Towards a cybernetics of value, presence, and anticipation

Abstract

The paper asks whether we can popularise a cybernetics of human presence. It suggests that, despite its implicit critique of mechanistic thinking, cybernetics inherited its mindset from classical science, and therefore played a part in the evolution of technologically induced forms of alienation. Cybernetics also upholds a strongly western model of “self” that, given the technological power implicit in established cybernetic principles, reinforces instrumentalist, solipsistic, and cynical modes of reasoning in the economically “advanced” nations. These effects, in turn, continue to precipitate ecological damage. In discussing more recent developments, the paper notes the possibilities for modes of cybernetics that could become operative at the site of our self‐world interface. At this level, it argues, our human ontology becomes more synonymous with our senses. This can also be shown by reminding ourselves of the crucial role of our “creative presence”, in which a greater acknowledgement of anticipatory reasoning might inform an actative, flow‐based grammar of cybernetics. It concludes that clocks need to be radically re‐designed within terms that are in accord with (at least) second‐order cybernetics.