Cliff Joslyn(NRC Research Associate, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
Wednesday Dec. 6 at 2 pm
in room 3C211 (building C, 3rd floor)
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus Oefenplein
The presentation with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards, an hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the topic.
Cybernetics, Systems Science, or General Systems Theory
was developed in the postwar
period as an attempt to approach the study of the general organization,
control, complexity, and evolution of systems (of whatever type), thereby
reviving ideas of a transdisciplinary unification of science. Although Systems Science has yet to establish itself firmly as a
supported, independent, academic discipline, many of its originators are widely respected, and a
small Systems Science community struggles on. More importantly, the core ideas
of Systems Science have become immanent in current scientific thought, and
inform, for example, the modern ``complex systems'' movement.
The very nature of Systems theory makes it a radically different kind of
activity: unlike traditional scientific knowledge, Systems Science is broad,
not deep; it approaches synthesis, abstraction, and generality at a
conceptual level, by spanning spatial and temporal scales and disciplinary
boundaries. Historically, Systems works tend to be either encyclopedic
or idiosyncratic: the difficulty of forging a common language and a
canonical theory has contributed significantly to its lack of successs within the academy. The presentation will review the underlying reasons for both the
successes and failures of the systems movement, and point out some possible
approaches, such as the Principia Cybernetica Project, that address these shortcomings.