| I. Historical Development of Cybernetics II. Relational Concepts III. Circular Processes IV. Goal-directedness and Control (2007) | |||||||||||||
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| Variety: a measure of the number of possible states or actions Entropy: a probabilistic measure of variety Self-organization: the spontaneous reduction of entropy in a dynamic system Control: maintenance of a goal by active compensation of perturbations Model: a representation of processes in the world that allows predictions 1 Constructivism: the philosophy that models are not passive reflections of reality, but active constructions by the subject Cybernetics is the science that studies the abstract principles of organization in complex systems. It is concerned not so much with what systems consist of, but how they function. Cybernetics focuses on how systems use information, models, and control actions to steer towards and maintain their goals, while counteracting various disturbances. Being inherently transdisciplinary, cybernetic reasoning can be applied to understand, model and design systems of any kind: physical, technological, biological, ecological, psychological, social, or any combination of those. Second-order cybernetics in particular studies the role of the (human) observer in the construction of models of systems and other observers. | |||||||||||||
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