Debbie and I ran up to Skyline here in the Los Gatos/Santa Cruz mountains to watch the Solar Eclipse. We were are little too far south to get the show that was seen further north, but it was a fun drive and we danced in the road to John Lee Hooker. Debbie took the following picture, she is very excited because, she claims, she captured the Solar Eclipse is in my eyes.

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My doctoral thesis "Process Interaction Models" is still relevant to current parallel computing, especially given the resurgence of interest in recent years because of multi-core and many-core architectures. The work is a development from my work and experience with Occam, the Transputer and Linda, at INMOS in Bristol and at Yale University. It contains an interesting historical account of some of the technical challenges we encountered during the first wave of interest in parallel computing, lessons that anyone doing parallel programming today needs to be aware of.

The book is now available to a wider audience and can be purchased through Amazon in the USA and now in Europe. The book is also available through regular channels such as bookstores, libraries and regular academic sources.

If you subscribe to IASE Access then I can send you a discount code that will give you a substantial discount. I also have a few copies that I can send out free to professional journal reviewers. Send me a note.

You can peek inside the book on Amazon.

Of course, I am now working on an entirely new approach to parallel computation, but while I continue to work on those details, in the meantime I hope that people will find this book useful.

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I gave my talk "Logic and computation as biophysics" yesterday. Here is a picture of me making the presentation. I have an imperfect recording of the presentation that will be made available through IASE. If you are interested in access to the recording request that access through me.

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Yesterday I had the great pleasure to introduce Jack Copeland at Stanford University. Here is the video of his talk and the transcript of my introduction.

INTRODUCTION TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to EE380. Stanford is a research institution for higher learning for which the facts of the matter dominate taboos and opinions. Considering the facts, it is my opinion that without Alan Turing Stanford University, Silicon Valley, and the world would be a very different place.

The advance of our species in the past 200 years of the industrial revolution is marked by our increasing mastery of machines and the enslavement of the population to its cause.

Inspired by the mechanisms of perforated cards invented by Joeseph Jacquard and the later work of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing formalized the concept of the "universal machine" and enabled the development of modern computing machinery.

In the lost war against tyranny Turing gave his life selflessly to an ungrateful and intollerant society. He cracked the Enigma code and thus enabled the British Isles to overcome the German U-Boat blockade that held Britain hostage. His contribution shortened the war against Hitler and helped to ensure its victory. It is difficult to consider Alan Turing's contributions without taking these broader matters into account.

Turing was the first computational biologist, the father of what later became Artificial Intelligence, and he was a modern philosopher of the mind. We are left to wonder what he would have made of all that followed had he lived. ...

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I will be giving an invited talk at the Stanford University Mathematical Logic Seminars on May 8th, speaking about my approach to logic and computation. Because of the context and time constraints the presentation will be absent any historical context or biophysical data (although I may introduce these if there is time at the end). The presentation moves quickly to the mathematics.

This is the first time that I am publicly discussing the mathematics that I have been pursuing ... so wish me luck.

Here is the abstract for my talk:

ABSTRACT

The elusive mechanics of natural logic is by definition the mechanics of biophysics, describing how sense is characterized and how the biophysical structure is moved from apprehension to action. I will argue that this mechanics is fundamental to the inquiry of logic, determining the natural laws of logic, and that it is time for logicians to return to these foundational issues as theoretical biophysics, a field in which a wealth of new data promises to inform us.

I present the current state of my inquiry: a new logic and model of computation based upon the function of flexible closed manifolds describing how sense is characterized, symbolic processing, and covariant response potentials, the analogs of biophysical cells and multicellular membranes and their associated mechanics. The mathematization of this approach formally requires a unification of logic and geometry. I will present steps toward the specification of such a logic and its geometric implementation in dynamic structure designed to enable the explanation and reproduction of biophysical function. And I will speak to the predictions of the theory concerning the mechanisms that remain to be discovered.

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Alan Turing is denied a pardon by the UK Government on the basis solely that he knew he was breaking the law at the time. 

Let me inform both the UK Government and my American friends, who may actually have an excuse for not knowing the details, about this law as it was at the time. It's a law that I was active against as a younger man. I was a political activist in my mid-teens. Believe it or not, at 15 I was the Chairman of the Hounslow Borough Young Liberals. Hounslow is a Borough of London, England. Peter Hain, the well-known anti-apartheid activist and now Labor MP, was the Chair of the national Young Liberals at the time.

I retired from activism when I became aware that politics is futile. I was 19. While I maintain an active disinterest in "politics," I do have a very active interest in political theory.

In any case, one of my favorite campaigns was in support of the "Gay Liberation Front." That movement managed to remove the questionable law that Alan Turing knowingly violated. And yes, I marched in support of the movement.

