The beginning of heaven and Earth has no name : seven days with second-order cybernetics

236 Pages·2014·5.642 MB·English, German

by  Heinz von Foerster & Albert Muller & Karl H. Muller & Elinor Rooks & Michael Kasenbacher

The Beginning of Heaven
and Earth Has No Name

series editors
Bruce Clarke and Henry Sussman
Editorial Board
Victoria N. Alexander, Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities
Erich Hörl, Ruhr University Bochum
John H. Johnston, Emory University
Hans- Georg Moeller, University College Cork
John Protevi, Louisiana State University
Samuel Weber, Northwestern University

T h e B e g i n n i n g o f H e a v e n
a n d E art h H a s N o N a m e
Seven Days with Second- Order Cybernetics
Heinz von Foerster
edited by albert müller
and karl h. müller
translated by elinor rooks
and michael kasenbacher
Fordham University Press : New York 2014
Frontispiece: Heinz von Foerster at his home, Pescadero,
California, in 1997
Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
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of the publisher.
The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name was published
in German as Der Anfang von Himmel und Erde hat keinen
Namen. Eine Selbsterschaff ung in 7 Tagen, © Kulturverlag
Kadmos Berlin, 2002.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Von Foerster, Heinz, 1911–2002, author.
[Anfang von Himmel und Erde hat keinen Namen.
English]
The beginning of heaven and Earth has no name : seven
days with second-order cybernetics / Heinz von Foerster ;
edited by Albert Müller and Karl H. Müller ; translated by
Elinor Rooks and Michael Kasenbacher. — First edition.
pages cm. — (Meaning systems)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8232-5560-3 (hardback) —
ISBN 978-0-8232-5561-0 (paper)
1. Cybernetics. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Science—
Philosophy. I. Müller, Albert, 1959– editor. II. Müller,
Karl H., editor. III. Title.
Q310.V6613 2014
003'.5—dc23
2013030580
Printed in the United States of America
16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
Contents
A Foreword by the Series Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix
An Author’s Forewords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xi
Forewords with Two Editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Foretaste of an Author with Two Editors . . . . . . . . .xix
Notes on the Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
Preface to the American Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv
List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xxvii
First Day: Building Blocks, Observers,
Emergence, Trivial Machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Second Day: Innovation, Life,
Order, Thermodynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Third Day: Movement, Species,
Recursion, Selectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Fourth Day: Cognition, Perception,
Memory, Symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Fifth Day: Communicating, Talking,
Thinking, Falling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .115
Sixth Day: Experiences, Heuristics,
Plans, Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Seventh Day: Rest, Rest, Rest, Rest . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179
Epilogue in Heaven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .187
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199

A Foreword by the Series Editor
Heinz von Foerster is one of the most consequential cybernetic thinkers
in the history of the fi eld. He was born in 1911 in Vienna, Austria, into a
progressive bourgeois family of architects, designers, artists, and activ-
ists. Hailing from a partially Jewish background, he weathered the Nazi
era by moving with his wife from recognition in Vienna to obscurity in
Berlin. His university studies in physics enabled him to secure employment
in corporate research laboratories. After repatriation at the end of World
War II, Foerster worked at a telephone company and as a commentator
for a radio station operated by the American military. In 1949, he came to
the United States seeking employment. He gained the attention of War-
ren McCulloch, who subsequently brought him into the later meetings
of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics and assisted his securing an aca-
demic position in the Electrical Engineering department at the Univer-
sity of Illinois. In 1957 he established his own research program there,
the Biological Computer Laboratory, and directed it until it closed and
he retired in 1975. A series of seminal colleagues and collaborators came
to the BCL, among them Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, Gotthard Günther,
Lars Löfgren, John Lilly, and Humberto Maturana. After retirement and
almost until his death in 2002, Foerster maintained an active round of
conference attendance and professional speaking engagements.
In all that time, although he was the author or coauthor of nearly two
hundred professional papers, and despite his growing renown and sig-
nifi cance within a variety of fi elds, he never wrote a book. Nor— unlike, for
instance, Gregory Bateson, who did so in Mind and Nature— did Foerster
gather his thinking up into a sustained summary statement. This unique
work, The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name, has come into exis-
tence to redress the lack in Foerster’s own oeuvre of such a book, and in
par tic u lar, to address the need for an accessible, nonmathematical, com-
prehensive overview of his cybernetic ideas and the philosophy latent
within them. This book gathers into a single volume a certain distilla-
tion of concepts and projects scattered amidst a life’s work left in short or
single- topic statements— mostly professional papers, and most of them
published versions of spoken addresses. As you will discover, its editors
have endowed it with the coherence and productive linearity of a pro-
grammatic framework. Nonetheless, this is still an interview book, and
as such it does justice to Foerster’s élan as a speaker and improviser. His
forte as a raconteur has not been diminished by this treatment.
If one does consult collections of his papers (which others, such as
Francisco Varela, had to bring into being), one typically fi nds a mix of
sophisticated wit and complicated mathematics. In this volume, although
math is often discussed, it does not intrude its immediate methods into
the conversation. Here we have a fully discursive Foerster, which is ad-
mittedly an artifact of the editors’ dialogical method. In his retirement,
the Austrian émigré was once again repatriated by the city of his birth
and upbringing. Published almost entirely in En glish, his work was
taken up and championed by a range German- speaking academics and
thinkers, including those developing radical constructivism and others
following the lead of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. Directed
by coeditor Albert Müller, a Heinz von Foerster Archive has been estab-
lished at the University of Vienna, while both coeditors, Albert Müller
and Karl H. Müller, have been instrumental in developing the Heinz von
Foerster Society and or ga niz ing a biannual congress. Originally devel-
oped by these Austrian editors for a German press, this American edi-
tion of The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name will allow En glish
speakers of all descriptions a new ease of access to the rich thought of
this remarkable and protean scientist.
Bruce Clarke
x A Foreword by the Series Editor