Some of the people featured in the story of an idea.
Questions: (1) How do ideas and information percolate through populations?
(2) How do ideas and information evolve as they are disseminated throughout the target population?
(3) how does this process change (i.e. cause adaptation in) the host population?
A bit of biography is in order as we discuss the history of ideas, because personalities shape ideas, as much as ideas shape personalities.
Note: the following personalities were selected using a "random walk" through state space; they are not necessarily any more noteworthy than others not listed.
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W. Ross Ashby 1903-1972. Received his M.D. from Cambridge in 1935. Ashby was originally a psychiatrist, and was one of the second wave of "general systems" writers to follow the first, post-war "cybernetics" move. Stuart Umpleby has written a nice article on Ashby's general systems theories. Here is a quote: "There are various types of regulators. An error-controlled regulator can be very simple, for example a thermostat. A cause-controlled regulator requires a model of how the machine will react to a disturbance. One consequence of Ashby’s view of regulation is the Conant and Ashby theorem, 'every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.' ”
Ashby's idea of requisite variety also remains influential in the discussion of complex adaptive systems.
Ludwig von Bertelanffy 1901-1972. Biologist from Vienna, Austria.PhD in 1926. If anyone deserves the appelation "founder of systems theory", then Bertelanffy, along with Wiener, would probably qualify. His book "General Systems Theory" is probably somewhat abstruse for the casual reader, but is rightfully regarded as a foundational work.
David Bohm 1917-1992. From Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Physicist; PhD Berkely 1943. His "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" is a very challenging review. I initially ran into his ideas in John Horgan's "The End of Science".
Niels Bohr His idea of complementarity opened the way for hierarchies in systems science.
Leon Brillouin French physicist. 1889-1969. Wrote a very interesting article ("Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics", 1949, The American Scientist) on the linkage between thermodynamics, information, and the persistence of life in the face of inexorable entropy.
Jacques Hadamard Opened the way for complex function theory, in which the independent variable and the dependent variable are both complex numbers. This produces equations which can map fields.
Donald O. Hebb Phd, psychology, Harvard 1936. Taught at McGill U, Montreal Canada. His watershed idea was "... that thoughts could actually be the activity of reverberating circuits of neurons called 'cell-assemblies.' ...Hebb himself was not only altogether unpretentious but also ever sceptical about his ideas. He saw them as pointing the way toward answers, rather than representing the answers themselves. In this I believe he had had a veridical insight into the state of contemporary psychology: he did not see much that was lapidary in it. ...Another negative lesson Hebb had learned from behaviorism was that it is unwise scientific practice to ignore anything, be it our brain, our biological heritage, our cognition or our conscious experience." ---from a former student, Stevan Harnad, Princeton U.
Arthur S. Iberall Physicist. From F. Eugene Yates: "The reticular activating system was a mode switcher for the 20 (he said) behavioral modes humans had. (Mammals in general have about 10.) He named the modes in his usual graceless English, and I re-named them to make them comprehensible, and often lectured about them."
"Cycles are (necessarily - for thermodynamic, balance- the -books requirements) the basic mode of temporal expression of the modes. That is, most of the modes are regularly recurrent, and a "personality" is defined largely by the set of transition probabilities among them. I extended this notion..."
"The present moment (i.e., "now") is a system update driven by sensory inputs. What's up? Am I OK? etc etc. The present moment lasts about 7 seconds, and is roughly the interval between spontaneous eye-blinks (if we are in repose and our eyes aren't dry)."
"The brain is marginally stable/unstable..."
Arthur Koestler His hierarchies of holons took Bohr's complementarity into the realm of systems. He's quite pessimistic in his writings on the state, and probable fate, of mankind. He might have some grounds for that, given his first-hand involvement in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II. However, every species at every age in the past 4.5 billion years of biotic life may also have had grounds for similar pessimism, and yet here we still are...life seems to be a stronger force than the stupidity of its constituents. Thus far, anyway.
Koestler seems to have had a dark side, both in his writings and in his biography. So one must sift through his ideas, which are many, for those which have utility and exploitability. I recommend his books "The Ghost in the Machine", and "Janus".
Rafael Lorente do No 1902-1990. He proposed multiple pathways in the brain. Apparently we are more complex than we realize.
James Grier Miller PhD at Harvard in Psychology (1940). Influenced by A.N. Whitehead. One of the old guard of systems thinkers. He wrote the massive book "Living Systems", published in 1978.
Marvin Minsky PhD, Mathematics, Princeton 1954. Posited, with Seymour Papert at MIT, the Society of Mind theory, describing how intelligence could arise from the interaction of non-intelligent parts. I especially liked his idea that intelligence is not merely a derivative of logic, but that feelings also weigh heavily upon the entity that we call the human mind.
Talcott Parsons PhD Heidelburg, Germany in Sociology and Economics. Served on the faculty of Harvard University (Economics, then Sociology) from 1927 to 1973. Attended some of the Macy Conferences. Wrote on cultural, social, and political systems.
