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Second-Order Cybernetics

Cybernetics had from the beginning been interested in the similarities between autonomous, living systems and machines. Early cybernetic models had very much an engineering approach. However later cyberneticists felt the need to clearly distinguish themselves from these more mechanistic approaches, by emphasizing autonomy, self-organization, cognition, and the role of the observer in modelling a system.

In the early 1970's this movement became known as second-order cybernetics.

Von Foerster defined first-order cybernetics as “the cybernetics of observed systems” and second-order cybernetics as “the cybernetics of observing systems” (von Foerster 1995: 1). That is, the observer is also integrated in a cybernetic system and his knowledge gained by observing is not objective but a subjective construction based on their perceptions and experiences.

This is a break with the traditional idea that there is an objective organization or structure that can be definitely investigated (Bunge 1979: 203-209). In its final consequence facts are not objective findings but only subjective perceptions. Findings are a ‘construction ‘or even an ‘intervention’ (von Foerster/Bröcker 2002).

They began with the recognition that all our knowledge of systems is mediated by our simplified representations, called models, which necessarily ignore those aspects of the system that are irrelevant to the purposes for which the model is constructed. Thus the properties of the systems themselves must be distinguished from those of their models. An engineer working with a mechanical system, on the other hand, generally knows its internal structure and behaviour to a high degree of accuracy, and therefore tends to de-emphasize the system/model distinction, acting as if the model is the system.

Moreover, such an engineer, scientist, or "first-order" cyberneticist, will study a system as if it were a passive, objectively given "thing", that can be freely observed, manipulated, and taken apart. A second-order cyberneticist working with an organism or social system, on the other hand, recognizes that system as an agent in its own right, interacting with another agent, the observer. The observer too is a cybernetic system, trying to construct a model of another cybernetic system. To understand this process, we need a "cybernetics of cybernetics", i.e. a "meta" or "second-order" cybernetics.

So a systems model does not mean a Scale model, like an Airfix kit, which may be made of, different materials but which is an accurate representation of the original. It means a sometimes wholly abstract representation that behaves like the system in question. This could be a software model (program), which has the same characteristics as the modelled system, say a Scud Missile, without being similar.

The simulation then does not reproduce the structure of the system to be modelled (like an Airfix kit), but the function. A software simulation can be set to run to see if it functions in the same way as the modelled system and to see what happens when various inputs are made to the model.

Systems exist within other systems. We define the extent of systems by defining their boundaries. So how do we know we have it right? In one reading of systems theory the definition of a system is pretty arbitrary i.e. a system is defined as the best way of looking at things at the time, the most efficient or the most useful. In practice when we view real world systems it is can be obvious where the boundaries are. A blood cell for instance can clearly be accepted as a system in its own right it has a boundary and a recognizable discrete function. It is equally obviously also part of a bigger system - the blood system.

In our model we identify subsystems by the different functions they appear to fulfil.