Cybernetics!

Friday, January 30, 2009

Bionics

Bionics (also known as biomimetics, biognosis, biomimicry, or bionical creativity engineering) is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology. The word "bionic" was coined by Jack E. Steele in 1958, possibly originating from the Greek word "βίον", pronounced "bion", meaning "unit of life" and the suffix -ic, meaning "like" or "in the manner of", hence "like life". Some dictionaries, however, explain the word as being formed from "biology" + "electronics".

The transfer of technology between lifeforms and synthetic constructs is, according to proponents of bionic technology, desirable because evolutionary pressure typically forces living organisms, including fauna and flora, to become highly optimized and efficient. A classical example is the development of dirt- and water-repellent paint (coating) from the observation that the surface of the lotus flower plant is practically unsticky for anything (the lotus effect).

Examples of bionics in engineering include the hulls of boats imitating the thick skin of dolphins; sonar, radar, and medical ultrasound imaging imitating the echolocation of bats.

In the field of computer science, the study of bionics has produced artificial neurons, artificial neural networks, and swarm intelligence. Evolutionary computation was also motivated by bionics ideas but it took the idea further by simulating evolution in silico and producing well-optimized solutions that had never appeared in nature.

It is estimated by Julian Vincent, professor of biomimetics at the University of Bath in the UK, that "at present there is only a 10% overlap between biology and technology in terms of the mechanisms used".

History

The name biomimetics was coined by Otto Schmitt in the 1950s. The term bionics was coined by Jack E. Steele in 1958 while working at the Aeronautics Division House at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton. However, biomimicry or biomimetics is more preferred in technology world in efforts to avoid confusion between the medical term bionics. Coincidentally, Martin Caidin used the word for his 1972 novel Cyborg, which inspired the series The Six Million Dollar Man. Caidin was a long-time aviation industry writer before turning to fiction full time.

Methods

Often, the study of bionics emphasizes implementing a function found in nature rather than just imitating biological structures. For example, in computer science, cybernetics tries to model the feedback and control mechanisms that are inherent in intelligent behavior, while artificial intelligence tries to model the intelligent function regardless of the particular way it can be achieved.

The conscious copying of examples and mechanisms from natural organisms and ecologies is a form of applied case-based reasoning, treating nature itself as a database of solutions that already work. Proponents argue that the selective pressure placed on all natural life forms minimizes and removes failures.

Although almost all engineering could be said to be a form of biomimicry, the modern origins of this field are usually attributed to Buckminster Fuller and its later codification as a house or field of study to Janine Benyus.

Roughly, we can distinguish three biological levels in the fauna or flora, after which technology can be modeled:

Mimicking natural methods of manufacture
Imitating mechanisms found in nature (velcro)
Studying organizational principles from social behaviour of organisms, such as the flocking behaviour of birds, the foraging behaviour of bees and ants, and the Swarm Intelligence(SI)-based behaviour of a school of fish.

Examples of biomimetics

Velcro is the most famous example of biomimetics. In 1948, the Swiss engineer George de Mestral was cleaning his dog of burrs picked up on a walk when he realized how the hooks of the burrs clung to the fur.

Cat's eye reflectors were invented by Percy Shaw in 1935 after studying the mechanism of cat eyes. He had found that cats had a system of reflecting cells, known as tapetum lucidum, which was capable of reflecting the tiniest bit of light.

Leonardo da Vinci's flying machines and ships are early examples of drawing from nature in engineering.

Julian Vincent drew from the study of pinecones when he developed in 2004 "smart" clothing that adapts to changing temperatures. "I wanted a nonliving system which would respond to changes in moisture by changing shape", he said. "There are several such systems in plants, but most are very small — the pinecone is the largest and therefore the easiest to work on". Pinecones respond to higher humidity by opening their scales (to disperse their seeds). The "smart" fabric does the same thing, opening up when the wearer is warm and sweating, and shutting tight when cold.

"Morphing aircraft wings" that change shape according to the speed and duration of flight were designed in 2004 by biomimetic scientists from Penn State University. The morphing wings were inspired by different bird species that have differently shaped wings according to the speed at which they fly. In order to change the shape and underlying structure of the aircraft wings, the researchers needed to make the overlying skin also be able to change, which their design does by covering the wings with fish-inspired scales that could slide over each other. In some respects this is a refinement of the swing-wing design.

