Between cybernetics, psychiatry, computational neuroscience, mathematization of being, and capitalism
We know that the mathematization of being is a very long-standing process, abiogenic one might say, in some ways. However, the scientific emergence of a specific desire to mechanize the mind emerged particularly in the 1950s with cybernetics, which accompanied a new computational era that encompassed and influenced a number of scientific fields such as cognitive science and psychiatry.
One of the assumptions of cybernetics was the view of the human brain as a machine, devoid of any subjective form. In these terms, the mechanization of the mind pursued by cognitive science precisely echoes cybernetic ideas, which are its ideological precursors.[1] Post-modern and contemporary psychiatry also takes up these same reductive and restrictive ideological assumptions,[2]promoting a ‘bottom-up’[3] ontology of biology, i.e. based on the reduction of every phenomenon to a set of physical and chemical interactions.
Here we must remember that cybernetics, starting from its very etymology, from the Greek κυβερνητική, means “the art of the pilot”, and is therefore akin to control, government and information management,[4] and the containment of entropy.[5] The mechanization of the mind and the way in which the discoveries emerging from these studies are applied incorporate cybernetic logic, which encompasses the capitalist laws that regulate the economy, profit, temporality, and bodies, in a system in which “the biological sciences work like an organ in the body of capitalism, each dependent on the other”.[6]
It is from this union between the healthcare system and capital that contemporary psychiatry emerges, especially since the 1980s with the turning point of the DSM III,[7] which marks the completion of the application of a bottom-up biology to mental health: with more than 250 disorders, the manual – which is atheoretical – assigns these labels on the basis of a certain number of symptoms (there must be at least 5 out of 9) corresponding to an individual’s behavior, without being able to give any explanation for the root causes of those disorders. The method of treatment is destructive, based on containment. Everything is treated with a pharmacological response that suppresses the symptoms without curing them, creating addiction and resistance to the drug, relapses, and many side effects. Contemporary psychopharmacology, instead of curing, seems to trigger a continuous recursive cycle of the disorder itself, often making it chronic and condemning the subject to taking drugs for the rest of their life. The mind as the brain, the brain as a mechanical agglomeration on which to act chemically on the main neurotransmitter systems: turn on, turn off, pause. Like a computer. But we are far from healing, and the purely mechanistic view is far from being anything other than a palliative and an epistemology for creating huge profits and pharmacological monopolies.[8] Johanna Moncrieff would speak of the myth of chemical cure,[9] Piero Cipriano of chemical asylum.[10]
The problem here is multiple and intersectional: on the one hand, we have a bottom-up science reduced to responding to a market logic that profits from the psychopharmacocentric approach; on the other hand – the other side of the same coin – we see how funding and economic investment often leave psychiatric care facilities such as CSMs (Mental Health Centers) and SPDCs (Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment Services) as if they were parking lots for human beings, instruments of containment and recursive return, without offering a long-term solution that can truly cure the person. This psychiatric approach, cybernetic insofar as it follows the dehumanizing and mechanistic view of the brain and the human being, helps to reinforce the entire economic healthcare system of large pharmaceutical companies.
If scientists, like doctors, are a “vital organ of the social body”[11], then a massive politicization of this working class would be necessary. If a scientific discovery in itself, at the physical, chemical, or technical level, can be considered neutral in terms of the bare facts discovered, it loses its neutrality as soon as all the application capabilities, methods, practices, and possibilities that arise around it are activated. Funding, cuts, and research directions. All of this is always political and always follows economic interests from above, those capable of maneuvering, investing, and therefore having the final say on science itself. The scientist is the Marxist worker par excellence, totally alienated from his knowledge and practice, depoliticized at the root. Why does this politicization not happen? According to Meltdown Your Books:
Just like cybernetic biology and its recursive logic of ever smaller units, cybernetic social and political structures fragment into ever smaller atomized processes. This horizontalization has the political effect of dispersing criticism and forces into increasingly atomized capacities, forcing socio-political criticism to provide adaptation on a granular scale. […] When all human political capacities are subsumed into a cybernetic worldview, there is no way to engage in political criticism from the standpoint of a subject, as a political body that exists outside this worldview. […] Protests in the cybernetic system reflect democratized and horizontal feedback on specific and highly decentralized issues. These are not protests against an ontology, a way of being, or a social order, because cybernetic society has freed itself from such systemic properties and therefore cannot be targeted. As a symptom of cybernetic thinking’s inability to characterize systemic capacities, the cybernetic orientation loses the capacity for grand narratives. […] In the absence of great possibilities, the atomizing logic of cybernetics remains the only reasonable direction for human endeavor.[12]
All this takes the form of a parallel history within the chapter on the mathematization of being from the post-World War II period onwards. The cybernetic vision – fundamental to the Cold War itself – takes the form of a continuation of the Cartesian project, as Jean Pierre Dupuy reminds us, and continues towards an increasingly dehumanizing mathematization of being. Not the humanization of the machine, but the mechanization of the human. We are well aware that we are inextricably linked to technology,[13] but the process of externalization does not necessarily entail the dehumanization of the subject. Mechanizing by eliminating the subjective component ultimately means eliminating pain, and eliminating pain means dehumanizing, as we see every day. When human beings become numbers to be contained, managed, controlled, exploited, starved, or killed in a chronophagic economic policy that is genocidal and contemptuous of quality of life or, worse, of life itself, then all technoscientific “progress” is futile. Ultimately, the very matrix of contemporary science and technology is perfectly integrated, absorbed, and co-producing the totality of a “cybernetic society”.
