296 THE LANGUAGE AND CONCEPTS OF CONTROL 



of the human being, discussions proceeding from first principles of physics 

 and physical chemistry. Then, to introduce control biophysics, in Chap- 

 ter 10 we considered some of the physical aspects of control of the system. 

 All this was in mechanistic terms, based on the movements of atoms and 

 molecules. 



In Chapter 8 we saw what happens if the speeds of biological processes 

 are not regulated and intermeshed. To illustrate the molecular mechanics 

 of control, we chose nerve and muscle, and discussed how commands are 

 passed down the nerve, across synapses, and then across the neuromuscular 

 junction to cause contraction. Probably the stimulation of the endocrine 

 gland system to chemical activity would have served equally well, although 

 to use that example would have required a rather bold and risky step into 

 biochemistry, which probably has the most prolific scientific literature of our 

 time, whereas there are plenty of problems yet in biophysics which warrant 

 attention. 



The principles and the language of the engineering concepts of control are 

 universal, however. They refer equally well to the monitoring of a chemical 

 processing plant, to the guidance of an intercontinental ballistic missile, to 

 the control of a large telephone exchange, or to a human being. There are 

 persons working in the computer technology who now believe that there is a 

 critical complexity to control systems above which they will have enough 

 versatility to be completely self-determining, like man, in many situations: 

 "ultrastability," Ashby calls it. The clever English logician, A. M. Turing, 

 was one of those persons; he predicted, slightly before his death in 1954, that 

 by the year 2000 a computer will be built which will confound its interroga- 

 tor with its ability at intellectual repartee! Most others are much more con- 

 servative. In any case, as von Neumann indicated in the introductory quota- 

 tion, the Turing computer would need a prodigious 10 9 (one thousand mil- 

 lion) parts and cost one or two orders of magnitude more in dollars! With 

 these possibilities, however, it should not be necessary, in view of the lessons 

 of history, to recall that careful definitions of general terms such as "intel- 

 ligence," "learning," etc., should precede philosophical and scientific dis- 

 cussions of these questions. Here we confine ourselves to subject matter 

 which is experimentally testable (at least in principle), and therefore we are 

 able to leave the philosophical discussion of these terms to others. 



THE SYSTEMS CONCEPT REDEFINED 



Man In His Environment 



Life is a continuum of events, with no isolation. A system is a collection of 

 things or events contained within some specified boundary. Man is such a 



