New Books in Systems and Cybernetics

The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and even the humanities.  Fortunately for devotees of Bateson’s expansive vision, Peter Harries-Jones has continued the expert analysis that gave us 1995’s A Recursive Vision:... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit meg...

In his new book, The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity (Simon & Schuster, 2018), futurist, technologist, and CEO of Gigaom, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history: 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom...

Between his retirement from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne in 1975 and his death in 2002, many cyberneticians made the pilgrimage to Pescadero, California to unravel the oft-elusive subtleties of second-order cybernetics with the master himself, Heinz von Foerster.  Fortunately, for all of those not blessed to have had... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic...

As Reader in Industrial Management in the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow, Rob Dekkers is well positioned to survey the currents of the vibrant systems tradition in the United Kingdom.  In his book, Applied Systems Theory, out in its second edition from Springer in 2017, Dekkers... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a...

How can we learn from large system failures? In their new book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (Penguin Press, 2018), Chris Clearfield and András Tilcsik explore system failures and what we can learn from them. The book takes readers through a diverse set of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! h...

While Systems Thinking has enjoyed an increasing amount of societal influence through work of such practitioner/authors as Peter Senge, it is also true that the vast majority of the popular literature on the systems view has taken place within a business context and, as such, often avoids placing the “first... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom...

The cybernetics community owes a great debt of thanks to the editors of Routledge Library Editions: Philosophy of Mind series, for bringing to light a neglected classic of the field in 2015.  It was then that their reprint of Kenneth M. Sayre’s Cybernetics and the Philosophy of Mind appeared.  Originally... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

It would be difficult to argue against Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn as the most bold and audacious chapter in the history of cybernetics.  In the early 70’s, at the invitation of leftist president, Salvador Allende, the “father of management cybernetics” (as Norbert Wiener christened Beer) attempted nothing less than the... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

The word “control”, with its seemingly instantaneous mental associations with forms of top-down oppression, is one that makes even some cyberneticians nervous and is often downplayed in contemporary descriptions of the field.   Perhaps this is one reason why William Powers’ fundamentally cybernetic Perceptual Control Theory, or PCT, has, in recent... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...

In their volume, New Horizons for Second-Order Cybernetics (World Scientific, 2017), editors Alexander Riegler, Karl H. Muller and Stuart A. Umpelby have assembled almost 60 articles, including their own analyses, in order to test what they have dubbed the Klein-Martin-Hypothesis that: “As a research program, second-order cybernetics was a) insufficiently... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

As Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science at Texas Tech University, Bruce Clarke has spent the last decade-plus publishing groundbreaking scholarship introducing the application of second-order systems theory to the analysis of literature and media more broadly. The staggering scope of Clarke’s multidisciplinary erudition is on full display... Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

On this episode, we will be talking to Anthimos Alexandros Tsirigotis about his book Cybernetics, Warfare, and Discourse: The Cybernetisation of Warfare in Britain (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017). Given the significant efforts of the field’s founder, Norbert Wiener, to distance cybernetics from military research and application, as well as the ethical... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphon...

For most people the field of architecture is not what they think about when discussing artificial intelligence as we describe it today. Yet, architects are a part of the historic foundations of what we call the Internet and now AI. In her new book, Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming...

With all of its entailed engagements with epistemology, emergence, and self-organization, cybernetics began (and arguably still is) the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine as it was coined in the subtitle of Norbert Wiener’s field defining book of 1948. While the reflexive turn of second-order... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support...

In the fields of systems and cybernetics, such movements as Soft Systems Methodology and Second-Order Cybernetics have undermined the objective realist view from nowhere at the core of scientific practice. Instead, they foreground a constructivist view of knowledge insisting that human consciousness has no direct access to any possible external... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone....

It’s no secret that we continue to live in the midst of digital revolution that continues to unfold in a rapidly accelerating fashion. Digital connectivity and the Internet of Things make possible not only Smart Homes, but Smart Cities. As with all technological revolutions, the road ahead is equally dotted... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becom...

Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) offers an examination of the intellectual life and ideas of Gregory Bateson that came to fruition... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our s...

Big Data: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our Lives (Icon Books, 2017), by Brian Clegg, is a relatively short book about a subject that has emerged only recently, but is rapidly becoming a significant force in the evolution of society. Most of us have heard the term “big data,”... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium m...

A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a number of different, often incompatible, elaborations. In Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gualtiero Piccinini integrates... Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities we want to talk about, such as “Mary”, or “that guy over there” – falls into this... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https:/...

For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea can and has been elaborated in a number of different ways that are or at least seem to be incompatible... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr...

Fueling his bohemian lifestyle and anti-authoritarian attitude with a steady diet of ice cream and whiskey, along with a healthy dose of insomnia, Warren Sturgis McCulloch is best known for his foundational contributions to cybernetics but led a career that spanned psychiatry, philosophy, neurophysiology, and engineering. Tara H. Abraham‘s new... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.f...

The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the light of expectations of what those sensory inputs ought to be. On this view, only prediction errors are fed forward... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by...

New technology has made us more connected than ever before. This has its advantages: instantaneous communication, expanded circles of influence, access to more information. And, of course, our connectedness has concomitant drawbacks including issues with privacy and safety. In Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno-Social Life (Sage, 2016), Mary... Learn more about your ad choices...

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. – Richard Brautigan, 1967 By the time Richard Brautigan distributed... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://n...