Maggie Boden

Maggie Boden interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 20th March 2015

0:05:07: Born in London in 1936; I knew my maternal grandparents; my mother's father was a locksmith and was obviously very clever as he was sent out to Egypt and other places to service vault locks in banks, some of which he designed; he was amazing with metal and designed puzzle boxes, but was uneducated; I know nothing about his parents or those of my maternal grandmother; my father's grandfather was Captain Arthur Burns, captain of a clipper ship, and they lived in Liverpool; I still have his captain's chest; my grandfather was an ostler and also ran a grocer's shop in Crouch End, London; in fact the building is still there and used to be called Boden's Corner, and was so years after they left it; my father used to tell me stories about how my grandfather had to spread straw on the cobbled road to deaden the sound when someone was ill; he also told me how his father would order in special stuff for Christmas, including Turkish Delights which were secretly eaten by his children; my father was the eldest of four; I don't remember my paternal grandfather as a person but I do remember my other grandfather; he was a crusty character who reminded me of Spencer Tracy; I remember him cutting up bacon rind to feed the birds, but most of his time was spent in the garage working with metal or on his car; he and my father got on very well as they were the only males in a house full of women; my mother was one of four sisters; my father was a civil servant; he didn't go to university but was a very clever man; I remember learning about square roots and asking my maths teacher whether one could do cube roots in the same way; she did not know; I asked my father, and although he did not know, he sat down and worked out how to do it; his parents could not afford to send him to university but his two younger brothers did go; they wanted my father to take over the shop but he refused; he was a soldier during the First World War and spent his 21st birthday in the trenches on the Somme; he started out in the civil service addressing envelopes in the Foreign Office; he found that if you were in the administrative grade you got six weeks holiday but you had to have a degree, so he did a degree in law at evening classes at King's College in the Strand; he got a 2:1 which I think was amazing in the circumstances; he then took the civil service exams, passing near the top, and got into the administrative grade; he then worked for many years in the Inland Revenue, working mainly on Wills; he was then transferred to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, and after the war he was the Secretary of the New Towns Committee, chaired by Lord Reith; I had no idea about what he was doing but would hear the words Stevenage, Hemel Hempstead and Crawley; when I was about ten or eleven I decided to make him envelope files for Christmas with the names of these towns on them; when he died just before he was ninety, in his wardrobe with a couple of new shirts still in cellophane, I found the six files; by that time I had been on enough committees to know that giving him one envelope file for Hemel Hempstead would have been ludicrous, but he had kept them; my mother left school at fourteen and went into the Post Office; she gave up work when she married as at that time you were not allowed to work if married; by that time she was working for Anglo-Iranian BP in the City and had been very good at her job, but she was given a canteen of cutlery when she married and had to leave; she was a convivial person, a good housewife and needlewoman; her first born son died at one month and she was warned not to have another; however I was born, although she was very ill when giving birth; although a good mother, she got very bored at home, missed her job, and resented not having money of her own; she bought a little shop at Finsbury Park selling knitting wool and underwear; I used to go and help out on Saturday mornings; before she had the shop she used to crochet bed-jackets to earn a little money; she had to account to my father for every penny; every year we went to the sales for clothes and he insisted on an exact account of all she had spent, even the bus fares

