BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

CONNECTIVE SYSTEM 1)2)

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A system made of an important number of simple interconnected units ("neurons").

Each unit receives an excitatory or inhibitory activity (or both) which, when reaching some threshold, produces a change of state. (after J. HORGAN, 1993, p.370).

We should be careful in the use of our vocabulary. Multiple electronic interconnections are most probably not exactly equivalent to biological neurons, if only for the inexistence of biochemical processes of transmission of flows in the case of so-called electronic "neurons".

Another important aspect is the highly parallelism in such a system: numerous local activities occur simultaneously in different zones of the system without producing instantaneously global interactions in the net. Any excitation or inhibition get transmitted with some delay, even if very short.

The global behavior of such a system is deterministic in a general sense, but it perfectly admits simultaneous and more or less aleatory behavior, locally, within the limits of the determinism of the whole.

Besides, such a type of net can show a considerable endogenous activity, but must necessarily receive stimuli from its environment. Moreover its activity probably make sense only if it results in some action on this same environment.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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