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| author | Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk> |
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| date | Sat, 23 Nov 2024 10:18:57 +0000 |
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| 16 | 1 Born December 1949. |
| 2 | |
| 15 | 3 After starting a degree at Oberlin in 1967, dropped out without |
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4 completing 3rd year. Torn between religion and physics as an |
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5 undergraduate. |
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6 |
| 16 | 7 |
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8 Out to BC with Katy Tolles (Father Frederick Barnes Tolles, |
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9 Philadelphia Quaker / historian) in the fall of 1969, visited Argenta, |
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10 a Quaker settlement in Argenta BC, back to Cambridge and Philadelphia |
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11 to see respective families. |
| 16 | 12 |
| 13 Had to get out of the US (draft), so that winter took over the old job | |
| 14 of his brother Arnold in an NRC high-energy Physics lab, living with | |
| 15 Katy and Arnold in an old farmhouse in a posh neighbourhood in Ottawa. | |
| 16 Very snowy winter, record-breaking, 18 feet?, long driveway and a lot | |
| 17 of shovelling, piled up to the 2nd floor. Involve with Ottawa QUaker | |
| 18 Meeting, a youth group, and a Mennonite youth group. Stayed through | |
| 19 the several years. March 1971, employer partnering with the Univ. of | |
| 20 Chicago Physics dept and LRL in Berkeley, went there, installed a | |
| 21 PDP-9 / 15, in a 40-ft Fruehof trailer, moved from Ottawa to Fermi | |
| 22 Lab, where Brian's office was. Programmed in machine language (see | |
| 23 below). He could 'program like crazy' in the air-conditioned trailer, | |
| 24 high-volume music in head-phones, but couldn't write English. Lived | |
| 25 in a hotel in Hyde ? park. They owned an Austin Mini bought for $100 | |
| 26 in summer of 1970, working at a Quaker peace conference on Rhinestone | |
| 27 island in lake near Ottawa. | |
| 15 | 28 |
| 16 | 29 Katy went out to Berkeley that spring, where the experiment was to |
| 30 take place. Married in June of 1971 at Pendle Hill / Swarthmore, then | |
| 31 back to Berkeley. Lived in a back yard house at Telegraph and Shannon | |
| 32 (?). Legally a Canadian resident notionally in US on a business trip. | |
| 33 Experiment ran, wrapped and went back to Ottawa. He wanted to stay in | |
| 34 US, they ended up (autumn 1971? 1972?) living with his parents in | |
| 35 Cambridge, where WCS was by then head of the new Center for the Study | |
| 36 of World Religions at Harvard. | |
| 37 | |
| 17 | 38 [Applied to Graduate School at MIT in EECS, started taking some |
| 16 | 39 courses, but eventually MIT admin said be couldn't be admitted w/o a |
| 17 | 40 UG degree.] |
| 41 | |
| 42 Interested in being a social inquiry major, in order to study the | |
| 43 politics of high technology, how we get to transferring to EECS from | |
| 44 that goal is not clear. | |
| 45 | |
| 46 It was very quickly clear that the understanding of computing that the | |
| 47 social scientists were critiquing was not [Programming in machine | |
| 48 language] the computing that I know. So I need to get clear on what | |
| 49 computing really is, so that I can legitimately critique it. So I | |
| 50 thought I had to go into the heart of the beast, as it were. | |
| 51 | |
| 52 Terry Winograd provided the friendship and both social and 'official' | |
| 53 support-structure to allow Brian to start to express himself out loud, | |
| 54 as it were. | |
| 55 | |
| 56 Saying to Fodor, ref. Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother, that | |
| 57 "this is not how compilation worked", Fodor was blustery but | |
| 58 open-minded enough to say "this is your subject area, I'm sure you're | |
| 59 rightl tell me how it does work". He and Fodor were friends, but | |
| 60 later Fodor "curdled". | |
| 61 | |
| 62 Dog hanging on to a scented cloth -- sitting at the console of a 360 | |
| 63 and keying in instructinos and debugging by staring at the pattern of | |
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64 lights that the console froze in. |
| 17 | 65 |
| 66 Articulating an understanding of computing that would do justice to his | |
| 67 intuitive understanding of computing as he had experienced it is the | |
| 68 theme of all his intellectual work. | |
| 16 | 69 |
| 70 "Course on compilers, I had written a compiler, I'd written a tiny OS | |
| 71 for a PDP-9 running a physics experiment". Pat Winston sat me down | |
| 72 and took me through the requirements for a CSEE degree, and decided | |
| 73 he'd satisfied them all. But he needed a Batchelor's thesis, so they | |
| 74 took a paper from a course he'd taken in the autumn, called "Comments | |
| 75 on Comments", and added some stuff, it got marked and accepted as his | |
| 76 thesis, so awarded the degree and could actually be enrolled as a | |
| 17 | 77 student under the supervision of Peter Szolovits. |
