Early work in cybernetics, a theory of systems as information processors, solidified under two essential presumptions:

1. that thinking is computation
2. physical laws exist that explain how nature appears to possess a form of finality, or teleonomy. The presumption is essentially that things do not just happen randomly, but tend towards certain regular states despite the fact that it cannot be said that they necessarily had to.

NB: The problem of imputing necessity to nature (natural world of empirical laws) defined Kant's critical philosophy. Hume famously reputed the argument that nature operated according to necessity (that things could not be otherwise) and demonstrated that all we can safely say is that human beings give the idea of necessity to nature by habit of association. We see the sun rise everyday which leads us to believe that it MUST rise tomorrow. Hume believed that anything not encountered in our experience, could not be said to have necessary validity, or be used as part of an argument that claimed to be beyond dispute. Kant argued that because we cannot derive the idea of necessity from our experience (we never experience necessity, so why do we have the idea of it in the first place?), even by association, that it must be a category of thought. It must be natural to the mind, occuring before experience takes place, if not to nature itself. Moreover, Kant held that the idea of necessity actively structures our perception of nature.

Back to cybernetics. Cyberneticians were not mind-body dualists. For them, mind or thinking is mechanical: minds basically are computing machines--minds are not just IN human bodies, and they don't define what it means to be human. The claim is more general. As Jean-Pierre Dupuy put it,

“[t]he computation involved is not the mental operation of a human being who manipulates symbols in applying rules, such as those of addition or multiplication; instead it is what a particular class of machines do—machines technically referred to as ‘algorithms.’”

Cybernetic systems were thought of as machines that precisely pilot, control or direct _their own activities_. Why? To reduce the complexity or noise in their environments and make possible dynamic properties and behaviors in their responses to this complexity. How can dynamic properties result from operations of self-control and self-direction, from a reduction of environmental complexity? Are such systems geared toward stasis? How do dynamic properties and behaviors result from systemic reductions of complexity?

Cybernetic systems draw a distinction between themselves and their environments and, once the distinction is drawn, consist in control mechanisms internal to the boundaries of a system. The environments of these systems thus act as mere triggers or perturbing devices. They thus build up their own, internal complexity as part of their historical responses to change in the environment. Control mechanisms operate to reproduce the system homeostatically, that is, control mechanisms represent the systems auto-poietic character: the fact that it produces itself by reproducing its elements or operations (without making recourse to the environment through an exchnage of information. Think of a thermostat. Or a heat-seeking missile.

Cybernetics thus addresses the following problems:
1. The self-organization of complex systems and
2. Their self-regulation through operations such as feedback;
3. The passage between the differing levels of integration of a system;
4. The modalities of openness and closure of a system;
5. The question of teleology and finality.
6. The concept of code or information.