Difficulty: Easy
Correct Answer: information
Explanation:
Introduction / Context:
Cybernetics, introduced by Norbert Wiener, unified ideas about control, communication, and feedback in organisms and machines. A key conceptual shift was emphasizing an abstract, measurable quantity that flows through systems and can be encoded, transmitted, and transformed.
Given Data / Assumptions:
Concept / Approach:
Wiener’s cybernetics and Shannon’s information theory placed information at the center of understanding control and communication. While energy drives physical processes, information governs organization, regulation, and signal meaning within feedback loops.
Step-by-Step Solution:
Identify cybernetics’ emphasis: feedback, signals, control.Recall that messages and their statistics are captured by information-theoretic measures.Select “information” as the quantity replacing a purely energetic viewpoint.
Verification / Alternative check:
Canonical summaries of cybernetics define it as “control and communication in the animal and the machine,” centering on information processing, coding, and feedback stability rather than on energy budgets alone.
Why Other Options Are Wrong:
Mathematics: a tool, not the modeled “substance.”
Common Pitfalls:
Conflating information with meaning; Shannon-style information is about uncertainty reduction, independent of semantics, yet still foundational to control and communication.
Final Answer:
information
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