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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NETWORK (Parallel- processing) 1)2)

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A network in which "all elements compute their next activities at the same moment".

S. KAUFFMAN comments about this type of networks: "If we find order in random networks, than random parallel networks with random logic have order despite an apparent cacophony of structure and logic" (1993, p.192).

This order would be most probably ergodic.

KAUFFMAN also observes: "… the current enthousiasm for connectionism and for parallel- processing neural networks is precisely that any such system almost inevitably classifies,… has internal dynamics whose attractors represent alternative asymptotic states of the network" (p.233). And the following statement may possibly be considered as another formulation of autopoiesis: "The alternative attractors in a fixed environment from which the network receives inputs can be thought of as alternative classification of the same environment. Similarly, alternative environments which map to the same attractor can be seen as classifications of those different environments as "the same" by the network. Thus such networks inevitably classify and have internal models of their worlds" (Ibid).

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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