Cybernetics. System Thinking Perspectives

Abstract

It was May 1942, just over eighty years ago. The 'Cerebral Inhibition' seminar was held in New York. Organised by Frank Fremont-Smith, then medical director of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, the seminar was attended by various researchers from different fields of knowledge. In addition to anthropologist Margaret Mead and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, participants included psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie, social scientist Lawrence K. Frank and two neurophysiologists: the first one was a psychoanalyst, the second one was a social scientist. Frank and two neurophysiologists: Warren McCulloch - who a year later would publish, together with Walter Pitts, a pioneering text on artificial neural networks - and Arturo Rosenblueth. The latter, for the occasion, presented the research, conducted together with Norbert Wiener and Julien Bigelow, that led to the famous article Behavior, Purpose and Teleology (1943), in which the functional equivalence between the purposeful behaviour of living beings and that exhibited by self-regulated machines through feedback was shown.