The Information - James Gleick [125]
The concepts and measures provided by the theory of information provide a quantitative way of getting at some of these questions. The theory provides us with a yardstick for calibrating our stimulus materials and for measuring the performance of our subjects.… Informational concepts have already proved valuable in the study of discrimination and of language; they promise a great deal in the study of learning and memory; and it has even been proposed that they can be useful in the study of concept formation. A lot of questions that seemed fruitless twenty or thirty years ago may now be worth another look.
This was the beginning of the movement called the cognitive revolution in psychology, and it laid the foundation for the discipline called cognitive science, combining psychology, computer science, and philosophy. Looking back, some philosophers have called this moment the informational turn. “Those who take the informational turn see information as the basic ingredient in building a mind,” writes Frederick Adams. “Information has to contribute to the origin of the mental.”♦ As Miller himself liked to say, the mind came in on the back of the machine.♦
Shannon was hardly a household name—he never did become famous to the general public—but he had gained an iconic stature in his own academic communities, and sometimes he gave popular talks about “information” at universities and museums. He would explain the basic ideas; puckishly quote Matthew 5:37, “Let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” as a template for the notions of bits and of redundant encoding; and speculate about the future of computers and automata. “Well, to conclude,” he said at the University of Pennsylvania, “I think that this present century in a sense will see a great upsurge and development of this whole information business; the business of collecting information and the business of transmitting it from one point to another, and perhaps most important of all, the business of processing it.”♦
With psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, economists, and all sorts of social scientists climbing aboard the bandwagon of information theory, some mathematicians and engineers were uncomfortable. Shannon himself called it a bandwagon. In 1956 he wrote a short warning notice—four paragraphs: “Our fellow scientists in many different fields, attracted by the fanfare and by the new avenues opened to scientific analysis, are using these ideas in their own problems.… Although this wave of popularity is certainly pleasant and exciting for those of us working in the field, it carries at the same time an element of danger.”♦ Information theory was in its hard core a branch of mathematics, he reminded them. He, personally, did believe that its concepts would prove useful in other fields, but not everywhere, and not easily: “The establishing of such applications is not a trivial matter of translating words to a new domain, but rather the slow tedious process of hypothesis and experimental verification.” Furthermore, he felt the hard slogging had barely begun in “our own house.” He urged more research and less exposition.
As for cybernetics, the word began to fade. The Macy cyberneticians held their last meeting in 1953, at the Nassau Inn in Princeton; Wiener had fallen out with several of the group, who were barely speaking to him. Given the task of summing up, McCulloch sounded wistful. “Our consensus has never been unanimous,” he said. “Even had it been