The participants were asked to submit personal statements addressing the following 3 points or topics:

1. How I Found Cybernetics
   (i.e., how I became acquainted and engaged with the field or its subject matter)

2. What Cybernetics Means to Me
   (i.e., what value or utility I ascribe to cybernetics in my personal and / or professional life)

3. Description of My Cybernetics
   (a statement describing cybernetics as you see it)

This webpage collates the contributions with respect to topic / point #1.

To review the contributions submitted for topic #2, click HERE

I was - and am - looking for an interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary framework that will allow a theory of information, cognition and communication and therefore also a theory of mind and meaning.

Bateson's lack of a theory of to whom the difference made a difference brought me to Maturana and Varela's idea of autopoiesis, which I have discussed with them both intensively and written papers using and criticising the theory. You can find my latest description of the limits of Bateson's theory in a chapter in this book:

http://www.springer.com/life+sci/book/978-1-4020-6705-1 .

It made many soft Bateson fans angry.

In my opinion Maturana lack a theory of mind. Therefore I continued into Heinz von Foerster's theories and philosophy and analyzed it in a paper to his 70.th birthday.

Although his is a bit more realistic then the rest of the very radical contructivistic cyberneticians and he brings in communication as well ( in his corolary to Maturana) as well as necessity of the recognition of the other as real, he does not unfold a theory of the social.

In search of the I went to Niklas Luhmann. I am very fond of the way he uses and combines the model of three autopoietic systems and have written a lot of that. But I do not think he manages to include a phenomenological first person point of view in his theory although he claims to build on Husserl. I wrote a paper on that in the double issue we did last year in CHK "Luhmann Applied".

I have ever since studied Peirce's semiotic to find a theory and philosophy of the observer and that no-place in non-time of the origin of meaning, words and cognition that Lou describes so wonderful in his mail. A theory that include meaning, communication and the observer that cybernetics has not managed to produce yet. I have had and have very inspiring discussions with him on this interesting subject when he makes his column 'Virtual logic', trying to convince him that Peirce actually produced something that cybernetic - even second order cybernetics - is in need of. My discussion with Ranulph around his columns have been and still are important for this issue to.

I have collected my last 25 years of work on that idea in the book "Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough", that I have finally received a copy of last week.

http://www.utppublishing.com/pubstore/merchant.ihtml?pid=8894&step=4

In my experience I encountered a group of people who like to think about the dynamic configurations of what we perceive, experience, and engage with in any given field. Not only that, but this loosely-knit eclectic group of people are generally aware that they do not have, nor cannot claim, any absolute truths for what they explore.

I come from a background of systems modeling, (ecosystems and the management concerns that arise) and hence take it as obvious that simulation models are not true, though sometimes very useful. Why should mental models, concepts, beliefs, etc. be any different? My encounter with the biology of cognition as presented by Maturana at the 1995 ASC conference (which I attended for unrelated motives) offered me an acceptable and credible basis for expanding this as a way of reflecting and living in comfort with the lack of Reality.

What I have appreciated as much as the ideas is the community; the people in ASC, and others I have encountered through the ASC. It is the quality of the conversations in terms of both the content and the mien that has been the core of what I have, in practice, accepted as "cybernetics".

Joseph Weizenbaum gave us a preprint of his book Computer Power and Human Reason, Lewis Mumford came and had lunch with us, Langdon Winner spoke about the politics of autonomous technology, Murray Eden taught us information theory, and professors had informal debates about the ethics of accepting defense grant money. I think we read Wiener's God & Golem and MacKay's Information, Mechanism and Meaning, and perhaps another book on information theory, Symbols, Signals, and Noise. It was far more enlightening and enlivening than the other three years at MIT that followed.... I was already thinking about biology, brains, and machines, but I imagine that many of Jerry's attitudes and ideas found fertile ground in my mind, and that I learned many cybernetic concepts from osmosis.

Spiritually, I am a theoretical biologist interested in realizing artificial intelligence through biologically-inspired design principles. I came to cybernetics formally as an undergraduate while I was looking for principles that might explain biological evolution and complexification. I thought then and still do now that one needs processes of open-ended complexification and creation of new functions to construct devices capable of autonomous learning. From library forays I came across biological systems theory (Waddington, Pattee, Rosen, Bertalanfy), self-organizing systems, bionics, biological cybernetics, hierarchy theory, systems theory, books like Jantsch's Self-Organizing Universe, autopoiesis, and many others.

