Cybernetics of cybernetics: Or, the control of control and the communication of communication

by Heinz von Foerster (Editor), Systems, Incorporated Future (Editor), Robert Abramovitz

***Price Reduced 50%*** Shrink wrapped. Cybernetics of Cybernetics, edited by Heinz von Foerster, ISBN 0-9647044-0-4, distributed by Systems Education, Inc. Also available in paperback for $60.00.

Genres: Science

497 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

Heinz von Foerster war ein österreichischer Physiker, Kybernetiker und Philosoph. Heinz von Foerster war Professor für Biophysik und langjähriger Direktor des Biological Computer Laboratorys in Illinois.

Reviews

[Blaine Snow · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this is the same as the volume I have (which has a slightly different cover)... what you have here is a eclectic collection of papers, articles, notes, musings, art works, computer printouts, definitions, and much more on the then (early 1970s) tech-chic topic of cybernetics, from students studying at what was then the Biological Computer Laboratory of the University of Illinois/Urbana headed by Heinz von Foerster who taught there for many years.



Major contributions to the volume are by: Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Warren McCulloch, von Foerster, and Jurgen Habermas, with smaller contributions from everyone from Gregory Bateson to Francisco Varela, G. Spencer-Brown, Gordon Pask, Stuart Umpleby, Herbert Gunther, and Humberto Maturana. I don't believe this can be purchased anymore unless it has been reissued. I got my copy from Von Foerster himself when I visited him in the mid-1980s at his home in Pescadero, CA.

Von Foerster was one of the original architects of cybernetics and systems theory, in the same generation as Bateson, Von Neumann, Ashby, Wiener, Von Glasersfeld, Brun, Beer, and many others. Cybernetics as a science was eclipsed in the 1980s by a new group of disciplines grouped around nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, self-organizing/adaptive systems, cellular automata, neural networks, connectionism, and what eventually became complexity theory. Cybernetics along with its sister discipline, General Systems Theory, laid the foundations for a systems approach to just about every discipline from electrical engineering to family therapy.

A short list of essential (but relatively dated) volumes in cybernetics and general systems theory are:
1. Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
2. An Introduction to Cybernetics
3. General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications
4. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology
5. The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time
6. The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (more recent)

Closely related to and overlapping general systems and cybernetics are various theories on the origin of living systems, namely the theory of autopoiesis and studies of non-equilibrium systems, also called self-organizing or self-adaptive systems:
7. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding
8. Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature
9. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications
10. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

That should keep you busy for a while!

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learning about the control of control and the communication of communication is pretty much the crux of the biscuit.