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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977): 141-159.

GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS: FROM INTERDISCIPLINARY INTERACTION

TO SOCIETAL FUNCTIONS STEVE P. HEIMS*

An instance of fruitful cross-disciplinary contacts is examined in detail. The ideas involved include (1) the double-bind hy othesis for schizophrenia, (2) the critique of game theory from the viewpoint of antKropolog and psychiatry, and (3) the application of concepts of communication theory anitheory of logical types to an interpretation of psychoanalytic practice. The protagonists of the interchange are Gregory Bateson and the two mathematicians Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann; the date, March 1946. This interchange and its sequels are described. While the interchanges between Bateson and Wiener were fruitful, those between Bateson and von Neumann were much less so. The latter two held conflicting premises concerning what is significant in science; Bateson’s and Wiener’s were com- patible. In 1946, Wiener sug ested that information and communication might be appropriate central concepts k r psychoanalytic theory - a vague general idea which Bateson (with Ruesch) related to contem orary clinical practice. For Bateson, Wiener, and von Neumann, the cross-discipinary interactions foreshadowed a shift in activities and new roles in society, to which the post-World War I1 period was con- ducive. Von Neumann became a high-level government advisor; Wiener, an inter- preter of science and technology for the general public; and Bateson, a counterculture figure.

While the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century can be characterized as an era of increasing “professionalization” and “specialization” across the board in all the sciences, there have also been countertrends. For example, the pattern of education of scientists at Cambridge University in the 1920s encouraged broad, general, interdisciplinary interests. We need only mention the names of C. H. Waddington, Evelyn Hutchinson, Joseph Needham, J. D. Bernal, and Gregory Bateson as notable products of this educational pattern.

In a very different way, World War I1 catalyzed interdisciplinary efforts in the United States. During the war, most physical scientists as well as many social scientists had been engaged in goal-oriented team research which cut across the disciplines. With some notable exceptions,’ universities, even after the war, continued to be organized along strictly disciplinary lines. This narrow professionalization and departmentalization seemed merely to provide the appropriate institutional form for science, as it had been characterized by Max Weber in his classic essay on “Science as a Vocation” - “A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, . . . may as well stay away from science.”2 But, to some, the personal issue has always been that of reconciling a commitment to science and the, at times, necessary wearing of blinders - the precise and detailed work - with a broad vision and a wide scope.

Another small island, in the sea of the scientific community, where wide intellectual scope was encouraged rather than discouraged, was a series’ of small conferences spon-

*My thanks are due to Gregory Bateson and to Neal Hartley, M.I.T. archivist, as well as to Jacques M. Quen, Cornell Medical Center, and Barbara Ross who critically read the manuscript. For reprints contact author at 24 Stanwood Avenue, Gloucester, Mass. 01930.

STEVE HEIMS received his doctorate in physics (1960) from Stanford University, and has taught at Brandeis University and Wayne State University. Since 1967 he has taken an increasingly active interest in /inding a humanistic perspective on science, and in 1970-71, he was a National Science Faculty Fellow in the history and philosophy of science. He is currently working on two books, one dealing with the interdisciplinary Mary Conferences on Cybernetics ( I 946-1953), and another dealing with two twentieth century mathematicians. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener.

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sored by the Macy Foundation, the first of which was held in March 1946, on the subject of “Teleological Mechanisms.” At the first meeting of this group, the behavioral scientist Gregory Bateson (now teaching at the University of California in Santa Cruz) for the first time met two of America’s leading mathematicians, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann (both deceased).

This article describes the intellectual, cross-disciplinary interaction among these three. The format of the article emphasizes communication and feedback among the three and, only secondarily, individual biographies. The natural historical unit to consider is, in this instance, not one individual person, but the communication and feedback loops involving more than one person. Other contexts come into play, such as philosophical, political, and institutional, as do particular individuals’ objectives and the actions taken to implement their purposes. In emphasizing contexts, communications, purposes, and feedback loops in the story, I have taken a leaf out of my protagonists’ books.

This way of regarding the events can be contrasted to those science-historical studies, which look to antecedents for explanation of events, such as the childhood ex- periences of each of the scientists, the traditions out of which they came, or the prior evolution of scientific ideas. Such a search for what is vulgarly referred to as “causes” and more precisely as “continuities,” leads one further into the past, away from the event with which one began. Elsewhere,‘ I have tried to interpret the same events and people considered here in terms of the protagonists’ childhoods, and traditions, and the prior state of science. The “interactive” approach taken in the present article does not dwell on prior events, but leads to subsequent events; the circumstances described are seen more as agents influencing or containing seeds of the future, than as consequences of the past.

The story to be related is, then, of three men - two mathematicians and a behavioral scientist, who, emerging from wartime projects, expand their intellectual horizons through various contacts, particularly by participating, with avid interest, in the small interdisciplinary “Teleological Mechanisms” conference in March 1946. Each of the three men was in mid-life and had been successful in his earlier work. Consideration of the interaction among the three men, their goals, and their institutional identifications shows portents of change for each of the three men in a different direction. This change was facilitated by the many viable options open to scientists in that period of high prestige and economic support of science, the same period (the McCarthy era) during which other freedoms were at a low ebb. All three men shift in the direction of new kinds of audiences and co-workers; the audiences they find are not only fellow scientists but groups of laymen, different types of groups for each of the three men. In effect, each is defining a new role or function in society for himself, in each case, a function which transcends the purely academic one; thereby, each plays a historical role of a scientist, who, as scientist, has a direct impact outside of the scientific community. It is part of my purpose in this paper to call attention to the historical significance of the societal roles which these scientists chose.

WORLD WAR I1 During World War 11, Norbert Wiener was assigned to section D-2 of the National

Defense Research Committee, as part of an interdisciplinary team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to work on mathematical aspects of the guidance and control of antiaircraft fire. John von Neumann was the foremost mathematical consultant to the in-

GREGORY BATESON AND THE MATHEMATICIANS 143

terdisciplinary “Manhattan Project” in Los Alamos, New Mexico (i.e., the construction of the first nuclear weapons). He had been present at the dramatic first explosion of an atomic bomb in 1945.

Under the pressure of wartime, von Neumann had devised radically new patterns of formal logical organization for computers, thereby advancing that technology significantly.6 It came to his attention that the logical calculus, devised by Pitts and McCulloch8 to describe the functioning of the human nervous system, could also be used to describe general purpose computers. From this insight, in 1943, evolved von Neumann’s avid interest in and exploration of the possibility of devising a formal-logical theory, which would, as a matter of course, encompass computers, but which also - and this was the awesome challenge - would eventually lead to a formal-logical description of the detailed pattern of organization of the human brain. In 1943, von Neumann knew very little empirical neurophysiology or experimental psychology, but he proceeded to learn’ whatever was needed to guide his exploration in formal logics. In 1943 he had also completed another work, which took him into applications of mathematics to the social sciences; the seminal book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, was written jointly with economist Oskar Morgenstern.

