A Greek tale

Lysistratus, a wealthy merchant of Athens, had made the acquaintance of Hero, a renowned engineer, in Alexandria, the city he came from. It was the first century before Christ, and something important was about to happen, even if neither Lysistratus nor Hero of Alexandria, the main actors in the affair, suspected the scale that the ramifications of this event would take on.

Throughout Athens, and well beyond, the parties given at Lysistratus’s house were famous. The wine, produced especially for him in the vineyards of the valley of Aetolia, was drunk by the guests as though it were air, which began to worry Lysistratus (above all when he was sober). That, and asking for help from Hero of Alexandria — then passing through Athens to give a few talks at a famous Academy — were one and the same.

Hero’s answer was a device connecting a jug to a cup, with a mechanism such that the more wine there was in the cup, the less came out of the jug. With this mechanism, which today we would call negative feedback, Hero had probably become the first cybernetician in history.

And even if things did not happen exactly like that (though it is not absolutely impossible either), I do not believe Professor von Foerster would take amiss this particular version of his particular version of the origins of one of the conceptual pillars of cybernetics.

And what if it were all a lie?

Within the framework of the Conference on biology, cybernetics and communication, Heinz von Foerster and Humberto Maturana met an audience that filled hall A of the General San Martín Cultural Centre. Billions of years of biofeedback and of circular causality went by on 27 and 28 May in a venue in central Buenos Aires, thanks to the initiative of the Asociación Sistémica de Buenos Aires and the Sociedad Argentina de Terapia Familiar, chaired respectively by Sara Jutorán and by D^r Ana Giller.

Three orders of cybernetics followed one another, developed with intelligence and humour by the two masters. It was therefore not very difficult to imagine Bertrand Russell, in his pleasant house on the outskirts of London, racking his brains over a sentence uttered two thousand years earlier by the representative of another of the conceptual columns of cybernetics: Epimenides, that Cretan who, by declaring “I am a liar”, caused more than one headache in the most lucid heads of humanity.

For thousands of years, human beings lived in cybernetics of order zero, the order of implicit cybernetics, applied but not reflected upon.

In the mid-1940s, a group of scientists from the most diverse branches, with the support of the Macy foundation, observed that there are certain differences between what is inside and what is outside systems: the era of first-order cybernetics begins. First-order cybernetics begins when one starts to conceptualise the models with which we describe the systems we observe.

Reflections upon reflections have plunged us, for some twenty years now, into second-order cybernetics… and we will go no further, because according to Professor von Foerster there is no higher order: when one reflects upon reflection, the circle closes.

The only truth is reality

Yes, but which reality? In the process of observing and explaining, we may choose not to question the observer and to validate experiences by reference to objects independent of the observer; or else we may accept the question of the observer. Taking one or the other of these paths depends, according to Maturana, on emotion. On the second path, I answer for what I say: the other is not in error, they are in another reality.

On the first path, one is never responsible: it is not I who assert such and such a thing, it is objective reality. On the first path, that of objectivity, tolerance exists: “one does not accept the other, but one lets them be for a while”.

On the second path, that of (objectivity), tolerance does not exist, because the other has another reality: “here, one is no better, but one realises that one is bad”.

The ethical depth of these questions led me, at a certain moment, to think that humanity would have spared itself a good many deaths simply by taking all this out of books and specialists’ meetings.

At six in the evening, on a cold Saturday in May 1988, two thousand years after the famous parties at Lysistratus’s house, a neurophilosopher and a magician (his former trade), named Humberto Maturana and Heinz von Foerster, added one more turn to the path of knowledge. The audience, grateful.