Cybernetics for the 21st Century

N. Katherine Hayles – Detoxifying Cybernetics:From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond

Research Network for Philosophy and Technology

16 Dec 2022

As is well known, first order cybernetics, developed in the 1940s-50s Macy Conferences, focused on homeostasis, feedback loops and control mechanisms for human, animal and mechanical systems. A central figure in this early period was Norbert Wiener; as Peter Galison has pointed out, Wiener’s research included work for the Defense Department and was deeply involved in war planning and implementation. For historians like Galison and critics like Donna Haraway, this gave cybernetics a toxic association with the military-industrial complex, apparent in Haraway’s 1995 description of cybernetics as a techno-addiction that had “technical and popular culture . . . shooting up with all things cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s.” Starting in the early 1970s, James Lovelock changed the tenor of these connotations when he drew on first order cybernetics to argue that the Earth itself was a homeostatic entity, with living organisms tightly coupled to the environment to form a single self-regulating system. When Lovelock then joined forces with microbiologist Lynn Margulis, her work on biosymbiosis expanded the argument with convincing evidence for the power of microorganisms to change the environment even as they were changed by it. In the genealogy carefully traced by Bruce Clarke, Margulis became aware of the work of Maturana and Varela on autopoiesis, and thereafter she adopted the term “autopoietic Gaia.” In contrast to first-order cybernetics, this remained almost completely a biotic concept; machines seem to have faded from the picture (aside from a brief essay Margulis co-authored with Dorion Sagan on the evolution of machines). Clarke, for his part, argues that the Gaia theory should properly be located within neocybernetics systems theory, which focuses on recursivity, reentry, and the necessary inclusion of the observer in what is observed. However, the historically contingent manner in which cybernetics moved from homeostasis to autopoiesis left a hefty conceptual debt stemming from the way in which Maturana and Varela defined cognition, which basically conflated it with the process of living as a self-making, self-organizing and self-structuring autopoiesis. This makes it difficult to re-introduce machines into the picture, since all machines are allopoietic (that is, not able to self-make and self-maintain themselves). This talk concludes by offering an alternative way to think about cognition that enables an integrated framework for understanding our present condition of technosymbiosis, which augments and drives the further evolution of biosymbiosis as humans and nonhumans enter into deep integration with computational media. —— N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published eleven books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and her research has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a University of California Presidential Award, among other awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99 for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship for Writing Machines. She writes on media theory, experimental fiction, literary and cultural theory, science fiction, and contemporary American fiction. She has won two teaching awards, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, University of Chicago as the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor, and Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University UK, among others. Her most recent book is Postprint: Books and Becoming C’omputational (2021, Columbia UP). —– About the talk series “Cybernetics for the 21st Century” aims to firstly reconstruct the history of cybernetics, from the perspectives of different geographical locations, political projects and philosophical reflections; and secondly to ask what might be the contribution of the cybernetic movement to the new form of thinking that is urgently needed to understand and reorient our digital earth. The first edition of the program consists of eight lectures and two symposiums with the presentation of philosophers, historians of science, and sociologists, including Andrew Pickering, Katherine Hayles, Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, David Maulén de los Reyes, Michal Krzykawski, Mathieu Triclot, Daisuke Harashima. The program is hosted by Yuk Hui and curated by Jianru Wu.

N. Katherine Hayles – Detoxifying Cybernetics:From Homeostasis to Autopoiesis and Beyond – YouTube

Reflections on possibilities for systemic design

BY CHERYL MAY | DEC 2022 | NEWS & NOTES

Reflections on possibilities for systemic design

GMoLS4E19 AI Learning with Donald Clark

https://html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/25763334/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/tdest_id/2994581/render-playlist/no/custom-color/000000/

Jan 29, 2023

Once the stuff of science fiction, Artificial Intelligence is now a part of everyday life. But the story of how it came into being is not often told. This episode reveals its roots in neuropsychology and observations of the physical processes in the brain that lead to learning. The theorists who Donald and John discuss began their work at a time when behaviorism, which by and large disouraged attempts to look within the mind, dominated academic psychology. But despite a few ‘winters’, AI has developed to the point where it is now all-pervasive, and a driving force of change in learning.

