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12 Modern Robotics

of conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, an
organization devoted to improving medical education. The first
meeting in 1942 cast the net wide, going beyond the physical sci-
ences by bringing together psychologists, physiologists, and social
scientists. Participants included Walter McCulloch, as well as the
noted anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Arturo
Rosenblueth brought Wiener’s and his own ideas to the conference.
Rosenblueth suggested that a wide variety of biological and human
communication processes needed to be understood not as simple
cause-and-effect but rather as “circular causality”—feedback. This
meant that action had an inherent purpose (such as maintaining an
equilibrium or tracking sources of light or heat).
Meanwhile, Bateson sought to apply feedback theory to social
interactions. Margaret Mead later observed in her 1968 paper
“Cybernetics of Cybernetics” that she became so excited by this idea
that “I did not notice that I had broken one of my teeth until the
Conference was over.”
Wiener proposed that a new group be formed to provide for the
ongoing interdisciplinary study of communication, control, feed-
back, and other key concepts. He called the group the Teleological
Society. Teleology is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the
purpose or goal of a design or process. For example, instead of only
studying how signals move between neurons in the visual cortex,
a teleological approach looks at the organism’s purposes or goals.
What is the visual system (the eye and brain) “trying” to recognize?
How does it go about adjusting or reinforcing the nerve signals in
order to recognize, for example, a dangerous predator? (It should
be noted that teleology as envisioned by Wiener does not mean con-
scious purpose; rather, it refers to the goals designed into the system,
either by evolution or by human engineers.)
The Teleological Society had its first meeting at Princeton’s Institute
for Advanced Study on January 6 and 7, 1945. As he would report in his
autobiography, Wiener was quite satisfied with these first proceedings:

Very shortly we found that people working in all these fields were
beginning to talk the same language, with a vocabulary containing
expressions from the communications engineer, the servomechanism
man, the computing-machine man, and the neurophysiologist. . . . All