My Address to the Conference
2007 of the American Association of
Cybernetics
by Charles François
Grupo de Estudio de Sistemas
Buenos Aires, Argentina
I was deleighted to receive from Professors Kauffman and Glanville the invitation to participate in this Conference, and still more so to know that they consider I deserve such a great honor as to receive the WIENER Medal, which makes me feel very grateful. I deeply appreciate this distinction and it surely stimulates me to try producing still some hopefully useful work.
I am unfortunately not in condition to be personally present, which I
deeply regret, as quite a number of you are good friends and not a few have
contributed to whatever may be my knowledge on our subject.
At least, with the help of
current technical means, I have the
opportunity to communicate you some
comments, mainly historical, about
Cybernetics progress, and how it helped
me on my way to a better understanding of the world and myself. To my great regret, these remembrances do
not include any personal encounter with Norbert Wiener, to whom I owe so much.
Urbana has played a very
special role in the history of Cybernetics.
It is the place where, in 1956
if I remember well, the Biological Computer Laboratory was created, under the
leadership of Heinz von Foerster.
Here, such luminaries as
Walter Ross Ashby and Humberto Maturana, among others, worked with Heinz for
some time and introduced quite new
concepts in Cybernetics:
- 2nd order cybernetics
- Cybernetics of the observer
- Cybernetics and biology of
cognition
Unfortunately, the Biological
Computer Laboratory folded up too early, seemingly because it did not produce
soon enough for the sponsors, these so-called “practical results” which are
generally the touchstone of success in our mercantile culture.
At least this is more or less
what Heinz told many years later, in his conversations with Monika Bröcker (see
“Teil der Welt”, published in 2002).
Referring himself to the
biological computer concept he told to Monika (as translated here from German):
“Studying the nervous
network, I learned that in living beings all operations run in parallel.
What I wondered first of all was that all nerves react quite slowly but
are anyhow able to process operations that no computer can do, even being very
fast…”
And “The eye, for example,
is a parallel computer…
And “The brain hears, sees,
tastes, feels all simultaneously and produces at the very same time accurate
results, which translate to behavior”
In any case, we now clearly
see that the work done in Urbana by von Foerster´s Group became the second
corner stone of Cybernetics, giving it a much wider meaning than its original
supposed one as “science of control”.
Of course, Norbert Wiener,
its founder, spoke first of all of “communication”, which includes much more
than control. But, later, this was less
emphasized and even largely overlooked.
Unfortunately, I could not
be in Urbana in 1956.
However, on the other hand,
some years earlier, in 1950 I had subscribed to the than new British Journal
for Philosophy of Science, started as a quarterly by the publisher Thomas Nelson
in Edinburgh.
In the August 1950 issue,
Ludwig von Bertalanffy published his original paper “An Outline of General Systems Theory”
I was immediately and deeply
impressed by this fundational work and, in 1956, I became a member of the Society
for General Systems Research (now International Society for Systems Sciences),
created that year by Bertalanffy, together with Kenneth Boulding, Anatol
Rapoport and Ralph Gerard.
Meanwhile, in 1952, I got my hands on Wiener´s “Cybernetics:
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” and, again in 1956, on
his second work: “The human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society”, much
less known, but at least as significant as his first work.
At that time I was living in
Central Africa and my business was in no way
related to science or philosophy of science. But I always thought, and
still believe - that making a living is a means, not a goal. And accordingly, I used some spare time to
maintain myself informed about new thought currents in the wide world.
That same year, I ordered
Ashby´s “Introduction to Cybernetics”, which became for me still a new beacon.
And, of course, I started
to munch it all over for myself, and cybernetics and systems started to
cross-fertilize in my mind .
It became obvious for me
that the dynamics of complex systems could not be understood without Wiener´s
so-called “controls”, nor without Ashby´s Law of Requisite Variety.
But at the same time, I
came to realize that Cybernetics was much more than the simple study of some
control devices and, moreover, made no sense if not related to systems in their
most extensive sense.
It dawned to me that
various regulations were at work simultaneously in any complex system and that
it meant that we should have a need for a kind of still more embracing
Cybernetics of Cybernetics to obtain and maintain global coherence.
. Also, at that time I became
very interested in Ecology, which is the paramount science of complex
interactions between natural systems. I discovered that man himself is always
an element in an environment, submitted to constraining conditions of many
kinds, while creating himself new constraints.
As a would be controller,
Man is in fact a controlled controller.
At that stage, Cybernetics became for me imperatively
integrated with systems.
However these general
statements do not avail to much if we do not elucidate the mechanisms of
cybernetic communication and regulation within the system.
