Many of this journal's articles deal with areas that overlap closely with the interests of non-linear dynamics. For example, during the last year (its sixth year of publication), it had a special issue on "self-organizing social systems." But perhaps more often, its center is somewhat to the side of the areas on which chaos theory concentrates, including an emphasis on the philosophical underpinnings of self-organization, and the semantics (in the most general sense) with which self-organization evidences itself in the world. The editor/publisher, Søren Brier, says that:
This journal is devoted to the new understandings of self-organizing processes of information in human knowing that have arisen through the cybernetics of cybernetics. . . . Through the concept of self-reference it tries to explore the meaning of cognition and communication; our understanding of organization and information in human, artificial and natural systems, and our understanding of understanding . . . (Brier, 1993, inside cover.)
For several years now, two on-going columns, Ranulph Glanville's "A (Cybernetic) Musing" and Louis Kauffman's "Virtual Logic" have addressed these issues from what I think of as the Aristotlean and Platonic viewpoints, respectively. Here's an excerpt from one of Glanville's 1994 columns which I think raises issues that we in chaos theory might also well heed:
In our need to show that Cybernetics is valuable, to convince others (who perhaps don't want or need to be convinced) that there is actually something there, we have, I believe accidentally sold Cybernetics out. By this I mean we have taken a position in which we treat how to use the subject more seriously than the subject itself. (1994, p. 53.)
I'm especially fascinated by Louis Kauffman's column, which, among other things, presents the work of both Kurt Gödel and G. Spencer-Brown in entertaining and often droll ways that make their complex ideas as fun as one of Martin Gardner's old "mathematical games and recreations" columns in Scientific American. In defining his goals for this column, Kauffman said that:
I take the meaning of the word virtual in the archaic sense. Virtual logic is not logic, it is that which energizes reason and so brings the forms of logic and mathematics into being. Virtual logic is not logic, nor is it the actual subject matter of the mathematics, physics or cybernetics in which it may appear to be embedded. Virtual logic lives in the boundary between syntax and semantics. It is the pivot that allows us to move from one world of ideas to another. (Kauffman, 1996, p. 65)
I highly recommend this journal to our readers. Those wishing to learn more should go to the journal's web site at http://www.imprint-academic.com/C&HK
Robin Robertson
Brier, S, (1993). Statement of purpose. Cybernetics & human knowing: A journal of second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis and cyber-semiotics, inside cover
Kauffman, L. (1996). Virtual logic. Cybernetics & Human Knowing: A journal of second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis and cyber-semiotics, 4 (1), 65-67.
Ranulph Glanville, (1994). "A (Cybernetic) Musing", Cybernetics & Human Knowing: A journal of second-order cybernetics, autopoiesis and cyber-semiotics, 2 (4) , 53-55.
The influence of the work by Bateson, Luhmann, Maturana, von Foerster, von Glasersfeld, and Varela is felt throughout these issues. Johnson's criticism of radical constructivism is a healthy indication that there is a debate in progless. If anything, more critical views of second-order cybernetics are necessary to enhance the value and potential of the journal.
Second-order cybernetics has produced a change in epistemology from the cybernetics of observed systems to the cybernetics of observing systems; from an objective world to an experiential world; from an objective world which accepts a transcendental reality independent of the observers to a wvorld which accepts multiple realities as constructed by multiple observers. This new epistemology is changing our appreciation of learning and communications processcs and, more specifically, is making more visible the need for mutual respect in social intercourse.
This point is beautifully highlighted by Bamberger's paper "Convention, Innovation and Multiple Hearings" (Vol. 1, No. 2/3). She starts her paper with the question, "How can we understand and account for often striking differences in the meanings made and the realities found by another when we are confronted with what might seem to be the 'same' phenomena?" This point is also highlighted, in the same volume, by Steier in his paper "Cybernetics as ... Mutualling", where he uses the idea of hierarchy to make a contrast between secondorder cybernetics and systems theory: "Hierarchy, as a property of complex relationships, is then often taken axiomatically as an unassailable 'given' to which one must be true in order to claim a systems approach." He then adds, "... It is precisely this reliance on hierarchy as a system of thinking that leads to a totalitarian ... logic" ana argues the need to replace this logic which "... forms the bedrock of our dominant systems of knowing with a contextual logic ..." which puts the emphasis on self-reference and autonomy.
