POSWID or “Purpose Of a System Is What It Does” is a famous dictum in Cybernetics. This is attributed to the Management Cybernetician Stafford Beer. Beer noted:
A good observer will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state.
Hence the key aphorism:
The purpose of a system is what it does.
There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it consistently fails to do.
I have written about this before here – https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2019/02/18/purpose-of-a-system-in-light-of-vsm/ and here – https://harishsnotebook.wordpress.com/2020/06/14/hegel-dialectics-and-posiwid/
In cybernetics, the emphasis is on what a “system” does, and not especially what a “system” is, or what the designer or management of the “system” claims what the “system” is doing. Thus, we can see that POSIWID has a special place in every cybernetician’s mind. A “system” is a collection of variables that an…
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Where do we come from? Where are we going? New research from the Santa Fe Institute explores key questions related to humanity, society, and the existence of life in our world.
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