The Next Macy Conference: A New Interdisciplinary Synthesis [Keynote]

Reports on the significance of the Macy Conferences in the field of cybernetics. These were a series of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held in New York from 1941 through 1960. The aim of the Macys was not to exterminate modern science but to set alongside it another way of understanding the world, one centered on unknowability instead of knowability. If we could reproduce this doubling of perspectives, we could come at this problem or that from two angles rather than our usual one. And, very importantly, different patterns of action hang together with different patterns of understanding.