Norbert Wiener, although a mathematician, had had a long-standing interest in physiology. He had, since about 1933, participated in an interdisciplinary seminar group at the Harvard University Medical School;8 over the ensuing decade, he learned an im- pressive amount of detailed physiology, and gained the self-confidence to speak about the subject. A seminal paper, in 1943, resulted from Wiener’s collaboration with engineer Bigelow and neurophysiologist Rosenblueth; it might be regarded as a position paper on the subject of “behavior,” the role of voluntary action or “purpose,” and also that of “negative feedback.” The definitions which were made of these concepts were intended to include organisms as well as machines, and to deal explicitly with the several similarities, as well as the differences, between the behavior of the two. Their underlying methodological viewpoint was a t variance with the strictly operational attitudes towards science, as the following excerpt illustrates: ‘‘. . . although the definition of purposeful behavior is relatively vague, and hence operationally largely meaningless, the concept of purpose is useful and should, therefore, be retained.”e Wiener was also in communication with psychologist Edwin Boring, who had prepared a list of psychological functions from a behaviorist’s perspective as challenges for Wiener; Boring wanted to see if Wiener, indeed, could “specify electrical or electronic systems that will give the same specificity of ‘output’ to ‘input.’ ”lo Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow had, in effect, announced a new paradigm in science, according to which one seeks an overarching theory to include machines and organisms; the theory would clearly involve ideas of information, control, and feedback. Of all things, it had been consideration of the guided (“purposeful”) antiaircraft projectiles which had brought home to Wiener and Bigelow the similarity of organisms and machines.

By 1943, von Neumann’s and Wiener’s thoughts on the utility of studying machines and organisms together, thoughts made cogent by their wartime work, had dovetailed sufficiently to consider making common cause, and they were in communication with each other. By 1945, with the war drawing to a close, they were setting up plans to implement their ideas. They organized a small study group which included neurophysiologists, mathematicians, and engineers.” In particular, Wiener and von Neumann visited each other frequently to engage in lengthy talks about the scientific and technical possibilities.

144 STEVE P. HElMS

On the practical level, they discussed and took steps to arrange with MIT an interdisciplinary research center, which would provide a home for their joint undertaking and for the related engineering and physiology.’* When von Neumann’s employer, the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, finally agreed to let von Neumann build a prototype computer there, von Neumann decided to stay on in Princeton.la Conse- quently, the “joint center” never materialized, but the MIT offer, resulting from the idea, had helped to persuade Princeton.“ Wiener meanwhile helped to arrange to bring some neurophysiological research to MIT.16 In particular, he arranged for himself to work together with physiologist Rosenblueth (at MIT and Mexico City) on concrete studies of nerve conduction, excitations in cardiac muscle, and the neuromuscular oscillations known as “clonus.”

Although an Englishman, Gregory Bateson, mostly known as a cultural anthropologist at that time, had been working for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in India, China, and Ceylon, during the war. His interests, it would seem, were at the opposite end of the scientific spectrum from those of “hard scientists” von Neumann and Wiener. Bateson was not satisfied with his interpretations of his own social anthropological fieldwork;18 the theoretical concepts he had introduced seemed ad hoc and awkward. He understood, for example, that the transvestite Naven ceremony served to prevent “symmetrical schismogenesis,” as he called it, in the Iatmul culture, but he sought a general or abstract theoretical context into which to place this type of phenomenon. To give another example, he had related the differences among appercep- tive habits, characteristic of various cultures, to the various types of learning contexts, as they had been enumerated by experimental psychologist^;^^ by using a relatively abstract vocabulary to describe laboratory experiments on learning, Bateson was able to, in some degree, make the desired connection between learning and cultural differences. But was there, still, a more general context into which to place these concepts?

Before he left the U.S. for his wartime activity, Bateson attended a conference on hypnosis;18 at that conference, he had heard a verbal report on the contents of an un- published Rosenblueth-Wiener-Bigelow article. Bateson was immediately excited, and anticipated that these ideas were sufficiently deep and sufficiently general, so that out of them might come a vocabulary suitable for a conceptual framework for the behavioral sciences. Others shared his enthu~iasm.’~

THE CONFERENCE By March 1946, and with the end of the war, as scientists were leaving their mission-

oriented research, they were looking for the opportunity to carry out ideas that had been left unexplored, or were seeking new research projects. It was a time for new beginnings, with a certain hope for scientific solutions to all kinds of problems; it was also a time at which money was becoming increasingly available for civiliar. science. In the U.S., the prestige of science had never been higher. The time was ripe for an interdisciplinary conference. Although it was primarily devoted to medical research, the Macy Foundation was persuaded to sponsor a small conference on “Teleological Mechanisms,” in the conviction that the conference could be a useful meeting ground for representatives of the most diverse scientific disciplines. In March 1946, the conference took place at the Beekman Hotel in New York City; John von Neumann (age forty-three), Norbert Wiener (age fifty-two), and Gregory Bateson (age forty) were among the conferees, By that time, Bateson had at least some knowledge of the von Neumann-Morgenstern work

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and was hoping to find new conceptual tools in that theory, as well as in the Wiener- Rosenblueth-Bigelow ideas. Incidentally, four bona fide psychologists20 were among the twenty-three conferees: Mollie Harrower, Heinrich Kluever, Kurt Lewin, and Donald Marquis, as well as the psychoanalyst, Lawrence Kubie.*’

When Bateson’s turn came, he spoke on the requirements of an adequate theoretical structure for the social sciences, and discussed learning theory and difficulties in describing mechanisms for stability in cultures. His purpose or reason for participating at the meeting lay in his search for new concepts and abstract formulations which social and behavioral scientists might borrow from the mathematicians and communication engineers. On these two days of the conference Bateson witnessed expositions, by Wiener and von Neumann, of a whole collection of concepts originating in mathematics and engineering, on which he would draw heavily thenceforth: the difference between “analogical” and “digital” processes, coding, circuits, servomechanisms, positive and negative feedback, time series, measure of information and its relation to entropy, binary systems, Russell’s Theory of Logical Types, “pathological” oscillations induced in a computer confronted with a Russellian paradox, the idea that the crucial concept to use in understanding communication systems is “information” and not “energy,” etc. As to this last idea, Wiener had mentioned it in commenting on a psychoanalytic description of neurosis by Lawrence Kubie in which concepts such as “libido,” “energy to be released,” and “psychic tension” had been employed. Bateson was also exposed to a presentation by von Neumann of the simpler portions of his Theory of Games.2z During these two days, in effect, Bateson was presented with a set of tools; he would make it his task to understand them as precisely as he could without mathematics, to examine them to see which of them would be useful to him for theory construction in the behavioral sciences, and he would learn to use them.

In order to test the correctness of his own understanding of the collection of concepts, Bateson sought to try out his own interpretations of the formal concepts with the mathematicians. While his personal relations with von Neumann were pleasant, he ap- parently had difficulty following von Neumann’s presentations. Von Neumann spoke rapidly; at the “cybernetics meeting he was pouring all the stuff out and punching with both fists, you know,” Bateson told me?’ Von Neumann was usually precise, carrying out arguments rapidly, in a strictly logical, step-by-step sequence. Beyond that, while both von Neumann and Bateson sought, as scientists, to describe “order” in events and generality, the kinds of order they sought were very different. Von Neumann was com- mitted to theories which were free of contradiction and rigorously expressible in terms of formal logics or mathematics. He had little sympathy for the conceptual, verbal descriptions which satisfied Bateson. The challenge presented at that March meeting, which stimulated von Neumann, would have made abstract formalism concrete. It was posed by Heinrich Kleuver: to explain in terms of formal-logical theory (i.e., a mechanical model involving coding and transfer of information and mechanisms of control) how the brain perceives visual form. Von Neumann would repeatedly come back to this concrete instance, wondering what new and interesting kinds of logic would have to be invented to obtain agreement with the, as yet, insufficient empirical knowledge from experimental neurophysiology or experimental psychology, in this problem of “visual analogy,” as he called it?‘ It was evident to him that all known logics were far from adequate for dealing with Kluever’s challenge.

