One of the concepts that seems hard to grasp with regards to Cybernetics is the idea of “informational closure”. This idea was introduced by Ross Ashby as “informational tightness”. Ashby defined Cybernetics as the study of systems that are open to energy but closed to information and control – systems that are “information-tight”. Just like something that is described as water-tight, where water does not enter it from outside, information-tight refers to the condition where information does not enter it from outside.

Ashby also said that when a machine breaks, it changes its mind. Ashby referred to “machine” as a collection of parts that interact on one another and an “organization” as the specific way they are put together. For example, when a user pushes on a button, a door opens. The machine in this case is the button together with the wiring that can interact on the door together with the hinges. Ashby would say that Cybernetics in this case is the study of all possible actions that could have happened when the button was pushed, but did not. The cybernetician would ask why of all the possibilities, the action of the door opening happened? That specific action happened due to the specific manner the parts are connected to one another. If the parts were connected differently something else would have happened such as the door staying closed and refusing to open. I use the phrase “refusing to open” to tease the idea of the machine having a mind. As a nod to Descartes, in the case of this machine, its mind is indeed its body. It acts the way it does because of its structure. If there was a loose connection, then the machine would indeed change its mind, and refuse to open.

Here, the reader might be tempted to say that the user is providing an input or information via the press of the button. From a cybernetics standpoint, the user is actually perturbing the machine, and the machine’s behavior to this perturbation is to behave in a specific manner as dictated by its internal structure and organization. This is the reason why if there was a loose connection, the user pressing the button would result in a different behavior altogether. There is no information being received that is processed by the machine. The user could use the same pressing action on a keyboard and it would elicit an entirely different behavior, one that is consistent with the keyboard’s internal structure and organization. The machine’s mind is already made up, so to speak. If one were forced to define information in this regard, it would be something to the effect of “information is that which has the potential to elicit a response.” But here is the catch, what elicits a response is not the information, but the internal structure of the machine. In order to respond, the machine must have a closed organization. Information tight or informational closure means that the machine does not process information from outside. Instead, it is perturbed and this elicits a response based on its internal structure.

Two Chilean cyberneticians Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela came up with the idea of autopoiesis that brought a new dimension to this. Their perspective is that humans are informationally closed as well. Maturana pointed out that prior to 1950’s, scientists and laypeople used to talk about neurons transferring or transmitting impulses. And after the advent of information theory by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, everything was viewed in a new light – that of information and entropy. The idea of conveying information from one person to the other, and information being processed is an attractive one. From a practical standpoint, one can see that this does not make sense. How many times have you conveyed information to another person only to have been misunderstood? As George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

We are obviously different than machines. We are not wired in order to be to elicited for specific responses. How we respond instead is based on a historical coherence. An easy example is how one responds to their own name. When we were infants, we were called our names, and we did not respond based on our then closed organization. With each repetition, we came to correlate the sound of the name to a response from us guided by reinforcement in the form of attention, love etc. The utterance of our name created a strong correlation in our behavior. There can still be instances where we may behave differently if our names are called such as in the case when your mother was using a stern voice. The history of interactions with others creates a stable response that we generally tend towards to. The more perturbations we have in the form of these interactions, the more we tend to respond in a particular manner. We have an embodied mind, unlike the machine. And unlike the machine, we are autonomous entities. We may still choose to change our mind for no good reason.

One of the examples that Maturana gave to further this idea is that of looking at a flower. The traditional way is to say that the light from the flower reaches our retina and this acts as information, and we see the flower. The informationally closed way is explained by Maturana as follows:

When light reflected by an object that the observer describes as external reaches the retina, an activity is initiated that is enclosed in the structure of the retina itself (and not in the structure of the source of light, nor in the structure of the world). The external world can only trigger such changes in the nervous system of an organism as are determined by the structure of the nervous system itself. The consequence is that there is no possible way, in principle, for the external world to communicate itself in its primordial, true form to the nervous system.

In other words, the flower does not inform the nervous system that it is a flower. Instead, the nervous system constructs an experiential reality of “flower” based on its own structure. It should refer to itself in order to make sense. This aligns with the view that each of us uniquely experience the world. What the color blue is? or what the sound of a hand clap is? – are all different for each of us, and this is based on our history of interactions and our closed interpretative framework. This brings attention to the essential point that what we experience is only one version of a human reality. To exist in a social realm requires us to be respectful of the other participants.

Stay safe and always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was On the Ambiguities in Complexity: