Participant: Victor MacGill
Format: Poster and Conversation
Themes: recursion, paradigm, praxis

Our experience is shaped by the worldview through which we see our world. The dominant paradigm of our world today is a reductionist, linear paradigm. While having many advantages, the reductionist paradigm is increasingly unable to provide the necessary framework to guide life in the 21st century. The reductionist paradigm has led us towards crises in such areas as the environment, economics, health and more that may threaten our very existence.

Among the alternative perspectives that have been explored to formulate a more effective paradigm is cybernetics. We investigate how cybernetics takes up this challenge and how to move from a cybernetic worldview to a cybernetic way of living.

The pioneers of cybernetics were well ahead of their time in developing a way of looking at the world in non-linear terms; accepting the inherent chaos and complexity in our world and looking as life in terms of flow and process. Cybernetics has the potential to assist people to make meaning from an increasingly complex and unpredictable world, so as to better cope with the challenges before us.

A cybernetic worldview enables us to see ourselves as partners in a dynamic co-creative process that looks beyond the many dualities we perceive in life towards an emergent synthesis of living in the gaps “in between”. To live by such a life requires courage to break away from and avoid falling back into appealing old ways of being.

A cybernetic lifestyle might include embracing uncertainty, living a life that integrates our multi layered being, rethinking how we organise ourselves and how we orient ourselves towards the future. Cybernetics can help us navigate the possible pathways before us to create a better world.