towards a meta-cyberTao

From 1946 to 1953 were held in New York by initiative of Warren McCulloch a historical series of conferences whose general theme was to set the foundations for a "general science of the workings of the human mind". Since its interdisciplinary intent, that went from systems theory to cybernetics to cognitive sciences, the basis were born for the establishment of a meta-cybernetics, or second-order cybernetics: a cybernetic theory/model on cybernetic systems that would include the Observer.

In the figure some participants to the Tenth Conference  on Cybernetics, April 22-24, 1953, Princeton, N.J., sponsored by Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation

First row:

T.C. Schneirla, Y. Bar-Hillel, Margaret Mead, Warren S. McCulloch, Jan Droogleever-Fortuyn, Yuen Ren Chao, W. Grey-Walter, Vahe E. Amassian.

Second row:

Leonard J. Savage, Janet Freed Lynch, Gerhardt von Bonin, Lawrence S. Kubie, Lawrence K. Frank, Henry Quastler, Donald G. Marquis, Heinrich Klüver, F.S.C. Northrop.

Third row:

Peggy Kubie, Henry Brosin, Gregory Bateson, Frank Fremont-Smith, John R. Bowman, G.E. Hutchinson, Hans Lukas Teuber, Julian H. Bigelow, Claude Shannon, Walter Pitts, Heinz von Foerster.

The main group included:

• William Ross Ashby; psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics

• Gregory Bateson; anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

• Julian Bigelow; pioneering computer engineer

• Heinz von Foerster; biophysicist, scientist combining physics and philosophy and architect of cybernetics

• Lawrence K. Frank; social scientist

• Ralph W. Gerard; neurophysiologist and behavioral scientist known for his work on the nervous system, nerve metabolism, psychopharmacology, and biological basis of schizophrenia

• Molly Harrower; pioneering clinical psychologist

• Lawrence Kubie; psychatrist

• Paul Lazarsfeld; sociologist and founder of Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research

• Kurt Lewin; psychologist, often regarded as the founder of social psychology

• Warren McCulloch (chair); psychatrist, neurophysiologist and cybernetician

• Margaret Mead; cultural anthropologist

• John von Neumann; one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century

• Walter Pitts; logician and co-author of the paper that founded neural networks

• Arturo Rosenblueth; researcher, physician, physiologist and a pioneer of cybernetics

• Leonard J. Savage; mathematician and statistician

• Norbert Wiener; mathematician and founder of cybernetics

while some invited guests were, among others:

• Max Delbrück; geneticist and biophysicist

• Erik Erikson; developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on social development

• Claude Shannon; electronic engineer and mathematician, "the father of information theory"

• Talcott Parsons; sociologist.