The Macy Conferences on cybernetics were a series of ten meetings held between 1946 and 1953, mostly in New York, funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and chaired by Warren McCulloch. Their original title was “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems”. After Norbert Wiener’s book of 1948, the meetings adopted “Cybernetics” as their main title.
Origins
At a 1942 Macy Foundation meeting in New York on cerebral inhibition, Arturo Rosenblueth presented the ideas he was developing with Wiener and Julian Bigelow on feedback and purpose. The discussion convinced McCulloch, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and the foundation’s medical director, Frank Fremont-Smith, that a sustained interdisciplinary series was worthwhile. War delayed it until 1946.
Participants and format
The core group of about twenty-five included Wiener, John von Neumann, McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Rosenblueth, Bateson, Mead, the psychologist Kurt Lewin, the psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, and later Heinz von Foerster, who edited the proceedings of the last five meetings. Claude Shannon, W. Ross Ashby and others attended as guests. Each meeting combined specialist presentations with long discussions, transcribed and published, in which participants tried to find common principles across their disciplines.
Significance
The meetings created a shared vocabulary (feedback, information, circular causality, homeostasis) that let a physiologist, an engineer and an anthropologist recognise the same pattern in their different subjects. The published transcripts also record the arguments, including disputes about whether information has meaning and whether minds can be reduced to machines.
The format has since been a model for transdisciplinary work. In 2020 Paul Pangaro began the NewMacy meetings to revive it for current problems.
Further reading
- Claus Pias (ed.), Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953 (2016)
- Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (1991)
Mentioned in
- Article A Brief History of Cybernetics
- Article Cybernetics as a Discipline
- Community American Society for Cybernetics
- Community ANU School of Cybernetics
- Person W. Ross Ashby
- Person Gregory Bateson
- Concept Behavior, Purpose and Teleology
- Person Julian Bigelow
- Concept Circular causality
- Concept Cybernetics
- Concept First-order cybernetics
- Person Heinz von Foerster
- Concept Information theory
- Person Warren McCulloch
- Person Margaret Mead
- Person John von Neumann
- Person Paul Pangaro
- Person Arturo Rosenblueth
- Person Claude Shannon
- Person Norbert Wiener