On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 19

von Foerster: Oh, absolutely, yes. (Laughter). Well, the distinction between noise
and nonsense, of course, is a very interesting one. It is referring usually to a refer-
ence frame. I believe that, for instance, if you would like to teach a dog, it would be
advisable not only to do one and the same thing over and over again. I think what
should be done in teaching or training, say, an animal, is to allow the system to
remain adaptable, to ingrain the information in a way where the system has to test
in every particular situation a hypothesis whether it is working or not. This can only
be obtained if the nature into which the system is immersed is not absolutely deter-
ministic but has some fluctuations. These fluctuations can be interpreted in many
different forms. They can be interpreted as noise, as nonsense, as things depending
upon the particular frame of reference we talk about.
For instance, when I am teaching a class, and I want to have something remem-
bered by the students particularly well, I usually come up with an error and they
point out, “You made an error, sir.” I say, “Oh yes, I made an error,” but they remem-
ber this much better than if I would not have made an error. And that is why I am
convinced that an environment with a reasonable amount of noise may not be too
bad if you would really like to achieve learning.
Reid ( Montreal Neurological Institute ): I would like to hear Dr. von Foerster's
comment on the thermodynamics of self-organizing systems.
von Foerster: You didn't say open or closed systems. This is an extremely impor-
tant question and a very interesting one and probably there should be a two-year
course on the thermodynamics of self-organizing systems. I think Prigogin and
others have approached the open system problem. I myself am very interested in
many different angles of the thermodynamics of self-organizing systems because it
is a completely new field.
If your system contains only a thousand, ten thousand or a hundred thousand
particles, one runs into difficulties with the definition of temperature. For instance,
in a chromosome or a gene, you may have a complex molecule involving about 10 6
particles. Now, how valid is the thermodynamics of 10 6 particles or the theory which
was originally developed for 10 23 particles? If this reduction of about 10 17 is valid in
the sense that you can still talk about “temperature” there is one way you may talk
about it. There is, of course, the approach to which you may switch, and that is infor-
mation theory. However, there is one problem left and that is, you don't have a
Boltzmann's constant in information theory and that is, alas, a major trouble.