Teleology which focuses instead on goal-contribution. With the objective goals of organisms being survival and inclusive fitness, Piccinini and Maley define teleological functions to be “a stable contribution by a trait (or component, activity, property) of organisms belonging to a biological population to an objective goal of those organisms.” Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener have conceived of feedback mechanisms as lending a teleology to machinery. Wiener, a mathematician, coined the term 'cybernetics' to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." Cybernetics is the study of the communication and control of regulatory feedback both in living beings and machines, and in
Paley–Wiener integral Paley–Wiener integral In mathematics, the Paley–Wiener integral is a simple stochastic integral. When applied to classical Wiener space, it is less general than the Itō integral, but the two agree when they are both defined. The integral is named after its discoverers, Raymond Paley and Norbert Wiener. Let "i" : "H" → "E" be an abstract Wiener space with abstract Wiener measure "γ" on "E". Let "j" : "E" → "H" be the adjoint of "i". (We have abused notation slightly: strictly speaking, "j" : "E" → "H", but since "H" is a Hilbert space, it is isometrically isomorphic to