BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

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ORGANIZATION (Hetero-) 2)

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According to E. PESSA: "It is commonplace… to speak of self-organization processes, but it would be better to speak of hetero-organization; that is, the control parameters are driven by the external environment, without any possibility for the (dynamical) system to counteract this influence" (1992, p.434).

This means that the system is self-organizing only as far as such process remains compatible with the environmental basic conditions. An oxygen-breathing living system cannot anymore organize itself if its environment becomes suddenly devoid of oxygen.

Without reaching such an extreme case, the system "… can… follow, in a passive way, the behavior of the external fluctuations, whose role, on the other hand, is only that of making explicit the richness of dynamic behavior implicitly contained… in the form (of the system)" (Ibid).

In other words, as stated by von FOERSTER, noise can be a source of order for a dynamic system.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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