Cybernetics Literacy

1. Norbert Wiener named cybernetics in 1948 as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Its founders had met at the Macy conferences on circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems.
2. In a circular process the effects of an action return to influence its cause. Systems linked in this way affect one another’s behaviour.
3. Feedback is a special form of circularity. Negative feedback corrects error and keeps a value within a preferred range; positive feedback amplifies a trend and can produce vicious or virtuous circles.
4. Control, in the cybernetic sense, works only in a circular arrangement. The root image is steering: a helmsman correcting course moment by moment.
5. Regulation always involves at least two parties, a regulator and the system it regulates, each affecting the other.
6. A linear system can be understood as a circular one whose feedback is so weak that it can be ignored, much as Newton’s mechanics is now seen as a special case of Einstein’s.
7. Thinking in circular relationships, rather than in hierarchical structures and one-way causes, is the first habit of cybernetic thought.

Survey roots Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q10, Q13. The most frequently named idea in the survey.

1. Variety is the number of distinguishable states a system can take. It is a measure of complexity, and always relative to an observer who does the distinguishing.
2. Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety holds that a regulator can keep a system within bounds only if it has at least as many responses as there are disturbances to be met.
3. Variety can be amplified and attenuated. Much of the craft of managing complex systems lies in deciding what to amplify and what to filter.
4. Constraint is a reduction of variety. Laws, structures and habits are constraints; desires and values may be understood as constraints rather than as goals or objectives.
5. Every encoding discards variety. Analogue and digital representations each carry benefits and penalties.
6. Variety decays as systems settle and can be renewed; novelty is the return of variety.
7. Ashby suggested that the systems theorist of the future must be an expert in how to simplify, without losing the variety that matters.

Survey roots Q2, Q6, Q7, Q8, Q11, Q12, Q13.

1. Self-organisation: elements of a system interacting with one another can move towards an equilibrium and generate order without an external designer. Heinz von Foerster spoke of order from noise.
2. Adaptation works through nested loops. In Ashby’s two nested feedback loops, a second loop changes the first when essential variables are pushed out of bounds.
3. Homeostasis keeps essential variables within limits. Living systems do this through continual change, which some respondents preferred to call homeodynamics.
4. Autopoiesis: a living system continually produces the components that produce it (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela).
5. Organisational closure and structural determinism: what a system does when perturbed is determined by its own structure. One cannot control the consequences of a perturbation; one can only anticipate the response of the system as it acts according to its structure.
6. A system can be open to energy and matter while closed in its organisation. Whether a system is called open or closed depends on what is being described.
7. Thinking in dynamic processes rather than static structures: what looks like a thing is often a stable pattern of activity.

Survey roots Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5, Q6, Q11, Q12.

1. Everything said is said by an observer (Maturana).
2. Second-order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems, recognises that the observer is in the system and changes the observer from objective outsider to participant insider.
3. Objectivity, von Foerster said, is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.
4. The participation of an observer may be weak, and so be ignored, but it is never absent: at the least the observer takes part in the knowing.
5. Self-reference, recursion and reflexivity: systems that observe themselves, operations applied to their own results, explanations that include the one who explains.
6. Different observers see a system in their own terms. Multiple perspectives may be more or less valid depending on context and purpose.
7. Many respondents held that every big idea is second-order, and several asked whether the line between first-order and second-order cybernetics is still useful at all.

Survey roots Q2, Q4, Q5, Q6, Q8, Q9, Q10, Q12, Q13, Q14. With circularity, the most frequently named idea.

1. Drawing a distinction is the elementary act of observing (George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form). A distinction is sustained by a going back and forth that compares two sides; there were never two sides before the distinguishing.
2. Knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the knowing subject (Ernst von Glasersfeld).
3. Cognition is adaptive: it serves the organisation of the experiential world, not the discovery of an ontological reality (von Glasersfeld).
4. The Black Box: faced with something whose workings we do not know, we examine its behaviour as we interact with it and propose an explanation that further interaction can test. Ashby considered the Black Box universal; the box and its explanation are constructions shared between the observer and what is observed.
5. Ignorance and error are unavoidable. Our explanations are tentative structures that may stop working at any time, and this is the ground of our freedom to construct our worlds.
6. Only those questions that are in principle undecidable can we decide (von Foerster).
7. Second-order blindness: the noticing of one thing makes another invisible. We do not see that we do not see.

Survey roots Q3, Q6, Q7, Q9, Q11, Q12.

1. Conversation is circularity in communication.
2. In Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory, understandings are not transmitted or shared but constructed by each participant. I can only build my understanding of what I take to be your understanding, in a recursive loop.
3. Teachback: understanding is tested by asking a learner to re-present what has been understood, so that error can be corrected in a circular loop. One respondent traced teachback to Pask’s collaborator, Bernard Scott.
4. Coded communication of the Shannon type can be seen as the simple case of conversation, with very weak feedback. Channel capacity, transduction and filtering describe it.
5. Genuine interaction is more than action and reaction. It involves a mutual generation of the unexpected.
6. We live in language. Language has descriptive and orientating tracks, and objects can be understood as tokens for stable patterns of behaviour.
7. Conversation differs from instruction, and design from showing expected behaviour. Ranulph Glanville’s theory of Objects describes entities that each observer sees differently yet believes to be the same, a structure that makes shared belief, and so conversation, possible.

Survey roots Q3, Q4, Q5, Q8, Q9, Q10, Q11.

1. Von Foerster’s ethical imperative: act always so as to increase the number of choices.
2. Because we cannot claim access to a reality that excludes us, we are left to make choices ourselves. Thus we are responsible.
3. “Truth is the invention of a liar” (von Foerster). Appeals to truth should not be used to settle moral judgments; tolerance of paradox and scepticism towards ‘knowledge’, ‘information’ and ‘reality’ follow.
4. Participation can be understood as dialogic process rather than as power relationships. The application of X to Y is a linear, one-way relation; cybernetic practice works with others rather than on them.
5. Being in control and being out of control are both part of living; there is power in unmanageability as well as in management.
6. Heterarchy: circular, many-centred organisation. An insistence on hierarchy as the only means of understanding can itself obstruct understanding.
7. Cybernetics asks to be lived as well as taught. Practitioners try to enact what they discuss, so that practice informs theory and theory informs practice, in a circle.

Survey roots Q5, Q7, Q8, Q9, Q10, Q11, Q28, Q38.