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

SPACE PERCEPTION 3)

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BERTALANFFY observes that von UEXKÜLL discoveries about the selective ambients of living systems relativize "… forms of intuition, considered by KANT as a priori and immutable. The biologist finds that there is no absolute space or time but that they depend on the organization of the perceiving organism" (1962, p.74).

Indeed experiments and even daily experience "… prove that the space of visual and tactual perception is in no way Euclidian. In the space of perception, the coordinates are in no way equivalent, but there is a fundamental difference between top and bottom, right and left, and fore and aft. Already the organization of our body, and, in the last resort, the fact that the organism is subjected to gravity, makes for an inequality of the horizontal and vertical dimensions" (Ibid).

Moreover "… perception of space is based on binocular vision, parallaxis, the contraction of the ciliary muscle, apparent increase or decrease in size of an approaching or receding object" (Ibid., p.79).

Thus space (as well as time, matter and energy), while their existence is doubtless as neatly separated frames, are constructed by us as a useful conceptual frame, in correspondence with our biological nature.

I. SILVERMAN, for instance, observes: "Space is the medium in which Energy and Time expenditures are opposed" (1992, p.137).

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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