Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American mathematician and philosopher. He was a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.

Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society.

Biography

Youth

Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, the first child of Leo Wiener and Bertha Kahn, Jews^[3] from Poland and Germany, respectively. Through his father, he was related to Maimonides, the famous rabbi, philosopher and physician from Al Andalus, as well as to Akiva Eger, chief rabbi of Posen from 1815 to 1837.^[4] Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was seven years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics and tutored his son in the subject until he left home. In his autobiography, Norbert described his father as calm and patient, unless he (Norbert) failed to give a correct answer, at which his father would lose his temper.

He became an agnostic.^[5]

After graduating from Ayer High School in 1906 at 11 years of age, Wiener entered Tufts College. He was awarded a BAin mathematics in 1909 at the age of 14, whereupon he began graduate studies of zoology at Harvard. In 1910 he transferred to Cornell to study philosophy.

Harvard and World War I

The next year he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies. Back at Harvard, Wiener became influenced by Edward Vermilye Huntington, whose mathematical interests ranged from axiomatic foundations to engineering problems. Harvard awarded Wiener a Ph.D. in 1912, when he was merely 17 years old, for a dissertation on mathematical logic, supervised by Karl Schmidt, the essential results of which were published as Wiener (1914). In that dissertation, he was the first to state publicly that ordered pairs can be defined in terms of elementary set theory. Hence relations can be defined by set theory, thus the theory of relations does not require any axioms or primitive notions distinct from those of set theory. In 1921, Kazimierz Kuratowski proposed a simplification of Wiener’s definition of ordered pairs, and that simplification has been in common use ever since. It is (x, y) = {{x}, {x, y}}.

In 1914, Wiener traveled to Europe, to be taught by Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and by David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen. During 1915–16, he taught philosophy at Harvard, then was an engineer for General Electric and wrote for the Encyclopedia Americana. Wiener was briefly a journalist for the Boston Herald, where he wrote a feature story on the poor labor conditions for mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but he was fired soon afterwards for his reluctance to write favorable articles about a politician the newspaper’s owners sought to promote.^[6]

Although Wiener eventually became a staunch pacifist, he eagerly contributed to the war effort in World War I. In 1916, with America’s entry into the war drawing closer, Wiener attended a training camp for potential military officers, but failed to earn a commission. One year later Wiener again tried to join the military, but the government again rejected him due to his poor eyesight. In the summer of 1918, Oswald Veblen invited Wiener to work on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.^[7]Living and working with other mathematicians strengthened his interest in mathematics. However, Wiener was still eager to serve in uniform, and decided to make one more attempt to enlist, this time as a common soldier. Wiener wrote in a letter to his parents, “I should consider myself a pretty cheap kind of a swine if I were willing to be an officer but unwilling to be a soldier.”^[8] This time the army accepted Wiener into its ranks and assigned him, by coincidence, to a unit stationed at Aberdeen, Maryland. World War I ended just days after Wiener’s return to Aberdeen and Wiener was discharged from the military in February 1919.^[9]

After the war

Wiener was unable to secure a permanent position at Harvard, a situation he blamed largely on anti-semitism at the university and in particular on the antipathy of Harvard mathematician G. D. Birkhoff.^[10] He was also rejected for a position at the University of Melbourne. At W. F. Osgood’s suggestion, Wiener became an instructor of mathematics at MIT, where he spent the remainder of his career, becoming promoted eventually to Professor. There is a photograph of him prominently displayed in one of the hallways, often used in giving directions.

In 1926, Wiener returned to Europe as a Guggenheim scholar. He spent most of his time at Göttingen and with Hardy at Cambridge, working on Brownian motion, the Fourier integral, Dirichlet’s problem, harmonic analysis, and the Tauberian theorems.

In 1926, Wiener’s parents arranged his marriage to a German immigrant, Margaret Engemann; they had two daughters. His sister, Constance, married Philip Franklin. Their daughter, Janet, Wiener’s niece, married Václav E. Beneš.^[11]

Many tales, perhaps apocryphal, were told of him at MIT, especially concerning his absent-mindedness. It was said that he returned home once to find his house empty. He inquired of a neighborhood girl the reason, and she said that the family had moved elsewhere that day. He thanked her for the information and she replied, “That’s why I stayed behind, Daddy!”^[12]

In the run-up to World War II (1939–45) Wiener became a member of the China Aid Society and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.^[13] He was interested in placing scholars such as Yuk-Wing Lee and Antoni Zygmund who had lost their positions.^[14]

