
J. Andrew Ross
Writer and Philosopher
I was born in England in 1949 and lived in Poole in
southern England until 1969. I was a pupil at Poole Grammar School. There I took
eight O-levels, three A-levels, and the Oxford entrance exam.
As a teenager I was interested in science,
the Space Race and the Apollo project, World War II and the Cold War, motorbikes
and girls. My first bike, in 1966, was a BSA Bantam. Soon after I passed my
motorbike-riding test I replaced it with a Triumph Tiger Cub, which I then
rebuilt and customized.
In the summer of 1968, I was awarded A-grade A-levels in Pure Mathematics,
Applied Maths, and Physics, and an S-level Credit in Pure Maths. That summer,
the school sent me as its delegate to an international young scientists congress
in London.
In December 1968, I was awarded the Stapledon Exhibition to read Physics at
Exeter College Oxford.
In early 1969, I worked as a bus conductor
for the Hants and Dorset Omnibus Company. I earned enough money to buy a car, a
Renault Dauphine, and to pass my driving test. Then I sold the car and went on a
hitch-hiking tour around Europe with two schoolfriends.
From 1969 to 1972, I was an undergraduate at Exeter College Oxford. In October
1969, I matriculated at the University of Oxford. In the summer 1970, I took
Second Class Honour Moderations in Physics and Philosophy.

Group photo at Poole schoolfriend's wedding, 1971, from left:
schoolfriend Steve, me, my
mother, schoolfriend Graham, schoolfriend Paul, my Oxford girlfriend Judy
In 1972, after elective study in the philosophy of mind and the respective
philosophies of Kant (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) and Bertrand Russell plus
Ludwig Wittgenstein (logical atomism and the Tractatus), I was awarded Second
Class Honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. My grades for the elective
papers were good but the rest were mixed, so I missed a First.
From 1972 to 1974, I studied at the London School of Economics and Political
Science. I was awarded a Leverhulme Studentship to study for a two-year Master’s
degree in Logic and Scientific Method in the department founded by Karl Popper.
The head of department was Imre Lakatos, who had developed a Popperian
philosophy of mathematics and science. I studied especially the works of Popper,
Gödel, Quine and Kripke.
In 1973, I did some part-time lecturing on Fundamental and Integrative Studies
in the Department of Accounting and Finance at the North East London
Polytechnic. I supplemented my LSE studies with participation at seminars in
other London colleges, mostly University College.
In 1974, I completed my Master of Science studies, with papers in Advanced
Scientific Method, Elements of Mathematical Logic, and Philosophy of
Mathematics, and distinguished thesis titled Logical Foundations for Probability
Theory. In the thesis, I used a Carnap semantics for inductive logic and Kripke
semantics for modal logic to build a logical foundation for probability theory.
I was awarded the degree of Master of Science in Logic and Scientific Method
from the University of London.
In the summer of 1974, I traveled to Berlin. I taught English as a Foreign
Language at the Hartnackschule, and also worked my way through Hegel’s
masterpiece, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in German and English, in the American
Memorial Library at Hallesches Tor.
From 1974 to 1977, I pursued graduate studies at the University of Oxford. I was
awarded an Amelia Jackson Studentship from Exeter College and started by
studying for a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in Philosophy, which is now called
a Master of Philosophy degree.
In 1975, I wrote a draft book titled Dialectical Logic. In it, I tried to
demonstrate the logical open-endedness of propositional logic, predicate logic,
arithmetic, set theory, and truth theory. Since the work began with a quotation
from Lenin and ended with one from Mao Zedong, it was not calculated to appeal
to conventional readers and is better left unread.
In 1975, I published three book reviews in the Oxford University magazine Isis.
The first was on the novel Dead Babies by Martin Amis. The second was on
The
Central Questions of Philosophy by Alfred Ayer. The third was on the
autobiography Unended Quest by Karl Popper.
