LIMITATION AND POSSIBILITIES OF COMMUNICATION

New Pathways in the Foundation of “Cybernetic Thinking”

by Rudolf Kaehr and Eberhard von Goldammer

 

The question of unexploited human (Brain) resources and their role in the development in the future leads inevitably to two basic questions:

1) What unnecessary barriers hinder the development of these resources?

2) Behind which unopened doors are to be found these possible new resources?

The development of productive forces has led to a situation in which it is no longer permissible to collectively gather social, scientific and technological actualities or data into a single unified or unifying context. The idea of a “Summum Bonum”, - whatever form this concept may want to assume - has forfeited its synthesizing power.

It is necessary to develop a way of thinking for the future which does not simply replace as the basic premise unity with diversity but which rather deals with a more fundamental interplay supporting and relating both these factors operatively and textually.

The opening of new resources in thinking depends substantially upon wether the transition - a paradigm change - can be achieved from the restrictive G�del-McCulloch-Pitts era (the “mathematizing power of Homo-Sapiens” E. Post) to a post-G�delian epoch of scriptualizing and the methods of symbolising.

The American second-order cybernetics points in particular to the necessity of such a shift: "The logic of our western industrial corporate society (with limited liability) is unidirectional, deductive, competitive and hierarchical, and the keystones of its paradigm are the claim of objectivity and the theory of types, which exclude in principle the autonomy of paradox and of the individual. In the scientific revolution that we know create and experience, however, we perceive a shift from causal unidirectional to mutualistic systemic thinking, from a preoccupation with the properties of the observed to the study of the properties of the observer". (Heinz von Foerster)

In order to open up and research the range of possibilities, a concept of the “possible” must be worked out which is freed from being bound to the present-tense as is the conceptualisation and methodo