FALL 1979

CYBERNETICS FORUM

THE PUBLICATION OFTHEAMERICAN SOCIETY FOR CYBERNETICS

VOLUME IX NO. 3

A SPECIAL ISSUE HONORING DR. HEINZ VON FOERSTER

ON THE OCCASION OF HIS RETIREMENT

IN THIS ISSUE:

Heinz Von Foerster: A Second Order Cybernetician, Stuart Umpleby. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

An Open Letter to Dr. Von Foerster, Stafford Beer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

The lmportance of Being Magie, Gordon Pask . ...... . ........ . ....... . . . . . . ... .. ........ . . . . . . ... . ...... 17

The Wholeness of the Unity: Conversations with Heinz Von Foerster, Humberto R. Maturana . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Creative Cybernetics, Lars LÖfgren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

With Heinz Von Foerster, Edwin Schlossberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Heinz Von Foerster 's Gontributions to the Development of Cybernetics, Kenneth L. Wilson ........ .. . .. . 30

List of Publications of Heinz Von Foerster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

The Work of Visiting Cyberneticians in the Biological Computer Laboratory, Kenneth L. Wilson . . . . . . . . . 36

About the Autho~$. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

© 1979 American Society for Cybernetics

Editor V.G. DROZIN

Department of Physics Buckne/1 University

Lewisburg, PA 17837

TECHNICAL EDITOR Kenneth W. Gaul

111 0/in Science Building Buckne/1 University

Lewisburg, PA 17837

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Charles I. Bartfeld School of Business Administration, American University

Mass. & Nebraska Aves. N. W. Washington, DC 20016

N.A. Coulter, Jr. Department of Surgery Curriculum in Biomedical Engineering

University of North Carolina School of Medicine

Chapel Hili, NC 27514

BOARD OF EDITORS

Charles H. Dym Dym, Frank & Company 2511 Massachusetts Avenue, N. W. Washington, DC 20008

Gertrude Herrmann Conference Calendar Editor 1131 Unlversity Boulevard West, 12122

Si/ver Spring, MD 20902

Harold K. Hughes The State University College Potsdam, NY 13.767

Akira lshikawa Graouate School of Business

Administration Rufgers University 92 New Street Newark, NJ 07102

Frederick Kile Aid Assoe/ation for Lutherans Appleton, Wl 54911

Mark N. Ozer The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Seiences

3000 Connecticut AvenueN. W. Washington, DC 20008

Doreen Ray Steg Department of Human Behavior & Development, Drexel University

Philadelphia, PA 19104

Paul Studer School of Library and Information Science, State University College of Arts and Sclence

Geneseo, NY 14454

OFF/CERS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR CYBERNET/CS

PRESIDENT Stuart Umpleby

The George Washington University

Washington, DC 20052

VICE PRESIDENT Doreen Steg

SECRETARY Roger Conant

TRUSTEES

TREASURER Al Kreger

OMBUDSMEN Klaus Krippendorff

Rolf Wigand

Stafford Beer Carl Hammer Daniel Howland Douglas Knight Heinz Von Foerster

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American Society for . Cybzrnehcs

The American Society for Cybernetics

and its officers wish

Heinz Von Foerster

continued success in the field of cybernetics

following his retirement

from the Faculty of The University of lllinois

after many years of leadership in the

Biological Computer Laboratory.

HEINZ VON FOERSTER

Heinz Von Foerster, A Second Order Cybernetician

Stuart A. Umpleby The George Washington University

Washington, DC 20052

lt is a pleasure to introduce this issue of Cyber­netics Forum dedicated to my triend and mentor, Heinz Von Foerster. As the following articles demon­strate, Heinz is a man who inspires not only admiration and respect for his scientific contribu­tions but also great affection. He is an outstanding human being as weil as a great scientist. The articles by Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, Lars Lofgren, Edwin Schlossberg and Kenneth Wilson often recount personal experiences with Heinz. Kenneth Wilson provides a very useful overview of Heinz' major articles as weil as the work of visiting cyberneticians in the Biological Computer Laboratory.

I shall provide some background on how Heinz came to the University of lllinois, a briet discussion of the effect that the Biological Computer Labaratory had on the students who worked there, and finally some personal reflections on the importance of Heinz' work for cybernetics, science, and society.

The Years Before lllinois Heinz has been a central figure in the field of

cybernetics since its beginning. During his student days he became involved with the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers that included Wittgenstein, Schlick, Menger and Carnap. From them he devel­oped an interest in the fundamental difference between the world as it is and its symbolic repre­sentation in language or equati0ns. He wanted to learn more about the observer. However, the war intervened and he spent those years in various labo­ratories in Germany working on plasma physics and microwave electronics. Luckily he survived the war unscathed in mind or body. After the war he helped set up the first post-war radio station in Vienna and was in charge of its science and art program until

1949. ln those days of rejuvenation, he returned to the old riddle of the nature of the observer. With the encouragement of the psychiatrists Victor Frank! and Otto Potzl, he published a short monograph on a quantum mechanical theory of physiological memory. During a visit to the United States he met Warren McCulloch who not only had the data for his theory of memory but who also introduced him to the campus at urbana.

Through McCulloch, at conferences about Cyber· netics: Circular Causa! and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, he met the people who laid the conceptual foundation for understanding the really complicated systems-teleological systems and self-organizing systems. The people attending these conferences included Gregory Bateson, Julian Bigelow, Margaret Mead, John Von Neumann, Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby. Heinz was so fas­cinated by the ideas that emerged at these meetings that after seven years of research at the University of lllinois in microwave tubes and ultra-highspeed oscillography, he went on sabbatical leave to learn more about the neurophysiology of his enigmatic observer. After one year under the tutelage of Warren McCulloch at MIT and Arturo Rosenblueth in Mexico 'he returned to the University of lllinois and established the Biological Computer Labaratory to study computational principles in living organisms.(1)

The Biological Computer Labaratory Almost from the beginning it was apparent that

the Biological Computer Labaratory (BCL) was not an ordinary university research group. One of the most amusing episodes in the history of BCL was the series of events that led up to Heinz's being mentioned in the cartoon strip Pogo, a distinction for scientists even rarer than the Nobel Prize. (see Figure 1) Someone at the National Institute of

4

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A Second Order Cybernetician

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Health wanted a mathematical model of the popula­tion dynamics of white blood corpuscles. Heinz be­came interested in the dynamics of populations, both those whose elements interact and those with elements that do not interact. He figured that data on human population growth would be the most complete set of data for a population with elements capable of communication. The result was an article in Science in 1960 by Heinz Von Foerster, Patricia Mora and Lawrence Amiot called "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026."(2) They found that the equation which best fit the data was not an expo­nential but rather a hyperbolic equation. There is a major difference. lf population is an exponential function of time, population will become very !arge as time increases, but within limited time the popu­lation will remain finite. A hyperbolic function, how­ever, has asymptotes. That is, there will be a time at which population will go to infinity. Applying the method of least squares to parameterize the equa­tion led to the date 2027, hence the title of the

article. There followed one of the most entertaining ex­

changes of letters ever to appear in Science. The idea that the human population could through com­munication form a coalition and engage in a game against nature was a particularly troubling idea. One demographer called attention to the widely accepted view that industrialization reduces rather than increases population. Heinz and his colleagues pointed out that if an inverse relationship between population and technological know-how is applied to the human population over the last couple of mil­lennia then 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 has dwindled from a once astro­nomical size to the mere three billions of today.(3) The BCL equation turned out to be considerably more accurate than other forecasts in predicting world population in 1970. The others were more con­servative. However, 1975 data suggests that world

Cybernetics Forum

population has moved ahead of even the SCL equation.(4)

ln addition to research the Siological Computer Laboratory also had a significant impact on the stu­dents at the University. On even the largest college campuses there is usually a small group of students who are innovators in campus activities. They are the students who write for the campus newspaper and Iead political or reform movements. These stu­dents usually know each other, and they often can be found in special project courses with the most stimulating faculty members. At the University of Michigan the Mental Health Research Institute with James G. Miller, Anatol Rapoport, Kenneth Soulding and Richard L. Meier was a focus of innovative activity. Tom Hayden and Carl Oglesby were stu­dents of Kenneth Soulding. Soulding has said that Students for a Demooratic Society was born in his living room as a result of a seminar in economics. The Siological Computer Laboratory served a similar function at the University of lllinois. Over the years Heinz's students produced a Whole University Cata­logue, a book on Metagames, an Ecological Source­book, and a large volume on the Cybernetics of Cybernetics.

lt is easy to understand why there was always a feeling of excitement around SCL once one under­stands Heinz's views on education. Heinz notes that most of contemporary education is designed to make students react to a question in exactly the same way. Tests are given to determine how suc­cessful the system has been at making the student a completely predictable member of society. The higher the score, the more predictable the student. ln other words the purpose of education is to turn nontrivial systems into trivial systems. Heinz, follow­ing Herbert Srun, defines an illegitimate question to be one for which the answer is known. A legitimate question is one for which the answer is not known. Hence formal education is mostly concerned with illegitimate questions. At SCL the emphasis was on learning to ask legitimate questions.(5)

Said Heinz there are two kinds of questions. To some there are answers in lessons,

But the questions that count, The ones to surmount,

Are the questions that not yet are questioned.(6)

To be "recruited" to SCL one only had to be attentive to the life of the campus. Secause of his highly entertaining as weil as thought-provoking manner of speaking, Heinz was a frequent lecturer on campus. One of the first times I heard him speak was about 1964 at the weekly luncheon series at the YMCA. ln his talk Heinz predicted that in the years ahead people would make three discoveries. First, they would discover that the earth is finite. That is, population growth cannot continue indefinitely. Second, people would learn that power resides where information resides. Third, human beings

5

would discover that A is better off if S is better oft. Events have tended to follow these predictions. ln

1968, Paul Erlich published The Population Bomb, and gradually people became more aware of rapidly increasing population and the impossibility of sus­taining the high growth rate for very long.(7) The 1970's brought greater attention to global communi­cations-satellites, television, computer networks­and also revelations about the covert activities of the CIA and the FSI. ln 1975 documents were made public which showed that during World War II the Allies were able to Iisten to the message traffic of the German and Japanase high commands.(8) Alan Turing was a central figure in this work. lt was no accident that World War II was such a successful war for the United States. This new perspective on World War II helps to explain the interest of the intelligence agencies in cybernetics research. The achievement of Heinz's third prediction-people will realize that A is better oft when S is better off-lies in the future. While there is increasing attention being paid to international development, the arms race continues and national and ethnic rivalries per­sist. One hopeful sign is that a national commission has been set up to study the possibility of estab­lishing a National Peace Academy. Since the U.S. now has several military academies devoted to teaching people how to win wars, it seems appropri­ate to have at least one academy devoted to teach­ing people how to resolve disputes short of war.

ln about 1974, I mentioned to Heinz the three pre­dictions he had made a decade earlier. He had for­gotten about them, and he attached little signifi­cance to them. He said he had put them together a short while before a talk because he thought they would amuse the audience. Sut for me, those three predictions remain an example of Heinz's depth of insight, broad human concern, and faith in the even­tual good sense of his fellow human beings.

Lest this description of the activities at SCL leave the reader with the impression that the laboratory led an untroubled existence, I should say a few words about the difficulties that Heinz faced . SCL was a Ieader. lt was chronically ahead of its time. There was an exuberance at SCL that some inter­preted as Iack of seriousness. Quite a few people thought that anyone with an interest in physics, linguistics, art, music, dance, and anthropology must be a dilettante. And more than a few people sus­pected that calling attent ion to perception was somehow subversive. Whi le the Iack of understand­ing was unfortunate, it did not greatly matter as long as Heinz maintained his reputation as a suc­cessful grantsman. Sut then came the Mansfield Amendment. Most of the early work on cybernetics had been supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Sut in about 1968 the Mansfield Amendment put an end to research projects supported by the Department of Defense which were not clearly related to a military

6

mission. lt was intended that the National Science Foundation and other agencies would pick up the support of projects that had been funded by DOD. The problern of course was that these agencies did not have people who were familiar with the work in cybernetics. There followed several frustrating years of searching for new sources of support. Meanwhile Ross Ashby and Gotthard Gunther had retired and left the University. Finally in 1975 Heinz retired and moved to California. The University decided not to hire new faculty members to continue the work of BCL. For those familiar with the laboratory, it was a heartbreaking end to a remarkable episode in the history of science.

How to do Cybernetics BCL left behind a rich legacy. ln its day it was

one of very few educational institutions training people in cybernetics. Between 1958 and 1975 oper­ating under 25 grants, the laboratory produced 256 articles and books, 14 masters theses and 28 doc­toral dissertations. The topics covered epistemology, logic, neurophysiology, theory of computation, elec­tronic music and automated instruction. These materials are available in a microfiche file compiled by Kenneth Wilson. But merely to note the range of ideas developed at BCL does not capture the feel­ings regarding the laboratory. Among the graduates of BCL that I know there is a strong feeling that the work produced at BCL has not received the attention that it deserves. When we. go to confer­ences on cybernetics and systems theory, we find that many people are still struggling with issues that were resolved at BCL, often quite elegantly, long ago. We believe that the field could progress more rapidly if the work done at BCL were more widely known. Of course other groups were also doing important work during this period. Great pro­gress was being made in computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research, simulation lan­guages, the brain sciences and other related fields. But at BCL there was more emphasis on episte­mology than at most other cybernetics research institutes. The different espistemology has led to a sort of gap between the BCL point of view and other systems theorists. People with a BCL background experience this gap as frustration when we try to discuss a wide range of theoretical issues. Our views are often rejected for reasons which seem to us uninformed and unpersuasive. lt is apparent that there is something rather complex going on.

ln order to understand the importance of Heinz's ideas and why they have so far experienced such limited acclaim, it is necessary to understand how science operates. Most scientific work follows weil trod paths. The questions dealt with are widely shared. The methods used are commonly practiced.

A Second Order Cybernetician

Consequently the results of most scientif ic work are readily understood and there is widespread agree· ment about their significance within the community concerned.

But scientific work that Ieads to the establishment of a new area of inquiry is different in kind. To understand this difference I find it useful to refer to Thomas Kuhn's Iist of components of a "disciplinary matrix." ln the epilogue to The Structure of Scien­tific Revolutions Kuhn identifies at least four ele­ments of a scientific field .(9) (1) There are "symbolic generalizations" such as F = ma and E =IR. (2) Models and analogies include the idea that elec· tric current is similar to water flowing in a pipe and the idea that the molecules of a gas behave like tiny elastic billiard balls in random motion. (3) "Values" could include the following proposi­tions. Quantitive predicalions are preferable to quali­tative ones. Predictions should be accurate. Theories should (or need not) be socially useful. (4) "Exemp· lars" are the concrete problern solutions that stu­dents encounter from the start of their scientific education, whether in laboratories, on examinations, or at the ends of chapters in scientific texts. Exemplars show scientists how their job is to be done.

Work at George Washington University on a "dis­ciplinary matrix" for the field of cybernetics has led to two additional components. (5) "Guiding ques­tions" state the principal concerns that motivate the development of a theory. For example, early in his career Warren McCulloch asked the question, "What is a number that man may know it, and a man that he may know a number?" (6) "Techniques" are the methods an author uses to persuade the reader to his point of view. Techniques can be mathematical or verbal. Examples are set theoretical proofs, regression analysis, computer simulation, laboratory experiments with animals, survey research, gedanken experiments, and historical examples.

Major changes in science seem to occur through the formulation of new "guiding questions". Heinz, for instance, has been preoccupied with the nature of the observer. Progress toward the resolution of these questions usually takes the form of new "exemplars". The role of exemplars in the develop­ment of a scientific field is crucial. Kuhn equates his concept of "paradigm" with exemplars. Exemplars can be used to identify the groups within a scientific field who practice the discipline differently.

Those with a BCL background use different exemplars and hence are using a different paradigm. Heinz's articles are filled with fascinating exemplars. Three of these accompany this article as illus· trations.

A central concept within the field of systems science is the notion that a whole can be somehow greater than the sum of its parts. (see Exemplar 1) Yet this very important idea is often not precisely

Cybernetics Forum

understood. Heinz has resolved the mystery with two simple illustrations, one from mathematics and one from biology.

The story of the magnetic cubes in a box demon­strates what Heinz calls "order from noise" (see Exemplar 2). I believe that it is also the most readily understood Blustration of a self-organizing system. ln order for more complex systems to evolve, two things must happen. New variety must be generated, and appropriate selection must take place. A self­organizing system is not a living system. Rather, a self-organizing system contains organisms and their environments. As the system moves toward its stable equilibrial states, it "selects" the stable rela­tionships. The example of the magnetic cubes in a

EXEMPLAR 1 On lnteractlon, the Whole and lts Parts:

Communication Amongst Planariae

A coalition is an example of the old saying that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts." Although we seem to understand very weil what this means, this statement has been attacked by posi­tivists and operationalists time and again, rightly so, I think because the way it stands it clearly is non­sense. Two and two are both parts of four, but 2 + 2 = 4 and not a tiny bit more or less. However, if what we want to say by this statement is properly formulated, a most profound principle is defined. lt is the principle of superadditive compositions for elements making up a system. Let me first give a precise formulation of this principle in rather abstract terms, and later illustrate the application of this principle to pertinent concrete Situations. What we really want to say is: "A measure of the sum of the parts is larger than the sum of the measure of the parts." This statement can be formulated in even more precise, mathematical terms. Consider F to be a measure function. lf you recall that the symbol ">" stands for "left side larger than right side," the above statement can be written in the following way:

F(a + b) > F(a) + F(b).

ln order to make this highly symbolical expression more tangible, Iet me suggest a simple example which may evoke old high school memories. Take for the moment as an example of a measure function the operation "squaring;" that is

F( ) = ( )'. Squaring all F-expressions in our first equation we obtain:

F(a + b) = (a + b)' = a' + b' + 2ab and

F(a) = a', F(b) = b'. Putting the results back in the form of our first equation, we obtain the undeniable truth that indeed:

7

box illustrates how this very general process can also generate variety. As the separate boxes find stable relationships, they form chains. The chains of boxes can themselves be the elements in the next step in the process of self-organization. Thus Heinz's example of the magnetic cubes in a box solves the problern of the emergence of new entities.

