The Philosophy of Cybernetics

Jeremy Horne

This special edition of The Journal on Systemics, Cybernetics, and Informatics (JSCI), "Philosophy & Cybernetics", would not be complete without describing the link between the two words of the subtitle. "Interdisciplinary" is the heart of this journal and its embracing organization, the International Institute of Informatics and Systemics (IIIS), one of the few, if not the only organization, devoted to the study of the concept. We find "cybernetics" within the context of "interdisciplinary", also carrying the same import of integration, interdependence, and organicity as "cybernetics".

To see why requires thinking about thinking, or philosophy, more precisely a philosophical system. Yet, all philosophical systems are beset by the insurmountable problem of attaining universal incontrovertible truths, that is, metaphysical certainty. A tentative solution exists.

I start with "discipline" having a generic meaning. Its academic meaning - rigor and specialization - are combined as intense focus, reducing scope ultimately to the smallest of the smallest, interacting Planck scale units, also in a unique manner characterizing the substratum, both process and object contained within the singularity and giving rise to what we have today. This substratum characterizes the most fundamental law, the unity of difference, the essence of "interdisciplinary". Bootstraps, an answer to the metaphysical problem, are starting points, the singularity with superposition and logic the descriptive language. Now, modern computing is moving towards supercomputers, the Q-bit, based on superposition as the computing unit. Ultimately, my discipline here is sociointelligence, the study of how we can transcend ourselves through cybernetics.

Integration and interdependence are dynamic, meaningless absent a framework, a special kind, a system, a dynamism explicitly operating inside and over a system with its descending subsets of objects and processes, designated logically as variables (like "a"s), those also ascending from Planck units to suprasystem, all mutually interacting. Contained within innately, thus implicitly, are deduction (descension of sets) and induction (ascension of sets).

Dynamism does not occur in isolation, it reflecting the same organic essence shared by humans, their environment, and between the two. "Cybernetics" describes that vital connection between dynamic systems and organisms, in founder Norbert Wiener's words, "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine". In the end, humans not only live "interdisciplinary" as well as study it but internalize it, ultimately being it.

Recursion, subsumed by cybernetics, occurs with virtually every dyadic relationship in the Universe, each's output forward-fed as inputs, ultimately reproducing the relationship. If logic is a language of innate order in the Universe, so recursion describes it, hence, cybernetic. In a true recursive manner, a cybernetic one, the IIIS studies itself, hence, self-reflective.

The philosophical system, resting on the pillars of ontology and epistemology (with its substructure of rationalism and empiricism), describes the relationships between cybernetics, and "interdisciplinary", moreover how we arrive at the connection and why. The system, itself, stands on ontology and epistemology, recognizing the inefficacy of attempts at absolutist metaphysics, deferring to bootstrapping. Such as the foregoing is a precis for my forthcoming book Zero is Greater Than One explaining in detail how and why this all occurs.

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