Second-Order Cybernetics

On the Importance of Being Emergent

Peter Cariani • Harvard Medical School, USA • cariani@mac.com

> Upshot • Emergence and Embodiment is a highly worthwhile and well-

crafted collection of essays on second-order cybernetics that draws to-
gether ideas related to self-organization, autopoiesis, organizational clo-
sure, self-reference, and neurophenomenology. Chapters include articles
by Heinz von Foerster, Francesco Varela, Niklas Luhmann, George Spencer-
Brown, and Evan Thompson and external commentaries on them that
analyze the relevance of their ideas in the context of social and cultural
theory. Despite some projective distortions to cybernetics that arise from
the internal imperatives of culture criticism, the book contains many valu-
able insights and analyses of core ideas of cybernetics that significantly
advance our understanding of them.
book Review Second-Order Cybernetics

Cybernetics has always been a fertile
ground for providing new perspectives on
our own nature and position in the world.
As a theory of how observer-actors are
(self-) organized so as to adapt to their sur-
roundings in order to fulfill internal goals,
cybernetics offers a universalistic, trans-hu-
man framework that explains how purpose
and meaning are possible in both natural
and artificial worlds alike.
This book is a discussion of ideas con-
cerning observer-actors and their interac-
tions that have evolved within the cyber-
netics movement over the last 70 years. The
commentaries pertain to the intellectual his-
tory and philosophy of cybernetics, as seen
through the eyes of contemporary cultural
86 theorists. Major themes involve open-ended
adaptive reciprocal informational transac-
tions with external environments, organi-
zational closure through self-production/
autopoiesis, the problem of boundaries (rec-
onciling open-endedness of emergent inter-
nal, external, and network transactions with
boundaries and closure), self-reference, and
the relationship of autopoiesis to conscious-
ness.
The intellectuals at the core of the book
are Heinz von Foerster, Francesco Varela,
Niklas Luhmann, and, to a lesser extent,
George Spencer-Brown. The volume in-
cludes newly-published posthumous inter-
views, first person accounts, and English
translations of each of them, along with ad-
ditional articles on their work by others, in-
cluding: the editors, Bruce Clark and Mark
Hansen; Varela collaborator and philoso-
pher, Evan Thompson; John Protevi; and
Laura Brigham. George Spencer-Brown’s
calculus of distinctions and self-reference
is the focus of essays by Michael Schiltz and
Edgar Landgraf. Two essays, one by post-
humanist Cary Wolfe on Luhmann’s social
systems theory and Derridean “theory,” and
one by Ira Livingston on “neocybernetics”
and “complex visuality” close the book.
The thematic center of the book revolves
around autopoiesis, which ties together
Francesco Varela’s personal recollections,
Thompson’s and Protevi’s accounts of the
evolution of Varela’s thinking from autopoi-
esis to neurophenomenology, Hanson’s
analysis of the problem of boundaries and
closures, Luhmann’s discussion of differenc-
es between social and biological self-pro-
duction networks, Schiltz’s essay on Spencer
Brown’s calculus of self-reference, and Brig-
man’s application of Maturana’s autopoietic
theory of cognition to cognitive neurology.
The essays are either discourses that are
internal to cybernetics itself or applications
of cybernetics to social and cultural studies.
Because presentations in cultural studies
are often more of provocative and evocative
dances of ideas than straightforward expli-
cations of concepts, entailments, and effec-
tive uses, one should not look here for clear,
operational definitions of emergence, em-
bodiment, autopoiesis, or self-organization.
I confess that my tastes run towards meaty,
grounded architectonics rather than concept
salads, but there is plenty here for anyone
Extended Review of “Emergence and
Embodiment: New Essays on Second-
Order Systems Theory” edited by
Bruce Clark and Mark B. N. Hanson.
