Cybernetics is a postwar framework of control theory and information theory that understands living systems and intelligence through analogies with nervous systems and communication engineering. In the provided context, it is associated above all with Norbert Wiener, who published Cybernetics in 1948 and proposed that life and cognition could be grasped quantitatively as flows of information. A central idea of this approach is that the brain and the computer are structurally comparable, and that mental and biological processes can be described as information patterns rather than as purely material or energetic events. Wiener’s famous claim that “information is information, not matter or energy” is presented here as a challenge to older materialist worldviews.
The context also shows how cybernetics helped establish a new way of thinking about the relation between humans and machines. Through feedback control theory and early brain-machine interface research, the human nervous system and electronic engineering came to be discussed in a shared language of information. This made it plausible to imagine reading and writing neural signals electrically, and eventually scanning, copying, or emulating brain information in computers. By the 1960s, such ideas were appearing in scientific literature rather than only in science fiction, and they fed into later developments in cognitive science, computational models of mind, AI research, and proposals such as whole-brain emulation and mind uploading.