Ruyer and His Elements Towards a Metaphysics of Information’s Origination Raymond Ruyer, Cybernetics and the Origin of Information, translated by Amélie Berger-Soraruff, Andrew Iliadis, Daniel W. Smith, and Ashley Woodward, with an introduction by Ashley Woodward, Lanham, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, xxvii-214 p.

Readers interested by a philosophy of information must be grateful to these four translators, and to the publisher Rowman & Littlefield, for making available to an English-speaking audience this provocative, and in many ways prescient book by French philosopher Raymond Ruyer, originally published in 1954, in the years when cybernetics as a philosophical programme was initially being investigated, and republished with revisions a little more than a decade later. Ruyer’s Néo-finalisme has been published in English in 2016 by the University of Minnesota Press, featuring a translation by Alyosha Edlebi, and the same publisher that publishes the current work has made available La genèse des formes vivantes in 2020, in a translation in English by Jon Roffe and Nicholas B. De Weydenthal. The book is presented with an introduction, the use of clear and legible fonts, and the diagrams are reused with English insertions where needed. The introduction is useful, as it situates the criticism of Ruyer in terms of his option to refuse (if we state it in a summary way) an information without an informer, or a framing consciousness. An attempt is also made to draw implications of Ruyer’s presentation for a philosophy of cognition, in our age of “deep learning” machines, pointing out some inevitably dated forms for some arguments, and also alluding to the implications of this presentation for a philosophy of embryonic development. The endnotes (p. 183-197) are helpful in guiding the reader through many elements of the history of a philosophy of cybernetics and information. They contain many editor’s notes, adding to Ruyer’s initial footnotes, and attempting to bring precision at times since Ruyer’s way of citing was, as is correctly pointed out, somewhat impressionistic. Ruyer’s writing is quintessentially French, and contains some expressions of his own that are not straightforwardly translated. For instance, an expression — more often encountered in Neofinalism — such as survol can be made into “flying over,” but when one does, one keeps the impression that misunderstandings could still occur. Should one turn sens into “sense” or into “meaning” ? And then again, is liaison going to be a “bond” or a “connection” ? We must be grateful to the translators for providing us at least some clarifications on their choices (see p. xxvi-xxvii). Ruyer was among the first to realize the sort of model inversion that early mechanistic cybernetics conveyed within itself. In his reaction to “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” by Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow, Warren Weaver had voiced objections to Wiener’s project. We indeed have “the brain is thinking”, from which one sought to get “thought is brain.” Not unlike Whitehead, Ruyer will submit the problem to a process-view, and ask what is really going on in cognition. In order to answer such a question, he will suggest a whole parabola, from the conception of any intelligent activity, all the way to its completion. Concerning the central notion of information, Ruyer deemed it unbelievable that information could be wholly analyzed in reference to spatio-temporal models alone. One has to remember that this was written at a time when the mystifications around that term of “information” were still very much in favor, and it was perhaps less evident that the logarithmic and mathematical definition of what information is, indeed has little to do with human attributions of a form or a finality to anything ; information is produced by shuffling, it accompanies the expansion of complexity, but then it also tends to restrict itself to moving bits, or other measures, from a concatenation to another in preserving a compressed and highly-abstractly defined order. Ruyer makes …