"This book an attempt will be made to outline the principles of cybernetics and relate them to what we know of behaviour, both from the point of view of experimental psychology and also from the point of view of neurophysiology."
Frank Honywill George was a British psychologist, cyberneticist and former Professor of Cybernetics and Director of the Institute of Cybernetics at the Brunel University, best known for his 1962 book The Brain as a Computer.
"The title of the book, The Brain as a Computer, is intended to convey something of the methodology involved; the idea is to regard the brain itself as if it were a computer-type control system, in the belief that by so doing we are making explicit what for some time has been implicit in the biological sciences."
"The sudden recent rise to prominence of cybernetics was due, immediately, to World War II. There existed then a series of problems which had not previously been met. The main one was that of range-finding for anti-aircraft guns in high-speed aerial warfare. The older systems involved human computers and these, with manually controlled locators, were wholly inadequate for the job in hand. The essence of the process involved was to track and predict the direction, velocity, and height of enemy aircraft. The human beings part in the operation was much too slow and inaccurate, and there were people available with machines already developed to do the job adequately; these machines were, of course, computing machines."
"These computing machines had already been designed, and some built, by Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, and others, and were almost ready-made for the job. These scientists, as well as others such as von Neumann, Shannon and Bigelow, were in a position to see that machines of an electronic kind were ideally suited to carry out the whole of the operations of range-finding and location without any human intervention whatever. These electronic computing machines were already developed to a very high degree of efficiency for the solution of mathematical equations, and some technical difficulties had led to the suggestion that a process of scanning, similar to that used in television, might be incorporated into the computer. Another innovation was the use of binary notation rather than decimal notation as in the early computer."
"In many ways it is true to say that syntax is mathematical logic, semantics is philosophy or philosophy of science, and pragmatics is psychology, but these fields are not really all distinct."
"George has some important (if not necessarily original) things to say and he has the positivist’s ability to avoid confusing abstractions. He holds strongly that the construction of inductive process machines will produce devices that can go far beyond the abilities of their inventors (a more general statement concerning Weiner’s recent argument in Science... He sees the importance of eventually gaining physiological statements to supplement psychological process description."
"Happily for physical science, cybernetics included, faulty philosophical premises do not vitiate the value of experimental findings. Thus, F. H. George is quite correct in stating that some parts of cybernetics can be accepted even by those "who are radically opposed to the Mechanistic Materialists and their modern counterparts. But they certainly cannot accept a cybernetics which is defined as "the application of an old idea, idea that human beings and animals are essentially very complicated machines."