This is a fascinating analysis of the scientific agenda of Heinz von Foerster, clearly one of the major scientists of the twentieth century. No one did more to create a revolutionary transdisciplinary research program involving biology, the cognitive neurosciences, cybernetics, and the social sciences. Von Foerster was one of those scientific minds so far ahead of his time that even today scholars in all fields of scientific inquiry should study his programs so that we might eventually realize his objectives.
This is a splendid collection of essays that challenges us to look back to von Foerster if we are to advance our efforts to learn from others in diverse fields of inquiry.

J. Rogers Hollingsworth
Professor of History and Sociology
University of Wisconsin (Madison)

The Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, led by Heinz von Foerster, was the nexus of Cybernetics and the point of origination of Second-Order-Cybernetics in the 1960's and 1970's. Here in this book, in these articles, drawings and photographs it all comes back to life with a lucidity that belies the passing years and shows that this theory of feedback process and awareness indeed shares in the living world of the eternal forms.

Louis H. Kauffman
Professor of Mathematics, University of Illinois
President of the American Society for Cybernetics

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>> further publications on Heinz von Foerster (and Ernst von Glasersfeld)