Heinz von Foerster

Foerster Von

J. W. Beauchamp

Music by Computers

Transactions Of The Sixth Conference, March 24-25, 1949. Contributing Authors Include John Stroud, Lawrence S. Kubie, Heinz Von Foerster And Norbert Wiener.

Circular Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems

Cybernetics

In these ground-breaking essays, Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. The author was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics.

Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition

Understanding Understanding

Bernhard Pörksen

Quanto è reale la realtà? Le nostre immagini del mondo sono solamente invenzioni oppure a esse corrisponde una realtà esterna? È possibile la conoscenza della verità? A partire da questi interrogativi, il fisico e filosofo von Foerster e il giornalista Pörksen si cimentano in un proficuo scambio intellettuale, che va al di là della semplice intervista. Dall’apparente oggettività della nostra facoltà cognitiva fino alle classificazioni del sapere, questa brillante conversazione esplora i nessi tra coscienza ed etica, libertà e responsabilità, coinvolgendo il lettore in un percorso di riflessione denso e appassionante.

Colloqui per scettici

La verità è l’invenzione di un bugiardo

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster’s cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential interdisciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster’s élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur. Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.

Seven Days with Second-Order Cybernetics

The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name

In these essays Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. Included are path- breaking articles concerning the principles of computation in neural nets (1967), the definition of self-organizing systems (1960), the nature of cognition (1970), as well as recent expansions on these themes (e.g. "How recursive is communication," 1993). Working with Norbert Wiener, Warren McCullough, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, von Foerster was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics, which has had profound effects both on modern systems theory and on the philosophy of cognition. At the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois he produced the first parallel computers and contributed to many other developments in the theory of computation and cognition.

Heinz von Foerster

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