Feedback
Feedback is the history-dependent, selective influence of past interactions on a system's future organization.
Definition
Connection Theory v4.6 uses feedback more narrowly than the everyday idea of any signal returning to a system.
Interaction explains that exchange can change state. Feedback asks which past interactions continue to influence what the system does later.
The key point is selection: past events do not all contribute equally or permanently.
Feedback availability
Feedback can affect later organization only if a consequence becomes causally available to the system, leaves a retained proxy, or is reconstructed by another process.
A consequence that never returns and leaves no usable trace cannot guide later organizational change through feedback.
Available feedback is also generally incomplete. Existing organization influences:
- which interactions occur;
- which consequences return;
- how quickly and reliably they return;
- which signals are retained.
Feedback is therefore often sampled through the organization that will later be updated.
What feedback does not mean
Feedback is not itself a complete rule for how organization should update.
It names the selective influence of past interactions. The mechanism by which a selected influence becomes a stable change is left open at this stage.
That boundary motivates Connection.