The idea of a self-organizing system as a closed system (the interaction rules do not change during the period of observation) is one of the most impor­tant and powerful ideas in systems theory. The prin­ciple can be applied in many ways. For instance, anticipating the stable states of a system is an alternative to trend extrapolation as a forecasting method.

a' + b' + 2ab > a' + b'.

The margin which makes the left hand side of this inequality larger than the right hand side is, of course, the product 2ab. This provides us with an important clue. The product 2ab is nothing eise but the measure of the Interaction of the two parts a and b, namely the Interaction of a with b and b with a. Hence, by taking the mutual Interaction of ele­ments in a system into consideration, the system as a whole indeed represents a more valuable entity than the mere sum of its Independent parts. That a coalition is such a structure, where the individual elements interact for the benefit of the system as a whole, and hence for the advantage of each element comprising the system is, I believe, now reasonably clear.

These so called "non-linear composition rules" allow in a non-trivial way the description of systems composed of interacting elements. Take, for instance, a colony of about a hundred million flatworms of the genus planaria. Each of these creatures has about one hundred nerve cells. Thus, all together they have about ten billion nerve cells. The human brain also has about ten billion nerve cells. Why don't these hundred million planariae represent the intelligence of a human brain? With this short course on super­additive composition rules, you are certainly now in a position to answer this puzzle. lt is because brain cells are in a state of perpetual interaction, constant­ly coordinating, abstracting, and sifting pertinent Information for the system as a whole. Poor planariae cannot do it; add a couple of million planariae to our colony, and nothing changes in the structure of this colony. They do not interact. lf they interact, they interact by competing for a limited supply of food.

Heinz Von Foerster, "The Logical Structure of Envi­ronment and lts Interna! Representation," Interna­tional Design Conference Aspen 1962. R.E. Eckerstrom (ed.), Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, lnc. 1963.

8

EXEMPLAR 2 MagneUe Cubes in a Box:

Order From Noise

Let me briefly explain what I mean by saying that a self-organizing system feeds upon noise by using an almost trivial, but nevertheless amusing example.

Assurne I get myself a large sheet of permanent magnetic material which is strongly magnetized perpendicular to the surface, and I cut from this sheet a large number of little squares. These little squares I glue to all the surfaces of small cubes made of light, unmagnetic material, having the same size as my squares. Depending upon the choice of which sides of the cubes have the magnetic north pole pointing to the outside (Family I), one can pro­duce precisely ten different families of cubes.

Suppose now I take a number of cubes, say, of family I, which is characterized by all sides having north poles pointing to the outside (or family I' with all south poles), put them into a large box which is also filled with tiny glass pebbles in order to make these cubes float under friction and start shaking this box. Certainly, nothing very striking is going to happen: since the cubes are all repelling each other, they will tend to distribute themselves in the avail­able space such that none of them will come too close to its fellow-cube. lf, by putting the cubes into the box, no particular ordering principle was ob­served, the entropy of the system will remain con­stant, or, at worst, increase a small amount.

ln order to make this game a little more amusing, suppose now I collect a population of cubes where only half of the elements are again members belang­ing to family I (or I') while the other half are mem­bers of family II (or II') which is characterized by having only one side of different magnetism pointing to the outside. lf this population is put into my box and I go on shaking, clearly, those cubes with the single different pole pointing to the outside will tend, with overwhelming probability, to mate with members of the other family, until my cubes have almost all paired up. Since the conditional proba­bilities of finding a member of family II, given the locus of a member of family I, has very mucn in­creased, the entropy of the system has gone down, hence we have more order after the shaking than before.

I grant you, that this increase in orderliness is not impressive at all, particularly if the population density is high. All right then, let's take a popula­tion made up entirely of members belonging to family IVB, which is characterized by opposite polarity of the two pairs of those three sides which join in two opposite corners. I put these cubes into my box and you shake it. After some time we open the box and, instead of seeing a heap of cubes piled up somewhere in the box, you may not believe you eyes, but an incredibly ordered structure will emerge, which, I fancy, may pass the grade to be displayed in an exhibition of surrealistic art (see Figure 2).

A Second Order Cybernetician

Figure 2. An arrangement of magnetic cubes demonstrates order form nolse.

lf I would have left you ignorant with respect to my magnetic-surface trick and you would ask me, what is it that put these cubes into this remark­able order, I would keep a straight face and would answer: The shaking, of course-and some little demons in the box.

With this example, I hope, I have sufficiently illus­trated the principle I called "order from noise," because no order was fed to the system, just cheap undirected energy; however, thanks to the little demons in the box, in the long run only those com­ponents of the noise were selected which contributed to the increase of order in the system. The occcur­rence of a mutation e.g. would be a pertinent analogy in the case of gametes being the systems of consideration.

Hence, I would name two mechanisms as impor­tant clues to the understanding of self-organizing systems, one we may call the "order from order" principle as Sehredinger suggested, and the other one the "order from noise" principle, both of which require the cooperation of our demons who are created along with the elements of our system, being manifest in some of the intrinsic structural proper­ties of these elements.

Heinz Von Foerster, "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments," in Yovits and Cameron (eds.), Self-Organizing Systems, New York: Pergamon, 1960, pp. 31-50.

Cybernetics Forum

Regression fits systems just trivial. But humans are systems convivial.

To say what will last From times that are past,

Will Iead to conclusions peripheral.

EXEMPLAR 3 The Gentleman in the Bowler Hat:

Autonomy, Responsibllity, Reality

"The nervous system is organized (or organ­izes itself) so that it computes a stable reality."

This postulate stipulates "autonomy," i.e., "self­regulation," for every living organism. Since the semantic structure of nouns with prefix "self·" be­comes more transparent when this prefix is replaced by the noun, "autonomy" becomes synonymous with "regulation of regulation."

lt may be strange in times like these to stipulate autonomy, for autonomy implies responsibility: lf I am the only one who decides how I act, then I am responsible for my action. Since the rufe of the most popular game played today is to make someone eise responsible for my acts-the name of the game is "heteronomy"-my arguments make, I understand, a most unpopular claim. One way of sweeping it under the rug is to dismiss it as just another attempt to rescue "solipsism," the view that this world is only in my imagination and the only reality is the ima­gining "1." lndeed, that was precisely what I was saying before, but I was talking only about a single organism. The Situation is quite different when there are two, as I shall demonstrate with the aid of the gentleman with the bowler hat (see Figure 3). He insists that he is the sole reality, while everything eise appears only in his imagination. However, he cannot deny that his imaginary universe is populated with apparitions that are not unlike himself. Hence, he has to concede that they themselves may insist that they are the sole reality and everything eise is only a concoction of their imagination. in that case their imaginary universe will be populated with apparitions, one of which may be he, the gentleman with the bowler hat.

According to the Principle of Relativity which rejects a hypothesis when it does not hold for two instances together, although it holds for each instance separately (Earthlings and Venusians may be consistent in claiming to be in the center of the universe, but their claims fall to pieces if they should ever get together), the solipsistic claim falls to pieces when beside me I invent another autono­mous organism. However, it should be noted that since the Principle of Relativity is not a logical necessity, nor is it a proposition that can be proven to be either true or false, the crucial point to be recognized here is that I am free to choose either to

9

The gentleman in the bowler hat can be regarded as proof of the need for multivalued logics (see Ex­emplar 3). A principal concern of systems theory is the relationship between an organism and its en­vironment. However, it is not sufficient to speak only

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ft.. I , ·' / . I' ' Y" ~t -.< I

.~-r~)>, ----:-~-}/ ) . ..,. ; (

_-L7/ -/ ~ ;-

'/ I ' • I L,.... I· \ ; - __/r J -V b

Figure 3. The gentleman in the bowler hat. Are his perceptions of other people fantasies or reality?

adopt this principle or to reject it. lf I reject it, I am the center of the universe, my reality are my dreams and my nightmares, my language is mono­logue, and my logic mono-logic. lf I adopt it, neither me nor the other can be the center of the universe. As in the heliocentric system, there must be a third that is the centrar reference. lt is the relation between Thou and I, and this relation is IDENTITY:

Reality = Community.

What are the consequences of all this in ethics and aesthetics?

The Ethical Imperative: Act always so as to increase the number of choices.

The Aesthetical Imperative: lf you desire to see, learn how to act.

Heinz Von Foerster, "On Constructing a Reality," in W.F.E. Preiser (ed.), Environmental Design Research, Volume 2, Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1973, pp. 44-45.

10

of an organism and its environment. The logical structure of the concept "environment" is more com­plex than can be described by a dyadic relationship. ln order to establish the concept "environment," there must be at least two elements observing this environment. And they must be sufficiently alike in order to serve as mutual witnesses for any objective event. Only knowlege that can be shared belongs to the environment. Observers without shared knowledge inhabit different universes. The logical structure of environment is a triadic relation because it involves three entities: an observer, A; a witness, A'; and that which is witnessed, B. Environment can be called "together-knowledge" for which the Latin expression is conscientia. Heinz has suggested that it was probably the triadic logical structure of this concept that gave philosophers over the last three thousand years difficulty when they tried to resort to a simple true-false, two-valued, Aristotelian logic, where at least a three-valued logic is required.(10) Of course it can be claimed that consciousness is a single person's affair and that you do not need a witness in order to be conscious. However, note that our consciousness is produced by the "together­knowledge" of our different senses. The ear is wit­ness to what the eye sees. Touch confirms what the eye reports.

For those for whom mental activity is an impor­tant part of life, a person who can invent images with such great organizing power becomes the object of tremendous affection. Cybernetics, like any science, is a different way of seeing. "Doing re­search" on a different way of seeing means creating examples of how the world Iooks from the new point of view. lf the field of cybernetics has not pro­gressed as rapidly as we would have liked, the rea­son may lie in the fact that more of us have not realized that a new field requires new exemplars.

Second Order Cybernetics and the Change of Science

Heinz believes that in order to deal with current concerns, science must change to include attention to the observer. He calls the new point of view "second order cybernetics." For several definitions of the difference between first order cybernetics and second order cybernetics, see Table 1.(11) Let me explain this new point of view in my own words. Science can be thought of as having moved through three stages in how it deals with objectivity. ln the early days of science researchers were concerned with inanimate objects such as balls, pendula and planets. We could call this an era of "unquestioned objectivity." When science progressed to the study of human behavior, it was found that control groups were necessary to eliminate interaction effects be­tween the observer and the subjects. That is, the

Author

Second Order Cybernetician

TABLE 1

First Order Cybernetlcs

Second Order Cybernetics

Von Foerster The science of The science of

Pask

Varela

Umpleby

Umpleby

observed systems observing systems

The purpese of the model

The purpese of the modeller

Controlled systems Autonomous systems

Interaction among Interaction between the variables in the observer and a system the observed

Theories of social A theory of the systems interaction

between ideas and society

experimenter would now have two groups of sub­jects rather than just one. For example, one group would be given the medication to be tested and the other group would receive a placebo. The difference between the responses of the two groups was assumed to be due to the drug. Effects due to the attention received by the subjects from the doctor could thereby be eliminated. This second stage in the treatment of objectivity could be called "con­structed objectivity."

Things became quite unwieldy, however, when social scientists began to do large scale social ex­periments. During the mid-1960's a great wave of social legislation was passed in the United States as part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program. After a few years it became apparent that many of the programs were not working exactly as antici­pated. There then developed a peculiar commonality of interest between conservatives and social scien­tists. The conservatives wanted to stop the social programs. The social scientists argued that before implementing a new social program on a nationwide basis, experiments should be run in selected com­munities to determine the effects of the program. These experiments were frequently quite controver­sial. The purpose of the experiment was usually de­fined differently by different people. The experimen­ters were considered suspect because they did not live in the community. And people demonstrated a remarkable ability to reject findings they did not agree with no matter how "scientifically" the experi­ment was conducted.

These experiences led Mitroff and Blankanship to develop seven guidelines for conducting a holistic experiment.(12) The guidelines are a radical departure from current methods in the social sciences. The usual social science experiment today, consistent

Cybernetics Forum

with the second stage in the treatment of objec­tivity, consists of testing a single hypothesis using a set of subjects and a control group. However, the guidelines for a holistic experiment say that at least two points of view should be used. Furthermore, the experimenters should be included within the class of subjects, and the subjects should be included within the class of experimenters. These guidelines amount to a new scientific method that is compatible with the new epistemology and its emphasis on the role of the observer. This third stage in the treatment of objectivity can be called the period of "contested objectivity."

Some systems display little interaction, But politics makes payments to each faction.

When establishing agreement, Becomes a great achievement,

Will "objectivity" give sufficient satisfaction?

The new epistemology or second order cybernetics encounters at least two kinds of resistance. Some people simply do not understand the question. Hence, they are unable to appreciate the answer. The concern with epistemology is not their concern. Their attention is elsewhere. So the discussion is irrelevant. This was my Situation during my early association with BCL. I began working with Heinz in 1971 in order to better understand the work of Ross Ashby, which did seem relevant to my con­cerns at the time. Heinz kept talking about the observer, a point that seemed rather obvious to me and not worthy of lengthy discussion. I believe it took about eighteen months for me to begin to get an inkling of what Heinz was talking about. I find now that second order cybernetics provides me with a scientifc basis for understanding things which I previously would have thought were outside the reach of science. For example the recent rise of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement and the current concern with values and ethics can be explained in terms of the observer's being aware of his relationship with his environment and the desire that people have to develop communi­ties of common understanding.

The second type of opposition that the new point of view encounters is more difficult to cope with. This Opposition is less a matter of ignorance than trained disbelief. lt is not malicious, but it can be virulent. lts self-confidence springs from the belief that the concern with the observer is a new form of introspectionism, the point of view that psycholo­gists abandoned when they adopted behavioralism in the 1950's in their effort to be more scientific. lt may weil be that science tends to oscillate back and forth between positions-a concern with the observer, then with the outside world, then with the observer, etc. But the pendulum never returns to exactly the same position. The old position is rede­fined as a result of intervening experience. Neverthe-

11

less it is extremely difficult to persuade a person whose early career involved the abandonment of one position and the adoption of a new one to embrace a point of view which appears to him to be quite similar to a position he long ago rejected. For deal­ing with this second kind of opposition to the new epistemology I believe our best hope lies in the correspondence principle.

Heinz introduced me to the correspondence prin­ciple-any new theory should reduce to the old theory for those cases in which the old theory is known to hold. The principle assumes that science grows somewhat like concentric circles. Of course science can also grow by the development of theories to explain completely new phenomena un­related to previously explained phenomena. But if the correspondence principle can be applied, it brings with it several advantages. First, if the new theory is consistent with the old theory for those cases already investigated, a large body of support for the new theory is readily at hand. Second, and most important for our purposes, if the corres­pondence principle can be shown to hold, then those scientists who have devoted their professional lives to the development of the old theory have not labored in vain. That is, the new theory does not threaten to invalidate their work, merely to extend it. Thus the correspondence principle reduces the threat of the new theory to those who have devel­oped the old theory. Of course the correspondence principle does not completely reduce the emotional threat. Nor does it seem to make the paradigm shift noticeably easier. Nevertheless I have found it to be a useful debating point that seems to ease tensions. The principle tends to turn an either/or situation into a both/and situation.

The way to apply the correspondence principle to second order cybernetics is as follows. Start with the assumption that first order cybernetics dealt

amount of interaction between observer and observed

\ second order cybernetics or the new epistemology

Figure 4. Second order cybernetics is in accord with the correspondence principle. The old epistemology is a special case of the new epistemology.

12

with interaction among the variables in a system. Second order cybernetics, on the other hand, focuses attention on the interaction between the Ob­server and the system being observed. Now draw a line going from zero to some large number. (see Figure 4) The points on this line indicate the amount of interaction between the observer and the system being observed. Classical science or logical posi­tivism dealt only with cases very near zero. Con­temporary science deals with cases all along the line. Clearly the old scientific method is a special case, a subset, of the new scientific method.

Few scientists have made contributions as sig­nificant as Heinz Von Foerster. He has contributed to electrical engineering and neurophysiology, he revolutionized demography, and he has been a central figure in establishing the new field of cyber­netics. There are still some systems theorists who claim that systems theory is not and should not be a scientific field. But Heinz had the daring to follow­ing the idea of communication and control to its logical conclusion. Since science is a method of communication and control, cybernetics is in part a science of science. By concentrating on the observer it became apparent that a new kind of science is required. Heinz and his colleagues not only estab­lished cybernetics as a scientific field in its own right, they have also developed theories which will eventually Iead to the change of science itself.

Heinz is currently enjoying a very active retirement in a house which he, his wife Mai, and his son Andy designed, and with one helper built on Rattle­snake Hili close to Pescadero in California.

REFERENCES 1. This account is taken from Heinz Von Foerster,

"Physics and Anthropology: A Personal Account by the New President of the Wenner-Gren Foun­dation," Current Anthropology, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1964, p. 330.

2. Heinz Von Foerster, Patricia M. Mora, and Lawrence W. Amiot, "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026, Science, 13213436, 1960, pp. 1291-1295.

3. Von Foerster, Mora and Amiot, "Population Density and Growth," Science, 13313468, 16 June 1961, pp. 1931-1937.

4. James Serrin, "ls Doomsday on Target?" Science, 18914197, 11 July 1975.

5. Based on an article by Don Blyly, "Von Foerster: Austrian Professor Brings Creativity, Innovation." Technograph, the student engineering magazine at the University of lllinois, February 1973, p. 11.

6. One semester while grading papers, I was moved to write several Iimericks about cybernetics. At the risk that they may seem inappropriate to some readers I have inserted a few in this article to provide further explanation and to enliven the presentation.

Second Order Cybernetician

7. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population 8omb, New York: Ballantine, 1968.

8. F. W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret, A Deli Book, 1975.

9. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, Second Edition, 1970, pp. 182-187.

10. Heinz Von Foerster, "The Logical Structure of Environment and lts Interna! Representation," International Design Conference Aspen 1962, R. E. Eckerstrom (ed.), Zeeland, Michigan: Herman Miller, lnc., 1963.

11. Stuart A. Umpleby, "Second Order Cybernetics and the Design of Large-Scale Social Experi­ments," Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Society for General Systems Research, Boston, February 1975.

12. lan Mitroff and Vaughan Blankenship, "On the Methodology of the Holistic Experiment: An Ap­proach to the Conceptualization of Large-Scale Social Experiments," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 414, 1973, pp. 339-353.