Lotus leaf surface, rendered: microscopic view

Some paints and roof tiles have been engineered to be self-cleaning by copying the mechanism from the Nelumbo lotus.

Nanostructures and physical mechanisms that produce the shining color of butterfly wings were reproduced in silico by Greg Parker, professor of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton and research student Luca Plattner in the field of photonics, which is electronics using photons as the information carrier instead of electrons.

The wing structure of the blue morpho butterfly was studied and the way it reflects light was mimicked to create an RFID tag that can be read through water and on metal.

Neuromorphic chips, silicon retinae or cochleae, has wiring that is modelled after real neural networks. S.a.: connectivity

Synthetic or "robotic" vegetation, which aids in conservation and restoration, are machines designed to mimic many of the functions of living vegetation.

Medical adhesives involving glue and tiny nano-hairs are being developed based on the physical structures found in the feet of geckos.

Specific uses of the term

In medicine

Bionics is a term which refers to the flow of concepts from biology to engineering and vice versa. Hence, there are two slightly different points of view regarding the meaning of the word.

In medicine, bionics means the replacement or enhancement of organs or other body parts by mechanical versions. Bionic implants differ from mere prostheses by mimicking the original function very closely, or even surpassing it.

Bionics' German equivalent, "Bionik", always adheres to the broader meaning, in that it tries to develop engineering solutions from biological models. This approach is motivated by the fact that biological solutions will usually be optimized by evolutionary forces.

While the technologies that make bionic implants possible are still in a very early stage, a few bionic items already exist, the best known being the cochlear implant, a device for deaf people. By 2004 fully functional artificial hearts were developed. Significant further progress is expected to take place with the advent of nanotechnologies. A well known example of a proposed nanodevice is a respirocyte, an artificial red cell, designed (though not built yet) by Robert Freitas.

Kwabena Boahen from Ghana was a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. During his eight years at Penn, he developed a silicon retina that was able to process images in the same manner as a living retina. He confirmed the results by comparing the electrical signals from his silicon retina to the electrical signals produced by a salamander eye while the two retinas were looking at the same image.

Politics

A political form of biomimcry is bioregional democracy, wherein political borders conform to natural ecoregions rather than human cultures or the outcomes of prior conflicts.

Critics of these approaches often argue that ecological selection itself is a poor model of minimizing manufacturing complexity or conflict, and that the free market relies on conscious cooperation, agreement, and standards as much as on efficiency - more analogous to sexual selection. Charles Darwin himself contended that both were balanced in natural selection - although his contemporaries often avoided frank talk about sex, or any suggestion that free market success was based on persuasion, not value.

Advocates, especially in the anti-globalization movement, argue that the mating-like processes of standardization, financing and marketing, are already examples of runaway evolution - rendering a system that appeals to the consumer but which is inefficient at use of energy and raw materials. Biomimicry, they argue, is an effective strategy to restore basic efficiency.

Biomimicry is also the second principle of Natural Capitalism.

Other uses

In a more specific meaning, it is a creativity technique that tries to use biological prototypes to get ideas for engineering solutions. This approach is motivated by the fact that biological organisms and their organs have been well optimized by evolution. In chemistry, a biomimetic synthesis is a man-made chemical synthesis inspired by biochemical processes.

Another, more recent meaning of the term "bionics" refers to merging organism and machine. This approach results in a hybrid system combining biological and engineering parts, which can also be referred as a cybernetic organism (cyborg). Practical realization of this was demonstrated in Kevin Warwick's implant experiments bringing about ultrasound input via his own nervous system.

In 2006 Mercedes-Benz introduced its Bionic concept car.

Biocybernetics

Biocybernetics is the application of cybernetics to the biological science, comprised of biological disciplines that benefit from the application of cybernetics: neurology, multicellular systems and others. Biocybernetics plays a major role in systems biology, seeking to integrate different levels of information to understand how biological systems function.

