Cybernetics, according to Gordon Pask, the academic responsible for popularizing the idea among architects, is "How systems regulate themselves, reproduce themselves, evolve, and learn. Its high spot is the question of how they organize themselves." This conceptual framework could be productively applied to architecture. As a practical design strategy, cybernetics is about negotiating a set of interrelated factors such that they function as a dynamic system. "The design goal is nearly always underspecified and the 'controller' is no longer the authoritarian apparatus which this purely technical name commonly brings to mind. In contrast, the controller is an odd mixture of catalyst, crutch, memory and arbiter. These, I believe ... are the qualities [the designer] should embed in the systems (control systems) which [they] design." The architect becomes a choreographer of dynamic and adaptive forces rather than scripting outcomes in a deterministic way."
Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, The City of Tomorrow, 2016
"To a pantheist the universe itself constitutes the mind of god. Every last star and atom constitutes a component of the mind of god who does not exist separately from the universe which as a whole functions like a living creature, and we can regard ourselves as thoughts within a mind universe.
Gradually the theism leached out of pantheism as it became apparent that the universe did not act as though its mind corresponded to that of some vengeful elderly gentleman with a rigidly authoritarian moral agenda."
-Peter Carroll, The Apophenion, 2008
"Magic used everywhere by practically everyone all of the time."
-Dean Radin
