Best 10 quotes of Heinz Von Foerster on MyQuotes

Act always so as to increase the number of choices

Either Stone Age man was a technological wizard, who carefully removed his technological achievements so as not to upset his inferior progeny, or our population dwindled from a once astronomical size to the mere three billions of today.

First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.

If you desire to see, learn how to act.

Objectivity is a subject's delusion that observing can be done without him.

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

Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity.

The environment as we perceive it is our invention.

What we need now is the description of the "describer" or, in other words, we need a theory of the observer.

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