Von Neumann’s participation at the conferences was consonant with his conscious purposes on two levels. Von Neumann was devoted to advancing progress in the high

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technology of computers; he was forever looking for innovations in computer technology, even if it made his own previous computer design obsolete.26 Discussions of the nervous system and behavior of organisms might stimulate innovations for computer design, (i.e., nature’s means of organization, control, and communication would be suggestive). On March 8 von Neumann had led off the conference with a description of the organization and the patterns of communication and control in the most advanced computers, then only in the design stage. There was a second purpose, which arose from von Neumann’s conviction that the glue that holds together all the sciences is formal logics, including mathematics.le His scientific objective, then, was to work out the logics for the patterns of organization of functional simulacra of organisms. While he was ever conscious of the desideratum of ultimately describing the logics of the organization of the human brain, he proceeded in his automata theory to deal with specific, formally manageable functional simulacra with particular properties. The conferences put him in touch with empirics concerning organisms, enabling him to assess the extent to which and the respects in which computers and his formal logical automata failed to correspond to the human brain.

Von Neumann’s pleasure, passion, and power lay just in his ability to give rigorous mathematical-logical form to everything that came his way. Elements of competitiveness and aggressiveness in modern society he contained within a strictly axiomatic theory of games, in which all definitions are reduced to operational ones. It was not so important to von Neumann that the theory lacked an empirical basis. Von Neumann was relatively little interested in conceptual issues or philosophical issues, which could only be expressed in necessarily ambiguous verbal forms and not in the form of logics. I think that, for von Neumann, as for others before him, only the strictly logical form transcended ambiguity, transcended fashion, transcended time, and transcended death; and that mattered to him.

Bateson understood relatively little mathematics; his interest was in the concepts from logical and mathematical theories which he could use, as metaphors or in an heuristic way, to formulate conceptual schemes in the behavioral and social sciences. His tool was and is the English language, and he tried to achieve clarity and precision in its use, as far as was possible, but never mathematical rigor. He was not willing to restrict his attention to topics amenable to rigorous logic, but, instead, chose topics that mattered to him: human communications, insanity, play, etc. He respected empirics, himself being a conscientious and careful observer of nature, of people. With such differences in scientific outlook, it is not surprising that Bateson did not use von Neumann as his mentor or his sounding board.

Wiener and Bateson had far more common ground. Wiener, already in his fifties, had made his mark in mathematics, despite his simultaneous serious interests in biology, philosophy, and high technology. With his collaborators, he had begun to cultivate mathematical biology, relating the two disciplines. There he could show that the mathematical description of experimental clonus in the cat was identical with the mathematics of certain servomechanisms; or that the mathematical techniques useful for analyzing time series in communication systems, were also fruitful in analyzing elec- troencepholograms. But Wiener was looking for a broader synthesis; he lamented that “since Leibnitz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day.”l’ Wiener, himself, was inclined to connect everything to everything else in conversation. He used the Macy Group as an audience for the wide


range of his thinking, seeking criticism, assurance, and new information. His own rather untidy comprehensiveness can be seen in his Cybernetics; there are precise mathematical statements and descriptions, but he does not hesitate to extend the ideas contained in the theorems to a broader class of circumstances. Essentially, Wiener used the physics, mathematics, and communication engineering as a source of metaphor; he easily glides from the mathematical to the philosophical or literary mode. His consideration of cybernetic machines, sophisticated robots created by man, leads him to passionate reflections on ethics and politics.

Some of his colleagues found this mixture highly disconcerting. But like Bateson, Wiener used metaphors from the mathematical sciences to devise conceptual schemes for behavior?* He was convinced that the world is far too rich and complex to ever be contained by formal logic.Pe He loved language, and appreciated Bateson’s knowledge of and sensitivity to the nature of human communications. His expository style, unsystematic and intuitive, was also congenial to Bateson. Morever, they shared a sense that everything is connected to everything else, and that, on an abstract or philosophical level, such connections can be manifested. So it happened that Bateson made Wiener his chief sounding board and mentor in the concepts and vocabulary of computers, communication theory, and formal logic. Wiener and Bateson communicated, not only at subsequent conferences of the series sponsored by the Macy Foundation, but through letters and visits.

BATESON - WIENER DIALOGUE (1) On various occasions,” Bateson urged Wiener to apply his mathematical power,

and especially his prediction theory, to the social sciences, but Wiener demurred. He viewed himself more as a humanist than as a social scientist. While, at one point, he considered the possibility of using his prediction theory to analyze data on voting behavior,81 he soon concluded that generally statistical runs in the social sciences are too short, and that the social scientist interacts too strongly with his subject to be a sufficiently good probe to warrant the application of precise measurement or mathematical p r e d i c t i ~ n . ~ ~ According to Wiener, “There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-‘scientific,’ narrative method of the professional historian.”

(2) But how about the von Neumann theory of games? As a mathematician, Wiener admired von Neumann’s elegant mathematical theory. Moreover, he saw it as applicable to the market economy, even though it contained the abstraction of “perfectly intelligent, perfectly ruthless players.” In 1947, Wiener saw the solutions of game theory as describing “a welter of betrayal, turncoatism and deception, which is only too true a picture of the higher business life, or the closely related lives of politics, diplomacy and war. . . . There is no homeostasis whatever.”8a Wiener admired game theory, but objected to the morality of the players. Nevertheless, in his view, it was appropriate to attribute such a morality or immorality to the power elite.

Bateson incorporated the ideas of von Neumann’s game theory into his intellectual repertoire rapidly; in the 1940s, when writing about Balinese and Iatmul culture, he used the assumptions of game theory as a well-defined model, for the sake of comparing and contrasting the actual human culture^.^' While, in his later writings, game theory no longer plays a significant role, the process of increasingly recognizing its irrelevance and even its harmfulness as a “self-validating hypothesis’’ was tested out in conversations and correspondence with Wiener. In 1952, Bateson wrote to Wiener concerning his own

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analysis of the social relevance of game theory. He was troubled by military planners’ use of game theory:*O

What applications of the theory of games do, is to reinforce the players’ acceptance of the rules and competitive premises, and therefore make it more and more difficult for the players to conceive that there might be other ways of meeting and dealing with each other. . . . The theory may be “static” within itself, but its use propagates changes, and I suspect that the long term changes so propagated are in a paranoidal direction and odious. I am thinking not only of the propagation of the premises of distrust which are built into the von Neumann model ex hypothesi, but also of the more abstract premise that human nature is unchangeable. This premise. . . is the reflection or corollary of the fact that the original theory was set up only to describe the games in which the rules are unchanging and the psychological characters of the players are fixed ex hypothesi. I know as an anthropologist that the “rules” of the cultural game are not constant; that the psychology of the players is not fixed; and even that the psychology can be at times out of step with the rules.