This compelled me to research the subject further, and led me to works such as "Autopoiesis and Cognition" by Maturana and Varela, but also to J. Klir's "Approach to General Systems Theory" and "Facets of Systems Science" and to R. Rosen's "Fundamentals of Measurement and Representation" and "Anticipatory Systems", where I found a lot of things relevant to my interests (in the area of linguistic and cultural communication) but also a lot more problems to be solved.

• What does the other know about oneself?
• What can one know about the other?
• How can another get me to know something?
• How can I get another to know something?
• How and why are choices made for others?
• Why should one accept choices others make on one's behalf?
• How does one get to know?
• What can be known?
• What happens in negotiation, what is trust and what are the implications for authority and responsibility? And so on.

It led me to embrace cybernetics themes, and it expanded the framework of my research. (Out of curiosity, I remember to be dissuaded by older colleagues, who saw me as a promising theorist losing his time with a death discipline). I got a special interest on the work and career of second-order cyberneticist Gordon Pask - a humanist who acted as consultant to (among others) Cedric Price - the maverick of British architecture. Then I spent some years doing archival research, including exhaustive research at professor G's personal archive (held by his daughter at the time). It ended in my PhD, and following presentations.

I was told that, designing such a complex, technical system, I needed to consult a cybernetician. A what?

Fortunately, my architecture school had one of these strange creatures on board as a consultant, and I went to meet him. In my memory, I spoke for 3 hours, quite unclearly, and then had what I could not express summarised with astonishing clarity in 3 minutes by the strange creature. I was astounded, and certain that the subject had something to do with this. So did the man, who was Gordon Pask. I was captivated, by both.

For me, it was fortunate that the text was rich with ideas because because the mathematics was incomprehensible.

In 1947 I had adopted Korzybski's Science and Sanity as my 'bible' (pub. 1933). I found immense satisfaction there, probably because at fourteen in 1938 I had started reading scientists like Eddington and Bertrand Russell's "Why I'm not a Christian."

This got me kicked out of my home, but I survived nicely.

In 1952 visiting the Korzybski General Semantic headquarters in Lakeville CT. I bought "Design for a Brain- Ashby". (I still have that original book published that year!) Then in 1956 his "An Introduction to Cybernetics."

My next major epistemological advance was in 1972, reading "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" - Bateson.

My attraction to Bateson's work came from a confluence of interests. In psychology I was interested in alternatives to behaviorism that could enhance human potential. In cultural anthropology I was interested in culture and its variability. And in ecology I was interested in how we could understand the ecological crisis that I felt was the issue of our times. Bateson added to these a kind of biological emphasis: he had us as a homework exercise look at a living thing, and then try to describe how we knew it was living.

I had the opportunity to create my own major, but I didn't do that. However, I once proposed that I do so to Bateson. I had in mind a major in "cultural planning." His response was that I should indeed try to envision how to do cultural planning, until the time should come when I would emerge from that study with a "belly laugh." Because I would realize that "it can't be done." You can't plan culture. "You can't deal with love in that way."

In the 90's, while working for the Boeing Co., I was assigned a research project into the area of managing human error (Boeing being keen to keep airplanes from falling out of the skies). The scope of our project quickly expanded from pilot error, which was the industry standard at that time, to include the production and maintenance of airplanes as well. This expansion was new thinking and very political as the agencies that monitor such things (FAA, NTSB) had a stake in the outcome. Our definition and mathematical probabilities were suddenly under much scrutiny, especially by ourselves, and required historical and legal explanations.

The definitions and algorithms being used for human error (really meaning lapses in human understanding) made no sense. Yet they were documented to some degree and the values accepted - although no one could say for sure where the values came from (an error will occur 1 out of 20 times, for instance). The legal definitions and systems set up for self-disclosure (ie., admitting you screwed up so we could analyze and design for it) that hinged on these definitions, and especially allowances for pilots versus mechanics, made even less sense.

The irony: the project was a huge success. Many airlines around the world participated. The net result: error rates stayed exactly the same although we managed to adopt a few new definitions and flaunted an expanded scope. While writing the concluding report, I turned briefly to systems theory, esp related to complexity, throwing in a few of Peter Senge's dizzying, circular, +/- graphics that were all the rage about then.