Professor Stafford Beer Cwarel lsaf Pont Creuddyn Lampeter Dyfed SA48 8PG Wales UK

An Open Letter To Dr. Von Foerster

from Stafford Beer.

My dear Heinz,

Ah·ha! What is this fellow up to? That was my first reaction to meeting you, more

than a quarter of century ago, when you leapt out of the pages of your paper 'Quantum Theory of Memory', and hit me on the head. You did it again only recently, when I read your reported remarks on the nature of self-consciousness. For twenty-five years you have made a habit of it. Whether you were writing about the population explosion, information retrieval, cognition, or (for Heaven's sake) taxation, you leapt out of the pages, and hit me on the head.

All that has a Iot to do with your incredible flair for illuminating your own bright ideas with the most creative use of mathematics that I have ever wit· nessed. ln every field you have touched, from psy­chology to economics, there exists a corpus of mathematical theory which is about as illuminating to the complexities of the systemic issues involved as a firefly. I have nothing against fireflies, which constitute such nice little cybernetic communities; but when your floodlights come on those fellows are out of business. I suppose that the Establish­ment was blinded; but this is not the moment to turn aux royaumes des aveugles .....

I have not yet referred, I realize, to our meetings in the flesh, and frankly I cannot remember exactly when those began. They must however already span some twenty years. ln any case, the story is the same. Whether you leap out of the printed page or a well-upholstered armchair to hit me on the head, I am reeling just the same. Ah·ha! What is this fellow up to? Weil, speaking as the cyberneticist with the sorest head in the business, I have to attest to the fact that an awful Iot of sheer Iove got in there somewhere. I think that it shows. Mutual friends have told me that they find it embarrassing. To which I reply: bad luck.

Whatever is the mainspring of my admiration for you, whether the bright ideas, or the brilliant mathe·

matics, or the Iove, is of no consequence. I want to thank you for being something to me that very few have been. The words are dull and prosaic indeed, and should embarrass no-one (except perhaps you, since you will understand them). You have been and long may you remain so, a negentropic pump to me. That is truly a gift of God, and something rare.

Weil, Heinz, what can I do with this opportunity to talk with you in public? Unlike so many of your friends, I have not been involved with your institu­tional activities. They can speak for all your fine work at lllinois, and I cannot. I am absolutely on the outside, and absolutely on the inside: surely it is a very special position. There is no point in agonizing about it, and I am going to discuss just a few things which occur to me in the context of our friendship, and which eavesdroppers may find of some interest.

About Neurocybernetics I go back now a long way, maybe to our first

meeting. A group of us were talking about the build· ing of 'artificial brains'. Computers barely existed, and in particular no-one was sure whether the tran­sistor 'would work'. As soon as you brought a sol­dering iron anywhere near one of those three prongs, the heat blew the device . . . . . So what would it take to construct an artificial neuron? We would need a box capable of registering pulsed in­puts from various sources. These would be used to charge up a condenser to some threshold. Dis­charge, representing 'decision' as the net effect of exitatory and inhibitory impulses, would operate a relay. This action would set an internal switch to provide at least a one-shot storage, and transmit an output pulse to the neural network. But in order to poop that signal on, our box would have to include an amplifier-consisting of a little collection of space-heating thermionic values. We could not pack

14

all this equipment into a box smaller than (say) a shoebox, nor could we buy the parts for less than (say) twenty dollars. I cannot vouch for all these details after so lang, but the message was clear. A brain artefact would need 1010 of these things. lt would cover the whole of Yorkshire. And the cost .....

The next bit of the story I can vouch for, since I remember it distinctly. You shook your head sadly and said: 'Gentlemen, we shall get nowhere with this approach until we have artificial neurons as small as the point of a pin, which you can buy for ten cents a shovelful.'

That appeared to be that. We moved into the epoch of electronic computers conceived as giant adding machines. They became less and less like brain artefacts by any neurocybernetic criterion. For instance, and in particular, they are tools whose nature has conditioned the approach to the regula­tion of very large probabilistic systems in totally unphysiological ways. Scientists have been led to represent these systems-urban development, demo­graphic development, industrial (meaning pollution) development, global weather systems, global eco­nomic systems, whole ecologies-as vast arrays of simultaneaus equations. They have stuffed these matrices into the giant CPUs of ever !arger main­frame computers, and mercilessly inverted them until they squeal. lt is said that some of these fellows have terminals in their bedrooms, so that they may access the inner workings of these models; but he must be a veritable deus pro machina who knows which coefficient to change in a maximizing func­tional, and by how much.

I think that it all comes down to this with these computers. 'We have ways of making you talk'; and if you (sad, unphysiological brain) constitute a regu­lator constituting a non-model of the regulated system, your talk is as the reeds being shaken by the wind. And only the computer manufacturers are clothed in soft garments. You weil know, Heinz, that these bitter words are not the product of mere hind­sight. lt is more than twenty years since my keynote address to the second international congress on cybernetics at Namur was called 'The lrrelevance of Automation'. lt meant to say that if we did not correctly think through the cybernetic issues for the regulation of large probabilistic systems, the capabil­ity to handle regulation by computer would avail nothing. lt has worked out far worse than I feared. Most of what is today being expensively and pres­tigiously done in the areas mentioned in the last paragraph is pure nonsense.

Now I would not be wasting print on all of this if it were simply a matter of weeping reminiscent tears into the wine. My story left you calling sadly for 'artificial neurons as small as the point of a pin, which you can buy for ten cents a shovelful'. At the time, it sounded ridiculous; but it was prophetic. With microprocessors, that is exactly what we hold in our hands today. I have seen a machine, not

An Open Letter

much bigger than that farnaus shoebox, and costing peanuts, orthogonally arranged with microprocessing boards on a bus (leading to amazing flexibility), with a random access memory of a megabyte. Link a few of those together, and we are in the brain artefact ball-park. I am sure that you also are alert to these developments. Then perhaps the time comes to make another huge effort, a quarter century on, to find the physiological approach, illuminated by neurocybernetics, to the regulation of very large probabilistic systems. We were on the way, I think, all that time ago: the Hixon Symposium; the annual Josiah Macey colloquia, which you yourself so pains­takingly edited .. . . . but the technology Iet things down. How could we build von Neumann's redundant networks, or McCulloch's formal neural nets, on a suitable scale? Now we certainly can.

I submit that humankind has a new set of tools in its grasp called microelectronics which makes the whole history of electronic computing to date irrelevant. The risk is that this will not be under­stood, and/or that understanding will be blocked by the vested interests of the zoo-keepers who are in charge of the existing menageries of computer dino­saurs. Just as we used the electronic computer to enshrine ledgers and quill pens in glass and wire, so may we now breed a race of miniature dinosaurs out of silicon chips. Surely, now we have the tech­nology for the neuron at ten cents the shovelful, it is time to renew the promise of neurocybernetics.

How can that promise best be expressed? Since every regulator must be an effective model of the system regulated, it ought to consist of an isomor­phic mapping of the system. Such things are hard to come by; indeed, the reason why the current approach is as ineffective as was argued above, is that the mappings are contorted homomorphisms and not isomorphic at all. Weil, it is evident but not trivial that the guaranteed isomorphic mapping is the identity mapping. The ocean, for example, is the computer that solves its own diophantine equa­tions-or nary a wave could break. The same must be true of the brain: it identically maps itself, and then declares that there is an imputed external reality just like that. Without pressing the full episte­mological implications of that contention, however, I think that we can go as far as to say this. lf we take hold of a large, probabilistic system (such as one of those previously listed) and innervate it with a network of microprocessors, so that each ganglion of neurons reflects local conditions, and all are interconnected to form an ultrastable system, then we approach an identity mapping of that system. Then this regulatory network should be as compe­tent to 'solve' the system as is the system itself.

lt certainly has to be borne in mind that such systems do 'solve themselves'. The reason that man­kind is so interested to understand them is that the working out of the natural systemic laws may pay scant regard to the wishes of humanity. lt is easy

Cybernetics Forum

to think of many incipiently unstable systems, rang­ing from the ecology to nuclear gamemanship, which will sooner or later achieve a new equilibrium; but it is not easy to find any assurance for the hope that the new arrangements will necessarily include the survival of our species. That is why we seek to construct regulators, I suppose: regulators that will accept certain constraints on purely natural solu­tions, or at the worst will provide some warning of Iethai tendencies in the systems regulated.

About Social Cybernetics Those reflections were based on an anecdote

about a meeting between us long ago. Although they are concerned with what we might call a neurocy­bernetic technology, the applications that occured to me were immediately in the area of large social systems-because most of my professional work has been in that kind of managerial scene. So now I remind you of another and more recent meeting, when you suddenly walked into my room in Santiago de Chile. To make up for earlier vagueness, I can tell you that this meeting transpired at 6:00 pm on Friday 22nd June, 1973! We had different assign­ments in Chile; my own, which was effectively to provide a real-time regulatory system for the social economy, appeared so portentous an undertaking that I kept a detailed log for the first and last time in my life.

We met several times in those final days before the September coup; and you got to know several of my key Chilean collaborators, who were as over­joyed to be able to attend your seminars as I was to know that you were teaching them. Moreover, you became the only eminent foreign scientist actually to see some of the cybernetic activity in which I was engaged during two hectic years for President Allende, in collaboration with his minister Fernando Flores.

The idea was indeed to innervate the social economy. Channels for these nerves were soon set up; and we had microwave links and extant telex networks to pull into service, and to create the so­called Cybernet, which covered the 3000 miles of the country on a continuous basis. The basic idea was to provide advanced management tools, and com­puter power itself, to the workers' committees who were running factories and the industrial sectors­which obviously had to be connected together to 'solve' the social economy in just the sense dis­cussed in the last section.

Even at the time it was technological/y possible to create a network of decentralized minicomputers to constitute the nodes of a neurocybernetic artefact, with teleprocessing interfaces. Unfortunately, this approach was impracticable: there was no foreign exchange to buy the equipment. Thus there was no alternative but to bring data over Cybernet to Santiago from all over the country, to process them

through the cybernetic filters that we had designed on the only computer facility available, and to send the messages back to the remote origins of the data. That is what we were doing; and I think you inspected the process, and could attest to its innocuousness.

lt strikes me as extremely sad that people who have not the least insight into cybernetic processes increasingly refer to Project Cybersyn as if it had been a sinister attempt to centralize power, a deduc­tion erroneously drawn from the technological acci­dentals of the case. Obviously this is infuriating to me, especially because it is wholly contrary to every element of the briefings that I had with the Presi­dent himself, and is a slur on his intentions as weil as my competence. But much more importantly, it draws attention away from what could yet be done­especially by the use of microprocessing, on the lines that I was discussing just now.

May I try out an argument in this open Ietter which is as apolitical as I can make it. No govern­ment, of whatever ideology, avoids massive interven­tion in the life of the country. This is an observ­able fact. What is more, massive intervention is demonstrably unavoidable if the explosive proclivities of interacting systems (all aggregating into ever larger and more powerful units) are to be contained. There will certainly be political disagreements as to how massive 'massive' intervention may legitimately be; but it is necessarily large. And it is necessarily administered by a bureaucracy.

Now to use a word that names a concept that cybernetics owes to the fertile seed-bed. of your Iabaratory at lllinois, the most favorable view of this bureaucracy is that it attends to national autopoie­sis. That is to say, the national identity is main­tained by the preservation of its own (that is, ~he nation's) organization, and the bureaucracy facilitates this. What we see in practice, all over the world, can hardly be interpreted thus favourably. The pathology begins when the bureaucracy is concerned to preserve-not the nation's identity-but its own. And the same diagnosis seems to me to apply to lesser bureaucracies than the national. For example, is the health service or the education service mainly concerned with the delivery of these services, or with preserving its own organization?

I am always asked how the Chilean bureaucracy reacted to Project Cybersyn, and how we managed to move it. The answer is that we simply ignored the bureaucracy, and set up our network indepen­dently under direct ministerial authority. ln two years we had about seventy percent of the social economy incorporated into the Cybersyn system. And I have often reflected that, had it been neces­sary to work through the bureaucracy, we should not have had even our initial plans approved within that time. As an indication that this is no exaggeration, it is worth recording that the Chilean government asked the British government for 'overseas aid' support for the work I was doing. Nothing was heard

16

of this proposal for more than eighteen months. I was eventually asked about the work in London some ten days after the coup which brought down the Allende administration, when the work was all over. Only an ingenou could imagine that this was a coincidence. lt could have been a straight political decision; but I satisfied myself that it was not. lt was pathological autopoiesis.

ln short, all radical change is threatening, as both of us and many of our colleagues know all too weil. But sooner or later, we have to believe, the under­standing so hardly acquired will prove useful some­where. With the microprocessing technology that makes the artefact of a neurocybernetic network possible and cheap, with the multiple connexions for richly interactive variety sponges made cheaply possible by fibre optics, and with the general axioms of cybernetics available in the mental tool-box, the mess could be ameliorated. But the proportion of humankind wanting that amelioration is in a terrible minority: I would estimate it at ninety-nine per­cent ..... So much for our 'democracies'.

About a Negentropy Pump My two discussions have ranged from the cyber­

netics of the neuron to the cybernetics of society; and yet they have overlapped, and interpenetrated each other's domains. ln this kind of systemic con­tinuity and in this theoretic generality lies the potency of cybernetics as a science in its own right. lf the founding fathers, of whom you were and re­main one, had not understood from the beginning that cybernetics is a science, nothing much would have happened to consolidate the subject over the last thirty years. And if the scientific Establishment had accepted in a mere thirty years that this is so, it would have been a miracle. Of course it has not.

ln this Ietter I have discussed some of the cyber-

An Open Letter

netic things that I reckon to understand. You will agree that this was a prudential policy; whether you agree or not with what I have said I am avid to hear. lt has to be stated emphatically that the views I have expressed cannot be laid at your door.

But in closing, my dear Heinz, I certainly do in­tend to lay something at your door. You are a negentropy pump for me, as I said, and you had better be clear that you are a negentropy pump for a whole population of cybernetic aspirants as weil. Those of us who have been around your influence for donkeys' years can usually dredge up a recol­lection or a reference-or know where to get it. But how can all this be communicated to new genera­tions of cybernetic neophytes?

Without apology, then, for I must needs be hard about this, I call upon you publically (as I have often called on you privately) to prepare an edition of your major writings to date. You will invent a splendid title for such a compilation, of course. But I can teil you the sub-title by which new generations will certainly pass that book from hand to hand. They will say to each other: Ah-ha! What is this fellow up to? And you will hit them on the head.

To reverse our roles for one minute: I am your junior, but I am working on my ninth book. lt is my experience that publishing a book gets 'all that stuff' out of the way; it frees the spirit for the next episode. Piease do not imagine, then, that my demand of you amounts to a request for your last will and testament. Absolutely to the contrary: when you get that stuft (so sorely needed) out of the way, you will be free to start again. I have the clearest expectations, because I know what I need from you, but I shall not say in public what they are.

ln the meantime, I transmit to you Iove and peace from the hills of Ceredigion,

Stafford

The lmportance of Being Magie

Gordon Pask Director of Research, System Research Ltd

Professor in Dept. Cybernetics Brunel University and the lET Open University

England

To the Editor of the Cybernetics Forum, who invited me to write of Heinz Von Foerster, and the Biological Computer Laboratory, BCL.

You have to be careful when writing a commen­tary about your boss (Patron, Professor-in-general, Maestro) and Heinz Von Foerster is all of them; much more as weil, to be honest with you. He is, Iet us say, an uncle figure to our family, like an elder brother, (no presumption is intended; my brothers come some 20 or 30 years my senior, in age, and more than that, in wisdom). On the other hand, this gentleman would brook no earnest piece from such a scamp as I; a fellow who snored him out of a monastery cell, embarrassed him (and Mai Von Foerster, also, I suspect) by broadcasting for their local TV station (the transmission was a put­up job where I was meant to play the statistician which, of all things I am not); by token of which I offered to buy the place, with cash, not realising, at that stage, the American's suspicion of real money. So, Mr. Editor, the response to your invitation is a piece entitled:

The lmportance of Being Magie The hallmark of a great Cybernetician is perfect

showmanship, tagether with the recognition that the show is paramount; it must go on. Yes, great scien­tist, great mathematician, sound in academic wind and limb, all that stuft is commonplace and, natu­rally, is taken for granted (you must know the back end of a differential equation from the front and may as weil forget the middle; the "input-output" paradigm).

Magie is as follows: You ask for participation, which is the privilege of Cabaret; quite discourteous in the theatre. Obtaining it, you say "Think the un­thinkable" or simply "I shall saw the Iady in half" or "we are flying through the centre of the earth upon a winged horse". There is a real, though momentary, even grudging, suspension of the customary habi­tudes. The saw dissects the box; the Iady is cloven,

midriff, a demonstration which is half believed. The lights go up. As conjuror you now explain the trick; the Iady, still intact, shall take her bow before the curtain. All the mystery is gone but for a smile that lingers, tantalising, as upon a tiger's face. For, ladies and gentlemen, if you did not quite believe your thought of the unthinkable; did not quite take the demonstration of that outrage to your great collective psyche as a fact; then you do not quite believe the explanation either.

Nor, ladies and gentlemen, does the man who led you by a sleight of hand to participate, connive behind the scenes, by privy to a double take. We have thought the unthinkable, so Iet us do it also; that is a magic.

Heinz Von Foerster is, of course, a conjuror weil credited, in the night clubs of Vienna, but also he is a great magician. The charm is real, but the seem­ingly respectable innocence should not deceive you.

For example, late in the 1950s, he characterised a self organising system as one for which the rate of change of redundancy (or any other index of organi­

dR sational coherence) is non negative: - ) 0. The whole

dT thing comes dressed up in a great deal of fancy symbolism. For, at that stage in life, the BCL, just born, was Iabeiied "Vacuum Tube Laboratory" and, in any case, it is an inclination of the Wittgensteins to surreund their brightest innovations with a peri­meter hedge of mathematical logic.

