Homeostasis

Full Title or Meme

A particularly life-like description of stability of living systems.

Context

The attempt to form analogies between computers and life systems continues. Even the word "computer" was originally applied to humans that performed mathematical calculations long hand, or with monstrous, clanking desktop machines.

Norbert Weiner was established as a professor of Mathematics at MIT when he began a collaboration with Aururo RosenBlueth originally with the Harvard Medical School. In 1948 Weiner published "Cybernetics or Control and Communications in the Animal and the Machine", which is as good a description as possible about their collaboration and about the plethora of terms from the life science that invaded computer science.

To Quote from Dr. Weiner:

• A great group of cases in which some sort of feedback is not only exemplified in physiological phenomena but is absolutely essential for the continuation of life is found in what as known as Homeostasis. The conditions under which life, especially health life, can continue in the higher animals are quite narrow. p114
• Small, closely knit communities have a very considerable measure of Homeostasis: and this, whether they are highly literate communities in a civilized county or villages of primitive savages. p 160
• Any organism is held together in this action by the possession of means for the acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. p 161
• [In a discussion of the control of electric generating systems with obvious analogies to cloud computing] parallel systems had a better Homeostasis than serial systems and therefore survived, while the serial system eliminated itself by natural selection. … This possibility of self-organizations is by no means limited to the very low frequency of [electricity or human brain waves]. Consider self-organized systems at the frequency of infrared or radar [frequencies]. p202

Problems

It is harder than it might be expected to create any system that is self-regulating and self-sustaining.