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J. Andrew Ross
Writer and Philosopher
1949–1969: Poole
I was born in November 1949 in southern England. My father was from
Northumberland, and worked as an engineer. My mother was from Yorkshire, and
worked as a secretary. I have a sister, who is two years younger than me. When I
was still too young to remember, we moved to Poole, Dorset, on the south coast
of England, where I lived until 1969.
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My father circa 1949
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My mother circa 1949
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| Me circa 1961 |
My sister circa 1967 |
From the age of 11 to the age of 19, I was a pupil at Poole Grammar School.
There I sat Ordinary-level exams (three in 1965, five in 1966), Advanced-level
exams (1968), and the Oxford entrance exam (also 1968).
At age 12, I was deeply impressed by a visit to the Science Museum in London. My
reading at that time included science fiction, history, and light technical
books about ships and aircraft. In the Boy Scouts, my proficiency badge was for
aircraft spotting. My interest in war machines bloomed into a passion for
plastic modeling.
As a teenager, I cut a nerdish figure, academically good and sometimes
outstanding but not obviously a genius. I had a high IQ and used to read books
about relativity and quantum physics but I didn't really understand them. I had
no evident prowess at sports and no great charisma. I enjoyed a series of girlfriends
but
remained chaste throughout the sixties.
From 1966 to 1968,
I earned pocket money by working as a stockroom boy at Woolworths on Saturdays.
In the summers of 1966 and 1967, I worked as a seaside seller of tea and
ice-creams for the Bournemouth Beach Catering corporation. I developed an
interest in motorcycles, and rode and restored a pair of old British bikes,
first a BSA Bantam and then a Triumph Tiger Cub.
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| BSA Bantam |
Triumph Tiger Cub |
My school career ended quite well:
| Subject |
Level |
Grade |
| Pure Mathematics |
Advanced |
A |
| Applied Mathematics |
Advanced |
A |
| Physics (+ practical) |
Advanced |
A+A |
| Pure Mathematics |
Special |
Credit |
In the summer of 1968, the school sent me as its delegate to an international
young scientists' congress in London. This was a landmark event for my
imagination. In December 1968, I was awarded the Stapledon Exhibition to read
Physics at Exeter College Oxford.
For the first half of 1969, I worked as a bus conductor for the Hants and Dorset
Omnibus Company. I also bought an old car, a Renault Dauphine, and learned to
drive.
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Model of a double-decker bus
like the ones I worked on |
Renault Dauphine
like the one I drove |
In the long, hot summer, two other Oxbridge-bound schoolfriends and I
hitch-hiked around Europe. We watched Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong step onto
the Moon on television on a ship in the Adriatic Sea.
1969–1972: Oxford 1
In October 1969, I matriculated at the University of Oxford. I studied for three
years at Exeter College Oxford. I cultivated a hippy biker look, read a lot of
big novels, and decided I could best transmit the spirit of Apollo into the
future by authoring some good books.

Exeter College Oxford, dining hall
In 1970, I joined the Oxford University branch of the United Nations Association
and helped to organize a student rock music club called Stonehenge. In the
summer I took Second Class Honour Moderations in Physics and Philosophy, then
returned to Poole to work as a laborer in a steel factory. In the fall changed
my major to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE), with an emphasis on
philosophy. I read a lot of philosophy and numerous literary novels and I enjoyed
the latest rock music. For my 21st birthday, I bought myself a
typewriter, an Imperial Olympia.
In early 1971, I met a fellow student called Judy. We went on to spend the next
four years together. They were very good years. Judy studied PPE too, with an
emphasis on politics.

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 Immanuel Kant (mainly Kritik der reinen Vernunft) and Bertrand
Russell plus Ludwig Wittgenstein (from Principia Mathematica to the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus), I was awarded Second Class Honours. I won a Leverhulme
Studentship to study for a two-year Master's degree in Logic and Scientific
Method in the department founded by Karl Popper at the London School of
Economics and Political Science.
1972–1974: London 1
In autumn 1972, I started work at the London School of Economics. The head of
department was Imre Lakatos, who had developed a Popperian philosophy of
mathematics and science. I studied Quine's works in depth and enjoyed the buzz
around the works of Noam Chomsky and Saul 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. My own studies began to focus on Hegel and set theory. I envisioned
the closure of the cumulative hierarchy of sets into a strange loop analogous to
the looping of dialectical hierarchies in Hegeliana.
In 1974, I completed my Master of Science studies:
Papers:
Advanced Scientific Method
Elements of Mathematical Logic
Philosophy of Mathematics
Thesis (distinguished): Logical Foundations for Probability Theory
Carnap semantics for inductive logic and Kripke semantics for modal logic are
used to build a
logical foundation for probability theory.
