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

CONSTRUCTS (Synchronous) 1)2)4)

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Any social construct must necessarily be highly synchronous, i.e. respect collective coherence in time. This can be easily observed in human construction of any kind of structures, not only material but also economical, social or political. It is however also present in the activities of social insects, where it corresponds to stigmergy, and in the progressive development of any living being, from embryogenesis on.

In the case of gregarious behavior in fish shoals, or locusts, as well as in the case of the amoeba dictyostelium discoideum, synchronicity originates in the reciprocal perception of visual stimulation (fishes) or pheromones, starting possibly with a positive feedback among local groups of individuals.

The same mechanism can be observed on a freeway at rush hours. Individual drivers experiment simultaneously various conditions: perceptive (observing what is going on), mental (understanding the situation), psychological (taking care), physiological (some stress) and physical (acting) evoked by the movements of their close neighbors in the traffic lanes. Their interconnected reactions gradually gain ground in all directions and finally a global flow appears, into which every driver becomes dynamically channelled.

This "case study" seems to indicate that synchronous constructs are one of the most basic features of human systems, in still more ways than in the case of other social systems.

Social constructs, when tending to permanence, are the in-making phase of social 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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