Biocybernetics as an abstract science is a part of theoretical biology, and based upon the principles of systemics.

Terminology

Biocybernetics is a cojoined word from bio (Greek: βίο / life) and cybernetics (Greek: κυβερνητική / controlling-governing). It is sometimes written together or with a blank or written fully as biological cybernetics, whilst the same rules apply. Most write it together though, as Google statistics show. The same applies to neuro cybernetics which should also be looked up as neurological, when doing extensive research.

Same or familiar fields

As those disciplines are dealing on theoretical/abstract foundations and are in accordance with the popularity of computers. Thus papers and research is in greater numbers going on under different names: e.g. molecular cybernetics -> molecular computational systems OR molecular systems theory OR molecular systemics OR molecular information/informational systems

Please heed this when you engage in an extensive search for information to assure access to a broad range of papers.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Conversation Theory

Conversation Theory is a cybernetic and dialectic framework that offers a scientific theory to explain how interactions lead to "construction of knowledge", or, "knowing": wishing to preserve both the dynamic/kinetic quality, and the necessity for there to be a "knower". This work is proposed by Gordon Pask in the 1970s.

Overview

Conversation Theory regards social systems as symbolic, language-oriented systems where responses depend on one person's interpretation of another person's behavior, and where meanings are agreed through conversations. But since meanings are agreed, and the agreements can be illusory and transient, scientific research requires stable reference points in human transactions to allow for reproducible results. Pask found these points to be the understandings which arise in the conversations between two participating individuals, and which he defined rigorously.

Conversation Theory describes interaction between two or more cognitive systems, such as a teacher and a student or distinct perspectives within one individual, and how they engage in a dialog over a given concept and identify differences in how they understand it.

Conversation Theory came out of the work of Gordon Pask on instructional design and models of individual learning styles. In regard to learning styles, he identified conditions required for concept sharing and described the learning styles holist, serialist, and their optimal mixture versatile. He proposed a rigorous model of analogy relations.

Topics

Conversation Theory as developed by Pask originated from this cybernetics framework and attempts to explain learning in both living organisms and machines. The fundamental idea of the theory was that learning occurs through conversations about a subject matter which serves to make knowledge explicit.

Levels of conversation

Conversations can be conducted at a number of different levels:

Natural language (general discussion)
Object languages (for discussing the subject matter)
Metalanguages (for talking about learning/language)

Conversation

Through recursive interactions called "Conversation" their differences may be reduced until agreement--that is, agreement up to a point which Pask called "agreement over an understanding"--may be reached. A residue of the interaction may be captured as an "entailment mesh", an organized and publicly available collection of resultant knowledge, itself a major product of the theory as devotees argue they afford many advantages over semantic networks and other, less formalized and non-experimentally based "representations of knowledge".

The Derivation of a concept from at least two concurrently existing topics or concepts

Alternative derivations may be shown with conjunctive (AND) and disjunctive pathways (OR). This is logically equivalent to T1 = (T2 AND T3) OR (T4 AND T5)

Any two concepts can produce the third, shown as the cyclic form of three concepts --- note that the arrows should show that BOTH T1 and T2 are required to produce T3; similarly for generating T1 or T2 from the others.

Lastly a formal analogy is shown where the derivations of the concept triples are indicated. The diamond shape denotes analogy and can exist between any three topics because of the shared meanings and differences.

The relation of one topic to another by an analogy can also be seen as a restriction on a mapping and a distinction to produce the second topic or concept.

Cognitive Reflector

From Conversation Theory Pask developed what he called a "Cognitive Reflector". This is a virtual machine for selecting and executing concepts or topics from an entailment mesh shared by at least a pair of participants. It features an external modelling facility on which agreement between, say, a teacher and pupil may be shown by reproducing public descriptions of behaviour. We see this in essay and report writing or the "practicals" of science teaching.

Lp was Pask's protolanguage which produced operators like Ap which concurrently executes, Con, the concept of a Topic, T to produce a Description, D. Thus:

Ap(Con(T)=> D(T), where => stands for produces.

A succinct account of these operators is presented in Pask Amongst many fascinating insights he points out three indexes are required for concurrent execution, two for parallel and one to designate a serial process. He subsumes this complexity by designating participants A, B etc.