So innocent, so harmless, so very unassumingly debonair; I recall this pronouncement especially weil because Marshall Yovitts of the ONR, had imported me, at Heinz's instigation, tagether with a massive chemical computer which, after computation and producing several progeny (its intended function) boiled and finally erupted in the bridal suite where it was housed (one of those conference hotels, on the South-Shore at Chicago). Weil, the mathemati­cians and computer whiz-kids simply could not understand a murky porridge full of dendrites, and identified it, vaguely, with some burgeoning tech-

"dR nology. Of course, they could understand - ) 0"

dt and demonstrated their positively incredible ability to annihilate the meaning attached to the symbols. lt

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took at least a day for any really respectable scien­tist to realise that this innocent expression put paid to the current, safely true-and-tried, mythology of what a system is; there are still a few of them who fail to realise that something epistemologically odd is going on when Hmax(the maximum informa­tion/entropy) must increase to compensate for H (the information/entropy) approaching zero. At any rate, the theorem is all right. lt has been stated again, independently, and by a different route, just recently (Nicolis and Protonarios, in the idiom of Prigogine and generalised bifurcation theory; also, by Caiani­ello of Naples with his modular thermodynamics).

Perhaps it is fortunate that Von Foerster's an­nouncement was generally regarded as a piece of decorative mathematics, just a conjuring trick. The notion of a system in the classical sense, with nice­ly defined state variables, clearly defined boundaries, and weil behaved trajectories, was a novel enough thought, itself. Any serious attempt to question the status quo might have been perceived as dangerous and inhibited the development of the BCL. As it was, the BCL flourished and, over its decade and a half lifespan, harboured more unthinkables than any other innovative Cybernetic Institution.

For here, Von Foerster acted as a magician, proper, in concert with Ross Ashby, Gothard Gunther, and many transient colleagues, Warren McCulloch, Lars Loefren, Humberto Maturana to mention only a few of them. The records of the work, from these and a host of other collaborators, Murray Babcock, Al Inselberg, Paul Weston, John White .... are preserved in a microfische collec­tion; they give a glimpse of the atmosphere prevail­ing in this truly magic place. But, in order to grasp the quality and the consequence of this entity, "the BCL", you must read between the lines, and beyond the lines; before them, and after them. For, one thing I learned within the BCL, (one of the very many) is that knowledge is not depersonalised; it is the product of people and their coherent aggregation into living systems (non trivially self organising systems; nowadays, it might be better to say, systems that are "organisationally closed and infor­mationally open"; that maintain "an autopoiesis, and something more"). Of course, Heinz Von Foerster maintained an autonomy within the BCL, whilst being part of it, and "the BCL" I insist, is a living entity with an autonomy and personality of its own.

Of such creatures, it is generally naive to say they are at such a place and time, or they begin here, and end, there. At l€ast, if you wish to make such Statements in generat (and you can say what­ever is germane of particularities and features), then you must think the unthinkable, of time, and place, and individual integrity, in order to give these terms a wider connotation than the hoary meanings, which are, in other-than-magical regions, taken for granted. Failing that, such systems, viewed in Newtonian and Cartesian corrdinates, pop on and oft, in and out,

lmportance of Being Magie

occasionally eat their tails, in the most disconcert­ing manner possible.

To begin with, the BCL always was distributed in space. lt ramified throughout Europe and the Ameri­cas; north, south, and central. For some 15 years, the central office and a motley assortment of meeting rooms and laboratories were located in Urbana, lllinois, at or around the Department of Elec­trical Engineering, on that campus of the State University. This situation struck many of his col­leagues as odd, since Heinz Iooks more at home in Almunster-am-Trauensee than in the great midwest. Someone, Rowland Beurle I think, once taxed him with the matter, as, one summer, we stood above Locarno speiibound at the rugged skyline towards ltaly, where surely every peak conceals a hollow hill. Heinz Von Foerster pointed out, by way of a reply, that lllinois was so much better, for there are no mountains to impede the view; a truth which cannot be denied.

Of course, the BCL head-office was not exactly typical of a Iand-grant university. The policemen with whom I consorted in the early hours assured me this was so; and they were tolerant enough. One used to break his rounds, pockets bulging with un­gainly firearms, and calculate statistics which was a lifelong ambition; some others, whom I came to know throughout the years, confided that the prefix "von" had done the trick, initially, and gained accep­tance for a strange community of real professors, absent minded, world renowned, fey, notorious, con­vinced, determined, with a hard pragmatism trans­cending the silly numbers attached to course options; for them, and their families, and their ex­tended family of long haired disciples (they would have been called "Hippies", so my police friends said, except that they were obviously extras in a movie, shot amongst the Transylvania Alps). I guess von Foerster brought his mountains with him.

Apart from head office, the rest of the operation could be, quite readily, transposed to Paris, for example, or to Boston, or to London, or Chicago, or Dayton, Ohio, or as now, Pescadero, California.

Heinz's one priority Investment is communication; that is true of any organisation, when it comes to telephone connections, data base access, transporta­tion, and linkages by conference or telegraph. With Heinz, the notion of communication is all that, for sure, but rather more than that is implied, as weil.

Let me exemplify this fact. Once, not having en­countered each other for some years, except in exchanges too briet for technical content, we met in Cuernavaca with lvan lllich, at CIDOC. Most of the BCL had been transported there, also. When last we met, neither of us had seriously examined the essen­tially personalised and dynamic character of knowl­edge, which may be imaged, statically, by several varieties of relational network.

Naturally, we were both anxious to share our latest thoughts; in particular to lay them on the table in

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front of lvan. Heinz had his usual folder, I, with my usual briefcase; but both of us also laboured awkwardly along with separate, travel torn, enormous scrolls. I recall Heinz saying on the way up the hill, "you don't usually carry such a thing"; making repartee, "weil, nor do you".

ln the marble pillared study which overlooks the valley, our scrolls were both unfurled; relational net­works, of gigantic proportion; independently devised and notated, not at all like the run of semantic structures. True, one exposed problern solving, one exposed learning, but the conclusions were suffi­ciently in kilter for us to teil the same story, divid­ing the labour of the exposition. Anyhow, as Brian Lewis has recently commented, learning is problern solving, or vice versa, as you prefer; so even this difference is insignificant.

Now communication, in this sense, is possible because of a profound discovery, one of so many, that Heinz Von Foerster made or catalysed.

The magic goes like this: Think the unthinkable. "Cybernetics is a science,"

not just a tatty hodge-podge of system-talk, arid snippets cut from automaton theory, control theory and the like, assuming a fancy neologism. To all of you this outrageous statement is supported, as a rule, by demonstrating general principles (somewhat like recursion, somewhat like information, but not quite either). Judgment is suspended, and the coher­ence of these principles is half accepted.

Finally, the box is opened; the trick explained. The principles in question are, every one of them, relativistic and reflective. Weil, of course, "a science is to do with outside observers"; you couldn't have a "relativistic and reflective science, where the out­side observer came inside as a participant, could you?"

lt might be an art, or a philosophy, a way of life.

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But a science? You do not quite believe it is not a science, a

science of being. So you might as weil get on with doing that very

thing. ln which, lies the magic of Cybernetics and, a fortiori, ot that magic gentleman, Von Foerster.

Mr. Editor, for this reason, though I concede your point in dating the BCL head office at Urbana, lllinois, I would take umbrage at any suggestion that "the BCL", qua organism, occupied an epoch; that it started, or has finished. lf you tax rne with historical progression, it started long before H. Von Foerster and I "first met" in Namur (a provincial capital, in Belgium, famed for its Cybernetic Association); and this was before the head office existed. When we "last met", earlier this year, in San Francisco, "the BCL" qua organism, was thriving very nicely, thank you.

To understand these words except as maudlin recollections and wild imaginations is also to under­stand what Cybernetics is concerned to explain in sober, scientific (and still a shade poetic), terms. Poetic, for a science such as Cybernetics; or any science worth its salt, the mechamism lies behind the publication Iist, in the body politic, a thing alive, of beauty, grace, of people and maybe, or pro­cessors, but if so, then much unlike the stupid computing engines which plague me, as I write these words, or the grooms conditioned to brush up their stupid calculating habits.

There is too little magic in our world; too few magicians, too many, technically proficient conjurors, who could never hold a real audience.

Hence, the importance of being magic, as, Sir, H. Von Foerster is.

The Wholeness of the Unity: Conversations with Heinz Von Foerster

Humberto R. Maturans Facultad de Ciencias Universidad de Chile

Santiago, Chile

Heinz Von Foerster is a remarkable man. ln this most of his friends agree and my statement offers no novelty. What nobody knows, however, is why I consider him a remarkable man, and it is of this that I am writing in this essay to honor him.

I consider Heinz Von Foerster a remarkable man because he is both in thought and in action essen­tially a magician, and, hence, a man that can con­sciously exist simultaneously in many realities. I do not claim that he is in this unique, I only claim that in this he is remarkable, and that this I admire in him.

We worked together for about ten months while I visited him in the Biological Computer Laborstory at the University of lllinois during the years 1968 and 1969. Maybe that we did not work in the usual sense, but we talked a Iot and embraced each other frequently, spending many full hours conceiving a Tractatus Biologico-Philosophicus that we never had the time to write. Yet, we learned with each other, and I was enriched with a most fundamental insight: the understanding of the unity of the unity through the understanding of its wholeness.

As a biologist I had been interested for many years in the organization of both the living and the nervous systems. This for two basic reasons: i) I wanted to understand living systems as autonomous entities; and ii) I wanted to understand the participa­tion of the nervous system in the phenomenon of cognition. I was weil versed in the ways of speaking in purposeful terms about the organism and its organization, describing it functionally as a goal oriented system. I was also weil versed in the ways of considering the nervous system also in purpose­ful terms, and talked about it as an organ of perception and as a processor of the information received from the environment. I feit, however, that the notions of purpose, function and goal were fundamentally fallacious when applied to living sys­tems in order to explain their operation, even though they were euristically useful in view of the adaptive character of both philogeny and ontogeny in living systems. The notions of purpose, function and goal,

are referential notions, and their use always implies a relation with a domain different from the domain in which the system to which they are applied exists. The value of these notions is clear in human design because through their use man defines domains of selection for his actions. Yet, when one wishes to understand living systems as autonomous entities, this reference to another system or domain to which the observer must have an independent access, and with respect to which he makes the description in purposeful terms asserting that the system is realized through goal oriented processes, is misleading. The same happens when one tries to understand the participation of the nervous system in the phenomenon of cognition. ln fact, if a pur­poseful description is used, and a goal is claimed in the processes of the organism, then the observer either believes that the purposeful description reveals the way in which the system described operates, or he (or she) uses the purposeful des­cription as a metaphore. However, in the first case the observer would commit a mistake because the components of a system operate (through their properties) only on neighbourhood relations, and any reference to a goal in their operation only asserts a cognitive relation that the observer establishes when he beholds simultaneously the components and the system that they integrate; in the second case the purposeful description that the observer makes is misleading because a metaphore requires that the listener should already know that to which it refers, so that it only orients him or her to his or hers pre-existing knowledge, and, hence, it carries no novelty in relation to how the system operates. Thus, for example, if I were to say, 'The function of the messengar ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is to con­vey to the ribosomes the information needed for the synthesis of proteins', then I would say nothing about how the mRNA operates in the synthesis of proteins, or how is the protein synthesis realized, to a listener that does not know how it does take place. The notions of function and information (which is also referential), only address the observer

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to his state of knowledge and to his certainties and uncertainties about the system, but do not address him to any feature in it. Similarly, if I were to say, 'ln mammals one function of the Ievei of oxygen in the blood is the control of the breathing rate of the organism', then I would be again making a referential statement that reveals my view of the relations that I establish between oxygen concentra­tion in the blood, activity of the nervous system, and contraction of the diaphragm, in the perspective of the organism as a whole. This is obvious for almost everybody, and it is not necessary to be a cybernetitian in order to realize that such an expres­sion only has communicative value, in a metadomain with respect to the operation of the components of the organism, between the persons that know how the system works. Yet, unless this is fully realized in fact, in cases less obvious an observer may be misled by the use of expressions like control, feed­back or information, and act as if these expressions were telling something intrinsic to the components and their operation as components, and not only something about their relations viewed from the per­spective of the whole that they integrate. I imagine that cybernetitians never commit this mistake, but we biologists frequently do. Therefore, at least from the perspective of a biologist, it is legitimate to ask the questions: 'lf to use the notions of purpose, goal or information, is fallacious, how should one then refer to the relationship of the components and the whole that they integrate?, and, 'How should one speak in order to grasp the wholeness or unity of a system in a description that reveals the system and not only our cognitive relations to it? At present the answer to these questions is for me obvious. How­ever, it was not obvious for me when I came to work with Heinz Von Foerster at the University of lllinois, and although he did not give me this answer (which I am sure he had), I found it inspired through my conversations with him, and through my attempt to answer other questions that he posed to me. ln fact, I think that he gave me the answer through its use. Let me tell of this:

His actions. Heinz is indeed an accomplished magician. Yet, as

far as I know he did not earn his living as a magi­cian in a professional manner, but he may weil have retained his intellectual and ethical health through it in Berlin, during the second World War. The following is a revealing instance of his abilities that proved very enlightening for me. He had at his house occa­sional evening parties in which he performed infor­mally as a magician. Of course, he had to prepare many tricks in advance, and he had to have them in his mind continuously, in a perfect tuning with the circumstance of his performance, in order to realize them at the proper moment during the evening. One of these tricks consisted in placing a playing-card (say the queen of hearts) between a particular pair of pages (say between pages 184 and 185), in a par-

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ticular volume (say vol. 7) of an encyclopedia (say the Britanica) in the living room. Since a Magician's performance frequently Ieads to conversations about the supernatural, or about unique powers (that many people seem to desire) such as telepathy or tele­kinesis, in a few occasions the following would occur. One of Heinz's friends (the most skeptical, of course) would passionately claim that magleians could not perform really outstanding feats that would require more than usual powers. Heinz would play his role in the expected unexpected game and ask, 'such as what?'. 'Weil .. .' his triend would say, 'such as to make appear a playing card in a particular place'. Heinz: 'What card?' Friend: 'The queen of hearts'. Heinz: 'Where?' Friend: 'ln a volume of Encyclopedia Britanica'. Heinz: 'ln which volume?' Friend: 'ln volume seven'. Heinz: 'Between what pages?' Friend: 'Between pages 184 and 185'. Heinz then would act a little and then say: 'Go and see'. Of course the card would be found since Heinz had placed it there before, earlier in the evening.

How can one explain the success of this particu­lar event? I asked Heinz, and his answer was like this: 'Since I had several tricks prepared I had to be careful of not forgetting any of them, and of not letting my arrangements to be disturbed, and, there­fore, I had to check in my mind frequently where everything was. This must have characterized my whole conduct during the evening, and I must have been giving clues continuously that could very specifically orient any one in the audience sufficient­ly atuned to my behaviour. He who was most criti­cal, obviously, had to be the most perceptive of these clues that did not tell him anything in the semantic domain, but which oriented his attention towards that to which I was continuously attending. Therefore, when he had to act, he acted according to a state of attention specified through his inter­actions with me.' This was revealing. Heinz's actions showed his implicit understanding that he and his triend operated as components of a single system (apparent only to a metaobserver) that were coupled only through neighborhood relations determined at any moment by their properties (psychological and otherwise), and not through relations of purpose specified by their Intentions.

His understanding. While Heinz was President of the Wenner-Gren

Foundation for Anthropological Research he attend­ed an international conference in anthropology at Moscow. One of the participants in this conference was Margaret Mead. Heinz likes museums; in fact, when he and I met for the first time and became friends at Leiden during the symposium on Informa­tion Processing in the Nervous System, in the XXII International Congress of Physiology, he and I skipped the ceremony of condecoration of Professor Ralph Gerard by the Queen of Holland in order to go to visit the museums of Amsterdam. There we followed the rules that visitors must accept. ln

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Moscow the situation was different. As Heinz told me, he went with Margaret Mead to visit a certain museum where, at the entrance, she was told that she could not enter carrying her walking stick. At this Margaret Mead decided not to visit the museum because she would not walk without her stick; yet, a moment later, Heinz convinced her to do other­wise. He said something like this: 'Let me carry your walking stick within my trousers, along one of my legs, Inside I shall take it out and nobody will say a word. ln this country, whether by perfection or by design, people do not commit mistakes, therefore, any guard that sees us Inside with the walking stick will be forced to admit that we were granted a special permit because otherwise we would not be Inside with it.' They did as Heinz proposed, and as he predicted nobody interfered with them.

When Heinz told me this anecdote I did not ask for an explanation. lndeed I was impressed. I ad­mired his self confidence, but I admired most his clear grasping of the definitory relations of the guard system of the museum that permitted him either to interact or not to interact with it at will. ln fact, this particular event was revealing for me in two respects:

i) Heinz behaved as if he knew that the guards did not consider the totality of the museum as a reference for their behaviour as guards, and that they acted only on local relations. Thus, although a walking stick should not be allowed to enter the museum, a walking stick carried by some one that needs it Inside the museum is seen as something that belongs in the museum, and not as something that should not have been allowed to enter into it. Yet, one can imagine that in some previous occasion the guards received instructions from a Ieader that had a general view of what should be done, and who acted accordingly. One can also imagine, however, that his instructions would have only specified the properties of the guards for their operation on local relations, without giving them his general view of their responsibilities. lf it had been otherwise Heinz and Margaret Mead would have been expelled from the museum.

ii) Heinz, by not asking beyond the entrance whether they could or not carry a walking stick, behaved as if he considered that through his inter­actions with the guards he could either interact with the protection system of the museum as a whole, or with its components as Independent entities, and as if he had chosen the latter. He, thus, revealed that he understood that the guards realized through their properlies two non-intersecting phenomenal do­mains, and that they could do this without contra­diction because they operated only on neighborhood relations. This allowed Heinz and Margaret Mead to move through the museum carrying what a meta­observer would have called an invisible forbidden walking stick.

Wholeness of the Unity

His questions. While Heinz and I were talking about the nervous

system during our long conversations in our attempt to generate a Tractatus Biologico-Philosophicus, Heinz made me the following question: 'What is a stimulus for the operation of the nervous system?'

