
„It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings
Quelle: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), p. 26-27 as cited in: Felix Geyer, Johannes van der Zouwen, (1994) " Norbert Wiener and the Social Sciences http://www.critcrim.org/redfeather/chaos/024Weiner.htm", Kybernetes, Vol. 23 Iss: 6/7, pp.46 - 61
„Let it be remarked … that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
V. Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 121.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
„The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.“
Philosophy of Science (1945) (with A. Rosenblueth)
„What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings
VIII. Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist. p. 135
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
„The terms "black box" and "white box" are convenient and figurative expressions of not very well determined usage. I shall understand by a black box a piece of apparatus, such as four-terminal networks with two input and two output terminals, which performs a definite operation on the present and past of the input potential, but for which we do not necessarily have any information of the structure by which this operation is performed. On the other hand, a white box will be similar network in which we have built in the relation between input and output potentials in accordance with a definite structural plan for securing a previously determined input-output relation.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Preface. page xi. (Footnote 1)
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
„The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings
X. Some Communication Machines and Their Future. p. 184
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
„We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings
VII. Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy. p. 129
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
„What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.“
— Norbert Wiener, buch The Human Use of Human Beings
II. Progress and Entropy. p. 46
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
