This chapter sketches an intellectual portrait of W. Ross Ashby’s thought from his earliest work on the mechanisms of intelligence in 1940 through the birth of what is now called artificial intelligence (AI), around 1956, and to the end of his career in 1972. It begins by examining his earliest published works on adaptation and equilibrium, and the conceptual structure of his notions of the mechanisms of control in biological systems. In particular, it assesses his conceptions of mechanism, equilibrium, stability, and the role of breakdown in achieving equilibrium. It then proceeds to his work on refining the concept of “intelligence,” on the possibility of the mechanical augmentation and amplification of human intelligence, and on how machines might be built that surpass human understanding in their capabilities. Finally, the chapter considers the significance of his philosophy and its role in cybernetic thought.

Key words: artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, equilibrium, human intelligence, cybernetic thought

The paper looks at how a society having to deal with the introduction of the computer and its derivatives may differ from earlier societies which dealt with the introduction of language, writing, and the printing press. Each one of the introduction of these media of the dissemination of communication is regarded as a ‘catastrophe ’ forcing the society into new ways to selectively deal with new kinds of surplus meaning. The paper presents a sociological theory having to incorporate aspects of heterogeneous networks and of self-referential action in order to watch how the transformation of modern society into a next society may enfold. It draws a distinction between the structure of a society, ensuring the dissemination of communication, and the culture of the society, enabling it to condense the meaning of disseminated and distributed communication into a form which allows actors to focus on selections of it while taking account of the unmarked state as the other side of any one selection. Niklas Luhmann proposed to consider Aristotelian telos the ancient literal society’s culture form, and Cartesian self-referential restlessness or equilibrium as modern printing press society’s culture form. We add the culture form of boundaries for primitive oral society, and Spencer-Brownian form for the emerging next computer society. The paper will be

Autonomy is modeled in terms of the property of certain far-from-equilibrium open systems to contribute toward maintaining themselves in their far-from-equilibrium conditions. Such contributions in self-maintenant systems, in turn, constitute the emergence of normative function. The intrinsic thermodynamic asymmetry between equilibrium and far-from-equilibrium processes yields the intrinsic normative asymmetry between function and dysfunction. Standard etiological models of function render function as causally epiphenomenal, while this model is of the emergence of causally efficacious function. Recursive self-maintenance – the meta-property of maintaining the property of being self-maintenant across variations in environment – yields the emergence of representation. This model of representation satisfies multiple criteria that standard approaches – such as symbolic or connectionist, or those of Fodor, Dretske, or Millikan – cannot.

Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misinterpretations of key enactive concepts. In particular, we notice a tendency to disregard the operational definition of autopoiesis and the distinction between a system’s structure and its organization. Other misreadings concern the conflation of processes of self-distinction in operationally closed systems with Markov blankets. Deeper theoretical tensions underlie some of these misinterpretations. FEP assumes systems that reach a non-equilibrium steady state and are enveloped by a Markov blanket. We argue that these assumptions contradict the historicity of agency and sense-making that is explicit in the enactive approach. Enactive concepts such as adaptivity and agency are defined in terms of the modulation of parameters and constraints of the agent-environment coupling, which entail the possibility of redefinition of variable and parameter sets and of the dynamical laws affecting a system, a situation that escapes the assumptions of FEP. In addition, the enactive perspective foregrounds the enabling and constitutive roles played by the world in sense-making, agency, development, and the path-dependent diversity of human bodies and minds. We argue that this position is also in contradiction with the FEP. Once we move beyond superficial similarities, identify misreadings, and examine the theoretical commitments of the two approaches, we reach the conclusion that the FEP, as it stands formulated today, is profoundly incompatible with the theories of autopoiesis and enaction.

Purpose: To consider how the approach and work of Heinz von Foerster, among others, can aid psychotherapists. Design/methodology/approach – A family therapist, as every therapist, is caught in the dilemma that (s)he cannot separate what (s)he sees from who (s)he is. One possibility to understand what happens in a therapeutic system is by means of the model of resonance. The therapist observes himself or herself and regards these thoughts and emotions as part of the therapeutic system. (S)he takes part in the reciprocal double binds, i.e. the strategy how each member of a human system s(he) is part of is protecting the worldview of the others by acting in a way, which is reinforcing their worldviews. Thus, a homeostasis is maintained. Findings: Proposes a new systemic approach closer to Ilya Prigogine’s work on systems far from equilibrium where chance plays a role helping members of human systems to leave a world of predictability and to enter a universe of freedom and responsibility. Also uses the teachings of Heinz von Foerster about being part of the world and not separated observers. The viewpoint of constructed realities entails freedom and responsibility and is a highly ethical position. Originality/value – Provides help in understanding how the teachings of Heinz von Foerster, among others, can aid psychotherapists.