Duke University Press, Durham, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-6223-4600-5. 296 pages.
even remotely interested in the evolution of
cybernetic thought. If one is already some-
what familiar with the basic theories and
personalities, the essays are, for the most
part, satisfyingly thoughtful and insightful,
well-crafted and well-motivated.
Von Foerster’s ideas about “order-from-
noise” and self-reference in self-organizing
systems come first. A brief interview with von
Foerster in 2001 and an accompanying essay
by Bruce Clarke very usefully discusses his
somewhat inscrutable 1959 paper (Foerster
1960) on the thermodynamics of self-orga-
nizing systems. I am a long-time admirer of
von Foerster from afar, both as a profound
thinker and a beautiful human being, but
I confess that I have always found Gordon
Pask’s provocative drawings that appear in
von Foerster’s paper more compelling than
its thermodynamic arguments, which have
always struck me as somewhat oblique. We
know from biology that energetically open

Constructivist Foundations vol. 5, N°2

 Second-Order Cybernetics
systems can and do complexify; the real
questions are cybernetic rather than ther-
modynamic and involve how these systems
bring into being new, emergent functional-
ities. How do observer-actors arise from the
dynamics of material systems?
Given the prominence of emergence in
the title of book, one might have expected
more discussion of Gordon Pask’s ideas
concerning the emergence of concepts and
relevance criteria in self-organizing systems
and the co-evolution of shared meanings in
his conversation theory. Where von Foerster
discusses emergence of new structures in
abstract terms, Pask’s paper, “On the Natu-
ral History of Networks” (Pask 1960), which
appeared in the same proceedings, discusses
in depth how a concrete (embodied), ill-de-
fined electrochemical system can acquire a
new sensing capability (Cariani 1993). What
is also somewhat disappointing is that, aside
from Evan Thompson’s comments on the
emergence of consciousness, where emer-
gence does come up in the book, it only
arises in connection with the emergence of
complex forms in Stephen Wolfram’s com-
putational worlds (Wolfram 2002) or the
emergence of complex structures in Stuart
Kaufmann’s dynamical systems (Kauffman
1993). These latter two approaches are bril-
liant within their own contexts and purposes,
but they do not in any appreciable way deal
with the central “second-order” cybernetic
problems of emergence of, in and between
observers. How do emergent functional or-
ganizations create new concepts, meanings,
purposes, coordinations and communica-
tions? One comes to understand only in ret-
rospect that the emergence in the title refers
not to cybernetic conceptions of emergence,
but the emergence of second-order from
first-order cybernetics. Being an emergent,
even insurgent, intellectual movement, and
therefore eligible for popular “post-” or
“neo” labels appears to be more important
than the emergent phenomena that lie at
the center of the movement’s epistemology
(more on this below). I had an analogous
revelatory moment when I realized that the
unfamiliar phrase “second-order systems
theory” in the book’s subtitle refers specifi-
cally to Luhmann’s social systems theory,
which is simply called “systems theory” by
many of the authors, and not, say, Ludwig
von Bertalanffy’s general systems theory or
On the Importance of Being Emergent Peter Cariani
W. Ross Ashby’s operationalist-pragmatist
theory of systems-as-models (Ashby 1956).
Here, prior familiarity of cybernetics and
systems theories can actually get in the way
of understanding the specific references to
theories and ideas that the authors intend.
Clarke’s lens moves on to later works by
von Foerster, most of which can be found
in the 2003 Understanding Understanding
collection of his papers (Foerster 2003).
Resonant eigenstates/eigenbehaviors and
self-reference are recurring elements of von
Foerster’s thought (and perhaps of all of our
thoughts). Neuroscientists from Ramon y
Cajal onwards through Rafael Lorente de
No and Warren S. McCulloch understood
full well that the brain is nothing if not sets
of reciprocal-connections that form recur-
rent circuits. Half of McCulloch and Pitts’
seminal 1943 paper on neural networks
(McCulloch & Pitts 1943) dealt with “nets
with circles” capable of indefinite reverbera-
tion and memory that shifts time in order
to liberate neural systems from dependence
on their immediate inputs. By the late 1940’s
there was a fairly widespread belief, usually
attributed to Karl Lashley and Donald Hebb
(Orbach, 1998), that short-term memory
processes responsible for ongoing informa-
tional integration in the waking state might
involve reverberating circuits of some sort.
