Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
Edited by M&T Thellefsen

Feedback

Definition
A flow of INFORMATION back to its origin. A circular causal process in which a SYSTEM's OUTPUT is returned to its

INPUT, possibly involving other systems in the loop.

Relations:

cybernetic system
homeostatic_machines
homeostasis
negative
positive
regulation

 

Definitions:

Principia Cybernetica
Encyclopedia Autopoietica
International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics

 

Principia Cybernetica (web)
A flow of INFORMATION back to its origin. A circular causal process in which a SYSTEM's OUTPUT is returned to its INPUT, possibly involving other systems in the loop. Negative feedback or DEVIATION REDUCING FEEDBACK decreases the input and is inherently stabilizing (see STABILITY, REGULATION, HOMEOSTASIS), e.g., the governor of a steam engine. Positive feedback or DEVIATION AMPLIFYING FEEDBACK increases the input and is inherently destabilizing, explosive or vicious, e.g., the GROWTH of a city when more people create new opportunities which in turn attract more people to live there. Feedback is not the term for a response to a stimulus rather for the circularity implied in both.

(Krippendorff)

 

Encyclopedia Autopoietica
Varela's construct of organizational closure is not to be confused with the traditional cybernetic construct of "feedback" or "feedback loops". The two concepts are entirely distinct "...to the extent that [feedback] requires and implies an external source of reference, which is completely absent in organizational closure." (Varela, 1979, p. 56)

These concepts intersect only in cases where a network of "feedback loops" constitutes a network meeting the criteria for organizational closure. The notion of externally-feedback as a definitory characteristic would make a systemic unity allo-referred (to use Maturana's early terminology) and preclude it from being autonomous (or, therefore, autopoietic): "...one of the central intentions of the study of autopoiesis and organizational closure is to describe a system with no input or outputs (which embody their control or constraints) and to emphasize their autonomous constitutions; this point of view is alien to the Wienerian idea of feedback simpliciter." (Varela, 1979, p. 56)

 

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics
"A feedback that works to maintain the organism in a certain relationship with its operating environment, rather than to sustain a certain internal state" (K. SAYRE, 1976, p.54).

SAYRE adds: "Heterotelic feedback differs from homeostasis in directing the response of the environmentally stimulated system back to the environment rather then containing it within the system itself" (Ibid).