Brier's paper, "Information and Consciousness: A Critique of the Mechanistic Concept of Information" (Vol. 1, No. 2/3), offers an excellent discussion of the shortcomings of objective information and argues for information as something a person communicates to another person. In doing this Brier introduces one of the contention points in second-order cybernetics: "It is clear that Maturana and many cybernetic constructivists have good arguments against physicalism. But when Maturana writes and talks about the autopoietic system and the domain its organisational closure creates - and underlines the general point that there are no autopoietic systems without an observer to distinguish them - then he seems to be in a pure phenomenalistic and solipsistic position." This criticism is further developed by Johnson in the "The Metaphysics of Constructivism" (Vol. 1, No. 4): "In sharp contrast to the reality-constituting narratives of radical constructivism ... the realist declares that our words and ideas most often serve as conventional instruments for the representation of extra-linguistic matters of fact." The section "Discussions" in the same volume includes von Glasersfeld's response to Johnson's article, and in Vol. 2, No. 1, we find Johnson's counterargument. This is an important debate for systems' practitioners; in their extremes both positions may lead to undesirable outcomes. The realist position may lead to methodologies which highlight capturing reality as it is, thus imposing the tyranny of those closer to "this reality," while the constructivist position may lead to dismissing invariance and constraint in the real world, thus leading to an extreme relativism in which all views are equally valid.
Krippendorff's paper "Major Metaphors of Communication and Some Constructivist Reflections on their Use," in Vol. 2, No. 1, is a powerful essay about understanding human communication: "In the above, I took metaphors as windows into how their users create their understanding of communication. In trying now to understand their variety in use, I am in fact moving from an individual understanding of communication through metaphor to an understanding of this understanding of communication. This shift is important for it enables an understanding of Others' understanding, including self-understanding, and could therefore be called second-order understanding." This quotation highlights not only the relevance of metaphors in understanding an observer's weltanschauung but, most significantly, the observer's scope for detecting and overcoming his/her own blind spots, that is (his/her own metaphors-in-use) for double-loop leaming.
In summary, reading these four issues of Cybernetics and Human Knowing gave me not only valuable insights about second-order cybernetics but also significant lessons for systems practice. This journal should be a valuable contribution to all libraries.
Raul Espejo
School of Computing and Information Systems
University of Humberside
Hull, HU6 7RT U.K.
Source: Systems Pratice, vol 7, no 3
"Uniqueness and freedom have as their consequence that one can never regard other people merely as means, but must always treat them as ends in themselves. As beings they have the fundamental authority to define their existence and its meaning themselves, including their own values and their morality. And that entails simultaneously that we must respect other people to do the same. In this way it becomes no not morality but ethics - understood as the meta-discussion of morals and how they can function together in a common system which is the universal basis for any discussion of values. We must therefore accept that we can find no universal morality." (Brier, vol 1, no 4)
Cybernetics and Human Knowing
Søren Brier, Editor. $60/year (4 issues)
from Royal School of Librarianship,
Langagervej 4, 9220 Aalborg Øst, Denmark
Source: Whole Earth Review, winter 1994
The journal is devoted to the new under-standings of the self-organizing processes of information in human knowing that have arisen through the cybernetics of cybernetics, or second order cybernetics. This new development within cybernetics is a nondisciplinary approach. Through the concept of self-reference it tries to explore: the meaning of cognition and communication; our understanding of organisation and information in human, artificial and natural systems; and our understanding of understanding within the natural and social sciences, humanities, information and library science, and in social practices as design, education, organisation, teaching, therapy, art, management and politics.
