Biological Cybernetics

Beyond design: cybernetics, biological computers and hylozoism

The history of British cybernetics offers us a different form of science and engineering, one that does not seek to dominate nature through knowledge. I want to say that one can distinguish two different paradigms in the history of science and technology: the one that Heidegger despised, which we could call the Modern paradigm, and another, cybernetic, nonModern, paradigm that he might have app...

Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics , Tübingen , Germany

Objects in the world, natural and artificial alike, are often bilaterally symmetric. The visual system is likely to take advantage of this regularity to encode shapes for efficient object recognition. The nature of encoding a symmetric shape, and of encoding any departure from it, is therefore an important matter in visual perception. We addressed this issue of shape encoding empirically, notin...

Cybernetics: Cybernetics and the Theory of Knowledge

Cybernetics

pared, and the successive stages of implantation and placental formation in various mammals are compared with those in man. Although the authors have quite successfully attempted to keep the book as short as possible, they have succeeded in putting much of great value in it with the result that it can be highly recommended. No biological library is complete without a copy of this excellent acco...

Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics

I. Historical Development of Cybernetics.......................................................1 A. Origins.....................................................................................1 B. Second Order Cybernetics............................................................2 C. Cybernetics Today.....................................................................4 II. Relational Concepts...