On Cybernetics

Cybernetics is an ontological view of all things as recursive systems.¹ This is a view taken at each and every level of encapsulation, from the smallest to largest. This ontology (enframing of the world) deals with the issue of incompatible idiosyncrasies and complexity by imagining all systems as operating according to the same principles.²

Like all science and invention this is powerful in its utility in understanding matter and its operations, yet prone to myopic totalism.

Man invents the wheel, reality is cyclical.

Man writes books, reality is a linear narrative.

Man refines sand into silicon and makes it think, reality is a simulation.

Man posits cybernetics, reality is a feedback loop.

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The drive behind cybernetics is distinctly autistic in its goals, viewing “entropy” as the enemy. Through the cybernetic lens everything is to be appraised as a system on the “measure of its degree of disorganization”. This dogmatic axiom allows cybernetics to judge with an elegant simplicity between organization and chaos (entropy) as “simply the negative of the other”.³

An enlightening example of the type of system cybernetics wishes to prescribe is the thermostat. Simple yet effective, driven by the single measurement of temperature able to increase or decrease the climate in a hermetic space according to a desired goal temperature. Life, the objectification of the Schopenhauerean will, gives us a cybernetically virtuous mechanism: “A homeostat can resist perturbation, not only against expected disruption, but against unexpected disruption too. For this reason it is not only stable, but ultrastable.”⁴

So, cybernetics ideally wants to prefer conceptual systems in regards to their stability. Thus, a system is in cybernetic crisis when there is a “systematic conflict within it determined by its form of organization, and this has produced a phase of instability.”⁵ As pointed out before, unmanaged variation is the enemy of cybernetic reality. The universe, the ‘system’, must be made predictable.