r/cybernetics

Some of the authors(heathcote) are well known in the decision making sphere, so I'm wagering that they can throw their weight around well, just honestly surprised that the authors took this direction as a response to current discourse in cognitive science (wagenmakers, ratcliffe and chemero, Turvey and colleagues had a line of beef going back to around 2004).

Haha the timing is funny I just started working on a presentation for our philosophy club arguing that A). Most of cognitive psychology and neuroscience abuses the metaphors and tools of cybernetics B). A large portion of cognitive science, neuroscience and modern psychology is conceptually confused, the methods of cybernetics was always about technology and communication, as well as human machine interactions. C) cognitive science must devote a portion of itself to the study of humans and our interactions with machines (andy clarks humans as natural cyborgs view comes to mind, so does cyborg anthropology)

Seems like the cognitive psychologists are wising up now

https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/86GA9

Bout time lol.

Hey guys! I hope y’all are doing good,i had some doubts about the above branch which seems relatively new and wanted to know the following details,fees is not a constraint ,also i scored 99 in met phase 1 and expecting around 87-89% in CBSE BOARDS 2026,i scored just 85 percentile in jee mains :/,i also scored 136 in bitsat phase 1 but imma be honest since past few days i am not able to study anything w focus like i really really feel burnout 😭😭 if yall wanna give any tips feel free to do so thank you so much ♥️:-

1)Curriculum and Academics:-
Is it tough,chill,how are the professors,is the curriculum good,does it lay emphasis more on the practical aspect?

2)Placement opportunities:-
I think not a single batch has yet been graduated but still what do yall think it gonna be

3)Future Relevancy:-
How much demand will it have in the future

4)Future flexibility:-
Like can i switch roles into finance or something else in the future coz i really wanna do my own startup,is the branch considered “good enough” academically?

5)Projects and practical exposure:-
Are there good labs,is research and coding culture good?

6)Peer quality and branch culture:-
Are the students coding focused,electrical focused,competitive or like chill

ALSO some more questions if you would like to answer:-

a)Would students or yall choose CPS again?

b)What are the biggest downsides?

c)What kind of student should NOT take this branch?

d)What do students struggle with most?

e)What opportunities are overhyped?

also my first reddit post ever haha

The thing about the human brain is it has a catch, it has a limited input and output Buffet aswell as a memory Buffer. Well some will argue it is unlimited so lets call it definite for the Sake of the argument.

Lets say you create a Video game that Falls exactly this Buffer, recurrently and in a feedforward sense at the same time.

This idea was born yesterday in my mind so i havent Figured out exactly every method in it 100%

Say you have a Sensory deprivation Chamber with nothing but an interactive computer to play in it, no Internet only a game where you make choice and deal with the consequences and rewards or punishment. The purpose of this Sensory deprivation Chamber is that the brain is actually a computer itself so instead of polluting its input output with external stimuli you get darkness or 0 from the rest of the World. Its like Filtering out the noise while debugging only the flow of the signal through the circuit that matters

Once you have hit the buffer limit, and in this theoretical game you have created where each choice leads to a consequence whether it is desired or undesired you reward the brain accordingly, the brain will actually reveal its learning/gradient/derivative matrix data to you and the consequence of that is that you can see exactly which neurons are faulty, by simply looking at the brains hessians and jacobian Matrices Extracted from the computer games continual data feed you can see which neuron is dead or doesnt learn anymore or is blind to the gradient, whether its going into the right or wrong direction over time or is simply frozen as if the gradient doesnt propagate

Your thoughts?

We correlate origins with history. Fair enough, but is that disingenuous to what the initial step actually involves?

History as a record domesticates the act after the fact. It assigns precedents, causes, narrative continuity — makes the origin look like a natural outgrowth of prior conditions. Which is true in hindsight but probably misrepresents what the pioneer was actually steering. They weren't operating inside an established structure with known feedback dynamics and an environment shaped by prior systems. They were the first structuring act. The environment they encountered wasn't yet an environment in any meaningful cybernetic sense — it hadn't accumulated enough to push back with genuine precision.

That distinction feels important and I'm not sure classical cybernetics has clean vocabulary for it. The field is remarkably sophisticated about systems already inside a regulatory structure — requisite variety, feedback, homeostasis, autopoiesis. But all of that seems to presuppose an environment with enough existing organization to generate perturbations worth responding to. Ashby's law works when there's already something on the other side generating variety. Autopoiesis describes closure and self-production but the system is already there, already producing itself against something.

What about before that? Not as a historical question about what came first, but as an ontological question about whether the pioneering condition is categorically different from the stabilized condition that follows it. Because if it is, then most of what cybernetics has built might be a theory of the second act onward — sophisticated about maintenance and adaptation, but quietly assuming away the first act by building it in as a boundary condition.

Is there literature that takes this seriously as its own problem rather than collapsing it into emergence theory or historical narrative?