Cybernetics & Human Knowing – serie

A volume dedicated to the life and work of Francisco Varela, this is an issue of the journal "Cybernetics and Human Knowing".

This Special Issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing contains rare material related to G. Spencer-Brown's book Laws of Form and its contents.

In 1973 there was a conference at Big Sur at which Spencer-Brown discussed his calculus with a group of scientists. This was the AUM Conference at Esalen, and the scientists consisted in an assortment of remarkable individuals exploring the cutting edge of human consciousness and culture, including Alan Watts, Ram Dass, John Lilly, Heinz von Foerster, Kurt von Meier, and others. One of the participants, Walter Barney, has written about this conference and has long been a keeper of the transcripts of Spencer-Brown’s talks. In this issue we print Barney’s transcripts of the conference and an article by Walter Barney and Kurt von Meier reflecting on the AUM conference. The transcripts are a remarkable amalgam of the thinking of Spencer-Brown and the questions and comments of the participants in AUM. The transcripts carry the same lucidity that infuses Laws of Form.

The other articles in this issue include a paper on Flagg Resolution by James Flagg and Louis Kauffman, a paper on Paper Computers and the Emergence of Fermions by Louis Kauffman, and a Virtual Logic Column by Louis Kauffman that is a new take on the Barber paradox and the Russell Paradox, based on satire, mirrors, and the key observation of Douglas Harding that no person can (in the absence of mirrors) perceive his or her own head. There is an American Society for Cybernetics Column by Zane Gillespie about the structure of implausibility in music, art, and cybernetics.

The Architecture of Ideas: The Life and Work of Ranulph Glanville, Cybernetician includes a text by Bill Seaman, the editor of this collection, called 'Composing Composing' which explores a number of Glanville’s texts in a pointed fashion. Late in his life Ranulph began to use the poetic term composer to be substituted for the term observer. ‘Composing Composing’ is a "composed" conversation derived from some of the salient artifacts of thought that Ranulph has provided for us. It is derived in part from a close reading of The Black B∞x, a three-volume series, and other of Ranulph’s texts as well as the interview that is the heart of this book — ‘A Long Conversation’.

Glanville helped generate through conversation, publications, works of art, design, music, modes of teaching, and, in particular, his manner of addressing problem solving and creativity, a cybernetic way of coming to understand the world. Our ‘Long Conversation’ circles through these topics, sometimes returning to one or the other topic to further elucidate its finer points.

Ranulph was to some extent a contrarian — someone who wanted to question the status quo in an ongoing manner, and he would do so utilizing the multiple strategies and methods discussed throughout this book. The volume starts out with a heartfelt text by Aartje Hulstein, Ranulph’s wife, who discusses this brilliantly lived cybernetic journey.

In bringing cybernetic insights to her work as a cultural anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson inspired new ways of thinking about contemporary global challenges. This collection of essays from authors representing a range of disciplines from anthropology to design to creativity and spirituality, as well as transdisciplinary perspectives that are at the heart of cybernetics, honours Mary Catherine's life and work. Just as Mary Catherine found resonance in the metaphor of composing as a creative process that unfolds over time in response to ever-changing contingencies, these essays bring forth and build upon the many themes from her work, such as interdependence, reflexivity, continuity/discontinuity, and cybernetics as a living process, recombining them in new ways to offer novel insights.

This volume is grounded in a deep appreciation of the rich and cohesive constellation of ideas developed by Humberto Maturana which, taken as a whole, can be understood as a biocultural matrix of human understanding. As a way of thinking, these ideas comprise an epistemological shift that changes the way we regard 'reality' as we are compelled by his work to consider not only how we do what we do, but also how we know what we know.

The backgrounds of the contributing authors reveal how Maturana’s work resonates with a variety of domains that range from art to family therapy, from education to organizational life, and from biology to dialogue. At the same time, these authors offer transdisciplinary perspectives rooted in cybernetic understanding. The papers in this volume invite us to reflect on Maturana’s contributions to our ways of being in the world, and of constituting and living in the worlds we create.

Gregory Bateson's work continues to touch others in fields as diverse as communication, ecology, anthropology, philosophy, family therapy, education, and mental/spiritual health. The authors in this special issue of Cybernetics & Human Knowing (C&HK) celebrate the Bateson Centennial.

This special double issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing is comprised of a collection of papers devoted to the cybernetics and mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce with a special focus on its synergies with George Spencer-Brown's thinking. Peirce was a truly original American philosopher and logician working in the late 1800s and early 1900s; Spencer-Brown is an English polymath, best known as the author of Laws of Form. The contributions reflect the extraordinary richness of Peirce's work and his relevance to present concerns in cybernetics. The similarities in the focus on some of the deep foundational subjects are astonishing, amongst those especially the concept of the void or Firstness and the continuity of mind and matter.

This book brings together international experts on the application of Niklas Luhmann's theory of society as autopoietic communication. Luhmann’s sociological systems theory is counter-intuitive and in its detached coolness difficult for many to understand and accept. Naturally they ask: is it really worth the trouble to learn? This book demonstrates what this combination of systems theory, Batesonian information theory, von Foerster’s second-order cybernetics, Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis and Husserl’s phenomenology can offer. The book is produced in cooperation with the Sociocybernetic Group and Copenhagen Business School.

This special issue of the journal Cybernetics & Human Knowing brings together contributions to the debate on emergence and related topics from a variety of perspectives, especially the sciences of complexity and cybernetics. The book is organised around four "position papers", each of which is discussed by other contributors to whom the original author then responds.

Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) was, perhaps, first and foremost a practising or experimental scientist. However, Peirce was also a philosopher, and to him the relation between science and metaphysics was intimate. Peirce not only wanted to develop a metaphysical system consistent with the important scientific results and conceptions of his time, but also, like Immanuel Kant, to set metaphysics on the path of a science. This collection of articles investigates central themes and difficulties in the metaphysics of Peirce — some of the articles clarify aspects of his metaphysics, others also show their contemporary relevance. The essays fall under the different headings of ontology, psychical or religious metaphysics and, finally, physical metaphysics.

A festschrift issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing focusing on the work of Ranulph Glanville, cybernetician, design researcher, theorist, educator and multi-platform artist/designer/performer.

This volume is a collection of articles on themes related to the book Laws of Form by George Spencer-Brown. Laws of Form was first published in 1969 and brings forth a new articulation of the foundations of thought. In Laws of Form we have a mathematical formalism based on one symbol and an approach to the question how the world would appear if a distinction could be drawn. Laws of Form does not answer the question how, given nothing as a beginning, a distinction can, indeed must, inevitably take place. This second question must, in its own structure, be left to each individual thinker. Nevertheless, Laws of Form, beautifully written and content free (form is emptiness, emptiness is form) is the most powerful mathematical text on the edge of nothing that has been produced since Euclid's Elements. These papers are a tribute to Spencer-Brown and his singular achievement.

Dedicated to the life and work of Thomas Sebeok, this is an issue of the journal "Cybernetics and Human Knowing".