Complexity_ A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell [143]
Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives)
In addition to Norbert Wiener, the series of Macy Foundation conferences included several scientific luminaries of the time, such as John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Shannon, W. Ross Ashby, among others. The meetings led Wiener to christen a new discipline of cybernetics, from the Greek word for “steersman”—that is, one who controls a ship. Wiener summed up cybernetics as “the entrie field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.”
The discussions and writings of this loose-knit cybernetics group focused on many of the issues that have come up in this book. They asked: What are information and computation? How are they manifested in living organisms? What analogies can be made between living systems and machines? What is the role of feedback in complex behavior? How do meaning and purpose arise from information processing?
There is no question that much important work on analogies between living systems and machines came out of the cybernetics group. This work includes von Neumann’s self-reproducing automaton, which linked notions of information and reproduction; H. Ross Ashby’s “Design for a Brain,” an influential proposal for how the ideas of dynamics, information, and feedback should inform neuroscience and psychology; Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ model of neurons as logic devices, which was the impetus for the later field of neural networks; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s application of cybernetic ideas in psychology and anthropology; and Norbert Wiener’s books Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings, which attempted to provide a unified overview of the field and its relevance in many disciplines. These are only a few examples of works that are still influential today.
In its own time, the research program of cybernetics elicited both enthusiasm and disparagement. Proponents saw it as the beginning of a new era of science. Critics argued that it was too broad, too vague, and too lacking in rigorous theoretical foundations to be useful. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson adopted the first view, writing, “The two most important historical events in my life were the Treaty of Versailles and the discovery of Cybernetics.” On the other side, the biophysicist and Nobel prize–winner Max Delbrück characterized the cybernetics meeting he attended as “vacuous in the extreme and positively inane.” Less harshly, the decision theorist Leonard Savage described one of the later Macy Foundation meetings as “bull sessions with a very elite group.”
In time, the enthusiasm of the cyberneticists for attending meetings faded, along with the prospects of the field itself. William Aspray, a historian of science who has studied the cybernetics movement writes that “in the end Wiener’s hope for a unified science of control and communication was not fulfilled. As one participant in these events explained, cybernetics had ‘more extent than content.’ It ranged over too disparate an array of subjects, and its theoretical apparatus was too meager and cumbersome to achieve the unification Wiener desired.”
A similar effort toward finding common principles, under the name of General System Theory, was launched in the 1950s by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who characterized the effort as “the formulation and deduction of those principles which are valid for ‘systems’ in general.” A system is defined in a very general sense: a collection of interacting elements that together produce, by virtue of their interactions, some form of system-wide behavior. This, of course, can describe just about anything. The general system theorists were particularly interested in general properties of living systems. System theorist Anatol Rapoport characterized the main themes of general system theory (as applied to living systems, social systems, and other complex systems) as preservation