About Cybernetics

Extract from Cybernetics and Second-OrderCybernetics by Francis Heylighen

Cybernetics is the science that studies the abstract principles of organization in complexsystems. It is concerned not so much with what systems consist of, but how they function.Cybernetics focuses on how systems use information, models, and control actions to steertowards and maintain their goals, while counteracting various disturbances. Being inherentlytransdisciplinary, cybernetic reasoning can be applied to understand, model and designsystems of any kind: physical, technological, biological, ecological, psychological, social, orany combination of those. Second-order cybernetics in particular studies the role of the(human) observer in the construction of models of systems and other observers.