At last there is a unifying framework that suspends long-held differences between science and art, and between external reality and internal belief. When Norbert Wiener and his collaborators worked in the 1940s, it was a new idea to hold that information and control could be studied in the abstract. Here was a science they named cybernetics, based not on cells versus atoms or biology versus physics, but on the way a system is studied. Indeed, cybernetics starts from the simple declaration that a system exists. This point is key, for it reveals the stance that is cybernetics.
All descriptions emanate from the definition of the system under study.
This problem could be ignored in the early applications of cybernetics. But the fundamental subjectivity of any process of scrutiny haunted the field. These issues, old as philosophy itself, came to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s, it is a framework for thought and enquiry that unifies philosophy, science, arts and humanities, and presents a context for understanding the history of these human activities. Biology and ecology are evolving in how they describe systems.