Cybernetics, Complex Systems, and Understanding Understanding:
The Work of the Biological Computer Laboratory, 1958-1975
Stuart A. Umpleby
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
www.gwu.edu/~umpleby
Synopsis
The field of cybernetics originated in the Macy Foundation conferences held in New York City between 1946 and 1953. Chaired by Warren McCulloch, the participants included Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Ross Ashby, and Heinz von Foerster. Von Foerster established the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois in 1958. He served as director until 1975 when he retired and moved to California. The laboratory was then closed. The research agenda of BCL was very similar to the field now known as cognitive science. However, few people in cognitive studies in the U.S. are familiar with von Foerster or the work done at BCL. Meanwhile a Heinz von Foerster Society has been established in his home city of Vienna, Austria, and several books have been written describing BCL as an example of a highly productive research team. The work conducted at BCL continues to inspire leading edge research 30 years after it closed. This panel will discuss the ideas developed at BCL in the 1960s and 1970s, how they were generated, why they have received more attention in Europe than the U.S., and how they are currently being developed. Stuart Umpleby will chair the panel on BCL.
Speakers
Crayton Walker, Professor Emeritus of Operations and Information Management at the University of Connecticut, will discuss what it was like doing research in BCL’s unusual intellectual climate. He will describe his early work at BCL with Ross Ashby studying complex systems.
Klaus Krippendorff, Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics,
Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School
for Communication, will reflect on W. Ross Ashby's role in the development
of cybernetics as distinct from systems science, his vision of the field and
his role in BCL.
Karl Mueller, director of the Vienna Institute for Social Documentation and Methodology in Vienna, a social science data archive, will speak about the contributions of BCL to cognitive studies and the social sciences. He is co-editor of An Unfinished Revolution? and other books about Heinz von Foerster. He is co-founder of the Heinz von Foerster Society.
Ranulph Glanville, incoming president of ASC and a consultant to academic institutions, will describe how the subject of research at BCL – circularity and conversation – influenced the operating style of BCL.
Stuart Umpleby will provide an overview of the systems sciences from the 1940s to the present, comparing several schools of thought and emphasizing cybernetics and complex systems. He will explain the evolution of cybernetics and why the later work in cybernetics is more well-known in Europe than the U.S.
Young BCL: 1961-1965
Its Research Environment and Complexity Studies
Crayton C. Walker
Department of Operations and Information Management
University of Connecticut
walker@uconn.edu
I first review my experience as a research assistant to W. Ross Ashby during the years 1961 to 1965 with particular attention given to the research environment that existed then at BCL. I next discuss the Ashby-influenced complexity theoretic study that formed my doctoral thesis, also carried out at BCL, and comment on its follow-on implications for interpreting management strategy and operationalizing observer perspectives in complex systems.
Crayton Walker got a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Illinois in 1965, taught at UCLA, and moved to the University of Connecticut in 1970. Now retired from UConn, his current interests include interpreting Ashby net models in various contexts and modular complexity.
Comments on Ashby’s Cybernetics
Klaus Krippendorff,br>
Gregory Bateson Professor of Cybernetics, Language, and Culture
The Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
kkrippendorff@asc.upenn.edu
I plan to review the role W. Ross Ashby played before he came to Urbana, while he was at BCL, and after he went back to England. I will talk on two levels. (a) His vision of cybernetics and how it differed from Wiener’s and Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, his epistemological stance in relation to second-order cybernetics, exemplified by the concept of non-trivial machines, and information theory. (b) My personal experiences with him as a teacher, member of my dissertation committee and mentor. I will heavily rely on my contribution to the conference held on the occasion of Ashby’s 100th anniversary of his birth, organized a couple of years ago at the University of Illinois Urbana and now about to be published.
Klaus Krippendorff was a student of W. Ross Ashby and teaches various communication related subjects at the University of Pennsylvania, right now, on the social construction of realities. He is particularly interested in emancipatory epistemology, critical scholarship in the social sciences and human agency, e.g., in cyberspace, and has demonstrated that a more radical formulation of second-order cybernetics opens the door to numerous actionable opportunities.
Form and Content
Ranulph Glanville
Portsmouth, England
My first experience of the BCL was a presentation to my fellow students in the UK arranged by Gordon Pask, in which Humberto Maturana presented “Autopoiesis” and Heinz von Foerster presented “Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things.” What struck me most about both was the performative nature of the work and of its presentation. Coming from the arts, I became aware that it was possible for an argument to be made in cybernetics in such a manner that the form and the content were matched, as I believe they are in art, rather than in the formulaic manner that traditional scientific writing requires. For me, this was a breakthrough, and brought a new light to understanding both the art and the science of my teacher, Gordon Pask.
Ranulph Glanville is a globe trotting, freelance, independent, academic vagrant, a professor of odd jobs. He is vice-president and president-elect of the American Society for Cybernetics.
The Evolution of Cybernetics and Connections to Complex Systems
Stuart A. Umpleby
The George Washington University
Washington, DC
www.gwu.edu/~umpleby
In the three tutorials on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I shall describe the history of cybernetics as passing through three stages – engineering cybernetics, biological cybernetics, and social cybernetics. All three were present in the beginning, at the Macy Foundation conferences, and all three continue today. But the emphasis within the American Society for Cybernetics has tended to shift from the first stage (1940s, 1950s, 1960s), to the second stage (1970s and 1980s), to the third stage (1990s and 2000s). The fields of complex systems and cybernetics overlap primarily in their use of the concepts of self-organization and adaptation, although they define the terms somewhat differently. The field of complex systems is defined in part by a strong emphasis on computer simulation (e.g., cellular automata and genetic algorithms) in somewhat the same way that artificial intelligence is defined by programs in Lisp and Prolog and system dynamics is defined by programs in Dynamo. Cybernetics is highly interdisciplinary. The members of the American Society for Cybernetics are biologists, mathematicians, family therapists, management scientists, and philosophers. To the extent that cybernetics emphasizes a method, it would be theoretical and philosophical reflection. Cyberneticians have taken research on neurophysiology and mathematics and asked what the implications are for our understanding of knowledge and of the philosophy of science.
Stuart Umpleby is a professor of management at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. As a graduate student in the early 1970s he worked in the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory and the Biological Computer Laboratory. His dissertation used ideas from cybernetics to anticipate the effects of a computer-based communications medium (now called the internet) on society. He is a past president of the American Society for Cybernetics.