The Cybernetics Group

Abstract

This is the engaging story of a moment of transformation in the human sciences, a detailed account of a remarkable group of people who met regularly from 1946 to 1953 to explore the possibility of using scientific ideas that had emerged in the war years (cybernetics, information theory, computer theory) as a basis for interdisciplinary alliances. The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, as they came to be called, included such luminaries as Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Kurt Lewin, F. S. C. Northrop, Molly Harrower, and Lawrence Kubie, who thought and argued together about such topics as insanity, vision, circular causality, language, the brain as a digital machine, and how to make wise decisions. Heims, who met and talked with many of the participants, portrays them not only as thinkers but as human beings. His account examines how the conduct and content of research are shaped by the society in which it occurs and how the spirit of the times, in this case a mixture of postwar confidence and cold-war paranoia, affected the thinking of the cybernetics group. He uses the meetings to explore the strong influence elite groups can have in establishing connections and agendas for research and provides a firsthand took at the emergence of paradigms that were to become central to the new fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. In his joint biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, Heims offered a challenging interpretation of the development of recent American science and technology. Here, in this group portrait of an important generation of American intellectuals, Heims extends that interpretation to a broader canvas, in the process paying special attention to the two iconoclastic figures, Warren McCulloch and Gregory Bateson, whose ideas on the nature of the mind/brain and on holism are enjoying renewal today.
Steve J. Heims, once a research physicist, has devoted his attention to the history of twentieth century science for the past two decades.
The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.

Full text

This PDF includes a chapter from the following book:
The Cybernetics Group
© 1991 MIT
License Terms:
Made available under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International Public License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
OA Funding Provided By:
The open access edition of this book was made possible
by generous funding from Arcadia—a charitable fund of
Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
The title-level DOI for this work is:
doi:10.7551/mitpress/2260.001.0001
Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1626075/9780262362757_fb.pdf by guest on 10 February 2023

Preface
The
subject
of
this
book
is
the
series
of
multidisciplinary
con-
ferences,
supported
by
the
Macy
Foundation
and
held
between
1946
and
1953,
to discuss
a
wide
array
of
topics
that
eventually
came
to
be
called
cybernetics.
Coming
in
the
aftermath
of
the
Second World
War,
when
the
scientific
and
technical advances
of
the
war
years-for
example,
the
modern
general-purpose
computer
and
models based
on
it-were
just
becoming
public
currency,
the conference
series
played
a
significant
historical
role
in
the development
of
the
human
and
the
natural
sciences
in
the
United
States.
The
cybernetics
conferences
and
attendant
events
form
a
complex
story,
and
I
have
tried
to
include
only
a
portion
of
it
in
this
book.
I
have
chosen
to focus
on
researchers
in
psychol-
ogy,
anthropology,
sociology,
and
psychiatry
rather
than
on
the
engineers,
biologists,
and
mathematicians.
For
the
book
to
be
seen
in
its
proper
light,
I
need
to
say
some-
thing
about
the
process
of
writing
it
and
my
own
relation
to
the
subject
matter.
More
than
twenty years
ago,
as
a
physicist
dur-
ing
the
Vietnam
War
era,
I
felt
a
need
to
gain
a
broader per-
spective
on
the
practice
of
the
sciences
and
the
direction
they
had
taken
in
the
postwar
world.
My
method
was
twofold:
to
learn more
about
what people
in
other,
related
academic
de-
partments-anthropology,
biology,
psychology,
mathematics-
were
up
to
and
to
acknowledge
fully
that
science
is
a
human
activity,
not
only
a
body
of
knowledge.
During
this
period
the
published
proceedings
of
the
cybernetics
conferences
fell
into
my
hands,
and
since
so
many
of
the
disciplines
were
repre-
sented
by
the attendees,
a
historical
study
of
these meetings
came
to seem
like
a
good
way
to
focus my
own
inquiry.
I
decided
that
it
might
be
worthwhile
to
pursue
my
study
in
the form
of
a
book,
but
I
quickly
saw
that
I
was
not
yet
ready
Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1626075/9780262362757_fb.pdf by guest on 10 February 2023

