Understanding Understanding, 2003 Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition

On self-organizing systems and their environments (1960). Computation in neural nets (1967). What is memory that it may have hindsight and foresight as well? (1969). Molecular Ethology: An immodest proposal for semantic clarification (1970). Thoughts and notes on cognition (1970). Responsibilities of competence (1972). On constructing a reality (1973). Cybernetics of epistemelogy (1974). Notes on an epistemology of living things (1974). Objects: Tokens for (eigen)behaviors (1976). Disorder/order: Discovery or invention (1984). Cybernetics of cybernetics (1979). Ethics and second-order cybernetics (1991). For Nicholas Luhmann: How recursive is communication (1993). Introduction to natural magic (1993). List of publications.

Heinz von Foerster is one of the founders of the science of cybernetics: he produced the first parallel computers and contributed to many other path-breaking developments. In these essays he discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. Included are path-breaking articles concerning the principles of computation in neural nets (1967), the definition of self-organizing systems (1960), the nature of cognition (1970).