Because of the interdisciplinary character articles are written in such a way that people from other domains can understand them. Articles from practitioners are accepted in a special section.
Subscription Information
For subscription send a check in DDK or USD, your name and address to Cybernetics &; Human Knowing, v/Søren Brier, The Royal School of Librarianship, Aalborg Branch, Langagervej 4, DK9220 Aalborg Øst, Denmark; or pay on Giro account no. 2 84 29 04 to Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Denmark or by Diners Club Card. The amounts are: 320 DDK (individual) and 640 DDK (institutional) for Europe and 360 DDK or 60 USD (individual) and 720 DDK or 120 USD (institutional) for the rest of the world.
Editor and Editorial Board
Søren Brier is editor and publisher; e-mail: sbr@db.dk. The editorial board members are: Edith Ackermann (USA), Peter Bøgh Anderson (Denmark), Jeanne Bamberger (USA), M.C. Bateson (USA), Stafford Beer (Canada), Stein Bråten (Norway), Heinz von Foerster (USA), Ernst von Glasersfeld (USA), Louis Kauffmann (USA), Bradford Keeney (USA), Klaus Krippendorff (USA), George E. Lasker (Canada), Erwin Laszlo (Italy), Niklas Luhmann (Germany), Humberto Maturana (Chile), Edgar Morin (France), Lars Qvortrup (Denmark), Thomas A. Sebeok (USA), Fred Steier (USA), Robert Vallée, and Francisco J. Varela (France).
Information for Authors
To facilitate editorial work and to enhance the uniformity of presentation, authors are requested to send three copies of the paper to the Editor, and to prepare the contribution in accordance with the conventions summarized below. Manuscripts will not be returned except for editorial reasons. The language of publication is English. Authors provide printed double-spaced manuscripts with wide margins. The following information should be provided on the first page: the title, the author's name and full address, a title not exceeding 40 characters including spaces and a summary/abstract in English not exceeding 200 words. Tables, diagrams, reference lists, illustrations and illustration captions should be presented on separate sheets.
Reference to a publication should preferably be made of the author, the year of publication and, when necessary, the page numbers (in parentheses).
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A Look into Cybernetics & Human Knowing
From the Editor of C&HK I received a couple of the journal numbers from which I could choose some new matters for the read-ers of Informatica. Let me look into Vol. 3 (1995) No. 1 (the marker used for citation will be 3 (1995) 1, and so on).
-CONTENTS of 3 (1995) 1: This issue is dedicated to cyber-semiotics: the integration of knowledge from second-order cybernetics and the triadic semiotics of C.S. Peirce to a broader framework for understanding infor-mation and communication. Papers are: Søren Brier, Cyber-Semiotics: On Autopoiesis, Code-Duality and Sign Games in Bio-Semiotics; Jesper Hoffmeyer, The Swarming Cyberspace of the Body; Lawrence S. Bale, Gregory Bateson, Cybernetics, and the Socialbehavioral Sciences. A paper concerning praxis, entitled A (Cybernetic) Musing: Control 1 was contributed by Ranulph Glanville. Book Reviews presents Robert Theobald's Turning the Century:Personal and Organizational Strategies for Your Changed World, reviewed by Tetsunori Koizumi; Asghar T. Minai's Aesthetics, Mind, and Nature - A Communication Approach to the Unity of Matter and Consciousness, reviewed by Michaela Ulieru, etc.
Citations from Cybernetics & Human Knowing
Let us list some most challenging citation from C&HK which characterize the aim of the journal.
-[1 (1992) 1, pp. 5-6, Rodney E. Donaldson, Cybernetics & Human Knowing: one possible prolegomenon.] Aspects of Humberto Maturana's brilliant analysis of the difference between transcendental and constitutive ontologies have been intuited by many wise women and men in past millennia and in a variety of cultures - but not by very many, and not with the clarity and scientific sophistication which Maturana's cybernetics offers.
