Cybernetics

I have started researching Cybernetics and how it relates to my adaptive play model. I thought it best to first define Cybernetics and look at some of the main authorites on the subject. Below I have pasted extracts from various sites to help me understand the subject matter.

Cybernetics is the science that studies the abstract principles of organization in complex systems. It is concerned not so much with what systems consist of, but how they function. Cybernetics focuses on how systems use information, models, and control actions to steertowards and maintain their goals, while counteracting various disturbances. Being inherently transdisciplinary, cybernetic reasoning can be applied to understand, model and design systems of any kind: physical, technological, biological, ecological, psychological, social, or any combination of those. Second-order cybernetics in particular studies the role of the
(human) observer in the construction of models of systems and other observers.


FIRST-ORDER CYBERNETICS
The cybernetics of systemS that are observed from the outside as opposed to the cybernetics of systems involving their observers (von Foerster). First-order cybernetics is concerned with circular causal processes, e.g., control, negative feedback, computing, adaptation. (Krippendorff)


Second-order cybernetics

Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, investigates the construction of models of cybernetic systems. It investigates cybernetics with awareness that the investigators are part of the system, and of the importance of self-referentiality, self-organizing, the subject-object problem, etc.

In effect, those involved in second order cybernetics have turned the principles of cybernetics upon the field of cybernetics itself. In order to qualify as second-order cybernetics, the observer of a system must be described and explained -- the explanation can not be based purely on the system observed as if the observer did not exist

http://pcp.vub.ac.be/SECORCYB.html 16/1/10

An engineer, scientist, or "first-order" cyberneticist, will study a system as if it were a passive, objectively given "thing", that can be freely observed, manipulated, and taken apart. A second-order cyberneticist working with an organism or social system, on the other hand, recognizes that system as an agent in its own right, interacting with another agent, the observer. As quantum mechanics has taught us, observer and observed cannot be separated, and the result of observations will depend on their interaction. The observer too is a cybernetic system, trying to construct a model of another cybernetic system (see constructivism). To understand this process, we need a "cybernetics of cybernetics", i.e. a "meta" or "second-order" cybernetics.

History of the word "cybernetics"

Cybernetics is the discipline that studies communication and control in living beings and the machines built by man. A more philosophical definition, suggested by Louis Couffignal in 1958, considers cybernetics as "the art of assuring efficiency of action. " The word cybernetics was reinvented by Norbert Wiener in 1948 from the Greek kubernetes, pilot, or rudder. The word was first used by Plato in the sense of "the art of steering" or "the art of government ". Ampère used the word cybernetics to denote "the study of ways of governing." One of the very first cybernetics mechanisms to control the speed of the steam engine, invented by James Watt and Matthew Boulton in 1788, was called a governor, or a ball regulator. Cybernetics has in fact the same root as government: the art of managing and directing highly complex systems.


Impressed by this disease of the machine, Wiener asked Rosenblueth whether such behavior was found in man. The response was affirmative: in the event of certain injuries to the cerebellum, the patient cannot lift a glass of water to his mouth; the movements are amplified until the contents of the glass spill on the ground. From this Wiener inferred that in order to control a finalized action (an action with a purpose) the circulation of information needed for control must form "a closed loop allowing the evaluation of the effects of one's actions and the adaptation of future conduct based on past performances." This is typical of the guidance system of the antiaircraft gun, and it is equally characteristic of the nervous system when it orders the muscles to make a movement whose effects are then detected by the senses and fed back to the brain.

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics 16/1/10
http://www.angelfire.com/co/1x137/cyber.html 16/1/10
http://pcp.vub.ac.be/SECORCYB.html 16/1/10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics#External_links 16/1/10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster 16/1/10
ftp://wwwc3.lanl.gov/pub/users/joslyn/heylighen6.pdf 16/1/10
http://ru.vlab.wikia.com/wiki/Heinz_von_Foerster_%22Cybernetics_of_Cybernetics%22_(1979) 16/1/10
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/HvF.htm 16/1/10
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_wiener.htm 16/1/10
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CYBSWHAT.html 16/1/10

I will be looking at the works of Nurbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster and Katherine Hayles for more information on the subject.