Within this context, von Foerster proposed
that stable, resonant eigenstates of neural
activity might constitute different, switch-
able informational brain states (Foerster
1969). Particular internal network eigenbe-
haviors can then function as stable mental
symbol-tokens (Rocha 1996). If one con-
siders stable resonances in sensorimotor
loops, then one has the eigenbehaviors of an
individual. Pairs and groups of such adap-
tively resonant agents form stable eigenbe-
haviors, leading to communicative signaling
networks with shared, adaptively coevolved
meanings and ever larger, growing circles of
stabilized, cooperative social behaviors. One
has an understanding of acquired, evolving,
and subjective concepts and meanings that
is constructive and grounded in adaptivity
rather than in somesort of realist account
based on “objective” truth-values. So far, so
good.
A pertinent question here is how are we
to think about the nature of the self-refer-
ences that are purportedly involved? Is it a
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/5/2/086.cariani
matter of self-description with the possibil-
ity of infinite regression, as platonists and
contemporary higher-order theories of con-
sciousness prefer, or is it a matter of circular
sets of self-productions in which the dy-
namics of material systems naturally settle
down into stable, persistent, resonant states?
The former is disconnected from the mate-
rial processes that might support it, while
the latter is intimately connected to the rela-
tional organization of the material substrate.
How are we to think of von Foerster’s self-
referential loops, Varela’s formalized self-
referential autopoiesis (Varela 1979) and
Spencer Brown’s laws of form in this con-
text? Should we be wary of potential mys-
tical and mysterian uses of self-reference?
Are paradoxes and circular logics created
by indefinite self-reference to be celebrated
as sources of freedom from linear logics or
avoided entirely as confusing halls of mir-
rors? Should we worry about the seductions
of ideal, platonic worlds, and the tempta-
tions to lose ourselves and our theories
within them? Here, Michael Schiltz’s essay
on laws of form and social systems is a par-
ticularly welcome critical discussion of the
relevance of Brown’s calculus of indications
for cybernetics and social systems theory. As
Schiltz perceptively observes, “self-reference
is infinity in finite guise” (p. 173). But if we
are speaking of real actor-observers with real
brains, the recursions of materially-realized
self-referential operations only go so deep,
unlike the imaginary, endless tapes of Tur-
ing machines or indefinitely long, garden-
path sentences of ideal grammars. 87
Some basic discussion of form-matter
relations in the context of different, incom-
mensurable “world hypotheses” is in order
here. To my mind, three perspectives are
relevant in this context: materialist mech-
anicism vs. hylomorphism (i.e., organiza-
tion embedded in matter) vs. platonic ideal
forms. These result in different conceptions
of novelty (emergence), and different epis-
temologies (materialist realism vs. construc-
tivist pragmatism vs. platonic realism). I
would argue that most primary thinkers of
cybernetics have had an implicitly hylomor-
phic philosophy that could be called “cyber-
netic functionalism.” Both first and second
order cybernetics has always been very much
biologically-inspired, conceiving of organ-
isms immersed in and in constant infor-
 mational and material exchange with their
environments, and seeking to understand
how goals and meanings might be embed-
ded in naturally evolved material organisms.
