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My talk will focus on the cybernetic paradigm of cognition as an alternative to causality thinking, mainly associated to the model of science. But this model neglects the fact that the effect of a cause becomes an effector, that is, is itself the agent of stability of the very cause. This cybernetic paradigm of cognition explains the fact that thinking: 1) is naturally oriented toward the future (reasons, strategies, propensities) and not the past (past isolated causes of one isolated event); 2) is interactive with other people’s thoughts, that is, is essentially collective (the notion of expanded and distributed mind as a model); 3) is unintentionally creative: being only a part of a wider cognitive system, turns the conclusion into something pragmatic (Pickering’s notion of unknowability as pragmatism); 4) To be guided by contingencies and not by a determined ideology (PDP neural nets as a model).
In III order cybernetics, Stafford Beer’s notion of “exceedingly complex systems” cannot rely on an external fixed set of rules, but on internal self-established (fallible, uncertain and modifiable) rules, in which the living and non-living contribute with equal weight to play the same game. What in the traditional paradigm we call the ‘truth’ or ‘knowledge’ is actually the stable but temporary solutions to problems and a continuous search for anti-chance factors, called for only when a crisis is occurring and needs a collective decision to turn the effect into an effector, that is, to find an anticipatory factor of equilibrium, or negative feedback. I will use Beer’s VSM as a cognitive model that envisages distributed agents of decision inside the system called mind. In Beer’s model of cybernetic systems all action is neither a reaction (even in the first order cybernetics, Walter’s Elsie would retroact on its direction) nor a pure action, but a retroaction, a recursive decision in which the unintended effects (POSIWID) are more efficacious than the good intentions. My references and examples are drawn from Machiavelli, Peirce, Wiener, De Latil, Keynes, Luhmann, Pickering and Beer (The Brain of the Firm).
Brunella Antomarini, PhD in philosophy, (Gregoriana University in Rome), teaches Aesthetics and Contemporary philosophy at John Cabot University, Rome. She has a pluri-disciplinary education in contemporary epistemology, aesthetics, anthropology, neo-cybernetics. She is a member of the collective CCCC. A Neo-Cybernetic Crew (https://neocyberneticcrew.org/). Among her recent publications: Le macchine nubili (Castelvecchi, Rome 2020). Thinking Through Error. The Moving Target of Knowledge (Lexington Books Lanham 2012). The Acoustic Pre-history of Poetry (Free Poetry Press 2024). Translating Rationalism: Leibniz and Cybernetics (Proceedings of the Symposyum: “Cybernetics for the 21st Century”, Y.Hui and W. Jianru, edd., Shen Zhen, Spring 2024). The Xenobots as Thought-Experiment: Teleology Within the Paradigm of Natural Selection, (Studi di Estetica n. 23, 2/2022, Fascicolo Sensibilia 15 Emergence/Emergency). Contact in Absentia: Toward a Cybertouch, (in The Covid Spectrum. Theoretical and Experiential Reflections from India and Beyond, edited by K. Mahadevan et al., intro by S. Zizek, New Delhi: Speaking Tiger, 2021). Peirce and Cybernetics: Retroduction, Error and Auto-Poiesis in Future Thinking. (“Cognitio”, São Paulo, v. 18, n. 2, 2017).
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