Heinz von Foerster, the father of the idea of second order cybernetics, refers to it as "[a] turn form looking at things out there to looking at itself". ... - once we recognize that perception is an activity and not a passivity - the notions of "communication" and "control", as well as "information", either require redefinition or become quite quietly obsolete. .. . We also learn that the past and future are stories we tell ourselves in the present ...
-[1 (1992) 1, p. 14, Heinz von Foerster, Ethics and Second-order Cybernetics.] ... in 1931, Kurt Gödel, then 25 years of age, published an article whose significance goes far beyond the circles of logicians and mathematicians. The title of this article I will give now in English: On formally unde-cidable propositions in the Principia Mathematica and related systems. What Gödel does in his paper is to demonstrate that logical systems, even like those so carefully constructed by Russel and Whitehead, are not immune against undecidables to sneak in.
[P. 17] When the language switches to the track of function it is dialogic. There are of course these noises; some of them may sound like "table", some others like "chair", but there need not be any tables or chairs. These noises are invitation to the other to make some dance steps together. The noises "table" and "chair" bring to resonance those strings in the mind of the other which, when brought to vibration, would produce noises like "table" and "chair": language in its function is connotative.
In its appearance, language is descriptive. When you tell your story, you tell it as it was: the magnificent ship, the ocean, the big sky, and the flirt you had, that made the whole trip a delight... The right question is: With whom are you going to dance your story, so that your partner will float with you over the decks of your ship, will smell the salt of the ocean, will let the soul expand over the sky, and there will be a flash of jealously when you come to the point of your flirt.
In its function, language is constructive, because nobody knows the source of your story. Nobody knows and ever will know how it was: because as it was is gone for ever.
-[1 (1992) 1, p. 22, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Why I Consider Myself a Cybernetician.] I had also come across Claude Shannon’s theory and in the first two pages of his famous paper on The mathematical theory of communication1, he mentions that meaning does not travel from a sender to a receiver. The only thing that travels are changes in some form of physical energy, which he called "signals". More important still, these changes in energy are signals only to those who have associated them with a code and are therefore able, as senders, to encode their meanings in them and, as receivers, to decode them. Too often, in discussion on communication, it is overlooked that the initial code of a particular communication system cannot be established within that system but has to be arranged by other means. The communication system we call "natural language" is no different in that regard.
[P. 23] Even monolinguals, when they grow up, sometimes discover that what they thought those other were doing is not what they thought they were doing. So they may become aware of discrepancies between their use of certain words and other people's. But since they have to interact not only with things but also with other speakers of the language, they adapt their meanings as best they can to the meanings they believe others to have in their minds. Quite often this leads to the feeling that one "sees things their way". But, as most of us discover, the need for adaptation never ends. In fact, as you advance to old age, you realize how much you are alone in your conceptual world.
On the strength of all this, I came to believe that the meanings we attribute to words and phrases, and to whole speeches and texts, are meanings, or built up of meanings, that we ourselves have generated in our own experience. They are the result of "self-regulation" - and the study of self-regulation is an integral part of cybernetics.
-[1 (1992) 1, pp. 31-32, Ole Thyssen, Ethics as Second Order Morality.] Heinz von Foerster2 has developed the idea of a second order cybernetics. While first order cybernetics deals with observed systems, second order cybernetics deals with observing systems. This involves a shift in perspective. First order cybernetics places an observer outside the observed system, while second order cybernetics places the observer inside a system which he observes and which observes him. lnstead of a privileged observer, who monopolizes the rationality of observation, we get a variety of observers, who observe each other without any one having priority. ...
Any observation takes place from a point which is invisible for the observer, while he observes. As von Foerster points out, any observation has a blind spot (von Foerster 1984, p. 289). Blindness is a condition of seeing. We are metaphysicians when we make choices which cannot be made and which nevertheless are made. We create philosophical systems on the basis of arbitrary decisions and try, perhaps, to make them socially obligatory. This happens when, e.g., a research elite decides what is good and what is bad research. Persons and institutions get their identity by making metaphysical choices, because such choices show (unfounded and arbitrarily) who they are and how to act.