He adds, incidentally, that “Von Neumann’s ‘players’ differ profoundly from people and mammals in that those robots totally lack humor and are totally unable to ‘play’ (in the sense in which the word is applied to kittens and puppies).” Bateson urged Wiener to take an active interest in a critique of game theory, as only one versed in mathematics could do authoritatively. In 1948, Wiener still spoke of designing a mechanical chess player in terms of game theory,s6 but in the second edition of his The Human Use of Human Beings (1954), Wiener, in a discursive style, points to the inapplicability of game theory to an automated chess player, and expresses alarm over the application of game- theoretical thinking to the formulation of military strategy in the Cold War. Finally, in 1959, in a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Wiener gave a clear analysis of the shortcomings of the game-theoretical approach in various practical, and especially nuclear strategy, application^.^^ His comment was consonant with Bateson’s comment in the 1952 letter. Bateson,S8 and Wiener too, regarded the von Neumann game player as a prototype, by definition incapable of protolearning, mis- guided and limited by his rigidity.

The poignancy of the discussion of game theory in the early 1950s can only be appreciated if one takes cognizance of the fact that it was at the height of the Cold War. Bateson’s relative optimism concerning the changeability of the psychological character of people was characteristic of the period. As Bateson had a strong dislike of the use of the social sciences for the purpose of manipulating people, he did not participate in such active programs as the World Mental Health Movement. On the other hand, John von Neumann was one of the most vigorous and unmitigated Cold Warriors in the scientific community. He also tended to interpret international conflict in game-theoretical terms.s8 In discussion with colleagues, von Neumann would mingle his knowledge of military history with game-theoretic reasoning to support his militant, cold warrior viewpoint.40 In any case, the military-political strategists at that time were conversant with game theory,” but not with Bateson’s criticisms of its premises; and Wiener was hardly on speaking terms with them. Game-theoretic arguments lent support to policies of deterrence by threat of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons and to the nuclear weapons race. Governments, dealing with plans and actions, are more interested in tools for developing and implementing strategies than they are in examining the basic premises underlying them. When, more recently, one military-political strategist, imbued with game-theoretic thinking, indeed did examine his own value premises critically, and acted on his insights, political history was made. I am referring to Daniel Ell~berg.~’


(3) An entirely different theme had to do with Wiener’s comment, at the March 1946 meeting, on information and communication in connection with psychoanalysis. Bateson was interested in the task of transferring the concepts of communication engineering and cybernetics to psychiatry (viz., psychotherapy and psychoanalysis); he had perceived within psychiatry a shift towards emphasis on interaction and communication, as well. He talked about it with Wiener at the March 1946 meeting, and on subsequent occasions in 1946 and 1947.

Wiener’s 8 March 1946 remark in connection with psychoanalysis indicated the direction of his thinking. It appears from a talk he gave in November 194648 and from his book completed a year later,44 that his general ideas on the subject became somewhat elaborated during that year and a half. There is no way of determining the role that conversations with Bateson may have played. In 1947, Wiener conjectured that, just as in the malfunctioning of a computer, the physical basis of so-called “functional disorders” may have to do with “instructions,” “messages,” “programs,” and “memory.” Conse- quently, the techniques of the psychoanalyst are “perfectly consistent” with the point of view of cybernetics.“ The standpoint is that a fully materialistic explanation of functional and organic disorders would in principle be possible if the concepts of “message,” etc., were included in the explanation.

Since the 1930s Wiener had interpreted Leibnitz’s monads, usually seen as ideal es- sences, in informational-material He now envisaged that id, unconscious, archetype, etc., might also be amenable to an informational-material interpretation. As Bateson saw it, the ideas of cybernetics resolved the ancient problem of body-mind dichotomy:’ permitting a description of “mind” as imminent in systems, rather than transcendent. He took on the task, working with psychiatrist Juergen Ruesch, and com- bining his sophisticated understanding of interpersonal communication with the new ideas and vocabulary learned from Wiener and others of the Macy Group, to put psychiatric practice in the context of a theoretical description of human communication.

Wiener and Bateson shared an attitude, often frowned upon by scientists, yet central to the two men’s mutual rapport. Wiener was familiar with some exact theorems of physics, of communication engineering, and of formal logics, as well as the principles of the operation of computers and goal-seeking devices. He translated these exact statements into relatively loose, verbal, formal statements, and on the basis of intuitively seeing their possible applicability elsewhere, suggested they might be far more generally applicable in a heuristic way than only in the narrow area where they turn into exact statements.

It was Wiener’s belief that these ideas could provide a unified view of the sciences, even though, as general principles, they lacked the precision of mathematical communication theory. Wiener had always been conscious of the limitations and paradoxes of formal logics, the ubiquity of randomness, the necessity of incompleteness of kn~wledge.‘~ Cybernetic ideas had to incorporate incompleteness and paradox; it was not a well-defined closed system. Wiener had a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary knowledge of empirics, but as a scientist he appreciated that “as a rule ‘high’ order, very abstract and general statements, are not amenable to experimental test. They have to be broken down into more specific terms. . . .”4e To explore whether general cybernetic ideas were consistent with, and perhaps even fruitful in, psychiatry and psychology would require far more work by scientists familiar with the fields in question. The unusual premise that Bateson and Wiener shared, is that, notwithstanding untestability and some vagueness, general

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cross-disciplinary principles are interesting. It is a legitimate human endeavor to understand the world about us in more than a piecemeal, “departmentalized” way. But, then, one must accept some paradoxes, some incompleteness, some tentativeness, some vagueness in the bargain. In fact, the general statements are verbal and conceptual, rather than mathematical. Such a movement from concrete science towards more general and philosophical discussion, is, in a sense, a retreat from the concrete and verifiable, but it is often a productive, strategic retreat.

It was in this spirit that Bateson wrote his book with Ruesch. Wiener liked the book, and spoke of Bateson’s “valiant work in attempting to bring psychoanalytic processes under the heading of cybernetics.” But he noted that this work “is and must be sketchy,” because, in psychology, the elementary processes themselves are only incompletely known.6o The book appeared in 1951, when cybernetics was in its heyday. Many scientists who did not appreciate the kind of theory cybernetics is had undue expectations from it, and took it too literally.61

What we see in Bateson and Wiener is the human desire to describe the world and ourselves in some comprehensive, holistic way, and yet to function as scientists. The long era of narrow specialization as the sine qua non of science had made such efforts at generality disreputable, and the impulse for universality among scientists was often ridiculed and had become largely muted.

(4) As a final example of Bateson-Wiener interaction, I consider the genesis of Bateson’s theory of play and fantasy and, in particular, that of the double-bind in schizophrenia. In the 8-9 March 1946 meeting, Wiener had described a computer’s 0s- cillatory response to being presented with a Russellian paradox: the computer replies yes-no-yes-no-yes-no . . . etc. Wiener had been a student of Russell and was well- acquainted with the Russell-Whitehead theories. Bateson had spoken of “learning about learning” at that same conference and had opposed it to simple “learning.” It was apparent that learning about learning could lead to something analogous to a Russellian paradox (e.g., if one learns that whatever one learns is nonsense, one has a paradoxical bit of knowledge).

