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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INTELLIGENCE 1)3)

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"The apprehension of the relevant structure of the total behavioral field" (R.L. ACKOFF & F.E. EMERY, 1972, p.52).

ACKOFF and EMERY define "relevance" "… in terms of the immediate and presumptive future purposes of the actor" (Ibid).

This definition also fits, partly at least, Artificial Intelligence, as for example in chess programs.

According to W.R. ASHBY: "… the test of intelligence is the power of appropriate selection… As a result every intelligent system is subject to the following postulate: Any system that achieves appropriate selection (to a degree better than chance) does so as a consequence of information received" (1963, p.215).

However this does not seem to be enough.

The system must be able to process such obtained information in a satisfactory way. And if it does that, the problem of understanding how it acquired such capacity remains still open. ASHBY states that this results of some form of "preprogramming", which according to him, has been acquired by "five billion years of evolutionary molding all occuring in three-dimensional space" (p.216) and subsequent learning, within this pre-existing frame.

It is anyhow quite difficult to understand what intelligence really is without a deeper understanding of the devices that produce it: namely the brain and possibly the computer (parallel or sequential? Hardware plus software, plus user ?). In ASHBY's words: "The living brain has had only one problem throughout evolution: how to get the necessary information in and how to process it with a reasonable efficiency" (p.217).

And now, we have the problem to explain how it did it. This is where the connection machine and other similar devices could possibly help us.

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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