Kenneth M. Sayre Publishes Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind

Can machines be conscious? Can AI? Can AI ever have something like a mind? Our friends, perhaps the heroes of the AI myth, the cyberneticists, have long been asking these questions.

Kenneth M. Sayre, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, published Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind, proposing that mental states can be explained through cybernetics: information and feedback, the concepts of Claude Shannon's information theory and Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, without either reducing mind to mechanism or placing it outside nature.

In other words, Sayre argued that thinking is a kind of information processing that any self-correcting system could do, be it man or machine. His foundational ideas still sit under today’s question of AI and machine consciousness.