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

LEARNING as cerebral differentiation 1)

In his paper: "Unidad biológica de cerebro y mente", J.M. RODRIGUEZ DELGADO (1993, p.265-6) shows that the brain do structure and organize itself by way of the learning process. The following facts can be mustered in support of such an opinion:

1. We do not remember our first infancy precisely because our brain had not yet created many of the structures needed to register most events.

2. Our mental faculties can express themselves only through what we have learned. DELGADO points out for example, that "Most of western people are illiterate respect to Chinese, Arabic or other languages… because they did not learn the corresponding reference frame" (p.261).

3. The so-called wolf children, even when back to civilization, are very difficult to educate "because their brain did not receive the needed sensorial stimulations and grew up without language, a fact which produces grave anatomical, neuro-chemical and functional deficiencies" (p.266).

This basic fact has been thus stated by H.von FOERSTER: "I believe that the ultimate reason… systems should learn at all is that learning enables them to make inductive references. In other words, in order to enhance the chance of survival, the system should be able to compute future events from past experience".

As stated by V. ROWLAND: "… the organization of learning involves the development of timing within ensembles of neurons that enable the organism… to have the timing of all elemental processes brought into coherence with the activity of a total ensemble" (1976, p.124).

This understanding is consonant with the autopoietic concept of organizational closure. In J.L. LOCKE words: "Long before they utter a word, infants are talking themselves into a language" (1994, p.436). It seems to be a kind of endogenous organizational process, based on preexistent physiological structures, and on selective interpenetration reactions to the perception of external events.

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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