See my post on LinkedIn (replicated below) and join the discussion there:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_rough-draft-systemscomplexitycybernetics-activity-7246779585235664896-64Xz
pdf: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/85zlt0t6ph8qarx7d7gic/2024-09-27-rough-draft-systems-thinking-reading-list-v1.1BT.pdf?rlkey=3rfavacsy4n6sl8j0pyedph1q&st=qagh1418&dl=0
Commentable Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tt8GgQQj4Qw4HnR7DxKeF370o_HlDlpv/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115526108239573817578&rtpof=true&sd=true
How do you get into systems | complexity | cybernetics?
Here’s my rough reading list.
There are a lot of answers to the question, many of them connecting with some kind of disjointing break from ‘normal’ ways of seeing and being. Anything from being bullied at school to being dyslexic. Being in an outsider group. Naively applying thinking from one domain to another. Studying a technical problem long enough to suddenly see it in a completely different light – then either have your breakthrough celebrated or rejected.
It isn’t some mystic thing and it doesn’t require to you break from polite society. But it is one of the richest, weirdest, most diverse and challenging, inspiring and confounding, confronting and validating things you can study.
I’m often asked for a reading list for people interested in the field, and I usually suck my teeth. Some of the books are engaging, insightful, humorous, relevant. Others are dry as old twigs but less likely to kindle a spark.
Really, it depends on you and your context – as David Ing says, it’s better to talk of the thinkers and their individual constellations of interests, history, learning, and personal tendencies than it is to talk of schools and fields and separate places.
And even presenting this reading list, I’d say that I’d recommend Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Ursula K Le Guin, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Star Trek, old 20th Century Sci-Fi and Apartheid-era South African writing, art movies and music more – if you happen to be a bit like me. You’ll find your thing, if you’re interested.
But. The books are there – and many of them are *really good*. Top ones I’d recommend came out this decade
Hoverstadt’s Grammar of Systems
Jackson’s Critical Systems Thinking: A practitioner’s Guide
Opening the box – a slim little thing from SCiO colleagues
Essential Balances by Velitchkov
The attached list is a bit systems-practice focused. It is also too long and incomplete and partial simply for lack of time and energy.
There are *so many* flavours of systems thinking / complexity / cybernetics – do yourself a favour and don’t flog through stuff that doesn’t work for you, find things that bring your mind alive. Start with the articles and skim through.
But do start, because you will find in here the thinking and tools to find better ways of doing things for organisations, societies, the ecosystem, for people – and a lot of fun.
Tip: to save the pdf, hover over the image of the first page and find the rectangle bottom right – click that and it should go full screen. Top right you’ll have a download option, which when clicked will then resolve into a download button… (which might then open in your browser, but at least as a proper pdf you can save).
So… deep breath… what would you recommend? What do you think is missing?
Virtual Open Meeting: A series of presentations of general interest to Systems and Complexity in Organisation’s members and others.
About this Event
SCiO organises Open Meetings to provide opportunities for practitioners to learn and develop new practice, to build relationships, networks hear about skills, tools, practice and experiences. This virtual meeting will be held on Zoom.
Speakers:
Robin Stowell – Is safety breaking the Laws?
Anne Gambles – Cross-institutional Community of Practice of Communities of Practice (CoP of CoPs
Which generated some really interesting responses –
@dei making the point that bongard games test the ability to infer the rule-space, so meta-contexuality is inference of the the connective context that define the rule space generation, andthen observing that, whilst bongard is small world, you’re still *technically* doing the process in the large world. (Some of this linked to a conversation on relevance realisation that I wasn’t participating in).
To which @misuaraboki said: so pure rationality can be meta-irrational as well, right
These theses come in different flavours but ‘truth in the formal model of the system cannot be defined within the system’, ‘language cannot express the world’. Lacan has three levels: the mirror stage where the child sees itself as unified before experiencing itself as coordinated, so the ego is constructed around an image of wholeness it never fully possesses, language as desires mediated through the ‘Other’ – society, parents, culture, symbolic systems. You start desiring through other people’s desires, and finally that the symbolic order is itself incomplete; there is no final signifier that explains everything.
