James Corbett on Cybernetics

My comment:

That slogan "The purpose of a system is what it does" probably has its origin in Aristotle's De Anima. For Aristotle the soul was three different but interdependent things: the vegetative, the animal and the rational. Plants have a vegetative soul which is how they reproduce, animals have a vegetative soul and an animal soul, and human beings have vegetative, animal and rational souls. The nature of these souls he called their perfection: what they strived to be. This was the teleological purpose or final cause of the soul. So Aristotle was saying that what a system does, when it is functioning properly, is its purpose. The kinds of system the cyberneticists studied were systems which had this teleological, goal-seeking behaviour by virtue of the internal relations of their parts to one another. So when you apply this slogan to what is loosely called "the education system" you are really abusing the terms 'system' and 'purpose'. It might sound apposite but it is really just polemics. The kinds of systems the cyberneticists studied included natural systems and cybernetics is actually inherent in most branches of biology, especially in cellular biology and biochemistry. I think what Stafford Beer was trying to do was build human systems of governance that where closer to natural systems than artificial hierarchical systems. So when you look up the Cybersyn project you should look at the way information was used in that system and how it was used by the internal relations between parts to affect a goal-oriented system of governance. That is very different to the type of "US foreign policy objectives" goals of systems of governance. 

See Stafford Beer on Systems And Learning To Increase The Capacity for Adaptation and Ian Grant's Weather Report 8/23/22 which were posted a week before I was incarcerated in the US asylum process. 

Subscribe to The Corbett Report. 

For an example of "systems" that aren't actually anything of the sort, see the UN. Practically anything it does!

There should have been a general disarmament process to replace the nuclear non-proliferation agreements. That process should have included a global "security architecture" with some basic principles for making general disarmament feasible. 

Subscribe to UN. 

Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom: the future that can be demanded now

On efficiency, see Crisis in Perception - An Example of a Common Problem. 

28:29 On the availability of money, see Participatory Budgeting Versus Private Equity and Kyla Scanlon on The Cost of Outsourcing Innovation. 

The free man in a cybernetic world: 

See the full playlist of lectures here and you can get the original audio recordings from the Internet Archive: Designing Freedom: The 1973 CBC Massey Lectures by Stafford Beer. 

Subscribe to Dank Audio Stash.

Subscribe to Josh Moore. 

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