Professor Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (born 14 February 1931 in Podolsk, Soviet Union) died on 7 April 2010 in Oakland, NJ, after a long illness. Turchin was a Professor of Computer Science at the City College of New York, retiring from there in 1999. Professor Turchin was a computer scientist, mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and dissident. But, first and foremost, he was a cybernetician. I was privileged to have been his student and friend, and I sorely miss him.
Turchin graduated from Moscow University in Theoretical Physics in 1952. From a position at the Institute of Physics of Energy in Obninsk, he took two graduate degrees in Physical and Mathematical Sciences in 1957 and 1963, respectively, performing research in slow neutron and solid state physics. After early investigations into the potential of computational methods for physics problems, in 1964 he was invited to join the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow, where he became a leader in Soviet artificial intelligence research.
Turchin's cybernetic philosophy was deeply coupled to a social theory committed to the value of human freedom, and with it action as a political dissident. In 1968, Turchin authored The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview, a critique of totalitarian socialism from the perspective of cybernetic social theory, in the underground samizdat press.Footnote1 By 1973, he was working closely with and publicly supporting Andrei Sakharov, had founded the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International, and was instrumental in the founding of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group. As his position became increasingly difficult politically, Turchin left Keldysh in 1974 for a position at the Institute for the Design of Automated Construction Systems in Moscow. Although facing political persecution by the KGB and threatened with imprisonment, pressure from the US Congress and the international scientific community led the Soviets to instead expel Turchin and his family from the Soviet Union in 1977. They immigrated to the USA, where he was with the Courant Institute in New York before joining City College in 1979.
Turchin's work spanned many fields of endeavour, ranging from physics to program optimization methods and artificial intelligence (for which he was a founding father in the Soviet Union), to the philosophy of mathematics, science, evolution, and society, and finally web science, social information systems, and the evolutionary future of a networked humanity. Central to all this work was a process-based evolutionary cybernetic philosophy of science and life, given unity through the concept of the ‘meta-system transition’ (MST), wherein levels of hierarchical control act and emerge in information systems. The interplay between the freedom and variety of the parts, and the constraint of the whole, among interleaved hierarchical levels, in the context of evolutionary blind variation and selective retention, is manifested in every MST. This forms the heart of Turchin's synthetic cybernetic philosophy, which included a global theory of evolution, a coherent social systems theory, a cybernetic foundation for mathematics, and an ethical system rooted in the essentiality of human freedom.
The Inertia of Fear was not merely a dissident tract, as it was based on a scientific theory and model of socialist social organization expressed in terms of Turchin's cybernetic philosophy and the MST. The MST was contemporaneously being developed in his core technical work in computer science during his early career at Keldysh, through the development of the Recursive Functional Algorithmic Language (Refal) programming language. Refal was one of the first purely functional programming languages, developed independently from the AI movement in the West, and still favoured in Russian computer science. Relying on pattern matching, Refal differs from Lisp or Prolog in being fundamentally about object representation, calling out actions on objects specifically as functions. This makes Refal programs not just shorter and simpler than corresponding Lisp or Prolog programs, but also ideal for metacomputation and program optimization techniques such as partial and lazy evaluation. These explorations led Turchin to develop the concept of ‘supercompilation’ as a unified method for program transformation and optimization, which is described in his 1986 paper, ‘The concept of a supercompiler’ [ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, 8, 292–323]. Using the MST concept, supercompilation enables computer programs to rewrite themselves and other programs to make them dozens to hundreds of times more efficient. Although underdeveloped in Turchin's lifetime, a school dedicated to supercompilation persists in both Russia and America, with hope to fulfil the promise of this potentially transformational technology.
The formal perspective of supercompilation and Refal in turn reflect back to a deeper realization of any formal system in terms of basic cybernetic processes. As Refal programs can be seen as recursive generators of predictions (halting processes), so every formal process can be cast in this light as well as in a cybernetic model. Adding the constructivist concept of the user interacting with these model-based predictive processes results in meta-mechanical, that is, mathematical, concepts such as sets and numbers. Although a complete development of Turchin's Cybernetic Foundations of Mathematics exists only as a technical report, a long 1987 paper in the Journal of Symbolic Logic [52, 172–201] persists as a compelling view of this perspective.
But Turchin's cybernetic philosophy and his view of the MST have their most profound expression not in formal systems, but in natural philosophy. In his 1977 masterpiece, The Phenomenon of Science (POS), published by Columbia University Press, Turchin provided a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution. Echoing Bergson and de Chardin, POS spans from the origins of life to the emergence of the trans-human digital superorganism we now see suggestively on our horizon. In the cybernetic tradition, Turchin sought to study human science as an object within the context of the ongoing scientific study of humanity and the universe. Positing the MST as the ‘quantum of evolution’, in POS Turchin provides a unifying view of the emergence of qualitative levels in biological and social evolution as successive hierarchical levels of control, including life as the control of energy, neural reflexes as the control of movement, learning as the control of neural representations, thought as the control of learning, and finally society itself as the control of thought.
As a cybernetic philosopher and AI researcher, Turchin was naturally drawn to try to use cybernetic techniques reflexively to develop cybernetic theory itself. In 1990, Turchin and I founded the Principia Cybernetica Project (PCP) to use what were burgeoning web technologies to develop a distributed, collaborative system of cybernetic philosophy. Quickly joined by Francis Heylighen of the Free University of Brussels, the three of us formed an editorial board for the project. Over many years, PCP has been recognized as a primary source for expository and pedagogical material for systems science and cybernetics, in addition to the vehicle for the expression of Turchin's later work and an overall MST Theory.
Turchin's vision of an interlinked community of scholars using information technology for collective, structured debate, argument, and persuasion was originally expressed in concepts of semantic graphs and hypermedia. PCP was quick to adapt itself to the emerging Web technologies, and founded the PCP Web siteFootnote2 in 1993 as the first in Belgium, and one of the first in the world. PCP thus presaged much of the modern knowledge systems movement, and still provides a forward look beyond current technologies such as Wikipedia and the Semantic Web.
Beyond supporting the scholarly process, Turchin foresaw that these ‘semantic’ computational technologies would produce the next human MST in which computational tools would lead to a unified emergent global superorganism. Echoing de Chardin's noosphere, a ‘global brain’ would emerge as a collectively intelligent artificial mind, integrating humans to an uncertain degree. This thrust led to the establishment of a global brain study group as a spinoff from PCP.
I knew Turchin as an unabashed romantic, and although a dedicated scientist and materialist, he was quickly drawn to religious topics. In our first work together, ‘The cybernetic manifesto’ [Kybernetes, 19, 63–64], I at first objected to including a discussion about a form of scientific pantheism, but over time I saw the value of the logical extension of the cybernetic ideas of freedom and control to the cosmic scale. The ethical system implied by MST theory posited freedom and survival, in the evolutionary sense, as the ultimate goods. The cosmic extension of this view compelled Turchin to the idea of the ‘will for immortality’, manifested in many forms from the metaphysical to the genetic.
To paraphrase our friend and colleague Francis Heylighen, although Turchin could not live to see either his hoped-for ‘cybernetic’ or ‘biological immortality’, he has achieved a form of ‘genetic immortality’ through his sons Peter and Dimitri by his wife Tanya and through absolutely his ‘creative immortality’ as his memory lives on in the vast scope of work that he has left us. I look forward myself to seeing the fulfilment of Valentin Turchin's vision through the demonstration of the liberation of humanity through a metasystem transition to a global brain with cybernetic immortality.
Notes
1. Published in 1981 under the same title by Columbia University Press.