Over the years, Bateson developed his theories of play, humor, fantasy, and schizophrenia, in all of which the concept of such a paradox was central. Moreover, in California, Bateson encountered his fellow expatriate Englishman, Alan Watts, who was a prolific author of books about Zen Buddhism. Bateson and Watts discussed at length the Zen counterpart of occidental psychotherapy, in which the Koan, a paradox to be resolved, plays a central Typically for Bateson, he was drawing his ideas from a mathematician, on the one hand, and from a student of oriental mysticism, on the other. Bateson sought these ideas, specifically, to help understand schizophrenia, but Bateson respected the mystic’s approach to life as much as the scientist’s, and was finding connections between them. Again, Wiener was the sounding board for his ideas. As early as 1952 Bateson wrote to Wiener, suggesting that he suppose a computer6*

were to suffer from a defect - say an idkefixe, a rooted memory or an erroneous over-specialization . . . is it not conceivable that to pose a paradox to the machines might be therapeutic?. . . All this leads to the possibility that the psychotherapist, dealing with a human patient might be able to improve his methods . . . he might be able to select that category of paradoxes which would in fact exercise the particular part which is stuck in the particular patient, always supposing that diagnosis would be good enough. But it also leads to a more difficult problem. Suppose the stuck part to be such that paradox is generated in the machine, even when non-


paradoxical problems are presented, what sort of psychotherapy would you ad- minister? (This actually seems to be a rather common type of pathology - and incidentally, is a pathology which might be generated by the type of therapy suggested above.)

This letter to Wiener reveals some of the thinking and questioning that lay behind the well-known, double-bind hypothesis given a definite form four years later. What is remarkable in his letter is that it shows Bateson seeking clues for psychotherapy from Wiener’s thoughts about computers. Some years later, Bateson recalleds4 that in a conversation Wiener had suggested that a

telephone exchange could be called “schizophrenic ”in a formal sense if it mistook numbers mentioned in the conversation between subscribers for those numbers which are the names of subscribers. The double-bind idea was born out of the question “how would one teach a telephone exchange to make this error?”

Once Bateson had formulated the double-bind idea, he immediately wrote to Wiener for confirmation of his own understanding of the logic involved. Of course, while in formal logical reasoning the Russellian paradoxes are to be avoided, Bateson came to the con- clusion that, in ordinary communication, analogs to the logical paradoxes make changes of habits, make humor, and make much else possible.

INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS So far we have depicted something of the role of the Bateson-Wiener interchanges,

especially in Bateson’s theory construction. Of course, Bateson had special opportunities to talk with Wiener because of their joint participation in the small conferences of which the March 1946 meeting was only the first. However, the ideas of cybernetics were far from exclusive. Wiener and von Neumann, especially in late 1945 when they were planning to estabiish a center, were actively propagandizing their ideas. After that March 1946 meeting, Bateson himself organized a meeting of “social scientists” to talk with Wiener and von Neumann, a meeting held in September of that year.ss Lawrence K. Frank, the director of the Caroline Zachary Institute of Human Development, and former vice-president of the Macy Foundation, was enthusiastic about Wiener’s ideas, just as Bateson was, and organized a larger conference for that October, under auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences; Frank saw himself as “actively participating in creating this new climate of opinion,’’66 by propagating the new ideas presented at the 8 March meeting. Moreover, at the same time Bertalanffy was publishing his “general system theory,” Shannon and Gabor published their information theories, so that some psychologists came to seek general principles for the behavioral sciences in some of the same group of ideas, but arrived there through very different routes than Bateson had, and had different attitudes towards them.s7 After Wiener’s best selling book Cybernetics appeared in 1948, the subject matter suffered, if anything, from too much uncritical attention.

One social institution which had played a central role in the first meeting and in subsequent conversations between Bateson and Wiener, obviously, was that of the small, interdisciplinary conference. We have not, so far, commented on Bateson’s, Wiener’s, and von Neumann’s working conditions in their day-to-day research or on other contexts im- pinging on them.

Since 1933, von Neumann had been a highly respected, tenured member of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study. In 1946, von Neumann’s successful effort to

152 STEVE P. HEIMS

bring engineers and large government contracts to build a computer in this place of quiet and esoteric scholarship was greeted by many of the scholars as the intrusion of the un- welcome machine into the garden.s* His primary source of funds for the advanced prototype computer was the government; in particular, the military services. While, at the end of World War 11, most scientists had abandoned weapons research, von Neumann became increasingly active in it. In 1946 and 1947 he divided his time between the computer project at Princeton and the hydrogen bomb research in Los Alamos, to which he brought the most advanced computer technology available. At Los Alamos he worked with physicists; at Princeton, primarily with the engineers and mathematicians he had hired, Through the Macy Conferences, von Neumann was periodically in touch with physiologists, and could interchange ideas and knowledge concerning the analogies between brains and computers. In the late 1940s he also began some highly original work, initiating the work in formal logic known as “automata theory.” In the ensuing few years, however, von Neumann devoted an increasing portion of his time and energy to participation on high-level government committees concerned with weapons development. With nuclear weapons and missiles, as with computers, he favored the fastest possible rate of technical i n n o v a t i ~ n . ~ ~ He was a strong proponent of and effective contributor to “winning” the nuclear armament race, and he prized, greatly, the medals and government honors which he received for his services.6o With these outside interests, he spent less and less time at his home base in Princeton, and found fewer opportunities for long talks with Wiener.

Wiener was the resident genius and the pride of MIT. Nonetheless, his salary was a modest $9,600 for the year 1946-1947. He states in his autobiography that in 1947, when he wrote Cybernetics, he was hoping to write himself out of a financial hole. Interper- sonally, Wiener was regarded as “difficult” by many, but, nonetheless, he was well loved and much at home at MIT. He worked with neurophysiologist Rosenblueth of Mexico City, each spending half-time in the other’s location; he also associated closely with philosopher Giorgio de Santillana and had the gifted, albeit eccentric, young collaborator, Walter Pitts. The political aftermath of World War I1 affected him as strongly as it did von Neumann, but in the opposite direction. As early as 1946, he precipitously decided to cooperate no longer with the military; his public statement to that effect?’ in the Atlantic Monthly, generated a strain in his relations with some colleagues. Several times, he was on the verge of abandoning science altogether.6a One scientific area that he put his mind to, however, assuaged his conscience: to create prosthetic devices for the deaf, which would allow sounds to be transformed into tactile sensations; and prosthetic limbs for amputees, in which the action potential of muscles in the limb stump is utilized for activating the artificial limbs. To implement these, he had to expand his knowledge of sensory physiology.eg The way he established the program in prosthesis at MIT ensured that any patents that might emerge would be in the public do- main, and manufacture would be in good nonexploitive hands.

Through his ideas, active interest, and prestige, Wiener generated outside interest, as well as financial support, for work in prosthesis, and his political action made it easier for other scientists to take an antimilitary stand. On the other hand, von Neumann’s prestige and leadership helped bring intellectual respectability to the study of military strategy, to working with computers, and to high-level governmental technical advising. Wiener and von Neumann both deliberately implemented the political or humanitarian purposes in which they believed, by making use of their technical abilities.


In 1946, Bateson had no regular institutional affiliation. His work had been in several disciplines, yet he was not strongly identified with any one. For one year, he held a visiting professorship at the New School for Social Research; he spent another year at Harvard. Then he went west, where he worked as a research associate in the department of psychiatry at the University of California Medical School for a year, collaborating with Ruesch. After that, he began his relatively long association with the Veteran’s Ad- ministration.Hospita1 in Palo Alto, California, with some lecturing at Stanford Univer- sity. Bateson did not become a regular, tenured faculty member at Stanford-University, any more than he had at Harvard. His associates were not primarily academics; instead, he cavorted with schizophrenics, alcoholics, mystics, poets, and otters at the zoo. He liked his title at the V.A. hospital, viz., “ethnologist.” There, he gathered a group of co- workers, in particular Jay Haley, Don Jackson, and John Weakland. To perform the research on communication, they survived on research grants, which Bateson was able to obtain from the Rockefeller and Macy Foundations. Bateson reports that, once, between grants “my team loyally stayed with me without pay.”” Although Bateson had a wide circle of personal acquaintances, and although the level of scientific funding was generally high in the postwar period, Bateson had to contend with a lack of finances. One context of Bateson’s work, then, was periodic uncertainty concerning the future, a greater measure of insecurity than either Wiener or von Neumann had to contend with. The political issues of the Cold War became grist for Bateson’s theoretical thinking, but did not shift the direction of his work, as they did Wiener’s and von Neumann’s. Bateson was, in a sense, apolitical.

