First Macy conference on feedback

The Macy Foundation convened its first conference on feedback mechanisms and circular causality in biological and social systems. The group drew physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, physiologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and anthropologists.

The first meeting was titled Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems. In the autumn of 1946 the next meetings were on teleological mechanisms, and the series took the name Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms later. The last, tenth conference met in April 1953 in Princeton. By later historians, the first met in New York on 8 and 9 March, at the Beekman Hotel on Park Avenue, where every later conference but the last was also held. No transactions of the first five conferences were published, the foundation itself says; printing began with the sixth, in 1949. Heims adds that attempts to record the first few conferences mechanically were technically unsuccessful, that Margaret Mead's detailed notes are in her own shorthand, and that the most useful sources on the first five conferences are the summaries and the correspondence. What the record does not claim: that a document of 1946 giving the days and the place of the first meeting has been read. By Heims, a sound recording of the conference and a partial transcript lie in the Frank Fremont-Smith papers at the Countway Library in Boston (Orr cites a transcript of the first conference there); a letter of Wiener to McCulloch of February 1946, which Heims cites, lies in the McCulloch papers at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and Bateson's letter to Wiener of 19 June 1946, on which Hellman relies, in the Wiener papers.