In Commentary toward the end of Pask he states:

The form not the content of the theories (conversation theory and interactions of actors theory) return to and is congruent with the forms of physical theories; such as wave particle duality (the set theoretic unfoldment part of conversation theory is a radiation and its reception is the interpretation by the recipient of the descriptions so exchanged, and vice versa). The particle aspect is the recompilation by the listener of what a speaker is saying. Theories of many universes, one at least for each participant A and one to participant B- are bridged by analogy. As before this is the truth value of any interaction; the metaphor for which is culture itself.

Learning strategies

In order to facilitate learning, Pask argued that subject matter should be represented in the form of structures which show what is to be learned. These structures exist in a variety of different levels depending upon the extent of the relationships displayed. The critical method of learning according to Conversation Theory is "teachback" in which one person teaches another what they have learned.

Pask identified two different types of learning strategies:

Serialists – Progress through a structure in a sequential fashion
Holists - Look for higher order relations

Gordon Pask

Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask (* June 28, 1928 in Derby; † March 28, 1996 London) was an English cybernetician and psychologist who made significant contributions to cybernetics, instructional psychology, experimental epistemology and educational technology.

Biography

Pask was born in Derby, England in 1928. After qualifying precociously as a Mining Engineer at Liverpool Polytechnic, now Liverpool John Moores University, Pask obtained an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1952 and a PhD in Psychology from the University of London in 1964. Whilst Visiting Professor of Educational Technology he obtained the first DSc from the Open University. From the sixties Pask directed commercial research at System Research Ltd in Richmond, Surrey and his partnership, Pask Associates, near Clapham Common during the eighties and nineties.

Pask held faculty positions at Brunel University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Concordia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Oregon, and University of Amsterdam.

In 1968 Gordon Pask and his pupil Roy Ascott were elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London. In 1974 he was elected president of the Society for General Systems Research, now the International Society for Systems Science. Pask was chairman of the Cybernetics Society from 1976 to 1979. He advised the professional cybernetician to proceed in the manner of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.

In 1995 he was awarded a ScD from his alma mater, Downing College, Cambridge, and he was a recipient of the Wiener medal from the Cybernetics Society in London.

In 1956 Pask had been married to Elizabeth Poole with whom he had two daughters. He was further active in the theatre and wrote a collection of short stories "Adventures with Professor Flaxman-Low" (narrated extract with notes) as a literary comment on his work. For many years he was Senior Tutor at the Architectural Association in London. He drew and painted and was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club and the Athenaeum Club.

Work: overview

Gordon's primary contribution to cybernetics and systems theory, as well as to numerous other fields, was his emphasis on the personal nature of reality, and on the process of learning as stemming from the consensual agreement of interacting actors in a given environement. Life and intelligence lie somewhere in the conflict between closed, unique, construction and open, shared, interaction. Between a specific material fabric, and a general conceptual/functional organization. In fact, his message, still very much mute to the more hardcore computationalist ears in the Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life communities, stresses that only systems striving out of this conflict can be considered to be alive and/or intelligent, and endowed with the potential for open-ended conceptual/functional variety.

Pask's most well known work was the development of

Conversation Theory: is a cybernetic and dialectic framework that offers a scientific theory to explain how interactions lead to "construction of knowledge", or, as Pask preferred "knowing" (wishing to preserve both the dynamic/kinetic quality, and the necessity for there to be a "knower"). It came out of his work on instructional design and models of individual learning styles. In regard to learning styles, he identified conditions required for concept sharing and described the learning styles holist, serialist, and their optimal mixture versatile. He proposed a rigorous model of analogy relations.
Interactions of Actors Theory: This is a generalized account of the eternal kinetic processes that support kinematic conversations bounded with beginnings and ends in all media. It is reminiscent of Freud's psychodynamics, Bateson's panpsychism (see "Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity" 1970). Pask's nexus of analogy, dependence and mechanical spin produces the differences that are central to cybernetics.