viii
Preface
to
deal
with
the
huge
cast
and
variety
of
disciplines
involved.
I
contented
myself
with
writing
a
book
about
just
two
of
the
par-
ticipants,
the
mathematicians
John
von
Neumann and
Norbert
Wiener.
When
that
book
was
finished,
however,
I
felt
encour-
aged
to
start
work
on
the
group
of
social
scientists
who
had
attended
the
meetings.
Here
I
must
add
a
warning:
I
have
not
practiced
sociology,
psychology,
economics,
psychiatry,
or
an-
thropology,
and
consequently
I
am
looking
at
these
fields
as
an
outsider.
My
main
interest
is
in
what
the
people
I
discuss
felt
to
be
interesting and
important
at
the
time,
not
necessarily
in
what
seems
so
today.
Such
an
outsider's
perspective
can
provide
new
insights, because
it
sidesteps
the
shared
premises
and
practices
within
a
discipline
(recall
Alexis
de
Tocqueville
writing
on
America),
but
it
also
inevitably leads
to
a
glossing
over
of
many
important
details
and
technical
points.
To
try
to
avoid
major
misunderstandings,
I
have
consulted
with
specialists
in
the
dis-
ciplines
I
discuss.
This
book,
however,
is
not
intended
as
a
source
of
information
about
technical
details.
It
is
perhaps
best
characterized
as
the result
of
one
person's
historical
examina-
tion
and
interpretation
of
portions
of
a
very
interesting confer-
ence series
and
of
its
participants.
One
of
my
first
steps
was
to
contact
as
many
of
the
partici-
pants
as
I
could.
Most,
unfortunately,
are
now
no
longer
alive.
I
began
to
read
the
participants' published
writings,
viewing
them
as
contributions
to
"progress"
within
their
specific
disci-
plines.
I
also
obtained
whatever biographical
information
was
readily
available.
But
it
didn't
work.
Much
of
the
so-called
social
science
was
unconvincing
to me
as
science
in
any
traditional
sense.
In
fact,
some
of
it
seemed
to have
only
a
thin
scientific
veneer, which
apparently
sufficed
to
make
it
acceptable.
More-
over,
as
I
wrote
I
found
my
study
as
a
whole
becoming
centrif-
ugal;
it
simply
would
not
cohere.
Something
was
wrong
with
my
approach.
Stymied,
I
put
the
manuscript
aside.
When
I
returned
to
the
project
a few
years
later,
I
came
at
the
subject
matter
in
a
different
way,
probably
because
I
had
picked
up
on
changing attitudes
among
historians
and
sociol-
ogists
of
science.
Instead
of
trying
to
review
the
specific
contri-
butions
of
individuals,
I
now
started
to look
at
fields
as a
whole
and
to
explore
the
role
of
elite
groups
within
fields,
groups
whose
shared
assumptions
and
consensus
about
what
is
valid
and
valuable establish
the
fields'
priorities
and
guide
the
di-
rection
of
research
(including
who
gets
funding,
what
gets
Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1626075/9780262362757_fb.pdf by guest on 10 February 2023

Priace
ix
published,
etc.).
From
this
point
of
view,
conversations
and
dis-
cussions,
including
those
at
the
center
of
this
book
and
some
at
the
periphery,
took
on
a
greater
significance.
I
now
saw
that
dialogue
among
researchers
could
serve
as
an
organizing
prin-
ciple
for
my
study.
With
this
focus,
the
material
I
had gathered
began
to
fall
into
discernible,
seemingly
natural,
patterns.
At
various
junctions
in
the
book,
where
I
had
the
data,
I
could
now
be
specific,
concrete,
and
explicit
in
describing
instances
of
how
the
process
of
science
worked.
Two
kinds
of
presumed
"background"
to
the
conferences
sometimes
push
themselves
into
the
foreground
as
influences
on
the
scientific work.
One
is
the
general
political
conditions
in
the
United
States
at
the
time-the
height
of
the
Cold
War-
and
more
specifically,
the general
conditions
of
the
various
nat-
ural
and
social
sciences.
Chapter
1
describes
these
circum-
stances.
The
second
is
the
intellectual
interests
each
conferee
brought
to
the first
meeting.
Chapter
2
is
a
systematic
survey
of
those
backgrounds.
A
reader
who
dislikes
preliminaries
might start
with
chapter
3. I
expect,
however,
that
sooner
or
later
he
or
she
will
be
impelled
to
turn
back to
the
first
two
chapters for
orientation.
Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1626075/9780262362757_fb.pdf by guest on 10 February 2023

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/1626075/9780262362757_fb.pdf by guest on 10 February 2023