Wiener’s Excursion into the Religious Domain

Abstract

As the study of transducers in the wide sense, cybernetics cuts across the traditional boundaries separating the sciences, cf. § 18B. The attitudes engendered by this scientific eclecticism, such as the view that we can learn about the human mind by studying an electrical network, or that the imprecise term “soul” must either be redefined or abandoned, conflicts with a religion which treats man as God’s favorite creature and the rest of creation as inferior, and so succumbs to its own misty conceptualizations. But the cybernetical attitude does not conflict with more cosmic religious attitudes, which seek the spiritual in the meanest of things, the attitudes exemplified for instance by St. Francis of Assisi, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer and others, and in the Leibnizian doctrine of monadic souls. It is in terms of the possibility of this harmony that Wiener’s musings of the 1950s and 1960s on the religious bearing of cybernetical thought has to be gauged. We have also to extrapolate, for his writings are scanty and his death has left us with several gaps in his train of thought.