The complete transactions of the Macys Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953, were recently (2015) edited by Claus Pias and published in English and German. Pias discusses the importance of first-order cybernetics in the post-Second World War history of ideas in his introductory essay called “The Age of Cybernetics,” which appears at the beginning of the volume. Ten conferences took place under the heading “Cybernetics, Circular, Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems.” The venue was the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan.
The advent of the computer and its digital logic in the mid-twentieth century inspired a resolute rethinking of the boundaries of the scientific disciplines which led the transdisciplinary thinker Gregory Bateson to exclaim: “I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last two thousand years.” At issue were fundamental questions of knowledge and clarifying the definition of cybernetic epistemology. Norbert Wiener had started the discussion by proclaiming that cybernetics would unify into one science the study of humans, animals, and machines by grasping the shared systemic nature of information and the feedback mechanism which are common to all those objects of inquiry. Cybernetics was to be a science of command, control, and regulation. It would be relevant to established knowledge fields ranging from economics, psychology, and sociology to the analysis of art, music, and literature. All disciplines were to be rethought under the numeric, digital, and informational paradigm.
In his essay, Claus Pias articulates the essence of the intellectual synthesis which the luminary presenters and discussants achieved at the Macys Conferences. The deepest questions remained unresolved, however, and cybernetics was overtaken in the 1960s by the more banal paradigm of “computer science,” which limited itself to pragmatically writing better programs and better serving the machines. This engineering-oriented informatics of data structures, algorithms, and operating systems became the standard curriculum at technology universities. The current revival in the twenty-first century of interest in the first- and second-order cybernetics which historically preceded technical computer science is a strong hint of widespread desire today for a trans-disciplinary informatics to reappear.
According to Pias, there were three components of a “set of models” discussed at the Macys conferences which were crucial to the cybernetic synthesis: the logic of Boolean algebra embedded into neurological and physical circuitry, information theory, and feedback.
(1) In their 1943 article,“A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” the logician Walter Pitts and the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch proposed the mathematical model of a neural network. Their “threshold logic” and concept of a formalized neuron implied a universal theory of digital machines. Humans are information machines. Humans are embodiments of switching logic. One reason why humans are themselves digital is that everything, both natural and artificial, is a digital information machine.
(2) The information theory of Claude Shannon is, in Pias’ formulation, a “stochastic theory of the symbolic.” It is a theory and practice of universal symbol manipulation. Information is a new technoscientific concept beyond matter and energy, which were previously thought to be the basis of all “physical” objective reality in the universe. Information fights against entropy. According to Shannon, information can arrive intact at its receiver due to its mathematical abstraction from materiality, its existence independent of the physical conditions surrounding the transmission.
(3) In their 1943 article “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” Arturo Rosenbleuth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow had formulated what Claus Pias calls a “non-deterministic yet teleological theory of feedback.” Biological and artificial systems both require information and feedback to be productive. They both operate on a logic of signals and cycles. Systems do not always require new input. They can instead be self-sustaining by converting their own outputs into instructions received and processed at anticipated and discrete intervals of time.
Pias emphasizes that, at the time, the participants in the Macys conferences did not think of themselves as having arrived at an overall coherent perspective. First-order cybernetics was post-humanist in the sense of seeing both humans and everything that is not-human as digital machines. The agreed upon science of information was disembodied in that the discrete logic of the digital lacked materiality and the continuousness or “in-betweenness” of the analog.
The conceptual grasping of systems in their time-based teleological dynamic meant that the verb tense of cybernetics would be the “future perfect.” Everything will have always already happened. What characterizes the digital age, for Pias, is “the excess of presentness in the present.” In first-order cybernetics, there was a kind of optimistic social engineering or technological determinism. The result was a belief in a cybernetic or technocratic government. A correctly parameterized and steered system could be set in motion and the desired results would occur quasi-automatically. All intuition, judgment, and debate would be removed from the political.
The inheritors of first-order cybernetics and cybernetic epistemology are systems theory (which separates the construction of a functioning system and the description of its functioning), actor-network theory (an action-oriented view of assemblages in society and nature consisting of both human and non-human components, processes, and interactions), and the trend of creating computer simulations to forecast the future. Claus Pias concludes his essay on a pessimistic yet very insightful note:
“The established methods of understanding have clearly reached their limits and now serve merely to indicate even more conspicuously how strongly they have been influenced by the cybernetic technologies that they seek to describe.” The irony is that the social and human sciences have become so imbued with “cybernetic” methodology that they have lost the distance or independence required to see clearly what they investigate.