Heinz von Foerster Quotes

Heinz von Foerster was an Austrian American scientist combining physics and philosophy, and widely attributed as the originator of Second-order cybernetics. He was twice a Guggenheim fellow and also was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1980. He is well known for his 1960 Doomsday equation formula published in Science predicting future population growth.As a polymath, he wrote nearly two hundred professional papers, gaining renown in fields from computer science and artificial intelligence to epistemology, and researched high-speed electronics and electro-optics switching devices as a physicist, and in biophysics, the study of memory and knowledge. He worked on cognition based on neurophysiology, mathematics, and philosophy and was called "one of the most consequential thinkers in the history of cybernetics". He came to the United States, and stayed after meeting with Warren Sturgis McCulloch, where he received funding from The Pentagon to establish the Biological Computer Laboratory, which built the first parallel computer, the Numa-Rete. Working with William Ross Ashby, one of the original Ratio Club members, and together with Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann and Lawrence J. Fogel, Heinz von Foerster was an architect of cybernetics and one of the members of the Macy conferences, eventually becoming editor of its early proceedings alongside Hans-Lukas Teuber and Margaret Mead. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. November 1911 – 2. October 2002
Heinz von Foerster: 11   quotes 1   like

Famous Heinz von Foerster Quotes

“What we need now is the description of the “describer” or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.”

Source: 1980s, Notes on an epistemology for living things, 1981, p.258

“Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity.”

Heinz von Foerster cited in: Bernhard Poerksen (2004). The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. p.3
2000s and attributed from posthumous publications

“The world, as we perceive it, is our own invention.”

Heinz von Foerster (1988) The Invented Reality p.45–46
1980s

“All this (the early excitement of Cybernetics) is now history, and in the decade which elapsed since these early baby steps of interdisciplinary communication, many more threads were picked up and interwoven into a remarkable tapestry of knowledge and endeavour: Bionics. It is good omen that at the right time the right name was found. For, bionics extends a great invitation to all who are willing not to stop at the investigation of a particular function or its realization, but to go on and to seek the universal significance of these functions in living or artificial organisms.
The reader who goes through the following papers which constitute the transactions of the first symposium held under the name Bionics will be surprised by the multitude of astonishing and unforeseen connections between concepts he believed to be familiar with. For instance, a couple of years ago, who would have thought to relate the reliability problem to multi-valued logics; or, who would have thought that integral or differential geometry would serve as an adequate tool in the theory of abstraction? It is hard to say in all these cases who was teaching whom: The life-sciences the engineering sciences, or vice versa? And rightly so, for it guarantees optimal information flow, and everybody gains…”

Von Foerster (1960) as cited in Peter M. Asaro (2007). "Heinz von Foerster and the Bio-Computing Movements of the 1960s," http://cybersophe.org/writing/Asaro%20HVF%26BCL.pdf
1960s

Heinz von Foerster Quotes

“Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today.”

Von Foerster, Mora and Amiot (1961) "Population Density and Growth". in: Science, Vol 133, 16 June 1961, pp. 1932-37 as cited in: Stuart A. Umpleby (2001) " Heinz von Foerster (1911 - 2002) http://projects.isss.org/heinz_von_foerster_by_stuart_umpleby"
1960s

“I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices”

Heinz von Foerster (1984) " Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention? http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/heinz/disorder.pdf. p.6
1980s

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