In his style, Bateson was skeptical of conventional psychiatric attitudes and ex- perimented with radically different ones. Towards his patients labeled “schizophrenic,” he was likely to act as a friend, interested in their language; with some, he would drink beer or play golf. As early as 1949, Bateson and his collaborators thought that family therapy would, in some cases, be more appropriate than individual therapy.e6 Somewhat later, Bateson raised the question whether a schizophrenic episode might not be regarded as akin to a spontaneous initiation ceremony, rather than to an “illness,”B6 thus calling into question conventional ideas of psychosis. In all this, Bateson was not a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist; he was merely a researcher in human and animal communications.

EMERGING SOCIETAL FUNCTION As one reflects about the interaction of the three men at the 1946 interdisciplinary

conference, it becomes apparent that each, in his own way, wanted to expand his horizons or his range of activities, to give a fuller range to his personality. Concurrent with the expansion of their intellectual horizons through the interdisciplinary interactions, was the emergence for each one of a social function as a scientist, an explicit or implicit personal choice, reflecting and defining who they were; their emerging societal function gave each a place in history. Their interests, goals, and interactions in March 1946, together with the institutional contexts in which their activities were then taking place, already strongly suggest the direction in which each of their functions in society would lie. One wonders whether the hydrogen bomb development and the committees in Washington would have interested von Neumann less, if he had been able to build his computer without creating the hostility and discord that disturbed him at Princeton, and if he had had congenial sensory physiologists and geneticists among his immediate colleagues.

154 STEVE P. HElMS

During the war, at Los Alamos, von Neumann, a jolly, friendly man, had been regarded as a paragon of equanimity and sober, rational judgment.67 In the 1940s he was, perhaps, the major contributor to the technological advancements in the modern computer. Aside from his technical contribution and innovation, he became an effective political proponent of the support of a rapid rate of innovation in spawning new generations of computers.88 Bigger and better computers were needed for the design of thermonuclear bombs. Von Neumann, again, was not only a technical contributor, but an active proponent of an accelerated rate of innovation in weapons production. He sat on the highest-level government committees dealing with weapons and personally con- ferred with President Eisenhower to urge him to give top priority to the development of intercontinental nuclear missiles, and he helped, actively, to make this priority effective. Finally, he became an Atomic Energy Commissioner and moved from Princeton to Washington D.C. for his full-time government activity. Eventually all the military chiefs of staff, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Secretaries of Defense, and of the Army, Navy, and Air Force would come to depend on his quick mind and his unequalled clear, logical, instrumental thinking.68 Around 1950, he was reportedly advocating a first strike (i.e., immediately bombing the Soviet Union) as a rational act to prevent future thermonuclear wars.7o Clearly, this is the kind of thinking to which Bateson had referred, in his informal comment on game theory, as paranoid. To say the least, the thinking of the more zealous cold warriors of that period, which included the willingness to inflict death and enormous suffering on a large number of people, suggests the actualizing of fantasies which probably reflected fears, angers, and con- flicts on a more personal level.

The debate among historians as to the proper interpretation of the cold warriors continues, and what one historian sees as a drive for aggrandizement and collective paranoia, another views (as did von Neumann, himself) as hard-boiled realism, and a third, perhaps, as both. But however one interprets them, John von Neumann’s powerful, logical thinking was increasingly in the service of “that.” As far as I know, there is no in- compatibility between paranoid premises and the implementation of their consequences by clear logic.

What then is von Neumann’s historic role, beyond his significant role in the internal history of mathematics and science? In a certain kind of popular history, his role would be identified in terms of his innovations in computer development, but this is a mis- understanding of technological change. For here, as is typical of technical change,71 numerous patent suits testify72 to the near simultaneity of similar innovations by different research groups. Von Neumann’s role is more correctly characterized as speeding the rate of advancement of the technology; more reliable and faster computers were available sooner because of him. The same could be said concerning his role in weapons development and the armament race. What is different in the case of weapons development is that the speed with which the weapons development took place precluded the option that the more slowly changing political conditions could obviate these developments. Von Neumann as technologist, as a high-level, superbly capable expert in government, is an early prototype of what D. Bell has characterized as a central figure in postindustrial Through the respect in which he was and is widely held, especially on account of his brilliance and competence, he has helped to give status - especially among scientific intellectuals - to a particular kind of role in our technocratic society.


Bateson’s societal identity lay in a different direction. The seeds of it are found in his nonidentification with the academies, even though he was a serious intellectual and behavioral scientist. It is also foreshadowed in his sympathetic interest in mysticism (Zen Buddhism), and in his respect for Blake’s approach to truth as on a par with that of Darwin or N e ~ t o n . ~ ‘ His fascination with metascience and metapsychiatry, combined with his experience in anthropology, led this, in many respects conservative, individual to radical critiques of our cultural assumptions. Thus, his radical suggestions concerning the nature of psychotic processes contained an implicit criticism of much of psychiatric pract i~e.’~ By asserting the legitimacy, as a “motive for scientific inquiry,” of “the desire to build a comprehensive view of the universe which should show what Man is and how he is related to the rest of the universe,” a view of the universe which was ethical and aesthetic, he was sharply at odds with the conventional view of the scientific e n t e r p r i ~ e . ~ ~ The counterculture, emerging in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, expressed a strong disaffection from the conventional Occidental cultural premises and was seeking alternatives;” it was prone to rejecting science altogether. A countercultural movement within psychiatry, especially the group associated with R.D. Laing, enthusiastically took up Bateson’s tentative suggestions concerning the nature of schizophrenic The younger generation of the widespread, popular countercultural movement slowly dis- covered Bateson, the man who found aspiration for holistic understanding to be compati- ble with science; who asserted that clear thinking, theoretical formulations, and detailed observations are means rather than hindrances to holistic understanding; who dis- associated himself from the conventional cultural assumptions.

Bateson’s approach was also congenial to the later ecology movement; for whether he talked of a New Guinea culture, or of the family interactions of a schizophrenic, or of cybernetics, his emphasis had always been on ecological pattern^.?^ Bateson, himself, turned towards the counterculture. He had befriended not only Alan Watts, but also Alan Ginsberg and Paul Goodman - major counterculture figures. He tried LSD and readily referred to his experience under the influence of the drug, the changed premises. And when, in 1972, Bateson put together an anthology of his own work, entitled Steps to an Ecology ofmind, a student wrote the preface. It states in part:

I believe that this is a very important book, not only for those who are professionally concerned with the behavioral sciences, biology, and philosophy, but also and especially for those of my generation born since Hiroshima - who are searching for a better understanding of themselves and their world. . . . This book is a sample of the best thinking I’ve found. I commend it to you, my brothers and sisters of the new culture, in the hope that it will help us on our journey.8o