In the summer of 1974, Judy and I traveled to Berlin. I taught English as a
Foreign Language and also worked my way through Hegel's masterpiece, Phänomenologie des Geistes, in German and English. Later in the year, I was
awarded the Master of Science degree in Logic and Scientific Method from the
University of London.
1974–1977: Oxford 2
In October 1974, I returned to the University of Oxford to pursue graduate
studies. I was awarded an Amelia Jackson Studentship from Exeter College and
studied for a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in Philosophy.
In 1975, I wrote a draft book entitled Dialectical Logic. In it, I tried to
demonstrate the logical open-endedness of propositional logic, predicate logic,
arithmetic, set theory, and truth theory.
In 1976, I completed my Bachelor of Philosophy studies:
Papers:
Original Authorities for the Rise of Mathematical Logic
Philosophy of Mathematics
Social and Political Philosophies of Hegel and Marx
Thesis : Truth and Provability
An open-ended sequence of restricted logical calculi is applied to arithmetic
and set theory to
accommodate the problems of self-reference illustrated by
Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
I was awarded a distinction. Robin Gandy at the Mathematics Institute had been
my tutor for mathematics in 1974–75. Crispin Wright at All Souls College was my
tutor for philosophy in 1975–77. The Oxford Bachelor of Philosophy degree is
worth somewhat more than a Master of Philosophy degree elsewhere and is
considered a sufficient and final qualification for teaching philosophy. I spent
the summer reading Iris Murdoch novels.
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 draft of my 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.
I decided to join the Civil Service as what they called a high flyer,
initially as an Administration Trainee. I was posted to the Ministry of Defence
in central London.
1977–1981: London 2
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 John Bell and Daniel Isaacson.
They gave the work as sympathetic a reading as it deserved and invited me to
resubmit, as and when I could produce something more polished. To make time to
do so, I resigned from the Ministry.
In early 1979, I wrote a quick novel called Fireball. It was a ripping yarn,
utter nonsense but fun. In the coming months a succession of publishers politely
rejected it.
Then I returned to London and got a job as an advertising representative for an
electronics journal called Electron, published by the International Publishing
Corporation. While there, I also wrote for their journal Data Processing. I
resigned to write my thesis anew in late 1979. With minimal length, math-free
dialog form, and few references, the typescript was more or less completed by
the end of the year.
In early 1980, I submitted the thesis. I did temporary clerical work for the
Institute of Administrative Accounting and Data Processing in London. 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 at the school teaching students
who were visiting Oxford. It was a pleasant summer. My thesis examiners were
Edward Craig and Michael Inwood. They accepted my Socratic dialog Dialectical
Logic for the degree of Master of Letters.
In September 1980, I moved back to London and started work as a tutor of
Advanced-level Physics at the Davis, Laing and Dick Tutorial College in Notting
Hill Gate.
In November 1980, at the University of Oxford degree ceremony at the Sheldonian
Theatre in Oxford, I was formally awarded certificates for the following
degrees:
Master of Arts
Bachelor/Master of Philosophy
Master of Letters
1981–1987: From Japan to Germany
In summer 1981, I flew to Japan. For a year, I taught English as a Foreign
Language at the Green English Conversation School, based in Shizuoka City. While
there I worked through all three volumes of the Feynman Lectures on Physics.
Refreshed, I returned to England in the summer of 1982. Getting a job took a
while, and I read more physics and wrote notes for a novel.
In January 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.
In the summer of 1984, I moved back to London, as a housemaster at a Lansdowne
residential college in Kensington. During the day job with A-level students from
all over the globe, I was in charge of the physics lab. Then I moved to the
Lansdowne dormitory in Notting Hill Gate.
In early 1986, to become more independent, I moved out, first to Crouch End in
east London, and then to Putney in southwest London. I wrote a draft novel
entitled Made in Japan. Not good enough, as a few literary agents politely said.
In the second quarter of 1987, to have a fresh record of my academic standing, I
sat the U.S. Graduate Record Examination in London:
| Test |
Score |
Percentile |
| Verbal |
790 |
99 |
| Quantitative |
800 |
99 |
| Analytical |
700 |
92 |
| Physics |
890 |
94 |
Soon afterward, 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.
1987–1998: Heidelberg
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.
I
studied German in evening classes at the local Volkshochschule. In spring 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 smart penthouse apartment on the lower East Side and visited the
Springer offices. In 1989, I published an article entitled "Springer's Tower of
Power" in the Springer New York magazine Springboard.
Later in 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 helped sort out technical details. I stayed in the department for almost a decade, until I left
Springer at the end of 1998. My senior colleague in the department was Dr. Hans Wössner, who had studied at the Munich Institute of Technology under Professor
Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Friedrich L. Bauer.
