The Self-Mechanized Mind

From 1946 to 1953 ten conferences—the first nine held at the Beekman Hotel at 575 Park Avenue in New York, the last at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey—brought together at regular intervals some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, these meetings have since come to be known as the Macy Conferences. The mathematicians, logicians, engineers, physiologists, neurophysiologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and economists who took part set themselves the task of constructing a general science of how the human mind works. What brought them together, what they discussed, and what came of a collaboration unique in the history of ideas— these things form the subject of the present volume. Every group of this kind adopts a code name as a way of affirming its identity. In the case of the Macy Conferences it was “cybernetics.” Today this name has fallen out of fashion, to say the least. Since 1954 the project undertaken by the Cybernetics Group1 has been carried on under a series of different names, ultimately coming to be known as “cognitive science.” Why cognitive science today is ashamed of its cybernetic heritage is one of the chief questions I wish to address.