Cyberneticists

"the distribution of flexibility among the many variables of a system is a matter of very great importance. The healthy system ... may be compared to an acrobat on a high wire. To maintain the ongoing truth of his basic premise (“I am on the wire”), he must be free to move from one position of instability to another, i.e., certain variables such as the position of his arms and the rate of movement of his arms must have great flexibility, which he uses to maintain the stability of other more fundamental and general characteristics. If his arms are fixed or paralyzed (isolated from communication), he must fall."

"But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster."

"What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it."

"Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man "in power" depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he "causes" things to happen...it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation."

"Logic is a poor model of cause and effect."

"The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named (see also, Alfred Korzybski)."

"In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA."

"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."

"Rather, for all objects and experiences there is a quantity that has an optimum value. Above that quantity, the variable becomes toxic. To fall below that value is to be deprived."

"Criteria of Mind"

":1) A mind is an aggregate of interacting parts or components."

":2) The interaction between parts of mind is triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time; difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than energy."

":3) Mental process requires collateral energy."

":4) Mental process requires circular (or more complex) chains of determination."

":5) In mental process, the effects of difference are to be regarded as transforms (i.e., coded versions) of events which proceeded them. The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content), but are in themselves subject to transformation."

":6) The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena."

"Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new."

"Science sometimes improves hypothesis and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again."

"We do not know enough about how the present will lead into the future. We shall never be able to say, "Ha! My perception, my accounting for that series, will indeed cover its next and future components," or "Next time I meet with these phenomena, I shall be able to predict their total course."

"Prediction can never be absolutely valid and therefore science can never prove some generalization or even test a single descriptive statement and in that way arrive at final truth."

"It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future. The Marxian error is a simple blunder in logical typing, a confusion of individual with class."

"The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them. Without a Rosetta stone, we would know nothing of all that was written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. They would be only elegant ornaments on papyrus or rock. To be meaningful - even to be recognized as pattern - every regularity must meet with complementary regularities, perhaps skills, and these skills are as evanescent as the patterns themselves. They, too, are written on sand or the surface of waters."

"Money is always transitively valued. More money is supposedly always better than less money."

"A relationship with no combat in it is dull, and a relationship with too much combat in it is toxic. What is desirable is a relationship with a certain optimum of conflict."

"Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i.e., into changes) in order to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible, only by scanning. Similarly, very slow changes become perceptible only by a combination of scanning and bringing together observations from separated moments in the continuum of time."

"To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time."

"Let's not pretend that mental phenomena can be mapped on to the characteristics of billiard balls."

"Number is different from quantity."

"The world partly becomes — comes to be — how it is imagined."

"Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and philosopher, was a deeply original thinker who crossed multiple disciplines, always sitting on the edge between them. He began only late in life to attempt to synthesise his many contributions. As Brockman (2004) wrote, “Bateson is not easy … To spend time with him, in person or through his essays, was a rigorous intelligent exercise, an immense relief from the trivial forms that command respect in contemporary society.” But his contributions were considerable, to a wide range of fields. He was perhaps the most wide-ranging and profound thinker in early cybernetics, and his work provides a foundation for much of the important work that followed, and a deep insight into the problems of the world today."

"A person's brain and body do not have to be in the same place."

"Shouldn’t I join the ranks of philosophers and merely make unsubstantiated claims about the wonders of human consciousness? Shouldn’t I stop trying to do some science and keep my head down? Indeed not."

"When comparing human memory and computer memory it is clear that the human version has two distinct disadvantages. Firstly, as indeed I have experienced myself, due to aging, human memory can exhibit very poor short term recall."

"There can be no absolute reality, there can be no absolute truth."

"I was born human. But this was an accident of fate - a condition merely of time and place. I believe it's something we have the power to change."

"I feel that we are all philosophers, and that those who describe themselves as a ‘philosopher’ simply do not have a day job to go to."