In 1986 I went to U.S. and studied under Stuart Umpleby as a visiting schoolar for two years, during that time, introduced by Stuart, I met Heinz von Foerster, Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Humberto Maturana, Robert Trappl, Klaus Krippendorff and many other colleagues in ASC. I started publishing in journals such as Cybernetics and Systems (1988, 1991) and CATO Journal(1991) on cybernetics related topics. I went back to China in summer 1988 but having to leave again in summer 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre. From 1990 to 1994 my Ph.D. work in management and organizations under Stuart's advisary was focused on cybernetics and system theory and since then I was considered a "Chinese cybernetician" in various conferences in U.S. and Europe. (But after "911" I decided to become an American citizen, or a "world-citizen", so lost my Chinese citizenship.)

I got a fellowship to study at Princeton University. as a academic green horn, I hated this place. Students were snobbish and arrogant and I found nothing there of what I came to study. In search of a better university I passed through Urbana, talked to a design professor there who told me about Heinz. I visited BCL and told Heinz of the catalogue of my interests. He mentioned in passing that Ashby was at U of I and teaching a course in cybernetics. This made my decision to stay there.

I studied with Ross. After the one year course was over, I organized a cybernetics club with his former students. I managed to get Ashby on my dissertation committee together with social science professors. My dissertation was about content analysis as a methodology. I wrote one chapter for Ashby, developing a set theoretical information theory to quantify the amount on information needed to make the kind of inferences that content analysts make. I graduated in communication which I considered close enough to cybernetics and design.

Scientific communication self-organizes into paradigmatic structures, e.g., disciplines and specialties, and these processes can be measured in terms of distributions of co-occurrences of words and cited references. Entropy statistics enables us to statistically decompose and relate these processes quantitatively at different levels of aggregation (e.g., articles, journals, sets of journals, etc.).

My thesis was entitled "Science as a Growing System" and although my background belong (primarily) to the realm of physical sciences (I got a Master Degree as Electronic Engineer) I had a broad interest in humanistic disciplines (I had been a free student in the humanistic university of Lisbon for some years). At the same time I was engaged in a psychoanalytic process. So, Gordon was clever enough to bind all these areas and the "growing science " he referred to was deeply related to the rational and IRRATIONAL processes that had framed the construction of the successive Images of Nature from the Sumerians (!!!) until the Renaissance, using his system (CASTE) and my fuzzy logics. In the present-day terminology the thesis entailed a historical-scientific perspective of the emergence of those Images as a non-trivial (state-transition) fuzzy machine.

After the thesis, he suggested me to deepen and erect some models of human affections and cognate irrational processes using my psychoanalytic knowledge (this in an epoch in which everybody's attention was focused on logical reasoning only). This stage last several years and finally some day in 93, in the Atheneaum Club in London we had a very serious conversation about the future of cybernetics and the possibility of endowing consciousness to machines ("Which type of machines?"). This topic has framed my research in the last 7 years.

It found the prepared mind (see above) of a researcher and Ph.D. student in Negroponte's lab (when it was called The Architecture Machine Group, before the Media Lab), seduced by the personae of Gordon Pask.

An academic pause followed in which I focused on teaching Taiji chuan, Qigong and family Gongfu style, during which only a few papers again relating to the subject of self-reference got published.

When I selected a doctoral program, one of the criteria I used was that there had to be courses I could take with the word cybernetics in the title. The University of Pennsylvania was the only institution I found with such courses. These courses were in the Annenberg School of Communication and I was in the Wharton School, so I sought out the Professor who taught the courses. Thus began my tutelage under Klaus Krippendorff, who became my teacher and mentor, and later colleague and friend. I learned that I could not address the seemingly intractable social issues I had identified without including myself in the issues I was observing, and being open to changing my formulation of those issues and my desires with respect to them. It was Klaus who convinced me to present my first paper, "Beyond Planning", at a general systems conference (while ASC was on a six year hiatus), at which I had a chance to hear, and in some cases meet, Heinz von Foerster, Francisco Varela, Ernst von Glasersfeld, Margaret Mead, Stuart Umpleby and others. When Stuart asked me to organize the first meeting of a re-established ASC in 1981, my future with cybernetics was assured. Not only did I continue to confront new ideas and ways of thinking, I also found the people who I met and with whom I talked to be fascinating in their variety and creativity.

