ABSTRACT
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; and developed uniquely in the United States, Britain, France, Chile, and the Soviet Union. Examining the trajectory while paying close attention to the various motivations for and obstacles to modeling, this chapter explores the complex historical relations between cybernetics and computational theories of mind. The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics authored by philosophically minded neuropsychiatrist Warren S. McCulloch and mathematical prodigy Walter Pitts, argues that by modeling neurons as all-or-none entities, one could achieve a workable model of the mind that would provide a foundation for the study of brains and minds – both healthy and diseased. John Von Neumann's work, in concert with that of McCulloch and Pitts, had a galvanizing effect on the cybernetics movement.
