DOI

Summary
Heinz von Foerster, precursor in the field of complex systems and founder of second-order cybernetics, which focuses on self-referential systems, self-organisation, positive/negative feedback, etc., expanded the core concept of cybernetics, circular causality, into the “cybernetics of observing systems”.
In second-order cybernetics, in which the correspondence between the knowing mind and the object is fundamental, the observer and the observed are inseparably entangled, thus assertions can never be disconnected from from the individual making them. It follows that there is an intrinsic connection between epistemology and ethics, in which the concept of circular causality inspires an an observer-relevant ethics, a “cybernethics”, in von Foerster’s own words.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Von Foerster’s famous distinction between trivial and non-trivial machines is a starting point for understanding the complexity of cognitive behavior. A trivial machine is analytically determinable, independent from previous operations, and thus predictable. “When the individuals are related trivially ...the dynamics of the system are predictable, but the individuals feel powerless to steer or redirect its course, even though the behaviour of the whole continues to be simply the result of individual reactions to the predictions of this same behaviour. The whole appears to become autonomous with respect to its conditions of emergence, and its development to be immobilised as its destiny.” For non-trivial machines, however, this is no longer true, given that the capacity to identify or deduce the structure of the machine from its behavior becomes impossible.

Point of Strength
in today’s society, whose ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICT) are an example of what von Foerster called ‘‘rigid relationships’’, his emphasis on observer-relevant ethics helps us to redefine our role in relation to technology, as long as we remember to follow his advice and “act always so as to increase the number of choices”, because “The world, as we perceive it, is our own invention.”