17:30:08 The first school I went to was Gloddaeth College just outside Llandudno because my father's office was bombed very early in the war; we three were living in one room in a tiny hotel as there were no houses available; we were there for a year until alternative accommodation was found back in London for my father's office; by that time, our house in London had been requisitioned for a family whose house had been bombed; so my mother and I had to stay there while my father went back alone; he used to come for occasional weekends as travel was restricted; when we came back to London I went to a local private school in Winchmore Hill; I was always top of everything so it was clear I would pass 11+ for Grammar school, but my mother wanted me to try for the City of London School for Girls which was at that time a direct grant school; from kindergarten to eleven it was private, but from then it doubled in size as they creamed off the top scholars at 11+ throughout London who had applied; my father thought I should go to Minchenden, the local Grammar school, but my mother insisted and I got in; for me the City of London was a very good school; my absolute passion was biology or nature study as they called it then; it had nothing to do with the teacher at Winchmore Hill who was a dreadful woman, but it was the subject, particularly learning about animals; the biology teacher at the City of London School was superb; there were two sisters - Miss B. Nash and Miss M. Nash - Barbara and Margaret - B for biology, M for mathematics; both of them were recognised as amazingly good teachers; I don't think Miss B. was the cleverest teacher in the school, but I didn't have to be coaxed to want to learn; sadly I was not taught maths by Miss M. but by a teacher who was not as good; that teacher also taught physics which you had to do in the sixth form if you wanted to do medicine; she didn't have a clue about physics and consequently I don't either; I can see the beauty of mathematics and understand enough about it, but I don't understand it; I have tried to understand both subjects since but have not succeeded, and that was due to the appalling teaching I had from this woman; so it was and it wasn't a good school, but for me with my passion for biology it was just great

23:17:17: We had games on a Friday afternoon and had to get the train from Charing Cross to Grove Park; as often as I could I skipped it, and either went up to Foyle's Bookshop in Charing Cross Road, sat on the floor and read books, or on several occasions went to the Houses of Parliament to watch; once my father, to my amazement, was sitting in a little box because if a Minister is to be questioned they need to have someone from their department to answer questions; I very much enjoyed the choir and also sang later on at Cambridge; I used to go to concerts, but as a child I only went to one or two and it was always the 'Messiah' as my mother loved it; my father loved Gilbert & Sullivan and that was that; I didn't hear much classical music until I came to Cambridge and then I heard it in my friends' bedrooms, played on their gramophones; I learnt to play the piano and enjoyed that but had to give it up for want of time at 'A' levels - you had to take four if you wanted to do medicine in those days; when I came down the Brighton, almost the first thing I did was to buy a piano and then played again; however, ten years ago I started writing a huge book, now two volumes, and while I was doing that I dropped piano and dressmaking, and when I tried to get back to it after the book was finished found I was so rusty and below the level that I had played before; even now I have so much writing to do that I don't have time; I hope in time to get back to it as I miss it; on hobbies, I collected stamps; I was very interested in wild flowers and could identify many

28:20:03: On religion, I was christened because that was what was done; I don't remember being taken to church except for family funerals, but I was sent to Sunday school though I suspect that was to get me out of the house; I didn't really talk about it to my father or mother, but was always interested in whether there is a God; at one stage I remember going to a lot of different churches, I read a lot and argued about it with my friends; I taught the philosophy of religion for many years and really enjoyed teaching it; the three things that turned me on intellectually in those days were religion, biology and botany, and mind-body problems and the relation to evolution; I spent many hours reading, mostly Enid Blyton; I would ask for books for birthdays and my mother would wonder why as I had so many; I suppose I would say I am an atheist because if I said I was an agnostic, that would imply that I'm not quite sure whether the Christian God exists, and that seems an absolute nonsense - a being with a personal interest in each one of us seems to me such hubris; I do not believe in a personal God but I am agnostic about Deism; despite all the philosophical arguments, it seems to me that the universe needs some sort of explanation; so maybe there is something out there, but one can just point to it, one can't say anything about it; it has always struck me as odd that people who believe in such a massively transcendent power, also believe that they can say things about it using human language; the mystic who points, I can understand, and I suppose the philosopher whose views are closest to mine in Spinoza, my absolute philosophical hero; the problem with Spinoza is that everybody wants to interpret him in their own way so it is not very informative when I say he is my philosophical hero; he was called a hideous atheist by Hume and a God-intoxicated man by Schiller; I can understand why but that is another argument

