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Einstein once defined Truth as an agreement obtained by taking into account observations, their relations, and the relations of the observers. In his case the observations were the coincidences of signals at points in frames of reference; their relations were matters of space and time in those frames; his observers were reduced to what Helmholtz called a locus observandi, devoid of prejudices and imagination; and the only relations he had to consider among them were their relative positions, motions and accelerations. The Truth he had in mind is a picture of the world upon which all observers can agree, because it is expressed in a manner invariant under the transformations required to represent the relations of the observers. It is a paradigm for what ‘scientific agreement’ may mean.
Unfortunately for us our data could not be so simply defined. It has been gathered by extremely dissimilar methods, by observers biased by disparate endowment and training, and related to one another only through a babel of laboratory slangs and technical jargons. Our most notable agreement is that we have learned to know one another a bit better, and to fight fair in our shirt sleeves. That sounds Democratic, or better, Anarchistic, as you have twice reminded me. Aside from the tautologies of theory and the authority of unique access by personal observation of a fact in question, our consensus has never been unanimous. Even had it been so, I see no reason why God should have agreed with us. For we have been very ambitious in seeking those notions which pervade all purposive behavior and all understanding of our world: I mean the mechanistic basis of teleology and the flow of information through machines and men. In our own eyes we stand convicted of gross ignorance and, worse, of theoretical incompetence.
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Our meetings began chiefly because Norbert Wiener and his friends in mathematics, communication engineering and physiology had shown the applicability of the notions of inverse feedback to all problems of regulation, homeostasis and goal-directed activity, from steam-engines to human societies. Our early sessions were largely devoted to getting these notions clear in our heads, and to discovering how to employ them in our dissimilar fields. Between sessions many of us made observations and experiments inspired by them, but we generally found it difficult to collect sufficient appropriate data in the six months between meetings. At the end of the first five sessions, of which there are not, and never will be, any published transactions to humiliate us, we elected to meet but once a year, keeping our gang together as far as possible, replacing a few who were lost to us, and inviting a few speakers to help us where we needed it most.
By the time we made this change we had already discovered that what was crucial in all problems of negative feedback, in any servo system, was not the energy returned, but the information about the outcome of the action to date. Our theme shifted slowly and inevitably to a field where Norbert Wiener and his friends still were the presiding genii. It became clear that every signal had two aspects, one physical, the other mental, formal, or logical. This turned our attention to computing machinery, to the storage of information, and to probabilistic considerations including the quantity of information as negative entropy. Here belong questions of coding, of languages and their structure, of how they are learned and how they are understood, including the theme of this, our last meeting, in which we expect to range from the most formal aspects of semantics to its most contental contact with the world about us. For all our sakes I would Wiener were still with us, but I understand that he is at present happily immersed in the clear and serene domain of relativity.
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To refresh our memories and inform our guests, let me recapitulate in logical rather than chronological order, the topics we have considered, and on which I believe the majority of us have been of one mind, to the limit of our ability to understand the evidence or the theory. You may find the consensus more commonly in my statement than in our published transactions. I am compelled to watch your faces, and to guess, before I let you have the floor, whether you will speak to the point or not, and from which side of the fence. With malice aforethought I have let loose the malcontent because he had not got the point, because he disagreed, or because he doubted, however unreasonably. Before I knew you so well this happened by accident, but as time went on and we learned one another’s languages, I had learned that it was the best way to keep our wits on their toes. Our guests have been remarkably good sports, but the transcriptions of our discussions are inevitably a hash of misunderstandings and altercations instead of argument. Of those who understood and agreed the transaction reveals nary a trace.
Transcription note: The handwritten substitutions on page 3 are incorporated: ‘the consensus’ replaces ‘it’, and ‘trace’ replaces ‘word’. ‘Contental’ on page 2 is as typed. Line-break hyphenation and marginal production notes are omitted.
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