The ‘Cybernetic Cut’: Progressing from Description to Prescription in Systems Theory (original) (raw)
Related papers
2008
Howard Pattee championed the term "epistemic cut" to describe the symbol-matter, subject-object, genotypephenotype distinction. But the precise point of contact between logical deductive formalisms and physicality still needs elucidation. Can information be physical? How does nonphysical mind arise from physicality to then establish formal control over that physicality (e.g., engineering feats, computer science)? How did inanimate nature give rise to an algorithmically organized, semiotic and cybernetic life? Both the practice of physics and life itself require traversing not only an epistemic cut, but a Cybernetic Cut. A fundamental dichotomy of reality is delineated. The dynamics of physicality ("chance and necessity") lie on one side. On the other side lies the ability to choose with intent what aspects of ontological being will be preferred, pursued, selected, rearranged, integrated, organized, preserved, and used (cybernetic formalism).
Cyberneticisation as a Theory and Practice of Matter
2020
The ecological implementation of cybernetic ideas in architecture requires a material theory and practice that enables their propositions to be tested. The need for approaches that move from simulation to cybernetic reality is a documented limitation of cybernetics recognised by Stafford Beer with his pond ecology experiments and Gordon Pask through electrochemical devices. While both experimented with adaptive material platforms as embodiments of designed cybernetic systems, their approaches were limited by the available toolsets. This article considers an ecological trajectory of cybernetisation by revisiting notions of biological computation as a generative material practice. In particular, the growing fields of biodesign and living architecture go beyond notions of biological analogues that inform modern architecture by directly incorporating living systems into the very fabric of buildings as designed expressions of ecology.
Biosemiotics, 2012
This article explores the usefulness of interdisciplinarity as method of enquiry by proposing an investigation of the concept of information in the light of semiotics. This is because, as Kull, Deacon, Emmeche, Hoffmeyer and Stjernfelt state, information is an implicitly semiotic term (Biological Theory 4(2):167-173, 2009: 169), but the logical relation between semiosis and information has not been sufficiently clarified yet. Across the history of cybernetics, the concept of information undergoes an uneven development; that is, information is an 'objective' entity in first order cybernetics, and becomes a 'subjective' entity in second order cybernetics. This contradiction relegates the status of information to that of a 'true' or 'false' formal logic problem. The present study proposes that a solution to this contradiction can be found in Deely's reconfiguration of Peirce's 'object' (as found in his triadic model of semiosis) into 'thing' and 'object' (Deely 1981). This ontology allows one to argue that information is neither 'true' nor 'false', and to suggest that, when considered in light of its workability, information can be both true and false, and as such it constitutes an organism's purely objective reality (Deely 2009b). It is stated that in the process of building such a reality, information is 'motivated' by environmental, physiological, emotional (including past feelings and expectations) constraints which are, in turn, framed by observership. Information is therefore found in the irreducible cybersemiotic process that links at once all these conditions and that is simultaneously constrained by them. The integration of cybernetics' and semiotics' understanding of information shows that history is the analytical principle that grants scientific rigour to interdisciplinary investigations. As such, in any attempt to clarify its epistemological stance (e.g. the semiotic aspect of information), it is argued that biosemiotics does not need only to acknowledge semiotics (as it does), but also cybernetics in its interdisciplinary heritage.
The Cybernetic Cut and Configurable Switch (CS) Bridge
2011
Howard Pattee championed the term "epistemic cut" to describe the symbol-matter, subject-object, genotypephenotype distinction. But the precise point of contact between logical deductive formalisms and physicality still needs elucidation. Can information be physical? How does nonphysical mind arise from physicality to then establish formal control over that physicality (e.g., engineering feats, computer science)? How did inanimate nature give rise to an algorithmically organized, semiotic and cybernetic life? Both the practice of physics and life itself require traversing not only an epistemic cut, but a Cybernetic Cut. A fundamental dichotomy of reality is delineated. The dynamics of physicality ("chance and necessity") lie on one side. On the other side lies the ability to choose with intent what aspects of ontological being will be preferred, pursued, selected, rearranged, integrated, organized, preserved, and used (cybernetic formalism).
Abstract: The Cybernetic Cut delineates perhaps the most fundamental dichotomy of reality. The Cybernetic Cut is a vast ravine. The physicodynamics of physicality (“chance and necessity”) is on one side. On the other side lies the ability to choose with intent what aspects of ontological being will be preferred, pursued, selected, rearranged, integrated, organized, preserved, and used to achieve sophisticated function and utility (cybernetic formalism). The Cybernetic Cut can be traversed across the Configurable Switch (CS) Bridge. Configurable switches are especially designed and engineered physical devices that allow instantiation of nonphysical formal programming decisions into physicality. The flow of traffic across the CS Bridge is one-way-only. Physicodynamics never determines formal computational and control choices. Regulation, controls, integration, organization, computation, programming and the achievement of function or utility always emanate from the Formalism side of the Cybernetic Cut.
CYBERNETICS OF CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS
Cybernetics and Systems, 1997
Cybernetics in the United States has evolved through three identifiable periods. In the first period of the 1950s and 1960s there was a primary concern with designing control systems and with building machines to emulate human reasoning. In the second period of the 1970s and 1980s the focus of attention was on the biology of cognition and constructivist philosophy. In recent years increasing attention has been given to social systems. Whereas the work on the biology of cognition required that attention be shifted from what was observed to the observer, the recent interest in social systems requires an emphasis on multiple observers and their beliefs. The third period of social cybernetics or the cybernetics of conceptual systems is illustrated by considering constructivist cybernetics as a conceptual system created to promote the evolution of certain social systems in a preferred direction.
Physical Computation as Dynamics of Form that Glues Everything Together
Information, 2012
The framework is proposed where matter can be seen as related to energy in a way structure relates to process and information relates to computation. In this scheme matter corresponds to structure which corresponds to information. Energy corresponds to ability to carry out a process which corresponds to computation. The relationship between each two complementary parts of each dichotomous pair (matter/energy, structure/process, information/computation) are analogous to the relationship between being and becoming, where being is persistence of existing structure while becoming is the emergence of new structure through the process of interactions. This approach presents a unified view built on two fundamental ontological categories: information and computation. Conceptualizing the physical world as an intricate tapestry of protoinformation networks evolving through processes of natural computation helps making more coherent models of nature, connecting non-living and living world. It presents a suitable basis for incorporating current developments in understanding of biological/cognitive/social systems as generated by complexification of physicochemical processes through self-organization of molecules into dynamic adaptive complex systems by morphogenesis, adaptation and learning -all understood as information processing.
Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics, 2020
The main purpose of this special issue is to show some intersections and/or relationships between the fields of Philosophy and Cybernetics (including Second Order Cybernetics). Philosophy and Cybernetics are, implicitly or explicitly, cybernetically related. The more explicit these relationships are made the more is the probability of emergent properties between them with the respective synergies generated by co-regulative negative feedback (or feed-forward) and potential co-amplificatory positive feedback. This forward also shows, briefly and schematically, the cybernetic relationships between 'reflections' and 'reflexion'. The latter is based on Second Order Cybernetics which, in turn, is based on the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, mainly supported by Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Niels Bohr's Complementarity Principle.