This cybernetic society is based on the search for order and stability built through economic power based on the numerical use of human beings[14] and the mathematization of their being, understood as a process of computational subjectivation and the configuration of a statistical desire. In other words, each individual is made, actively or passively depending on their social role, a number that is functional to the system and productive in its own way. The cybernetic vision of society attempts to reduce information entropy through the negentropic and predictive imperative.
Computational Neuroscience and Predictive Minds: Active Inference and Free Energy
Current neuroscience, with its presumed neutrality, contributes to framing this condition as a neurobiological inevitability. A prime example is the concept of Active Inference[15] conceptualized by neuroscientist Karl J. Friston, as reported in the most comprehensive and up-to-date volume on this study:
Active inference is a normative framework for characterizing optimal behavior and cognition […] in living organisms. Its normative character is demonstrated by the idea that all aspects of behavior and cognition in living organisms follow a single imperative: to minimize the surprise of their sensory observations.[16]
Research mathematically demonstrates how every living organism reasons in order to reduce entropy, thus avoiding uncertainty and acquiring as much information as possible from the environment: we are “biologically computational” [17] primarily as a matter of survival. This biological production model is based on what Friston calls free energy, which is nothing more than a mathematical and dynamic model of the brain to constantly readjust its predictions. In practical terms, if free energy is low, the brain has predicted correctly and reality was as expected, while if it is high, it indicates that the prediction was wrong and everything needs to be recalibrated. In other words, we can say that living beings seek to counteract negentropy with the universal law of entropy. It is precisely to this extent that we are negentropic beings: we are not orderly, but we are seeking balance. And it is to this extent that desire is also negentropic. Also in the aforementioned book, the researchers report that
Obtaining a reward (or satisfying our preferences) or encountering a signal indicative of a future reward increases our confidence that we are pursuing a strategy that minimizes expected free energy. This increase in confidence manifests itself as a spike in dopamine.[18]
Today’s socio-technical architecture is based on this biological determinism of dopamine reward, which recalibrates negentropic desire into statistical desire within a totalizing framework of total gamification. Desire as negentropic is based on a predictive model, but the integration of algorithmic technologies of calculation, statistics, and interpellation[19] are based on the construction of continuous rewards in order to be “the right model” to pursue. These rewards, if not implicit, can be made explicit in the gamification model through goals to be achieved (linked to other concrete or symbolic rewards); in this sense, statistical desire no longer pursues objects of desire (object a) but goals of desire (objective a).[20] In light of this, it is worth considering the findings of researchers who report that
creatures with active inference satisfy two imperatives: epistemic (e.g., visually exploring places where salient information is present that can resolve uncertainty about hypotheses or models) and pragmatic (e.g., moving to places where preferred observations, such as rewards, can be obtained). “The epistemic imperative makes both perception and learning active processes, while the pragmatic imperative makes behavior goal-oriented.[21]
Comparing this with computational neuroscience, we realize how capitalism itself, in its dynamics of productivity and unproductivity, is based on the satisfaction of the individual not at the epistemic level – which we could also understand in noetic terms, as a ‘good life’, potentially – but exclusively on the pragmatic imperative of rewards. We move blindly in search of these rewards in all areas of life, which are constructed as playing fields where everything is an objective and a reward, where humans are tools on a par with technical instruments and must be considered, studied, and exploited as such.
