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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RECOGNITION BY INFERENCE 3)5)

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The capability to recognize patterns, figures, objects or people is a property of neural networks.

Fr. CRICK and Ch. KOCH give the following example and explain it: "If you look at a person whose back is turned to you, you can see the back of the head, but not the face. Nevertheless your brain infers that the person has a face. We can deduce as much because, if that person turned around and had no face, you would be very surprised.

"The viewer-centered representation that corresponds to the visible back of the head is what your are vividly aware of. What your brain infers about the front would come from some kind of three dimensional representation" (1992, p.112).

Of course, such three-dimensional representation is present in our cerebral network as a very basic feature, acquired during the infancy. It seems moreover that there is more to it than this: We also should be very surprised if that person whould have a cat's or dog's face, which implies that we have a somehow permanent category of "human beings" in our neural network.

Moreover, the nature of our internal and potential representations obviousluy depend of our cultural training:.We easily recognize the symbols of our culture (say: the Cross, the Crescent, the Mandala, our flag, etc…), but do not recognize at all or easily symbols of other cultures.

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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