“Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves.”

— Louis Kauffman

Louis Kauffman (2007) CYBCON discussion group, 20 September 2007: 18-15; as cited in: Andrzej Targowski (2011), Cognitive Informatics and Wisdom Development, p. 68

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Louis Kauffman 2

American mathematician 1945

Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (1902–1975) Indian activist

Atheism Questions and Answers
Context: Further, economic systems … have never arranged themselves by themselves. It is men who do the ordering according to their attitudes, desires and understanding of things. Changes take place, not independent of man's will, but on account of man's wills. Civilization has progressed by man's interference with material conditions.

“Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

hence one actually or potentially open
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 38.

“Cybernetics is a young discipline which, like applied mathematics, cuts across the entrenched departments of natural science; the sky, the earth, the animals and the plants. Its interdisciplinary character emerges when it considers economy not as an economist, biology not as a biologist, engines not as an engineer. In each case its theme remains the same, namely, how systems regulate themselves, reproduce themselves, evolve and learn. Its high spot is the question of how they organize themselves.
A cybernetic laboratory has a varied worksheet - concept formation in organized groups, teaching machines, brain models, and chemical computers for use in a cybernetic factory. As pure scientists we are concerned with brain-like artifacts, with evolution, growth and development; with the process of thinking and getting to know about the world. Wearing the hat of applied science, we aim to create what Boulanger,' in his presidential address to the International Association of Cybernetics, called the instruments of a new industrial revolution - control mechanisms that lay their own plans.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 11. Partly cited in: A.M.E. Salazar, A. Espinosa, J. Walker (2011) A Complexity Approach to Sustainability: Theory and Application. p. 11.

“It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.