Cybernetics

Cybernetics studies control, communication, and feedback in animals, machines, and organizations. It treats regulation and goal-directed behavior as patterns that can be compared across biological and engineered systems.

Feedback: A process in which a system's output influences its subsequent input. Feedback is the central mechanism cybernetics uses to explain self-regulation.
Norbert Wiener: An American mathematician who formulated cybernetics as a study of control and communication in animals and machines. His 1948 book gave the field its name and a broad intellectual program.
System: A set of interacting components whose relations form a recognizable whole. Cybernetics studies control and communication across systems of many kinds.
Servomechanism: An automatic control system that uses feedback to make a mechanism follow a command. Servomechanisms provided a concrete engineering model of cybernetic control.
Second-order cybernetics: An approach that includes the observer and the observer's acts of distinction within the system being studied. It extended cybernetic analysis to the role of observers in constructing models.
Control theory: The mathematical study of influencing the behavior of dynamic systems. It formalizes how controllers steer systems toward desired states.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: Norbert Wiener's 1948 book introducing cybernetics as a cross-disciplinary field. This book established the field's foundational account of control and communication.
Communication: The transmission or exchange of information between entities. Cybernetics treats communication as part of how systems coordinate and regulate.
Autopoiesis: The self-producing organization through which a living system continually generates and maintains itself. This theory applies cybernetic thinking to the organization of living systems.
Systems theory: An interdisciplinary approach to understanding organized wholes and relations among their parts. Cybernetics helped establish a shared language for studying systems across disciplines.

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