Ethics and Second-Order Cybernetics - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 299

zero-order cybernetics when activity becomes structured; when “behavior”
emerges, but one doesn't reflect upon the “why” and the “how” of this
behavior. One just acts. This is when cybernetics is implicit.
Y. I see. But what is now “First-order cybernetics?”
H. This is when one reflects upon one's behavior, upon the “how” and the
“why.” Then cybernetics becomes explicit, and one develops notions like
“feedback,” “amount of information,” “circularity,” “recursion,” “control”
“homeostasis,” “dynamic stability,” “dynamic instability or chaos,” “fixed
points,” “attractors,” “equi-finality,” “purpose,” “goal,” etc., etc. In other
words, one arrives at the whole conceptual machinery of “early” cybernet-
ics, first-order cybernetics; or as I would say, the cybernetics of observed
systems.
Y. Let me come back to my first question. How did you come upon
cybernetics?
H. Very simple. Cybernetics came upon me; because my English vocabu-
lary was at most 25 words.
Y. This makes no sense, dear Heinz. You'll have to explain that a bit better.
H. Okay. Then we have to go back to a time when you, dear Yveline, were
not yet born. We have to go back to the year 1948, when parts of Austria
were still occupied by Russian troops, and the world was slowly recovering
from the wounds of the war. In November of that year, in Cambridge, Mass-
achusetts, Norbert Wiener published a topic entitled Cybernetics , with the
subtitle Communication and Control in the Animal and the Machine. Also
that November, Heinz von Foerster in Vienna, Austria, published a topic
entitled Das Gedächtnis [The memory] with the subtitle Eine quanten-
physikalische Untersuchung , [An investigation in quantum physics]. I am
originally a physicist, and what I tried to do in this investigation was to
connect observations in experimental psychology and neurophysiology
with the physics of the large (biological) molecules. I think that I didn't do
a bad job of it.
Now I have to switch to another track. My wife's dearest friend, Ilse, had
escaped from Germany when Hitler came into power. By 1948 she was well
established in New York and she invited me to come to the United States
in the hope that I could establish a beachhead in order to make it easier
for the rest of my family to follow. In February of 1949 I crossed a very
stormy Atlantic on the Queen Mary. Since I don't get seasick, (most of the
other passengers were) I always had 6 waiters serving me in an empty dining
room.
A few days after my arrival in New York, one of America's leading neu-
ropsychiatrist, Warren McCulloch (who, by an amazing combination of
miraculous circumstances, had gotten hold of my topic) invited me to