The problem is not neurobiology as a neutral observation or the fact that we are – as we have seen throughout this essay – algorithmic, predictive, and anticipatory desiring beings; the problem is the cynical and purely mechanized view of the human being, and therefore the instrumentalization of biological fatality as a Hobbesian and Thatcherian pretext for capitalist reproduction as a natural condition. This condition hooks into and exploits the human mind, working very well because it appeals to and reproduces the way we desire (negentropically) but at the same time reconfigures it in statistical terms, creating a stratification in which everyone competes and those who fail are reabsorbed into other forms as long as they do not get in the way.
A Step Back: Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics
At this point, we can take a step back and return to the primary phase of cybernetics, prior to cognitive science and computational neuroscience,[22] and its initial encounter with psychoanalysis. Dupuy recalls how
Jacques Lacan, together with anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, one of the founders of structuralism, adopted the same critical attitude towards Freud as cybernetics. The father of psychoanalysis had been led to postulate an unlikely “death wish” [death drive] – “beyond the pleasure principle”, […] this compulsion to repeat failure [the so-called “compulsion to repeat”] was translated by Lacan as “automatism of repetition”, that is, the automatism of repetition. In doing so, he replaced the supposed unconscious desire for death with the functioning of a meaningless machine-, so as to identify the unconscious from that moment on with a cybernetic automaton.[23]
In reality, Lacan does not proceed in the same dehumanizing and mechanistic direction as cybernetics; rather, he uses it to recognize an automatism at the basis of the human being; however, this automatism will be recognized in the structure of the unconscious (structured as a language, as a set of signs) and never as an automatism of desire, which is what we have tried to define throughout Retrograde Prometheus.
What does meaning mean? Meaning means that human beings are not the masters of this primordial and primitive language. They have been thrown into it, committed to it, caught up in its workings. We do not know its origin. We are told, for example, that cardinal numbers appeared in languages before ordinal numbers. One would not expect this. One might think that man enters into numbers via the ordinal, through dance, through civil and religious processions, the order of precedence, the organization of the city, which is nothing more than order and hierarchy. And yet linguists confirm this: cardinal numbers appeared first. This paradox is surprising. Man is not master in his own house. There is something into which he integrates himself and which already reigns with its combinations. Man’s transition from the order of nature to the order of culture follows the same mathematical combinations that will serve to classify and explain. Claude Lévi-Strauss calls them elementary structures of kinship. And yet primitive men are not supposed to have been Pascals. Man is engaged with his whole being in the procession of numbers, in a primitive symbolism that is distinct from imaginary representations.[24]
Although in these lines Lacan shows how he has somehow failed to reflect more broadly on the relationship between technology, mathematization of being, and desire, he nevertheless grasps the essential fact that has already been amply demonstrated in Retrograde Prometheus, namely that not only is there the, now obvious, observation that we are predictive beings projected into a complex temporality and a continuous process of mathematization and exosomatized (externalized) evolution through technology, but that this automatic process makes us “not masters in our own house”. The unconscious has an alien structure, which we have not decided upon and which responds not so much to physiological laws as to cosmic ones: entropy and negentropy, instability and stability. Always on a tightrope. This procession of numbers does not mean that we are robots and that our mind is like a computer, but rather that our humanity lies in inevitably turning this procession into martyrdom, self-flagellation, laughter. We are human to the extent that we stumble in this procession, but we cannot help but continue to follow it. This devotion is reflected in the negentropic desire for stability, which does not reduce us to machines, but makes our computational side even more complex and multifaceted, moving from the mechanical to the social and political, from automatism to conscious decision-making, ethics, moral conscience, and cruelty. This aspect of complexity is essential to maintain, otherwise every action would be reduced to meaningless automatism.