In contrast to cybernetics, the dominant
culture of modern molecular biology reduc-
tionistically privileges the particularities of
material parts and local mechanisms over
functional organization. On the other front,
platonic idealism, in symbolic AI ontologies
of world-as-computation, and some sectors
of artificial life, asserts the supremacy of
ideal form and the complete irrelevance of
matter. Pask and von Foerster’s cybernetic
conceptions of self-organizing, emergent
systems that arise from (often hidden) ma-
terial dynamics are thus fundamentally dif-
ferent from Wolfram’s platonic visions.
book Review Second-Order Cybernetics
For the vast majority of cyberneticists,
mathematics was regarded as a tool for de-
scribing and analyzing relational organiza-
tion/order in material systems, and not a
model of or substitute for the ultimate nature
of the world. A useful test for distinguishing
between platonic and hylomorphic assump-
tions is to ask whether one thinks cellular
automata, either physically implemented or
simulated, could realize an autopoietic sys-
tem, such that one would regard it as a live
organism. If autopoiesis necessarily entails a
particular kind of organization embedded in
a material substrate, such that a set of rela-
tions must be materially realized in order for
it to be autopoietic, then one has adopted a
hylomorphic conception. If the form of the
relations is all that counts, as in a simula-
88 tion or a physically-implemented cellular
automata that does not reproduce its own
hardware, then one has adopted a platonic
perspective.
The three worldviews are complemen-
tary ways of seeing the world, and are best
adapted to different realms. A reductionist
worldview is appropriate if you are a mo-
lecular biologist searching for new molecu-
lar pharmaceutical interventions that can
switch the dynamics of cells, but that have
no use for theories of life. A platonic, com-
putationalist worldview is effective if you are
a mathematician or computer scientist who
can imagine or program whole ideal worlds
into being by fiat. But a hylomorphic, cyber-
netic functionalism is essential if you want
to understand how real-world biological,
psychological, and social systems work, as
Constructivist Foundations vol. 5, N°2
self-constructing and maintaining systems
that make meanings in order to fulfill em-
bedded purposes.
In the context of these three worldviews,
it is truly strange that in their introduction,
Emergent Cybernetics, Clark and Hansen
accuse Wiener, Ashby, and essentially all of
early cybernetics of a kind of platonistic dis-
embodied separation of form from matter
(pp. 2–5). In a section entitled From Cyber-
netics to Neocybernetics they say,
“ One could generalize from Wiener and Ashby
– as well as from much of its popular offspring
in cyberpunk and technoid fantasies – that first-
order cybernetics remains inscribed within classi-
cal scientific thought: it holds on to humanist and
idealist dualisms that describe the world in terms
of an equivocal dialectic of matter and form, of
substance and pattern, in which the immaterial
”
wrests agency from the embodied (p. 4).
The term “neocybernetics” has been
coined here, partly in order to distinguish
conceptions of self-constructing and inter-
acting emergent observer-actors (“second-
order cybernetics”) from feedback control
theory (“first-order cybernetics”). It also
serves as a new covering term that allows
critical theorists of various orientations in
the humanities to more freely and flexibly
import and selectively appropriate ideas
of cybernetics without having to defend
the original ideas or their interpretations.
Clarke and Hanson essentially dichotomize
first- and second-order philosophies into
familiar modernist/postmodernist poles,
with an earlier, more naive, “technoscien-
tific” first-order phase, followed by a more
sophisticated, self-reflexive emergent “neo-
cybernetic” second phase. The “importance
of being emergent” here for their cultural
theory discourse is to set up this early/late,
modern/postmodern, realist/post-realist
opposition – this is why emergence figures
so prominently in the book’s title. While
there is some utility and historical truth in
this distinction as a marker of intellectual
identities and tribal allegiances within the
cybernetics movement, the polemical con-
struction of the dichotomy causes Clark and
Hansen to make mistakes of several kinds.
