Second-Order Cybernetics | Neo-Cybernetics

Second-order cybernetics applies cybernetics to itself. It begins with a simple but rather dizzying thought. If cybernetics studies how systems observe, compare and correct, then the scientist doing cybernetics is also such a system, and their observations are shaped by their own structure, language and purposes. The observer, in other words, has to be included in the picture.

Origins

Margaret Mead raised the question in 1967 in a talk to the new American Society for Cybernetics titled “Cybernetics of Cybernetics”: could the society use cybernetic thinking to understand and organise itself? Heinz von Foerster took the phrase as the title of a 1974 course book produced with students at the Biological Computer Laboratory, and through the 1970s developed the distinction between the cybernetics of observed systems and the cybernetics of observing systems.

Several streams fed in at once:

Humberto Maturana’s neurophysiology, which suggested that the nervous system responds to the outside world according to its own structure, much as a piano can only ever answer a blow with its own notes.
George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969), a calculus built from the single act of drawing a distinction.
Gregory Bateson’s work on learning and logical levels.
Jean Piaget’s account of how children construct their knowledge.

Key ideas

The observer is part of the system. Every description is made by someone. Maturana: “Anything said is said by an observer.” Von Foerster added: “Anything said is said to an observer.”

Distinction comes first. To observe anything you must separate it from something else. Where you draw that line is a choice, and the choice shapes what you find.

Operational closure. Living and cognitive systems are closed in their organisation: they respond to disturbances according to their own structure. The environment can trigger change but cannot dictate it.

Autopoiesis. Maturana and Varela’s term for systems that produce the components that produce them, like cells. Cognition, on their account, is what such a system does to maintain itself.

Constructivism. Knowledge is built through action and tested by whether it works. Since nobody can step outside their own experience to compare it with reality directly, workability is the test we have.

Responsibility. If observers bring forth the world they describe, they cannot hide behind “the facts.” Von Foerster’s ethical imperative: “Act always so as to increase the number of choices.”

Mode 02 Feedback & Cybernetic Loops

In second-order cybernetics the observer (red) is inside the loop. Distinctions shape descriptions, which shape the observer, and interventions change what is observed.

Where it went

Family therapy: the Milan school and the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto treated the therapist as part of the family system.
Education: radical constructivism reshaped maths and science teaching.
Sociology: Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems.
Cognitive science: the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.
Design: Gordon Pask, Ranulph Glanville, and later Paul Pangaro framed design as conversation.
Finance: George Soros’s theory of reflexivity, which Stuart Umpleby identified as an independent discovery of second-order ideas.

Criticisms

Critics, including some cyberneticians, argued that second-order cybernetics became inward-looking: more philosophy than engineering, harder to fund and harder to test. The historian Ronald Kline links the rise of the term with the end of cybernetics’ moment in American science. Defenders reply that the observer problem is real and unavoidable, and that ignoring it produces confident models that fail when the people being modelled respond.

Why it matters now

Machine learning systems observe us, and our responses become their training data. Metrics reshape the institutions they measure. Polls change votes. In each case the observer and the observed are coupled. Second-order cybernetics was built to think about exactly this situation, which is why we believe it deserves a second hearing.