Pask, Gordon: An Approach to Cybernetics,1968, Hutchinson and Co., ISBN 13: 9780090868117
Textstellen:
015. The cybernetician has a well specified, though gigantic, field of interest. His object of study is a system, either constructed, or so abstracted from a physical assembly, that it exhibits interaction between the parts, whereby one controls another, unclouded by the physical character of the parts themselves. 011b. Cybernetics…like applied mathematics, cuts across the entrenched departments of natural science; the sky, the earth, the animals and the plants. Its interdisciplinary character emerges when it considers economy not as an economist, biology not as a biologist, engines not as an engineer. In each case its theme remains the same, namely, how systems regulate themselves, reproduce themselves, evolve and learn. Its high spot is the question of how they organize themselves.
018a. Although the energetics do not immediately concern us, the assembly embodies one or many more or less regular modes of dissipating the energy…as a result of which it produces an unlimited supply of observable events. 031. …the behaviour in a phase space is an account of observable events and makes no direct comment upon the energetic aspects of the assembly. 012. The signalling arrangement is independent of energetic considerations, and it is legitimate to envisage the governor as a device which feeds back information in order to effect speed control. 021. [footnote]. We take it, as a matter of belief, that the world is such and we are such that we see some order in the world. As Rashevsky puts it, this much must be admitted in order to make science possible. 018b. Observers are men, animals, or machines able to learn about their environment and impelled to reduce the uncertainty about the events which occur in it, by dint of learning. 047 – 8. … the phrase „self-organizing system“, entails a relation between an observer and an assembly. It also entails the observer’s objective (an assembly may be a self-organizing system for one observer but not another, or for one objective but not another). 102 – 3. An evolving hybrid is a self-organizing system…in terms of its relation to an observer, for an observer must continually change his reference frame to make sense of it. But, in this context, to „change our reference frame“ only means that we perform different conceptual experiments, try to make sense of unitary actions, sequences of actions and so on, in short, that we „converse“. 019. … we do not make predictions about a piece of the real world, an „assembly“ as such, which is unknowable in detail. Rather, we make predictions about some simplified abstraction from the real world – some incomplete image – of which we can become certain … 035c. … most observers are not content to watch and wait. They act upon the assembly and induce the system to change states in a satisfying manner. … Notice, they need have no more knowledge of what they are doing than they have of what they are measuring. But we know omnisciently. The logical position is that an observer of this kind, a so-called participant observer, is provided with a set of … possible actions, and he is told, at least, that each action induces some cogent change of state in the system. 035a. … speaking omnisciently … 037. … the whole concept of a subsystem is „arbitrary“, in the sense that it depends not only upon the „regularities“ in the assembly which, from omniscience, we know to exist but also upon those the observer chooses to recognize. 022. Individuals circumvent their imperfections by forming a simplified abstraction of the real world, through learning and concept formation (as a result of which, amongst other things, they learn to recognize new percepts). This abstraction, of course, is a private image, but it allows them to deal with and decide about their environment. On the other hand, just because of our human limitations there is advantage to be gained if a group of observers, anxious to make the same sort of predictions, communicate with one another and in place of many private images, build up one commonly understood abstraction (such as the hypothetico-deductive structure of science). This will be a public image of the world within which all observations are assimilable and in terms of which behavioural predictions are made. An observer who subscribes to the plan, must limit himself to observations that are mutually intelligible and which can be assimilated. Again, the rules of deduction which apply in the abstract structure (and on the basis of which these predictions are made) must be rules which have met with public approval. 021b. From the whole gamut of orders that appear in the world we can recognize only a few and these we can only assimilate at a limited rate… 043. Since inductive procedures do not lead to complete certainty it is, perhaps, better to say that all systems are statistical. „Determinate“ is the name we give to a system with particularly „consistent“ statistics.