Customer Reviews

Cybernetics of Cybernetics

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Originally published by Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, but out of print and unavailable for 20+ years, this, by far the greatest cybernetics collection between two covers, has been rescued and brought back into print by Future Systems. Articles, diagrams, definitions, illustrations, and aphorisms are collected and creatively indexed. Ashby, Bateson, Beer, Hardin, Maturana, McCulloch, Pask, Powers, von Foerster, and Wiener are all here, as are many others. This collection is not perfect (where is Maruyama?), but the cybernetic ideas live and breathe here as they do nowhere else. For the student who has heard the words but not yet the music of cybernetics, this is the place to start. For the professional cybernetician, of whatever stripe or trade union (and who may well have been on the lookout for this collection for decades), this is the place to return.

I have two copies of the Cybernetics of Cybernetics--and wouldn't be without them. The C of C is a collection of key papers in understanding how everything in our world connects to everything else. If you try to identify what can be said on the most general level about how machines, humans, and nature interconnect, you have the science of cybernetics. This is basic information; you don't have to be a specialist to read it and learn! You do have to make an effort that will be well repaid. Oh, in addition to the key papers, there are non-technical definitions of basic concepts, marvelous short, even witty essays about such key ideas as randomness, pattern, cognition, etc. Still more, you get a "metabook"--a booklet which lovingly documents how the concepts in the book connect with one another--a graphic connector of the connections in the main book. The understandings in this book belong to us all, but they're in danger of being lost to specialization. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in understanding what Gregory Bateson called "the pattern which connects."