ABSTRACT
It is quite common in historical and philosophical discussions of computational theories of mind to give foundational status to a groundbreaking paper that appeared in 1943, authored by neuropsychiatrist Warren S. McCulloch and mathematical prodigy Walter Pitts. 1 The paper, entitled “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity”, also became foundational in the cybernetics movement. A complex and multivalent field, cybernetics emerged historically in the context of the Second World War and the research of Norbert Wiener on anti-aircraft systems (Wiener, 1948). Out of this grew a central analogy between organisms and machines in terms of purposeful behavior, based on the concept of negative feedback. 2 Over the course of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, cybernetics – as a practice, discipline, and research field – encompassed and influenced work in fields such as information theory, mathematics, psychology, control theory, neurophysiology, psychiatry, and sociology (Kline, 2009); and developed uniquely in the United States, Britain, France, Chile, and the Soviet Union. 3
