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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 photo
Heinz von Foerster: 11 quotes1 like

Famous Heinz von Foerster Quotes

“I don't know where my expertise is; my expertise is no disciplines. I would recommend to drop disciplinarity wherever one can. Disciplines are an outgrowth of academia. In academia you appoint somebody and then in order to give him a name he must be a historian, a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, a biophysicist; he has to have a name. Here is a human being: Joe Smith -- he suddenly has a label around the neck: biophysicist. Now he has to live up to that label and push away everything that is not biophysics; otherwise people will doubt that he is a biophysicist. If he's talking to somebody about astronomy, they will say "I don't know, you are not talking about your area of competence, you're talking about astronomy, and there is the department of astronomy, those are the people over there," and things of that sort. Disciplines are an aftereffect of the institutional situation.”

Heinz von Foerster

Von Foerster (1995) &quot; Interview Heinz von Foerster http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/interviewvonf.html&quot; S. Franchi, G. Güzeldere, and E. Minch (eds) in: Constructions of the Mind Volume 4, issue 2. 26 June 1995 <br class="br">1990s

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

Heinz von Foerster

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

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

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…”

Heinz von Foerster

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

“It seems that cybernetics is many different things to many different people. But this is because of the richness of its conceptual base; and I believe that this is very good, otherwise cybernetics would become a somewhat boring exercise. However, all of those perspectives arise from one central theme; that of circularity. When, perhaps a half century ago, the fecundity of this concept was seen, it was sheer euphoria to philosophize, epistemologize, and theorize about its unifying power and its consequences and ramification on various fields. While this was going on, something strange evolved among the philosophers, the epistemologists and, the theoreticians. They began to see themselves more and more as being included in a larger circularity; maybe within the circularity of their family; or that of their society and culture; or even being included in a circularity of cosmic proportions!”

Heinz von Foerster

Von Foerster (1991) &quot; Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/heinz/ethics.pdf&quot; <br class="br">1990s

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.”

Heinz von Foerster

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

“To remove these one had to account for an “observer” (that is at least for one subject):
(i) Observations are not absolute but relative to an observer’s point of view (i. e., his coordinate system: Einstein);
(ii) Observations affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer’s hope for prediction (i. e., his uncertainty is absolute: Heisenberg).
After this, we are now in the possession of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes it”

Heinz von Foerster

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

“While in the first quarter of this century physicists and cosmologists were forced to revise the basic notions that govern the natural sciences, in the last quarter of this century biologists will force a revision of the basic notions that govern science itself. After that “first revolution” it was clear that the classical concept of an “ultimate science”, that is an objective description of the world in which there are no subjects (a “subjectless universe”), contains contradictions.”

Heinz von Foerster

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

“The main theme of this report is a particular facet of the general problem of pre-organization in self-organizing systems, namely, the theory and circuitry of information processing networks. One may consider these networks as a special type of parallel computation channels which extract from the set of all possible inputs a particular subset which is defined by the internal structure of the network. The advantage of such operationally deterministic networks in connection with adaptive systems is the obvious reduction in channel capacity of the adaptors, if it is possible to predetermine classes of inputs which are supposed to be meaningful for those interacting with the automaton”

Heinz von Foerster

Von Foerster (1963, p. ii) as cited in Peter M. Asaro (2007). &quot;Heinz von Foerster and the Bio-Computing Movements of the 1960s,&quot; http://cybersophe.org/writing/Asaro%20HVF%26BCL.pdf <br class="br">1960s

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

Heinz von Foerster

Heinz von Foerster (1984) &quot; Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention? http://ada.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/cybernetics/heinz/disorder.pdf. p.6 <br class="br">1980s

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