| 78 | |
| 79 [CSLI not particularly relevant] | |
| 16 | 80 |
| 17 | 81 [CPSR?] |
| 82 | |
| 19 | 83 ---------- |
| 84 MIT, 1974++ MSc thesis _Levels, Layers and Planes_, about | |
| 85 architectural properties of computer science | |
| 86 There are no particulars in physics [ref. deiexis discussion, where is | |
| 87 it] | |
| 54 | 88 What drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was |
| 19 | 89 needing to be back in the practice. That skill was not somthing that |
| 90 people on the outside understood. | |
| 91 | |
| 92 Lens on a conical base, watchmakers, with oil and iron filings, that | |
| 93 allowed you to manifest the data on digital mag tape. No disks on the | |
| 94 PDP-9. That concrete engagement with the computer affected my sense | |
| 95 of digitality. | |
| 96 | |
| 97 I wanted there to be types, not tokens. Set theory has no constants | |
| 98 (e.g. pi, e, i), functions, derivatives, intergrals are types in a | |
| 99 way. Wanted a KR that didn't depend on token identity (no eq tests in | |
| 100 the interpreter). | |
| 101 | |
| 102 LLP was an attempt to get the things, "kernel facts", of a KRL to be | |
| 103 types, not tokens (cf *car* and *cdr* vs. differentiation and | |
| 104 integration), the ontology of the computational. | |
| 105 | |
| 106 [HST mentions intergral signs and script deltas] Brian says | |
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107 "syncategoramaticity" |
| 19 | 108 |
| 109 Promote the eq tests into type tests (in the interpreter). | |
| 110 | |
| 111 "You want to arrange the metaphysics so that _everything_ falls out" | |
| 112 G. Nunberg of BCS | |
| 113 | |
| 114 My imagination was arrested by essentially foundational questions | |
| 115 about ... this stuff. Not interested in applications, AI as such, | |
| 116 etc. | |
| 117 | |
| 118 Still wanted to know what computing was., remains true up to what's in | |
| 119 this book, CR. | |
| 20 | 120 |
| 121 Something else that makes me feel uncomfortable about CS from the | |
| 122 outset: Conversation with MM: for you MM science is a form of worship, | |
| 123 whereas science is a form of theology for me (BCS), so I look to CS | |
| 124 not just to manifest the glory of God, but also to explain it. | |
| 125 | |
| 126 Science should do justice to that. | |
| 127 | |
| 128 Being shy around Peter and Butler, something else made me skittish, | |
| 129 something I needed in order to be at peace: a warmth / humility. Why | |
| 130 I was at peace with [John] Haugeland. [HST: JH wasn't a | |
| 131 programmer. BCS: Yes, but he programmed [in] Postscript. BCS: We | |
| 132 disagreed about typography]. | |
| 133 | |
| 134 Had a sense with JH that even though he knew a lot more philosophy | |
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135 than I did, that we were looking _together_ at relative |
| 20 | 136 clauses/propositional claims, not that he was scrutinising |
| 137 me. [ref. Andee Rubin] | |
| 138 | |
| 139 In the book I claim that deferential semantics is the heart of | |
| 140 intentionality. "There is more in heaven and on earth than is drempt | |
| 141 of in your philosophy". CS is fundamentally an intentional subject | |
| 142 matter, and that its intentional character has been hidden, and that | |
| 143 its use of semantics has usurped it for mechanistic purposes. | |
| 144 | |
| 145 All semantical vocabulary has been redefined in mechanistic terms: | |
| 146 "the semantics of X" == "what will happen if X is processed" | |
| 147 | |
| 148 Thereby all humility and deference is lost. | |
| 149 | |
| 150 [What about Phi vs. Psi, 'full [?] procedural consequence'] | |
| 151 | |
| 152 If you are interested in _real_ semantics, ... what's a poor boy to | |
| 153 do? | |
| 154 | |
| 24 | 155 Semantical issues are non-the-less still in the drivers seat---we are |
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156 happy when (+ 2 3) yields 5 because of our awareness of them. |
| 24 | 157 |
| 158 Tracing the fate of those issues, and the vocabulary, are stories that | |
| 159 need told. | |
| 160 | |
| 161 "Things have changed and now we do things differently." What's | |
| 162 changed and how is it different? | |
| 20 | 163 |
| 24 | 164 Answer - the SDK would [be wanted to] track reference relations, not |
| 165 just implementation relations. But that's so complicated that it | |
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166 couldn't possibly work. Suppose you're defining a vector type |
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167 accessible via theta and rho or x and y. Setting x and rho |
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168 constrains. Compiler can ignore this, and just keep one or the |
| 24 | 169 other, but the type system should 'know' the relationship of both, and |
| 170 could therefore track a lot more about a program using vectors than it | |
| 171 does at the moment. | |
| 172 | |
| 173 [HST poses a story about astronomers and air traffic controllers?] | |
| 174 | |
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175 Problem solving is not the motivation, articulating what is the case |
| 24 | 176 is, to say what's true. |
| 177 | |
| 178 The effect of PSI is everything that happens, and the PHI relations | |
| 179 are what matters. All constraints, norms, requirements are expressed | |
| 180 in terms of PHI stuff. | |
| 181 | |
| 182 What does this book say that requirements engineering etc. haven't | |
| 183 already | |
| 184 | |
| 185 [HST what about program correctness, specification languages ? etc.] | |
| 186 | |
| 187 [Chapter 7?] | |
| 30 | 188 |
| 189 The gap between computer science and and programming practice is | |
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190 well-known and embarrassing but rarely foregrounded. |
| 30 | 191 |
| 192 The vocabulary point is easy to state. | |
| 193 | |
| 194 Barwise foundered on different understandings of binding a variable. | |
| 195 | |
| 196 That the vocabulary issue is of huge importance needs "a clarion | |
| 197 statement". This is foundational work, so I can't define my terms. | |
| 198 | |
| 199 "I don't believe in definitions" | |
| 200 | |
| 201 "Look, this kind of paper that I write should be read more like novel | |
| 202 than like a manual. What things mean will gradually take shape" | |
| 203 | |
| 204 Engender confidence that what you're about to read will make sense by | |
| 205 the end/in due course/by-and-by. | |
| 206 | |
| 207 Vocabulary point is several points: | |
| 208 1) Points will be expressed using a vocabulary which is a term | |
| 209 of art for someone/drawn from someone's technical vocabulary, perhaps not you | |
| 210 2) Also, not necessarily the term of art you use for it; | |
| 211 Indeed it may be an ordinary word of English, so you may not | |
| 212 realise that a term of art has gone by. | |
| 213 3) There may not be terms in _any_ technical vocabulary that do what | |
| 214 I need here | |
| 215 | |
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216 Taking on their meaning like a polaroid did, fill in gradually. |
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217 |
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218 Consider 'effective': boundary (with non-..) is run roughshod over by |
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219 |
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220 "Call this state 'zero'" naming with an abstract type a concrete token. |
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221 |
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222 [Argh, not really right] |
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223 |
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224 When classifying these things with labels that respect/front their |
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225 ontological character |
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226 |
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227 If trying to teach this stuff, it would be useful to know that we had |
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228 14 weeks, and on day 1 you can say we'll get to that in week 3. |
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229 |
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230 A book on the philosophy of computation, not by a philosopher, but by |
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231 a practioner who was driven to spending their life trying to |
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232 understand what they practiced. |
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233 |
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234 Come hither, one and all |
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235 |
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236 That this is important needs to be said. And it's not about _me_, |
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237 that is, it's not important because I say it is. But that it's |
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238 important to you does mean that that claim deserves our attention. |
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239 |
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240 A delicate dance -- why have I asked you [HST] to write this, not |
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241 someone else. Because you were there from the beginning. |
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242 |
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243 NB on p. 24 of CR 0.93: |
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244 |
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245 Inevitably, as noted in the Preface, it follows that all statements |
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246 made here are vulnerable to being differentially interpreted by |
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247 diverse audiences—even those to which the book is primarily |
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248 addressed. |
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249 |
| 18 | 250 ------------ |
| 251 Foundations of/Philosophy of Computation | |
| 252 | |
| 253 Lisp was 'broken', 2-Lisp was a flawed attempt to fix it, 3-Lisp takes | |
| 254 us in to new territory. | |
| 255 | |
| 256 Don't think you have to be a specialist to read this book. | |
| 257 | |
| 258 Effective vs non-Effective is actually new: at the book boundaries, | |
| 24 | 259 project onto the effective [? - it's not that everything is |
| 260 term-rewriting, it's more like ]. | |
| 17 | 261 |
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262 ------------------- |
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263 |
| 54 | 264 On first reading, before even finishing the introduction, I asked |
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265 Brian what "effective" meant, since it seemed very important, and |
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266 appeared to be being used in some technical sense, and it was not |
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267 immediately obvious to me how that related to my understanding(s) of |
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268 the word as used in ordinary language. |
| 17 | 269 |
| 18 | 270 |
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271 ------------ |
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272 *Foreword* |
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273 |
| 47 | 274 Brian Cantwell Smith was born in Montreal, Canada, on 1 December 1949. |
| 275 Growing up first there and later in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he | |
| 276 remains a Canadian citizen. Multiple allegiances, sometimes | |
| 277 conflicting but mostly complementary, have characterized both his | |
| 278 personal and intellectual life ever since. | |
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279 |
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280 He started undergraduate study at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1967, |
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281 where his interests included both physics and religion but left after |
| 54 | 282 only two years, travelling first to visit the Quaker community |
| 283 Argenta, British Columbia, and ending up in Ottawa where he started | |
| 284 work as a programmer at the Division of Physics laboratory of the | |
| 285 National Research Council of Canada, working on a project jointly | |
| 286 involving Fermilab in Chicago and the Lawrence Research Laboratory in | |
| 287 Berkeley. Working at all three sites on PDP 9 and PDP 15 | |
| 288 microcomputers, he "programmed like crazy" in machine language, | |
| 289 building systems for experimental control and data gathering. | |
| 290 | |
| 291 When the project ended Brian moved back to the family home in | |
| 292 Cambridge, and started taking classes at the Massachusetts Institute | |
| 293 of Technology (MIT), studying what was then known as Social Inquiry, | |
| 294 in particular the politics of high technology. But it quickly became | |
| 295 apparent that the understanding of computing that the social | |
| 47 | 296 scientists were critiquing was not the computing that he knew as a |
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297 programmer, what he later came to refer to as "computing in the wild". |
| 54 | 298 |
| 299 "What drove me out of Social Inquiry and back to [Computer Science] was | |
| 300 needing to be back in the practice. That skill was not somthing that | |
| 301 people on the outside understood." | |
| 302 | |
| 303 Brian had realised that in order to legitimately critique Computer | |
| 304 Science, he needed to get clear on what computing really is: "I had to | |
| 305 go into the heart of the beast, as it were". So he applied for the PhD | |
| 306 program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and | |
| 307 began taking classes there. | |
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308 |
| 49 | 309 When the MIT administration discovered Brian didn't have an |
| 54 | 310 undergraduate degree, and so couldn't be registered for graduate |
| 311 study, Patrick Winston, the newly-appointed head of the Artificial | |
| 312 Intelligence Laboratory, gave Brian an informal oral exam in topics | |
| 313 from the MIT undergraduate computer science curriculum and awarded him | |
| 314 the credits necessary for a degree, clearing the way for his admission | |
| 315 to the graduate program. | |
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316 |
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317 In 1976 Terry Winograd, who had left MIT to join the Computer Science |
| 49 | 318 Lab at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), invited Brian to |
| 48 | 319 spend the summer in the Understander Group there, where he joined in |
| 320 the development of KRL, a Knowledge Representation Language, which | |
| 47 | 321 came to embody some of the ideas that were developed in his Masters |
| 54 | 322 and PhD dissertations [refs]. |
| 48 | 323 |
| 49 | 324 These biographical details bring us to the brink of Brian's |
| 325 professional life, and to the time and place where we first met. The | |
| 326 point made above about multiple allegiances can be succinctly | |
| 327 summarized by a list of the positions he has occupied since the | |
| 328 completion of his PhD a few years later: | |
| 329 | |
| 54 | 330 * Member of the Scientific Staff, Xerox PARC |
| 49 | 331 * Director, Xerox PARC System Sciences Lab |
| 332 * Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University | |
| 333 * Founding member of Stanford University's Center for the Study of | |
| 334 Language and Information | |
| 335 * Founding member and first president, Computer Professionals for | |
| 336 Social Responsibility | |
| 54 | 337 * President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology |
| 338 * Professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Philosophy, | |
| 339 Indiana University | |
| 340 * Kimberly J. Jenkins University Distinguished Professor of | |
| 341 Philosophy and New Technologies, Duke University | |
| 342 * Dean of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto | |
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343 * Invited keynote speaker, _Défaire l'Occident_, Plainartige, France |
| 49 | 344 * Professor of Information, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the |
| 345 History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of | |
| 346 Toronto | |
| 347 * Senior Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto | |
| 348 * Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human, | |
| 349 University of Toronto | |
| 350 | |
| 54 | 351 It was during Brian's years in Palo Alto at PARC, at first just for |
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352 the summer and then full-time, that the foundations were laid for the |
| 54 | 353 work that led to this book. |
| 354 | |
| 355 "As an exercise in using KRL representational structures, Brian | |
| 356 Smith tried to describe the KRL data structures themselves in | |
| 357 KRL-0. A brief sketch was completed, and in doing it we were made | |
| 358 much more aware of the ways in which the language was inconsistent | |
| 359 and irregular. This initial sketch was the basis for much of the | |
| 360 development in KRL-1." [ref. Bobrow and Winograd 1978, "Experience | |
| 361 with KRL-O: One Cycle of a Knowledge Representation Language", in | |
| 362 _Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference on | |
| 363 Artificial Intelligence_, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington, | |
| 364 MA. Available online at | |
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365 https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/77-1/Papers/032.pdf]. |
| 54 | 366 |
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367 Brian's input into the (never completed) KRL-1 meant that not only |
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368 could some parts of a system's data be _about_ other parts, but that |
| 54 | 369 this would be more than just commentary. It would actually play a role |
| 370 in the system's operation. For KRL-1, this was initially motivated by | |
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371 a desire to formulate aspects of knowledge representation such as |
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372 negation and disjunction as, if you will, knowledge about knowledge, |
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373 rather than as primitives built into the vocabulary of the |
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374 representation language itself. [elaborate this with reference to |
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375 old-style Semantic Nets and Bobrow and Norman ?] |
| 49 | 376 |
| 54 | 377 Brian's development of this idea, which he termed 'reflection', is |
| 378 documented in the papers gathered in _Legacy_. But its title | |
| 379 notwithstanding, this book is _not_ a recapitulation of that work. | |
| 380 | |
| 381 There was an assumption at the heart of Brian's reflective | |
| 382 architectures, which was initially expected to occupy just one section | |
| 383 of one chapter of his PhD, as signalled in its preliminary outline | |
| 384 Table of Contents. But its resolution proved to be much more | |
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385 problematic than expected, to the extent that it has taken |
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386 a lifetime of work for Brian to bring it clearly into focus. |
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387 |
| 54 | 388 Looking back it seems that this difficulty acted rather like the grit |
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389 in the oyster, stimulating Brian's wholesale reconsideration of the |
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390 nature of computation, and Computer Science as currently practiced, |
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391 which _is_ what this book is about. |
| 54 | 392 |
| 393 You'll have to read the book to find out what that assumption was, and | |
| 394 the details of the critique of Computer Science that it led Brian to. | |
| 395 | |
| 396 It may seem rather presumptuous of me to suggest that this one person | |
| 397 has accurately diagnosed a problem that a whole field of enquiry has | |
| 398 missed, to the point where they've ended up altogether stuck, unable | |
| 399 to see what they've missed. The point of the list offered above of | |
| 400 Brian's achievements and the manifest breadth of his background it | |
| 401 testifies to will I hope give sufficient grounds for suggesting that | |
| 402 it is at least possible that this indeed just might be worth checking | |
| 403 out. | |
| 404 | |
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405 As Brian himself said about this recently "That this is important |
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406 needs to be said. And it's not about _me_, that is, it's not |
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407 important because I say it is." That it's important to him does |
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408 however mean that his claim deserves our attention. |
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409 |
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410 This is not an easy book to read, but it's a very important book, so |
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411 it's worth the effort. As Brian himself has said, it's written rather |
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412 like a detective story, in which the same underlying set of facts is |
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413 explored repeatedly, getting closer each time to a complete and |
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414 self-consistent picture. When I first read it, I said to Brian more |
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415 than once "But you keeping using [some term], and it's clear you mean |
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416 it in some important, technical, sense, but you haven't _defined_ it". |
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417 And he said, "Look, what I've writen should be read more like novel |
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418 than like a manual. What things mean will gradually take shape. Be |
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419 patient". |
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420 |
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421 If you care about computer science, either as a practioner, or a |
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422 theorist, or a concerned citizen, this book matters for you. It's |
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423 conclusions matter, even if parts of it are not meant for you. So |
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424 even if you find it hard, as a computer programmer, to see why you |
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425 should care if the theorists have got it wrong, be patient. If you're |
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426 a theorist, and you find Brian's critique at best irrelevant, and at |
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427 worst aggresive, obnoxius and founded in misunderstanding, be patient. |
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428 If you're a citizen, and the technical details are off-putting, be |
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429 patient. |
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430 |
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431 If you _are_ patient, and stay the course, when you get to the end you |
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432 will realise that you actually do understand the terminology now, and |
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433 that even though the work that remains is hugely challenging, and |
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434 perhaps only imperfectly grasped by Brian himself, much less the rest |
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435 of us, getting it done matters for all of us. As practioners and |
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436 theorists, we need to ask ourselves what we can do to make Brian's |
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437 vision a reality. As citizens, we need to cheer from the sidelines, |
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438 and keep asking questions. We owe him that much. |
| 55 | 439 |
| 440 Henry S. Thompson, Toronto and Edinburgh, November 2024. | |
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441 |
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442 *Epigraph* |
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443 |
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444 Therefore, I close with the following dramatic but also perfectly |
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445 serious claim: cognitive science and artificial intelligence cannot |
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446 succeed in their own essential aims unless and until they can |
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447 understand and/or implement genuine freedom and the capacity to |
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448 love. |
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449 |
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450 John Haugeland, "Authentic Intentionality", 2002 |