Foreword: The Oroborous and the Glass Bead Game

This double issue of Cybernetics and Human Knowing is dedicated to celebrating the life and work of Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician extraordinaire. He died on October 2nd, 2002. Mai von Foerster, his wife of over 60 years, died on June 22nd, 2003. They lived as a team and it is wrong to think of the work that appeared under the authorship of Heinz von Foerster without thinking of Mai's part in it. In life they were inseparable. Death did not separate them for long, either. It is fitting to start this introduction by recording this, and by commemorating Mai von Foerster, née Sturmer, along with her husband, Heinz. We have attempted to make this issue a sort of Glass Bead Game in recognition of his ability to research and unite art with practical work; and in recognition of his teaching, rhetoric and existential conversation. Hermann Hesse envisages a system that has been able to combine science, arts, philosophy and poetry into one condensed expression—a new language of culture—and to build an institution around the development, preservation and communication of this new language of global culture. Von Foerster's work shares this character in the way he distilled messages into tiny, minimalist " crystals " that can be seen from many different perspectives. Reflecting both science and ethics, they were also little art works in themselves. The Biological Computer Laboratory he founded worked to this end, with von Foerster as the Glass Bead Master collecting creative scientists and scholars from all over the world. Since, over the last ten years, von Foerster's written communication with the general public was mainly through the medium of the interview, we start off with an interview: " In Each and Every Moment I Can Decide Who I Am. " This is a chapter from Bernard Poerksen's forthcoming book: The Certainty of Uncertainty: Dialogues Introducing Constructivism. Here Poerksen, in one of his last interviews with von Foerster, tries to get to the bottom of the wisdom of " the Socrates of Cybernetics. " In his paper " Action Without Utility: An Immodest Proposal for the Cognitive foundation of behavior, " Karl Müller, from the Heinz von Foerster Society, abstracts from and recombines elements in several of von Foerster's papers to indicate how they provide a critique of rational choice theory, composing them to form a unified theory of cognition. Thus, the article both sums up von Foerster's …