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 [?]