Heinz von Foerster was the inventor of second-order cybernetics, which recognizes the investigator as part of the system he is investigating. The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name provides an accessible, nonmathematical, and comprehensive overview of von Foerster's cybernetic ideas and of the philosophy latent within them. It distills concepts scattered across the lifework of this scientific polymath and influential inter-disciplinarian. At the same time, as a book-length interview, it does justice to von Foerster's élan as a speaker and improviser, his skill as a raconteur. Developed from a week-long conversation between the editors and von Foerster near the end of his life, this work playfully engages von Foerster in developing the difference his notion of second-order cybernetics makes for topics ranging from emergence, life, order, and thermodynamics to observation, recursion, cognition, perception, memory, and communication. The book gives an English-speaking audience a new ease of access to the rich thought and generous spirit of this remarkable and protean thinker.
"Heinz Von Foerster spent most of his career seeking to understand cognition based on neurophysiology, mathematics, and philosophy. He came to a new understanding of knowledge which led to a new epistemology. What this book reveals is that after retiring from the University of Illinois, von Foerster reinterpreted his earlier professional training in physics and the sciences generally from the new
George Washington University
"I know of no other such a broad and coherent statement of Foerster's essential thinking."
Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Cybernetics, The Bartlett, University College Londo
