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Mathematical biophysics, cybernetics and significs

Summary

It remains to summarize the contributions which each of the three disciplines discussed here is making toward the development of a science of man.

Significs makes a study of the effects on human behavior of the linguistic aspects of the evaluative process, the most distinctly human aspect of the behavior of the human organism.

Mathematical Biophysics seeks to describe the events associated with evaluative processes in physico-mathematical terms.

Cybernetics is discovering important invariants common to these processes and others, particularly those observed in man-made machines and in situations which lend themselves to description in thermo-dynamic or statistical (order — chaos) terms.

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References

  1. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics New York: John Wiley, 1948.

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Rapoport, A. Mathematical biophysics, cybernetics and significs. Synthese 8, 182–193 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485903

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00485903

Keywords

  • Human Behavior
  • Human Organism
  • Mathematical Biophysics
  • Important Invariant
  • Human Aspect