In information thermodynamics, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was an American mathematician notable for his 1948 development of the science of cybernetics, the subject of the set of problems centered around communication, control, and statistical mechanics (statistical thermodynamics), whether in machine or in a living organism, and for his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, specifically chapter "Entropy and Progress", in which he theorizes about entropically. [1]

In his logic, Wiener made a connection between "information", which he correlated with the degree of a system's organization, and the inverse of entropy, which translates with the use of a negative sign in logarithmic terms. [3] The thermodynamic part of Wiener's theory, being based on the weak footing of Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger's idea of negative-entropy, is generally considered as an off-logic extrapolation, but, however, one which has had historical impact.

Wiener studied under British mathematician Bertrand Russell during a fellowship at Cambridge in 1912. [4]

Overview
In 1948, Schrödinger's 1944 overly-simplified descriptions of negative-entropy and life, Wiener postulated that "the notion of information attaches itself very naturally to a classical notion in statistical mechanics: that of entropy." [1] As such, Wiener argued naively that "just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other." He continues "this point of view leads us to a number of considerations concerning the second law of thermodynamics, and to a study of the possibility of the so-called Maxwell demons." On this logic, he states that such questions arise independently in the study of the phenomenon of living matter, as metabolism and reproduction, and that a "third fundamental phenomenon of life, that of irritability, belongs to the domain of communication theory (cybernetics)."

In his 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener outlined his general theory:

“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operations: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or the machine.”

He continues, “in both cases, these external messages are not taken in neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead …the information is then turned into a new form available for the further states of performance.” [2]

Machines, life, and entropy
In commentary on his perspective of what defines “life”, with focus on machine life, Wiener states: [5]

“Certain analogies of behavior are observed between the machine and the living organism, the problem as to whether the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes, semantic … if we use the word ‘life’ to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of entropy, we are at liberty to do so; however, we shall then include many astronomical phenomena … it is my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as ‘life’, ‘soul’, ‘vitalism’, and the like, and say merely that machines [and] human beings [are] pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase.”

Freud
Wiener, supposedly, argued that there are points of contact between Sigmund Freud’s psychodynamic views and Willard Gibbs' statistical mechanics views, stressing that they both recognized chance as a basic element in the fabric of the universe. He also, supposedly, argued that in communication systems the crucial concept is information rather than energy, and that therefore Freud’s emphasis on libido was inappropriate. [6]

References
1. Wiener, Norber. (1948). Cybernetics - or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, (pgs. 11-12). Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
2. (a) Wiener, Norber. (1950). The Human Uses of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, (pgs. 26-27). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
(b) Bynum W.F. and Porter, Roy. (2005). Oxford Dictionary of Scientfic Quotations, (pg. 624). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Entropy and Information (Norbert Wiener Quotes).
4. Campbell, Jeremy. (1982). Grammatical Man - Information, Entropy, Language, and Life (pgs. 24). New York: Simon and Schuster.
5. ibid, Wiener (1950). (ch. II: Progress and Entropy, pgs. 28-47) .
6. (a) Heims, Steve J. (1980). John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (pg. 155). MIT Press.
(b) Fernández-Galiano, Luis. (2000). Fire and Memory: On Architecture and Energy (pg. 141). MIT Press (written: 1982).