I f von Neumann’s new audiences were high-level government and military men, and Bateson’s the members of the counterculture “searching for a better understanding of themselves and their world,” then Wiener’s new audience came from various segments of the general public. With his best selling books, Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), he had become a public figure, a speaker in great demand, usually talking to overflow audiences. The mass media liked to quote particular passages from the introduction to his Cybernetics, which had dramatic overtones, as, for example, the assertion that, with computers and automation, we are “in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard of importance for good and for evil.. . .” This was not mere rhetoric, for Wiener had, indeed, taken a number of actions which indicate his genuine concern about the misapplications of science and technology. He had publicly announced

156 STEVE P. HEIMS

his decision, which violated the scientific ethos, but served other values:81 “I do not ex- pect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsi- ble militarists.” He had contacted and corresponded with Walter Reuther, the labor leader,82 who, in turn, gave publicity to Wiener’s thinking in the union journals. Wiener’s research turned to prosthetic devices for the deaf and for amputees. The overall context out of which these ethical decisions were derived, viz., his view of the relation of modern man to his technological creations, is amply described in his books. His actions indicate that he put humanitarian values above those of the scientific ethos. He did not become part of any movement, but, after Wiener’s death, in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement among scientists and technologists called upon Wiener’s memory as a precedent to its actions. The high point of this movement occurred on 4 March 1969 when dissenting professors at MIT initiated a “work stoppage” and teach-in to oppose research for destuctive military purposes and generally to oppose the misuse of science and technology. The 4 March work stoppage and teach-in extended to thirty other major universities and technical schools across the country.8a It does not appear at present that this movement resulted in a major reformation of science and technology, but the consciousness of the issues involved at least has penetrated scientific and technological practice. Wiener’s books were part of the literature of the movement. In his own day, Wiener’s antimilitary conscience had been viewed with considerable an- noyance by most of his scientific and mathematical colleague^.^'

Wiener’s humane reflections and moral decision was one part of his public role. Another was his heralding, recognition, and interpretation of a new era: the era dominated by the concerns and the technology of communication, control, information, and organization. This recognition and interpretation of the present era was imbedded in and supported by a rich texture of historic and philosophical insight and a wide-ranging familiarity with contemporary science and high technology; morever, it was presented with literary fluency, style, and passion. His public function had become not that of a “mere” scientist, but that of an intellectual, an original thinker about the state of our society and civilization, one who also had a first-hand acquaintance with science and technology. Without that first-hand knowledge, he would not have been nearly so convin- cing. At M I T he came to play the role of peripatetic interdisciplinary genius, wandering from department to department, bending any willing listener’s ear with ideas, concerns, and suggestions, which might deal with topics in mathematics, physics, biology, engineering, psychology, or philosophy. Often, however, they dealt with humane and human concerns.

FOOTNOTES 1. Among these were the University of Chicago, and the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT. In

both institutions, cross-disciplinary research dealing with topics now referred to as cybernetics, the subject of the “Teleological Mechanism” conference, flourished.

2. From Mux Weber. trans. and ed. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 135. The essay was first published in German in 1919.

3. Altogether the series consisted of ten conferences, the last five of which were recorded and the proceedings published. Transactions of the Conference on Cybernetics, 5 vols., ed., H. von Foerster, M. Mead, and H . L. Teuber. The conference series is described in!ol. 9 of the Transactions; in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (New York: Wiley, 1948) and in Steve Heims, Encounter of Behavioral Sciences with New Machine-Organism Analogies in the 1940s,” Journal of the History of the BehavioralSciences 11( 1975): 368- 373. 4. Two books in preparation. 5 . See Arthur W. Burks’s introduction to John von Neumann, Theory ofself-Reproducing Automata. ed.,

A.W. Burks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966); and Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pmcal to Von Neumann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). For a different view see the review of Goldstine’s book by Harry D. Huskey in Science 180(1973): 588-590.


6. Warren S. McCulloch and Walter H. Pitts, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Ac- tivity,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5( 1943): 115-133.

7. The proceedings of the 1948 Hixon Sym osium are full of von Neumann’s comments, and questions asked of physiologists and sychologists, a n l i n particular detailed and probing questions about vision. Cerebral Mechanisms in BeEavior. ed., L. A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley, 1951).

8. Among the participants were A. Rosenblueth, S. S. Stevens, R.S. Morison, G. B. Wislocki, A. B. Hastings, S. Vallarta, E. W. Dempsey, C. Lashley, M. Coffman, A. Grafflin, F. A. Simeone (based on recollections of E.W.Dempsey and R. S. Morison). 9. Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,”

Philosophy of Science lO(1943): 18-24. 10. Letter from Boring to Wiener, 13 November 1944. I I . Participants were H. Aiken, L. E. Cunningham, W.E. Deming. H. H. Goldstine, R. Lorente de No. W. S. McCulloch, Walter H. Pitts, E. H. Vestine and S. S. Wilks, aside from von Neumann and Wiener. (Reference: Form letter of 12 January 1945 by von Neumann to all of them.) 12. Wiener-von Neumann correspondence, January to May 1945. 13. Herman H. Goldstine, op. cit., and Freeman Dyson, “The Future of Physics,” Physics Today 23(1970):

14. George Harrison to von Neumann, 23 August 1945; von Neumann to Frank Aydelotte, 25 August 1945. 15. At first, A. Rosenblueth; later, also Warren McCulloch and Jerome Lettvin. 16. See e.g., Gregory Bateson, Naven (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1936), pp. 1-5. 17. Gregory Bateson, “Social Planning and the Concept of Deutero-Learning,” in G. Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972). pp. 159-176. 18. Macy Conference on “Cerebral Inhibition,” New York City, 14-15 May 1942. 19. Besides his own and his wife’s (Margaret Mead) recollections, one could cite a letter from Mead to McCulloch of 27 February 1945 and the “Note by the Editors” in vol. 9 of Trunsactions of the Conference on Cybernetics. cited. 20. I am indebted to the late Frank Fremont-Smith for providing me with a list of participants. 21. Lawrence K. Frank, foundation executive and author of books on social psychology, also attended. 22. Summary of the conference, prepared by its chairman, Warren S. McCulloch. 23. 13 August 1968. 24. Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, cited; John von Neumann, Computer and the Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). 25. John von Neumann, Collected Works. ed., A. H . Taub (New York: Macmillan, 1963). 5: 238-247; H. H. Goldstine, op. cit., pp. 331-332. 26. Biographical study in preparation. 27. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics. cited, p. 8. 28. Rosenblueth et al., loc cit.; Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth, “The Role of Models in Science,” Philosophy of Science 12(1945): 316-322; see also Cybernetics, cited; Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). 29. He took issue with Bertrand Russell and the British school of analytical philosophy. He welcomed Goedel’s theorem, when it appeared, and saw in it confirmation of his intuitive view of the role of logics. 30. Cybernetics, op. cit., pp, 33-34; Bateson to Wiener 22 September 1952; summary of the first three “Teleological Mechanism” meetings prepared by Warren McCulloch. 3 1. Summary of the second “Teleological Mechanisms” conference, cited. 32. Cybernetics. op. cit., p. 191. 33. Ibid., pp. 185-186. 34. Gregory Bateson, “Bali, the Value System of a Steady State,” in Steps fo an Ecology of Mind, op. cit.,

35. 22 September 1952. 36. Cybernetics, op. cit. 37. Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science 131 (1960): 1355- 1358. 38. Juergen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 21811; “Bali, The Value System of a Steady State,” loc. cit.; Gregory Bateson, “The Message of Reinforcement” in Language Behavior: A Book of Readings in Communication, ed., J. Akin (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). pp. 62-72. 39. Stainslaw M. Ulam notes this explicitly in his essay, “John von Neumann, 1903-1957,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64(1958): 1-49 (see p. 6); see also e.g., In the Matter of J . Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board and Text of Principal Documents and Letters (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 1971), top of page 651, where von Neumann comments on Russia. Incidentally, von Neumann defended his colleague, Oppenheimer, at the hearlng. 40.