-[P. 1.3] Of course a subsystem is unable to transgress its boundary. It operates inter-nally, and it uses its medium to define its operation. ...
-[2 (1993) 2, p. 4, Massimo Negrotti and Lars Qvortrup, Introduction to the Theme: the Theory of the Artificial.] ... artificial devices are built in order to "mimic" something outside the device, be it something in the natural, the psychic or the social world. But what does it mean to "mimic"? ... It is plausible to think that the concept of artificial concretely includes two poles (nature and techliology) and generates new realities and not only metaphors. A children's game, a theatrical piece, a painting or a symphony are good examples of artificial realities in the sense that they try to reproduce situations, feelings or ideas by means of 'technologies' like social rules, language rules, color rules or acoustic rules. What kind of objects do they set up? Surely they generate artificial realities, but not in the sense of something false: rather they establish new levels of reality (or recombine other levels of reality in a new one) strictly depending, as in any other case of the artificial, on two factors: the 'selections' of the author and the technological tools adopted to reproduce them.
In this sense, man is much more involved in doing the artificial than in doing something natural and this is, perhaps, his very peculiarity as compared to lower living systems, though not to all of them. Since to reproduce is, coeteris paribus, more easy than to produce ex novo, humans spend a lot of time reproducing the world, both the ex-ternal and the internal one, thanks to the various technologies invented during the centuries.
-[2 (1993) 2, pp. 7, Lars Qvortrup, Orders of Artificiality.] ... if C is an internat element of the system, then the system is a natural (or social) system, which means that it produces its own conditionality. Thus, the system is an autopoietic system. If, however, C is an external element in relation to the system conditioned by C, then the system is artifi-cial (or at least artificial in condition to C). Such a system does not produce its own condition: it is heteropoietic system. For example, a machine is a heteropoietic sys-tem: it may or it may not produce its own elements and relations, but it does not produce its conditionality.
[P. 121 According to Luhman, meaning is at one and the same time produced by the system and externalizing itself in relation to the system. "Communication systems develop a special way to deal with complexity, i.e., introducing a representation of the complexity of the world into the system. I call this representation of complexity meaning' ", Luhman writes ...3
[P. 13] Social systems: Communicate through meaning as if meaning is a common denominator. I.e. system A communicates with system B through system A's meaning-conditionality, as if it were also the meaning-conditionality of system B. One person, A, understands other person, B, as if this other person were identical with person A, or, more precisely, if person B shared person A's meaning system. We understand each other egocentrically.
-[2 (1993) 2, p. 22, Massimo Negrotti, Towards a Theory of the Artificial.] Artificial is no longer a mere adjective: it is also to be conceived as a substantive. It means that there are artificial objects just as there are natural or technological ones. Artificial is an object which does not wholly overlap either with an object of nature or with an object of technology: it is bound to swing between nature and technology. Far from overlapping with all which is simply "non-natural", this concept is closely dependent on the natural object which it aims at reproducing. The artificial constitutes an original reality (a mix of technology and nature), but is always such "with respect to something else", without which it would turn out to be meaningless as artificial and should be defined as pure technological object, as a pure machine.
-[2 (1994) 3, p. 3-15, Ervin Laszlo, Y-Field Memory: The Missing Factor of Order.] (A comment: for the sake of readability the markers of skipped text parts are omitted.) ... we group the major kinds of systematic realities under the heading of "alternative universes". There are four of them: the mystical m-universe, teleological t-universe, random-change f-universe, self-forming f-universe. The origins of the m-universe go back to the dawn of human intellectual history, with roots in both Eastern and Western thought. lt was Plato who introduced it into systematic philosophy. Aristotle objected to this postulate and proceeded to outline the historically powerful variant of the t-universe. In Aristotle's conception matter is inert and formless. To account for the world's known prop-erties we must assume action of four distinct "causes", including the final cause which makes the universe basically teleological.
