As Judea Pearl, who, in the 1980s, introduced a new approach to artificial intelligence called Bayesian networks, explained to me:
What Wiener created was excitement to believe that one day we are going to make an intelligent machine. He wasn't a computer scientist. He talked feedback, he talked communication, he talked analog. His working metaphor was a feedback circuit, which he was an expert in. By the time the digital age began in the early 1960s people wanted to talk programming, talk codes, talk about computational functions, talk about short-term memory, long-term memory— meaningful computer metaphors. Wiener wasn’t part of that, and he didn’t reach the new generation that germinated with his ideas. His metaphors were too old, passé. There were new means already available that were ready to capture the human imagination.” By 1970, people were no longer talking about Wiener.
One critical factor missing in Wiener’s vision was the cognitive element: mind, thinking, intelligence. As early as 1942, at the first of a series of foundational interdisciplinary meetings about the control of complex systems that would come to be known as the Macy conferences, leading researchers were arguing for the inclusion of the cognitive element into the conversation. While von Neumann, Shannon, and Wiener were concerned about systems of control and communication of observed systems, Warren McCullough wanted to include mind. He turned to cultural anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead to make the connection to the social sciences. Bateson in particular was increasingly talking about patterns and processes, or “the pattern that connects.” He called for a new kind of systems ecology in which organisms and the environment in which they live are one in the same, and should be considered as a single circuit. By the early 1970s the Cybernetics of observed systems—1* order Cybernetics— moved to the Cybernetics of observing systems—2"™ order Cybernetics—or “the Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, as coined by Heinz von Foerster, who joined the Macy conferences in the mid 1950s, and spearheaded the new movement.
Cybernetics, rather than disappearing, was becoming metabolized into everything, so we no longer saw it as a separate, distinct new discipline. And there it remains, hiding in plain sight.
“The Shtick of the Steins”
My own writing about these issues at the time was on the radar screen of the 2"4 order Cybernetics crowd, including Heinz von Foerster as well as John Lilly and Alan Watts, who were the co-organizers of something called "The AUM Conference," shorthand for “The American University of Masters”, which took place in Big Sur in 1973, a gathering of philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, each of whom asked to lecture on his own work in terms of its relationship to the ideas of British mathematician G. Spencer Brown presented in his book, Laws of Form.
I was a bit puzzled when I received an invitation—a very late invitation indeed— which they explained was based on their interest in the ideas I presented in a book called Afterwords, which were very much on their wavelength. I jumped at the opportunity, the main reason being that the keynote speaker was none other than Richard Feynman. I love
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