In 1976, I completed my Bachelor of Philosophy studies with papers in Original
Authorities for the Rise of Mathematical Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, and
Social and Political Philosophies of Hegel and Marx, and a thesis titled Truth
and Provability. In the thesis, I applied an open-ended sequence of restricted
logical calculi to arithmetic and set theory to accommodate the problems of
self-reference illustrated by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. I was awarded a
distinction for both the papers and the thesis, and received warm
congratulations all round. Robin Gandy at the Mathematics Institute was my
tutor for mathematics in 1974–75. Crispin Wright at All Souls College was my
tutor for philosophy in 1975–77.
In the academic year 1976–77, I continued my studies at Oxford, now registered
for a Doctor of Philosophy degree, and did part-time work as a tutor in logic
and philosophy at St. Anne’s College Oxford. I wrote another, more formalized
and detailed draft of my ill-fated book Dialectical Logic. The argument now
culminated in a new, open-ended, evolutionary theory of facts that unfolded in a
constructive universe where time was realized layer by layer behind a moving
present moment.
In 1977, I decided to join the Civil Service, initially as an Administration
Trainee. I did well in the exams and was posted to the Ministry of Defence in
central London. In October 1977, I started work at the Ministry of Defence in
London. My work there is subject to the Official Secrets Acts.
I submitted my new draft of Dialectical Logic as a doctoral thesis and was
examined on it in June 1978. My examiners were both young and already known to
me: John Bell, a mathematical logician from Oxford who now lectured in London,
and Daniel Isaacson, the Oxford Reader in Philosophy of Mathematics. They gave
the work as sympathetic a reading as it deserved and invited me to resubmit.
In Q3 1978, I resigned from the Ministry. This was undoubtedly a good move,
painful as it was. In early 1979, I wrote a quick novel and called it Fireball.
It was a ripping yarn, utter nonsense but fun. In the coming months a succession
of publishers politely rejected it.
In Q2 1979, I returned to London and got a job as an advertising representative
for a journal called Electron published by the International Publishing
Corporation, based on the South Bank. While there, I also wrote for their
journal Data Processing. Despite the pleasure of a company car, this was not
right for me, and I resigned to write my thesis anew in late 1979.
In Q1 1980, I finished and submitted the thesis, and did temporary clerical work
for the Institute of Administrative Accounting and Data Processing in the
Strand, just opposite the Savoy Hotel. The Institute was computerizing its
records, and needed someone with a clear mind and a sharp eye to mark up its
files.
In Q2 1980, I moved back to Oxford and took a short course in teaching English
as a Foreign Language at the Oxford Intensive School of English, then spent the
summer teaching vacation students in Oxford. It was a pleasant summer.
The time came for the viva voce exam on my thesis. The examiners were Edward
Craig from Cambridge and Michael Inwood, an Oxford man whose seminars on Hegel
some years earlier I had attended with some pleasure. Graciously enough, they
accepted my thesis Dialectical Logic for the degree of Master of Letters.
In Q3 1980, I moved back to London and started work as a tutor of A-level
Physics at the Davis, Laing and Dick Tutorial College in Notting Hill Gate. It
was good to be busy with physics again. I was in charge of the laboratory and
set up some good experiments. The job was temporary, with a contract for two
terms.
In November 1980, I attended the University of Oxford degree ceremony at the
Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, and was formally awarded certificates for the
degrees of Master of Arts, Bachelor of Philosophy, and Master of Letters.
in Q2 1981, unemployed again, I typed out a 500-page draft for an autobiography
based on my diaries, as an attempt to find out what I really wanted to do with
my life.
From summer 1981 to summer 1982, for one year, I taught English as a Foreign
Language at the Green English Conversation School, based in Shizuoka City,
Japan. I bought all three volumes of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, then read
them carefully from beginning to end.
In Q3 1982, refreshed, I returned to England to start again. Getting a job is
not always easy, and I had to wait a while, reading more physics and writing
notes for a novel about Japan. I started writing a sci-fi novel but the idea
soon unraveled.
In Q1 1983, I started work as a tutor of A-level physics and mathematics for
Lansdowne Tutors, a small college based in London. For the first 18 months I
worked as a housemaster at their residential campus in Woking, southwest of
London, where an élite group of Iraqi military cadets were being given a
fast-track education.
