IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2017 - 83

And:
[...] we observe the movement we have induced.
In other words, the stimuli to the sensitive nerve
endings resulting from the changes in our relationship to the external environment are transmitted to the brain by the sensory nerves and
brought to consciousness. As we see, hear, feel,
etc the motion caused by our "machine" and the
accompanying phenomena, we are in a position
to bring our actions into harmony with our overall
intention, as well as to modify or halt them in
response to changes. [...] the activity we use to
direct our human "machine" towards its goal
always derives from the difference between the
will and the perceived or imagined reality - that
is, the difference between the desired and actual
result of the action.
In particular, Lincke distinguished between the
"nerves of will" (what we would now call motor nerves)
and the "nerves of sensations" (sensory nerves),
pointing out that "the brain is a communication bridge

FIGURE 2. Lincke's "proto-cybernetic" view of the human

body.

DECEMBER 2017

∕

between the nerves of sensation and the nerves of
will." He also emphasized the significance of what we
would now call the "error" in a closed-loop system: his
"difference between the will and the perceived or imagined reality."

Jakob Von Uexküll (1920)
Von Uexküll was born in Estonia, to an aristocratic family. Although the family money was mostly lost in WWI,
he retained a villa on Capri, visited by the likes of Walter Benjamin.
Uexküll was interested in how living beings perceive
their environment, arguing that organisms perceived the
experience of living in terms of species-specific, spatiotemporal subjective reference frames that he termed
Umwelt, now used as the general German word for environment. He wrote the seminal book Theoretical Biology
(1920) [4], founded the Hamburg Institute for Environmental Research, and established the discipline of biosemiotics. Figure 3 shows the cover of Theoretical Biology.
The 1920 book included many explicit in-text diagrams of an informational nature - what we would now
term, "signal flow diagrams" (Figure 4).

FIGURE 3. The cover of Theoretical Biology.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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