Orit Halpern
speaker
133 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Orit Halpern’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So the fundamental innovation here was to, A, try to mathematically calculate human behavior,
and to make it seem mechanical, basically, so making machines and humans equivalent.
And secondly, to basically attempt to understand the whole world in terms of information or communication.
One of the key features, especially in cybernetics, was the idea of feedback, that there's a relationship going on
in this case between the gun and the plane, not a very friendly one, but nonetheless a relationship, they're in some sense talking to each other in the mathematical modes of communication that what the plane does gets the gun to change its behavior and what the gun does impacts what the plane is doing.
And so people started to think about things not as separate objects, but as always relational or communicating objects and trying to turn that communication into something they could mathematically represent or compute.
Warren McCullough was a psychiatrist and actually had been in World War I on ships, kind of wondering a little bit about signals and messages.
But also as a psychiatrist, he also worked with a lot of people who had undergone war trauma and things like that.
And so he was really interested in these questions about hallucination and
why people have traumatic experiences, how phantom limb, these kind of things that seem both very material and yet very imagined, right?
And so he was really interested in this mind-body thing.
And Walter Pitts was another kind of mathematical genius who came out of a really impoverished background, didn't have really a formal education, but walked into the Detroit Library, for example, at age 13 and
and picked up the Principa Mathematica, corrected it apparently, wrote to Bertrand Russell, and got invited to Cambridge, but he was 13, so he couldn't go, and also impoverished, but managed to get kind of picked up by Norbert Wiener and this group of cyberneticians as kind of a potential prodigy and kind of brought into this circle at MIT that was working on cybernetics.
And, you know, you have to remember that at this period of time, people didn't know what a machine was or what a brain was.
Like, we didn't have fMRIs and we didn't have digital computers.
You know, we didn't have these kind of things.
And, in fact, people were, you know, if we could start modeling human behavior mathematically and computationally, how would we rethink what people are and what machines are?
Right.
Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts, under the sort of influence of all these people modeling brains and modeling machines during the war, started to ask, what is a man that he may know a number and a number that it may be known by man?
Now, this sounds like the kind of like obscure sort of like esoteric philosophical thing that none of us would care about, which maybe it is.
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