For me this was a very interesting and revealing question, even though it seemed formulated in very standard terms. As every scientist knows, the formu­lation of a question defines the domain in which the answer must be given in order to be acceptable. Accordingly, I feit that I should examine Heinz's question in the domain in which it demanded an answer, under the assumption that the way he formulated it was not accidental. This I did by evalu­ating the question in the following manner: i) ln this question Heinz does not distinguish between internal and external stimuli for the operation of the nervous system. Therefore, this question implies a view that considers the nervous system as a closed system for the operation of which the observer's distinction between internal and external perturbations of the nervous system is not valid, and for the operation of which internally and externally triggered changes of state (relations of activity between neurons) are states of the same class. ii) ln this question Heinz leaves out the observer as a generator of the stimu­lus. Therefore, this question implies the view that what constitutes a stimulus for the nervous system is determined by the nervous system itself. ln other words, the question implies the view that although the observer may choose a stimulus from a set of them, he does not determine what structural config­uratlon operates as a stimulus because this is determined by the structure of the nervous system. iii) ln this question Heinz does not specify the domain or domains in which the stimuli may exist. Therefore, this question implies the view that a stim­ulus to the nervous system is any structural con­figuration of the medium (as the domain in which the nervous system operates as a unity) that triggers in it a change of state, but it does not prejudge about what constitutes the medium of a nervous system, and does not exclude the possibility that the activity of the nervous system itself may re­cursively constitute part of its medium. iv) Finally, in this question Heinz makes no use of notions of goal, finality or function, in relation to the stimulus. Therefore, there is nothing in this question that may suggest that the answer must include any notion through which the nervous system as a totality may be seen to participate in the operation of its components.

Of the many interactions and conversations that I had with Heinz Von Foerster I have chosen these three because I find them representative in revealing his insights in the operation of systems, as weil as in revealing the way he moved simultaneously in many domains of reality. Let me expalin this. lt is apparent to me that Heinz shows, in every aspect of

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his conduct, either consciously or unconsciously, that he, as a magician: i) understands a system as a composite whole that he can manipulate (if he so wishes) either by coupling hirnself to the operation of its components as components, interacting thus with the system at a surface of interactions of his choice, or by abstracting the components from the domain in which they constitute the system, and through interacting with them in the domain in which they are independent entities, change the properties of the system by changing the properties of its components; ii) does not expect from the components any "understanding" of the system that they constitute, nor that one should find in the operation of the components through the interplay of their properties through neighborhood relations, a reresentation of the whole that they integrate; and iii) understands that the wholes does not participate in the operation of its components, and that any interaction of the whole with its components takes place in a different dimension than that in which its components are its components.

lt was, in one way or other, through my grasping of these understandings of Heinz the Magician that I reached my own insight into the wholeness of fhe unity that I summarize below:

-A unity is always defined by an observer who distinguishes it by a set of operations of distinction that specify its properties.

-An observer can distinguish a unity, either as a simple unity that he or she cannot or chooses not to analyze into components, and which is character­ized only by the properties with which he or she endows it at the moment of distinction, or as a composite unity that he or she anlyzes into com­ponents that hold between each other a configura­tion of relations, static or dynamic, that remain invariant while they integrate it as a composite unity of a particular kind.

- The invariant relations that hold between the components of a composite unity, and constitutes it as a composite unity of a particular kind, constitute its organization. The actual components (all their properties included) and the actual relations between them that realize a composite unity as a particular composite unity, constitute its structure. Therefore, the relations that constitute the organization of a unity of a particular class are a subset of the rela­tions included in the structure of a particular unity of that class.

- The identity of a particular composite unity as a composite unity of a particular kind remains invari­ant as long as its organization remains invariant. ln other words, if the organization of a composite unity changes, the unity disintegrates. However, since the structure of a particular composite unity includes more relations than its organization, the structure of a particular composite unity may change without it losing its class identity as long as the relations that constitute its organization do not change.

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-A simple unity does not have organization or structure. A simple unity, therefore, only exists in the space established by the properties with which an observer, or its oparational equivalent, endows it in the operation of distinction.

-From the perspective of the observer a com­posite unity has a double existence. ln fact, an Ob­server sees a composite unity only to the extent that he or she can define a domain from the per­spective of which he or she distinguishes a simple unity as composite by distinguishing the components that integrate it. By doing this the observer makes two non intersecting operations of distinction that he relates, in a metadomain, by mapping them in his descriptive domain through the recursive closed oper­ation of his or her nervous system in a single domain of relations of neuronal activities. ln other words, for an observer a composite unity exists: i) as a simple unity (that is, as a whole) in the space specified by its properties as a simple unity, if he or she dis­tinguishes it as such by not distinguishing com­ponents in it; and ii) as a composite unity in the space specified by the properties of the components that he or she distinguishes as integrating it as a simple unity, and which realize it as a whole by the way they are organized and determine the bound­aries of separation through which the observer dis­tinguishes it as a simple unity. Therefore, the des­cription of the properties of a composite unity as a simple unity necessarily does not include any refer­ence to its components. (For example, a person as a person can be fully described without reference to its component organs and their relations or inter­actions). But, the description of a composite unity as a composite unity cannot be made without refer­ence to it as a simple unity, because it is with respect to its operation as a simple unity that a composite unity is composite and its components are components that realize its organization. Accord­ingly, a composite unity and a simple unity exist in operationally different phenomenal domains.

-A simple unity interacts with other unities through the operation of some of its properties, but a composite unity interacts with other unities through the operation of some of the properties of its components.

ln conclusion, an observer can always treat a col­lection of simple unities as a composite unity by specifying an organization that defines a domain in which the collection of simple unities operates as a whole, and makes the simple unities that integrate its components. Yet, operationally, whenever an observer interacts with a unity, regardless of whether this is, from the perspective of a meta­domain, a simple or a composite one, he always interacts in a space specified by the properties of the unity as a simple one. Accordingly, an observer cannot interact in the same phenomenal domain with a composite unity as a simple unity and with its components as components. The wholeness of a

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composite unity as a relation of totality in a com­position, therefore, is a cognitive relation established as a function of the manner of composition (organ­ization) of a collection of simple unities by an Ob­server who beholds simultaneously, from a meta­domain, the composite unity as a simple unity and its components as components.

I do not pretend that what have said about unities and wholes is necessarily a novelty for cyber­netitians; most likely it is definitively not. Nor do I think that Heinz was not fully aware of all the con­ceptual implications of his actions and questions. What I am saying is that the fact that Heinz dis­tinguished through his conduct the several non-inter­secting phenomenal domains in which a composite unity and its components exist, and that he did this in a manner that revealed that for him the whole­ness of a composite unity is never a factor in the operation of its components, was for me inspiring. lt permitted me to fully understand notions such as control, regulation, goal or information, that are used to describe the participation of the components of a system in its constitution as a whole, as notions that refer only to cognitive relations generated by the observer in a metadomain of descriptions with respect to the system and its components, and not to any aspect of the actual operation of the proper­ties of the components through neighborhood inter­actions. Also, it made for me more obvious that the way that the components acquire their properties is irrelevant for their operation as components, be­cause it is only their actual properties at any mo­ment what determines at any moment their actual neighborhood interactions. This I considered then, in 1968, of great relevance for the clearing of mis­conceptions in the understanding of the relations between a whole and its parts, particularly in the study of organisms as autonomaus entities and in the study of the participation of the nervaus system in the phenomenon of cognition .

Accordingly, it was only after I understood the manner in which Heinz the Magician treated systems that I understood that the meaning of his question 'What is a stimulus for the operation of the nervaus system?' was 'What interactions of the components of the nervaus system tread into the operation of the nervaus system as a simple unity?' lf the mean­ing of the question that Heinz had asked had not been this, then the answer to his question would have been obvious and trivial; namely: 'Any perturba­tion of the nervaus system at the sensory surface of the organism constitutes a stimulus' . But if the question asked by Heinz implied his understanding of systems, then it required a different answer. ln fact, it required an answer that answered the refor­mulation of the question as given above. That is, an answer that simultaneously revealed the nervaus system both, as a composite unity whose com­ponents operate only on local interactions, and as a composite unity whose components can, in principle,

Wholeness of the Unity

interact through their local interactions with the system that they integrate as a simple unity. lt was only after I understood this that I realized that I had the answer from my studies on color vision with Gabriela Uribe and Samy Frenk, and that Heinz, even without knowing it, also had it, implicit in his ques· tion. Thus, my answer was: lf i), the nervaus system is organized as a closed network of interacting neurons that operates in a manner such that in it every change in relations of neuronal activities gen· erates further (recursive) changes in relations of neuronal activities in it, and if ii), the closed network operates homeostatically maintaining or generating certain relations or paths of change of relations of neuronal activities in a manner determined by its structure, then iii), any change in the relations of neuronal activities in the network that constitutes a compensable perturbation (that does not disintegrate it) in the network, is a stimulus for the operation of the nervaus system. ln an actual nervaus system the relations of neuronal activity or the paths of change of neuronal activities generated by the closed neuronal network, must be subordinated to the maintenance of the organization of the organism which it integrates.

This answer proved for me fundamental for my understanding of the phenomenon of cognition that I summarize in the statement: to live is to cognize. Yet, I shall not dwell now on this subject, which I have treated in an article called "Biology of Cogni­tion" that appeared as a BCL Report (Report 9.0, 1970), nor shall I consider now the question of auto­nomy in living systems that is also central for the understanding of the phenomenon of cognition, and that Francisco Varela and I treat in an article called "Autopoietic Systems", also a BCL Report (Report 9.4, 1975). I shall only make a few remarks about the nature of the problern of cognition as I saw it after my interactions with Heinz Von Foerster in the years 1968 and 1969.

The fundamental difficulty that a biologist faces when trying to cope with the question 'What rela­tions exist between the operation of the nervaus system in the organism that it integrates and the phenomenon of cognition?' is that the answer to this question necessarily involves his notion of real­ity, which obviously determines the perspective from which he selects the facts that he considers rele­vant in his Observations of the organism and its nervaus system. Accordingly, any independent view that permits the biologist to have a more sure holding in one or other of these domains, is for him of great help. This happened to me. When I visited Heinz at the University of lllinois, in Urbana in 1968, I had already concluded that the nervaus system had to operate as a closed network of interacting neurons. Thus, when I came to the Biological Com­puter Labaratory I found this view of closure of the nervaus system confirmed through my interactions with Heinz the Magician. I had reached this view

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while studying color vision when I discovered that one could, in principle, generate the color space of an animal by correlating his retinal activity with his color naming, in a process that entailed the oparational closing of the neuronal network by cor­relating the neuronal activity of one part of the nervaus system with the neuronal activity of the rest. My approach had been directly analytical. ln Heinz the Magician, however, I found a Zen Master in the art of dealing with systems that revealed the same answer in his perfect tuning with systems, without requiring (at least apparently) to go through the analysis of the nervaus system itself. ln these circumstances I had to follow the notion of closure in the nervaus system to its ultimate consequences, yet, in order to do so I had to accept at least two fundamental ones, namely: i) that whatever happened to the nervous system was necessarily determined by its structure through its operation as a closed neuronal network; and ii) that if the perceptual spaces (as I found studying color vision) are gen­erated by internal correlations in the operation of the nervaus system as a closed network, then I had to abandon the notion of reality as the indepen­dently given to be grasped by the cognitive opera­tion of the nervaus system. Cognition itself became a problern with a legitimate unexpected answer.

lf cognition as the grasping of an external reality could not be accepted when attempting to under­stand the operation of the nervaus system, then reality and its cognition had to be accepted as a mode of operation of the nervaus system as a closed neuronal network. Also, if to operate with the notion of an external cognizable reality was inade­quate, then the question 'how does the nervaus system obtain from the medium the information needed for computing the adequate Operation of the organism in it?' should be changed into 'how is it that the organism and its nervaus system obtain the structures that permit them to operate adequately in the medium in which they exist?' A semantic ques­tion had to be changed into a structural one. lt was then apparent to me that this change could only be fruitful if the wholeness of a composite unity was recognized to be in a metadomain with respect to the operation of its components because then, and only then, the distinction between organization and structure permits the full understanding of the phenomena of spontaneaus generation, stability and change, in biological systems. Biologists have intui­tively known this distinction for a lang time, and they have used it in the study of evolution and ontogeny without its full formulation. Yet, they have found it difficult to apply to the nervaus system and to the study of cognition because they did not have a clear oparational understanding of the wholeness of the unity, and of how a living system operated as a totality. This is very apparent in the frequent confusion between a system as a system and its description. The seduction of Von Neumann to pro-

25

pose outside of biology but under the influence of biological descriptions, a self-reproducing automaton in his article "The General and Logical Theory of Automata," was a very interesting case of this kind. Von Neumann proposes an effective system of pro­duction by a system of another of the same kind as a separate entity. Why did he call his automaton self-reproducing and used an expression used by biologists to refer to cells in reproduction? lf he pretended his proposition to be a model of cellular self-reproduction, then it was fully inadequate because what his model modeled was one descrip­tion of what a cell does, and not what in fact takes place (not even closely) when a cell undergoes reproduction. lf that was not his aim, then the name was inadequate because what the automaton does is to produce another automaton of the same kind at its side through a process of genetic determination only metaphorically similar to what takes place in a cell. Cells do not construct other cells, they just divide into two of the same kind like in the frag­mentation of a crystal.

The transformation of the semantic question about the cognitive operation of the nervaus system into a structural one, brings the problern of cognition within a domain accessible to biology, which has the conceptual and methodological instruments to deal with structural change in living systems. Thus, learning becomes ontogenic adaptation, and the phenomenon of learning a phenomenon of selection of an ontogenic path of structural change through a history of interactions with invariance of organiza­tion in the learning system. ln order to understand what takes place in the nervaus system as a system while undergoing structural change, it is essential to understand the nervaus system as a whole, and to visualize clearly the domain in which its whole­ness takes place. Finally, the view of the nervaus system as a closed network of interacting neurons has another interesting consequence also basic for the understanding of the phenomenon of cognition. This can be expressed as follows: i) if the nervaus system operates as a closed network of interacting neurons, it is apparent to an observer that the ner­vaus system operates only on internal relations, and only through internal relations; ii) an observer exter­nal to the organism can consider the internal states of the neuronal network as representations of the environmental circumstances under which they take place as a result of the interactions of the organism;

and iii), if i) and ii), then the necessary recursion in the operation of the nervaus system as a closed network of interacting neurons appears for an external observer as a recursive operation of the organism on representations of the environment. From all this two additional consequences become apparent to an external observer, namely: i), that everything takes place in the nervaus system within the same phenomenal domain, that is, in the domain of relations of neuronal activities; and ii), that

26

although the nervaus system does not operate upon representations, the conduct of the organism appears as if it did take place in many disjoint phenomenal domains. These consequences, however, can only be fully appreciated if one sees clearly that the wholeness of a composite unity takes place in a metadomain with respect to the operation of its components, which, for me, has been the funda­mental insight that I obtained through my interac­tions with Heinz Von Foerster.

I cannot say much more in this article without going beyond the generosity of the readers, there­fore I shall conclude inviting them to contemplate thre relevant drawings made by my sons to honor Heinz. They are: Autopoiesis, The Tree of Knowl­edge, and Heinz the Magician.

Lastly, I wish to say that I once told Heinz the Magician that I found his understanding of systems so remarkable that I feit that if he had not been a scientist he would have been a Felix Krull. But I also told him that I was more happy that he was a scientist because this permitted me both, to meet him and to admire him freely.

Autopoiesis, by Alejandro M. Maturana.

Wholeness of the Unity

~ ~--.,""

'·J\';\\ I:J} \

\

The tree of knowledge, and Heinz the Magician, by Marcelo M. Maturana.

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Creative Cybernetics

Lars LÖfgren University of Lund

Sweden

The interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and even non-disciplinary characteristics of cybernetics is what makes it a stranghold for non-biased creative thinking about the difficult problems that face us as explaining and planning creatures. At the same time, however, these characteristics make cybernetics a topic that is difficult to fit into any traditional aca­demic organization. ln spite of these difficulties, Heinz Von Foerster succeeded in establishing a live­ly, productive, interdisciplinary group in an academic milieu. He was able to establish the Biological Computer Laboratory, BCL, at the University of lllinois at a time when the University was young in the sense that rigid departmental classifications did not yet exist.

To be sure, Heinz played an active role in the development of cybernetics even before the days of BCL. I am thinking of his work in the Josiah Macy Symposia on Cybernetics in the early 1950's which attempted to stimulate research and to promote effective communication across the departmental walls which tend to isolate the professions and specialties from one another. Heinz edited the pro­ceedings with Margaret Mead and Hans Teuber as assistant editors. The transactions [1] bear the sub­title: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems.

ln the early and late 1960's, when I was a member of BCL, I personally experienced Heinz's stimulating talents. From these periods, I recall in particular how a central cybernetic idea, that of circularity, matured in the lively BCL discussions, and was ob­served in phenomena like self-organization, self­reproduction, self-description, and self-repair. Heinz hinted at circularities by noticing that concepts I ike Observation, description, and explanation cannot really be objective (as a classical thought), but are themsslves subject to Observation, description, and explanation. He developed first order cybernetics as cybernetics of observed systems and second order cybernetics as cybernetics of observing systems, thus suggesting how circularities in description could be unfolded or explained.

Recursive function theory helped the understand­ing of cybernetically established circularities and the links to Turing machine theory and automata theory. Automata models were exhibited with very complex

behaviors, for example, learning automata. The difficult problems that were approached called

for high requirements on the languages used. The dangers of formalizing away essences of cybernetic inquiry was clearly understood. Connections between circularities and paradoxes were developed in attempts to characterize those circularities that could be explained by the process of unfolding, or by consistent axiomatization.

ln this way phenomena such as decision-making and planning have been studied, resulting in degrees of explanatory value. We explain not only for pre­dictability, which makes us decide and plan, because when prediction is impossible, we may plan for Understandability (describability on a higher Ievei), which also may make us decide and plan. The very idea of explaining why we explain indicates a cyber­netic circle, the unfolding of which Ieads into open interdisciplinary processes, creating temporarily sufficient high Ieveis of explanation.

I believe that cybernetics should retain this inde­pendent, interdisciplinary, creative character. Only with this will it have a chance of breaking the barriers that disciplinary subjects erect in their development. Only then will it be possible to apply present-day knowledge to the knowledge process itself to obtain the higher Ievei of knowledge that appears necessary for tomorrow.

The influential, stimulating power behind Heinz Von Foerster's creative work [2] has indeed proved the value of his cybernetic philosophy. I hope that his recent change of platform will make it possible for him to continue his basic research into high order cybernetics, not only as a theoretical exten­sion, but also with applications as a continued high order stimulation of the field.