In order to create and protect the ground for rational reasoning, you need shielding and transduction from the unending complexity and infinite pattern of reality. I love Chapman’s older diagram
You’re right that Bongard Games unlock this – in my view it’s a powerful experiential tool (reminder of original link https://stream.syscoi.com/2019/06/09/a-first-lesson-in-meta-rationality-meaningness/). This link explains the issue from a particular point of view: https://stream.syscoi.com/2020/11/07/glimpse-at-the-metaphysics-of-bongard-problems-linhares-2000/ (concluding sentence of the abstract: “The resulting conclusion of this analysis is that in the case of Bongard problems there can be no units ascribed an a priori existence—and thus the objects dealt with in any specific problem must be found by solution methods (rather than given to them). This view ultimately leads to the emerging alternatives to the philosophical doctrine of metaphysical realism.”
This is the core metarational/postrational insight. As Chogyma Trungpa Rinpoche (problematic guru) said: ‘The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.’
Footnote: I asked ChatGPT out of interest if MacIntyre had ever written on Lacan, and the answer is very congruent with my drift above (and – despite MacIntyre’s metaphysical commitments – has a good concept of a telos that can be human-determined despite our limitations):
Yes, but not extensively in the sense of producing a major sustained critique or synthesis of Lacan. MacIntyre engaged with psychoanalysis throughout his career, and Lacan appears intermittently rather than centrally.
That’s significant because MacIntyre rarely spent much time on French post-structuralism directly. He tended to regard large parts of postmodern theory as downstream symptoms of the moral fragmentation he diagnoses in After Virtue. But psychoanalysis interested him because it sits awkwardly between:
scientific explanation,
moral agency,
narrative interpretation,
and therapeutic practice.
Those are all core MacIntyre themes.
What’s interesting is where they overlap despite radically different metaphysical assumptions.
Lacan:
the subject is constitutively split,
desire emerges from lack,
language precedes and structures the subject,
reconciliation is impossible.
MacIntyre:
the self is narratively constituted,
practical reasoning is tradition-dependent,
desire requires education toward goods,
flourishing is teleological and communal.
So both reject the Enlightenment fantasy of the autonomous rational individual. Both think the self is socially and linguistically formed. Both think modernity produces distorted desire.
But they diverge sharply on whether human desire can ultimately be ordered toward genuine goods.
For Lacan, lack is structural and ineradicable. Desire endlessly circulates around absence.
For MacIntyre, desire can be educated through practices, virtues and participation in traditions toward a telos — an intelligible human good. Conflict and incompleteness remain, but they are not ontological voids in the Lacanian sense.
You could caricature the difference this way:
Lacan: fragmentation is fundamental.
MacIntyre: fragmentation is historically produced.
Or:
Lacan radicalises Augustine’s restless heart into permanent constitutive lack.
MacIntyre tries to rehabilitate Aristotle’s account of purposive flourishing without naïve harmony.
There’s also a deep tension over language.
Lacan inherits Saussure and structuralism. The symbolic order traps and constitutes the subject.
MacIntyre inherits Aristotle, Aquinas and post-Kuhnian historicism. Traditions of rational inquiry shape subjects, but language remains connected to practices and goods rather than floating endlessly in signification.
Honestly, they belong to different civilisational moods.
Lacan is the theorist of impossibility after the collapse of metaphysical confidence.
MacIntyre is trying to reconstruct rational moral life after that collapse. One diagnoses the ruins brilliantly. The other asks whether inhabitable forms of life can still be rebuilt within them.
Additional note: other source and references (also ChatGPT)
von Foerster
The closest single von Foerster reference is ‘Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors’ (1976/1977; reprinted in ‘Understanding Understanding’). That is the one that most directly supports your claim that the world doesn’t arrive pre-cut into stable objects, categories and meanings. In observer-excluded epistemology we talk about ‘objects’; in observer-included epistemology these become tokens for stable behaviours. That is almost exactly your ‘reality doesn’t impose the bounds necessary to comprehend it; we make distinctions, frames, affordances and worlds’ point. (monoskop.org)
The second closest is ‘On Constructing a Reality’ (1973). That is the punchier, more quotable reference: ‘the environment as we perceive it is our invention’. Not ‘we invent reality’ in some silly idealist sense, but ‘we enact workable worlds through distinctions, bodies, histories, purposes and constraints’. (Kurt von Meier)
The third is ‘Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things’ (1972). This is the strongest for the meta-claim: a description of the universe implies someone describing it; therefore we need a theory of the observer. That is your Tarski/Gödel/Lacan/MacIntyre/Chapman line in cybernetic dress: no clean theory of reality without accounting for the observer who draws the distinction. (semiorganized.com)
Then ‘Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics’ is the reference for the existential and ethical turn. Von Foerster’s ethical imperative, usually rendered as ‘Act always so as to increase the number of choices’, fits your ‘basic cheerfulness’ stance surprisingly well: not metaphysical certainty, but a disciplined increase in agency, possibility and responsibility. His aesthetic imperative, ‘If you desire to see, learn how to act’, is even closer to your practical systems line: seeing is not prior to action; seeing is changed by action. (Encyclopedia.com)
George Spencer-Brown, ‘Laws of Form’.
This is the big missing formal reference. ‘Draw a distinction’ is almost too neat, but it gives you the clean grammar of boundaries, indication and marked/unmarked space. It sits under von Foerster, Luhmann, Varela, Glanville, Kauffman and a lot of second-order cybernetics. Use carefully. It attracts mystical over-reading like jam attracts wasps.
Ernst von Glasersfeld, radical constructivism.
Very close to your claim that knowledge doesn’t ‘match’ reality but must ‘fit’ or prove viable in experience. It helps avoid both naïve realism and limp ‘anything goes’ relativism. Von Glasersfeld’s line is that knowledge is actively constructed and judged by viability in experience, not by access to an observer-independent God’s-eye reality. (pcp-net.org)
Louis Kauffman, ‘Eigenforms: Objects as Tokens for Eigenbehaviors’.
This is probably the best modern companion to von Foerster. Kauffman develops the idea that objects have apparent stability because of recursive processes of observation and action. It gives you a bridge from cybernetic epistemology to form, object, self, sign and world. (Docslib)
Humberto Maturana, ‘objectivity in parentheses’.
You have autopoiesis, but this is the sharper epistemological reference. Maturana’s point isn’t just living systems self-produce; it’s that objectivity without parentheses pretends to access reality from nowhere, while objectivity in parentheses recognises explanations as arising within domains of observer action, language and coordination. This fits your ‘different worlds, different validities, no final sovereign context’ move. (SciELO)
Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, ‘The embodied mind’.
This is missing if you want to connect affordance, cognition, Buddhism, embodiment and enaction. It says cognition is not representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind. It is embodied action. That gives you a less cybernetic, more phenomenological route to the same place.
Niklas Luhmann, especially observation as distinction and indication.
His system/environment distinction, second-order observation, communication systems and operational closure belong here. He is strong for ‘what does this system make observable, and what does it have to make invisible in order to operate?’
Ranulph Glanville.
You need him more than the standard second-order cybernetics canon usually admits. Glanville’s work on objects, black boxes, design, conversation and second-order cybernetics is directly aligned with your practice orientation. He keeps epistemology close to making, designing and acting, not just knowing.
Robert Rosen, ‘Life itself’ and the modelling relation.
Rosen’s modelling relation is exactly about how systems, observers and models relate: encoding, inference, decoding, and the gap between formal systems and natural systems. It gives you a better bridge from Tarski/Gödel to systems modelling than most complexity literature does.
C. S. Peirce.
Peirce is probably the missing deep root for signs, inquiry, fallibilism, habit, abduction and reality as that which inquiry would tend toward under ideal conditions. He lets you avoid both correspondence realism and lazy constructivism. Also relevant to eigenforms: Kauffman explicitly notes resonances between von Foerster/eigenforms and Peirce. (Systems Community of Inquiry)
John Dewey, ‘Logic: The theory of inquiry’ and ‘Experience and nature’.
Inquiry starts in a problematic situation. Knowing is a way of transforming an indeterminate situation into a more determinate one. That is basically ‘systems practice’ without the cybernetic hat. Strong on action, practice, democracy and learning.
Michael Polanyi, ‘Personal knowledge’ and ‘The tacit dimension’.
Missing for tacit judgement. Your argument depends on the fact that rationality requires more than explicit rule-following. Polanyi’s ‘we know more than we can tell’ gives you the tacit substrate: skill, perception, connoisseurship, tradition and embodied judgement.
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Phenomenology of perception’.
This is the missing philosophical reference for embodied perception. Gibson gives affordances from ecological psychology. Merleau-Ponty gives the body-subject, perception as situated, and the world as lived before it is theorised. Useful if you want to keep ‘sensors create worlds’ from becoming too computational.
Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the philosophy of mind’.
The useful bit is the attack on ‘the myth of the given’. This is exactly your point that the world doesn’t arrive as self-interpreting data. Observation is already concept-laden, socially formed and inferentially placed. Excellent bridge into philosophy of mind and language.
Nelson Goodman, ‘Ways of worldmaking’.
Almost too on the nose. Goodman gives you a pluralist, constructivist account of world versions without making it all whim. His phrase ‘worldmaking’ is useful, though you’d need to handle it carefully so it doesn’t sound like TED-stage metaphysics with nice shoes.
Ian Hacking, ‘styles of reasoning’ and ‘the looping effects of human kinds’.
Strong for the public service angle. Categories don’t just classify people; they change the people classified, and the changed people then change the category. This is very relevant to service labels, needs, demand, eligibility, diagnosis, safeguarding, ‘complex families’, ‘vulnerability’, and the great administrative sausage machine.
Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges’.
Haraway gives you the feminist epistemology version: no view from nowhere, but also not relativism. Knowledge is embodied, located, accountable. That fits your ethics and power thread.
Helen Longino, ‘Science as social knowledge’.
Good for avoiding the lone heroic observer. Knowledge improves through socially organised criticism, not purified individual objectivity. Useful for your ‘learning system’ and ‘constructive challenge’ practice.
Bowker and Star, ‘Sorting things out’.
Classification systems are moral and political technologies. They make worlds. They create residual categories, invisibilities, workarounds and suffering. Very close to your ‘a life becomes a case; a need becomes a form’ point.
Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, ‘boundary objects’.
You talk boundaries all the time. Boundary objects are the missing social mechanism: things plastic enough to adapt across worlds, robust enough to maintain identity. Excellent for commissioning, systems convening, partnership working, public service reform, and why everyone can agree to the same strategy document while meaning different things by every word.
Lucy Suchman, ‘Plans and situated actions’.
This is a must. It demolishes the fantasy that plans determine action. Plans are resources for situated action, not scripts that govern reality. It fits your anti-programmatic, ‘work in context’ line and your suspicion of transformation theatre.
Andrew Pickering, ‘The mangle of practice’.
Useful for ‘practice bites back’. Humans, machines, models, institutions and materials resist and accommodate each other. Knowledge and practice emerge through this mangle, not through clean implementation.
Nancy Cartwright.
Use for the argument that laws and models work in highly arranged circumstances, not everywhere. Good for your ‘shielding’ argument: rational models need nomological machines, set-ups, scaffolds, prepared worlds. This links very well to public service pilots, test environments, and why scaled roll-out so often goes to die.
Donald Schön, ‘The reflective practitioner’.
Almost too obvious, but still missing from the philosophical spine. Reflection-in-action is one of the cleanest practice references for acting under uncertainty, uniqueness and value conflict.
Chris Argyris and Donald Schön.
Connect learning loops to the metarational argument: single loop changes action; double loop changes governing variables; triple loop touches identity, purpose and form of life. Your slides already link triple loop learning to identity and results.
Mary Douglas, ‘How institutions think’.
Institutions classify, remember, forget, legitimate, and make certain thoughts easier than others.
Charles Taylor, ‘social imaginaries’.
Useful for the background picture of what is possible, normal, legitimate and desirable. It’s a richer cultural version of context cues.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Truth and method’.
This is your hermeneutic missing piece. Understanding is historically effected. We don’t stand outside tradition; we work through horizons, prejudice, interpretation and conversation. Good bridge to MacIntyre.
Michael Oakeshott.
Probably useful as a counterweight. His distinction between technical and practical knowledge fits your loathing of method worship. Also useful for the critique of rationalism in politics.
Bruno Latour.
Use selectively. ‘We have never been modern’ and actor-network theory give you translation, mediation and networks of humans/nonhumans. But don’t let Latour eat the whole argument. He does that. Like bindweed with tenure.
Isabelle Stengers.
Worth adding for ecology of practices, cosmopolitics, and resisting imperial knowledge forms. Good for transdisciplinarity without Nicolescu’s transcendence problem.
Annmarie Mol, ‘The body multiple’ and ‘The logic of care’.
Mol shows realities being enacted differently in different practices. ‘The logic of care’ also supports your critique of clean choice/consumer models.
Karen Barad, ‘Meeting the universe halfway’.
Potentially useful for ‘agential realism’, intra-action and apparatuses making phenomena. But handle with tongs. There’s good material there, and also a fog machine.
What you’re underplaying
Power.
You have it, but this argument needs it nearer the surface. If worlds are made through distinctions, then the right to draw distinctions is political. Who gets to say ‘need’, ‘risk’, ‘outcome’, ‘efficiency’, ‘case’, ‘failure’, ‘choice’, ‘evidence’, ‘vulnerability’? Your power notes already have the right Flyvbjerg line: power includes the freedom to define what counts as truth and reality.
Gendered and colonial epistemology.
Haraway, Longino, Harding, Santos, Mignolo, Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Not to genuflect to the citation police, but because your argument is about whose reality-making counts. Leaving this out weakens the ethics.
Institutional technologies.
Forms, metrics, classifications, eligibility rules, scripts, case-management systems, dashboards. These are not administrative trivia. They are reality engines. Bowker and Star, Suchman, Mol and Hacking help you say that cleanly.
[Which makes me think to add cultural technologies, norms etc more strongly – and therefore Erving Goffman]
Here is a ChatGPT summary of the content and core points
Podcast summary
Vicente Raja is arguing for an ecological neuroscience: a neuroscience that takes body, movement, and environment as constitutive, not decorative. The brain shouldn’t be studied as if cognition happens in a skull-bound computer, then gets applied to the world. Cognition happens through organism-environment coupling.
His orthodox Gibsonian claim is that affordances are perceived through ecological information. An affordance isn’t just ‘a possible behaviour’. It’s a property of the environment relative to an organism, specified by information in stimulation. Perceiving it means detecting that information.
He accepts that ‘affordance’ has escaped ecological psychology. In design, robotics, and neuroscience, it now often just means ‘opportunity for interaction’. Don Norman’s door example is the clean case: don’t put a pull-handle on a door that should be pushed. But Raja says that’s already no longer Gibsonian in the strict sense.
A large chunk is about ‘motifs’. Raja’s idea is that scientific fields rely on vague but productive core concepts: ‘representation’, ‘encoding’, ‘affordance’, ‘algorithm’, and so on. They aren’t precise definitions. They are flexible explanatory patterns. Their vagueness is partly why they survive and travel between fields. Annoying, but useful.
He contrasts mainstream cognitive neuroscience with ecological psychology. Mainstream models often assume poor stimulation plus internal inference: the brain adds prior knowledge to make perception work. Ecological psychology starts from the opposite bet: the stimulus is rich, and the task is to identify the information already available in the organism-environment relation.