"Heinz performs the magic trick of convincing us that the familiar objects of our existence can be seen to be nothing more than tokens for the behaviors of the organism that apparently create stable forms. These stabilities persist, for that organism, as an observing system. This is not to deny an underlying reality that is the source of objects, but rather to emphasize the role of process, and the role of the organism in the production of a living map, a map that is so sensitive that map and territory are conjoined."

"The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience (Glasersfeld, 1987)."

"Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity."

"Heinz von Foerster was a physicist and philosopher, who worked extensively in cybernetics, biology and family therapy, although he hated being categorised as belonging to a particular academic discipline. Indeed he once remarked that “I am. Viennese. That is the only label that I have to accept. I come from Vienna; I was born there, that's an established fact” (von Foerster and Poerksen 2002, p. 43)"

"I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices"

"I don't know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines. I would recommend to drop disciplinarity wherever one can. Disciplines are an outgrowth of academia. In academia you appoint somebody and then in order to give him a name he must be a historian, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a biophysicist; he has to have a name. Here is a human being: Joe Smith -- he suddenly has a label around the neck: biophysicist. Now he has to live up to that label and push away everything that is not biophysics; otherwise people will doubt that he is a biophysicist. If he's talking to somebody about astronomy, they will say "I don't know, you are not talking about your area of competence, you're talking about astronomy, and there is the department of astronomy, those are the people over there," and things of that sort. Disciplines are an aftereffect of the institutional situation."

"Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today."

"All this (the early excitement of Cybernetics) is now history, and in the decade which elapsed since these early baby steps of interdisciplinary communication, many more threads were picked up and interwoven into a remarkable tapestry of knowledge and endeavour: Bionics. It is good omen that at the right time the right name was found. For, bionics extends a great invitation to all who are willing not to stop at the investigation of a particular function or its realization, but to go on and to seek the universal significance of these functions in living or artificial organisms. The reader who goes through the following papers which constitute the transactions of the first symposium held under the name Bionics will be surprised by the multitude of astonishing and unforeseen connections between concepts he believed to be familiar with. For instance, a couple of years ago, who would have thought to relate the reliability problem to multi-valued logics; or, who would have thought that integral or differential geometry would serve as an adequate tool in the theory of abstraction? It is hard to say in all these cases who was teaching whom: The life-sciences the engineering sciences, or vice versa? And rightly so, for it guarantees optimal information flow, and everybody gains..."

"Mein background bestand ja darin, daß ich ein Labor gegründet hatte, das Biological Computer Lab an der University of Illinois – da sind sehr viele freaks gewesen, also Leute, die nicht so denken wie alle anderen."

"The main theme of this report is a particular facet of the general problem of pre-organization in self-organizing systems, namely, the theory and circuitry of information processing networks. One may consider these networks as a special type of parallel computation channels which extract from the set of all possible inputs a particular subset which is defined by the internal structure of the network. The advantage of such operationally deterministic networks in connection with adaptive systems is the obvious reduction in channel capacity of the adaptors, if it is possible to predetermine classes of inputs which are supposed to be meaningful for those interacting with the automaton"

"It seems that cybernetics is many different things to many different people. But this is because of the richness of its conceptual base; and I believe that this is very good, otherwise cybernetics would become a somewhat boring exercise. However, all of those perspectives arise from one central theme; that of circularity. When, perhaps a half century ago, the fecundity of this concept was seen, it was sheer euphoria to philosophize, epistemologize, and theorize about its unifying power and its consequences and ramification on various fields. While this was going on, something strange evolved among the philosophers, the epistemologists and, the theoreticians. They began to see themselves more and more as being included in a larger circularity; maybe within the circularity of their family; or that of their society and culture; or even being included in a circularity of cosmic proportions!"

"What we need now is the description of the “describer” or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer."

"To remove these one had to account for an “observer” (that is at least for one subject): (i) Observations are not absolute but relative to an observer’s point of view (i.e., his coordinate system: Einstein); (ii) Observations affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer’s hope for prediction (i.e., his uncertainty is absolute: Heisenberg). After this, we are now in the possession of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes it (observes it)."

"While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that “first revolution” it was clear that the classical concept of an “ultimate science”, that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a “subjectless universe”), contains contradictions."