I read Miller, Galanter and Pribram's (1960) book on Plans and the Structure of Behaviour, a key text marking the rise of cognitive psychology and, eventually, 'cognitive science'. The authors make clear their indebtedness to cybernetics. I also recall W Sluckin's Men, Minds and Machines as a good introductory text.

Thanks to David Stewart, I spent 6 months working with Gordon Pask at System Research Ltd as a research assistant. I took a Pask paper (A Cybernetic Model for Some Kinds of Learning and Mentation), a 50 plus (!) page conference paper and worked through its 70 or more references in order to understand it. This was one of the most intense learning periods of my life. It lead to my getting a good degree and becoming committed to cybernetics.

Here are some snippets that trace my interest in cybernetics...

I'll start with a quote...

"Cybernetics, a word coined by Norbert Wiener to describe the complex of sciences dealing with communication and control in the living organism and in the machine." When Wiener introduced the term, which is derived from the Greek ... meaning governor or steersman, he was unaware that it had already had a considerable history and that it had been used more than a century before by Andre Ampere to cover the purely governmental side of such a theory, in the positivistic classification of scientific theories.

As a matter of fact not only Ampere... but Plato had used the word... (which would be transliterated as "cybernetics") in Gorgias. Although Plato used the word more or less in relation to the art of navigation, it is highly interesting, as pointed out by Watanabe, that Plato compared cybernetics with rhetorics because he viewed both as concerned with influence and control entirely different in nature from knowledge of some fixed reality such as astronomy or geology. "(Wiener, 1985, p.215)

WIENER, N. 1985. Norbert Wiener: Collected Works with Commentaries. Cambridge/London: MIT Press I came in contact with Cybernetics first while studying at MIT in 1985 through Wiener's writing.

WIENER, N. 1967. The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society. New York: Discuss Books.

I later became focused on Cybernetics during my study at the Center for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Art, University of Wales, with Roy Ascott functioning as my advisor. Ranulph often visited� One of the other students was writing on Gordon Pask and this opened my deep interest in him. And of course Bateson came up often in discussion. Later I met Peter Cariani also . He was interested in Pask and we have become good friends. See his impressive website: http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/CarianiHomePage.html See also BATESON, G. 1972. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, Co.

Roy Ascott saw the potentials of behavioural relations in terms of works of art. In his paper entitled Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision, published in 1966, Ascott presented the following concept:

"Behaviourist Art constitutes, as we have seen, a retroactive process of human involvement, in which the artefact functions as both matrix and catalyst. As matrix, it is the substance between two sets of behaviours; it neither exists for itself nor by itself. As a catalyst, it triggers changes in the spectator's total behaviour. Its structure must be adaptive implicitly or physically, to accommodate the spectator's responses, in order that the creative evolution of form and idea may take place. The basic principle is feedback. The system Artefact/Observer furnishes its own controlling energy; a function of an output variable (observer response) is to act as an input variable, which introduces more variety into the system and leads to more variety in the output (observer's experience). This rich interplay derives from what is a self-organising in which there are two controlling factors; one, the spectator is a self-organising subsystem; the other, the art work is not usually at present homeostatic...

There is no prior reason why the artefact should not be a self-organising system; an organism, as it were, which derives its initial programme or code from the artists creative activity and then evolves in specific artistic identity and function in response to the environment which it encounters. "(Ascott, 1966, p.11)

ASCOTT, R. 1966. Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision. Cybernetica, International Association for Cybernetics, Namur, IX, pp.247-264.

My Ph.D thesis was entitled: Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment, c1999. I have many texts on my website including this one at billseaman.com. I have a history of interest in works that explore meta-meaning systems...