Interactions of Actors Theory

While working with clients in the last years of his life, Gordon Pask produced an axiomatic scheme for his Interactions of Actors Theory, less well-known than his Conversation Theory. "Interactions of Actors (IA), Theory and Some Applications", as the manuscript is entitled, is essentially a concurrent spin calculus applied to the living environment with strict topological constraints. One of the most notable associates of Gordon Pask, Gerard de Zeeuw, was a key contributor to the development of Interactions of Actors theory.

The figure shows Pask's famous "repulsive carapace" force surrounding a concept. It is shown by the minus sign, it has a clockwise or anticlockwise spin - compare Spin (physics). The spin signature is determined by the residual parity of a braid which is the thick line enclosed by the cylinder. The plus sign labels a process seeking closure by "eating its own tail". Three of these toroidal structures can produce a Borromean link model of the minimal stable concept. Pask said the prismatic tensegrity could be used as a model for the interaction in a Borromean link.

Prismatic Tensegrity space filling unit cell of a minimal concept. The red, blue and green rods exert compressive repulsions, the black lines represent attractive tensions. The Borromean link shown is regarded as a resonance form (c.f. tautomerism) of Pask's minimal persisting concept triple.

Interactions of Actors Theory (IA) is a process theory. As a means to describe the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Pask would make analogies to physical theories in the classic positivist enterprises of the social sciences. Pask sought to apply the axiomatic properties of agreement or epistemological dependence to produce a "sharp-valued" social science with precision comparable to the results of the hard sciences. It was out of this inclination that he would develop his Interactions of Actors Theory. Pask's concepts produce relations in all media and he regarded IA as a process theory. In his Complementarity Principle (see New Cybernetics (Gordon Pask)) he stated "Processes produce products and all products (finite, bounded, coherent objects) are produced by processes".

Most importantly Pask believed that no two concepts could be the same because of their different histories. He called this the "No Doppelgangers" clause or edict. Later he reflected "Time is incommensurable for Actors". He saw these properties as necessary to produce differentiation and innovation or new coherences in physical nature and, indeed, minds.

In 1995 Pask stated what he called his Last Theorem: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". For ease of application Pask stated the differences and similarities of descriptions (the products of processes) were context and perspective dependent. In the last three years of his life Pask presented models based on Knot theory knots which described minimal persisting concepts. He interpreted these as acting as computing elements which exert repulsive forces in order to interact and persist in filling the space. The knots, links and braids of his entailment mesh models of concepts, which could include tangle-like processes seeking "tail-eating" closure, Pask called "tapestries".

His analysis proceeded with like seeming concepts repelling or unfolding but after a sufficient duration of interaction (he called this duration "faith") a pair of similar or like-seeming concepts will always produce a difference and thus an attraction. Amity (availability for interaction), respectability (observability), responsibility (able to respond to stimulus), unity (not uniformity) were necessary properties to produce agreement (or dependence) and agreement-to-disagree (or relative independence) when Actors interact. Concepts could be applied imperatively or permissively when a Petri (see Petri net) condition for synchronous transfer of meaningful information occurred. Extending his physical analogy Pask associated the interactions of thought generation with radiation : "operations generating thoughts and penetrating conceptual boundaries within participants, excite the concepts bounded as oscillators, which, in ridding themselves of this surplus excitation, produce radiation"

In sum, IA supports the earlier kinematic Conversation Theory work where minimally two concurrent concepts were required to produce a non-trivial third. One distinction separated the similarity and difference of any pair in the minimum triple. However, his formal methods denied the competence of mathematics or digital serial and parallel processes to produce applicable descriptions because of their innate pathologies in locating the infinitesimals of dynamic equilibria (Stafford Beer's "Point of Calm"). He dismissed the digital computer as a kind of kinematic "magic lantern". He saw mechanical models as the future for the concurrent kinetic computers required to describe natural processes. He believed that this implied the need to extend quantum computing to emulate true field concurrency rather than the current von Neumann architecture.