The f-universe has an especially rich history, first within philosophy and then in science. Its origins can be traced to the atomism of Democritus and Leucippus. After a career in philosophy, atomism penetrated into science. Scientific atomism viewed the world as the precise and predictable concourse of atoms (or more basic particles) in space and time. The laws of motion that determine all things in the universe are dynamic, invariant and universal. Probed with more precise instruments, the universe refused to behave like a precise mechanism. The uncertainties that came to light suggest not merely limitations of knowledge but basic indeterminacies at the heart of reality. The breakdown of determinism in the f-universe was presaged in Boltzmann's statistical mechanics more than a hundred years ago. The probabilistic variant of the f-universe remains the main reality for con-temporary science to this day.
Something is missing from the f-universe - a factor that would introduce the necessary guidance or direction into the random con-course of particles of matter. In the hypothesis put forward on these pages the holographic field that acts as the natural memory of the universe is termed the u-field. The hypothesis concerns the existence of a mne-mic field that conserves the wave-transform of all configurations of matter that arise in the universe and, in the inverse transform, feeds the conserved pattern back to the cor-responding configurations. The basis of the u-field is the energy potentials believed to be associated with all particles and configuration of particles of matter. The new theory views particles as quantized localizations of the quantum probability field: it postulates that the total wave-field is made up of the energy field frequencies plus Planck's constant. Each particle is described by a probability function in space-time. Living in a u-universe, reality is not what commonsense and even science thought it was.
-[2 (1994) 4, p. 11, Lloyd Fell and David Russel, Towards a Biological Explanation of Human Understanding.] ... we do not think that the meaning of the words or the "body language" has been transferred from one person to the other. That kind of explanation has lead to the idea that we live in an "information age" and we come together to exchange information rather than interact. ... Our re-framing of the basic biology means that we do not regard cognition as an information-processing operation, but as a constitutive mechanism of living things. ... From the biology of Maturana and Varela we can say - as Mingers (1991)4 has done - that language is essentially connotative rather than denotative...
The fact that we often reach the agreement about the meaning of a word or scientific concept is a testament to our ability to reach agreement, not a proof that such an entity exists in reality. We would say that the meaning of anything lies in the relationship which we make with it. Therefore we are saying that meaning is not transferable - it is formed individually in the course of conversation.
-[2 (1994) 4, p. 41, Asghar T. Minai, Information and Aesthetics.] Since the ultimate reality for me is "information" then the usual metaphysical problems arise - from the one how did the existing many derive? Unity has no differentiations. Following Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, I emphasize the "difference" principle that is associated with chance, the irrational, the spontaneous and the individual aspects of reality as opposed to the necessary, the rational, the for-mal, and the universal aspect of things.
-[3 (1995) 1, p. 5, Søren Brier, Cyber-Semiotics: On Autopoiesis, Code-Duality and Sign Games in Bio-Semiotics.] The idea is to make computer manipulate signals which to humans have symbolic value in a logic syntax describable in algorithms in such a way that it becomes meaningful to other language users. But although there is a lot of talk of semantics and symbols in Cognitive Science, the concept of information seems to be like Wiener's (1961)5 combination of Shannon's statistical information theory and Boltzmann's probabilistic understanding of thermodynamics6. This is again combined with a linguistic theory which claims that the semantic content that symbols of a sentence represent can be determined through truth tables. The basic reality of a sentence is seen as a logical structure with semantically empty symbols. The semantical content can then be "poured into the symbols" by their capacity to refer to things, and determined through the truth tables. Reason and the working of language in communication is seen, roughly, as fitting the model of formal logic. The core of meanig, intelligence and reasoning is seen as logical algorithms.
