Emergence and Embodiment

“Emergence and Embodiment is a highly worthwhile, collection of commentaries that measurably adds to the contemporary discussion of cybernetic ideas. . . . [T]he book contains many valuable and provocative insights and analyses of core ideas of cybernetics that remain as relevant as ever.” - Peter Cariani, Constructivist Foundations

“The book offers some excellent contemporary discussion on emergence and embodiment in a holistic manner. For example it offers the main points of important theories such as autopoiesis and second order cybernetics. Further, another major attraction of the book is chapters on critical theory that offer sharp contrast to purely scientific evaluation of systems theory. The volume is an interesting mixture of ideas from biology, philosophy as well as the humanities.” - Ramesh Mishra, Metapsychology Online Reviews

“Emergence and Embodiment is an outstanding collection of sharp, well-crafted essays by prominent authors in the field of science and literature studies, all of whom have made major contributions to discussions of cybernetics, poststructuralism, and posthumanism. Here they demonstrate the viability of neocybernetics as a resource for resolving the dilemmas of the posthuman raised by newer fields of artificial life, complexity theory, and cellular automata.” - Tim Lenoir, Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair of New Technologies and Society, Duke University

“Emergence and Embodiment provides a useful overview and detailed analyses of the complex field of neocybernetics and its major thinkers. It indicates the significance and breadth of interdisciplinary work being done in the wake of Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Heinz von Foerster, and George Spencer-Brown, even as it makes demands on its readers to rethink some of their assumptions about he last forty years of ‘theory’ in the humanities and the interdisciplinary social sciences.” - Robert Markley, author of Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination