In today’s post, I am looking at the Socrates of Cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster’s ethical imperative:

“Always act so as to increase the number of choices.”

I see this as the recursive humanist commandment. This is very much applicable to ethics, and how we should treat each other. Von forester said the following about ethics:

Whenever we speak about something that has to do with ethics, the other is involved. If I live alone in the jungle or in the desert, the problem of ethics does not exist. It only comes to exist through our being together. Only our togetherness, our being together, gives rise to the question, How do I behave toward the other so that we can really always be one?

Von Foerster views align with that of constructivism, the idea that we construct our knowledge about our reality. We construct our knowledge to“re-cognize” a reality through…