Specially, in living
systems, any action is an individual action, even if many individual actions
can sum up to shape some integrated
global behavior of the system.
Remained to be seen how
this takes place effectively.
And now, the American
Society of Cybernetics.
In fact, I had still much
to discover about the works of some founding fathers.
In 1970, already living in
Argentina, I heard for the first time about ASC, through a contact with Mike
Hammer who visited Buenos Aires to give some lectures.
I had an unexpected
opportunity to attend the Society´s Annual Conference that very same year.
This was the first international meeting on Cybernetics
or Systems in which I took part and it was also the first opportunity to meet
some of those clearest minds of our time, among them, Ashby, von Foerster and Stafford Beer.
It was at that conference
that Stafford presented his epoch making paper “The surrogate world we manage”,
making clear our basic ontologic problem with perception of what we call
“reality”.
He made it gleamingly
obvious with the following little joking story:
“Jack, what is the name of
your dog?
“I don´t know
“Come! How is that you
don´t know the name of your dog ?
“Well…we call him
“Bobby”. But we don´t know what his
“real” name is”
Possibly some of you, just
as myself at that time, will find themselves non-plussed and think: “Yes… and
so what?”… until the awkwardness of the human situation as an observer starts to sink in.
At that time, Heinz von
Foerster was already speaking about “Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, “Cybernetics
of the observer”, or “2nd Order Cybernetics”.
Somewhat later, in 1976
at the 8th Namur (Belgium) Congress of the International Association of
Cybernetics (created in 1955 by Georges Boulanger). I met Gordon Pask and learned about his theory
of conversation, which is about reciprocity in human communication. This introduced me to still another
dimension in Cybernetics.
In those years I had also
made another mental encounter:
Korzybski´s General Semantics, being yet a different approach to the intricacies of communication
between human beings: “The map is not the territory” was Korzybski´s slogan.
All this was like a
puzzle which I had started to reconstruct slowly, trying to adjust all these
seemingly disparate pieces together.
Meanwhile, I had started
to meet some interesting people in
Buenos Aires. In 1976, at a meeting of the Instituto de Cibernetica of the
Argentine Scientific Society we began
to meet regularly to work on the subject. Soon, with other people coming from
very varied disciplines, the “Grupo de
Estudio de Sistemas Integrados” (GESI), was created. After more than 30
years, is still going strong and
is, since 1984, the Argentine branch of the ISSS. Information on Cybernetics and Systems in
spanish was at the time very scarce and incomplete. We started to organize
tutorials and publish informative booklets
and in 1992 GESI published my Diccionario de Teoria General de Sistemas y
Cibernética, as a basic sourcebook. This work obliged me to seriously try to
put more order and coherence in the whole field. The Dictionario was already at the time conceived like an
hypertext, with a system of cross references establishing multiple links
between all concepts. For example, the
definition and comments about “Homeostasis” used the following notions which
where also defined and commented in the Dictionario: “Set, Structure, Function,
Dynamic equilibrium, Feedback, Regulation, Ultrastability, Autonomy”. In this way, the links between concepts
became as important as the concepts themselves.
Later on, this
multi-connecting feature was developped and incorporated in my “International
Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics”, published in english in 1997 and considerably expanded in the
2004´S 2nd edition.
As a result, we have now
in Argentina a very lively group of people who has acquired an extended
knowledge of Cybernetics and Systems. Moreover, this group is widely
transdisciplinary, including doctors in medicine, psychologists, biologists,
economists, ecologists, barristers, businessmen, technicians (for ex. in
telecommunications), journalists, etc..
Finally, I would like to
transmit you a very personal testimony.
Cybernetics did change
my life.
I slowly started to
connect better with the world around me.
I learned to discover
hidden interconnections and interactions in natural and man
made systems, and
evaluate their possible or probable outcomes.
I obtained a better
understanding of the ways and rhythms situations, societies and other systems change at short, median
and long terms
I learned to understand
myself in biological terms and to better manage my health.
I learned to see things
as in Heinz´s words: “through the eyes
of the other”, sparing me innumerable problems due to misunderstandings,
prejudices, uncontrolled reactions, useless aggressivity, incorrect, ambiguous
or even mischievious use of the language.
I learned a better
undertanding of processes and better
ways to manage them, when needed (and not to manage them when not needed… and to understand the
difference)
I learned to maintain
open my options and manage better my timings
I hope many of you also
benefited from cybernetical research, and wish everybody else could do, with
its increasing diffusion.
Thank you, dear friends,
for your attention.