In the summer of 1984, I moved back to London, as a housemaster at the Lansdowne
college in Kensington, where a group of undergraduates from Florida were getting
the star treatment. During the day job with A-level students from all over the
globe, I was in charge of the physics lab. I moved to the Lansdowne dormitory in
Notting Hill Gate, with more Americans.
In Q1 1986, I moved to Crouch End in northeast London, where I tried to get my novel ideas
together. In the summer, in a pleasant apartment in Putney in southwest London,
I wrote a draft novel titled Made in Japan. Not good enough, as a few literary
agents politely said.
In Q2 1987, to have a fresh record of my academic standing, I sat the U.S.
Graduate Record Examination in London. My scores: Verbal 790 (top 1%),
Quantitative 800 (top 1%), Analytical 700 (top 8%), Physics 890 (top 6%). I was
offered the financed opportunity to study for a Ph.D. at Stanford University in
California, but just a few days before the offer arrived I had accepted a job in
Heidelberg, Germany.
In June 1987, I moved to Germany. I started work as the promotion editor for
physics and economics books and journals at the academic publisher
Springer-Verlag based in Heidelberg. I was responsible for promoting new
products by planning and writing brochures and newsletters and serving at
conference exhibitions. The products were mostly in English, but at work we
spoke German. I studied German in evening classes at the local Volkshochschule.
In 1988, I was awarded the ICC/Goethe Institut Zertifikat Deutsch als
Fremdsprache with the top grade (sehr gut).
Over Christmas/New Year 1988–89, I traveled to New York to see the sights. I
stayed in a posh penthouse apartment on the lower East Side. In 1989, I
published an article titled Springer’s Tower of Power in the Springer New York
magazine Springboard.
In Q4 1989, within Springer-Verlag, I moved to the computer science editorial
department. There, essentially as a copy editor, I helped academic authors and
editors to get their books together. This was mostly a matter of language and
presentation, though sometimes I could do more and help sort out tricky
technical details. The work was satisfying and the environment pleasant. I
stayed in the department until I left Springer at the end of 1998. My boss was
Dr. Hans Wössner, who had studied at the Munich Institute of Technology under
Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Friedrich L. Bauer. I worked directly with Prof.
Bauer on his Springer book Decrypted Secrets.
In 1991, I published an article, The Globall Hyperatlas – a development
proposal, in the Computer Graphics Society journal The Visual Computer. This was
an idea for an electronic globe consisting of a fixed glass sphere mounted like
a lightbulb on a baseplate and covered on the inside with a few million pixels.
From 1992 to 1998, I managed and desk-edited new proceedings volumes in the NATO
ASI Series F on computer and systems sciences, which included the NATO Special
Programme on Advanced Educational Technology.
I was working on a science fiction novel titled Lifeball. I wrote using
Microsoft Word on a Macintosh LCII. In 1993, I wrote a blockbuster 800-page
draft.
In 1995, I finally completed Lifeball, to create the 432-page paperback
edition that appeared in 1996. A New York agent tried her best to place it for a
while, but to no avail.
All this work with scientific ideas and academic publications reawakened my
interest in professional philosophy. I realized that the fallow years had
allowed my own ideas to grow far enough to be worth following.
In August 1997, at the suggestion of Springer author Alwyn Scott, I participated
at the Brain and Self Workshop held in Elsinore, Denmark, as part of the
conference series Toward a Science of Consciousness sponsored by the Department
of Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona.
In 1998, I joined the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
(ASSC) and participated at the ASSC conference The Neural Correlates of
Consciousness, held in Bremen, Germany, in June 1998.
The Springer directors did not take up my offer to focus on books and journals
devoted to consciousness studies. I used my interest in computers and computing
to land a documentation job at SAP, which was and is one of the biggest success
stories in the German business scene.
In January 1999, I reported for work at SAP AG, in Walldorf, Germany. I was
hired as an Information Developer in a department called Technical Core
Competence (TCC) and was responsible, together with a few others, for editing,
translating, writing, and coordinating technical documentation.
