Cybernetics
& Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
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Observer |
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Definition |
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| Any percipient
organism able to acquire a degree of awareness and obtain some understanding
of its environment and environment.
A system that through recursive interactions with its own linguistic states may always linguistically interact with its own states as if with representations of its interactions.
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Principia Cybernetica (web) |
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| l) One who
watches without participating. (2) The source of factual evidence; a person
who communicates his sense
impression of the external environment. (3) Everything said is said to an observer. (Witz, in Von Foerster, 1974) (4) Observer dependence - the concept that knowledge of reality is dependent upon the perceptions of the observer. (5) Observer inseparability - the concept that observation or measurement affects the state of the object being observed, that is, objective measurement or observation from outside a system is not possible, and the act of observing makes the observer part of the system under study. Therefore, the observer or measuring device should be included in the definition of the system. (Weinberg) (6) A system which, through recursive interactions with its own linguistic states, may always linguistically interact with its own states as if with representations of its interactions. (Maturana and Varela, 1979)
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Encyclopedia Autopoietica |
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| "A
system that through recursive interactions with its own linguistic states
may always linguistically interact with its own states as if with representations
of its interactions." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 137) Through
this recursive internal interaction, the system's own linguistic states
serve as sources of perturbation / deformation for the system itself. Phrased
another way, such a system is self-coupling.
A "... living system who can make distinctions and specify that which he or she distinguishes as a unity, as an entity different from himself or herself that can be used for manipulations or descriptions in interactions with other observers." (Maturana, 1978, p. 31) As a consequence, "observing is both the ultimate starting point and the most fundamental question in any attempt to understand reality and reason as phenomena of the human domain. Indeed, everything said is said by an observer to another observer that could be him- or herself." (Maturana, 1988, p. 27) Cf. consensual distinction, metadomain, observer-community, phenomenology, phenomenological domain
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International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics |
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| Any percipient
organism able to acquire a degree of awareness and obtain som understanding
of its environment and invironment.
[…] H. von FOERSTER, and H. MATURANA and F. VARELA developed a systemic-cybernetic concept of the percipient conditions of any observer. According to this viewpoint, an observer perceives basically anything in function of her/his own internal organization physical and/or cerebral-mental. According to von FOERSTER: "Qualities that we believe finding in objects lie within the observer". As an example, he uses: "Obscenity: I show a picture to somebody and ask him if it is obscene. He says "yes". As a result, I now know something about him but not about the picture" (1992, p. 85) We must however start by believing that the picture does exist! In any case, as noted by J. J. GIBSON: "The observer and his environment are complementary. So are the set of observers and their common environment" and "The environment persist in some respects and changes in other respects. The most radical change is going out of existence or coming into existence (1986, p. 15)
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