Reviewing IA he said:

Interaction of actors has no specific beginning or end. It goes on forever. Since it does so it has very peculiar properties. Whereas a conversation is mapped (due to a possibility of obtaining a vague kinematic, perhaps picture-frame image, of it, onto Newtonian time, precisely because it has a beginning and end), an interaction, in general, cannot be treated in this manner. Kinematics are inadequate to deal with life: we need kinetics. Even so as in the minimal case of a strict conversation we cannot construct the truth value, metaphor or analogy of A and B. The A, B differences are generalizations about a coalescence of concepts on the part of A and B; their commonality and coherence is the similarity. The difference (reiterated) is the differentiation of A and B (their agreements to disagree, their incoherences). Truth value in this case meaning the coherence between all of the interacting actors.

He added:

It is essential to postulate vectorial times (where components of the vectors are incommensurate) and furthermore times which interact with each other in the manner of Louis Kaufmann's knots and tangles.

In experimental Epistemology Pask, the "philosopher mechanic", produced a tool kit to analyze the basis for knowledge and criticize the teaching and application of knowledge from all fields: the law, social and system sciences to mathematics, physics and biology. In establishing the vacuity of invariance Pask was challenged with the invariance of atomic number. "Ah", he said "the atomic hypothesis". He rejected this instead preferring the infinite nature of the productions of waves.

Pask held that concurrence is a necessary condition for modeling brain functions and he remarked IA was meant to stand AI, Artificial Intelligence, on its head. Pask believed it was the job of cybernetics to compare and contrast. His IA theory showed how to do this. Heinz von Foerster called him a genius, "Mr. Cybernetics", the "cybernetician's cybernetician".

Hewitt's Actor model

The Hewitt, Bishop and Steiger approach concerns sequential processing and inter-process communication in digital, serial, kinematic computers. It is a parallel or pseudo-concurrent theory as is the theory of concurrency. See Concurrency (computer science). In Pask's true field concurrent theory kinetic processes can interrupt (or, indeed, interact with) each other, simply reproducing or producing a new resultant force within a coherence (of concepts) but without buffering delays or priority.

No Doppelgangers

"There are no Doppelgangers" is a fundamental theorem, edict or clause of cybernetics due to Gordon Pask in support of his theories of learning and interaction in all media: Conversation Theory and Interactions of Actors Theory. It accounts for physical differentiation and is Pask's exclusion principle. It states no two products of concurrent interaction can be the same because of their different dynamic contexts and perspectives. No Doppelgangers is necessary to account for the production by interaction and intermodulation (c.f. beats) different, evolving, persisting and coherent forms. Direct evidence is seen, for example, in spectral line broadening. Two proofs are presented both due to Pask.

Duration Proof

Consider a pair of moving, dynamic participants A and B producing an interaction T. Their separation will vary during T. The duration of T observed from A will be different from the duration of T observed from B.

Let T^s and T^f be the start and finish times for the transfer of meaningful information.

Where <> stands for "is not equal to" we can write:

T^sA <> T^fB,

T^sB <> T^fB,

T^sA <> T^sB,

T^fA <> T^sB

T^fA <> T^sA

T^fA <> T^fB

Thus

A <> B

Q.E.D.

Pask remarked :

Conversation is defined as having a beginning and an end and time is vectorial. The components of the vector are commensurable (in duration). On the other hand actor interaction time is vectorial with components that are incommensurable. In the general case there is no well-defined beginning and interaction goes on indefinitely. As a result the time vector has incommensurable components. Both the quantity and quality differ.

No Doppelgangers applies in both the Conversation Theory's kinematic domain (bounded by beginnings and ends) where times are commensurable and in the eternal kinetic Interactions of Actors domain where times are incommensurable.

Reproduction Proof

The second proof is more reminiscent of R.D. Laing: Your concept of your concept is not my concept of your concept- a reproduced concept is not the same as the original concept. Pask defined concepts as persisting, countably infinite, recursively packed spin processes (like many cored cable, or skins of an onion) in any medium (stars, liquids, gases, solids, machines and, of course, brains) that produce relations.

Here we prove A(T) <> B(T).

D means "description of" and reads A's concept of T produces A's description of T, evoking Dirac notation (required for the production of the quanta of thought: the transfer of "set-theoretic tokens", as Pask puts it in 1996).