35:05:08:I was going to do medicine because I wanted to do psychiatry; I got a place at University College and then my Head Mistress suggested I apply for Oxford or Cambridge; going to university had never entered my head because I was assuming I was going to medical school; you were not allowed to apply to both, and I had always been Cambridge in the boat race as most people supported one or the other without thinking of the university, and I had always loved light-blue; I applied to Cambridge without getting on a train to look at either place; it turned out to be not just the beauty of the place but a really lucky choice because the arrangement of the Tripos was different between Cambridge and Oxford; I later found out that it was possible, having done the Part 1 in Natural Sciences you could do something else; at my interview I had discovered that you could study philosophy at university about which I had no idea; of course I knew what philosophy was and was fascinated by Bertrand Russell; I did Part 1 Natural Sciences in two years which about 20% of people did, and I got the top mark for whole university according to my director of studies; I decided to do Moral Sciences, as it was then called, for a year, before going on to St Thomas's Hospital where I was going to do my clinical; I enjoyed it so much that I wanted an extra year and put back my place at "Tommies", then I was just about to go there when I got a telegram from Richard Braithwaite asking me to come to see him at King's immediately; he offered me snuff, which I refused, then sherry, then said they were interviewing for an assistant lecturer in philosophy at Birmingham and was I interested; it had never occurred to me and had not even taken my finals in philosophy; the explanation for this was that Richard Braithwaite had been a student with Austin Duncan Jones, who was then the Professor at Birmingham, and Gilbert Ryle; Austin told me later that ever since he had been a professor when he had a job to fill, a few days before the interview he would ring Ryle in Oxford and Braithwaite in Cambridge and ask for anybody they knew might be interested; Richard knew about me for three reasons; one was that when I switched to philosophy I was taught by his wife, Margaret Masterman; the college did not approve of her as she was a maverick and a very strange woman, but I insisted she taught me; she ran the Cambridge Language Research Unit at the time and was one of the first people in the world to work on machine translation, though that was not what I was doing, she was teaching me philosophy; Braithwaite therefore knew me personally, but in addition to that I had written a piece after doing three months of philosophy which was a criticism of a piece that had just appeared in 'Mind' by Hart and Hampshire, 'Decision, intention, certainty' ; Margaret never gave me essay topics but just told me to write an essay; I was so green that I chose huge subjects and the first I did was on science and religion; that week I decided to write on thought and language but soon realized it was too huge a subject; I needed to give her something so decided to write a review of the idiotic paper in 'Mind'; she thought it wonderful and worth publishing in 'Mind', which it was; the third reason Braithwaite might have thought of me was that I had recently applied for some sort of prize that would support further work in philosophy, so he knew that I was interested in continuing with philosophy while I was doing medicine; I used to go to the Moral Sciences Club every week but very rarely spoke there