During and after World War II

During World War II, his work on the automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns caused Wiener to investigate information theory independently of Claude Shannon and to invent the Wiener filter. (To him is due the now standard practice of modeling an information source as a random process—in other words, as a variety of noise.) His anti-aircraft work eventually led him to formulate cybernetics.^[15] After the war, his fame helped MIT to recruit a research team in cognitive science, composed of researchers in neuropsychology and the mathematics and biophysics of the nervous system, including Warren Sturgis McCullochand Walter Pitts. These men later made pioneering contributions to computer science and artificial intelligence. Soon after the group was formed, Wiener suddenly ended all contact with its members, mystifying his colleagues. This emotionally traumatized Pitts, and led to his career decline. In their biography of Wiener, Conway and Siegelman suggest that Wiener’s wife Margaret, who detested McCulloch’s bohemian lifestyle, engineered the breach.^[16]

Wiener later helped develop the theories of cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He discussed the modeling of neurons with John von Neumann, and in a letter from November 1946 von Neumann presented his thoughts in advance of a meeting with Wiener.^[17]

Wiener always shared his theories and findings with other researchers, and credited the contributions of others. These included Soviet researchers and their findings. Wiener’s acquaintance with them caused him to be regarded with suspicion during the Cold War. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to end economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential in India, whose government he advised during the 1950s.

After the war, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article “A Scientist Rebels” for the January 1947 issue of The Atlantic Monthly^[18] urged scientists to consider the ethical implications of their work. After the war, he refused to accept any government funding or to work on military projects. The way Wiener’s beliefs concerning nuclear weapons and the Cold War contrasted with those of von Neumann is the major theme of the book John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.^{[19][citation needed]}

Wiener was a participant of the Macy conferences. He died in March 1964, aged 69, in Stockholm, from a heart attack. Wiener and his wife are buried at the Vittum Hill Cemetery in Sandwich, New Hampshire.

Work

Information is information, not matter or energy.

— Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Wiener was an early studier of stochastic and mathematical noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems. It was Wiener’s idea to model a signal as if it were an exotic type of noise, giving it a sound mathematical basis. The example we give our students nowadays is that English text could be modeled as a random string of letters and spaces, where each letter of the alphabet (and the space) has an assigned probability. But Wiener dealt with analog signals, where such a simple example doesn’t exist. Wiener’s early work on information theory and signal processing was limited to analog signals, and was largely forgotten with the development of the digital theory.^[23]

Wiener originated cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with many implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.

Wiener’s work with cybernetics influenced Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and through them, anthropology, sociology, and education.^[24]

Wiener equation

A simple mathematical representation of Brownian motion, the Wiener equation, named after Wiener, assumes the current velocity of a fluid particle fluctuates randomly.

Wiener filter

For signal processing, the Wiener filter is a filter proposed by Wiener during the 1940s and published in 1942 as a classified document. Its purpose is to reduce the amount of noise present in a signal by comparison with an estimate of the desired noiseless signal. Wiener developed the filter at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT to predict the position of German bombers from radar reflections. It is necessary to predict the future, because by the time the shell reaches the vicinity of the target, the target has moved, and maybe has changed direction slightly. They even modeled the muscle response of the pilot, which led eventually to cybernetics. The unmanned V1’s were particularly easy to model, and on a good day, American guns fitted with Wiener filters would shoot down 99 out of 100 V1’s as they entered Britain from the English channel, on their way to London. What emerged was a mathematical theory of great generality—a theory for predicting the future as best one can on the basis of incomplete information about the past. It was a statistical theory that included applications that did not, strictly speaking, predict the future, but only tried to remove noise. It made use of Wiener’s earlier work on integral equations and Fourier transforms.^[25] [26]

In mathematics

Wiener took a great interest in the mathematical theory of Brownian motion (named after Robert Brown) proving many results now widely known such as the non-differentiability of the paths. Consequently, the one-dimensional version of Brownian motion was named the Wiener process. It is the best known of the Lévy processes, càdlàg stochastic processes with stationary statistically independent increments, and occurs frequently in pure and applied mathematics, physics and economics (e.g. on the stock-market).

Wiener’s Tauberian theorem, a 1932 result of Wiener, developed Tauberian theorems in summability theory, on the face of it a chapter of real analysis, by showing that most of the known results could be encapsulated in a principle taken from harmonic analysis. In its present formulation, the theorem of Wiener does not have any obvious association with Tauberian theorems, which deal with infinite series; the translation from results formulated for integrals, or using the language of functional analysis and Banach algebras, is however a relatively routine process.

The Paley–Wiener theorem relates growth properties of entire functions on Cⁿ and Fourier transformation of Schwartz distributions of compact support.

The Wiener–Khinchin theorem, (or Wiener – Khintchine theorem or Khinchin – Kolmogorov theorem), states that the power spectral density of a wide-sense-stationary random process is the Fourier transform of the corresponding autocorrelation function.

