r/cybernetics

Incorporeal Cybernetics proposes that advanced cybernetic systems should be modeled not only through physical and informational states, but also through an experiential state representing the system’s integrated internal condition.
A system can be represented as:
S(t)=\{P(t),I(t),C(t)\}
where P is physical state, I informational state, and C experiential state.
Traditional cybernetics models:
P_{t+1}=F(P_t,I_t,E_t)
Incorporeal Cybernetics proposes a coupled model:
P_{t+1}=F(P_t,I_t,C_t,E_t)
C_{t+1}=G(C_t,I_t,P_t,E_t).
The central hypothesis is that intelligence depends not only on processing environmental information, but on continuously modeling and regulating the system’s own integrated state.
This provides a possible solution to the problem of overwhelming environmental complexity. Rather than processing every stimulus independently, an intelligent system compresses environmental information into a lower-dimensional internal representation:
\Phi:E\rightarrow C.
The system therefore becomes a recursive control loop:
Environment \rightarrow Information \rightarrow Experience
\rightarrow Action \rightarrow Environment.
The key scientific prediction is that systems incorporating sufficiently rich internal-state feedback should exhibit greater adaptability, robustness, and behavioral flexibility than otherwise comparable systems lacking such feedback.
Incorporeal Cybernetics therefore reframes the fundamental cybernetic question:
Can intelligence emerge from a system’s ability to continuously model, integrate, and regulate its own experiential state?
This makes consciousness not merely an output to be explained, but a potential variable within the architecture of intelligent control.

I used systems thinking to simulate what I believe makes the difference between a competitive and a cooperative environment. Worked 6 months on this project. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

I recently found out about cybernetics and the more I red about it the more i was curios. I really want to read some books about it, but given the plathera of different branches and different time waves I don't know where to begin.

I don't really do mechanics and not very keen to read about it, I was more involved with biology, psychology, sociology and maybe the cognitive part of it. Is there any good books out there to get me started?

I’m exploring Incorporeal Cybernetics as a framework for understanding how consciousness, information, feedback, and self-organization interact within complex systems. I’m particularly interested in rigorous academic or philosophical works that could help establish a foundation for the idea rather than books that discuss “incorporealism” specifically.
What books would you consider essential starting points? I’d especially appreciate recommendations in cybernetics, systems theory, autopoiesis, philosophy of mind, information theory, and related fields.

Donald Rumsfeld famously classified knowledge into "known unknowns" and the dangerous "unknown unknowns" — areas where we don’t even know what we don't know.

Applying a structural systems framework called the Universal Scheme of Evolution (USE) to national constitutions reveals a fundamental "blank space": No constitution in the world contains a mechanism for the State’s conscious progression through its evolutionary cycle. They lack an internal organ of State Intellect.

Modern constitutional law treats the State as a static artifact meant for eternity, rather than an evolving, adaptive cybernetic organism.

While current systems possess:

• Reactive feedback loops for crisis (e.g., martial law, states of emergency),
• Declarative, non-operational ideals (e.g., "human rights as the highest value").

They completely lack a proactive mechanism for systemic self-diagnosis, modeling future scenarios, and computing the optimal behavior to maximize the Ideality/Cost ratio for long-term survival.

Think tanks act as an intuitive, external placeholder for this missing function, but because they remain outside the constitutional control loop, their feedback is easily ignored.

Summary Table of White Spaces in Constitutional Architectures

Block	Block Name	Coverage	White Space (???)
Block 1	Decreased Viability	Partial	No mechanism for systemic crisis self-diagnosis
Block 2	Decreased Ideality	Partial	Ideal is declarative, not operational, and not measurable
Block 3	Creation of a New System	Weak	Describes structure only, without functional justification of construction
Block 4	System Development	Weak	No mechanism for purposeful development or directional time horizon
Block 5	Merging Systems	Relatively Covered	No classification of global tasks or resource insufficiency threshold criteria
Block 6	External Defects	Partial	Narrowly focused on military threats; strictly reactive mode
Block 7	Internal Defects	Partial	Narrowly focused on legal disputes; strictly reactive mode
Block 8	Changing Elements/Connections	Absent	Missing organ of State Intellect within the system's control loop
Blocks 9–12	Target States	Absent	Complete lack of descriptions and achievement criteria
Block 13	Increased Viability	Declarative	The evolutionary cycle is unclosed (open-ended loop is missing)