REFERENCES 1. Von Foerster, H. (editor): Cybernetics. Transac­

tions of the Tenth Conference, April 22-24, 1953. The Josiah Macy Foundation, New York, N.Y.

2. Von Foerster, H. et. al.: The Goileeted Works of the Biological Computer Laboratory. lllinois Blue­print Corporation, 821 Bond, Peoria, IL 61603 (1976).

With Heinz Von Foerster

Edwin Schlossberg Johnson Hili Road

Chester, Mass. 01011

Part One-Parts To recall one calls-to recreate one creates-to

remember one becomes. Where is there a moment when one can call, create, and become fully enough to revive the attitude of wonder and enjoyment necessary in the auspices here organized?

Parts assemble, no continuity-fearing that the sense of continuity is a sense of exclusion fiercely rejected.

Excitement and wonder need no purpose. Teleological descriptions require meta-analysis

which requires a meta-community which requires a meta-meta-analyst.

Heinz Von Foerster-meta-man. Having en-countered, becoming metameta-man. Now-Meta3

man. Being most human one is most invisible being

both the context and content of the process. He is always very interested in eyes. There are

several parts to this interest. One of them is the yes in eyes.

What is memory that it has Heinz's sight? 1 have always been interested to hear him des­

cribe a new aerial photograph of a new paradigm. Even if the groundwork has not been done, he fills the absences with brilliance.

Part Two-Stories Once upon a time there were more than two of

everything. There was the recurrent need to decide which was part of a group and which was not part of a group. The search required not only Observation but the energetic willingness not to assume. Had the groups been Iabeiied too early, the excitement might have waned. Had the total count been an­nounced, the justification would have been demanded. Weather entered and intruded constantly forcing the postponement of exercises unrelated to the intention. Each morning the arrival of the possi· bility dislodged the purpose and caused ripples of derision from those sources uninvolved in the pro­cess. As the climate changed there occurred several very cold days on which the clarity of the air became a model of precision. This did not disturb the progress in any way.

All the clocks were set at varying rates idiosyn-

cratically mechanized. The verbal descriptions of each group were written in a variety of notations none of which alluded to the referent. Games were played in the open areas and the consequence of one groups' activity did not affect the consequence of any other group. This provoked the calling of a general meeting among all the voices to which only one magician attended.

lf the resultant of the process was adjusted to any obvious need the communications channels were obstructed and the laughter emerged. Once the hum of the machines was heard, everyone adjourned to the other room to participate in the metabolics.

On the metaphoric ocean the waves are coming faster than ever and the necessity for descriptions of the groups becomes ever more present. The maps of the areas to be entered upon reflect only the eddying tides and without the numbers necessary for notation. Despite the vastly improved labelling techniques the job performed has only reached to the very fringes of sensibility. Despite the constant request for failure tales, this one ends with the excitement of possibility walking towards the control panels with delight and humor, never positing the purpose as an excuse for ignorance.

A Short Dictionary As. Verb, Being part of. Always. Verb, Non definable construct His. Ver, Description of process embodied in

celebrant. Mind. Verb, Unalterably pursuing the most intricate

and generous explanation. lnsight. Verb, Extraordinary ability to tune to the

needs and thoughts of several generations without distortion.

Part Three -Notes Dear Heinz,

You are the one man I know whose life is the evidence of a celebration no words could duplicate or model.

Sincerely, Edwin Schlossberg

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P.S. I have had a dream over many years and never

had the sleep for it. During this dream there is an idea auction. People get up to the podium and des­cribe what they are thinking about and then the others bid on the ideas as to what they think their worth is. You are the auctioneer and also the one whose ideas bound the process. This is an auction, perhaps it will not be a dream.

Lately a thought occurs over and over. lt involves embarking on the process of creating an intelligent and evolving community of people whose concerns are not to protect their ideas but to share them attempting to make the process of discovery into the process of discovery again rather than the bitter competitive struggle of musical papers that it has become. Your work and the people araund whom and among you have worked are so attractive an example.

I thought of a game which I have been meaning

29

to write to you about. The game involves setting up a new rule-making procedure such that the way player 1 plays determines how player 2 plays and player 3 and so on. Each player making those addi­tions that become the moment. This game only works if there are 238,000 players and they are all the parents of the new children born onto the earth each day.

The end, the success of any set of fine ideas is that they become invisible because they are inte­grated into the flow of thought of the culture. As if the culture were learning to ride a bicycle-once the learning took place, the ideas and instructions could be abandoned, exchanged for the feeling of moving, the wind in one's hair, the muselas extend­ing. lt is difficult, at any moment, to Iet go, to Iet ideas go, wondering if they are invisible because tor­gatten, or because unused, or because they are pul­sating. ln my mind what you have said is invisible and making my fingers move.

Heinz Von Foerster's Gontributions

To The Development of Cybernetics

Kenneth L. Wilson Precision Circuits, lnc. Eatontown, NJ 07724

Heinz Von Foerster has made substantial contri­butions in six major areas: Biological Computers, Self-Organizing Systems, Perception, Memory, Epis­temology, and Ethics. Of course, he also worked out­side these fields and in some cases several of these areas overlapped. Nevertheless, I will try here to outline the major works of Professor Von Foerster in these six areas.

Biological Computers As a member of the early conferences on Cyber­

netics sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, Professor Von Foerster contributed to the formative stages of the discipline that is now called Cyber­netics. He edited the transactions of the five Macy conferences and was responsible for attaching Norbert Weiner's word "Cybernetics" to the confer­ence title "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechan­isms in Biological and Social Systems." lnspired by these conferences, Von Foerster continued his inves­tigations into this new field by creating the Biologi­cal Computer Laboratory and publishing several papers centered around the early Cybernetic concept of biological computers.

ln the early 50's the analogies between the human brain and the infant field of digital computers com­prised a new and unexplored realm. But where did this study belong? Biologists did not study digital computers and electrical engineers did not study biology. Attempts to explain the need for an inter­disciplinary study left university administrators with blank stares.

lnto this void, Von Foerster molded a laboratory for the study of biology and computers: the Biologi ­cal Computer Laboratory. The early work in this laboratory concentrated on establishing links in the analogies between biological systems and digital computer systems. Concept from general systems theory, information theory, and control systems

theory were used to explore and explain the behavior of biological nervous systems. Von Foerster con­tributed to this work with the writing of some basic papers on hemeostasis and bionies (17,23,42,48). * ln all of Von Foerster's work, he attempted to point out new directions for study and thought. Later papers in this area set down some of the basic principles of computation in neural networks (51).

*The numbers refer to the List of Publications of Heinz Von Foerster which follows this article.

Self·Organizing Systems Cybernetics has always been closely aligned with

general systems theory, using many of its concepts in the description of biological and mechanical systems. Of great importance to the cyberneticists is the concept of the self-organizing system. These systems have the peculiar property of generating organized structure from a disorganized universe. Thus, a living system springs from elements in nature which have no organization of themselves. The early cyberneticists noted that living systems are self-organizing systems. Models of simple self­organizing systems could thus be used in describing certain features of living systems.

Professor Von Foerster wrote two major papers which clarify many of the notions of systems theory with respect to cybernetics. ln "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments" (21) Von Foerster shows his classical physics background by pointing out that there is no such thing as a self-organizing system. Such a system would violate the second law of thermodynamics. What is assumed when talking of self-organizing systems is the existence of an environment which provides a pool of energy and organization from which the self-organizing system can draw. Expanding on this concept. Von Foerster describes the relation of entropy to systems which

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Cybernetics Forum

are said to be self-organizing. He gives a lucid treat­ment of Schroedinger's comments on the principles of order and the mechanics of a self-organizing system via Maxwell's demon. To these concepts of order from disorder and order from order, he adds a new concept of order from noise. lt is hypothesized that if elements are constituted in certain manners, the system as a whole can gain order through the injection of noise. A simple example of this behavior is provided by specially magnetized blocks which, when thrown into a box and shaken, form a complex structure.

The second of Von Foerster's writings in systems theory is entitled "Molecular Ethology" (61). This lengthy paper gives a thorough description of finite state machines and their application to cybernetic concepts. He developed a new concept of a finite function machine which provided greater flexibility in describing complex systems. A large section of this paper is devoted to the applications of systems theory in biophysics.

Memory Professor Von Foerster was an early opponent of

cybernetic theorists who tried to make analogies be­tween human memory and the "memory" of a com­puter. The computer makes use of a mass storage system where sequences of binary digits are record­ed and then later retrieved. Human memory is a much more complex mechanism.

ln several major papers (47,52,59,63) Professor Von Foerster approaches the problern of memory as a process of cognition. Memory must be understood as an integral part of thinking, reasoning and per­ception. ln a digital computer two kinds of memory can be clearly distinguished by their difference in structure and in function; namely, the storage sys­tem and the program. As Von Foerster points out, "Unfortunately, some anthropomorphically inclined quipsters have dubbed the storage system "memory", and henceforth some naive psycholo­gists-and, alas, some neurophysiologists-who be­lieved the engineers to know what they were talking about, kept looking for analogues of magnetic tapes, discs, cores and drums within the nervous system." Von Foerster proposes that human memory is more akin to the changing of a computer's program. "Memory" is the network itself and a particular memory is generated from the network's structure.

This view rejects assertion that memory is similar to the storage system of a computer. "At issue is an important property of the functioning of our ner­vous system. We call it "memory." ln looking for mechanisms that can be made responsible for this property, I strongly suggested that we not Iook upon this system as if it were a recording device. lnstead I have proposed looking at this system as if it were a computer whose internal organization changes as a result of its interaction with an environment that

31

possesses some order. The changes of the internal organization of this computer take place in such a way that some constraints in the environment which are responsible for its orderliness are mapped into the computer's structure. This homomorphism "envi­ronment-system" reveals itself as "memory" and permits the system to function as an inductive inference computer. States of the environment which are, so to say, "incompatible with the laws of nature" are also incompatible with output states of the computer."

Von Foerster attacks the theory of memory as a storage type of mechanism in three ways. First, he shows that the amount of information that comes into the brain through the eyes, ears, nose, etc., is much larger than even the number of molecules in the brain. This type of storage memory would be filled up in a short time. Further, he shows that the number of possible networks of Connections in the brain is a much larger number. This would argue for the network approach. Secondly, Von Foerster points out that memory as we experience it is not at all like a recording device. For example, suppose I were to take a black box with me to the symphony and then bring it home. lf I inquired of it at breakfast the next morning what it heard, it might give two very different answers. lf it had stored the informa­tion of the symphony, I would get an exact, or close to exact, repeat of the symphony. This is something like a tape recorder, a storage mechanism. On the other hand, if the box spoke to me and said that it had heard a very nice rendition of Beethovan's fifth symphony and that the horn section was lousy I might suspect that my black box contained a mid­get who had listened to the symphony and was now saying something about his memory of that symphony. Thirdly, the proposition that memory is akin to the storage system of a computer begs the question of "who is looking." That is, what is the nature of the entity that is looking at all this stored information and making sense of it. The concept of the holographic memory is particularly susceptible to this criticism. This theory, and similar storage type theories of memory, do not deal with the prob­lems of determining the nature of the demon run­ning around in the head that is looking at this stored information, interpreting it, and acting upon it.

Problems of Perception Professor Von Foerster was one of the first to

apply the techniques of cybernetics to the problems of perception. ln the papers dealing with perception (42,44,65) Von Foerster investigates the mechanics of perception from a biological and theoretical view­point. He analyzes the possible functioning of neurons in a network such that computations which are done by that network could be called perception. Some of the first neural receptor models were cre-

32

ated at the Biological Computer Laboratory under the direction of Professor Von Foerster. Though this field of study has now gone far past these early studies, Von Foerster's work in this area is funda· mental in linking neurophysiology with automata theory.

Epistemology Some of Professor Von Foerster's most important

work is in the area of epistemology. The first of his three major papers (63,75,77) "Thoughts and Notes on Cognition," is an overview of epistemological considerations that affect an organism and its envi­ronment. The relationship between the "sensorium" and the "motorium" of an organism is investigated with some elementary mathematical models such that basic Statements can be made about the organism in an environment. The second work, "An Epistemology for Living Things," contains the frame­work for a new epistemological system. This system draws heavily on the work of Humberto Maturana and Ludwig Whittgenstein. The third work, "On Con­structing a Reality", proposes that "The environment as we perceive it is our invention." Von Foerster presents evidence that cognition is a continuously recursive computation of descriptions of reality. He then shows that the recursive computations of des­criptions are computations of further descriptions and the term "reality" need not enter into the matter. And since descriptions are a form of compu­tation, cognition is thus the recursive computation of computations of computations.

Development of Cybernetics

Ethics The scientific work of Professor Von Foerster is

never far from his ethics (72,78,86). He has always been of the opinion that cyberneticians should prac­tice cybernetics. A capsulation of his thoughts on ethics is found in a beautifully written paper entitled "Perception of the Future and the Future of Percep­tion" (73). For an abstract to this paper Professor Von Foerster chose the following quote from Herbert Brun: "The definition of a problern and the action taken to solve it largely depend on the view which the individuals or groups that discovered the prob­lern have of the system to which it refers. A prob­lern may thus find itself defined as a badly inter­preted output, or as a faulty output of a faulty out­put device, or as a faulty output due to a mal­function in an otherwise faultlass system, or as a correct but undesired output from a faultlass and thus undesirable system. All definitions but the last suggest corrective action; only the last definition suggests change, and so presents an unsolvable problern to anyone opposed to change." Von Foerster follows this quote with the following para­graph: "Truisms have the disadvantage that by dull­ing the senses they obscure the truth . Almost no­body will become alarmed when told that in times of continuity the future equals the past. Only a few will become aware that from this follows that in times of socio-cultural change the future will not be like the past. Moreover with a future not clearly per­ceived , we do not know how to act. With only one certainty left, if we don't act ourselves, we shall be acted upon. Thus, if we wish to be subjects rather than objects, what we see now, that is, our percep­tion, must be foresight rather than hindsight."

List of Publications by

Heinz Von Foerster

1. "Uber das Leistungsproblem beim Klystron", Ber. Lilienthai Ges. Luftfahrtforschung, 155, 1-5 (1943).

2. Das Gedachtnis: Eine quantenmechanische Untersuchung, F. Deuticke, Vienna, 40 pp. (1948).

3. Cybernetics: Transactions of the Sixth Confer­ence (ed.), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York, 202 pp. (1949).

4. "Quantum Mechanical Theory of Memory", Cybernetics: Transactions of the Sixth Confer­ence, H. Von Foerster (ed.), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York, pp. 112-145 (1949).

5. With Margaret Mead and H.L Teuber, Cyber­netics: Transactions of the Seventh Conference (eds.), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York, 251 pp. (1950).

6. With Margaret Mead and H.L Teuber, cyber­netics: Transactions of the Eighth Conference (eds.), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York, 240 pp. (1951).

7. With M.L Babcock and D.F. Holshouser, "Diode Characteristic of a Hollow Cathode", Phys. Rev., 91, 755 (1953).

8. With Margaret Mead and H.L Teuber, Cyber­netics: Transactions of the Ninth Conference (eds.), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York, 184 pp. (1953).

9. With E.W. Ernst, "Eiectron Bunches of Short Time Duration", J. of Applied Phys., 25, 674 (1954).

10. With LR. Bloom, "Ultra-High Frequency Beam Analyzer", Rev. of Sei. lnst., 25, 640-653 (1954).

11. "Experiment in Popularization," Nature, 174, 4424, London (1954).

12. With Margaret Mead and H.L Teuber, Cyber­netics: Transactions of the Tenth Conference (eds.), Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, New York, 100 pp. (1955).

13. With O.T. Purl, "Velocity Spectrography of Elec­tron Dynamics in the Traveling Field", Journ. of App/. Phys., 26, 351-353 (1955).

14. With E.W. Ernst, "Time Dispersion of Secondary Electron Emission", Journ. of Appl. Phys., 26, 781-782 (1955).

15. With M. Weinstein, "Space Charge Effects in Dense, Velocity Modulated Electron Beams", Journ. of Applied Phys., 27, 344-346 (1956).

16. With E.W. Ernst, O.T. Purl, M. Weinstein. "Oscillographie analyse d'un faisceau hyperfre­quences", LE V/OE, 70, 341-351 (1957).

17. "Basic Concepts of Hemeostasis", Homeostatic Mechanisms, Upton, New York, pp. 216-242 (1958).

18. "Some Aspects in the Design of Biological Computers", The 2nd International Congress on Cybernetics, Association International de Cyber­netique; Namur, 240-255 (1958).

19. With G. Brecher and E.P. Cronkite, "Production, Ausreifung und Lebensdauer der Leukozyten", Physiologie und Physiopathologie der weissen Blutzellen, H. Braunsteiner (ed.), George Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart, pp. 188-214 (1959).

20. "Some Remarks on Changing Populations", The Kinetics of Gellu/ar Proliferation, F. Stohlman Jr. (ed.), Grune and Stratton, New York, pp. 382-407 (1959).

21 . "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environ­ments", Se/f-Organizing Systems, M.C. Yovits and S. Cameron (eds.), Pergarnon Press, London, pp. 31-50 (1960).

22. With P.M. Mora and LW. Amiot, "Doomsday: Friday, November 13, AD 2026", Science, 132, 1291-1295 (1960).

23. "Bionics", Bionies Symposium, Wright Air Development Division, Technical Report 60-600, J. Steele (ed.), pp. 1-4 (1960).

24. "Some Aspects in the Design of Biological Computers", in Sec. Inter. Congress on Cyber­netics, Namur, pp. 241-255 (1960).

25. With G. Pask, "A Predictive Model for Self­Organizing Systems", Part 1: Cybernetica, 3, pp. 258-300; Part II: Cybernetica, 4, pp. 20-55 (1961).

26. With P.M. Mora and LW. Amiot, "Doomsday", Science, 133, 936-946 (1961).

27. With D.F. Holshouser and G.L Clark, "Micro­wave Modulation of Light Using the Kerr Effect", Journ. Opt. Soc. Amer., 51, 1360-1365 (1961).

