The cybernetic equivalent of logic is oscillation
“Logic is a very elegant tool,” Bateson said, “and we’ve got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and habit formation” – his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause, looking out over the ocean – “you know, to all those pretty things” – and now, looking straight at me [Capra] – “logic won’t quite do.”
“No?”
“it won’t quite do,” he continued animatedly, “because that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. you see, when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. Just take the thermostat, a simple sense organ, yes?”
He looked at me, questioning whether I followed and, seeing that I did, he continued.
“If it’s on, it’s off; if it’s off, it’s on. If yes, then no; if no, then yes.”
With that he stopped to let me puzzle about what he had said. His last sentence reminded me of the classical paradoxes of Aristotelian logic, which was, of course, intended. So I risked a jump.
“You mean, do thermostats lie?”
Bateson’s eyes lit up: “Yes-no-yes-no-yes-no. You see, the cybernetic equivalent of logic is oscillation.”
(Fritjof Capra (1989) interviewing Gregory Bateson in "Uncommon Wisdom")
Bateson in Learning to think in a new way, 1975, the second Lindisfarne Association conference.
34:47: That “then” has time in it. Sequential time, always with a delay. Alright. If Epimenides was right in saying that cretins always lie, and he was a cretin, was he a liar or not a liar? If he was a liar, then he was a liar. If he was not a liar, then it was untrue that cretins are always liars. A-ha! Now, if you look at the “then” in that paradox—if yes, then no; if no, then yes. You’re looking at a logic that has time in it. Which is essentially the same as the logic of the electric bell on the front door: if the circuit is complete, then a magnet is activated which will break the circuit. If the circuit is broken, then the magnet will not be activated and the circuit will be restored. If the circuit is restored, then the magnet will be activated and the circuit will be broken. And we get, you see, not this curve that we were talking about last night, but this one. It’s an off-on one for the magnet. It’s… a-ha.
36:53: But the paradox—if yes, then no; if no, then yes—contains, then, a real temporal “then,” and the nature of the system is such that you switch at the break (this middle point)—actually, when you closed systems, oscillating systems—this one can’t be said to have a middle point and this one, of course, the correctives are always starting to act all the time, really. But they change their magnitudes and you get a swinging system.