Heinz von Foerster Book order

The book offers a comprehensive overview of Heinz von Foerster's second-order cybernetics, emphasizing the investigator's role within the system studied. Through a week-long conversation, it captures von Foerster's dynamic speaking style and storytelling ability while exploring various themes like emergence, cognition, and communication. By distilling his ideas into an accessible format, it provides English-speaking readers with insights into his influential philosophies and the broader implications of his work, showcasing his unique contributions to science and thought.

Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of Heinz von Foerster's cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them.

Exploring fundamental principles of knowledge and information processing, the essays delve into key topics such as neural nets, self-organizing systems, and cognition. Heinz von Foerster, a pioneer in cybernetics, shares groundbreaking insights from his collaborations with notable figures like Norbert Wiener and Warren McCullough. His work at the Biological Computer Laboratory led to innovations in parallel computing and advancements in computation theory, making significant contributions to both systems theory and cognitive philosophy.

In these essays Heinz von Foerster 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), as well as recent expansions on these themes (e.g. "How recursive is communication," 1993). Working with Norbert Wiener, Warren McCullough, and others in the 1960s and 1970s, von Foerster was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics, which has had profound effects both on modern systems theory and on the philosophy of cognition. At the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois he produced the first parallel computers and contributed to many other developments in the theory of computation and cognition.