TA = A(T) = , A's Concept of T,

TB = B(T) = , B's Concept of T,

or, in general

TZ = Z(T) = ,

also, in general

AA = A(A) = , A's Concept of A,

AB = A(B) = , A's Concept of B.

and vice versa, or, in general terms

ZZ = Z(Z) = ,

given that for all Z and all T, the concepts

TA = A(T) is not equal to TB = B(T)

and that

AA = A(A) is not equal to BA = B(A) and vice versa, hence, there are no Doppelgangers.

Q.E.D.

A Mechanical Model

Pask attached a piece of string to a bar with three knots in it. Then he attached a piece of elastic to the bar with three knots in it. One observing actor, A, on the string would see the knotted intervals on the other actor as varying as the elastic was stretched and relaxed corresponding to the relative motion of B as seen from A. The knots correspond to the beginning of the experiment then the start and finish of the A/B interaction. Referring to the three intervals, where x, y, z, are the separation distances of the knots from the bar and each other, he noted x > y > z on the string for participant A does not imply x > z for participant B on the elastic. A change of separation between A and B producing Doppler shifts during interaction, recoil or the differences in relativistic proper time for A and B, would account for this for example. On occasion a second knotted string was tied to the bar representing coordinate time.

Further Context

To set in further context Pask won a prize from Old Dominion University for his Complementarity Principle: "All processes produce products and all products are produced by processes". This can be written:

Ap(Con Z(T)) => D Z(T) where => means produces and Ap means the "application of". This can also be written

Pask distinguishes Imperative (written &Ap or IM) from Permissive Application (written Ap) where information is transferred in the Petri net manner, the token appearing as a hole in a torus producing a Klein bottle containing recursively packed concepts.

Pask's "hard" or "repulsive" carapace was a condition he required for the persistence of concepts. He endorsed Rescher's Coherence Theory of Truth approach where a set membership criterion of similarity also permitted differences amongst set or coherence members, but he insisted repulsive force was exerted at set and members' coherence boundaries. He said of Spencer Brown's Laws of Form that distinctions must exert repulsive forces. This is not accepted by Spencer Brown and others. Without a repulsion, or Newtonian reaction at the boundary, sets, their members or interacting participants would diffuse away forming a "smudge"; Hilbertian marks on paper would not be preserved. Pask, the mechanical philosopher, wanted to apply these ideas to bring a new kind of rigour to cybernetic models.

Second-order cybernetics

Second-order cybernetics, also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, investigates the construction of models of cybernetic systems. It investigates cybernetics with awareness that the investigators are part of the system, and of the importance of self-referentiality, self-organizing, the subject-object problem, etc.

Overview

The anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead contrasted first and second-order Cybernetics with this diagram in an interview in 1973. It emphasizes the requirement for a possibly constructivist participant observer in the second order case.

Heinz von Foerster attributes the origin of second-order cybernetics to the attempts of classical cyberneticians to construct a model of the mind. Researchers realized that:

. . . a brain is required to write a theory of a brain. From this follows that a theory of the brain, that has any aspirations for completeness, has to account for the writing of this theory. And even more fascinating, the writer of this theory has to account for her or himself. Translated into the domain of cybernetics; the cybernetician, by entering his own domain, has to account for his or her own activity. Cybernetics then becomes cybernetics of cybernetics, or second-order cybernetics.

The work of Heinz von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, Gordon Pask, Ranulph Glanville, and Paul Pangaro is strongly associated with second-order cybernetics. Pask recommended the term New Cybernetics in his last paper which emphasises all observers are participant observers that interact.

Cybernetics!

What is Cybernetics?

Friday, January 30, 2009

Bionics

History

Methods

Examples of biomimetics

Specific uses of the term

In medicine

Politics

Other uses

Biocybernetics

Terminology

Same or familiar fields

Categories

Bioengineering

Bioengineering

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Conversation Theory

Overview

Topics

Levels of conversation

Conversation

Cognitive Reflector

Learning strategies

Gordon Pask

Biography

Work: overview

Interactions of Actors Theory

Hewitt's Actor model

No Doppelgangers

Duration Proof

Reproduction Proof

A Mechanical Model

Further Context

Second-order cybernetics

Overview

Blog Archive

Followers

About Me