Abstract
General Systems Theory was first conceived and developed in the context of biological organisms, but at a time when a living system was only vaguely understood as a kind of chemical Cartesian robot. This view was intended as a synthetic extension of the engineering disciplines, for which the languages used for systems description came directly from the mathematics and epistemology of classical physics. These machine-like systems were later augmented with “informational” constraints by the infusion of concepts from cybernetics, and communication and control theory which were themselves outgrowths of the engineering view of artificial hardware systems.
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Pattee, H.H. (1978). Biological Systems Theory: Descriptive and Constructive Complementarity. In: Klir, G.J. (eds) Applied General Systems Research. NATO Conference Series, vol 5. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0555-3_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-0555-3_38
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