On Charles Muses
Robert Vallée
Charles Musès had a very original mind. A man of wide culture, he mastered perfectly both English and French and knew both literatures. His main interests concerned logic, mathematics, physics, biology, to quote only a few. They gave him deep insights in philosophy, a field he liked above all. Very naturally cybernetics and systems gave him the opportunity for many important reflections written in a bright style of his own, for example, in his study of complexity (Kybernetes, Vol. 29 Nos. 5/6, 2000 pp. 612-637). In this domain, as well as in many others, he gave an important place to the historical point of view, looking often for forgotten, or concealed, anteriorities as he did in a paper on Coxeter's polytopes (Kybernetes, Vol. 25 No. 5, 1996,pp. 48-52)
He criticized mathematical logic as formalized by Russell and Whitehead (Kybernetes,Vol. 24 No. 4, 1995, pp. 33-45). The role of feedback in cybernetics appeared to him as a way to correct the dangerous consequences of the use of logic starting with omissive premises acting as a blind spot (Kybernetes, Vol. 24 No. 7,1995, pp. 6-20). Recognition of this so frequent cause of failure as well as that of the role played by the neglect of subjectivity, values and motives,would be a progress in the domain of action, close to cybernetics which he considered, among other points of view, as a science of consequences, linked to what we call ''epistemo-praxiology'' (Kybernetes, Vol. 26 No. 8, 1997,pp. 936-938)
Neuro-cognitive sciences attracted his interest. He proposed, before K. Pibram, the brain function as holographic (Kybernetes, Vol. 27 No. 1,1998, pp. 26-28). But his main concern in this field was ''consciousness''. He pointed out the difficulties encountered in neo-Darwinism mechanical explanations and the concept of emergence (Kybernetes, Vol. 25 Nos. 7/8,1996, pp. 109-129).
Charles Musès' approach to problems was un-conventional. He devoted much of his efforts to the most fundamental questions of cybernetics and systems seen with the eyes of a mathematician and philosopher.
