From an explorer who is condemned to seek 'structural properties' of an inaccessible reality, the experiencing organism now turns-into a builder of c… - Ernst von Glasersfeld

What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function.

.. in spite of the fact that it often feels as though the meaning of words and sentences were conveyed to us by the sounds of speech or the signs on a printed page, It is easy to show that meanings do not travel through space and must under all circumstances be constructed in the head of the language users.

For me, as I later came to say, cybernetics is the art of creating equilibrium in a world of possibilities and constraints. This is not just a romantic description, it portrays the new way of thinking quite accurately. Cybernetics differs from the traditional scientific procedure, because it does not try to explain phenomena by searching for their causes, but rather by specifying the constraints that determine the direction of their development.