Monday, May 31, 2010

Norbert Wiener

In Wiener's 1948 Cybernetics on page 158, he says In the case where two subjects have the same technique and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.

Having Universal Isocracy regarded as Leibnizian is quite a compliment, but it does explain why no one has ever taken it seriously. The people who profess to study human behavior are certainly not familiar with the behavior of quantum mechanical systems and even less with the mathematical techniques used in that field; nor are physicists commonly familiar with the various academic specialties that the study of human behavior is divided into. Neither would imagine that the same mathematical techniques would be useful in both.

Curiously enough both Wiener and Feynman had the breadth of interest to do what I did in Universal Isocracy and both touched on applying mathematical thinking to human behavior. They just didn't push it far enough.

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