His radio metaphor matters. The radio doesn’t reconstruct the song from scratch; the information is in the signal. The organism still does work, but not the same kind of work. The brain doesn’t have to rebuild the world internally every moment. It helps couple movement to meaningful information.
He pushes neuroscientists to take the stimulus seriously. Don’t just stick people in fMRI scanners and show them pictures, then assume you’ve studied perception. Real objects, real movement, and naturalistic environments matter. He cites work where real objects and pictures produce different effects.
Resonance is his preferred bridge concept. Ecological information constrains organism-environment dynamics, and may also constrain neural dynamics. So the brain is not representing the world in the usual computational sense; it is resonating with, or being tuned to, meaningful environmental structure.
He doesn’t think ecological psychology explains everything. It’s strong for perception-action in natural environments. Scaling it up to reading, language, social cognition, and richer mental life is still a problem. He’s wary of ecological psychology becoming a theory of everything. Good. The world has enough imperial theories wearing a borrowed hat.
The plant behaviour section extends the argument. Plants move. Climbing plants change their movement patterns when a support pole is nearby, even before touching it. Raja’s lab is studying whether this resembles goal-directed behaviour, and whether plants are detecting environmental possibilities for action in a minimal sense.
Affordancesin brief
Colloquially, ‘affordance’ usually means ‘what something lets you do’. A handle affords pulling. A button affords pressing. A website affords sharing. This is the Norman/design use. Useful, but flattened.
Properly, in the ecological sense Raja defends, an affordance is not just a feature or option. It is an organism-relative possibility for action, specified by ecological information. The key triad is:
environment, organism, information specifying possible action.
So: a pole affords climbing for a climbing plant, not for a toaster. A chair affords sitting for some bodies, not all bodies. A handle may afford pulling, but only within a learned, embodied, practical world.
The mistake is to treat affordances as object properties. Better: affordances are relational, embodied, and perceptible action-possibilities in a structured environment.
Ami Elliott and I recorded this last year as a first installment of a podcast for our Neuroboros Society. I’m consolidating and sharing some past content from elsewhere (and unpublished) under this account to help align a foundation for new aspects of the Unjournaling that are underway.
Thanks for your patience, pardon our dust, etc.
Our conversation in this episode covers the beginnings of cybernetics in the US, from Norbert Wiener in WWII through the Macy Conferences (pictured below in slightly tongue-in-cheek style. There was a running thread of curiosity about mysticism and unexplained phenomenon in both US and British cybernetics origins – though we haven’t delved into this much yet) in the late 40s and early 50s. This period of cybernetics was one of the primary precursors to modern AI engineering which kicked off later in the mid 1950s.
Neuroboros is a podcast by Sean Manion and Ami Elliott, two neuroscientists working in tech. The focus is the limitations that have been created with the closed loop thinking of brain-as-computer and computer-as-brain, along with how we got here and how we can break out of this loop.
Episode 1: Cybernetics & Wiener Walks is a look at the early years of cybernetics and its primary founder, Norbert Wiener.
A very good implementation of LLMs – submit betwen a para and 75,000 words and get useful feedback.
SECOND ORDER SCIENCE FOUNDATION How Would Lissack Respond? Submit your writing and receive AI-powered intellectual feedback grounded in the frameworks of Professor Michael Lissack — complexity scientist, philosopher of science, and second-order cybernetician.
In all socio-technical systems, there is a tension between autonomy and cohesion. Every system finds a way to deal with this tension, or it collapses if it fails to do so for long.
This essay is part of the Autonomy and Cohesion series, which includes an earlier one-dimensional version of the Cohesion Spectrum.
