Can Psycho-Cybernetics' self-reinforcing feedback loop model positive thinking?

[Dr Alain L Fymat]

The first cyberneticists (Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, and others) set for themselves the challenge of discovering the neural mechanisms underlying mental phenomena and expressing them in explicit mathematical language. Their original intention was to create an exact science of the mind. Although their approach was quite mechanistic, concentrating on patterns common to organisms and machines, it involved many novel ideas that exerted a tremendous influence on subsequent systemic conceptions of mental phenomena.

The application of cybernetic principles to the concept of the mind was a scientific revolution that opened the door to understanding the nature of the mind as a systems phenomenon. It became the first successful attempt in science to overcome the Cartesian division between mind and body. The contemporary science of cognition, which offers a unified scientific conception of brain and mind, can be traced back directly to these pioneering years of cybernetics.

However, cybernetic machines are very different from Descartes' clockworks. The crucial concept is embodied in Wiener's concept of "feedback". A "feedbak loop" is a circular arrangement of causally connected elements, in which an initial cause propagates around the links of the loop so that each element of the cycle has an effect on the next, until the last "feeds back" the effect into the first element of the cycle. Thus, the first link ("input") is affected by the last link ("output"), which results in self-regulation of the entire system, as the initial effect is modified each time it travels around the cycle. In other words, feedback means the conveying of information about the outcome of any process or activity to its source.

Cyberneticists distinguish between "self balancing" (or "negative") and "self-reinforcing" (or "positive") feedback. The former has been known for hundreds of years as the "vicious circle", the "self-fulfilling prophecy" (in which originally unfounded fears lead to actions that make the fears come true), the "bandwagon effect" (or the tendency of a cause to gain support simply because of its growing number of adherents), etc..

I posit that positive thinkling can be modeled as a self-reinforcing feedbackloop.

DO YOU AGREE? ANY IDEAS ON THIS OR OTHER MODELING APPROACHES?