I was at the wonderful ASC C:ADM 2010 conference at Troy and look forward to a similar experience.
I am particularly interested in something I find fantastic in cybernetics: that, understanding epistemology in terms of circularity, one both rejects objectivity and escapes subjectivity in the same terms (that being part of the world we are neither apart from it in the sense of an independent observer or in the sense of an isolated subject). This is manifest in the conference theme—in the acting and understanding present in the circularity of learning; that we must act to understand as well as understand to act.
It seems to me that this reflects on our relations with others (that is in ethics but also in the example of design). While cybernetics and ethics have been said to coincide, the consequences of cybernetics for ethics have only been put tentatively (understandably given one of these is that “ethics cannot be articulated”). This can become confused with an ethical reticence—to avoid impacting on others at all costs (or at least, I have confused it with this in the past). While we often spend too much time talking and not enough time listening, the opposite can also be the case. This observation returns to circularity—that in order to act we need to listen and in order to listen we need to act.
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