I got all of the Macy Convention books and read them one summer� I collaborated on a paper with Andrea Gaugusch:

(Re)Sensing the Observer Offering an Open Order Cybernetics (billseaman.com)

Andrea Gaugusch & Bill Seaman

What we need now is the description of the "describer" or in other words, we need a theory of the observer. (Heinz von Foerster, Observing Observers)

Abstract

Instead of presuming the "observer" as given, we are (re)sensing the observer and are thereby offering an "Open Order Cybernetics" (OOC). We are first of all concerned about our use of language as the precondition for any meaningful statement. This self-reflexive point of departure distinguishes our project from philosophers who are first of all presuming "something" ("senses", "objects", "subjects", "language" etc.) without being aware of their presumptions i.e. that they are already able to talk meaningfully about "something". We are undertaking a self-reflexive loop towards our already undertaken meaningful actions, reflecting inside of our concepts on our concepts, trying to find out how our concepts about "something" have come into existence. We are reflecting on our concepts through this on-going open investigation. We are sketching the ramifications of such a self-reflexive loop for epistemology as well as for the main research-areas within cognitive science (i.e. language-acquisition, perception, consciousness). We are also pointing towards the arts and virtual reality as awareness-aids, helping us in our self-reflexive endeavors.

More recently I have been collaborating with Otto Rossler, theoretical biochemist and physicist on the creation of an Electrochemical Computer and developing a model for an intelligent, situated robotic system. We are currently working on a book entitled Neosentience. A number of papers can also be found at billseaman.com related to this project.

Pask early on articulated the following : Chemical computers arise from the possibility of 'growing' an active evolutionary network by an electro-chemical process.

Pask, G. 1961. An Approach to Cybernetics, with a preface by Warren S. McCullock, Harper and Brothers, MIT press (pg. 105)

Ranulph has done a lovely write up on this book.

I have of late been reading:

Mechanisation of Thought Processes Proceedings of a Symposium held at the National Physical Laboratory on 24-27th November 1958 Volume II. National Physical Laboratory Symposium No. 10. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1959, p. 879

Physical Analogues to the Growth of a Concept by Gordon Pask Introduction

In my early twenties I did a lot of work with education, conflict resolution, and facilitation, especially with grassroots organizations that aspired to model/instigate social change (a la lefty politics). A time came when I decided I would go on a tour of intentional communities (www.ic.org) to determine what such communities described as their needs with regard to conflict resolution. I would then, in light of their described needs, pursue training that would make me useful and relevant to meeting them. My first stop was to be SDAS, in Urbana, IL. I was going to go for a week, but Mark Enslin convinced me to get the full experience I would need to be there the whole session, one month.

When I arrived there, Steve Sloan, who had taught cybernetics, was no longer active in body as a teacher. However, a group met weekly, often hosted by Ben Emerick, which was called, 'Cybernetics'. I didn't know what it was, and the class didn't teach me.

There was a scribe who took notes about the content, and a meta-scribe who wrote the content of the content-carriers: the loop of herself describing the selves describing the environment and content they observed themselves observing. There was a lot of silence and descriptive sentences. These descriptions ornamented conversation rooted in a short piece of introductory content such as the distinction between 'complicated' (many elements) and 'complex' (many relationships).

In Urbana, at SDAS, I was challenged consistently, for the first time in my life, to hold my language accountable to my desires. What did my sentences do for or against my interests? In the past I would say very interesting things, or quite banal things, and the response rate was nearly identical. I'd learned at age 14 that I could put very little effort into my schoolwork and still be praised. At SDAS, what I did was measured against what I said I wanted to do- I had social support for self-observation! I knew this had something to do with second-order cybernetics (which was described to me in terms of a radio controlled car). I didn't know what cybernetics was, though. I liked myself in this environment so much I stayed on a few extra weeks. As I departed, people encouraged me to move there.

When I returned to Worcester, MA, I received a song written about me living in Urbana. I had never been in an environment which noticed my noticing and valued it so!

Visiting a friend, I went to UMASS and looked up cybernetics in its huge library. My response consisted of many large tomes in technical language about artificial intelligence. This was a far cry from my beloved conversations. It was clear I would not learn about cybernetics alone.

I have a PhD in an area of biology which is astride both animal and human nutrition, completed while I was an academic in agriculture at the University of what is now Zimbabwe. Following this I took opportunities to gain a qualification in human nutrition in London, migrate to Australia and obtain a position in a new medical school in Adelaide to set up and run a graduate course in Nutrition and Dietetics.

A student, Chris Bell, who had just done an honors degree in virology came to me to say that he wished to do a PhD with me. Very quickly we came to the mutual recognition that our interest lay not in biological type questions but rather 'Why do people choose to eat what they do in particular contexts?'

