This repository contains selected chapters and photographs from the Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch (1989), published by Intersystems Publications.
Most of McCulloch’s works can be found elsewhere on the internet, but interspersed in the Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch are reflections and anecdotes about McCulloch, written by his friends, not published elsewhere. Due to the bankruptcy of Intersystems Publications, there are roughly only 300 printed copies of the Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch, making these chapters hard to find.
Short Answer: McCulloch, along with Walter Pitts, authored the famous “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” paper that directly inspired the fields of automata theory and artificial intelligence.
Long Answer: McCulloch’s friends thoughtfully describe the type of person he was in the chapters included in this repository. I recommend reading the Introduction to Volume 1 and Chapter 56 of Volume 2, both written by Jerome Y. Lettvin, to get a sense of how McCulloch’s friends viewed him. I also recommend reading McCulloch’s book Embodiments of Mind for an introduction to his academic work.
Short Answer: Pitts was McCulloch's frequent collaborator and coauthor.
Long Answer: I recommend reading this wonderful essay on Pitt’s life written by Neil Smalheiser. Smalheiser’s essay was my own introduction to McCulloch, Pitts, and Cybernetics.
McCulloch is a mysterious character who many, including Marvin Minsky, credit with creating the intellectual foundations of artificial intelligence. McCulloch and Pitts were the first people to create a neurocomputational model of intelligence, albeit a wrong one, and their work has had widespread impacts on computer science, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. The fact that these chapters were previously not available on the internet seems unfair to McCulloch’s legacy.
