This article considers W. Ross Ashby’s ideas on the nature of embodied minds, as articulated in the last five years of his career. In particular, it attempts to connect his ideas to later work by others in robotics, perception and consciousness. While it is difficult to measure his direct influence on this work, the conceptual links are deep. Moreover, Ashby provides a comprehensive view of the embodied mind, which connects these areas. It concludes that the contemporary fields of situated robotics, ecological perception, and the neural mechanisms of consciousness might all benefit from a reconsideration of Ashby’s later writings.

Key words: representation, embodiment, cognition, information theory, requisite variety

Recent work on the fundamental processes of regulation in biology (Ashby, 1956) has shown the importance of a certain quantitative relation called the law of requisite variety. After this relation had been found, we appreciated that it was related to a theorem in a world far removed from the biological – that of Shannon on the quantity of noise or error that could be removed through a correction-channel (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; theorem 10). In this paper I propose to show the relationship between the two theorems, and to indicate something of their implications for regulation, in the cybernetic sense, when the system to be regulated is extremely complex.

W. Ross Ashby was a founder of both cybernetics and general systems theory. His systems theory outlined the operational structure of models and observers, while his cybernetics outlined the functional architecture of adaptive systems. His homeostat demonstrated how an adaptive control system, equipped with a sufficiently complex repertoire of possible alternative structures, could maintain stability in the face of highly varied and challenging environmental perturbations. The device illustrates his ‘law of requisite variety’, i.e. that a controller needs at least as many internal states as those in the system being controlled. The homeostat provided an early example of how an adaptive control system might be ill-defined vis – vis its designer, nevertheless solve complex problems. Ashby ran into insurmountable difficulties when he attempted to scale up the homeostat, and consequently never achieved the general purpose, brainlike devices that he had initially sought. Nonetheless, the homeostat continues to offer useful insights as to how the large analogue, adaptive networks in biological brains might achieve stability.

Ashby’s Law of Requisite variety, Beer’s Viable System Model, Maturana’s Biology of Cognition, Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Luhmann’s theory of social systems have assisted my reflections upon issues such as power, democracy, participation and fairness in society. I have explored these issues from a cybernetics perspective in several publications (Espejo, 2001a, 2001b, 2004) and they remain a central concern of my current work on nuclear waste management in Europe.

In marketing theory, the shift from the paradigm of value creation to value ‘cocreation’ calls for a deeper grasp of the interactions between producers and customers. Marketing studies have widely focused on the value cocreation concept, but so far, the mechanism through which consumers can be involved in the process of value cocreation through product development had found little space in marketing studies. In this theoretical paper, we aim to fill this gap and pave the way towards a better understanding of the mechanisms of value cocreation for product development through second-order cybernetics. We conceive the market arena as a physical or virtual place where communications of value propositions produce eigenforms driving the eigenbehaviours of producers and customers towards shared meaningful objects. Based on these assumptions, we offer a framework based on the viable systems model and the law of requisite variety to shed light on processes of interaction between producers and consumers in the market arena. The proposed framework can be an effective tool for the managers involved in product design and marketing to contribute to a firm’s policies by supplying a clearer picture of the systemic relations involved in the value cocreation for product innovation and product development.

Purpose Autopoiesis is a concept originally used to define living systems. However, no measure for autopoiesis has been proposed so far. Moreover, how can we build systems with a higher autopoiesis value The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: Relating autopoiesis with Ashby’s law of requisite variety, self-organization is put forward as a way in which systems can be designed to match the variety of their environment. Findings: Guided self-organization has been shown to produce systems which can adapt to the requisite variety of their environment, offering more efficient solutions for problems that change in time than those obtained with traditional techniques. Originality/value: Being able to measure autopoiesis allows us to apply this measure to all systems. More “living” systems will be fitter to survive in their environments: biological, social, technological, or urban.

Key words: Adaptation, Autopoiesis, Self-organization

Excerpt: What I want to show is that, whereas Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is usually interpreted as placing a difficult condition on us, there is another way of looking at this law that treats it as (amongst other things) the source of creativity. Just how difficult it is to satisfy the Law is the first thing I show in exploring transcomputability limits and how we have traditionally overcome these (thus satisfying the Law). I then introduce this idea that we do not have to satisfy the Law, and indicate how it works in offering increased variety and, hence, a (potential) improvement in creativity, citing our interaction with the World Wide Web as an example.

In this article I explore, from a cybernetic point-of-view, the associated notions of com-plexity, unmanageability, conversation and trust. Complexity is familiarly presented as a problem of our time. I argue that, when seen through the characterisations of the cyber-netic Law of Requisite Variety, complexity often leads to unmanageability, characterised by a controlling system not having enough variety to control the system it is to control. This leaves two options: to reduce the complexity of the system to be controlled (the option used by dictators controlling peoples), or to admit unmanageability. It is argued that unmanageability can be desirable in offering access to novelty. It is then argued that the primary means by which we can interact (and thus affect the behaviour of another system) should be seen as the conversation rather than encodement. (The alternative, to find another way in which to think of the system displaying complexity is also discussed.) The conditions that support conversation are explored: in particular, the im-plicit obligation to trust other participants in a conversation – and oneself. Trust is considered, and its benefits extolled against a background of experience in a historical context.

The Viable System Model (VSM) was described by British cybernetician Stafford Beer in his books Brain of the Firm (1972), The Heart of Enterprise (1979), and Diagnosing the System for Organizations (1985). The VSM is a model of organizational structure that is based on the structure of the human nervous system. Beer notes that the human nervous system as a device for information processing and decision-making is the result of millions of years of evolution. Imitating it may have some advantages. The Viable System Model is based on Ross Ashby’s theory of adaptive behavior and his Law of Requisite Variety. For a further explanation of Ashby’s work, see the definition of “cybernetics.”

In the 1950s and 1960s Ross Ashby created a general theory of adaptive systems. His work is well-known among cyberneticians and systems scientists, but not in other fields. This is somewhat surprising, because his theories are more general versions of the theories in many fields. Philosophy of science claims that more general theories are preferred because a small number of propositions can explain many phenomena. Why, then, are Ashby’s theories not widely known and praised? Do scientists really strive for more general, parsimonious theories? This paper reviews the content of Ashby’s theories, discusses what they reveal about how scientists work, and suggests what their role might be in the academic community in the future. Relevance: Since Ashby defines a system as a set of variables selected by an observer, his work is quite compatible with second order cybernetics even though Ashby never directly addressed the issue of the observer or second order cybernetics.

Key words: cybernetics, complexity, adaptation, self-organisation, requisite variety