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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HOLOGRAPHY as a metaphor 3)

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A way to represent a whole as a network of connected and more or less redundant elements, allowing simultaneously for specialization and a global coherent behavior.

The brain is now widely supposed to have an holographic organization.

A. HAUAN, J.A. JOHANNESSEN and J. OLAISEN characterize this metaphor as follows: "… the whole is enclosed in its parts: More specifically, if a holographic picture is broken into pieces, any single piece, when enlarged, will display all images of the original picture, al-though maybe somewhat blurred. As a consequence, the "whole" could conceivably be reconstructed through a thorough analysis of any of the constituents parts" (1992, p.1057).

The metaphor implies that, within a system, any element should have (and in biological and cultural system, have indeed, as genes, memes, or mindscapes) at least a kind of historical imprint of the global identity of the system.

The holographic metaphor is as old as 19th Century's Arnold BÖCKLIN's "Public opinion" engraving that shows a gigantic dragon made of a multitude of similar dragonlets collectively self-organized in the suited way to ensure self-similarity between the micro- and the macro level.

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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