systems capable of processing information, i.e. of making differences from differences...

    <p class=default>
      
        The notion of systems capable of processing information, i.e. of making differences from 
        differences, might explain in retrospect why Claude Shannon’s idea of “communication” is 
        far more fruitful than a social sciences debate, stimulated by Warren Weaver’s channel 
        model of communication and horrified by the idea that semantics could amount to 
        engineering, was able to grasp. When debating communication Heinz von Foerster and Gregory 
        Bateson, W. Ross Ashby, Herbert Bruen, Gotthard Guenther, and others were already thinking 
        in terms of redundancy and variety, and thus in terms of non-identical, non-linear, 
        iterative reproduction. Their contribution to the emerging science of cryptography, which 
        appears set to become the premier science of the new century, still awaits its historian.
      
    </p>