23-28.

pp. 107-127.

See e.g., S. Ulam, loc. cit., p. 6.

158 STEVE P. HEIMS

41. Philipp Green, Deadly Logic (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1966). 42. Actually, already in a Harvard thesis in economics (1952) Ellsberg studied game theory. He used game theory in a heuristic way in his “Crude Analysis of Strategic Choices,” American Economics Review 51(1961): 472-478. His change of premises is described in an autobiographical passage of Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), p. 28. 43. Norbert Wiener, “Time, Communication, and the Nervous System,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 50(1948): 197-220. 44. Cybernetics, op. cit., Chapter 7. 45. Ibid. 46. Norbert Wiener, “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz,” Philosophy ofScience l(1934): 479- 482. 47. Juergen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson, loc. cit., p. 177. The viewpoint was expressed more sharply later in Gregory Bateson’s “The Cybernetics of ‘Self‘: A Theory of Alcoholism,” Psychiatry 34(1971): 1-18. 48. This was a central theme in Wiener’s work, which pervades nearly all of his philosophical writings, as well as much of his mathematics. 49. Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth, “The Role of Models in Science,” Philosophy of Science 12(1945): 316-322. 50. Norbert Wiener to Lawrence K. Frank, 26 October 1951. 51. The general mood has been described by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel in Language and Information (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1964), p. 6: “This was also the time when Cybernetics and Information Theory reached their common heydays and created among many of us the feeling that the new synthesis heralded in them was destined to open new vistas on everything human and to help solve many of the disturbing open problems concerning man and humanity.” 52. Alan Watts, In M y Own Way (New York: Random House, 1972), pp. 273, 332-334. 53. Gregory Bateson to Norbert Wiener, 22 September 1952. 54. Gregory Bateson to Steve Heims, 17 August 1970. 55. The conference on ‘Teleological Mechanisms in Society” was sponsored by the Macy Foundation, and held on 20 September 1946 at the Beekman Hotel, New York City. 56. Lawrence K . Frank, “Foreword,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 50(1948): 189-196, p. 192. 57. George A. Miller and Frederick C. Frick, “Statistical Behavioristics and Sequences of Responses,” Psychological Review 56(1949): 31 1-324; George A. Miller, Language and Communication (New York: McGraw-Hill, 195 1); James G . Miller, “Toward a General Theory for the Behavioral Sciences,” American Psychologist 10 (1955): 513-531; George A. Miller, Eugene H. Galanter, and Karl Pribram, Plans andStruc- ture of Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960). 58. Freeman Dyson, loc. cit. 59. Some discussion of von Neumann’s governmental function is given in Herbert York, Race to Oblivion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). See also von Neumann’s public statements, “Defense in Atomic War” and “Can We Survive Technology?” in John Von Neumann Collected Works, ed., A. H. Taub (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 6: 523-525 and 504-519. 60. Numerous friends have commented on it. For example, Lewis Strauss, John von Neumann memorial dinner remarks, 22 May 1971; Oskar Morgenstern’s comments in the film John Von Neumann, A. Novak, producer (Providence, R.I.: American Mathematical Society, 1958). 61. Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” Atlantic Monthly 179 (1947): 46. 62. Draft of a letter of resignation from M I T by Norbert Wiener, 18 October 1945. The letter describes his intention to withdraw from all scientific work. See also Dirk J. Struik, “Norbert Wiener - Colleague and Friend,’ American Diaiog 3(March-April 1966): 34-37. 63. Wiener’s contribution to sensory and muscular-skeletal prosthesis has been reviewed by Robert W. Mann in Norbert Wiener: Collected Works. vol. 3, to be published by M I T Presy, Cambridge, Mass. Wiener’s papers on these topics are: “Sound Communication with the Deaf,” Philosophy ofscience l6( 1949): 260-262; “Some Problems in Sensory Prosthesis” (with L. Levine), Science 1 lO(1949): 512; “Problems of Sensory Prosthesis,” Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 56( 195 1): 27-35; “Contribution by Dr. Wiener” to Proceedings of the International Symposium on the Application of Automatic Control in Prosthetic Design. 27-3 1 August 1962, Opatija, Yugoslavia, pp. 132-133; (Belgrade: Rad, 1963) “Epilogue” in Progress in Brain Research, ed., J. P. Schade (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1963), 2: 264-268. 64. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. op. cit., p. 11. 65. Gregory Bateson in interview with Stewart Brand: “We made a film in ’49 at Langley-Porter Clinic sf the fact that the minor patterns of interchange in a family are the major sources of mental illness Stewart Brand, I 1 Cybernetic Frontiers (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 29. 66. Gregory Bateson, “Introduction” in Perceval’s Narrative: A Patient’s Account of his Psychosis, 1830- 1832, ed., G . Bateson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. v-xxii. 67. For typical opinions see e.g., Laura Ferrni, Illustrious Immigrants, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 212.


68. John von Neurnann, Collected Works. ed., A. H. Taub, (New York: Macmillan, 1963). 5: 238-247; H. H. Goldstine, op. cit., pp. 331-332. 69. Lewis Strauss [Men and Decisions, (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 236) describes a poignant incident. 70. I have satisfied myself through discussion with some of John von Neumann’s close associates, including Oskar Morgenstern (1 1 May 1970), that he indeed held these views. Also see Lve 42(25 February 1957): 96. 71. S. Colum Gilgillan, The Sociology of Invention (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970). 72. H. H. Goldstine, op. cit.; H. D. Huskey, loc. cit. 73. Daniel Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society,” The Public Interest 6(1967): 24-35, and 7(1967):

74. Gregory Bateson, “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia,” American Medical Association Archives o j General Psychiatry 2( 1960): 477-491. 75. Perceval’s Narrative, op. cit. 76. “Minimal Requirements for a Theory of Schizophrenia,” cited. 77. Theodore Roszak, Th Making o f a Counter Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1969). 78. Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1967). 79. Stewart Brand, loc. cit. The magazine Coevolution Quarterly has also given considerable space to Bateson: see 4, (1974). 24-29; 6 (1975): 132-136; and 7 (1975): 32-47. 80. Mark Engel, “Preface” in Steps to an Ecology ofMind. op. cit., p. vii. 81. “A Scientist Rebels,” loc. cit. 82. The initial letter from Norbert Wiener to Walter Reuther is dated 13 August 1949. In S ring 1950 Wiener was making contacts among scientists, and Reuther among labor leaders for the establisgment of a labor-science council. 83. Paul Goodman, New Reformation (New York: Random House, 1970). 84. This I conclude primarily from discussion with a relatively small sample of the mathematical community that was acquainted with Wiener, some of whom still seemed angry with him in 1969 or 1971. One of his tactics for asserting his antimilitary conscience was that of snubbing colleagues who were in weapons work. (The snubbing tactic was described to me by Armand,Siegel, 8 June 1971, and by H. H. Goldstine, 26 February 1971). Dirk Struik, loc. cit., refers to Wiener’s feeling isolated in his worries” concerning the military, See also Norbert Wiener, I am a Mathematician (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964). p. 298.

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