@Kihbernetics @psybertron Wiener had the same idea - the "Cyberneticists" were not so much unlike the Vienna "Logical Positivists", very "continental". Those days electronics was a new and exciting technology. Knowledge of ecosystems was in its infancy when Ashby wrote about a "Law of Requisite Variety", ignoring the fact that in open systems analytic/deductive solutions are impossible. The 20th century saw great advances in understanding ecological systems - long after Cybernetics was founded.
Yes. I think the emergence of modern computing in the same period didn't help cybernetics at all because everything was (and still is) considered as "computation", although the ever-increasing power of computation, as Ashby noted, allowed the analysis and simulation of "medium complexity" systems along with traditional deterministic and stochastic methods for dealing with the extreme cases.
@Kihbernetics @psybertron Rosen made the case that most systems can't be formalized so that they are computable. We can always design systems that are computable but so far those don't have agent properties. Tough luck.
@Kihbernetics @tg9541
Disagree with quite a lot you say - but largely because so many large topics are being conflated in short posts 😉
For example - I agree the rise of electro-mechanical computing skewed everything, but unskewed, I have no problem with computation (process manipulation of information) as something much more fundamental.