Cybernetics and Supra-Human Autopoietic Systems

The approach taken in this paper is in the nature of a "thought experiment". Kuhn (1970) specified that thought experiments should rest only on information already to hand. The experiment should consist of rearranging patterns of that information in the hope that new knowledge, understanding and appreciation will emerge. As I understand it this is what "systems practice" is really all about. "Practical systems practice" would seem to be about assembling and rearranging information about real-world operational systems, administrative, management, production, information systems and so on. "Theoretical systems practice" I take to be concerned with assembling and rearranging information about systems theoretics; in short, about thought experiments with systems thinking. "Theoretical systems practice" looks anachronistic at first sight and though, to me, it is a proper use of terms, perhaps "meta-systems practice" would label the practice more comfortably. The topic area of this paper is the field of cybernetic thinking and the new insight, which I hope to convey from this reforming of some patterns of cybernetic thinking, is that there may exist entities in the organisational world which have properties such that they may be properly called "supra-human autopoietic systems". By this I mean that systems so dubbed are meta-systemic to and have a higher logical order than the human organisations which therefore constitute (at least part of) their environment and that they are organisationally closed, holding their own unity invariable despite fluctuations in their environment. I conclude that such systems are therefore beyond the control of humans or human organisations. The hope is expressed that cybernetic thinking will be directed to elucidating how such systems may emerge, how we may identify them and whether or not that emergence should be, or indeed can be, stimulated or stifled by the application of practical systems practice. Before embarking on this journey, I set out the framework in which the thought experiment is carried out by entering a caveat about inductive inference, and particularly about causation, upon which so much so-called "practical" work rests.

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