Let us ignore, for just a moment, the moral climate at the time concerning the acts and sexual preferences of Alan Turing. The moral dilemma is complicated. There remains a significant portion of the population who consider homosexuality immoral and if they had their way many of them would chemically castrate homosexuals on the basis that such castration is, in some sense, a "treatment" for this "condition." 

And that is, in fact, precisely what the UK Government did to Alan Turing in 1952. As a part of his punishment for being homosexual they chemically castrated him. He became depressed, started to grow breasts, and ultimately committed suicide.

Which act is immoral? Alan Turing's sexual preference or enforced chemical castration? If there is a moral question here then surely it is the UK Government that is answerable.

Let's ignore, for just a moment, contemporary moral questions. Let's ask the question from the point of view of simple justice.

In 1952 it was illegal for men to be homosexual. It has never been illegal for women to be homosexual in the UK. The law was not equitable and on this basis alone all prosecuted under it must be pardoned.

Why? Why was it illegal for men to maintain homosexual relations and not women?

Well, when Queen Victoria was presented with the original draft of the Bill that made homosexuality illegal in the UK she responded, "Ladies don't do that sort of thing." That's it.

It is this law, an unequitable and unjust law that Alan Turing broke. Of course, he knew that he was breaking it. He knew that the law was unjust. It was a "silly law," to use the parlance of the time.

The announcement this week lacks any insight into the human condition and reveals the mentality of Governement in the UK. It is the language of tyranny seeking to justify the right of Government to assert what is right and demand the obedience of the people.

• New York Times Report
• Guardian Report

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As most of you know, I do not celebrate Xmas. People often ask me why. I say "I'm not a Christian" and they often respond, "What's that got to do with it?" Which is, frankly, as disappointing as having the question asked in the first place.

You will also know that I lament the failure of compassion in our society. So here is my wish this weekend. My wish is that the good and compassionate sentiments that I see among my friends on this day, for whatever reason, be not isolated to this day or this time of year. But that compassion be rediscovered by you all in every new day henceforth - and by this, that when you are in need of compassion that you shall find it in abundance.

My love to you all, not just today or for this season, but everyday ...

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After a meeting today between the Chair of the Stanford University Mathematics Department, Steve Kerckhoff, Sol Feferman, Whitfield Diffie and myself, I am pleased to announce that the Stanford University Mathematics Department will be one of the sponsors of "Challenging Turing 2012" and that Sol Feferman will join the committee, Chair a part of the program and help us to strenghten the program committee.

More sponsorship news soon.

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On October 5th on Peirce-L Eugene Halton reprimanded Charles Sanders Peirce for making the following statement in a letter to Victoria Welby in 1908:

“Being a convinced Pragmaticist in Semeiotic, naturally and necessarily nothing can appear to me sillier than rationalism; and folly in politics cannot go further than English liberalism. The people ought to be enslaved; only the slaveholders ought to practice the virtues that can alone maintain their rule. England will find out too late that it has sapped the foundations of culture. The most perfect language that ever was spoken was classical Greek; and it is obvious that no people could have spoken it who were not provided with plenty of intelligent slaves. As to us Americans who had, at first, so much political sense, we always showed a disposition to support what aristocracy we had; and we have constantly experienced, and felt but too keenly, the ruinous effects of universal suffrage and weakly exercised government. Here are the labor organizations, into whose hands we are delivering the government, clamouring today for the ‘right’ to persecute and kill people as they please. We are making them a ruling class; and England is going to do the same thing” (Dec. 28, 1908. Hardwick, 1977: 78-79).*

If I am honest I must recognize that the egalitarianism and despise of unmerited privilege and class in my own view is the product of English Liberalism, culture and circumstance, and not one of uncompromised reason. I am English, I was raised in England, my grandparents were "in service" and they died of malnutrition in 1949, too late for the welfare state that was finally established that year. 

We subjugate other species yet I am as convinced of their equal standing in terms of the necessary receipt of compassion. 

The systemic notion of "jobs" and "employment" means that our time will be recorded as the most successful culture of slavery in all history. The population are today "intelligent slaves." They do not have the liberty to freely determine their daily actions nor their whereabouts for the majority of their time in pursuit of their own productivity and happiness. They cannot speak and act without fear that their speech or their free actions will terminate their income or residence. 

"In this society we trade income for liberty, I prefer liberty," I say. But most people do not. They prefer comfort, convenience, schools, healthcare and the illusion of perpetual security. They appear to prefer a uniformity of culture and they subjugate themselves to it. 

Being a convinced Pragmaticist in Semeiotic, I have to challenge myself. Is this "intelligent slavery" the natural and necessary order? Is the population that pays lip service to liberty and democracy, whose vote is impotent and that entraps itself in the semeiotic veil of public narrative serving only their subjugation, ultimately suffering a necessary delusion in the cause of evolution and species growth and survival? 

