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

SYMBOLIC PROCESSING 2)3)

D. GREGORY writes: "A great deal of mischief and unnecessary excitement has been caused through the use of the phrase symbolic processing. Symbolic processing, as distinct from number crunching is what powerful Lisp machines were manufactured for. The focus of the distinction is the realization that computers are not restricted to the manipulation of numbers, but rather, they can be made to manipulate any kind of symbol which mayor may not represent a number. What is overlooked of course, is that the difference is a difference in our eyes only: the machine is in no position to care one way or the other whether what it manipulates appears to us as a number or a word. And it does not care because what it manipulates has no ultimate meaning for it.

"To a machine, the symbols it shunts around are syntactic patterns: it is only when a user interacts with the machine that the patterns are given some final symbolic value that finds existence at a semantic experience in the user".

"… It is the key to understanding how PASK's cybernetics is quite different to the A.I. enterprise" (1993, p.63)

In other words, by careless use of terminology, man puts unwittingly his own ghost in the machine and mistakes it for real.

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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