45:30:00: I went to Birmingham for the interview and they offered me the job on the spot; I had been totally relaxed because I didn't know whether I wanted the job and didn’t think I would get it; all the other candidates were men and one had a PhD which in those days was very unusual; I asked for 48 hours to think about accepting it; I remember writing columns, pro and con, psychiatry and philosophy; I did take the job and was very happy at Birmingham but was getting very bored intellectually; it was a very good philosophy department; Peter Geach was there, Bernard Mayo and of course Austin Duncan Jones, and Charles Whiteley, all very good people, but it was an orthodox philosophy department which was not what I wanted to do; I wanted to do things which didn't exist like philosophy of psychology and biology, and the nearest I could get to it was teaching philosophy of science to the chemists and physicists there, but what they wanted was the classic philosophy of science; I thought of going back to medicine and St Thomas's said I could have my scholarship - they had one each year for somebody coming from Oxford or Cambridge - but though it had a lot of prestige, there was very little money so I couldn't afford it; then I got a letter from Casimir Lewy, a Polish logician at Cambridge; you remember that I said I had insisted on being taught by Margaret Masterman, but there were things wrong with her teaching and she was over-effusive about what I wrote; (one anecdote concerning the piece that was published in 'Mind'; when the proofs arrived my father had for a joke steamed open the envelope and enclosed a false, very negative response from Gilbert Ryle); I did feel I needed stricter supervision and at the time had asked for a few supervisions from Lewy; he had been one of my Prelims examiners and for the second year I had had alternate weeks with him; anyway, his letter was to tell me that there was an assistant lectureship going in Cambridge and was I interested; I applied for the job and was interviewed; the people on the interviewing committee were Richard Braithwaite, John Wisdom, Oliver Zangwill and possibly one other; they didn't give it to me; Richard told me afterwards that they argued for over three-quarters of an hour whether or not to give it to me; there were three reasons why they didn't; one was that they had been looking for an aesthetics expert which I had said in the interview was my bête noire, and the person they appointed was Michael Tanner who was; the second was that I had told them that I was restless at Birmingham and was thinking of going back to medicine so they thought I would have an alternative career; the third was a point made by John Wisdom, that I was a woman, would get married, and they would lose me; while still in Cambridge I talked to a friend, Charlie Gross, a neurophysiologist who later did amazing work, but at that time was a graduate student; he suggested I speak with Oliver Zangwill who knew the work of a man at Harvard, Jerry Bruner, whose work I might be interested in; Zangwill suggested I did a PhD in psychology with him but I had lost my State studentship when I went to Birmingham so had no funding; I applied for money to go to the States and spent a day in Birmingham reference library looking for sources of money; of two dozen, only six were open to women; I was offered a Harkness Fellowship and went off to Harvard to do social and cognitive psychology with Bruner

Second Part

0:05:07: I was in America for two years at Harvard Graduate School; after I had accepted the Harkness Fellowship and before I had left for America, the nascent University of Sussex announced that they were going to be an interdisciplinary university and I knew that's where I wanted to go; I would have applied right at the beginning if I hadn't been committed to going to America; a few months after I got back from the States I heard that they were interviewing at Sussex; I went there in 1965 and have been there ever since; I was appointed in the philosophy subject group in the School of Social Sciences; by that time I was already interested in artificial intelligence but had actually published on it; my PhD which I was beginning to write was on artificial intelligence and its relationship to the philosophy of mind and various sort of psychological and personality theory; when I went to Harvard I had picked up a book which changed my life, 'Plans and the Structure of Behaviour' by Miller, Galanter and Pribram; it was the first book to try to apply to notion of programming to the whole of psychology, not just cognitive psychology; there were only about four interesting programs at the time it was published in 1960, but it used those to show how you could think about mental processes in terms of what precisely needs to be done, what has to be the case in order for that to be possible, how it is to be done, etc. I immediately got the point that it was a way of thinking about all the issues that had bugged me ever since I was at school, on the one hand how is it possible to have a mind in a body, also to actually ask clear questions about what the processes were; I wish I had understood this when working with Margaret Masterman; she was at the time working on machine translation but it didn't seem to me that it related to the issues that interested me, which were purpose and intention etc.; I understand why I didn't get the point with her but did immediately I read that book – was that she wasn't doing programming, talking about actual processes although it was implicit; she talked about the structure of language and memory, and she was writing information retrieval programs although the methods were primitive compared with now - punch cards and no computer that she could run it on; Roger Needham, who was working with Maurice Wilkes, used to take the cards into the computer lab each night and run them for her; her question was what is in the mind rather than how does the mind work, whereas if you are writing a program you are defining processes and their order; that was exactly what was being done in the famous program, the general problem solver, which was one of the most important influences for the book by Miller et al; their idea was of what they called T.O.T.E. units - test, operate, test, exit; so test might, for instance, be a perceptual test - is it sweet or sour; operate might be swallow or spit out; test might be a repeat of the first or another, and so on, and finally exit; they applied this notion to the whole of psychology; of course it was hugely simplistic but it was a book of vision, and it opened my eyes and of a lot of others too; I regard it as the manifesto for cognitive science; you only have to go back to the book and ask what progress has been made in cognitive science since; from the moment of reading that book, all the questions that I asked about the mind and how it works I try to approach from a computational view; it is not necessary to write programs, but you are aware of the clarity and precision of the sorts of questions that you have to ask and answer; prior to have those concepts available and that sort of discipline psychologists didn't do it; since then I have done a lot of work on creativity, drawing on computational concepts from artificial intelligence, to understand what sorts of things might be going on to enable people to come up with a brand-new idea; that theme has gone through all of my writing and thinking ever since; for instance, in terms of mental illness which was the reason I wanted to do psychiatry; I had read about hysterical paralysis before I even came up to Cambridge; in a case where someone cannot move their arm but can if hypnotised, it is clear it has nothing to do with nerve damage; there may be a nerve switch that can be turned on by hypnosis which allow the arm to function, but there is group of spinal nerves in the body that only innovate the arm muscles; thus the failure of the arm to work is not due to failure in the body but is a mind problem; the layman's belief that the arm is independent, ie. stops at the shoulder, is structuring the behaviour