An abstract Wiener space is a mathematical object in measure theory, used to construct a “decent”, strictly positive and locally finite measure on an infinite-dimensional vector space. Wiener’s original construction only applied to the space of real-valued continuous paths on the unit interval, known as classical Wiener space. Leonard Gross provided the generalization to the case of a general separable Banach space.

The notion of a Banach space itself was discovered independently by both Wiener and Stefan Banach at around the same time.^[27]

The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications (NWC) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park is devoted to the scientific and mathematical legacy of Norbert Wiener. The NWC website highlights the research activities of the Center. Further, each year the Norbert Wiener Center hosts the February Fourier Talks, a two-day national conference displaying advances in pure and applied harmonic analysis in industry, government, and academia.

More at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

Moonwob Oct 2018

Zoom in for a larger view.
Compiled by Rick Thomas, H.W., M.

Newly-minted full mentor Rick Thomas, H.W., M., has left the Executive Council to seek a new direction in his teaching and counseling.  William Fennie, H.W., M., has returned from his sabbatical to join serving members  Al Haferkamp, H.W., M., (Dean) and Heather Williams, H.W., M.

One of the first actions of the newly formed Executive Council was to deny the proposed Comprehensive Workshop class which the long-standing Monday Night listening and dialogue group had hoped to begin on September 24.  This would have been an online class presented by Thane (on audiotape) and discussed by the group using the Group Dynamics method taught by Thane in his lesson “Group Dynamics and the Art of Leadership.”

The reason cited for denial of this class was that “it is not timely.”  No further elaboration was offered by the Executive Council other than to say:  “Comprehensive Workshop is part of the Pinnacle Class series. The Executive Council is not prepared to approve these lessons at this time.”

According to our best sources, the last time Comprehensive Workshop was presented in public was at The Prosperos Assembly over Labor Day weekend in 2002, when it was presented in full (via Thane on audiotape) and monitored by Trustee Anne Bollman, H.W., M.

The Monday Night group is still deciding how (and perhaps whether) to proceed.

–Mike Zonta, H.W., M.,  editor of the Bathtub Bulletin (and host of the Monday Night listening and dialogue group)

The Autumnal Equinox is upon us. Modern pagans celebrate this time of year as Mabon, honoring the Green Man with cider, wine, acorns, and horns of plenty. Mabon is the second harvest which is intended to help us prepare for the winter. Come and join us for the Autumnal Equinox Celebration!

People often ask “What should I do?” when faced with an ethical problem. Aristotle urges us to ask “What kind of person should I be?”

SCOTTY HENDRICKS (BigThink.com)

21 May, 2018

While most of us ask “What should I do?” when we think about ethics, many philosophers have approached it by asking, “What kind of person should I be?” These thinkers often turn to virtue ethics for answers. Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers of all time, developed a comprehensive system of virtue ethics that we can learn from even today.

Why be virtuous?

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proposed that humans are social, rational animals that seek to “live well.” To that end, he proposed a system of ethics designed to help us reach eudaimonia, a world that means living well or flourishing.

Eudaimonia is reached by living virtuously and building up your character traits until you don’t even have to think about your choices before making the right one.

Such a person will be happy, but not in the same way as a hedonistic person. They will strive for self-improvement and will live their lives to the fullest. They will be the kind of person that others want to be like. Above all else, they will flourish.

What are virtues?

Aristotle sees virtues as character traits and tendencies to act in a particular way. We gain them through practice and by copying ‘moral exemplars’ until we manage to internalize the virtue. We become temperate by practicing temperance, courageous by practicing courage, and so on. Eventually, the virtue becomes a habit.

He further explains that each virtue is the “golden mean” between a vice of excess and deficiency. Taking the example of temperance, if we have the vice of deficiency we will be intemperate but if we the vice of excess we will never drink at all. Aristotle sees both traits as vicious. The virtuous person will know how much they can drink without having too much or teetotaling.

What are Aristotle’s virtues?

The virtues he lists in his Nicomachean Ethics are:

Courage: The midpoint between cowardice and recklessness. The courageous person is aware of the danger but goes in any way.

Temperance: The virtue between overindulgence and insensitivity. Aristotle would view the person who never drinks just as harshly as the one who drinks too much.

Liberality: The virtue of charity, this is the golden mean between miserliness and giving more than you can afford.

Magnificence: The virtue of living extravagantly. It rests between stinginess and vulgarity. Aristotle sees no reason to be ascetic but also warns against being flashy.