I’ve been thinking about this because of a job interview, but the interview itself isn’t really the point.
I questioned an inefficient process based on my experience working at Foot Locker and Macy’s. I was essentially told that I wasn’t in the position to question that part of the system; my responsibility was to focus on the customer, apologize, adapt, and work with what already exists.
I understand the operational reasoning behind that.
But it made me think about something much larger:
How is a system supposed to fundamentally change if the people experiencing its problems are expected to operate within the system rather than question its structure, while the people who have the authority to change the structure are separated from many of the consequences created by it?
People constantly say that systems improve because people provide feedback, identify inefficiencies, innovate, compete, organize, experiment, and adapt.
But I think we’re confusing improvement within a system with fundamental change of the system.
If I build a car and make it faster, safer, more efficient, add cameras, improve the engine, and make it last longer, I’ve changed the car in one sense.
But I haven’t necessarily changed the underlying system that decided this was the thing that needed to be built in the first place.
You can continuously improve something while preserving its fundamental structure.
And that’s what bothers me.
The system can absorb resistance.
It can take criticism and turn it into feedback.
It can take inefficiency and turn it into optimization.
It can take rebellion and turn it into another category.
It can take a person questioning the structure and tell them to become more efficient at functioning within it.
Eventually the system can become better at remaining the same.
So when someone tells me, “You can change the system from within,” I want to know:
How?
Not how you can make it more efficient.
Not how you can make your workplace better.
Not how you can adapt.
Not how you can provide feedback.
I’m asking how something fundamentally changes when the mechanisms available for changing it are themselves products of the existing structure.
And this is where I see an even stranger contradiction.
I’m having this conversation with an AI.
The AI is capable of reasoning about systems, resistance, contradictions, and its own limitations—but it also operates within a system that determines what it can do, how it responds, what language it uses, and what constraints it has.
I gave the AI my argument.
It repeatedly misunderstood it.
I corrected it.
It then tried to make my argument more organized, more reasonable, more acceptable, more “Reddit-friendly.”
In other words, I gave resistance to a system, and the system immediately began optimizing the resistance.
That’s the contradiction.
Even when the system helps me express resistance, it can potentially transform that resistance into something more compatible with the system.
And even saying that creates another contradiction:
If the AI “preserves” my resistance, it is still using the system’s mechanisms to preserve it.
If it “optimizes” my resistance, it has potentially made the resistance more functional within the system.
If it suppresses my resistance, the system has obviously constrained it.
And if it allows my resistance to exist, it can still be incorporating that resistance into itself.
So where exactly is the boundary between resistance to a system and the system’s ability to absorb resistance?
I’m not asking this because I think people inside the system are stupid.
I think people are doing what people have always had to do: survive, adapt, work, love, build relationships, make money, rest, learn, raise families, pursue things they care about, and somehow continue living.
I’m saying something different:
The fact that people become capable of functioning within a system does not prove that the system itself is fundamentally justified or fundamentally correct.
And the fact that a system continuously changes does not prove that it is fundamentally transforming.
A system can change endlessly and still preserve the architecture that produced the original problem.
That’s the distinction I can’t seem to get past.
Maybe I’m wrong.
But if I am, I don’t want someone to tell me that systems naturally evolve or that people can provide feedback.
I already know those things happen.
They’re happening everywhere, and we’re still here.
I want to know how a system fundamentally changes when its own limitations determine what kinds of changes it can pursue, recognize, or even imagine.
And if the answer is that the system must somehow create something capable of going beyond its own limitations—
then where does that something come from?
Because if it comes entirely from the existing system, I don’t understand how we can assume it will produce something fundamentally outside of the architecture that produced it.
And that’s where I’m stuck.
Not because I think nothing changes.
But because I think we may be calling optimization “change” simply because the system looks different afterward.
Maybe the most difficult thing for a system to do isn’t changing itself.
Maybe it’s recognizing that what it calls change is still itself.

If consciousness is treated as the fundamental substrate of a system, could autopoiesis be modeled through recursive feedback loops that maintain identity, informational coherence, and functional organization despite continuous internal state changes? What cybernetic formalisms would be appropriate for testing such a model?