19:29:13: On artificial intelligence, I don't see any reason in principle that some sort of computational system couldn't achieve all the results that we do, not just in problem solving, but motivation, emotion, personality structure - all of these psychological things do not happen by magic, they happen because of processes going on inside the brain; of course we know very little about what those processes are, except for low-level vision that goes on in the visual cortex, about which we know a great deal; the sort of vision that requires stuff going on in the temporal cortex, like Charlie Gross's monkeys hands, we also know something; but the sort of thing that goes on in our heads, like you and I having this discussion, we know nothing really about the neural underpinnings of it; when I say that what goes on in the brain could, in principle, be modelled in the computer, you could say that that is an act of faith, but it is backed up by a huge amount of evidence; some computational system could think in the sorts of ways that we do, although we know very little about what those ways are; it also might be able to do certain things that we find interesting in very different ways; when AI started most of the people involved wanted to find out how we do these things, and wanted to build their systems in such a way that they would replicate us, using some experimental evidence but mostly hunches about how the human mind worked, and they used them to write their programs; increasingly as time went on AI has in a sense been growing away from the human example; take machine translation; Margaret Masterman was looking at it from the point of what is there in the head, but machine translation today is hugely effective in certain areas just using statistics; take the European Union, they have now 24 official languages and every official document has to be published in every one of those languages; at first the translation was done by human beings; now it is done by special machine translation programs which are doing what the human translators were doing a few years ago; but that is not so, because the way in which those machines work is to digest all the texts ever produced, then using statistics, matches are made between the original, which may be in English, and the language store to convert it into whichever language is needed; using statistics and very fast computers matches are made which has nothing to do with language whatsoever - there is no understanding or grammatical parsing; we look at AI today and we look at the amazing results that it can achieve, and in certain things it can do much better than we can, but it doesn't do them in the same way; the bad news is that these things can do what they do but can't do anything else, so are extraordinarily narrow; computer vision, for example, can be used for face recognition, iris matching etc., far better than human beings can, but it can't tell the difference between a dog and a cat, or identify or count objects on a shelf; it can get better but is going to be very much more difficult than people imagined at the start to make a truly flexible, general, artificial intelligence; we are nowhere near that at the moment; personally I wouldn't be surprised if it never happens, though it is in principle possible; of course there are people that believe it will happen at a human level and an a super-human level intelligence before the middle of this century, the so-called singularity; I think that is nonsense and these people have got no notion about how much current AI can't do, no notion of the difficulty of getting them to do it, and little notion of the subtlety and richness of human language, the sort of judgements and relevance that are involved in using human language, even to understand fairly unchallenging poetry; Macbeth's "Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care..." is a highly creative use of language; to understand all the allusions that Shakespeare intended, we have to know so much; if you wanted to have a computer system that could even understand the line it would not only have to have the relevant vocabulary, huge and various world knowledge; we all do this the whole time and I don't believe that people who talk about the singularity think about such issues or problems; they are thinking in arithmetical terms, but not all human thinking is like that; though the singularity may be nonsense that doesn't me that there isn't a lot to be frightened about already in AI which we ought to be aware of; the panic about the singularity has meant that at last people in AI are starting to think about these issues, and that is a good thing; if you are talking about consciousness, we don't understand the concept of consciousness well enough to be able