Heinz Von Foerster Quotes

I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.

Everything that is said is said by an observer.

The aesthetical imperative: If you desire to see, learn how to act

As a practical matter I’ve learned to seek the minimum amount of technology for myself that will create the maximum amount of choices for myself and others. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called this approach the Ethical Imperative, and he put it this way: “Always act to increase the number of choices.” The way we can use technologies to increase choices for others is by encouraging science, innovation, education, literacies, and pluralism. In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options.      

As a practical matter I’ve learned to seek the minimum amount of technology for myself that will create the maximum amount of choices for myself and others. The cybernetician Heinz von Foerster called this approach the Ethical Imperative, and he put it this way: “Always act to increase the number of choices.” The way we can use technologies to increase choices for others is by encouraging science, innovation, education, literacies, and pluralism. In my own experience this principle has never failed: In any game, increase your options.

Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.

Constructivism identifies, for all who care to look through the lens of its epistemology, the limits of what we can know.

Even before Prigogine’s ‘order through fluctuations’, the Viennese polymath Heinz von Foerster had already recognized in 1960 the need to distinguish self-organization, and what he termed ‘order from noise’, from what Schrödinger had called ‘order from disorder’ in What Is Life?: “reading recently through Schrödinger’s booklet I wondered how […] his keen eyes escaped […] a ‘second clue’ to the understanding of life, or—if it is fair to say—of self-organizing systems. Although the principle I have in mind may, at first glance, be mistaken for Schrödinger’s ‘order from disorder’ principle, it has in fact nothing in common with it. Hence, in order to stress the difference between the two, I shall call the principle I am going to introduce to you presently the ‘order from noise’ principle” (von Foerster 1960: 43).

Even before Prigogine’s ‘order through fluctuations’, the Viennese polymath Heinz von Foerster had already recognized in 1960 the need to distinguish self-organization, and what he termed ‘order from noise’, from what Schrödinger had called ‘order from disorder’ in What Is Life?: “reading recently through Schrödinger’s booklet I wondered how […] his keen eyes escaped […] a ‘second clue’ to the understanding of life, or—if it is fair to say—of self-organizing systems. Although the principle I have in mind may, at first glance, be mistaken for Schrödinger’s ‘order from disorder’ principle, it has in fact nothing in common with it. Hence, in order to stress the difference between the two, I shall call the principle I am going to introduce to you presently the ‘order from noise’ principle” (von Foerster 1960: 43).