Magnanimity: The virtue relating to pride, it is the midpoint between not giving yourself enough credit and having delusions of grandeur. It is a given that you also have to act on this sense of self-worth and strive for greatness.

Patience: This is the virtue that controls your temper. The patient person must neither get too angry nor fail to get angry when they should.

Truthfulness: The virtue of honesty. Aristotle places it between the vices of habitual lying and being tactless or boastful.

Wittiness: At the midpoint between buffoonery and boorishness, this is the virtue of a good sense of humor.

Friendliness: While being friendly might not seem like a moral virtue, Aristotle claims friendship is a vital part of a life well lived.  This virtue lies between not being friendly at all and being too friendly towards too many people.

Shame: The midpoint between being too shy and being shameless. The person who has the right amount of shame will understand when they have committed a social or moral error but won’t be too fearful not to risk them.

Justice: The virtue of dealing fairly with others. It lies between selfishness and selflessness. This virtue can also be applied in different situations and has a whole chapter dedicated to the various forms it can take.

Each virtue is the midpoint between a vice of deficiency (red) and excess (blue). The virtuous person will tend to the center.

Aristotle sees ethics as more of an art than a science, and his explanations purposely lack specifics. We have to learn what the right approach to a situation is as part of our moral development.

He also doesn’t mean to say that we can’t break the rules. Just because a person is honest, for example, doesn’t mean they can’t lie when they need to. This makes virtue ethics more flexible than deontological systems of ethics but also harder to use since we have to determine when we can lie, get angry, or be prideful on our own.

This list seems a little strange

Keep in mind that this list was designed for upper class, Greek men who had a decent education and a fair amount of luck. The virtue of magnificence, for example, would be impossible for a person of limited means to practice.

Most of the virtues on the list always have relevance to us though. As philosopher Martha Nusbaum explains, “What [Aristotle] does, in each case, is to isolate a sphere of human experience that figures in more or less any human life, and in which more or less any human being will have to make some choices rather than others.”

We must all face danger at some point, so we must ask how to be courageous. We must all deal with other people, so we must ask how to be friendly. We all get angry, so we must ask how to be patient. The virtues Aristotle lists remain relevant even if the world they were created for has long vanished.

While the exact nature of what the good life is and how to reach it is subject to never-ending debate, the ideas of great minds are always relevant. While some of Aristotle’s views may not be as relevant now as they were 2,000 years ago, they can still inform our efforts to live better lives. While not every person that tries to live up to the virtues will succeed in every case, wouldn’t we be better for trying?

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

When Walt Whitman contemplated the wisdom of trees, he saw in them qualities “almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic,” and found in their resolute being a counterpoint to the human charade of seeming. “When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse rhapsodized in his lyrical love letter to our arboreal companions, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.” A century and a half earlier, William Blake wrote in his most beautiful letter: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.”

But to truly see and listen to a tree — or to any being beyond ourselves — as more than a teaching, more than an object of envy or worship or desire, more than a metaphor for our own lives, requires a special kind of regard — the kind to which Ursula K. Le Guin alluded in contemplating the difference between objectifying and subjectifying the universe.

This unsolipsistic orientation to another’s reality does not come easily to us, being such colonizers of the experience and essence of others as we are. What it takes to cultivate it is what philosopher Martin Buber (February 8, 1878–June 13, 1965) explores in poignant passage from I and Thou (public library) — his 1923 existentialist masterpiece, laying out Buber’s visionary lens on what makes us real to one another and extracting from it abiding insight into the meaning of love and presence.

Martin Buber

Buber illustrates the distinction between I-It and I-Thou relationships — the redignifying shift of perspective at the heart of his philosophy — with the example of how one regards a tree:

I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.

Illustration by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

Decades before scientists came to uncover what trees feel and how they communicate, Buber adds:

The tree will have a consciousness, then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.

Complement this particular fragment of I and Thou with Henry David Thoreau on the language of trees and biologist David George Haskell on what a dozen of the world’s most unusual trees taught him about the art of relationship, then revisit bryologist and Native American storyteller Robin Wall Kimmerer on how to regard non-human life with dignity.

Translators:  Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam

SENSE TESTIMONY:   Addiction to the past keeps us living in the problems of the past.

5th Step Conclusions:

1)  All is addicted to Truth, the only “past.”  Problems are an indication of the underlying Truth, which is “alive and kicking.”

2)  One Infinite Consciousness Beingness, is the always already entirely PRESENT, that is living all unconditionally and boundlessly, creating perfectly wholesome reliable dependency.

3)  Truth Being Inherently Observable motivational motive, the nature of Self Investing Autismical Assurance, This living Aliveness is the Absolute Unpredictable Self Addictive sensuousness, Being Consciousness Awareness.