HIERARCHICAL MAN: A COMPARISON OF THREE CYBERNETIC THEORIES

In recent years, a new view of man has begun to emerge. This view, inspired by the concepts of cybernetics, holds that man's behavior and experience can be accounted for by feedback‐control processes and that these processes are hierarchically organized. In this paper, the ideas of three authors who have best expressed this new view, Arthur Koestler, Ervin Laszlo and William Powers, are summarized and compared. The conclusion is reached that, despite differences in detail, the three authors articulate remarkably consistent theories of the nature of man.