Second-order cybernetics

New cybernetics or second-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of cybernetics.

It investigates the construction of models of cybernetic systems looking beyond the issues of the "first", "old" or "original" cybernetics and their politics and sciences of control, that the investigators are also part of the system, and of the importance of autonomy, self-consistency, self-referentiality, and self-organizing capabilities of complex systems. Investigators of a system can never see how it works by standing outside it because the investigators are always engaged cybernetically with the system being observed; that is, when investigators observe a system, necessarily they affect it and are affected by it.

The so-called "new cybernetics" is an attempt to move away from the "old" cybernetics of Norbert Wiener. Old cybernetics is tied to the image of the machine and physics, whereas "second-order" new cybernetics closely resembles organisms and biology. The main task of the new cybernetics is to overcome entropy by using "noise" as positive feedback.

The anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead contrasted first and second-order cybernetics with this diagram in an interview in 1973. It emphasises the requirement for a possibly constructivist participant observer in the second order case:

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