diff CR_preface.txt @ 23:0a12a284beb7

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author Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
date Sat, 02 Nov 2024 15:50:09 +0000
parents 28fdea8f3e67
children 7688b405c09f
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+Born December 1949.
+
+After starting a degree at Oberlin in 1967, dropped out without
+completing 3rd year.
+
+Out to BC with Katy in the fall of 1969, back to Cambridge and
+Philadelphia to see respective families.
+
+Had to get out of the US (draft), so that winter took over the old job
+of his brother Arnold in an NRC high-energy Physics lab, living with
+Katy and Arnold in an old farmhouse in a posh neighbourhood in Ottawa.
+Very snowy winter, record-breaking, 18 feet?, long driveway and a lot
+of shovelling, piled up to the 2nd floor.  Involve with Ottawa QUaker
+Meeting, a youth group, and a Mennonite youth group.  Stayed through
+the several years.  March 1971, employer partnering with the Univ. of
+Chicago Physics dept and LRL in Berkeley, went there, installed a
+PDP-9 / 15, in a 40-ft Fruehof trailer, moved from Ottawa to Fermi
+Lab, where Brian's office was.  Programmed in machine language (see
+below).  He could 'program like crazy' in the air-conditioned trailer,
+high-volume music in head-phones, but couldn't write English.  Lived
+in a hotel in Hyde ? park.  They owned an Austin Mini bought for $100
+in summer of 1970, working at a Quaker peace conference on Rhinestone
+island in lake near Ottawa.
+
+Katy went out to Berkeley that spring, where the experiment was to
+take place.  Married in June of 1971 at Pendle Hill / Swarthmore, then
+back to Berkeley.  Lived in a back yard house at Telegraph and Shannon
+(?).  Legally a Canadian resident notionally in US on a business trip.
+Experiment ran, wrapped and went back to Ottawa.  He wanted to stay in
+US, they ended up (autumn 1971?  1972?) living with his parents in
+Cambridge, where WCS was by then head of the new Center for the Study
+of World Religions at Harvard.
+
+[Applied to Graduate School at MIT in EECS, started taking some
+courses, but eventually MIT admin said be couldn't be admitted w/o a
+UG degree.]
+
+Interested in being a social inquiry major, in order to study the
+politics of high technology, how we get to transferring to EECS from
+that goal is not clear.
+
+It was very quickly clear that the understanding of computing that the
+social scientists were critiquing was not [Programming in machine
+language] the computing that I know.  So I need to get clear on what
+computing really is, so that I can legitimately critique it.  So I
+thought I had to go into the heart of the beast, as it were.
+
+Terry Winograd provided the friendship and both social and 'official'
+support-structure to allow Brian to start to express himself out loud,
+as it were.  
+
+Saying to Fodor, ref. Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother, that
+"this is not how compilation worked", Fodor was blustery but
+open-minded enough to say "this is your subject area, I'm sure you're
+rightl tell me how it does work".  He and Fodor were friends, but
+later Fodor "curdled".
+
+Dog hanging on to a scented cloth -- sitting at the console of a 360
+and keying in instructinos and debugging by staring at the pattern of
+lights that the console frooze in.
+
+Articulating an understanding of computing that would do justice to his
+intuitive understanding of computing as he had experienced it is the
+theme of all his intellectual work.
+
+"Course on compilers, I had written a compiler, I'd written a tiny OS
+for a PDP-9 running a physics experiment".  Pat Winston sat me down
+and took me through the requirements for a CSEE degree, and decided
+he'd satisfied them all.  But he needed a Batchelor's thesis, so they
+took a paper from a course he'd taken in the autumn, called "Comments
+on Comments", and added some stuff, it got marked and accepted as his
+thesis, so awarded the degree and could actually be enrolled as a
+student under the supervision of Peter Szolovits.
+
+[CSLI not particularly relevant]
+
+[CPSR?]
+
+----------
+Torn between religion and physics as an undergraduate.
+
+MIT, 1974++ MSc thesis _Levels, Layers and Planes_, about
+architectural properties of computer science
+There are no particulars in physics [ref. deiexis discussion, where is
+it]
+WHat drove me out of social inquiry and back to department 6 was
+needing to be back in the practice.  That skill was not somthing that
+people on the outside understood.
+
+Lens on a conical base, watchmakers, with oil and iron filings, that
+allowed you to manifest the data on digital mag tape.  No disks on the
+PDP-9.  That concrete engagement with the computer affected my sense
+of digitality.
+
+I wanted there to be types, not tokens.  Set theory has no constants
+(e.g. pi, e, i), functions, derivatives, intergrals are types in a
+way.  Wanted a KR that didn't depend on token identity (no eq tests in
+the interpreter).
+
+LLP was an attempt to get the things, "kernel facts", of a KRL to be
+types, not tokens (cf *car* and *cdr* vs. differentiation and
+integration), the ontology of the computational.
+
+[HST mentions intergral signs and script deltas] Brian says
+"syncategoramaticity
+
+Promote the eq tests into type tests (in the interpreter).
+
+"You want to arrange the metaphysics so that _everything_ falls out"
+G. Nunberg of BCS
+
+My imagination was arrested by essentially foundational questions
+about ... this stuff.  Not interested in applications, AI as such,
+etc.
+
+Still wanted to know what computing was., remains true up to what's in
+this book, CR.
+
+Something else that makes me feel uncomfortable about CS from the
+outset: Conversation with MM: for you MM science is a form of worship,
+whereas science is a form of theology for me (BCS), so I look to CS
+not just to manifest the glory of God, but also to explain it.
+
+Science should do justice to that.
+
+Being shy around Peter and Butler, something else made me skittish,
+something I needed in order to be at peace: a warmth / humility.  Why
+I was at peace with [John] Haugeland.  [HST: JH wasn't a
+programmer. BCS: Yes, but he programmed [in] Postscript.  BCS: We
+disagreed about typography].
+
+Had a sense with JH that even though he knew a lot more philosophy
+than I did, that we were looking together at relative
+clauses/propositional claims, not that he was scrutinising
+me. [ref. Andee Rubin]
+
+In the book I claim that deferential semantics is the heart of
+intentionality.  "There is more in heaven and on earth than is drempt
+of in your philosophy".  CS is fundamentally an intentional subject
+matter, and that its intentional character has been hidden, and that
+its use of semantics has usurped it for mechanistic purposes.
+
+All semantical vocabulary has been redefined in mechanistic terms:
+"the semantics of X" == "what will happen if X is processed"
+
+Thereby all humility and deference is lost.
+
+[What about Phi vs. Psi, 'full [?] procedural consequence']
+
+If you are interested in _real_ semantics, ... what's a poor boy to
+do?
+
+ 
+
+------------
+Foundations of/Philosophy of Computation
+
+Lisp was 'broken', 2-Lisp was a flawed attempt to fix it, 3-Lisp takes
+us in to new territory.
+
+Don't think you have to be a specialist to read this book.
+
+Effective vs non-Effective is actually new: at the book boundaries,
+project onto the effective [?]
+
+
+