BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

ALEATORY (or random) PHENOMENON 2)3)

According to M. BELIS: "Aleatory phenomena present a subjective aspect related to the observer and an objective one, which corresponds with their own nature. The subjective aspect consists of the difficulty to know (by observation or by measure) the perturbing phenomena which exert some influence on the results of the process. The objective aspect is precisely the fact that the process can be influenced by infinitesimal variations of the environmental phenomena, i.e. that it is unstable. While perturbing phenomena generally also take place in deterministic processes, the stability of these latter makes them invulnerable to perturbations. A phenomenon is either random or not, independently of the presence of an external observer, but according to the instability or stability of the causal connection which determines it. As POINCARÉ did notice, the movement of the heavenly bodies is a stable, deterministic phenomenon, independently of the degree of any terrestrial observers ignorance, while dice throwing is aleatory because of the instability of the causal connexion which determines the results" (1938, p.66).

However, POINCARÉ himself has been the first to show that, even objectively, the movements of the heavenly bodies are not rigorously deterministic. He demonstrated the impossibility to find a perfectly exact solution to the three bodies problem and set the first bases of the theory of chaos which is presently being developed (Understanding chaos as randomness within deterministic limits).

M. BELIS pursues nonetheless as follows: "However, after a long succession of experiences a stability of the results appears in cases in which the unstable causal connections are a structural make-up of a number of permanent causes".

This is precisely how most aleatory phenomena, random at short term, show nevertheless at long term an embedding global determinism, which figures basically a kind of statistical limit to randomness.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]


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