The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics

Notes

Notes Frontmatter 1. Hans Hahn, “Superfluous Entities, or Occam’s Razor” (1930), in Empiricism, Logic, and Mathematics: Philosophical Papers, ed. Brian McGuinness (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980), 4. 2. See “Im Goldenen Hecht. Über Konstruktivismus und Geschichte. Ein Gespräch zwischen Heinz von Foerster, Albert Müller und Karl H. Müller,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 8 (1997): 129–143, esp. 136. 3. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI § 510: “Try to do the following: say ‘It’s cold here,’ and mean ‘It’s warm here.’ Can you do it? And what are you doing as you do it? And is there only one way of doing it?” Wittgenstein rejected the idea of private language. First Day: Building Blocks, Observers, Emergence, Trivial Machines 1. “The environment contains no information. The environment is as it is.” Heinz von Foerster, “Thoughts and Notes on Cognition,” in Cognition: A Multiple View, ed. Paul L. Garvin (New York: Spartan Books, 1970), 25–48, here 47; UU 189. 2. On Marie Lang, see Heinz von Foerster, UU 325ff. 3. Rashomon, directed by Akira Kurosawa, 1950. 4. See Heinz von Foerster, UU, 293. 5. See George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form (New York: Dutton, 1979). The motto is placed before the text starting with page 1. 6. See Karl R. Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Routledge, 1982), 216: “For example, men may have invented the natural numbers. . . . But the existence of prime numbers . . . is something we discover.” 188 Notes to pages 4–36 7. See Murray Gell Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (New York: Freeman, 1994). 8. Voltaire, Candide ou l’optimisme (Geneva, 1759). 9. As a résumé, see Ilya Prigogine and Grégoire Nicolis, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction (New York: Freeman, 1989); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). 10. Leibniz, Theodizee III. 11. See John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). 12. The eminent Austrian dancer Grete Wiesenthal (1885–1970) was an aunt of Heinz von Foerster. See UU 325ff. 13. See John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, ed. Wojciech Herbert Zurek (Redwood City, Calif.: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 3–28. 14. Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI § 24. 15. Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), introduction. 16. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–133. 17. John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958). 18. See Heinz von Foerster, Through the Eyes of the Other, in Research and Reflexivity , ed. Frederick Steier (London: Sage, 1991), 63–75. 19. Prigogine and Stengers, Order Out of Chaos. Second Day: Innovation, Life, Order, Thermodynamics 1. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Theoretische Biologie (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1932, 1942). 2. See Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine, Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structure to Order through Fluctuations (New York: Wiley, 1977). 3. See J. L. Locher, ed., The World of M. C. Escher (New York: New American Library, 1974). 4. Go West, directed by Edward Buzzell, 1940. 5. See Heinz von Foerster, “On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments ,” in Self-Organizing Systems, ed. Marshall C. Yovits and Scott Cameron (London: Pergamon, 1960), 31–50. Notes to pages 37–48 189 6. The Biological Computer Laboratory was directed by Heinz von Foerster at the University of Illinois, Urbana. The reputation of the BCL is legendary today because of its transdisciplinary praxis of research and teaching. Important members of the BCL besides Heinz von Foerster have been W. Ross Ashby, Herbert Brün, Gotthard Günther, Lars Löfgren, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, Alfred Inselberg, and Paul Weston. The BCL was closed following Heinz von Foerster’s retirement. The scientific work of the BCL is well documented by a microfiche edition. Of great interest is the liberal approach to teaching and learning, with systemic commitment to involving students. CoC is an excellent document of these educational principles. See also Albert Müller and Karl H. Müller, eds., An Unfinished Revolution: Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory (Vienna: Echoraum, 2007). 7. Lars Löfgren, “Recognition of Order and Evolutionary Systems,” in Computer and Information Sciences, ed. J. Tou (New York...