Observing Systems

✍ Scribed by Heinz von Foerster

• Publisher: Intersystems Publications
• Year: 1984
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 355
• Series: Systems Inquiry Series
• Edition: 2
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Considered as a whole, the work of Heinz von Foerster can be taken as a framework for the understanding of cognition. This framework is not so much a fully completed edifice, but rather a clearly shaped space, where the major building lines are established and its access clearly indicated.

Von Foerster's framework has two fundamental principles. First, we are to understand by cognition the described behaviour or a particular class of systems: those which satisfy for their components a specific kind of internal coherence (or eigenbehaviour). Second, we are to understand our own knowledge as resulting from similar kinds of mechanisms. These two levels are inextricably connected: the study of mechanisms proper of first order systems (those we study), and the study of how second-order systems (those we are) are reflected in such descriptions. This mutually specifying pair, and all its details, constitutes the space where cognition is to be properly understood.

✦ Table of Contents

OBSERVING SYSTEMS
Preface Second Edition
Preface First Edition
Acknowledgements
Contents
INTRODUCTION by Francisco Varela
PART I
On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments
Computation in Neural Nets
Molecular Bionics
Memory without Record
Time and Memory
Molecular Ethology
PART II
Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception
The Responsibilities of Competence
Technology: What Will It Mean to Librarians?
Thoughts and Notes on Cognition
Notes on an Epistemology of Living Things
Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors
On Constructing a Reality
PART III
Publications by Heinz von Foerster
Publications by the Biological Computer Laboratory (Microfiche Reference)
Index