From a biological, cybernetic and semiotic point of view this theory overlooks various fundamental characteristics of biological systems: selforganization, closeness, complexity, autonomy, self-interest in survival, life history and intentionality. The mechanistic idea of reason and knowledge - and of logic, of course - has led to a simplistic understanding of how meaning functions in both language and in practice. The mechanicists hope that the causal interaction of symbols can be explained through their syntactic relations.
-[3 (1995) 1, p. 16, Jesper Hoffmeyer, The Swarming Cyberspace of the Body.] lf the 'observation of observing systems' is the core of second order cybernetics, then certainly biology is a kind of second order cybernetics, for living systems are definitely observing systems.
[P. 17] DNA does not contain the key to its own interpretation. In a way the molecule is hermetic. In the prototype case of sexually reproducing organism, only the fertilized egg "knows" how to interpret it, i.e., to use its text for the construction of the organism. The interpreter of the DNA message is buried in the cytoskeleton of the fertilized egg (and the growing embryo). This in turn is the product of history, i.e., of the billions of molecular habits acquired through the evo-lution of the eukaryotic cell (Margulis 1981)7 in general and the successive phylogenetic history of the species in particular. (It took evolution two billion years to pro-duce this marvelous entity, the eukaryotic cell. Having accomplished this deed, evolu-tion spent only one and a half billion years producing all the rest.)
[P. 22] There is a growing awareness among immunologists that the separation of the immune system from the rest of the body, and especially from the brain, is illusory. Not only the nerve fibers branching into the organs of the immune system, thymus, lymph glands, bone marrow and spleen, but more importantly, a major conceptual shift in neuroscience has been wrought by the realization that brain function is modulated by numerous chemicals in addition to classical neurotransmitters. Many of these informational substances are neuropeptides. Their number presently exceeds 50 and most, if not all, alter behavior and mood. We now recognize that their semiotic specificity resides in receptors rather than the close juxtaposition occurring at classical synapses.
-[3 (1995) 1, p. 28-29, Lawrence S. Bale, Gregory Bateson, Cybernetics, and the So-cial/behavioral Sciences.] System theory emerged out of the need to map and explain biological phenomena that cannot be suitable understood using the classical mechanistic model of reality. "The analytic, mechanistic, one-way causal paradigm of classical science" (Bertalanffy, 1968, p. XXi)8, as Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy describes it, assumes that reality can be quantifiably analyzed; that a whole can be understood in terms of its parts; and that the nature and function of a substance or an organism can be comprehended by re-ducing it to its material, externally observ-able components.
... the successes garnered by the classical scientific paradigm revealed its inadequacies. As refined tools have opened wider panoramas of research, exhibiting data of increasing complexity, science has been driven to search for new ways of conceptualizing reality. In short, the classical paradigm of science has proven inadequate to the task of mapping the natural world. It is particularly inadequate when applied to describing and explaining the multivariable processes of human interaction, e.g., communication, and human-kind's intricate interrelationship with local and global ecological systems.
[P. 38] Note how the cybernetic paradigm shifts the focus of our discourse away from: discreet material substances, one-way causality, structure, and summativity. Rather, a cybernetic explanation focuses on: process and behavior, dynamic or animated organization, circular or more complex than circular causality, the mutual causal loops of feedback cycles, interaction between multiple variables, and emergent morphogenesis. Hence, the cybernetic stability of a system must be understood not as an inactive structure, but as a pattern of events - an animated organization of exchanges and transformations within the system's parameters. Hence, it is not the characteristics of the "parts" alone that are basic to any whole. Rather, it is the manner in which the system's differentiated components are interrelated that gives them their distinctive properties. Furthermore, within more complex systems the "differentiated parts" exhibit properties which they owe specifically to being components of a larger whole.
Is this presentation instructive for the readers and authors of Informatica? I hope so, thanking Søren Brier, the editor, giving me the opportunity to write this report.
Notes
Source: Informatica. An International Journal of Computing and Informatics. Vol. 19. no. 13. Sept. 1995. The Slovene Society In-formatika, Ljubljana, Slovenia. ISSN 0350-5596
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