Grandmaster Ratte' was mentioning something about him being fascinated by the "study of systems". I found this synchronous 'cause just a day or two before that post I was telling somebody that that was what I was all about. I seem to remember Sans posting about Game theory which is another area of cybernetic research...come to think of it, I would imagine that most people here are natural cyberneticists.
Cybernetics
Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener, in his book of that title, as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization and Gordon Pask extended it to include information flows "in all media" from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks
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The most recent definition has been proposed by Louis Kauffman, President of the American Society for Cybernetics, "Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves"
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For a time during the past 20 years, the field of cybernetics followed a boom-bust cycle of becoming more and more dominated by the subfields of artificial intelligence and machine-biological interfaces (ie. cyborgs) and when this research fell out of favor, the field as a whole fell from grace. Recent endeavors into the true focus of cybernetics, systems of control and emergent behavior, by such related fields as Game Theory (the analysis of group interaction), systems of feedback in evolution, and Metamaterials (the study of materials with properties beyond the newtonian properties of their constituent atoms), have lead to a revived interest in this increasingly relevant field.
I like the way cybernetics is applied by Gordon Pask to
Conversation Theory. His notions of Serialist and Holist learning strategies are particularly fascinating.
For some reason, looking at the visual aids for Conversation Theory, I am reminded of Herman Hesse's "The Glass Bead Game".
At the center of the monastic order lies the (fictitious) glass bead game, whose exact nature remains elusive. The precise rules of the game are only alluded to, and are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Suffice it to say that playing the Game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. Essentially the game is an abstract synthesis of all arts and scholarship. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics. For example, a Bach concerto may be related to a mathematical formula. One description says:
"Theoretically," writes the Narrator Archivist, "this instrument is capable of producing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. The manuals, pedal, and stops are now fixed. Changes in their number and order and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory." And with this statement, he reveals the limitations of the game: its elitism, its hubris, its stagnation, and its sterility. In its infancy, the Game was played with delicate glass beads, which have since been discarded as too . . . real? They connected the Game with the spiritual beads played by religious believers worldwide, as the robes, and secret language, and ceremonial trappings of the game form a mock religious experience in the time of the Narrator Archivist. Without them, the game flies into the ether without a tether to reality. In our world, prayer beads and the repetition of simple phrases serve as keys to transcendence. In Castalia, they are discarded and the key is lost. The Narrator Archivist makes no reference to the ecstatic states that might be achieved by Glass Bead Game players. The games as he describes them in Knecht's time (the twenty-second century) and his own (the twenty-fourth century) apparently fall short of what seems the obvious goal.
The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go. At the time that the novel takes place, such props had become obsolete and the game is played only with abstract, spoken formulas. At other times it is played with movement and gesture. The audience's appreciation of a good game draws on its appreciation of both music and mathematical elegance.
The Glass Bead Game also brings to mind Leibniz's notion of a universal calculus and his dream of a Mathesis universalis. Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, even though it does not mention Hesse's novel, is an intellectual exercise very much in the spirit of the Game.
However, rather than being seen as a purely intellectual or rational notion, it is more likely the glass bead game includes more Existential elements. As Hesse's other works (such as Steppenwolf for example) draw strongly on Existential and shamanic themes it is likely that the glass bead game refers to the way in which people construct their realities. That is to say that the glass bead game is in fact life or existence and it illustrates the ways that people position not just themselves but how they construct, deconstruct, signify, encode and program their entire perception of reality. As one needs to understand reality before one can deliberately allocate it, this is the reference to the years of study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_GameI've always wanted to try and do this over the web and, in a sense, this is what the picture association thread (and (ha-ha!) other, associated threads) are all about. ..or maybe, that's just me.
Psycho-cybernetics, is another sub-field of cybernetics and has been around for awhile. It's a great map of reality to some...not so great to others.
Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way to Get More Living out of Life was first published in 1960 by Prentice-Hall and first appeared in a pocket book edition in 1969. The book introduced Maltz's view that a person must have an accurate and positive view of one's self before setting goals, otherwise he or she will get stuck in a continuing pattern of limiting beliefs. His ideas focus on visualizing one's goals: a simple idea which some cognitive-science research, in the area of priming, has validated under certain conditions. He believed that self-image is the cornerstone of all the changes that take place in a person. If one's self-image is unhealthy, or faulty, all of his or her efforts will end in failure.
It seems to make good sense to me, though.
Cybernetics (at least according to the wiki entry) also, has connections to
memetics. Which is "an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme." Which as most of you know is responsible for the net slang "going viral".
Ha! Somebody's put up a site and they've got a
principia too!
From their site:
Moreover, we start from the thesis that systems at all levels have been constructed by evolution, which we see as a continuing process of self-organization, based on variation and natural selection of the "fittest" configuration. Therefore, our specific approach may be called evolutionary cybernetics. Evolution continuously creates complexity and makes systems more adaptive by giving them better control over their environments. We consider the emergence of a new level of control as the quantum of evolution, and call it a "metasystem transition".
What are the conditions that define a "metasystem transition" and are we in the midst of one? If so how long will it last? If not, when did the last one end and when will the next one begin? What conditions brings about a metasystem transition?
Peter Drucker was a big proponent of cybernetics and although, his ideas of MBO have fallen out of favor, I admire his ability to think in a totally rad manner.
I've always liked reading business management books. Not, because I've ever intended to become a manager or business executive but because, given the proper motivation people will throw their best resources at a problem or situation, i.e. how to make more money, or, put a different way, how to make a system operate at peak efficiency.
(originally posted on the
Cult of the Dead Cow's Bovine Dawn message board)
