No scholar-representative from economics or political science would ever attend any of the 10 conferences.

This establishes a dichotomy between 'analogical' and 'digital' which would become a recurrent topic of debate throughout the conferences. Some (especially the mathematicians like von Neumann) would be emphasizing 'digital' perspectives, while others (especially the psychologists) would be emphasizing a more 'analogical' orientation.

This allusion to the need for a 'meta-language' would be repeated again and again throughout the conference series. Fremont-Smith would open each conference with a reminder that it was necessary to establish a new lexicon or language for the new ideas being discussed.

Such (often critical and animated) discussion on psychiatric issues and models would recur throughout the conference series. Kubie in particular would demonstrate remarkable persistence and patience in making regular presentations on psychoanalytical topics which would invite criticism from the 'hard scientists' like Pitts.

Northrop's appearance illustrates three things. First, not all participants' contributions were treated with equal interest by the group at large. Second, not all core group members actively contributed presentations throughout the conference series. Third, although some would treat the Macy Conferences as 'philosophical' and as an 'exercise in metascience', Northrop's experience would seem to indicate neither of these themes struck a chord with the audience at large.

This proposal (which was acted on) reinforces some scholars' opinion that the essence of the Macy Conferences was to impart the new ideas to a primarily social science audience.

The participants found the inaugural conference sufficiently enlightening and interesting to motivate a commitment to attend further such conferences.

These first additions to the core group increase the already-disproportionate representation of psychologists among the conference attendees.

This is one of the rare occasions where psychological or behavioral issues were contextualized in terms of a collective (as contrasted with individuals).

The 2nd conference should therefore be seen as the central event in a trio of meetings. The earlier 'sociological subconference' and this latter conference serve to expand the audience for the Macy Conferences' core themes outside the context of the main conference itself.

This illustrates the extent to which (a) there was occasional individual trepidations about the topical and procedural foci of the conference series as well as (b) there were a lot of back-channel communications concerning the conduct of the conferences.

This is the first important instance in which von Neumann acts not only on his own initiative, but with regard to his own personal topical interests. In retrospect, von Neumann would later be characterized (e.g., by von Foerster) as something of an 'insider' (member of the core group) who operated more like an 'outsider' (i.e., someone pursuing his own agenda tangential to that of the collective).

This illustrates that the Macy Conference audience was, after all, a collection of people, each with his or her own personal commitments and attachments. The social network of these commitments and attachments would influence the conferences in many ways - including selection of new invitees and the departure of some people along the way.

This anecdote (cited in multiple of von Foerster's documented reminiscences) illustrates how concise circumscription of the conference's subject matter under a discrete label had not theretofore been given much attention. More generally, it's indicative of the inattention given to portraying the conference's themes as a discernible field in and of itself.

This illustrates multiple points. First, Fremont-Smith (as mentioned earlier) was very interested in these conferences serving as the birthplace for a truly multidisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) field (or metascience). Second, as of halfway through the eventual series, there was little evidence this was occurring. Third, it illustrates that Fremont-Smith was growing increasingly concerned at the extent to which the attendees continued to engage each other in terms of their respective disciplinary perspectives.

At the 5th conference there was a block of time invested in presentations on human language. This time around, the theme wasn't so much language in and of itself, but rather how human language intersected with the features relevant to (e.g.) Shannon's information theory. In this regard, it's important to note that this 7th conference was the first of three that Shannon himself would attend.

This illustrates two points. The first was that no amount of criticism from the 'hard science' contingent (especially Pitts) would dissuade Kubie from presenting psychoanalytical issues at the conferences. The second was that some people from the 'soft science' contingent (in this case Bateson) also had problems accepting psychoanalytic theory or terminology as sufficiently clear or rigorous.

Gerard had served as a recurrent gadfly during the conferences (cf. his repeated observations on the 'analogical versus digital' distinction). This marked the first time anyone had pointed to the manenr in which these conferences' subject matter and participants were being externally viewed and treated as a cohesive group with a coherent agenda. His remarks were motivated in large part by articles in the popular press (e.g., Time) that were characterizing this 'cybernetics group' as the vanguard of an imminent fusion of man and machine. His remarks about mathematical modeling and empiricism are also interesting, because they mark the first recognition of the risks inherent in relying only on abstract models as the entirety of their methodology.

This illustrates how little progress had been made in response to Klüver's original challenge to the 1st conference to explain 'Gestalten'. Although the group had gone out of their way to invite Köhler so as to resolve such issues, that had ended up being a disruption rather than an illumination. It also highlights the fact that in between the engineering of artifical neural models and the fuzzy subject of psychoanalysis was a middle ground of experimental and comparative psychology which had been underrepresented and little noted during the conferences to date.

This debate is interesting in the sense that what MacKay was proposing can be seen as the basis for exploration, adaptation, and learning. Given the prominence that learning and education would achieve in later decades (e.g., the work of Gordon Pask), it's ironic that 'learning in systems' would be such a rare subject of discussion in the Macy Conferences.

Bavelas' presentation is interesting because it illustrates how the Macy Conferences influenced the thinking and methods among some of the 'soft science' participants. This case illustrates Bavelas' drift toward concise and abstract theoretical elements (a la information theory) and away from the positions he'd held when he first appeared at the 5th conference. When he arrived, he could be characterized as an adherent of Lewin and Köhler's Gestalt approach. By this time, he'd begun to jettison some of the more 'fuzzy' descriptive concepts and make an effort to adopt more rigorous constructs.

This illustrates that even at this late date the conferences continued to engender stimulating and multi-faceted conversations.

The inconclusive discussion that followed Richards' presentation includes the only known allusion to Gödel's incompleteness theorem in the entire Macy series. Given the mathematical expertise present in the conferences and the subsequent prominence of Gödel's theorem in critiques of artificial intelligence, this is something of a surprise.

These three factoids provide evidence of something that had permeated the entire conference series - a persistent critique from the 'hard science' contingent against fuzzy descriptions based on vague 'mentalist' constructs. This in turn illustrates why the participants interested in cognitive 'content' (cf. Klüver's persistent allusions to Gestalten) were always at a disadvantage in putting such topics before the group.

Ironically, this means the 'hardcore' cyberneticians were in the position of arguing their case from an internalist or mentalist perspective - the same position for which they'd been castigating the psychiatrists for years. It's also ironic in the sense that such critiques had for years stifled attention to the subject of 'learning' - the very point upon which they challenged Ashby.

This illustrates a drift similar to Bavelas (cf. 8th conference notes), but one more like a defensive reaction rather than a positive adaptation based on past discussions.

Quastler's presentation apparently didn't generate a lot of discussion or enthusiasm. Interestingly, the notion of quantifying 'complexity' would serve as the seed for 'complexity studies' - one of the many alleged latter-day successors to cybernetics.

Dupuy (2000) cites this as a specific illustration of cybernetics' problem with managing non-specialists' and public perceptions of the usually very specific concepts and constructs the group generally addressed. In this case, Bigelow was warning the non-specialist participants that they were uncritically accepting some of the 'hard science' contingent's products without understanding the limits of their significance. This also relates to Gerard's earlier comments warning of overinflated expectations among the public.

This incident is a poignant event, in that at the time it seemed to indicate one of the project streams feeding the Macy Conferences had in fact turned out to be a dead end.

As chairperson for all 10 Macy Conferences, McCulloch no doubt desired to portray the series as having produced something. His concession of what can only be called a social networking outcome illustrates how the Macy Conferences could not even then be construed as having produced a unified theory or meta-discipline of the sort to which Fremont-Smith had aspired.