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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Process Interaction Models

 Authored by Dr Steven Ericsson-Zenith

Process interaction models are an integral component of parallel processing theory and practice, defining the means by which concurrent processes interact; where "interaction" means not only the exchange of data but also synchronization between processes. In searching for a general purpose model to program parallel machines, it is desirable to provide portability, an expressiveness which does not distract the programmer from the task in hand and efficiency independent of the memory architecture of the machine.  

 This book discusses these issues and presents a new process interaction model. Ease is described as a general purpose, high level, imperative programming language. A program is a collection of processes which execute concurrently, constructing and interacting via strictly typed shared data structures called "Contexts".  

 Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith of the Institute for Advanced Science & Engineering (Silicon Valley) was previously a member of the Computer Architecture team at the British Semiconductor company INMOS (STMicroelectronics) during the development of the Transputer microprocessor, a device designed for large-scale parallel computing. In addition, he was involved in the design of the parallel programming language Occam and is the author of the Occam 2 Reference Manual, published by Prentice Hall. Following his work on Occam, he was invited to continue research at YALE University with Professor David Gelernter on the coordination language Linda. This book arises from this experience. 

 This book was completed at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, traditionally the science department of the Sorbonne.

Also available from Amazon.

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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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A storm of recent paintings from my wife.

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Here I am preempting a response I plan to make next week to a Foundations of Information Science (FIS) discussion on Logic and "Reality." Contributors are allowed only two posts a week, and I have eaten mine. I want to get the issue "off my chest."

George Darby wrote a damning review of the book "Logic In Reality" in the journal Metascience last year and thereby gave the author, Joe Brenner (a contributor to FIS) and the rest of us a chastising though too charitable reminder of the mathematical discipline required to address challenges in the Foundations Of Logic.

Darby's main complaint is that he can understand none of it. Neither can I.

But what strikes me is what appears most plain. Brenner makes a common category error and it is an error that is pervasive among those that are using the computational sciences to describe natural behaviors. It is the same category error that is revealed by the question "How does the Brain compute?"

Let's be clear, the brain does not compute in any sense. Similarly, there is no "Logic In Reality" unless you define "Reality" to simply be our experience of logical construction. For me the term "Reality" is yet another way of speaking about existence and it is as redundant as the notion of "Truth" that I discussed a few entries ago. It is what Peirce described in 1904 in his well-known Popular Science essay "How To Make Our Ideas Clear" as "that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be."

Peirce: CP 5.405 §4. REALITY

405. Let us now approach the subject of logic, and consider a conception which particularly concerns it, that of reality. Taking clearness in the sense of familiarity, no idea could be clearer than this. Every child uses it with perfect confidence, never dreaming that he does not understand it. As for clearness in its second grade, however, it would probably puzzle most men, even among those of a reflective turn of mind, to give an abstract definition of the real. Yet such a definition may perhaps be reached by considering the points of difference between reality and its opposite, fiction. A figment is a product of somebody's imagination; it has such characters as his thought impresses upon it. That those characters are independent of how you or I think is an external reality. There are, however, phenomena within our own minds, dependent upon our thought, which are at the same time real in the sense that we really think them. But though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be. Thus, a dream has a real existence as a mental phenomenon, if somebody has really dreamt it; that he dreamt so and so, does not depend on what anybody thinks was dreamt, but is completely independent of all opinion on the subject. On the other hand, considering, not the fact of dreaming, but the thing dreamt, it retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was dreamt to possess them. Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.

The key here is the phrase "though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be." This basically identifies the category mistake made when people ask questions like "How does the Brain compute?" or explore "Logic In Reality."

Mathematical Logic is a tool that we use to characterize the world. The pertinent questions are "How successful is our logical construction, how well does it characterize the world?" and "Are there any intrinsic limits in the Foundations Of Logic preventing the full characterization of the world?"

Now, you have read my work, so you will certainly know that I believe that there are such limits in our computational paradigm, if not in the Foundations Of Mathematics and Logic itself (where the matter of concurrency and locality is ambiguous at best). It's the question that I pose in the prospectus of a Stanford conference next year celebrating the Centenary of Alan Turing's birth "Challenging Turing."

At this point I am going to yield the stage to Peirce himself to elaborate further. I do this in part because Brenner has claimed on FIS that Peirce had nothing to say on these matters, in part because what he says elaborates on the points in my recent posts and discloses my influences. Peirce continues:

Peirce: CP 5.406. But, however satisfactory such a definition may be found, it would be a great mistake to suppose that it makes the idea of reality perfectly clear. Here, then, let us apply our rules. According to them, reality, like every other quality, consists in the peculiar sensible effects which things partaking of it produce. The only effect which real things have is to cause belief, for all the sensations which they excite emerge into consciousness in the form of beliefs. The question therefore is, how is true belief (or belief in the real) distinguished from false belief (or belief in fiction). Now, as we have seen in the former paper, the ideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the experiential method of settling opinion. A person who arbitrarily chooses the propositions which he will adopt can use the word truth only to emphasize the expression of his determination to hold on to his choice. ... Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that the philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are, than on inquiring what belief is most in harmony with their system. It is hard to convince a follower of the a priori method by adducing facts; but show him that an opinion he is defending is inconsistent with what he has laid down elsewhere, and he will be very apt to retract it. These minds do not seem to believe that disputation is ever to cease; they seem to think that the opinion which is natural for one man is not so for another, and that belief will, consequently, never be settled. In contenting themselves with fixing their own opinions by a method which would lead another man to a different result, they betray their feeble hold of the conception of what truth is.