I can't say that I like it much if this is the case, but as a Positivist I must rise above mere opinion in all matters. 

I certainly choose to define myself differently and I choose for myself a different path, the path of liberty. I guess the outliers are necessary. Yet I have always been an idealist and have wanted for all the liberty that I find for myself. 

Whilst I clearly disagree with the content of Peirce's political pragmatism, and this may contribute toward  the historical suppression of his view, at this juncture it is beside the point. His essentially Positivist approach was the right one and his political view may well be as naive as my own. It shares though a quest for the truth of the matter. The particulars of his view must not distract us from the merit of Peirce's contribution in general or of the Positivist approach. 

* Peirce, C. S., and Welby-Gregory, Victoria (Lady Welby), Semiotic and Significs: The Correspondence between C. S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, edited by Charles S. Hardwick with the assistance of James Cook, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1977

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See the full gallery on Posterous

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Since my May update I have made numerous small revisions to my book's draft "Introductory Remarks." These revisions are mainly derived from feedback on a related submission document to SuperComputing 2011 that comes from a chapter of the book on the Foundations of Computation.

In that submission to the Disruptive Technologies Program I propose a new computational paradigm for certain large scale parallel computing problems so the reviewers were all leading Computer Scientists. This work is not generally available but I did want to propagate some of the important elements of the review back into the Introductory Remarks.

The primary additions from the review relate to some relative comments with respect to Connectionism and Neural Networks.

Honestly, despite its popularity among Neuroscientists, I had dismissed Connectionism long ago and view Neural Networks as a failed technology founded upon a model that is naive and poorly informed.

However, several senior reviewers criticized my failure to mention it directly and, worse, suggested that I had not done adequate research because it was absent.

The truth is that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, before I embarked upon this work, I spent a lot of time with the Churchland work and with McClelland's "Distributed Parallel Processing" text and thought that we had all moved on from what had become a footnote in history :-) 

This was wrong of me and I should have included Connectionism in my review, at least to compare my model of distributed representation with the earlier work.

In short, the problem with Connectionism and Neural Networks is that they were founded before a lot of the more detailed evidence became available: they are naive, not founded upon a general theory, they deal with "brains" not organisms, and they ignore physical structure.

My decomposition arguments also hold. Neural Networks do not form a computational parallelism that makes a difference since the parallelism in Neural Networks can be removed (the node computations executed in sequence) without a discernible effect upon the results.

I have started to correct my deficit in the "Introductory Remarks" and, for historical completeness, will add a discussion of Connectionism in a new section of the book. This sort of evolution is why books should always be well reviewed before publication. It's why I publish drafts of my evolving work online.

Although I get few real review comments unless I pointedly ask someone to do it. I tend instead to hear only from people that either love the work and it has changed their entire view of the world (this is nice but not especially useful) or from crazy people that claim that I have stolen their ideas. So far it turns out that such people understand neither their own work nor mine, and precedence is easily established via the Archive.org record.

I also took the opportunity over the past day or two to refine the Introductory description of the model of memory and recognition. This is mostly word craft and clean up of late night bumbling, it is now a clearer technical introduction I hope. 

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Since I first published an early draft of an overview of my research work and scholarship in 2006, the "Introductory Remarks," I have published a major update annually. 

Today I make my first major update since early last year. This has been a difficult year or more since I too became effected by the current state of the economy. I am ever hopeful that I will find more funding for my efforts.

You can find the update here:

Explaining Experience In Nature : The Foundations Of Logic And Apprehension

This, I very much hope, is the penultimate draft before making more of the work available. In those plans, in addition to the first formal presentation, I will be making a more accessible summary available. My current audience is the academic community so I apologize in advance for the difficult read for many of you.

To publish my work I use a technology that I have developed over the same timeframe that I now call "The Glass Bead Game," after a technology described in the Magnum Opus of Hermann Hesse by the same name (and suggested to me first by my friend Tudor Boloni). This tool, based upon XML technologies, lets me do a level of technical text analysis and concept development impossible to do otherwise. It generates XHTML5 "decorated documents," an example of which you will find at the above link.

Without this technology I would not have made such progress. It is designed to aid the move from intuition to formal structure and applies many of the ideas about apprehension found in the work. In particular it is founded upon the epistemology that I have developed there. What this means in real terms is that you will find an enumeration, increasingly refined, of the "necessary distinctions" and "ways of speaking" that I use through-out. 

I hope that you will take the time to review the work and to give me feedback.

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We quickly threw together a small website to present Debbie's work. The lion's share of images currently show paintings that are recent work. Some of the later images are of work she created while living in Costa Rica. I am very excited by Debbie's work. Her creative outburst since we met is inspiring.

Website: Debbie Ericsson-Zenith, Artist. 

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