Professor Heikki Hyötyniemi gave an interesting, interdisciplinary lecture on Neocybernetics at the annual meeting of The Finnish Society for Natural Philosophy tonight.
First he rehearsed the basics of Hebbian learning and argued for “semantics through substance”: symbolic grounding is hermeneutic and emphasizes relevance over truth. He then used the Hebbian model as a starting point to holistic considerations generalizing to other domains such as ecology, economy and cognition. “Evolution is equally cruel in all environments,” as he puts it. The basic tenets were that:
- The details are abstracted away — a holistic view.
- There exist local actions only, no structures of centralized control.
- Underlying interactions and feedbacks are consistent.
- One can assume stationarity and dynamic balance in the system in varying environmental conditions.
- Linearity is pursued as long as it is reasonable.
One of the important points was that as cybernetic systems perform “pattern matching”, the process can be substituted with the final pattern. Adaptation processes are very different but the end states are unique and generally characterizable.
Unfortunately, Hyötyniemi skipped the mental system in his presentation due to time constraints, but the exemplary ecological simulations were also of interest. He provided some mathematical evidence of the robustness and biodiversity of ecological systems. Control in these systems is neither centralized or distributed (in traditional sense), but the coordination occurs through environment.
The natural philosophy was addressed in the true spirit of Heraclitus. I somewhat missed Hyötyniemi’s account on the relationship of information and material flows in a cybernetic system, but understood that information and matter are tightly intertwined and that “the natural system is a model” as much as “the model is a natural system”. He also brought in that the nature is more like work of a “hardworking idiot” than an “intelligent designer”.
