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Cybernetics is the theory of control in any system or in a machine. It is completely general, i.e. it is applicable to any system. At first sight it appears to be about physical things such as incubators; it is then seen to be equally about physiological things such as the nervous system—but this is physical too; however, the materials out of which the system is constructed are in fact totally irrelevant. Cybernetics is most easily illustrated by means of physical examples, but in fact it has to do with control in any system in which there is some self-regulation. The central hypothesis in it is that of feed-back, in which part of the action of the control-system, instead of going to the output, is fed back to the control-system.
The general application of this to the body is neurological. The behaviour of the central nervous system—and indeed of all this—can be interpreted fruitfully in these terms, and unlooked-for advances in neurology may be expected. This is important. But it has an ideological effect; to some people the excitement of cybernetics is that it is to them a nail in the coffin of psychology, on the grounds that goal-directed activity can now be explained mechanistically (which contains several simple fallacies).
If there is an ideological effect on that side, there is on the other side an equally unfortunate attitude