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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RANDOMNESS (Restricted) 3)

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Systemic randomness, i.e. randomness within a system is, by necessity, limited. A system totally submitted to randomness could have no internal order at all, and thus could not be a system.

Systemic organization is possible only by way of constraints, i.e. the existence of admissible (authorized) connections among elements or subsystems, combined with impossibility (or prohibition) of other connections.

Constraints tend to become differentiated in different areas of the system. In this way, degrees of order and randomness become locally distributed.

As the system as a whole can remain performant only as long as its specialized processes and subsystems function in a non-contradictory way, there is a paired restriction to randomness among levels:

1°- The subsystems and specific functions tend to become better interconnected and compatible.

2°- The system as a whole imposes to its parts its basic determined conditions of survival.

Randomness is also functionally limited: any system or subsystem has only a limited repertory of responses to specific stimuli, and even only some of these responses are the most probable ones.

ASHBY's experiment, with homeostats (1960, p.100-121) demonstrated, moreover, that even a machine specifically constructed to produce random behavior, tends towards at least statistical stability, provided it is constructed as a net of subsets, submitted to some rules of interconnections. Without these last ones, there can be no coherence whatsoever, while, of course, the rules introduce a measure of constraining general determinism.

The most typical random-restricted systems are the ecosystems, where, within the limits of global determinism imposed by geophysical cycles, numerous vegetal and animal interconnected populations fluctuate in ways practically unpredictable.

Respect to the environment, systems are "anti-random", using, as demonstrated by P. VENDRYES (1942) specific reserves to counteract perturbing variations imposed upon them. This concept is obviously related to ASHBY's Law of Requisite Variety.

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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