The following material comes from a recent exercise in autobiography that I have been performing, in which I have tried to demonstrate that what I have been doing might fairly (but not pejoratively) be called alchemy: As a student, I was always drawn to impossible or unrealistic problems, seduced by visions of what life would be like if those problems could be solved. These visions were rarely good for my research methodologies, and they never failed to set me apart from my fellow students and later from my colleagues. My only source of encouragement and support was my doctoral thesis advisor, Marvin Minsky; but it was not until about fifteen years after I had completed my thesis that I appreciated his motives. The insight came when I heard him give a seminar at the University of California at San Diego. This was at a time when UCSD was a focal point of the connectionist approach to cognitive science, a position that Minsky opposed on the basis of arguments he had developed when I was still a graduate student. Therefore, it was inevitable that, during the Q&A, some local student would show off by asking him his current opinion of connectionism. I wish I had recorded his response verbatim, but it went something like this:
Well, there is certainly nothing wrong with attaching yourself to an advisor who will supervise your writing a connectionist thesis. You will have no trouble presenting your results at one or more conferences and will probably get a journal paper out of it. However, your achievement will be one of many similar results. You may even discover later that someone else arrived at the same results at about the same time and also published them. You will have your thesis, but you probably will not have advanced the state of the art of cognitive science.
On the other hand you could decide to investigate an area that few, if any, have decided to pursue. You will be driven by some grand problem, which you probably will not be able to solve; but, if you have the right advisor, you will be able to break off a viable piece of that problem and get enough results for a thesis. Those results may not attract very much attention, and you may even have trouble getting them published. However, you will at least have the satisfaction that those results were yours; and isn’t that why you went into doctoral research in the first place?
Minsky had basically summarized how he had treated me when I was his student, right down to the frustrations I encountered when trying to publish and continue my research once I had my degree.
This is the spirit of alchemy—trying to do things that are closer to fantasy than to the realistic practices of one’s times. The alchemist rarely fits it with those times. At best he is viewed as a harmless eccentric. At worst he is either exploited or persecuted (or both). Nevertheless, if he persists at his work, he arrives at results; and he at least has the satisfaction that those results are his.
Unfortunately, most of our institutions think little of that alchemical spirit. Whatever my fantasies may have been, I had to worry about getting a proper graduate education and then going out to earn a living. In my case this led to a highly nomadic lifestyle that concentrated on both coasts of the United States, as well as Haifa and Singapore. My nomadism also led to my failure to settle down into any single research area. Somewhat in the spirit of the Turner thesis, I preferred being out on my own in frontier territory. When the rest of the world began to take an interest in where I was, I knew it was time to pull up stakes and find another frontier. This book is a report from my most recent frontier. However, in order to set a context for how I chose to arrive at my results, I would like to offer a brief review of my earlier alchemical pursuits.
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