Announcing a new Meetup for Bay Area Artificial Intelligence Meetup Group!

What: Mark Carranza: Peirce for Programmers

When: Sunday, June 13, 2010 12:00 PM

Where:
TechShop
120 Independence Dr.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
[masked]

Mark Carranza will present his view of C. S. Peirce's main work. The meetUp will be video recorded.

C. S. Peirce: Intro to Semiosis for Programmers

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was a chemist, scientist, logician, and America's most original and perhaps greatest philosopher. His astoundingly wide-ranging thought deeply influences computer science: from the basic idea electrical circuits could be used to carry out logical operations, to methods of reasoning in AI, to John Sowa's Conceptual Graphs.

Peirce explored formal systems which could explain the processes of both human thought and science. Reasoning might be looked at from two families of ideas:

• processes of logic: Syllogism
  
• processes of sign relations: Semiosis
  

Peirce defined semiosis in 1907 as "action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs".

Trinary. Think about it.

There will a brief biography of Peirce. The talk will mainly focus on the Peirce's triadic analysis of sign relations: iconic, indexical, and symbolic from the "Symbols aren't Simple" chapter in the 1997 book "The Symbolic Species," by Terrence Deacon. An attempt will be made to consider AI and programming concepts from this perspective.

Dr. Deacon is currently a UC Berkeley professor, and has graciously agreed to speak here next month, on July 11th. His new book on information will be coming out around that time. The current talk is an sort of preparation and intro to his work as well.

Biographical note:

Mark Carranza is a former poet. In 1984 he started MX, a memory experiment, writing down each thought which was interesting enough to be thought again. He learned to write software and created unique and simple associative database software-to-think-with. As a kind of cognitive art, or the world's longest re-orderable poem, he has stored in MX over 1.2 million unique thougths and 7.5 million unique associations between them. He still uses MX daily to as a tool to think with and source to remember things he forgot he once knew.

He quickly learned that other people would pay him ridiculous amounts of money to write their software, and since 1985 has been a professional independent software developer. This used to allow a lot of money and time to read, but now everybody and their brother writes code and ridiculous amounts of money are harder to come by.

He's working on a sharable eMemory thought storage and animation framework based on repeated (non-unique) thought events at http://mind.mx, and could really use some help, but still prefers reading.
He hopes he can express Peirce's genius in a way that others can benefit from and be inspired to check the ideas out themselves .

Learn more here:
http://www.ai-meetup.org/calendar/13733638/