Introduction

In this book I have created an exploration of social collectives seen as complex systems, which in general are far from equilibrium and maintain a bounded instability so that they are inherently dynamically unstable and subject to fundamental change, with their existence being maintained through the order that they create beyond any thresholds of instability through the use of information and energy. Viable complex systems evolve through a sequence of structures and processes that enables them to maintain integrity (through autopoiesis), and maintain their identity and autonomy (through autogenesis and autopoiesis). However such a system will not be able to maintain itself viably through evolution if its parts decompose or are consumed, and where no possibility arises of a re-synthesis, replacement or substitution, or where its integrity is lost through sever pathologies. To deal with these a significant part of this book involves an exploration of the cybernetic processes that occur in complex social systems. The field of cybernetics was formulated by Norbert Wiener in his book published in 1948 called Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, in which principles of control, communications and feedback were explained and discussed. Since its inception cybernetics has gone through a series of philosophical transitions. Heinz von Forester distinguished between first-order cybernetics - concerned with observing control and communications processes, and second-order cybernetics and its perspective of subjectivity. More recently Daniel Dubios added the notion of third-order cybernetics that is neither objective nor subjective in its frame of reference, but takes an indeterministic view: in which it is recognized that observation influences the observed. It promotes a relativistic (as opposed to a realistic) perspective typical of inquiry systems that are able to explore the relationship between the observer and the observed. It is consistent with the approaches, for instance, of both Foucault and Piaget who have individually explored in their own ways the relationship between the subject and object. It is this approach to cybernetics that I adopt here.