In a capitalist world, the mechanization of the mind – which, from early cybernetics to computational neuroscience, points to a totally mathematical view of life that sees humans as machines – can only dehumanize, exploit, extract, and kill. There is no empathy if we think we are dealing with a machine, if suffering seems to us to be a chemical imbalance or a scratch on an inanimate object: the very concept of pain is emptied of its meaning. A similar process occurs with animals and meat consumption: ‘dehumanized’ as living beings, in this case downgraded compared to humans from a speciesist perspective, even if we recognize the pain they feel, this concept is emptied of meaning because of dehumanization. In labor exploitation practices, neocolonial extractivism, necropolitics, and genocidal economies, the numerization of humans – that is, their reduction to numbers, targets, images, labor power, obstacles – is precisely what sustains these systems, the only way to keep them standing. As we have seen helplessly with the genocide in Gaza – even though this fact, outside the Western power bubble, has always been visible elsewhere – every law, ethic, and moral conscience, all so-called rights, are nothing more than a veneer necessary to cover the true infrastructure that sustains everything, the only rule that the capitalist system needs to reproduce itself, namely that every individual is a number that must be made to feel human only when necessary. For the rest, there are no ethical limits when it comes to economic expansion and the preservation of privileges.
The process of mathematization of being carried out by the scientific field is not only an epistemological paradigm but also a philosophical, economic, and political one of eliminating the human from humanity itself, which can become an instrument of itself; this is what it is all about.
[1] “One of the assumptions of cybernetics: ‘the mind is computation’ and ‘the brain can be explained in physical, mechanical terms’, which is why cybernetics is considered a precursor to cognitive science”. J.P. Dupuy, Alle origini delle scienze cognitive. La meccanizzazione della mente, Mimesis, Milano 2015, p. 34.
[2] “Atomization and specialization, Meltdown Your Books argues, has been one of the ‘primary social consequences of 20th-century cybernetic thought’ […]. Allan Horwitz, offers a history of this process taking place within psychiatry: responding to the rise of function orientation in biomedical practice with deliberate atomization of the matters of the mind, with the explicit goal of removing the need for deep personal context and history in treatment (as psychoanalysis would have it) and replacing it with generalizable diagnostic and treatment protocols mirroring the contemporary treatment of the body”. I0 xen0, When is a body? (foreword), in Where Does a Body Begin? Biology’s function in contemporary capitalism, Becoming Press, Berlin/Nicosia 2023, pp. 4-5. See A. V. Horwitz, DSM. A history of psychiatry bible, JHU Press, Baltimore 2021.
[3] Meltdown Your Books, Where Does a Body Begin?, 2023, p. 28.
[4] From the Treccani dictionary: https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/cibernetica/
[5] What we have seen as a lack of information in the theory itself, see for example the concept of information entropy mentioned in paragraph (§)22.
[6] Meltdown Your Books, Where Does a Body Begin?, 2023, p. 50.
[7] The DSM, which stands for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is the psychiatrist’s manual used as a reference practically all over the world.
[8] Consider, for example, how the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelics have been and continue to be slowed down. The bibliography here would be very long, but I refer you to a book that I myself edited: P. Cipriano, Ayahuasca e cura del mondo, Politi Seganfreddo Edizioni, Milano 2023.
[9] J. Moncrieff, The Myth of the Chemical Cure. A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment, Palgrave Macmillan, NY 2008.
[10] P. Cipriano, Il manicomio chimico. Cronache di uno psichiatra riluttante, Eleuthera, Milano 2023. By the same author, see also La salute mentale è politica (Mental Health is Political), Fuori scena, Milano 2025.
[11] Meltdown Your Books, Where Does a Body Begin?, 2023, p. 51.
[12] Meltdown Your Books, Where Does a Body Begin?, 2023, pp. 72-76, my translation.
[13] See the first part of the book.
[14] Modifying the famous subtitle “The Human Use of Human Beings” from Wiener’s Introduction to Cybernetics. See N. Wiener, Introduzione alla cibernetica, Universale scientifica Boringhieri, Torino 1966.
[15] T. Parr, G. Pezzulo, and K. J. Friston, Active Inference. The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior, MIT Press, Massachusetts 2022.
[16] Ibid., p. 25.
[17] Ibid., p. 85.
[18] Ibid., p. 97.
[19] See Part III and Part IV, and in particular§.33 Digisexuality.
[20] See §.33 Digisexuality.
[21] T. Parr, G. Pezzulo, and K. J. Friston, Active Inference, 2022, p. 198.
[22] “Active inference is closely related to cybernetic ideas about the intentional and goal-oriented nature of behavior and the importance of agent-environment interactions (based on feedback)”. Ibid., p. 203.
[23] J.P. Dupuy, Alle origini delle scienze cognitive, 2015, p. 52.
[24] J. Lacan, Il seminario. Libro II. L’io nella teoria di Freud e nella tecnica della psicoanalisi (1954-1955), Einaudi, Torino 1991, p. 387.
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