Understanding Understanding

by Von Foerster, Heinz

• ISBN13: 9780387953922
• ISBN10: 0387953922
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Springer-Nature New York Inc

Summary

In these essays Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. Included are path- breaking articles concerning the principles of computation in neural nets (1967), the definition of self-organizing systems (1960), the nature of cognition (1970), as well as recent expansions on these themes (e.g. "How recursive is communication," 1993). Working with Norbert Wiener, Warren McCullough, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, von Foerster was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics, which has had profound effects both on modern systems theory and on the philosophy of cognition. At the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois he produced the first parallel computers and contributed to many other developments in the theory of computation and cognition.

Table of Contents

On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments	p. 1
Computation in Neural Nets	p. 21
What Is Memory that It May Have Hindsight and Foresight as well?	p. 101
Molecular Ethology, An Immodest Proposal for Semantic Clarification	p. 133
Thoughts and Notes on Cognition	p. 169
Responsibilities of Competence	p. 191
Perception of the Future and the Future of Perception	p. 199
On Constructing a Reality	p. 211
Cybernetics of Epistemology	p. 229
Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things	p. 247
Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-) Behaviors	p. 261
Disorder/Order: Discovery or Invention?	p. 273
Cybernetics of Cybernetics	p. 283
Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics	p. 287
For Niklas Luhmann: "How Recursive is Communication?"	p. 305
Introduction to Natural Magic	p. 325
Publications	p. 339
Index	p. 351
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