A look at cybernetics in the modern world in the digital age

Read Time:3 Minute, 39 Second

The world is facing the task of all-round increase in the efficiency of scientific research, accelerated implementation of the achievements of science and technology in the economy, improving methods of planning and management of production, socio-economic processes.
In the light of this program task is extremely relevant is the development of the basis for the application of methods of cybernetic modeling and analogies, explanation of the modern view of the dialectical-materialistic essence of the methodology of system research and creation of automated control systems, in which the feedback is implemented through the human-mechanism. Nowadays, the “production” of technical, mathematical, cybernetic, sensory and epistemological models has become a mass phenomenon. It is difficult to name a field where specialists would not conduct scientific research by means of the integrated application of such models, and would not draw appropriate conclusions by analogy.

Methodological and ideological influence of informatization as a successor of cybernetics on scientific and technological progress is deeper and more comprehensive than the influence of physics on natural science and technology. The systemic, cybernetic approach is very effective in the study of such objects with a large number of unpredictably changing parameters, as energy complexes; especially when the task is to determine the hidden modes of a real process, inaccessible to direct perception or occurring under conditions of ultrahigh temperatures, high radioactivity, etc.

Cybernetic models often act as a mediating form of human information interaction with electronic information display and transmission systems. They help determine the most appropriate forms of interaction between man as a subject of cognition and the computer as a tool of mental labor. The operator in the conditions of modern production becomes a cognitive subject at the same time. In this regard, the question of enhancing his intelligence by means of cybernetics is increasingly coming to the fore.

This issue is also important in the optimal organization of scientific research. After all, the question of how to obtain the planned scientific result, and of what methods, means and resources to obtain the greatest commercial effect from it, is not only in the competence of specialists, but is also one of the tasks of philosophy and methodology of science, designed to help scientists identify in the arsenal of science, in its history unused heuristic opportunities, to help determine promising directions and methods, the strategy of science management.

Extensive development of modeling practice is now accompanied by intensive development of mathematical techniques on the logical side of the modeling process, deepening of similarity theory, formation of the theory of construction of cybernetic models, actualization and development of philosophical problems of cybernetics. In the course of scientific modeling dialectically combines elements of theoretical empirical levels of knowledge, systematic approach with the use of mathematical apparatus, heuristic methods of thinking with electronic systems of information processing and transmission. The task is to reveal this dialectic.

In the information age there are qualitative changes in the structure of cognition, the process of dialectical integration of different sciences is increasing, the importance of the methodology of systems research is sharply increasing. This emphasizes the importance of the philosophical category of structure to establish the mathematical logic of the model of the studied or controlled process.

The system-structural approach becomes more and more important in the practice of scientific cognition. The theory of management of large systems is formed, including the management of the development of science itself. Mathematization of science is complemented by its cybernetization, which means studying those or other problems in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and economics from the perspective of information theory, control and feedback theory, using methods of mathematical programming and their integrated application. General models of cybernetic type are forms of the concept of the studied object as a system with a complex network of interrelated elements, properties and functions, which is in deterministic interaction with the environment and as a consequence in the dynamics, development.

The paper assesses the work done by philosophers and natural scientists in the study of the philosophical foundations of cybernetics. It emphasizes that narrower methodological problems are now being brought to the forefront. One such problem is the study of the role of the analogy method in the structure of scientific modeling, in substantiating the methodology of systems research based on modern computational tools and theoretical principles of cybernetics, to which this paper is devoted.