28. With P.M. Mora and LW. Amiot, "Population Density and Growth", Science, 133, 1931-1937 (1961).

29. With G. Brecher and E.P. Cronkite, "Production, Differentiation and Lifespan of Leukocytes", The Physiology and Pathology of Leukocytes,

34

H. Braunsteiner (ed.), Grune & Stratton, New York, pp. 170-195 (1962).

30. With G.W. Zopf, Jr., Principles of Self-Organiza­tion: The 11/inois Symposium on Theory and Technology of Self-Organizing Systems (eds.), Pergarnon Press, London, 526 pp. (1962).

31. "Preface" in Principles of Self-Organization: Transcripts of the University of lllinois Sym­posium on Self-Organization, Pergarnon Press; London, vii-xi (1962).

32. "Communication Amongst Automata", Amer. Journ. Psychiatry, 118, 865-871 (1962).

33. With P.M. Mora and LW. Amiot, " 'Projections' vs. 'Forecasts' in Human Population Studies", Science, 136, 173-174 (1962).

34. "Biological ldeas for the Engineer", The New Scientist, 15, 173-17 4 (1962).

35. "Bio-Logie", Biological Prototypes and Synthe­tic Systems, E.E. Bernard and M.A. Kare (eds.), Plenum Press, New York, pp. 1-12 (1962).

36. "Circuitry of Clues of Platonic Ideation", Aspects of the Theory of Artificial lntelligence, C.A. Muses (ed.), Plenum Press, New York, pp. 43-82 (1962).

37. "Perception of Form in Biological and Man­Made Systems", Trans. I.D.E.A. Symp., E.J. Zagorski (ed.), University of lllinois, Urbana, pp. 10-37 (1962).

38. With W.R. Ashby and C.C. Walker, "lnstability of Pulse Activity in a Net with Threshold", Nature, 196, 561-562 (1962).

39. "Bionics", McGraw-Hi/1 Yearbook Science and Technology, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp. 148-151 (1963).

40. "Logical Structure of Environment and its Inter­na! Representation", Trans. Internat'/ Design Conf. Aspen. R.E. Eckerstrom (ed.), H. Miller, lnc., Zeeland, Mich., pp. 27-38 (1963).

41. With W.R. Ashby and C.C. Walker, "The Essen­tial lnstability of Systems with Threshold, and Some Possible Applications to Psychiatry", Nerve, Brain and Memory Models, N. Wiener and J.P. Schade (eds.), Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 236-243 (1963).

42. "Molecular Bionics", Information Processing by Living Organisms and Machines, H.L. Oestreicher (ed.), Aerospace Medical Division, Dayton, pp. 161-190 (1964).

43. With W.R. Ashby, "Biological Computers", Bio­astronautics, K.E. Schaefer (ed.), The Macmillan Co., New York, pp. 333-360 (1964).

44. "Form: Perception, Representation and Symbol­ization", Form and Meaning, N. Perman (ed.), Soc. Typographie Arts, Chicago, pp. 21-54 (1964).

45. "Structural Models of Functional lnteractions", Information Processing in the Nervaus System, R.W. Gerard and J.W. Duyff (eds.), Excerpta Medica Foundation, Amsterdam, The Nether­lands, pp. 370-383 (1964).

List of Publications

46. "Physics and Anthropology", Current Anthro­pology, 5, 330-331 (1964).

47. "Memory without Record", The Anatomy of Memory, D.P. Kimble (ed.), Science and Be· havior Books, Palo Alto, pp. 388-433 (1965).

48. "Bionics Principles", Bionics, R.A. Willaume (ed.), AGARD, Paris, pp. 1-12 (1965).

49. "From Stimulus to Symbol", Sign, Image, Symbol, G. Kepes (ed.), George Braziller, New York, pp. 42-61 (1966).

50. "Computers in Mucis", Datamation, Val. 12 (10), 106-111 (1966).

51. "Computation in Neural Nets", Currents Mod. Bio/., 1, 47-93 (1967).

52. "Time and Memory", lnterdisciplinary Perspec­tives of Time, R. Fischer (ed.), New York Aca· demy of Sciences, New York, pp. 866-873 (1967).

53. With G. Gunther, "The Logical Structure of Evo­lution and Emanation", /nterdisciplinary Per­spectives of Time, R. Fischer (ed.), New York Academy of Sciences, New York, pp. 874-891 (1967).

54. "Biological Principles of Information Storage and Retrieval", Electronic Handling of Informa­tion: Testing and Evaluation, Allen Kent et al. (eds.), Academic Press, London, pp. 123-147 (1967).

55. With A. Inselberg and P. Weston, "Memory and lnductive lnference", Cybernetic Problems in Bionics, Proceedings of Bionies 1966, H. Oestreicher and D. Moore (eds,), Gordon & Breach, New York, pp. 31-68 (1968).

56. With J. White, L. Peterson and J. Russell, Pur· posive Systems, Proceedings of the 1st Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cyber­netics (eds.), Spartan Books, New York, 179 pp. (1968).

57. With J.W. Beauchamp, Music by Computers (eds.), John Wiley & Sons, New York, 139 pp. (1969).

58. "Sounds and Music", Music by Computers, H. Von Foerster and J.W. Beauchamp (eds.), John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 3-10 (1969).

59. "What is Memory that it May have Hindsight and Foresight as Weil?", The Future of the Brain Sciences, Proceedings of a Conference held at the New York Academy of Medicine, S. Bogach (ed.), Plenum Press, New York, pp. 19-64 (1969).

60. "Laws of Form", (Book Review of Laws of Form, G. Spencer Brown), Whole Earth Catalog, Portola Institute; Palo Alto, California, 14, (Spring 1969).

61. "Molecular Ethology, An lmmodest Proposal for Semantic Clarification", Molecu/ar Mecha· nisms in Memory and Learning, S. Bogach (ed.), Plenum Press, New York, pp. 213-248 (1970).

62. With A. Inselberg, "A Mathematical Model of the Basilar Membrane", Mathematical Bio­sciences, 7, pp. 341-363, (1970).

Cybernetics Forum

63. "Thoughts and Notes on Cognition", Cognition: A Multiple View, P. Garvin (ed.), Spartan Books, New York, pp. 25-48 (1970).

64. "Bionics, Critique and Outlook", Principles and Practice of Bionics, H.E. von Gierke, W.D. Keidel and H.L. Oestreicher (eds.), Technivision Service, Slough, pp. 467-473 (1970).

65. "Embodiments of Mind" (Book Review of Em­bodiments of Mind, Warren S. McCulloch), Com­puter Studies in the Humanities and Verbal Behavior, 111 (2), pp. 111-112 (1970).

66. With L. Peterson, "Cybernetics of Taxation: The Optimization of Economic Participation", Journal of Cybernetics, 1 (2), pp. 5-22 (1970).

67. "Obituary for Warren S. McCulloch", ASC News/etter, 3, (1), (1970).

68. "Computing in the Semantic Domain", Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 184, 239-241' (1971 ).

69. "Preface" in Shape of Community by S. Cher­mayeff and A. Tzonis, Penguin Books, Salti­more, p. xvii-xxi (1971).

70. Interpersonal Relational Networks (ed.); CIDOC Cuaderno No. 1014, Centro lntercultural de Doc­umentacion, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 139 pp. (1971).

71. "Technology: What Will lt Mean to Librarians?" 11/inois Libraries, 53, (9), 785-803 (1971).

72. "Responsibilities of Competence", Journal of Cybernetics, 2, (2) 1-6 (1972).

73. "Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception", lnstructional Science, Vol. 1 (1), 31-43 (1972).

74. With P.E. Weston, "Artificial lntelligence and Machines that Understand", Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, H. Eyring, C.J. Christensen, H.S. Johnston (eds.), Annual Reviews, lnc.; Palo Alto, pp. 353-378 (1973).

75. "On Constructi ng a Real ity", Environmental Design Research, Vol. 2, F.E. Preiser (ed.), Dowdon, Hutchinson &Ross; Stroudberg, pp. 35-46 (1973).

76. With P. Arnold, B. Alton, D. Rosenfeld, K. Saxena, "Diversity: H-A Measure Complement­ing Uncertainty H", SYSTEMA, No. 2, January 1974.

77. "Notes pour un epistemologie des objets vivants", in L'unite de l'homme, Edgar Morin and Massimo Piatelli-Palmerini (eds.), Edition du Seuil; Paris, 401-417 (1974).

78. "Giving with a Purpose: The Cybernetics of Philanthropy", Occasional Paper No. 5, Center for a Voluntary Society, Washington, D.C., 19 pp. (1974).

35

79. "Kybernetik einer Erkenntnistheorie", Kybernetic und Bionik, W.D. Keidel, W. Handler & M. Spring (eds.), Oldenburg; Munich, p. 27-46, (1974).

80. "Epilogue to Afterwords", After Brockman: A Symposium, ABYSS, 4, 68-69 (1974).

81. With R. Howe, "Cybernetics in lllinois" (Part One), Forum, 6, (3), 15-17 (1974); (Part Two), Forum, 6, (4), 22-28 (1974).

82. "Culture and Biological Man" (Book Review of Culture and Biological Man, by Elliot D. Chap­ple), Current Anthropology, 15, (1), 61 (1974).

83. With R. Howe, "lntroductory Comments to Fran­cisco Varela's Calculus for Self-Reference", lnt. J. General Systems, 2, 1-3 (1975).

84. "Two Cybernetics Frontiers" (Book Review of Two Cybernetics Frontiers by Stewart Brand) The Co-Evolutionary Quarterly, 2, (Summer), 143 (1975)_

85. "Oops; Gaia's Cybernetics Badly Expressed", The Co-Evolution Quarterly, 2, (Fall), 51 (1975).

86. "The Needs of Perception for the Perception of Needs", American Institute of Architects, Altan­ta, 1975 (BCL Fiche #105/6).

87. "La Percapeion de Futuro y el Futuro de Per­cepcion" Communicacion, Barcelona (1975).

88. "Sobre Sistemas Autoorganizados y sus Contor­nos", Epistemologia de Ia Comunicacion, Juan Antonio Bofil (ed.), Fernando Torres, Valencia, p. 187-214 (1976).

89. "Objects: Tokens for (Eigen)-Behaviors", ASC Cybernetics Forum, VIII (3,4) 91-96 (1976).

90. "Formalisation de Certains Aspects de I'Equili­bration de Structures Cognitives", Epistemolo­gie Genetique et Equilibration", B. lnhelder, R. Garcias and J. Voneche (eds.), Delachaux et Niestle, Neuchatel, p. 76-89 (1977).

91. "Second Order Concepts: An Elliptical Parabel of Circular Causality", General Systems Bulletin, 7, (2), 7-11 Winter 1977).

92. "The Curious Behavior of Complex Systems: Lessons from Biology", Futures Research, H.A. Unstone and W.H.C. Simmonds (eds.), Addison­Wesley, Reading, p. 104-113, (1977).

93. "On 'Where Do We Go From Here?", Proceed­ings of the International Symposium on the History and Philosophy of Technology, G. Bugliarello (ed.), University of lllinois Press (1978).

94. "Cybernetics of Cybernetics", Communication and Control in Society, K. Krippendorf (ed.) Gordon & Breach, New York, p. 1-4 (1978).

The Work of Visiting Cyberneticians in the

Biological Computer Labaratory

Kenneth L. Wilson Precision Circuits, lnc. Eatontown, NJ 07724

Three years ago Heinz Von Foerster retired from the University of lllinois. With his departure, the Biological Computer Labaratory (BCL) closed its doors as a functional Iab at the University. For two decades Von Foerster and the BCL strongly pro­moted the development of traditional cybernetics, and generated many new, exciting ideas which further stimulated interest in cybernetics. *

The following section attempts to give a brief overview of the work done at BCL.

Living organisms perpetually compute through their sensory inputs complex abstractions, relations, and decisions in order to determine the appropriate actions which will allow them to survive in a hostile and capricious environment. They leave the naive task of computing sums, products, differences, frac­tions, square roots, log tables, Sessel functions, etc., to machines, for their nervaus systems are busy solving much more sophisticated computational problems: for instance, identifying quickly and relia· bly whether entities in their environment are desirable or dangerous, predicting within a certain degree of confidence the future behavior of these entities once identified and, ultimately, reacting, interacting and relating to these entities once they are identified and understood. Of course, from a philosophical point of view the problems of identifi· cation and of prediction have the same root, since identifying an object means essentially predicting the invariance of some of its properties over some period of time. However, identification and prediction are meaningful only if what is being identified and predicted is significant for the maintenance of the integrity of the organism who interacts with these entities. Today, during the "information explosion" in which we are ever more forced to process infor­mation generated and absorbed by man, a question arises: "How have living organisms solved this prob· lern of gathering, processing and utilizing informa·

* The Goileeted Works of the Biological Computer Laboratory, Kenneth L. Wilson (ed.), The lllinois Blue­print Co., 1976.

tion which, when necessary, may be communicated via signs or symbols to other organisms of the same or different kind?"

The Biological Computer Labaratory (BCL) of the University of lllinois was founded in 1957 to address precisely this question. BCL's main lines of research have been to explore the principles of computation in living organisms, to establish the structural and functional organization of such "biological Compu­ters," and to utilize this knowledge in the design and construction of cognitive systems, conversant systems, inductive inference machines, etc. Research has been conducted on almost all Ieveis of inquiry, from studies in epistemology, logic, linguistics, mathematics, neurophysiology, etc., to computer sim· ulations, speech recognition and other electronic in· formation systems. The senior members of the group carried joint appointments with various departments of the University, and the graduate students who participated in these studies majored in fields that range from philosophy, psychology, and linguistics to physics and electrical engineering.

Among the cyberneticists who worked with Von Foerster in the BCL were W. Ross Ashby, Gotthard Gunther, Lars Lofgren, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, and Paul Weston. The following paragraphs give a descriptive picture of the work done by each of these people.

W. R. Ashby W. Ross Ashby was the originator of cybernetics

as it is known today. He provided an interpretation of Shannon's information theory in terms of the theory of sets as developed by N. Bourbalse. Thus he was able to bring the entire and powerful appara­tus of modern set theory to bear upon the definition and analysis of systems information transfer and regulation (1 ,2,3). He provided an information-theo­retical interpretation of the concepts of model and modelling, and with Roger Conant proved the theorem that "every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system" (4,5). Ashby

Cybernetics Forum

showed that the propositions of information theory were equivalent to proportians concerning certain functions of partitions of integers: i.e. if you can count, you can be a cyberneticist.

As a result of this work in systems and informa­tion theory, Ashby was able to contribute major papers in the areas of System Stability (6,7) and Many Dimensional Relations (8,9). The importance of Ashby's early work in cybernetics is widely recog­nized. The importance of these later works is only now becoming weil known.

Gotthard GÜnther Classical logic is based on a monothematic

ontology which specifies what can be studied by science. Objects and thus materiality can be known while subjectivity, being the immaterial aspects of a system, must be objectified before it can be studied. Monothematic ontology must therefore stipulate the notion of the transeendental soul in a dichotomy between thought (soul) and being (matter).ln light of Ashby's statement that Cybernetics is the study of the immaterial aspects of systems, classical logic presents a fundamental descriptive weakness for the study of Cybernetics. Gotthard GÜnther proposes an interpretation of transclassical logic using a polythe­matic ontology to give a structural basis for object qua object and subject qua subject as weil as object qua subject (10,11,12,13,14). ln a polythematic ontology there are no attributes of the object with­out the subject and no attributes of the subject without the object. The object is discontextual with regard to the subject and vice versa, where context­ual refers to the non-reducibility of subject and object by an excluded third. A more than two-valued logic allows us in speaking about descriptions to grasp the indefinite recursion of seit reflexivity.

Lars Löfgren

Lars LÖfgren approaches the problems associated with a theory of description (15) and of explanation (16) by the axiomatic systems of automata theory. There is a similarity between the concepts of repro­duction and explanation which implies a similarity between the less weil understood concepts of com­plete self-reproduction and complete self-explanation (17). LÖfgren shows these latter concepts to be independent from ordinary logical-mathematical-bio­logical reasoning, and in a special form, complete self-reproduction is shown to be axiomatizable (18). lnvolved is the question, previously argued by Wittgenstein, of whether or not there exists a func­tion that belongs to its own domain. Complete self­reproduction is primarily of interest in connection with formal theories of evolution. The importance of Löfgren's work also lies in the mathematical machinery necessary for modeling self-reflective and

37

completely closed systems (19) (see also L. Peterson (20 and 21)).

Humberto R. Maturana Humberto Maturana of the University of Chile and

BCL has written fundamental works on the implica­tions of biology on cognition. Maturana, in Biology of Cognition (22) and Neurophysiology of Cognition (23), presents an epistemological theory of the Ob­server as a living system and the living system as a closed network of interactions. This closed systems concept is in Opposition to current biological thought and makes possible a concise theory of cognition and associated phenomena. Maturana clarifies this concept in a book on the organization of living things (23,24). He shows that all the phe­nomenology associated with living organisms arises from a closed circular organization. Maturana also recognizes the sociological implications of these theories (25). His work gives the biological basis for a unified philosophy of cognition and living systems.

Gordon Pask Gordon Pask has combined the concepts of self­

referential systems and systems modeling to synthe­size new system formulations (26,27) and apply them in "teaching-learning machines". More recently, Pask has developed a theory of conversation which can be modeled and used in conversational teaching systems (28). The theory of conversation makes a distinction between "material individuals" and "psy­chological individuals" in order to model the process of topic-concept-memory formation in a conversation between one or more subjects. The object language used to explain topics and concepts is distinguished from the meta-language used to discuss how the object language is being used. Conversation is treated as a self-organizing system with an arbitrary distinction between teacher and student. Pask has made use of the Gunther-type logic system to model dialag with a true "dialogic".

Paul Weston Paul Weston has developed a new and powerful

data structuring concept called "Cylinders" (29). This structuring method makes possible very fast and efficient relational data bases necessary for dealing with the subtleties of language. Weston has also done fundamental work in the field of natural language computation which he and Von Foerster have aptly termed "Computing in the Semantic Domain" (30). Additionally, Paul Weston has written several papers on the philosophical and practical aspects of machines which can understand (31 ,32,33).

38

First on the Iist of additional people who should be mentioned as playing important parts at BCL is Herbert Brun. A professor of composition at the School of Music at the University of lllinois, Herbert Brun was a constant source of new ideas and valu­able criticism. Through Professor Brun, BCL main­tained an important link to the creative arts. This link gave BCL an interesting perspective on itself and on science.

