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"The Science of Cognitive Everything" is now available at http://rossbender.org/irkswatch.html. Following is the Introduction.
"While it is difficult to date with any real precision the origin of the academic discipline known as âThe Science of Cognitive Everythingâ, certainly it has its advent in the development of the modern computer in the throes of the Second World War. Although historians of science are now inclined to look for forerunners in the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (b. 1646, d. 1716) who invented a clunky calculating device, and the English mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871) whose âdifference engineâ, while not actually functional, preshadowed the modern computer, it is now agreed that the true creator of the computer as we know it was the brilliant English mathematician, computer scientist, philosopher and homosexual, Alan Turing.
Turing (1912-1954) http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/ worked with a team of British and American intelligence agents during the war at Bletchley Park to crack the famous German ENIGMA code machine. Turing devised what has become known as the Universal Turing Machine, a conceptual computer which is recognized as the true mother of the modern digital computer, although it was never built. After the war, Turing, who was gay, was arrested by Her Majestyâs government on suspicion of homosexuality and given the choice between imprisonment and chemical castration. After consulting a fortune teller, Turing chose not to go the way of Oscar Wilde, but rather to subject himself to a serious of injections which augmented his breasts. He committed suicide in 1954, to the relief of a grateful British Parliament.
Despite rival claims to primacy by Harvard and Iowa State University, it is now generally agreed that the first electronic digital computer, or ENIAC, was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania for the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory to compute ballistic firing tables. Originally housed in the basement of Bennett Hall http://www.studyusa.com/factshts/penn.htm at Penn, in the University City Village of West Philadelphia, the ENIAC was a monstrous contraption full of vacuum cleaners and Energizer batteries. While the original ENIAC is now at the Smithsonian Institution, sacred relics of the original machine can now be viewed in the ENIAC Museum http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~museum/Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.
After the war, computer science developed as an academic specialty, and eventually began to take over traditional disciplines such as linguistics, philosophy and home economics. In the mid-1970s the Science of Cognitive Everything Society http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science was formed, and since then over sixty universities in North America and Europe have established interdisciplinary programs in the all-encompassing discipline.
At the University of Pennsylvania, nestled in the heart of charming and elegant olde University City, a formal program in cognitive science was initiated in 1978. In 1991 the Institute for Research in Cognitive Everything http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/index.shtml was founded at the University with grants from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the CIA, MI6, the KGB and the University City Old Ladies Sewing Circle and Gentrification Collective. Currently Dr. Mark Liberman (Linguistics) and Dr. Michael Kearns (Computer and Information Science) are the Co-Directors of IRCE.
IRCE issued its first CD in 1991 to critical acclaim. Titled âAssociation for Computational Linguistics Data Collection Initiative CD-ROM Iâ and produced by Dragon Systems, Inc., with grants from GE and the NSF, the album soared to the top of the Billboard charts in 1992 and then disappeared without a trace. A collection of random files from the Wall Street Journal, the Nixon tapes, White House press conferences, logs of Chinese tank commanders along the Yalu River, and remixes of the Fugs and works by Philip Glass, it is a brilliant minimalist work which is generally agreed even by the avant-garde digerati to be âbefore its time".
The IRCE currently sponsors a Friday lecture series in a secret location in the basement of Bennett Hall, bringing together the best minds of a generation, starving hysterical and naked, including experts from such fields as cyberlinguistics, neuroscience, experimental psychology, hacking, philosophy, genetics, and home economics. The following is a collection of essays in honor of the lecturers at the Friday IRCE series for the academic year 2003-2004."
Ross Bender
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