Peirce: CP 5.407. On the other hand, all the followers of science are animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they apply it. One man may investigate the velocity of light by studying the transits of Venus and the aberration of the stars; another by the oppositions of Mars and the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites; a third by the method of Fizeau; a fourth by that of Foucault; a fifth by the motions of the curves of Lissajoux; a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, and a ninth, may follow the different methods of comparing the measures of statical and dynamical electricity. They may at first obtain different results, but, as each perfects his method and his processes, the results are found to move steadily together toward a destined centre. So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a fore- ordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great hope is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.

Peirce: CP 5.408. But it may be said that this view is directly opposed to the abstract definition which we have given of reality, inasmuch as it makes the characters of the real depend on what is ultimately thought about them. But the answer to this is that, on the one hand, reality is independent, not necessarily of thought in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it; and that, on the other hand, though the object of the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet what that opinion is does not depend on what you or I or any man thinks. Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of the belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion must be the one which they would ultimately come to. "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again," and the opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think. But the reality of that which is real does depend on the real fact that investigation is destined to lead, at last, if continued long enough, to a belief in it.

Peirce: CP 5.409. But I may be asked what I have to say to all the minute facts of history, forgotten never to be recovered, to the lost books of the ancients, to the buried secrets.

"Full many a gem of purest ray serene. The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

Do these things not really exist because they are hopelessly beyond the reach of our knowledge? And then, after the universe is dead (according to the prediction of some scientists), and all life has ceased forever, will not the shock of atoms continue though there will be no mind to know it? To this I reply that, though in no possible state of knowledge can any number be great enough to express the relation between the amount of what rests unknown to the amount of the known, yet it is unphilosophical to suppose that, with regard to any given question (which has any clear meaning), investigation would not bring forth a solution of it, if it were carried far enough. Who would have said, a few years ago, that we could ever know of what substances stars are made whose light may have been longer in reaching us than the human race has existed? Who can be sure of what we shall not know in a few hundred years? Who can guess what would be the result of continuing the pursuit of science for ten thousand years, with the activity of the last hundred? And if it were to go on for a million, or a billion, or any number of years you please, how is it possible to say that there is any question which might not ultimately be solved?

Peirce: CP 5.409. But it may be objected, "Why make so much of these remote considerations, especially when it is your principle that only practical distinctions have a meaning?" Well, I must confess that it makes very little difference whether we say that a stone on the bottom of the ocean, in complete darkness, is brilliant or not -- that is to say, that it probably makes no difference, remembering always that that stone may be fished up tomorrow. But that there are gems at the bottom of the sea, flowers in the untraveled desert, etc., are propositions which, like that about a diamond being hard when it is not pressed, concern much more the arrangement of our language than they do the meaning of our ideas.

Peirce: CP 5.410. It seems to me, however, that we have, by the application of our rule, reached so clear an apprehension of what we mean by reality, and of the fact which the idea rests on, that we should not, perhaps, be making a pretension so presumptuous as it would be singular, if we were to offer a metaphysical theory of existence for universal acceptance among those who employ the scientific method of fixing belief. However, as metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it, I will not trouble the reader with any more Ontology at this moment. ...

Now if this seems long winded to us today, that's because it is. Here Peirce anticipates the Logical Positivists of a few decades later by dismissing metaphysics as "a subject much more curious than useful."

"Truth" and "Reality" are metaphysical concepts, curious perhaps but not useful. We can happily let go of these concepts without losing anything except the endless distraction they evoke.

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On the Foundations of Information Science (FIS) list Jerry Chandler takes me to task about my claim that the Uniformity Conjecture is the necessary basis of scientific epistemology. He argues that the "necessity for irregular extension" invalidates the conjecture of uniformity and that my line of reasoning "explains virtually nothing."

Jerry is someone that I respect immensely for his occasional well-considered responses on another scholarly list, Peirce-l. But I am unconvinced by his argument.  

This is not to say that there are not such extensions and that they are not necessary for the refinement of ideas. Surely they are. But from a strictly epistemological point of view they are indicators, pragmatic and temporary aberrations that are ultimately resolvable by applying the necessary uniformity conjecture.

As I note often: If a logical reduction fails it is never an indicator of the supernatural nor is it a justification for metaphysics. It is an indicator that we must, of necessity, review the logical construction that has failed and ultimately revise it.

The central point of my argument concerning the profound uniformity of Nature is that no scientific epistemology is possible without this conjecture. If we reject it or worse, if we find evidence that the universe is not uniform in this way (by finding a galaxy that does not conform to the laws observed in the others, for example) then all bets are off and no scientific epistemology is possible.

Jerry goes on to say that "the only intrinsic uniformity is of space and time."

Since I take space and time to be merely a way of speaking about mass/energy, as did Einstein, its uniformity or not is a matter of conception alone. If you disagree with this then you essentially affirm the case I make since it is then the laws of space and time that would be the necessary basis of all science.

Jerry is concerned that my line of reasoning "excludes the mental, biological and chemical sciences." But this would only be the case if I did limit my formal conception of the world to space and time. If you have read my materials then you will know why I think that this is inadequate.

Further, for me "explanation" is the identification of causes. The notion of profound uniformity identifies the casual basis, the functional dependence, of all scientific knowledge; as such it is an explanation of why science works.

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