to give an answer to that; people have made distinctions between functional consciousness and phenomenal consciousness where the former is the sorts of cognitive things that you can do for which you require consciousness, for example making a decision based on a lot of examples; you could use a machine to get into that aspect of consciousness, but phenomenal consciousness, the feel of an experience, is much more tricky, not just scientifically, but it is much more tricky philosophically; we think that we understand what we mean when we talk about phenomenal consciousness - the colour of red, the feeling of warmth - and many people would say we understand that better than anything else; it is the most immediate and direct form of understanding, and consciousness in that sense they would say is the basis of everything else, including science for that matter; but I think we are kidding ourselves; philosophers have tried over many years to make it clear but it is still hugely contentious; so I don't know whether it is possible or not, in principle, to have that sort of consciousness in a computational system; the notion that some singularity believers have that if we get a super intelligent machine in the sense of problem solving and language use that it would automatically be conscious, if they meant it would be phenomenally conscious, then I would say that they were kidding themselves - not because they are wrong, but because nobody knows or can say whether they are right or wrong
41:54:02: Thinking of the writing that I am most proud of, I think of two very different ones; one is my book, 'The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms', which you might say is an idea; it is offering a way of thinking about various sorts of creativity and doing it in computational terms; the other is my most recent, two volume work, which took me nine years to write, 'Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science', because what that does is to bring all the disciplines in cognitive science together, including anthropology, to show how they relate to one another and to show many common misconceptions and misunderstandings people have, even people inside the field, and to show how they arose; it is a history but it is also state of the art, although published in 2006, in the sense that in each area I mention some contemporary examples, but also in the final short chapter, on what next, and I pick out a couple of dozen of what I think are the most exciting and promising ideas in cognitive science, including, but not only AI; if I were to only pick one it is work on the computational architecture of the mind as a whole, so going back to my very first interest when at school; it is a way of thinking about how all the different sorts of capacities in our mind, not just cognition, also motivation and emotion, and how these are interrelated, how the mind works as an integrated whole even though it is made up of many different cooperating parts; the relationship between mind and body which puzzled me so much and has helped drive my work ever since, now the most readily intelligible way of answering the question is to say the mind is what the brain does; the better way of putting it is to say that the mind is the set of interacting, interlocking, virtual machines that is implemented in the brain; the mind is a concept at the level of information processing, that can't happen without being implemented in some physical substrate, and in AI and computer science the distinction is between the actual physical machine, the computer, and the way it is utilized, it is not magic

51:15:10: The exciting thing about Sussex when I went there was this genuine commitment to interdisciplinarity; when I and some of my colleagues decided to start an interdisciplinary programme based on AI, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, in which in a certain sense I was the intellectual core of it, it was the first such programme in the world and copied by other universities; the structure meant that students studied in the context of other disciplines, so you chose subject group and the school; we built a school within a school and it ended up as its own special school; now, very unfortunately, it doesn't exist as a school any more because the university has very much lessened the interdisciplinarity that was there at the beginning; I think that this is one of the many bad effects of the Research Assessment Exercise - R.A.E. - trying to persuade both students and faculty to keep within narrowly defined disciplines, not to do anything risky, and a huge break on creativity; however, there are still people there who work in interdisciplinary ways and I have some very exciting colleagues there; I never regretted going to Sussex.