Heinz von Foerster

Life

Von Foerster grew up in a Viennese family of artists and intellectuals. Ludwig Wittgenstein was a relative, and the family circle included figures from Vienna’s cultural life. He studied physics in Vienna and took his doctorate in Breslau during the war. In 1949 he emigrated to the United States, where Warren McCulloch recruited him to the Macy Conferences and made him editor of their proceedings.

At the University of Illinois he founded the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) in 1958 and directed it until his retirement. It became a world centre for cybernetics, hosting W. Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana and many students. In retirement he lived on the California coast at Pescadero, where he continued to write and teach until his death.

Influences

Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle taught him to look closely at the language in which claims are made. McCulloch gave him a home in cybernetics; Ashby and later Maturana pushed him towards the question of the observer: what happens when the system being described includes the one describing it?

Contributions

Von Foerster gave the turn to observing systems its most quoted formulations. He contrasted the cybernetics of observed systems (first order) with the cybernetics of observing systems (second order), and argued that “objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer”. He distinguished trivial machines, whose outputs are predictable from their inputs, from non-trivial machines, whose internal states change with use, and argued that education too often tries to make children trivial.

His work on eigenforms (stable objects arising from recursive operations) and on self-organisation influenced constructivism and family therapy. His ethical imperative, “Act always so as to increase the number of choices”, gave second-order cybernetics an ethics. He also co-wrote a famous 1960 paper in Science projecting that human population would become infinite on “Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026”, a deliberate warning about growth.

Why it matters today

As machine learning systems increasingly shape what people see, von Foerster’s point that every description depends on a describer has become practical: models encode the choices of their builders. His ethical imperative is a useful test for recommender systems and interfaces that narrow rather than widen options.

Further reading

• Heinz von Foerster, Understanding Understanding (2003)
• Heinz von Foerster, “Cybernetics of Cybernetics” (1974)
• Albert Müller and Karl H. Müller (eds), An Unfinished Revolution? Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory (2007)