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.

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CONSTRAINT (Second order) 2)

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A constraint imposed on the variation of constraints.

F. HEYLIGHEN, who introduces this concept, applies it to the emergence of systems (in the sense of TURCHIN's Meta System Transition). He writes: "We may conceive the emergence of such a metasystem in the following way. Assume that a system has insufficient internal variety to maintain itself in its given environment, and that it can only reach the adequate configurations by changing its defining constraint. If the constraint changes in a relatively slow, continuous way, we might say that the system survives the changes, even though its identity has changed in the process.

(Comp. note: it would seem in this case that the system only has accomodated or adapted itself). "But the variation of the constraint itself undergoes selection, and that means that most likely an eventual stable configuration of second-order variations will be reached, defining a second-order constraint. This defines a new metasystem.

"When this process is combined with the process of a supersystem transition we will find that several systems undergoing second order variations collectively develop an overall constraint on their mutual variations. Here we come back to TURCHIN's original structural characterization of a meta system transition, where a number of subsystems are integrated, under the control of a higher order mechanism of constrained variation" (pers. comm., p.16).

We have, in this way and simultaneously, the opening of new possibilities of variety creation and their ordering by second order constraints.

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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