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

ANTICIPATORY SYSTEM 1)2)4)

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A system able to define its own goals, or at least able to behave in order to tend in a permanent way to maintain itself in the future.

Human beings are more or less conscious of their goals and in any cases able to define and describe them. In other living beings the goals remain implicit and probably totally unconscious.

The study of anticipatory systems is quite difficult. B. EKDAHL writes: "Anticipatory systems are a result of evolution and the characteristic of them is that they consist both of description (genotype) and interpretation (phenotype). Many such systems are not conscious of their own interpretations and can be regarded as having only a built-in theory and no language in which its interpretations is described. Such systems show an algorithmic behavior and can be simulated on a computer.

"Systems which can also make a (semantic) model and moreover have a possibility to reason about this model cannot be reduced to computation since in no other language its interpretation process can be described than in the language itself.

"As a consequence, model-based anticipatory systems cannot completely be described by mathematical means but have to be holistically considered in order to give a reasonable explanation of their behavior. The way to look upon a system as a mathematical structure is not applicable in such cases" (2000, p. 13)

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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