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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ENTROPY versus Improbability 1)3)

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The apparently impossibility of any type of structurating and ordering evolution that seemed to result from the 2nd. principle of thermodynamics, anguished many scientists during the first fifty years of the 20th century, as for example the French biologist P. LECOMTE DU NOUY. Biologists were the most desperate. H. SIMON, citing an article by H. JACOBSON, published as late as 1955, (JACOBSON, 1955) comments: "The essential idea in JACOBSON's models is that the expected time required for the system to reach a particular state is inversely proportional to the probability of the state - hence increases exponentially with the amount of information (negentropy) of the state.

"Following this line of argument, but not introducing the notion of levels and stable subassemblies, JACOBSON arrived at estimates of the time required for evolution so large as to make the event rather improbable. Our analysis carried through in the same way, but with attention to the stable intermediate forms, produces very much smaller estimates" (see the "Hora and Tempus parable").

SIMON demostrated the possibility of the progressive emergence of organization step by step, through successive levels of accumulation.

This concept must be connected:

1) with the appearence of dissipative structures in systems overfed with an excessive quantity of energy, which push them through instability thresholds.

2) with the concept of negentropy, which, in the words of SIMON, "can be interpreted as the logarithm of the reciprocal of the probability – the "improbability".

3) the understanding that higher complexity in systems implies a higher level of entropy production.

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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