Oswald Wiener's Theory of Thought by Thomas Eder

£35.00
Out of stock
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9783110659610
Published:
18 Aug 2023
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
304 pages
Dimensions:
200x130x21mm
Weight:
0.383kgs
Author:
Oswald Wiener - whose activities covered many fields, whose roots are in the arts, and who by necessity became a researcher - made it difficult for his ideas to be accepted by science throughout his life. This has different reasons, one of them being his seemingly eccentric approach to understanding artistic research as not contrasting with discursive science, and another one being the fact that he linked informatics with self-observation. The book also includes conversations of the authors with Wiener about the three stages of forming a theory: 'From language critique to cognition theory', 'From cognition theory to automata theory', and 'From automata theory to Weisertheorie'. The book is intended for those who have read and are familiar with Wiener's writings, as well as for social scientists and psychologists.

As a versatile and creative thinker, Oswald Wiener (1935-2021) developed from an artist into a researcher out of sheer necessity. At the end of his life he emphasized: 

"I do not aim at a synthesis of introspection and automata theory but rather at contrasting them. Which relationships identified in introspection can - in a fairly satisfactory way - be understood as realizations of relationships within a formal system, e.g., the formal system of automata theory. Or the other way around: How well does automata theory as a model (i.e., the computer as mental metaphor, 'Physical Symbol Systems,' today's Artificial Intelligence ...) capture essential features of human thought? What does 'in a fairly satisfactory way' mean in this context? What, and how strongly, does the formal system abstract from natural processes?"  

In this book, three conversations with Wiener about the development of his theory and four essays introduce and elaborate on this new ap proach to the theory of thought, which has previously received too little attention in academic discourse. A pivotal role is played by Wiener's last major essay "Cybernetics and Ghosts."

"The collected essays in this book orbit around the mind of Oswald Wiener, becoming visible in his poignant text Cybernetics and Ghosts. The subtitle, in the no-man's-land between science and art adds an unnecessary caveat to Oswald Wiener's thoughts, because his thinking operates in a well-developed domain, just one that sadly resides in a parallel universe, one in which computer scientists are philosophers of mind, cybernetics did not die, and psychology did not end after Piaget.

Artistic research in Wiener's (1935-2021) œuvre Oswald Wiener's approach to cognitive psychology On the link between informatics and self-observation Also available in German Oswald Wieners Theorie des Denkens 978-3-11-065960-3

Wiener's perspective becomes very timely when it comes to the current, dismal discourse about Artificial Intelligence, which is largely taking place between philosophically illiterate engineers and scientifically illiterate humanities scholars. Where the engineers present their discoveries of practically useful algorithms and the scholars their practically useful political opinions, Wiener remains a true intellectual, sifting through the phenomenology of AI systems in an attempt to understand its significance for the unanswered questions of mind, meaning and the construction of reality."

Joscha Bach, Cognitive Scientist / AI Strategist at Liquid AI / Research Fellow at Thistledown Foundation, San Francisco Bay Area

About the Author: Oswald Wiener (1935-2021), Thomas Eder, Thomas Raab, Wien. Michael Schwarz, Berlin.

More Information
Number of pages 304

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