Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
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Learning

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Principia Cybernetica
Encyclopedia Autopoietica

Principia Cybernetica (web)
A process of growing success in a fixed environment. E.g., mastering the violin, acquiring linguistic skills, increasing the accuracy of guesses, driving safer (Ackoff).
Thus learning is not the same as acquiring knowledge through reception of INFORMATION even though this often precedes manifest improvements. Learning is also different from PROBLEM SOLVING which involves making decisions of how to bridge the gap between a present and a desired STATE and ADAPTATION which implies changes in response to a changing environment not necessarily of growing success. One can only speak about learning when BEHAVIOR noticeably increases the EFFICIENCY with which information is processed so that desirable states are reached, errors are avoided, or a portion of the world is CONTROLled. Consciousness may or may not be involved. Learning by trial and error is a process by which FEEDBACK on errors prevents unsuccessful behavior from reoccurring thus increasing success. (Krippendorff)

 

Encyclopedia Autopoietica
" If the structural coupling of the organism to its medium takes place during its ontogeny, and if this structural coupling involves the nervous system, an observer may claim that learning has taken place because he or she observes adequate behavior generated through the dynamics of states of a nervoussystem whose structure has been specified (selected) through experience.
If, in these circumstances, the observer wants to discriminate between learned and instinctive behavior, he or she will discover that in theiractual realization, both modes of behavior are equally determined in the present by the structures of the nervous system and organism, and that, in this respect, they are indeed indistinguishable.
The distinction between learned and instinctive behaviors lies exclusively in the history of the establishment of the structures responsible for them.

Any description of learning in terms of the acquisition of a representation of the environment is, therefore, merely metaphorical and carries no explanatory value.
Furthermore, such a description is necessarily misleading, because it implies a system in which instructive interactions would take place, and such a system is, epistemologically, out of the question.
In fact, if no notion of instruction is used, the problem becomes simplified because learning, then, appears as the continuous ontogenic structural coupling of an organism to its medium through a process which follows a direction determined by the selection exerted on its changes of structure by the implementation of the behavior that it generates through the structure already selected in it by its previous plastic interactions.
Accordingly, the significance that an observer may see a posteriori in a given behavior acquired through learning plays no part in the specification of the structure through which it becomes implemented.
Also, although it is possible for us as human beings to stipulate from a metadomain of descriptions an aim in learning, this aim only determines a bias, a direction, in a domain of selection, not a structure to be acquired. This latter can only become specified during the actual history of learning (ontogenic structural coupling), because it is contingent on this history.

A learning system has no trivial experiences (interactions) because all interactions result in a structural change, even when the selected structure leads to the stabilization of a given behavior." (Maturana, 1978, p. 45)

 

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics
no def.