At mid-career as a tenured professor of modern literature, I finally found cybernetics. It was a slow-rolling revelation, a protracted unraveling, for it took me quite a while to unwrap cybernetics’ conceptual core from out of the layers of adjacent or covering discourses that had obscured or forgotten their own origins in the fecundity of cybernetic ideas. Heinz von Foerster’s relation to the Whole Earth Catalog and the systems counterculture around CoEvolution Quarterly were instrumental for my subsequent cybernetic development toward the work of Maturana, Varela, and Luhmann on the one hand, and Lovelock and Margulis on the other.

Key words: autopoiesis, gaia theory, heinz von foerster, information theory, neocybernetics, second-order systems theory, the systems counterculture.

Review of von Foerster, H. (2014). The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days With Second-Order Cybernetics (A. Müller & K. H. Müller, Eds., E. Rooks, Trans.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. 236 pp. $95. 00 (hardcover). ISBN: 9780823255603.

In this paper, the nature of distinction drawing, in the sense of George Spencer Brown, is examined with special reference to the distinction between the self and the other. It is noted that a distinction, which must draw its self, also requires an other and a transfer distinction, both within a particular distinction and for that distinction to be part of, and that these can generate the purpose of the distinction as becoming, of, by and for itself.

Biology has no definitive definition of life yet. Second Cybernetics and Autopoiesis revealed that autonomy is the keypoint to work on, but no real autonomy can arise from an abstract idea that, like autopoietical organization, isolates a logical mechanism from its materialization. Two main problems are posed; 1) how to distinguish a living system from a simulation of it, and 2) what to do with those physical systems that although fulfilling the autopoietical conditions cannot intuitively be considered living beings. We propose that autonomy is not separable from the evolutive and reproductive capacities of living systems and, therefore, autonomous systems capable of self-reproduction and evolution need to be explained as two level mechanisms involving informational records and dynamic instances capable of interpreting them.

A discussion of various theories of emergence is given. It is argued that artificial life and the related theoretical constructs have to be rethought on the basis of new epistemological foundations. In particular, three earlier approaches, the theories of ‘anticipatory systems,’ ‘semantic closure’ and ‘component systems’ are examined from the point of view of representation of emergence. In addition, reductionism and the theory of autopoiesis are considered as possible alternatives. On the basis of these discussions, the possibility for a synthetic view of biological existence, based on the notion of emergence, is outlined.

Key words: theory, autopoiesis, reductionism, emergence, constraints, anticipatory systems, semantically adaptive devices, artificial life, component‐systems

There is arguably a parallel between recent ideas within cognitive science about the distributed mind and the development within linguistics known as integrationism, turning on similarities between the critique offered by the former of the ‘classical’ view of mind and by the latter of the ‘classical’ view of language. However, at the heart of the integrationist attack on the classical view of language is rejection of the idea that natural languages are codes. This idea appears to be taken for granted by certain cognitive scientists as the basis for explaining not only how language is mentally apprehended by the individual, but also how it facilitates ‘second-order cognition’. It is suggested that the language-as-code idea, although prima facie endowed with the attractiveness of common sense, is untenable, and should not figure, at least in the role usually assigned to it, in any inquiry into either language or human cognition in general.

Key words: clark, andy, distributed cognition, harris, roy, integrational linguistics, language and mind

The author compares the theoretical elements of her grounded theory, Protecting Self: Experiencing Organizational Change, with autopoiesis, a biological theory of living systems. Autopoiesis, meaning self-production, is a closed system that recursively generates the same organization, components, and network of processes from which they are produced. A cautious extrapolation of theoretical similarities between the two theories is presented, including self-referentiality, self-maintenance, circularity, individuality, and the maintenance of identity. The author concludes that this comparison provides a thought-provoking argument that supports the difficult process of individual and organizational learning, growth, and change.

Key words: autopoiesis, grounded theory, self, self-protection, systems theory