For me, as I later came to say, cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and constraints.

This is not
just a romantic description, it portrays the new way of thinking quite accurately. Cybernetics differs from the traditional scientific
procedure, because it does not try to explain phenomena by searching for their causes, but rather by specifying the constraints
that determine the direction of their development.
( Von Glasersfeld (2010) Partial Memories: Sketches from an Improbable Life. p. 136

Cybernetics, Experience and the Concept of Self, 1970

As a metaphor - and I stress that it is intended as a metaphor - the concept of an invariant that arises out of mutually or cyclically
balancing changes may help us to approach the concept of self. In cybernetics this metaphor is implemented in the closed loop,
the circular arrangement of feedback mechanisms that maintain a given value within certain limits. They work toward an invariant,
but the invariant is achieved not by a steady resistance, the way a rock stands unmoved in the wind, but by compensation over
time. Whenever we happen to look in a feedback loop, we find the present act pitted against the immediate past, but already on
the way to being compensated itself by the immediate future. The invariant the system achieves can, therefore, never be found or
frozen in a single element because, by its very nature, it consists in one or more relationships - and relationships are not in things
but between them.
If the self, as I suggest, is a relational entity, it cannot have a locus in the world of experiential objects. It does not reside in the
heart, as Aristotle thought, nor in the brain, as we tend to think today. It resides in no place at all, but merely manifests itself in the
continuity of our acts of differentiating and relating and in the intuitive certainty we have that our experience is truly ours.

pp.186-7 cited in: Vincent Kenny (2010) Remembering Ernst von Glasersfeld (http://www.oikos.org/vonen.htm) at oikos.org,
retrieved Oct 11, 2012.

Quotes about Ernst von Glasersfeld

The "second order cyberneticians" claimed that knowledge is a biological phenomenon (Maturana, 1970), that each individual
constructs his or her own "reality" (Foerster, 1973) and that knowledge "fits" but does not "match" the world of experience (von
Glasersfeld, 1987).

Stuart A. Umpleby (1994) The Cybernetics of Conceptual Systems (http://www.itk.ntnu.no/ansatte/Gulbrandsoey_Kenneth/doc

uments/papers/THE%20CYBERNETICS%20OF%20CONCEPTUAL%20SYSTEMS.pdf). p. 3

Ernst von Glasersfeld, who founded radical constructivism (RC) in the 1970s, is clearly on Kuhn's side

Luciano L'Abate (2011) Paradigms in Theory Construction. p. 236

External links
Ernst von Glasersfeld (http://www.vonglasersfeld.com/)

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