Stafford Beer, though never in residence at BCL, provided BCL with its link to the operations research side of cybernetics. His work was studied diligently at BCL and his all too infrequent trips to BCL were important events in its history.

Francisco Varela, coworker for many years with Humberto Maturana, added mathematical innovation to some of the biological concepts evolved at BCL. His input into BCL in the latter years provided a needed stimulus for rethinking the work of Gunther and Maturana.

The students of Heinz Von Foerster and BCL are too numerous to mention here. Much of their work is included in The Goileeted Works of the Biological Computer Laboratory. Others, who are not included in that volume, may at times in the future express their ties to BCL. lt is certain that they share with this author an intense gratitude for the opportunity of studying with Heinz Von Foerster and his col­leagues at BCL.

REFERENCES 1. Ashby, W.R.: "Measuring the Interna! lnforma­

tional Exchange in a System", Cybernetica, 8, 5-22 (1965).

2. Ashby, W.R.: "Some Consequences of Bremer­mann's Limit for lnformation-Processing Sys­tems" in Cybernetic Problems in Bionics, H. Oestreicher & D. Moore (eds.), Gordon & Breach Science Publishers; New York, 69-76 (1968).

3. Ashby, W.R.: "Information Flows Within Co­ordinated Systems", International Congress of Cybernetics, J. Rose (ed.), London, 57-64 (1969).

4. Ashby, W.R.: "Requisite Variety and lts lmplica­tions for the Control of Camplex Systems," Cybernetica, /, (2) 83-99 (1958).

5. Ashby, W.R. and R. Conant: "Every Good Regu­lator of a System Must Be a Model of that System", lnt. J. Systems Sei., 1, 89-97 (1970).

6. Ashby, W.R., H. Von Foerster & C.C. Walker: "lnstability of Pulse Activity in a Net with Threshold", Nature, 196, 561-562 (1962).

7. Gardner, M.R. & W.R. Ashby: "Connectance of Large Dynamic (Cybernetic) Systems: Critical Values for Stability", Nature, 228, 784 (1970).

8. Ashby, W.R. & H. Von Foerster: "Biological Computers" in Bioastronautics, K.E. Schaefer (ed.), The Macmillan Co.; New York, 333-360 (1964).

Work of Visiting Cyberneticians

9. Madden, R.F. & W.R. Ashby: "The ldentification of Many-Dimensional Relations", lnt. J. Systems Sei., 3, (4) 343-356 (1972).

10. Gunther, G.: "Cybernetic Ontology and Trans­junctional Operations" in Self-Organizing Sys· tems, M.C. Yovits et al (eds.), Spartan Books; Washington, D.C., 313-392 (1962).

11. Gunther, G.: "Time, Timeless Logic and Self­Referential Systems" in lnterdisciplinary Per­spectives of Time, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 138, (2) R. Fisher (ed.), New York Academy of Sciences; New York, 396· 406 (1967).

12. Gunther, G. & H. Von Foerster: "The Logical Structure of Evolution and Emanation" in lnter­disciplinary Perspectives of Time, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 138 (2), New York Academy of Sciences; New York, 874-891 (1967).

13. Gunther, G.: "Many-Valued Designations and a Hierarchy of First Order Ontologies" in Proc. of the 14th Internat'/ Congress of Philosophy, 111, L. Gabriel (ed.), Herder; Vienna, 37-44 (1969).

14. Gunther, G.: "Natural Numbers in Trans-Ciassic Systems", (Parto I & II), Journal of Cybernetics, 1, (2) and 1, (3) 23-33, 50-62, (1971).

15. Lofgren, L.: "Recognition of Order and Evolu­tionary System" in Computer and Information Seiences II, J. Tou (ed.), Academic Press; New York, 165-175 (1967).

16. Lofgren, L.: "An Axiomatic Explanation of Com· plete Self-Reproduction", Bull. Math. Biophys., 30, 415-425 (1968).

17. Lofgren, L.: "Self-Repair as a Computability Concept", Proc. Symp. on Math. Theory of Automata, Polytechnic lnstit. of Brooklyn; New York, 205-222 (1962).

18. op. cit., "An Axiomatic Explanation of Complete Self-Reproduction".

19. B.C.L. Staff: Accomplishment Summary 1966167 of the Biological Computer Labaratory for the Period 1 June 1966-31 April 1967, 126 pp.; 1967.

20. Peterson, Larry J.: The Recursive Nature of Des· criptions: A Fixed Point, Ph.D. Thesis, Depart· ment of Computer Science, University of llli· nois; Urbana, 106 pp. + 'Vitae (1974).

21. Maturana, H.: Biology of Cognition, 95 pp.; 1970.

22. Maturana, H.: "Neurophysiology of Cognition" in Cognition: A Multiple View, P. Garvin (ed.), Spartan Books; New York, 3-23 (1970).

23. Varela, F.G., Maturana, H.R., and Uribe, R.: Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Sys· tems, its Characterization and a Model", Bio· systems, 5 (4), 187-196 (1974).

24. Maturana, H. and F. Varela: Autopoietic Sys· tems: A Characterization of the Living Organiza· tion, BCL, University of lllinois, Urbana, BCL Report #9.4, 107 pp. (1975).

25. Maturana, H.: "Representation and Communica· tion Functions" in Encyclopedia Pleiade, J.

Cybernetics Forum

Piaget (ed.) 1978. 26. Von Foerster, H. & G. Pask: "A Predictive

Model for Self-Organizing Systems", Cyberneti­ca, 3, 258-300 (1960) and 4, 20-55 (1961).

27. Pask, G.: "The Meani.ng of Cybernetics in the Behavioural Seiences (The Cybernetics of Be­haviour and Cognition: Extending the Meaning of "Goal")" in Progress of Cybernetics, Vol. 1, J. Rose (ed.), Gordon and Breach; New York, 15-44 (1969).

28. Pask, G.: Conversation, Cognition and Learning. Elsevier, 1975.

29. Weston, P.E.: Gy/inders: A Relational Data Structure, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Elec­trical Engineering, University of lllinois; Urbana, 77 pp. (1970).

39

30. Weston, P.E.: "To Uncover; To Deduce; To Con­clude", Computer Studies in the Humanities and Verbal Behavior, 3 (2) 77-89 (1970).

31. Von Foerster, H., A. Inselberg & P. Weston: "Memory and lnductive lnference" in Bionies Symposium 1966: Cybernetic Problems in Bionics, H. Oestreicher & D. Moore (eds.), Gordon and Breach Science Publishers; New York, 31-68 (1968).

32. Weston, P.E. and S.M. Taylor: "Cylinders: A Re-lational Data Structure", ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 6, (2), 398-416 (1971 ).

33. Weston, P.E. & H. Von Foerster: "Artificial ln­telligence and Machines That Understand", An­nual Review of Physical Chemistry, Vol. 24, H. Eyring, C.J. Christensen & H.S. Johnston (eds.), Annual Reviews lnc.; Palo Alto, 353-378 (1973).

About the Authors

STAFFORD BEER Stafford Beer is a part-time Professor of Cybernetics at Manchester University and also works as a consultant in managerial cybernetics. He has worked for many large organizations, twelve governments, and interna­tional organizations such as the UN, UNESCO, and OECD. He has also held full­time managerial posts in various senior roles. He is a past president of the Oparational Research Society (Great Britain) and of the Society for General Sys­tems Research (USA). He holds the Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society of America and was the first recipient of the McCulloch Memorial Award of the American Society for Cybernetics. He has held many committee appointments, including ten years on the General Advisory Council of the BBC, and ~welve years on the United Kingdom Auto­mation Council.

Stafford Beer has published some two hundred items, and has just completed his eighth book, The Heart of Enterprise, published 1979, by John Wiley. He lives very quietly in a remote cottage in the hills of Wales.

.. LARS LOFGREN Lars Lofgren was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1925. He received his master's de­gree in 1949, "licentiat" in 1954, and the degree of Ph.D. in mathematics in 1962, all from Kungliga Tekniska Hogskolan in Stockholm.

ln 1959-61 he worked with the Biological Computer Group at the University of lllinois, Urbana. Since 1963 he has been Professor at the Department of Automata and General Systems Seiences at the University of Lund, Sweden. ln 1966-68 he revisited the Biological Computer Group at the University of lllinois as a Visiting Associate Professor.

HUMBERTO R. MATURANA Dr. Maturana received his Ph.D. IN Biology at Harvard University in 1959. He worked as a research associate at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1958 to 1960. From 1961 on he has been a research as­sociate at the Department of Biology and Genetics at the Medical School of the Uni­versity of Chile in Santiago. ln 1965 he was named Professor of Biology on the Faculty of Seiences at the University of Chile. He is currently teaching and doing research at that University.

During the past 10 years Professor Maturana also has been a Visiting Professor and Lecturer in both the United States and West Germany.

GORDON PASK Dr. Pask is a co-founder and Director of Research at Sys­tem Research Ltd. at Rich­mond in Surrey, and is also Professor of Cybernetics at Brunel University and at the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open Uni­versity. He is President of the Cybernetic Society, Lon­don and is past president (1974) of the Society for General Systems Research, remaining on the panel of "Distinguished Advisors". He was also elected an honorary member of the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies.

Dr. Pask is on the Editorial Boards of "lnstruc· tional Science", "Policy Analysis and System Sei· ence", "Behavioural Science", and "International Journal of Man Machine Studies". He has served as visiting professor at the Universities of Mexico, lllinois, Oregon, and at the Georgia Institute of Tech­nology, and occasionally serves as consultant to or committee member of various international organiza· tions. He lives in Richmond, Surrey, with his wife and two daughters.

Cybernetics Forum

EDWIN SCHLOSSBERG Edwin Schlossberg was edu­cated at Cornell University, Columbia College, and Co­lumbia University where, in 1971, he received his doctor­ate in Science and Literature. Dr. Schlossberg designed the Environmental Design Pro­gram at the Willard School in Berkeley, California, the Environmental Room for the Children's Art Garnival in New York City, and was the editor of the Journal of Environmental Design. With R. Buckminster Fuller he directed, in 1969, the World Game. From 1971-74 he was the administrator of exhibit design at the Brooklyn Children's Museum for which he created the design of the entire Learn­ing Environment. He is also the designer of the Animated Toy Exhibit for the Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design. Dr. Schlossberg has been a con­sultant for the White House Conference on Children and Youth and the Smithsonian Institution Division of Performing Arts. He is the author of The Learning Environment for the Brooklyn Children's Museum, Einstein and Beckett, and WORDSWORDSWORDS which has been exhibited in many major museums. He is also the co-author of The Pocket Calculator Game Book, Volumes 1 and 2, The Kid's Pocket Calculator Game Book, The Philosopher's Game, The Horne Computer Handbook, and other works.

STUART A. UMPLEBY Stuart A. Umpleby is an as­sociate professor of Manage­ment Science at George Washington University. He teaches in the program on General Management Sys­tems and Organizational Cy­bernetics (GEMSOC). He re­ceived degrees in mechani­cal engineering, political sci­ence, and communications from the University of lllinois in Urbana-Champaign. while at the University of lllinois he was connected with the Biological Computer Laboratory and the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (the PLATO system). For two years he has been the mod­erater of a computer conference among about fifty cyberneticians and systems theorists in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He has recently com­pleted a system dynamics model of national develop­ment for the Agency for International Development.

KENNETH L WILSON Kenneth L. Wilson studied with Professor Von Foerster from 1972 to 1977. During this period he received a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Univer­sity of lllinois with Von Foerster. Mr. Wilson has also studied with Professor Humberto Maturana of the University of Chile and with

41

Professor Herbert Brun of the University of lllinois. He was responsible for the production and editing of The Gofleeted Works of the Biological Computer Labaratory published by the lllinois Blueprint Cer­poration (1976). Mr. Wilson is currently Process Engi­neering Manager for Precision Circuits lncorporated.

Statement of Editorial Policy

The ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM is an internationally distributed quarterly publication of the American Society of Cybernetics. lt is published to promote the understanding and advancement of cybernetics. lt is recognized that cybernetics covers a very broad spectrum, ranging from formalized theory through experimental and technological development to practical applications. Thus the boundaries of acceptable subject matter are intentionally not sharply delineated. Rather it is hoped that the flexible publication policy of the ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM will foster and promote, the continuing evolution of cybernetic thought.

The ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM is designed to provide not only cyberneticists, but also intelligent laymen, with an insight into cybernetics and its applicability to a wide variety of scientific, social and economic problems. Gontributions should be lively, graphic and to the point. Tedious listings of tabular material should be avoided.

The Editors reserve the right to make stylistic modifications consistent with the requirements of the ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM. No substantive changes will be made without consultation with authors. They further reserve the right to reject manuscripts they deem unsuitable in nature, style or content.

Opinions expressed in articles in the ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM or its editors, or the American Society for Cybernetics or its directors and officers. All material published in the ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM is Copyright by the American Society for Cybernetics who reserve a/1 rights.

lnstructions to Authors

Papers already published or in press elsewhere are not acceptable. For each proposed contribution, one original and two copies (in English only) should be mailed to Dr. V.G. Drozin, Physics Dept., Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA. 17837. Manuscripts should be mailed flat , in a suitable envelope. Graphie material should be submitted with suit­able cardboard backing .

Types of Manuscrlpts: Three types of contributions are considered for publication : full-length articles, brief commu­nications of 1,000 words or less, and letters to the editor. Letters and brief communications can generally be pub­lished sooner than full-length manuscripts. Bocks, mono­graphs and reports are accepted for critical review. Two copies should be addressed to the Editor.

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Style: While the ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM demands a high standard of excellence in its papers, it is not a scholar­ly or technical journal. Authors should avoid mathematical formulae and Ieng lists of references or footnotes. Tltles should be brief and specific, and revealing of the nature of the article. Acknowledgments and credits for assistance or advice should appear at the end of articles. Subheads should be used to break up-and set off-ideas in text.

Graphie Materials: All artwerk submitted must be in fin­ished form suitable for reproduction (black on white) and large enough so that it will be legible after reduction of as much as 60 percent. Photographs should be black and white glossy no less than 5"x7".

About the Authors: A briet biography (less than one page), along with a small photograph, must be sent with all manuscripts. This will be included in the " About the Author" section of each issue.

Manuscrlpt Return: Authors who wish manuscripts re­turned must include a stamped, self-addressed envelope along with their manuscript.

ASC PUBLICA TIONS ORDER FORM Dr. Barry A. Clemson, Amerlcan Soclety for Cybernetlcs • Unlverslty of Maryland, College of Educatlon, College Park, Md. 20742

Piease send me the following ASC publications. My check, payable to ASC in the amount of $ is enclosed.

No. of Copies

__ 1967:

__ 1968:

__ 1969:

___ 1970:

___ 1971:

Proceedings

1st Annual Symposium, "Purposive Systems"

2nd Annual Symposium, "Cybernetics and the Management of Large Systems"

3rd Annual Symposium, "Cybernetics, Simulation, and Conflict Resolution"

4th Annual Symposium, "Cybernetics, Artificial lntelligence, and Ecology"

Fall Confcrence, "Cybcrnctics Techniquc in Brain Research and the Educational Process"

Journal of Cybernctics

___ 1971: Vol. 1, 1·4

___ 1972: Vol. 2, 1·"

___ 1973: Vol. 3, 1·4

Journal of Cybernetics and Information Science _ _:1976: Vol. 1, 1-4

ASC CYBERNETICS FORUM-Annual Subscriptions ___ 1972: Vol. IV, 1·4 •

___ 1973: Vol. V, 1·4·

___ 1974: Vol. VI, 1-4*

___ 1975: Vol. VII, 1·4**

*Single copy: $2.50 **Single copy $5.00

Total Cost @$12.50 = $ ___ _

@$12.50 = S----

@$12.50 = S----

@$12.50 = S----

@$ 7.50 = S----

@$20.00 = $ ---­

@$20.00 = $ ---­

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$55.00 = $ __

@$10.00 = $ ___ _

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@$18.00 = $ ___ _

@$18.00 = $---­

TOTAL=$====

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MEMBERSHIP AND RENEWAL APPLICATION

GENTLEMEN:

Piease consider my applicalion for mcmhcrship/rcncwal in thc Am~rican Sol'il'!y for Cyhcrnctics. i\nnual dues are $20 for mcmbers and S5 for studcnts. Ducs indude thc quartcrly ASC Cl'IJHRNHTICS FORUM, and the quarterly Joumal.

Return Iogether with your check (payablc to Amcrican Socicty for Cybcrnctic~) to: Carlls A. Taylor Membershlp Chairman 1005 Hopewell Avenue Takoma Park, MD 20012

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B CL THE COMPLETE PUBLICATIONS OF THE

BIOLOGICAL COMPUTER LABORATORY DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA, ILLINOIS

The collection contains the complete publications of the Biological Computer Labaratory from 1957 to 1976 with over 300 papers and articles. This 14,000 page collection is presented on 148 microfiche (Standard 24X) with complete indexing and introduction in an attractive binder.

The collection contains works by:

W. R. Ashby; 55 papers on Information Theory, Self-Organizing Systems, Regulation and Control, System Stability, Many Dimensional Relations in Large Systems

Gotthard Gunther; 34 papers on Multivalued Logic, Non-Ciassical Logical Structures, Philosophical Foundations of Cybernetics

Lars Lofgren; 12 papers on Systems Theory, Self Reproducing Systems, Automata Theory, The Theory of Descriptions

Humberto Maturana; 2 books and 5 papers on The Biology of Cognition, The Organization of Living Systems, Epistemology, Language, Memory, Conscious­ness, and other aspects of Cognition.

Gordon Pask; 6 papers on System Modeling, Goal Oriented Systems, Computer Aided lnstruction

Heinz Von Foerster; 91 papers on Self Organizing Systems, Information Theory, Biological Computers, Memory, Perception and Cognition, and the Philosophy of Cybernetics

Topical Areas lnclude: Cybernetics, Cognition, Perception, Memory, Learning, Systems Theory (General, Control, Biological and Social), Multi Valued Logic, Computer Science (Semantic Computation, Relational Data Structures, Information Processing), Automata Theory, Philosophy, Linguistics, Movement Notation, and the Cybernetics of Cybernetics.

Price: $59.00

Check, Money Order, or Purehase Order (Piease add $5.00 for overseas Airmail)

Send To: lllinois Blueprint Corp. Micrographics Dept. 821 Bond Peoria, lllinois 61603