Kybernetes. The international journal of systems & cybernetics

Heinz von Foerster never paid heed to the boundaries of academic disciplines. Having worked for a decade in research on short- and microwave technology, he published a molecular theory of memory. It was adopted by a prominent neurophysiologist because it seemed to overcome the problem of storage space in the head. HvF, however, quickly discarded the theory as he concluded that it was preferable to view memory as a mechanism of reconstruction rather than storage. He played an important role in the Josiah Macy Conferences in the late 1940s and 1950s and thus, with Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and a few others, became a founder of the discipline based on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics. Margaret Mead had asked HvF to edit the proceedings of the conferences because, as she said, this was a good way for him to learn English. Although Wiener, McCulloch, and Bateson had a profound interest in philosophy, the main activity within the new discipline was focused on the development of technological advances exploiting the ideas of feedback and circular causality. Then, in the mid-1960s, after HvF had founded and firmly established the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, he turned his attention to the agent that was able to observe, understand, and describe the things cyberneticians had been dealing with. The first evidence of this shift was his book Observing Systems (von Foerster, 1970). It was the beginning of what was to become known as “Second Order Cybernetics”. It seemed an innocent shift of focus and it has taken a long time for the findings it yielded to be recognised as powerful arguments for a world-shaking change of epistemological perspective. What triggered the new view was HvF’s rediscovery of an observation Johannes Mu¨ ller had made around 1850, namely that the electro-chemical signals sent by the sense organs to the cortex differ only quantitatively but not qualitatively. The finding was called “undifferentiated coding” and HvF characterized it by saying “the senses tell us how much but not what”. In other words, the phenomenological characteristics of our experiential world – color, texture, sounds, tastes and smells – are the result of our own computations based on co-occurrence patterns of signals that differ only with regard to their point of origin in the living system’s nervous network. This new perspective led to a first formulation of a constructivist epistemology grounded in empirical findings (von Foerster, 1973). In the following year, came the startling statement that objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer (von Foerster, 1974). This statement did not immediately have great impact, because for scientists its full significance emerges only when it is taken in conjunction with the notion of undifferentiated coding. Given that in the mainstream of philosophical thinking it has always been