Walter Pitts The tragic genius. His is the real "Good Will Hunting" story. In the movie, the savant named Will Hunting is discovered as a janitor at MIT, but Pitts was discovered as a homeless waif; he began interacting with the logicians Carnap and Russell in Chicago and was thence induced to MIT, where he was given a cover job as a janitor. At MIT he was acknowledged as probably the smartest guy in the room (per Jerome Lettvin), but it seems like the right side of his brain couldn't hande messy emotions and illogical feelings. Pitts was a preeminent logician with no capacity to control his feelings. When Wiener split with Warren McCulloch in 1951, Pitts couldn't handle the rejection and ensuing alienation; he ended up drinking himself to death. Warning: we need both sides of our brain to function sustainably!
Gordon Pask His Conversation Theory proved to be instrumental for reciprocality in systems signalling. Only one intelligent person is necessary for an intelligent conversation. An intelligent machine (God) can reproduce itself through a much less intelligent counterpart (human). The human then spends the rest of its existence complaining to God about how tough things are. Pask says this qualifies as a conversation. To me, Pask has demonstrated the importance of humor in sustainable systems. If something is amusing, you'll go back and repeat the behavior, and remain involved. Maybe Pask built the first machines that had humor. Anyway, I thought some of his 'adaptive' machines were quite droll. I posit that Pask did cybernetics neither for money nor fame nor power, but simply because it was amusing.
Robert Rosen Received his PhD in Relational Biology from Chicago in 1959. Student of Nicholas Rashevsky. Taught at SUNY Buffalo, later at Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Rosen is noted for the idea of Anticipatory Systems. He is a theoretical biologist, which means he works with mathematical models, and therefore can be quite abstruse to the uninitiated. But he writes wonderfully, and can provide a pleasingly challenging read (i.e. inspiring otherwise uncreated thoughts) for the curious reader.
Herbert Simon Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. PhD in Poli. Sci. from U. Chicago. If you ever attempt to fathom agent heuristics in multivariate systems, then Simon's hypothetical ant navigating the beach will at some point probably appear. There is a nice recent biography out on him, by Hunter Crowther-Heyck, published in 2003 by Johns Hopkins U. Press. Simon was a brilliant thinker, original, and fiercely dedicated to his vision of explaining the decision-making process in the semi-autonomous human agent.
Jan Smuts His Holism theory was the first shot of the revolution. Along with Koestler, he proves that the trained scientists are not always the leading thinkers.
Alan Turing Along with Pitts, his is one of the great tragedies of 20th century science. He was "treated" for his homosexuality by chemical castration via hormone injections, courtesy of the British government, and in 1954 he committed suicide. When you think of what people like he and Pitts could have accomplished, given the room and encouragement!
Sir Geoffrey Vickers Was a decorated soldier in WWI, took a degree in history and law at Oxford, was a lawyer in the interwar years, served as a Colonel in "economic intelligence" during WWII, then served in various administrative and management capacities before becoming a systems author and speaker. He coined the idea of 'appreciative systems', in which the values of the agents involved must be taken into consideration. The ISSS every year gives a Vickers award for student papers:
"The Sir Geoffrey Vickers Award commemorates the life and works of Sir Geoffrey Vickers. His view of the human condition as fundamentally embedded in a web of value relations, and of the dilemma of human action as both rational and valuative, lead him to the formulation of the Appreciative Systems approach. The spirit of his lifework is tremendously contemporary, even though he wrote his most significant works in the early second half of the 20th century: society as evolutionarily emergent; participative and interactive communication as a creative agent; humanization as the necessary normative component of socialization - all this as part of what he called "a science of human ecology." It is through a truly integrative and systemic approach to our humanity that Sir Geoffrey believed we can learn to navigate multi-valued choice in the ways we structure and value our situation. Being critical (without criticizing), judging (without being judgmental), and engaging in normative decision taking (without ignoring or subjugating the interests of others) - these are the challenges of a science of human ecology as he saw it. The realization that "Science is human" (1) derives from his assertion that we are "incorrigible valuers."(2) Indeed, it was Sir Geoffrey's fundamental affirmation that only by learning to be appreciative systems, ourselves, will we create social structures capable of supporting the essence of our humanity. The ISSS Vickers Award seeks to recognize promising work that advances the systems sciences toward this vision."
(1) Vickers, G. (1968) Value Systems and Social Process, Pelican Books, Middlesex, England, 1968, p.214.
(2) Ibid. 214.
Norbert Wiener The original "boy genius" whose Phd at Harvard was received at age 18. Taught mathematics at MIT for 40 years. His Cybernetics (1948) was a great turning point. One of the first popularizers of the idea of adapting systems. He, like Pitts, had a hyperdeveloped left brain (logic), with an atrophied/suppressed right brain (feelings). Triumph and tragedy ensued.
Last modified 11/26/11