On Constructing a Reality - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 226

autonomy becomes synonymous with regulation of regulation . This is
precisely what the doubly closed, recursively computing torus does: It
regulates its own regulation.
Significance
It may be strange in times like these to stipulate autonomy, for autonomy
implies responsibility: If I am the only one who decides how I act, then I
am responsible for my action. Since the rule of the most popular game
played today is to make someone else responsible for my acts—the name
of the game is “heteronomy”—my arguments make, I understand, a most
unpopular claim. One way of sweeping it under the rug is to dismiss it as
just another attempt to rescue “solipsism,” the view that this world is only
in my imagination and the only reality is the imagining “I.” Indeed, that was
precisely what I was saying before, but I was talking only about a single
organism. The situation is quite different when there are two, as I shall
demonstrate with the aid of the gentleman with the bowler hat (Fig. 20).
He insists that he is the sole reality, while everything else appears only
in his imagination. However, he cannot deny that his imaginary universe is
populated with apparitions that are not unlike himself. Hence he has to
FIGURE 20.