The first mistake is to temporalize the
first-order/second-order distinction, (ear-
ly = first-order, late = second-order), which
radically underestimates and misconstrues
the philosophies of many of the think-
ers who made up the first wave (e.g., Mc-
Culloch, Wiener, Ashby, Walter, von Foer-
ster, Pask, Beer, and one could add Piaget
here as well). When one looks more closely
at these thinkers, it becomes obvious that
they had embodied and enactive systems
in mind from the start (see, for example,
Asaro 2008a, 2008b; Cariani 2009; de Latil
1956; Pickering 2002). The Embodied Mind
(Varela, Thompson, & Rosch 1991) distantly
echoes Embodiments of Mind (McCulloch
1965) in its title. Arguably, all of the germs
of second-order cybernetics were already
present in the movement by the mid-1950s,
but without a self-described distinction be-
tween observed and observing systems. The
ensuing Procrustean rewriting of the intel-
lectual history of cybernetics to conform
to the dichotomous and faintly Manichean
structures of debates within cultural theory
does violence to our understandings of the
ideas of cybernetics and their evolution.
I would instead argue that the first-or-
der/second-order distinction is more of a
difference in research orientation than un-
derlying philosophy, an inevitable difference
that was always and will always be present
in cybernetics. Some division will persist as
long as cybernetics remains a universalistic
movement that encompasses natural bio-
logical, psychological, and social systems on
the one hand, and artificial, designed sys-
tems on the other. Those in science and en-
gineering who are focused on understand-
ing the workings of biological organisms
and the design of adaptive, artificial systems
understandably need to focus on the nuts-
and-bolts of how physically-realized feed-
back control and communications systems
operate. Those who are in the psychologi-
cal and social sciences, on the other hand,
are focused on the qualitative and reflexive
dynamics of interpersonal interactions,
communications, and cooperations rather
than on the underlying neural processes
and mechanisms that make these possible.
Their different research contexts also make
for fundamental differences in method and
style. A scientist or engineer needs to apply
a great deal of logical, empirical and prag-
matic rigor to concrete problems in order
to receive funding for his or her work. In
these kinds of performative contexts there is
 Second-Order Cybernetics
a natural reticence to publish more specu-
lative and philosophical excursions that
might undermine one’s reputation for rigor,
even if one is thinking in “second-order”
terms. A systems therapist, cultural theorist,
or artist, on the other hand, is often in the
position of inspiring colleagues and clients
using the persuasive power of a novel ex-
planatory framework. Each to its own place.
We would not want poets designing our air-
planes, nor aeronautical engineers writing
our poetry. The first-order/second-order
distinction as construed here, in parallel
perhaps with modernism/postmodernism,
is as much about attitude as it is about con-
tent, whether one strives for clarity and res-
olution (even in lieu of certainty) or playful
ambiguity and imaginative possibility. With
some of the second-order cybernetics, it can
sometimes be difficult to distinguish what is
meant metaphorically and even poetically
from what is meant more conventionally.
But this is also part of its charm.
In my mind the most exasperating mis-
take the editors make is to conflate early
cybernetics with symbolic AI and com-
puter science (as in the very first sentence
of the teaser on the book’s back cover). The
“mathematical and engineering sides of cy-
bernetics” are characterized as “Artificial
Intelligence (AI), robotics, computer sci-
ence, and command-control-communica-
tions technologies” (pp. 34–35). Although
early cybernetics did encompass adaptive
control theory and some robotics (Grey
Walter’s autonomous tortoises), cybernet-
ics was and is quite distinct from comput-
er science and AI (“symbolic AI”). These
movements have fundamentally different
goals, founding concepts, and methods –
cybernetics concerns the organization of
effective action in the world via the incor-
poration of ends into means, not the com-
putational and representational possibili-
ties of symbol systems – but the urge seems
to be to crudely lump everything together
into one info-computational “technosci-
ence” that has given us “a computer on your
desk and an iPhone in your pocket” (p. 35).
When many cultural theory commenta-
tors confuse cybernetics with artificial life
simulations, cellular automata, complexity
studies, and computational emergence a la
Wolfram, one gets a sinking feeling that the
profound philosophical differences between
On the Importance of Being Emergent Peter Cariani
cybernetics and these latter-day computa-
tionalist approaches are poorly appreciated.