In April 2000, I took time off work to attend the conference Toward a Science of
Consciousness, held in Tucson, Arizona. This was a magical experience.
Later in 2000, I moved with SAP Support to the new company campus at St.
Leon-Rot, a ten-minute drive south of Walldorf. Amid idyllic scenery, beside a
tournament golf course, I focused on preparing training materials for courses
held at the adjacent SAP University.
In 2001, I became a certified support engineer and conducted several remote
EarlyWatch Check sessions for paying customers. I learned to handle the SAP
tools for technical authors and editors, and to maintain online content in the
company intranet.
In August 2001, I attended the next Toward a Science of Consciousness
conference, held in Skövde, Sweden. I drove to this one, in my 1998 Honda
Accord, over the new bridge linking Denmark to Sweden. I presented a 20-minute
talk illustrated with a smoothly animated PowerPoint show.
In April 2002, I attended the next Toward a Science of Consciousness conference,
again at Tucson, Arizona. After the T2K event, this could only be an anticlimax,
but it was a good one. I presented a poster. Soon after my return, I wrote a
review of recent books by Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn.
At SAP in 2002, I took an active role in the creation of a new series of online
sets of multimedia materials designed to enable consultants to train themselves
on new releases of SAP products. In September, I moved from a small apartment in
a crowded suburb near Heidelberg to a large apartment on the west bank of the
Rhine.
Also in September 2002, I attended the conference The Self: From Soul to Brain,
organized by the New York Academy of Sciences and held at the Mount Sinai School
of Medicine in New York. I was sufficiently inspired by this event to write a
very detailed review of the proceedings for the Journal of Consciousness
Studies.
In 2003, I started work as a Developer in SAP, now back in Walldorf, on
intelligent search and classification tools and technology.
In July, I attended my next consciousness conference, Towards a Science of
Consciousness: Between Phenomenology and Neuroscience, held in Prague, Czech
Republic. There I met Johnjoe McFadden – we kept in touch for long afterwards. I
also enjoyed a pleasant conversation with Arthur Piper, which inspired me to
write the brief essay Business at the Speed of Evolution for one of his
journals.
In September, I went as an SAP delegate to the conference DC-2003 on Dublin Core
metadata held in Seattle. The conference program included a pleasant formal
dinner at Microsoft in Redmond.
In May 2004, I spent a week at a fine hotel in New York City, courtesy of SAP. A
colleague from my SAP team and I served as SAP delegates for the 13th World Wide
Web conference. There I exchanged a few words with Tim Berners-Lee and became
inspired by the potential scope of the upcoming Semantic Web revolution.
In July, SAP sent me on two more business trips. In early July I traveled with
two of my colleagues from SAP Walldorf to the SAP Labs in Atlanta, Georgia, to
deliver a training course to our American colleagues on search technology. My
teaching experience and consciousness workouts had given me pretty good skills
for this sort of assignment, even though my grasp of the technology itself was
patchy. Two weeks later, another SAP Walldorf colleague and I traveled to
Sheffield, England, as delegates to the 27th annual international ACM Special
Interest Group conference on research and development in information retrieval
(SIGIR).
In late 2004, I completed work on my book Mindworlds, which collected a
miscellany of papers on consciousness and related studies that I had written
over the previous ten years.
In 2006, I worked hard to support the rollout of my SAP NetWeaver TREX team's
new product, the
SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence Accelerator.
In the summer of 2006, I attended the ASSC conference at St Anne's College,
Oxford, and experienced the exchange later recorded in my JCS essay Will robots
see humans as dinosaurs?
In 2008, I published a review of the controversy on consciousness between Ted
Honderich and Colin McGinn in the JCS, and a mathematical paper (with my SAP team
colleague Gerhard Hill) on database theory in The VLDB Journal (a Springer journal).
My book for SAP Press on my SAP team's flagship product, the SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator,
is scheduled for publication in late 2008.
My publications
Article about me in SAP World, December 2007
PDF: 2 pages, 105 KB
My curriculum vitae
PDF: 2 pages, 31 KB