• 1:20 Introducing AI Learning
• 8:06 Eric Kandel (1929 – )
• 13:29 Donald Olding Hebb (1904 – 1985)
• 23:29  Warren Sturgis McCulloch (1898 – 1969) & Walter Pitts (1923 – 1969)
• 37:37  Frank Rosenblatt (1928 – 1971)
• 44:16  David Everett Rumelhart (1942-2011) & Geoffrey Everest Hinton (1947–)
• 57:06  Demis Hassabis (1976–)
• 1:07:23  Summing Up 

Read Donald’s book, Artificial Intelligence for Learning: https://www.koganpage.com/product/artificial-intelligence-for-learning-9781789660814

• Kandel bit.ly/3oiiYDo
• Hebb bit.ly/3kq3z2A
• McCulloch & Pitts bit.ly/3kn6Fo8
• Rosenblatt bit.ly/31PZmih
• Rumelhart & Hinton bit.ly/3bXU3zd
• Hassabis bit.ly/3qrYgmT

The Blog that started it all: https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2021/09/these-were-written-as-quick-readable.html

Great Minds on Learning: GMoLS4E19 AI Learning with Donald Clark

Gerald Midgley – Nov 2022 – SCiO Open Event

Gerald Midgley – Nov 2022 – SCiO Open Event – YouTube

Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael

Jan 29, 2023

Practice Tools for Systemic Design

BIS PUBLISHERS 2022

Podcast | Peter Jones and Kristel van Ael, “Design Journeys Through…

Michael Nielsen’s interview with Jim Rutt emphasised in my mind how his ‘metascience’ project is in itself a form of systems convening and also describes systems convening and systems change in science.
It’s also most likely connected in inspiration with ethnography of science, I suspect.

The trouble in comparing different approaches to science funding
Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu
February 9, 2022
https://scienceplusplus.org/trouble_with_rcts/index.html

A Vision of Metascience
An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science
By Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu
October 18, 2022
https://scienceplusplus.org/metascience/index.html

How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen
https://numinous.productions/ttft/

The Operational Research Society Systems Thinking Special Interest Group, the Centre for Systems Studies at the University of Hull (UK), and the Linnaeus University Systems Thinking Community (Sweden) are partnering in a new seminar series. Our first seminar is announced below.

Please register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/why-logosofia-for-an…

If you want to be on our mailing list for future events, sign up here: https://www.theorsociety.com/…/specia…/systems-thinking/

WHY LOGOSOPHIA FOR AN ASSAULT ON SITUATIONAL COMPLEXITY? Seminar from Aleco Christakis

1.30pm to 3pm (UK time) on 1 February 2023 (online – register using the above link.

ABSTRACT. Situational complexity is a phenomenon that emerges when groups of stakeholders congregate to address wicked problems. It emerges as the combined effect of three distinct observational complexities. The seminar will discuss the role of the Logosofia software platform, which has been developed to support the methodology of Structured Dialogic Design (SDD), in launching an efficient, effective, and ephemeral assault on situational complexity. SDD is a problem structuring approach that integrates proposed policy options from multiple stakeholders into a model that all the stakeholders can commit to implementing.

Why Logosofia for an assault on situational complexity? Tickets, Wed 1 Feb 2023 at 13:30 | Eventbrite

Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisationsJanuary 24, 2023By Angela Espinosa

Viable System Model: A theory for designing more responsive organisations – Integration and Implementation Insights

Very sad to receive the below message from Allenna, Angela and Jon at Metaphorum

It is with sorrow that we inform the Metaphorum Community of the death of Javier Livas-Cantu on January 17 of this year at age 76. Javier was a Mexican constitutional lawyer who became interested in cybernetics and came to the 1981 SGSR (Now ISSS) Conference in Toronto to meet Stafford. Many conversations followed, culminating in Javier bringing Stafford to Mexico City for the better part of 1983 to assist his attempts to introduce cybernetics into the Mexican government. Although these efforts were not ultimately successful, they did help Javier advance his cause of fair voting and government improvements in Mexico. Javier was very passionate about Sttaford’s theories: he wrote articles (See “The Cybernetic State’), made videos and recorded podcasts in both Spanish and English over decades and participated in several Metaphorum conferences – most recently in Huizen in the Netherlands and Leeds, UK. He was a dear friend and an important member of our community and will be missed.

Allenna, Angela and Jon

Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose

• Carl Sachs 

Abstract

The rise of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology—the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind—could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by “teleology” as well as what is meant “nature”. I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the twentieth century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly “self-controlled” systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas’s phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas’s phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas.

Naturalized Teleology: Cybernetics, Organization, Purpose | SpringerLink

Resources available online

Members of the Systems group at the OU had a significant influence in piloting what is now the University-wide Open Research Online (ORO) – making OU research publications freely available online.

We have also had a long tradition of developing resources that may be used by others externally in pursuit of supporting the application of systems thinking in practice, particularly on OpenLearn.

Badged Open Course

A freely available open online 8 week course (approximately 3 hours/week) called Mastering Systems Thinking in Practice introduces systems thinking in practice at postgraduate level.

Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Resources | School of Engineering and Innovation

Many other resources in source:

Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Resources | School of Engineering and Innovation