[Spotted by Ian Glendinning – not yet available other than on the website and in ‘BBC Sounds’ app. Interesting, not perfect, intriguing reading list… always my favourite show, I had secretly hoped to replace Melvyn Bragg but he fooled me by retiring early 😉 ]
Radio 4,· 30 Apr 2026,· 52 mins Cybernetics In Our Time
Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machines. Cybernetics was first defined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) and aimed to find a shared universal language which could be used across disciplines. The name drew on an Ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course. Cybernetics saw the world as systems which used loops of information and feedback to adjust their own course of action. Those ideas could be applied to anything from thermostats to the human brain, and arguably laid foundations for the information age.
With
Jacob Ward Historian of science and technology at Maastricht University
Jon Agar Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London
And
Orit Halpern Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden
Producer: Martha Owen
Reading list:
Peter Galison, ‘The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision’ (Critical Inquiry 21, 1994)
Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2004)
Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke University Press, 2015)
Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique (Grey Room 68, 2017)
Orit Halpern, Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets (e-flux, March 2023)
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
Steve J. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1980)
Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age The Information Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)
Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011)
David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010)
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (first published 1950; Da Capo Press, 1988)
In Our Time is a BBC Studios production
Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.
It’s almost 50 years now since I first encountered the volumes of Peirce’s Collected Papers in the math library at Michigan State, and shortly afterwards a friend called my attention to the entry for Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form in the Whole Earth Catalog and I sent off for it right away. I would spend the next decade just beginning to figure out what either one of them was talking about in the matter of logical graphs and I would spend another decade after that developing a program, first in Lisp and then in Pascal, that turned graph‑theoretic data structures formed on their ideas to good purpose as the basis of its reasoning engine.
I thought it might contribute to a number of long‑running and ongoing discussions if I could articulate what I think I learned from that experience.
Here are some animations I made up to illustrate several different styles of proof in an extended topological variant of Peirce’s Alpha Graphs for propositional logic.
Edited by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University, Boston, MA; received April 21, 2025; accepted January 8, 2026
Scaling laws for function diversity and specialization across socioeconomic and biological complex systems Vicky Chuqiao Yang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6111-3699 vcyang@mit.edu, James Holehouse jamesholehouse1@gmail.com, Hyejin Youn https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6190-4412, +3 , and Christopher P. Kempes https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1622-9761Authors Info & Affiliations Edited by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Northeastern University, Boston, MA; received April 21, 2025; accepted January 8, 2026
Diversification and specialization are central to complex adaptive systems, yet overarching principles across domains remain elusive. We introduce a general theory that unifies diversity and specialization across disparate systems, including microbes, federal agencies, companies, universities, and cities, characterized by two key parameters. We show from extensive data that function diversity scales with system size as a sublinear power law-resembling Heaps’ law-in all but cities, where it is logarithmic. Our theory explains both behaviors and suggests that function creation depends on system goals and structure: federal agencies tend to ensure functional coverage; cities slow new function growth as old ones expand, and cells occupy an intermediate position. Once functions are introduced, their growth follows a remarkably universal pattern across all systems.
Abstract
Function diversity, the range of tasks individuals perform, and specialization, the distribution of function abundances, are fundamental to complex adaptive systems. In the absence of overarching principles, these properties have appeared domain-specific. Here, we introduce an empirical framework and a mathematical model for the diversification and specialization of functions across disparate systems, including bacteria, federal agencies, universities, corporations, and cities. We find that the number of functions grows sublinearly with system size, with exponents from 0.35 to 0.57, consistent with Heaps’ law. In contrast, cities exhibit logarithmic scaling. To explain these empirical findings, we generalize the Yule-Simon model by introducing two key parameters: a diversification parameter that characterizes how existing functions inhibit the creation of new ones and a specialization parameter that describes how a function’s attractiveness depends on its abundance. Our model enables cross-system comparisons, from microorganisms to metropolitan areas. The analysis suggests that what drives the creation of new functions depends on the system’s goals and structure: federal agencies tend to ensure comprehensive coverage of necessary functions; cities tend to slow the creation of new occupations as existing ones expand; and cells occupy an intermediate position. Once functions are introduced, their growth follows a remarkably universal pattern across all systems.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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