The antagonism, both philosophical and fi-
nancial, between cybernetics and AI seems
to be lost history. Artificial intelligence was
born at a conference at Dartmouth in 1956
that was organized by McCarthy, Minsky,
Rochester, and Shannon, three years after
the Macy conferences on cybernetics had
ended (Boden 2006; McCorduck 1972). The
two movements coexisted for roughly a de-
cade, but by the mid-1960s, the proponents
of symbolic AI gained control of national
funding conduits and ruthlessly defunded
cybernetics research. This effectively liq-
uidated the subfields of self-organizing
systems, neural networks and adaptive ma-
chines, evolutionary programming, biologi-
cal computation, and bionics for several de-
cades, leaving the workers in management,
therapy and the social sciences to carry
the torch. I think some of the polemical
pushing-and-shoving between first-order
control theorists and second-order crowds
that I witnessed in subsequent decades was
the cumulative result of a shift of funding,
membership, and research from the “hard”
natural sciences to “soft” socio-psychologi-
cal interventions. Clan wars ensue when the
pool of natural resources dwindles. Rather
than rows of gigantic moai statues on now-
barren hills, we have left to us libraries of
monumental writings about profound ideas
whose original meanings are rapidly being
lost to time.
Beyond problems of matter and form/
organization are issues of social autopoi-
esis, closure, enaction, and the relations of
matter, mind, and consciousness. Luhmann
discusses his own conceptions of self-or-
ganization and autopoiesis in relation to
Maturana’s in a talk, circa 1992, that was
transcribed into German and subsequently
translated into English for this volume by
Hans-Georg Moeller and editor, Bruce
Clark. Protevi’s illuminating chapter, Be-
yond Autopoiesis, discusses the evolution of
Varela’s thinking regarding the application
of autopiesis to social systems. He addresses
problems of closure and openness that are
raised by some of the tenets of autopoi-
etic theory in the context of postmodernist
wrangling over the status of boundaries. My
own sense of organizational closure is that
the organism constructs the physical ap-
http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/5/2/086.cariani
paratus that it uses to interpret the world.
This involves the adaptive construction of
sensors, both external and internal, that
make distinctions on the world. However,
although a self-constructed system chooses
its own sensors (and in effect the percep-
tual categories and observables that it uses
to engage the world), it does not choose the
values of the signals it receives via those
sensors. So such systems are organization-
ally-closed because of their self-chosen ob-
servables but are informationally-open to
the world via the contingent interactions
of those constructed sensors with the envi-
ronment. This distinction between sensors/
measuring devices/observables/categories
and the contingent states of incoming sig-
nals allows for both clear organizational,
functional boundaries and informational
permeability. We invoke the concept of
“information” here in Ashby’s operational
sense of reduction of internal contingency
rather than in its now-taboo realist/refer-
entialist sense. If we recognize this duality
of closed categories and open, contingent
states, we can have our cake and eat it too,
and thus avoid the false choices of either so-
lipsism or realism.
Evan Thompson’s interesting essay deals
with Varela’s transition from theories of life
to theories of consciousness (neurophe-
nomenology). Thompson discusses Varela’s
proposition that “life is cognition,” which
reminded me in some respects of Howard
Pattee’s cell psychology (Pattee 1982). On
one level, one can agree that living organiza-
tions have embedded within their dynamics 89
an implicit goal state of structural stability,
such that the adaptive “adjustment of inner
to outer relations,” even on the cellular level,
can constitute a form of intentional, goal-
driven sense-making. On the other hand,
living organization entails the ongoing re-
production of material parts and relations,
whereas the actions of specialized informa-
tional subsystems such as nervous systems
entail adaptive switchings of functional
states rather than production of material
components. An animal whose mental func-
tions are temporarily interrupted by means
of general anesthesia is nevertheless still a
living organization; the question is whether
one can have sense-making in the absence
of a living organization, i.e., in a digital com-
puter or robot. Thompson also discusses the
 relationship of autopoiesis to Robert Rosen’s
metabolism-repair (M,R) systems (Letelier,
Martin, & Mpodozis 2003).
