Cybernetics: Feedback Loops and Self-Organization

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water.
We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”
- Norbert Wiener

The patterns of communication and their organization are the main focus of cybernetics (10). Norbert Wiener, one of the participants in the famous Macy Conferences (11), offered cybernetics as a science of a unified approach to problems of communication and control in humans and animals. Similar to Gregory Bateson, who was looking for “the pattern which connects,” Wiener was fascinated with patterns.

Wiener introduced the originally cybernetic notion of feedback (12), nowadays an obvious though originally a genius discrimination, which is important in the understanding of how a living system attains the capacity of self-organization. “A feedback loop is a circular arrangement of causally connected elements, in which the initial cause propagates around the links of the loop, so that each element has an effect on the next, until the last “feeds back” the effect into the first element of the cycle.” (13) The input link is affected by the output: the original initiator is modified by the feedback, and thus it modifies the initial cause of the next cycle (14). This results in self-regulation of the entire system. The understanding of feedback later changed in the autopoietic cognitive theory, which rejected the notion of pre-existent external information units entering the cognitive system: information is created inside the system where it travels and adjusts to different levels of complexity.

The discernment of the feedback loop led to a deeper understanding of systems behavior: the system’s ability to generate feedback loops effects the system’s ability to regulate itself. In other words, feedback is how a system can re-evaluate its input (“learning from mistakes”) and re-organize itself in improved structuring.

(10) The name comes from the Greek kybernetes –’steersman”.
(11) The Circle of the Macy Conferences was formed in 1946 and included some of the most brilliant thinkers of that period: Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead from the humanities, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann (the inventor of the digital computer, involved in research of quantum physics), and others. Bateson’s main aim was to discover common principles of organization in diversity of life – “the pattern which connects”. He pioneered the application of systems thinking to family therapy and developed a concept of the mind based on cybernetic principles: the nature of the mind as a systems phenomenon was the first successful attempt in science to overcome the Cartesian division between mind and body. He stayed within the limits of the presupposition of the existence of external pre-given world of information, which was later refined in the Santiago theory.
(12) “Feedback loops are abstract patterns of relationships embedded in physical structures or in the activities of living organisms. Cyberneticists clearly distinguished the pattern of organization of a system from its physical structure.” (Kapra, 55)
(13) Ibid. 56
(14) There are two types of feedback loops: self-balancing and self-reinforcing (the initial effect continues to be amplified as it loops).

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