Key words: cybernetics, therapists, ethics.

The concept of autopoiesis was conceived by Maturana and Varela as providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing the living from the non-living (and, by extension, the cognitive from the non-cognitive). More recently, however, there has been a growing consensus that their original conception of autopoiesis is necessary but insufficient for this task as it fails to meet a number of constructive, interactive, normative, and historical requirements. We argue that it also fails to satisfy crucial phenomenological requirements that are motivated by the ongoing appropriation of autopoiesis as a key concept in enactive cognitive science. The root of these problems can be traced to the abstract general systems framework in which the ideas were first formulated, as epitomized by Ashby’s cybernetics. While this abstract generality has helped the concept’s popularity in some circles, we insist that a restriction of autopoiesis to a radical embodiment in chemical self-production under far-from-equilibrium conditions is necessary if the concept is to live up to its original intentions.

This article reviews the potential of Niklas Luhmann’s autopoiesis as a contribution to organization theory. We consider organization theory to consist of three epistemological foundations, which we label equilibrium-based theory, process-based theory and recursivity-based theory. We review critically Luhmann’s autopoietic theory in relation to each of these three foundations. We suggest that whereas it deviates radically from equilibrium-based theory and deviates significantly from process-based theory, it holds potential in its complementarity with Giddens’s structuration theory in providing a promising basis for recursivity-based organization theory.

Key words: Organization theory, autopoiesis, systems theory, Luhmann

At first sight, life and cognition only seem to deal with each other in an indirect way, the former as is perhaps necessary as a precondition for the mere possibility of the latter. However, looking at the question more closely and especially when we include the central problem of the emergence of life from inanimate pre-stages, we arrive at a reasonable conclusion of complete identity between life process and cognitive act: through the spontaneous formation of living systems, i.e. of exceptionally stable processual structures far from the thermodynamic equilibrium, external influence – which only now can be opposed to internal correlations – is transformed into an adaptive integration or, in cognitive terms, into a meaningful interpretation by a (within limited conditions of stability surviving) living system. Thereby the purely quantitative notion of “information” has to be subjected to a decisive relativization, since it is not before the system formation itself that it makes sense to speak of information. Far-reaching conceptual consequences follow from the possibility of conclusively demonstrating the fundamental equation of life and cognition.

The role of context-sensitive constraints – first as enablers of complexification and subsequently as regulators that maintain the integrity of self-organized, coherent wholes – has only recently begun to be examined. Conceptualizing such organizational constraints in terms of the operations of far from equilibrium, nonlinear dynamic processes rekindles old metaphysical discussions concerning primary and secondary relations, emergence, causality, and the logic of explanation. In particular, far-from-equilibrium processes allow us to rethink how parts-to-whole and whole-to-parts – so-called “mereological”– relationships are constituted. A renewed understanding of recursive feedback and the role context-dependence plays in generating the boundary conditions and the internal organization of complex adaptive systems in turn allows us to redescribe formal and final cause in such a way as to provide a meaningful sense of heretofore seemingly intractable philosophical problems such as autonomy, self-determination, and agency.

In this paper, I argue that enactivism and computationalism – two seemingly incompatible research traditions in modern cognitive science – can be fruitfully reconciled under the framework of the free energy principle (FEP). FEP holds that cognitive systems encode generative models of their niches and cognition can be understood in terms of minimizing the free energy of these models. There are two philosophical interpretations of this picture. A computationalist will argue that as FEP claims that Bayesian inference underpins both perception and action, it entails a concept of cognition as a computational process. An enactivist, on the other hand, will point out that FEP explains cognitive systems as constantly self-organizing to non-equilibrium steady-state. My claim is that these two interpretations are both true at the same time and that they enlighten each other.

Key words: Active inference, autopoiesis, computational theory of mind, enactivism, predictive processing, self-organization.