Heinz von Foerster. Biografia

When Heinz von Foerster was in his teens, he and his cousin Martin  spotted the twenty volumes of Johann Christian Wiegleb's  Natuerliche Magie in the window of an antiques shop. This work was the classic textbook of the professional magicians' craft. The boys rushed home, borrowed the 40 shillings the dealer asked for it (today about $25), and took the books home.
A few years later they both passed the official examination of the guild and graduated as Master Magicians. The diploma saved Martin from the trenches during the Second World War, because he was detailed to entertain the troops.
For Heinz, the profound understanding of the magician's attitude merged with his passion for physics and became the source of a kind of wisdom that is usually alien to science.
Wittgenstein was a friend of the family, and when Heinz became a student in Vienna, he heard lectures of Carnap, Reichenbach, Waismann and others who belonged to the Wiener Kreis. The unorthodox views that flourished there had a profound influence on him. As he said later, the  Vienna Circle was not really a school of thought, but a school of thinking. It was more like a discussion group whose members were highly original thinkers who happened to agree on certain points. Heinz listened to them and then proceeded to adapt his interpretation of some of their ideas in the construction of his own picture of the world.
Throughout his studies of physics and his subsequent research on shortwave transmission and signal theory, a problem from a different field intrigued him: what sort of mechanism could possibly underly our memory?
Because remembering historical dates had always been difficult for him in school, he created a chart for himself on which he marked all the dates that seemed important. He discovered that the further you went back in time, the fewer were the events you learned about. He conjectured that this was because things tended to be forgotten. His work with electromagnetic signals and the technical notion of information triggered the idea that forgetting might be caused by the physical decay of molecules in the brain.
In his spare time, while working for the Austro-American radio station in Vienna, he started to develop this idea and found that the figures psychologists had compiled about forgetting could be considered a perfect match with those that physicists had measured for the decay of large molecules. He wrote it up, a monograph of 40 pages. It became his first post-war publication and though he quickly gave up the molecular theory it turned a visit to the United States into the beginning of life-long emigration.
In 1958 he founded the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, where he had been in charge of microwave  research until then. He directed the BCL for almost twenty years, providing a peaceful and stimulating work place for temporary co-researchers such as Gordon Pask, Ross Ashby, Humberto Maturana, Gothard Guenther, and others.
In an intensely interdisciplinary atmosphere he generated a way of thinking that he aptly called “Second-Order Cybernetics”. If first-order cybernetics revolutionized the world we observe by introducing the notions of circular causality, feedback, and self-organization, the step to the second order challenged the very concept of observation.
Heinz put the new view into a nutshell: “Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.” Instead of worrying about an inaccessible external reality he focused attention on the world we build in the course of interactions with others in the domain of our experience. Though this experiential world is a social construction, it is also individual because each constructs it according to his or her own experience. And because there is always more than one way of constructing, we are all responsible for the world in which we live.

AS A youth in Vienna, Heinz von Foerster's first claim to fame was as a magician. But more important, and to some people just as magical as his tricks, was his transformation of cybernetics (in the decade around 1970) by insisting that the observer must be taken into account in the description of any system, because he may affect the processes being observed. From this he went on to develop systems to modify the formulation of the systems of classical cybernetics, in an extension of the field that became known as “the cybernetics of cybernetics” or “second-order cybernetics”.
Heinz von Foerster (originally Förster) was born in Vienna, the eldest son of Emil von Förster and his wife Lilith, and educated in philosophy and logic by the Vienna Circle, and in physics at Vienna's Technical University. He completed his doctorate at the University of Breslau in 1944. His family was distinguished and held a prominent position in the intellectual life of Vienna: friends and relatives included the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the playwright Hugo von Hoffmansthal, the painter Erwin Lang, and the Wiesenthal family.
The family supported Josef Matthias Hauer, the inventor of an alternative to Schoenberg's 12-tone technique. His grandfather was architect of the Vienna Ring. He had a brother, Ulrich, and a sister, Erika, and was especially close to his cousin Martin Lang, with whom he studied magic and roamed Austria's mountains in winter and in summer. In 1939 he married the actress Mai Stuermer, with whom he had three sons.
During the war von Foerster lived and worked in Berlin, where he moved to disguise the Jewish element in his ancestry, and did research in short-wave and plasma physics. At the end of the war he found a way back to Austria, where he worked in the telephone industry while also reporting on art and science for the Austro-American radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot, his communication skills and showmanship flourishing.
Meanwhile, he was working on his book Memory: A Quantum Physical Examination. To promote this, he moved to the United States in 1949, where (with barely a word of English) he was taken up by the mathematician, neuroscientist and philosopher Warren McCulloch, with whom he communicated in the language of mathematics.
The trip was a turning-point. McCulloch was then chairing the Macy Conferences on “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems” in New York, which were attended by the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the computation theorist John von Neumann and the mathematician Norbert Wiener.
To improve his English, von Foerster was made secretary and editor. His first act was to add “Cybernetics” to the conference title. Together with Wiener's book Cybernetics (1948), these conferences gave form and substance to the emerging discipline. The study of “circular causality” can now be said to be the real heart of cybernetics.
McCulloch arranged for von Foerster to become director of the University of Illinois tube laboratory. Von Foerster imported his family and lived in Champaign until his retirement in 1976, when he moved into a house that he built himself, with his architect son, above the Pacific outside Pescadero, California.
In 1958 von Foerster founded the Biological Computer Laboratory, attracting considerable funding. As well as a cohort of students, he hosted most of the distinguished scholars in cybernetics for residencies, and the laboratory became the world's most advanced centre for the development of cybernetic thinking. The first parallel computers were built there, and crucial research was carried out on the fast electronic switching that is critical to today's computers.
Although von Foerster is known in some circles for his excursion into demographics (when he started lively debate in the journal Science), he was most important for sponsoring radical work in such subjects as the organisation of the living and the foundations of mathematics and logic. He tended to hide his own contribution behind the work of others, but his understanding of the reflexive nature of systems led to profound changes in the understanding of knowledge and of our connection with the world in which we find ourselves. For many he reintroduced the amazement of wonder.
Having held Guggenheim fellowships in 1956-57 and 1963-64, von Foerster won many honours. He was president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, 1963-65, and of the Society for General Systems Research, 1976-77. He was elected to a fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1980, and in 1996 the University of Vienna made him an honorary professor. Last year he won the first Viktor Frankl Prize. He published some 200 scientific papers and several books, and gave more than a thousand lectures around the world.
He is survived by his wife, Mai, and two sons.
Heinz von Foerster, cybernetician, was born on November 13, 1911. He died on October 2, 2002, aged 90.

Heinz von Foerster, Wien 1911, studioso e realizzatore di sistemi cibernetici, direttore del Biological computer lab (Università dell’Illinois), nella sua ricerca ha integrato le più varie discipline dalla biologia, alla teoria dei sistemi, alla neuropsicologia. I suoi lavori più importanti sono stati tradotti nella raccolta: Sistemi che ossevano, a cura di M. Ceruti e U. Telfner, Roma, Astrolabio, 1987.

Phoenix