Heinz von Foerster Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

What we need now is the description of the describer or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.

Heinz von Foerster
The world, as we perceive it, is our own invention.

Heinz von Foerster
The main theme of this report is a particular facet of the general problem of pre-organization in self-organizing systems, namely, the theory and circuitry of information processing networks. One may consider these networks as a special type of parallel computation channels which extract from the set of all possible inputs a particular subset which is defined by the internal structure of the network. The advantage of such operationally deterministic networks in connection with adaptive systems is the obvious reduction in channel capacity of the adaptors, if it is possible to predetermine classes of inputs which are supposed to be meaningful for those interacting with the automaton

Heinz von Foerster
Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him. Involving objectivity is abrogating responsibility – hence its popularity.

Heinz von Foerster
I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices

Heinz von Foerster
Hard sciences are successful because they deal with the soft problems; soft sciences are struggling because they deal with the hard problems.

Heinz von Foerster
To remove these one had to account for an observer (that is at least for one subject):
(i) Observations are not absolute but relative to an observer's point of view (i. e., his coordinate system: Einstein);
(ii) Observations affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer's hope for prediction (i. e., his uncertainty is absolute: Heisenberg).
After this, we are now in the possession of the truism that a description (of the universe) implies one who describes it (observes it).

Heinz von Foerster
Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today.

Heinz von Foerster