The Presence of Norbert Wiener in Both Order Cybernetics

Abstract

When confronted with issues dealing with first and second order cybernetics, it seems that the manner of defining the former has been somewhat caricatured. The second appears to sometimes give rise to conclusions which are almost opposite to those of Wiener by questioning the possibility of a control for a system. We find in Wiener’s research a prefiguration of the autonomy concept, which, in our opinion, could bring an explanation – and a solution – in cases where control elicits some perverse effect; an acceptance of positive feedback if it serves a desired purpose; the central importance held for him by ergodic theory that we use in an addendum on imbalanced strange attractors control; the idea of a knowledge which may be the fruit of the control; an interest for logical paradoxes he put in relation to communication in nervous system; and already the notion of dialogue in the core of the relation man/man or man/machine. Of course, Wiener did not accord an equal development to all his insights, but we have not yet finished scrutinizing his writings. First and second order cybernetics perhaps form an agonistic/antagonistic couple of which neither element could overshadow the other.

Observing observers. Von Foerster, Luhmann, and management thinking

“…Although cultivating a broad and fruitful array of research and publications, management cyberneticians in St Gallen and elsewhere appear to have not really been looking for a revised epistemology with all its implications, as von Foerster hoped. Bernard‐Weil comments on the writings of Stafford Beer and his followers that it could not be said “that observing systems are always in dialectic interaction with observed systems, the latter were rather objectively defined, and control was fixed as purposiveness for a cybernetician who is himself little changed by the modifications he brought into the controlled systems” (Bernard‐Weil, 1994). Referring to the St Gallen Management Concept, Lentge suspects that, hidden behind a fig‐leaf of cybernetic semantics, the old fictions and utopias of steering and control would merrily live on (Lentge, 1994).…”

New developments in agonistic antagonistic systems science: variable parameters, partial derivatives, medical applications

“…However, AA networks have been built in order to understand better the effects of a combination of couples (balanced or imbalanced) -as is always the case in real systems -and also to study some types of dynamics not observable with the elementary model. For instance, the simulation of chaotic dynamics was proposed at the end of a paper published in Kybernetes for the special issue of the Norbert Wiener Centenary [3].…”

“…Using the MRAAC, they only considered, besides the changes in the values of state equations parameters, the possible changes in eight parameters of the control equations (those of the expression Λ 1 and Λ 2 ). Indeed we had showed that an automatic identification of the 12 other parameters could theoretically be made according to the rule: k i contrôle = ki physio -ki patho (for c i see [3]). In this paper, the variation of the state parameters (corresponding to the pathological endocrine system) was not directly formalized, but was explained by an ad hoc reasoning: it was assumed that, at the first step of the control, even though not sufficient, the pathological model modified by itself the values of its parameters so that the behaviour of the system without control would be identical to the one of the controlled system; this change would allow a second step in the identification of the control parameters, and so on up to the normalization of the pathological system and the vanishing of the control system.…”

Coupled-channel analysis of pion- and eta-electroproduction with the Jülich-Bonn-Washington model

“…On the theory side, many approaches have been developed to describe these reactions. Specifically for pion electroproduction, chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) has been successfully applied in the analysis of the threshold region [19][20][21][22][23]. In building on ChPT, chiral unitary models (see, e.g., the recent review [24]) have also become quite successful in accessing the resonance region.…”