Deciding to pursue this was fateful, to say the least! For although this was fascinating to us it was not one that we were academically prepared for, nor was it a medical question. Both very severe constraints in a new institution wishing to establish its reputation for hard nosed biomedical research.

We did not have a clue as to where to begin in addressing our question. And observed, in tune with a comment we saw in 'Science': 'That in the early stages of a research and development project you can see ... absolutely nothing!'

A 'chance' finding of a book called 'Frames and Cages' - on PCP - by Chris led us to follow our passion by seeking understanding of decision making about food choice through this constructivist approach.

To cut a long (and tortuous) story short the (very fine, in my opinion) PhD was completed and granted (in the early 80's, with some difficulty) but produced no career option for Chris as we had opened up a new field of enquiry � which is not meant to happen in a PhD program! While I have not kept a close look at the field I am not aware of anyone else working up the notion that food has no meaning except what we supply to it. And that there are very useful systems analytic models which can greatly assist in understanding the kinds of belief which underly these meanings in diverse contexts.

Moving on ... In 1980 Prof Jack Farquhar, head of the world's first major community health initiative on heart disease (The Stanford Heart Disease Prevention Program) visited Adelaide. He expressed great interest in the 'constructivist' approach to understanding food choice that I was engaged in and invited me to spend time with his group. This led to my being a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Stanford in the second half of 1981.

It was during this time that I had a truly life changing experience. This was meeting Heinz and Francisco while attending a conference entitled 'Disorder and Order'. For what I heard from them excited me greatly. I obtained a copy of the proceedings and recordings of their presentations.

And took these back to Adelaide to have lively discussions about them with a small group of interested people. This included Allen E Ivey, a visiting scholar, who was very encouraging. (Writing this brought Allen to mind; we have not had contact for many years).

This led me to set up the 'Cybernetics Group' with a colleague and great friend, John Graham. We kept this going for over 10 years from the mid 80s to 90s, with meetings 3-4 times per year.

A wide range of topics chosen loosely focused on self organizing systems. Some of which were informed by 'Autopoiesis and Cognition' and by 'The Tree of Knowledge.' Others from jamming on drums!

Among the 'happenings' of our lively group which emerged from these influences was bringing Humberto to Adelaide, twice. This was in collaboration with Relationships Australia (formerly Marriage Guidance Council).

I published many papers in the fields of cybernetics and systems, introducing « observation operators » (1951-1957), the use of information for wave functions (1968), « structure transfers » (1975), a generalization of Laplace transform (1986), « epistemo-praxiology » (1987), new views on the perception of duration (1991), « epsilon distribution » (1994). In 1995 I published a book : �laquo; Cognition et Syst�me �raquo;. One of my recent papers is about Heinz von Foerster (2006).

I was completely carried away by Bob Scholte, a Dutch Anthropologist who was interested in the Ethnology of Anthropological Traditions and who introduced me to French Structuralism and Claude Levi Strauss' aesthetic rigor where the 'goal requires an affective, historicist orientation' which attempts 'to understand the past for the sake of the past' and 'by suspending judgment as to present utility, we make that judgment ultimately possible.' Bob became my intellectual guru and, like a passionate schoolgirl, I was captured by the poetry of Levi Strauss' words. 'Like the pebble which marks the surface of the wave which circles as it passes through it, I must throw myself into the water if I am to plumb the depths.'(Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 1955:396)

Bob Scholte was a protege of Gregory Bateson and was the one who arranged Bateson's coming to UCSC. Gregory was the man I didn't quite understand but I would never miss his invitation to our class to gather in his living room for conversation and I attended all his lectures. I knew what he was saying was important. He was like an itch I could not quite reach to scratch. I think I was learning through osmosis and when, later, after a year of discovering that no one 'understood' Levi-Strauss in Allan Dundees' Department of Folklore at UCBerkeley, I found a post graduate course in Cybernetics at San Jose State University created by Bill Reckmeyer. Thus began my formal training in cybernetics.

At 12 I first read Wiener and Ashby, within the already distorted context of cybernetics being about robots and 'intelligent' computers. After 3 decades of doggedly steering counter to the positivistic / objectivistic mindset AI entailed I found I'd circled back to cybernetics, navigating via waypoints not always strongly associated with the field.