Freedom and the Machine

If there’s one thing that human beings do, it’s to find patterns. We find them everywhere, and if we didn’t we’d not be able to remember or recognise anything: in pattern we find constancy and thus we find our understanding of the things in, and ideas of, the world, which we can think of as wholes. Indeed, if we didn’t create these patterns, these wholes, we’d not know there were any things and ideas.
But we are undecided, in a deeply emotional way, about how we find these patterns: do they exist in a real world or do we construct them ourselves from what we call our experience? Do these patterns embody our freedom of choice or trap us within a machine?

Cybernetics has been described as the study of all possible machines. In this lecture I will use the lens of cybernetics to explore pattern as cybernetic mechanism. We will discover that this mechanism, paradoxically, leads to freedom, and to an approach to the world that, rather than breaking it down into units, leads to the making of new wholes. Making new wholes (changing the world) is, of course, the business of the designer.

Ticket Information:
Free admission

Sponsors: Fletcher Priest Trust

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