Thompson then considers the possi-
bility of consciousness at cellular levels of
organization, but argues against it on the
grounds that being consciously aware of
something “would seem to entail being able
to form intentions to act in relation to it,”
which in turn “would seem to require the
reflexive elaboration and interpretation of
life processes provided by the nervous sys-
tem” (p. 85). Although intention, attention
and action can modulate the contents of our
awareness, the radical enactive theory of
consciousness (without action, there is no
awareness) has always struck me as naive,
for the simple reason that we do not always
book Review Second-Order Cybernetics
completely control our own inputs, such that
surprising and unexpected events readily in-
trude on our awareness. The dogmatic forms
of enactivist theories are reminiscent of old
motor theories of perception in which one
cannot perceive rhythms without moving
or intending to move. But we easily perceive
sound patterns we have never heard before,
and could not possibly reproduce ourselves.
We perceive much more of the world than
we can influence: sometimes a perception is
simply just a reception.
A question I have been asking myself
for roughly two decades now is why have we
not fully articulated an autopoietic theory
of the brain? After all, many cyberneticists
have had training as neuroscientists or psy-
chiatrists (McCulloch, Pitts, Walter, Ashby,
90 Lettvin, Maturana and later, Varela). Mat-
urana clearly had the organizational closure
of neural networks in mind when the theory
of autopoiesis was originally proposed, but
the mapping of brain states and processes
to autopoietic networks has never been ex-
plicitly spelled out. Pask (1981) wrote a tan-
talizingly cryptic paper on organizational
closure and consciousness, but it is unclear
whether anyone left alive would be capable
of decoding it. Thompson and Varela (2001)
sketched a theory of consciousness loosely
based on brain oscillations and synchronies,
but explicit notions of autopoietic self-pro-
ductions of neuronal signals or states seem
to be completely absent from the exposition
of their theory, both in their paper together
and in Thompson’s essay here. It looks like a
road not (yet) taken.
Constructivist Foundations vol. 5, N°2
Standing on the foundations laid by
both first- and second-order cybernetics,
we should look to the future of cybernetic
theory. One of the goals of cybernetics today
should be development of a self-production
theory of brain function. I think that such
theory would entail neural network archi-
tectures that actively regenerate sets of mu-
tually compatible signals (neuronal activity
patterns) in switchable, weakly-amplifying
recurrent circuits (Cariani 2000). Stable sets
of neuronal signal productions, system ei-
genstates, would constitute the functional,
informational states of the brain. At present
the best models of the neuronal requisites
of conscious awareness require a least one
cycle of recurrent activity (i.e., closure) in
cortico-cortico and/or cortico-thalamic cir-
cuits (e.g., Lamme 2006; Pollen 2008). In a
weakly-amplifying neural re-entrant loop,
if one is able to attain one cycle, then a sig-
nal can be actively regenerated within the
loop indefinitely. It is thus conceivable that
processes that sustain the regeneration of
neuronal signals and support the functional
organization of brain states (i.e., mind) are
analogous to autopoietic processes that sus-
tain the regeneration of cellular components
(i.e., life). Once we achieve such a theory,
then perhaps the seemingly unbridgeable
abyss between recurrent neuronal processes
and recurrent interactions between actor-
observers will eventually be spanned.
To summarize, Emergence and Embodi-
ment is a highly worthwhile, collection of
commentaries that measurably adds to the
contemporary discussion of cybernetic
ideas. Despite some projective distortions
to cybernetics that arise from the overriding
“importance of being emergent” for fulfill-
ing the expectations and internal impera-
tives of culture criticism, the book contains
many valuable and provocative insights and
analyses of core ideas of cybernetics that re-
main as relevant as ever.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Paul Pangaro and Alexander
Riegler for valuable conversations and com-
ments.
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