Notes on Von Foerster's Notes
What's really real?
Note: This was originally written in response to an assignment for my course on the Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems at Binghamton University.
Heinz Von Foerster's Notes On An Epistemology For Living Things (1972) was a challenging read for me.1
Von Foerster was an Austrian-American scientist and polymath who made contributions in fields from physics to philosophy and is widely recognized as the creator of second-order cybernetics.
Stylistically, I enjoyed the way that he develops his argument step-by-step in the form of a set of 11 logical propositions. Each piece of the whole argument follows directly from the prior piece in a clear fashion. The fact that the Notes can be "read in a circle" giving the reader the option of starting at any of the propositions rather than being forced to read from the beginning is a nice creative touch.
Unfortunately, I struggled to really grasp the essence of all his points on my first read through. Perhaps this is because he wasn't a native English speaker. Or maybe it's because I felt flooded by such a large amount of novel mathematical, biological, and philosophical concepts, all at once?
Since there were so many details in this paper that I didn't understand, I'm going to focus on a few high level concepts that (I think) I did.
Notes represents an attempt by Von Foerster to address a key challenge faced by scientists in the 20th century. Natural scientists, from Einstein to Heisenberg, had recognized that there is no such thing as an "objective description of the world in which there are no subjects." From this observation, it follows naturally that science must develop a coherent "theory of the observer" or "the description of the describer." Since only living organisms qualify as observers, Von Foerster reasons, biologists must take on the task of developing such a theory.
The notes set out to address the question of how do we (humans) know?
Proposition #1 states "The environment is experienced as the residence of objects, stationary, in motion, or changing."
I was immediately thrown off by considering the environment as something that is experienced rather than something which simply exists. And the use of the word "residence" didn't feel very natural to me. I might have preferred a term like "existence," or "appearance." But, after reading through the rest of the notes and spending some time reflecting, I was able to accept this initial proposition as true and uncontroversial.
From this initial proposition, Von Foerster goes on to make several assertions. These are a few that stood out for me:
"Objects" and "events" are not primary experiences, and they have no absolute objective status. Instead, they are representations of relations that emerge from two forms of computation, abstraction and memorization.
There is no external objective reality, and the notion of environment is subjective and personal. Reality is determined by processes of internal computation.
Concepts like “change” or “invariance” are properties of descriptions, not of objects themselves.
Living organisms are "relators" that compute the relations which maintain the integrity of organisms.
“Information” is a relative concept that only has meaning when related to the cognitive structure of the recipient of a message. Information associated with a description depends on the ability of an observer to draw inferences from the description.
The final proposition, #11, states "The environment contains no information; the environment is as it is" and the reader is prompted to return back to proposition #1.
From the perspective of epistemology, the philosophical study of how we come to know things, I'm left feeling that I can't disagree with anything that I've read. I appreciate being encouraged to think rigorously about the role of subjective internal computations in determining how we obtain knowledge.
But I'm left with several questions.
What does Von Foerster have to say about ontology, or what exists (in contrast to how we come to know what exists?)
What happens when robots imbued with advanced AI start taking on the role of observer? How will this impact our understanding of intelligence, science, and reality?
What exactly does it mean for a living organism to "compute the relations which maintain the integrity of the organism"?
How does Von Foerster's mathematical definition of information compare and contrast with Shannon's? The formalism seems identical, but I wonder if it should be interpreted differently based on context?
This is a piece that I'll need to return to several times in order to really grok. But, even having only understood a portion of the content, I feel like I've been enriched with a valuable new perspective as I grapple with developing my own understanding of the relationship between the fields of systems, cybernetics, and complexity as scientific paradigms.
von Foerster, H. (Ed.). (2003). Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things. In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (pp. 247–259). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21722-3_10
This is fun! I haven’t spent any time thinking about computational models of the environment, but this is tangentially related to some of the philosophical works I’ve read analyzing how decartes internal turn (ergo sum) lead to this understanding of the observable environment as an abstraction to be experienced, not a fundamental reality. For me what’s most interesting about this is the later development of the romantics who tried to resolve alienation through the imagination - finding universal principles common to the interior of the human being. Jung comes from that line, for example.
But also - so does gender theory! Gender theory builds on this line of thought through treating identity as something internally constructed and externally preformed - not something fixed.
It’s really interesting to trace the philosophical roots of these things out. For me, it also helps me understand why the idea of the environment as experienced and not “real” would be such a strong argument