N. Katherine Hayles - Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics - Configurations 2:3

Observing Systems: a Cybernetic Perspective on System/Environment Relations

Descriptions of society have changed during the preceding decades. Expressions such as “knowledge society” or “information society” are nowadays generally used. In science, and social science in particular, the concept of information has entered as fundamental concept. It is no longer relegated to special fields of inquiry, such as public opinion research, mass communication or educational tech...

CHAosB UND ORDERLY DISORDER in CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE and SCIENCE

Reflexivity in Social Systems: the Theories of George Soros

George Soros’s reflexivity theory is quite compatible with second order cybernetics. Indeed his work shows how to apply ideas in second order cybernetics to economics, finance, and political science. This paper briefly reviews three theories of reflexivity in cybernetics. It provides an introduction to Soros’s version of reflexivity theory and reviews applications in economics and finance. Soro...

Foundations and the critical point on the square lattice

1 distance ku vk is 1. For brevity, we will also write uv instead of {u, v} for the edge between u and v (note that uv = vu). The boundary @G of G is the set of those vertices u in V for which there is a v 2 Z2 \ V with ku vk = 1. We associate to G a space of spin configurations ⌦G = { 1,+1}V . For 2 ⌦G , v denotes the spin at v. Sometimes we impose positive boundary conditions, meaning that we...

Reflexivity, Eigenform and Foundations of Physics

This essay is a discussion of the concept of reflexivity and its relationships with self-reference, re-entry, eigenform and the foundations of physics.