Cybernetics

I think to fully understand "Seek", I must first have an understanding of what Cybernetics is....
Some notes that may or may not make sense....

- the relationship between a 'thing' and it's environment.
- could essentially explain everything.

Second Order Cybernetics
- as soon as you look at something, you affect it.
I feel a bit 'blah' about this. How can I affect something just by looking at it? If I look at a piece of paper and don't touch it, how am I affecting it? I may have thought about the paper and may have thought about drawing on it, but I haven't. Since I haven't done anything with the paper I have therefore not affected it.
How does this sentence make any sense?
- the observer impacts on the system.

Some more stuff to help my understanding of Cyber-freaken-netics...

Perhaps the most fundamental contribution of cybernetics is its explanation of purposefulness, or goal-directed behavior, an essential characteristic of mind and life, in terms of control and information.

-The essential goal of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems that have goals, and that participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to comparison with desired goal, and again to action.
-the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.
-Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks.

-"the art of ensuring the efficacy of action" Louis Couffignal

-"Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves" Louis Kauffman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_cybernetics
New Cybernetics is a study of self-organizing systems.
Closely resembles organisms and biology.