For Niklas Luhmann:* “How Recursive is Communication?” - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 322

With the vocabulary developed here I can extend and sharpen this first
version with a few words:
10. Communication is the Eigen behavior of a recursively operating system that is
doubly closed onto itself.
The essential thing about the topology of a double closure is that it not only
avoids the pseudo-solution of hierarchy, to which one always defers the
responsibility for judgment in order to avoid one's own, but also that,
through the hetarchical organization that comes with it, the fascinating pos-
sibility exists of allowing operators to become operands and operands to
become operators. This is just exactly what we've always wanted to under-
stand but which has nevertheless been made impossible for us up till now
by the structure of a one dimensional logic. But through the interchange-
ability of functors standing in reciprocal relationships to one another, our
freedom of action is returned to us and with it also our responsibility.
With that I have arrived at my conclusion, which I owe to Wilhelm Busch:
11. Wilhelm Busch's Desideratum:
“Twice two is four” is clearly true,
Too bad it's cheap and flighty;
For I would rather that I knew
About what's deep and mighty.
Whether I've succeeded at that, I don't know, but I do thank you many
times for having been so friendly as to have the patience to listen to me.
And as my last word, I'd like once more to congratulate our birthday child
Niklas Luhmann.
Literature
Kaufmann, Louis
1987 “Self-reference and Recursive Form,” Journal of Social and Biological
Structure , 10, pp. 53-72.
Luhmann, Niklas
1991 “Wie lassen sich latente Strukturen beobachten?,” in Paul
Watzlawick, Peter Krieg (eds.), Das Auge des Betrachters: Beiträge
zum Konstruktivismus. Festschrift für Heinz von Foerster , Piper,
München-Zürich, pp. 61-74.
McCulloch, Warren
1945 “A Hetarchy of Values Determined by the Typology of Nervous Nets,”
Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics , 7, pp. 89-93; reprinted in Warren
S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind , MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.,
2nd edition, 1989, pp. 40-45.