In 1991, I published 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. Online, and
with a trackball remote control and the right software, it would show
interactive real-time images of the Earth from space or thematic global maps
with a zoom feature for close-ups and drilldowns.
From 1992, 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.
Since 1990, I had been working on a novel called
Lifeball. In 1993, I wrote an
800-page draft. I called it "Lifeball — Proceedings and Prophecies on Planet
Earth" and hand-made sixteen hardback copies.
In 1994, I edited Lifeball down to some 500 pages and improved the style. I
called it "Lifeball — Birth of a New God" and made fifty paperback copies. A New
York agent tried to place it but gave up in early 1995.
In 1995, I revised Lifeball one last time, to create the 432-page paperback
edition that appeared in 1996. An enthusiastic and professional New York agent
tried her best to place it for a while, but again to no avail.
Perhaps the high point of my time at Springer was the work over several years in
collaboration with Professor Friedrich Bauer in Munich on his book Decrypted
Secrets — Methods and Maxims of Cryptology (1997).
In August 1997, at the suggestion of Springer author Alwyn Scott, I participated
at the Brain and Self Workshop held in Elsinore, Denmark, which was 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 next 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.
1999–2009: Walldorf
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.
University of Arizona philosophy professor David Chalmers was the master of
ceremonies and the presiding genius of the whole conference series.
Later in 2000, I moved with SAP Support to the new company campus at St.
Leon-Rot, a ten-minute drive south of Walldorf. I focused on preparing training
materials for courses held at the adjacent SAP University.
In 2001, I became a certified support engineer and began to conduct 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 delivered a talk at the next Toward a Science of Consciousness
conference, held in Skövde, Sweden. Among the highlights of the conference for
me were conversations with Peter Farleigh, Scott Hagan, Basil Hiley, Susan
Greenfield, and Ted Honderich. Also at the conference was a charming lady whom I
met up with again in Stockholm, Heidelberg, Prague, London, and Oxford.
In April 2002, I attended the next Toward a Science of Consciousness conference,
again at Tucson, Arizona. I presented a poster, although its contents left David
Chalmers, Stuart Hameroff, and many others puzzled. Soon after my return, I
wrote a review of recent books by Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn for the Journal
of Consciousness Studies (JCS).
At SAP in 2002, I took an active role in the creation of a new series of online
learning maps designed to enable consultants to train themselves on new releases
of SAP products using a mixture of multimedia materials.
In September, I moved from a small apartment near Heidelberg to a large
apartment on the west bank of the Rhine, sharing a house with an SAP colleague.
My new company car was a BMW 318 Ci sports coupé.
Also in September 2002, I took time off work to attend 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 wrote a detailed
review of the
proceedings for the JCS.
In 2003, I started work as a Developer in SAP, now back in Walldorf, on
intelligent search and classification tools and technology, and on new ideas for
the Semantic Web such as the ontology language OWL.
In July 2003, I attended my next consciousness conference, this one entitled
Towards a Science of Consciousness: Between Phenomenology and Neuroscience, and
held in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. There I met Johnjoe McFadden. I
also met Arthur Piper, who invited me to write a brief
essay for one of his
journals.
In September 2003, 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.
But our conference was utterly upstaged by the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony in
the same hotel.
In July 2004, SAP sent me on two more business trips. 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. 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 August 2004, I studied Roger Penrose's new book The Road to Reality and wrote
a detailed review of it for the JCS.
In October 2004, I published my works so far on the theme of consciousness as an
online book called Mindworlds.
In 2005, I worked hard for SAP on the introduction of my team's new flagship
product, which became known as the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
Accelerator.
In 2006, I attended the tenth ASSC conference at St. Anne's College in Oxford.
This was a sentimental return to the college where I had taught philosophy
thirty years earlier. Highlights of the conference for me were conversations
with Daniel Dennett, David Rosenthal, and David Edelman. A conversion with
Claude Pasquini that he related in his conference report in the JCS prompted me
to write another essay for the JCS, entitled:
Will robots see humans as dinosaurs?
Starting in 2006, I began to think about religion. I read Dan Dennett's fine
book Breaking the Spell and then Sam Harris' polemical manifesto on religion,
The End of Faith.
From January 2007 to summer 2008, I blogged actively on the On Faith web forum
hosted by the Washington Post and Newsweek, and then on Sam Harris' own web
forum.
At the end of 2007, I wrote another JCS essay on the works of Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn,
called Hitting on Consciousness.
During these years, I also put real effort into my SAP work. In 2008, team colleague Gerhard Hill and I published a
paper, Reducing Outer Joins, in
the Springer VLDB journal. Later in 2008, I published my (third) book SAP NetWeaver BI Accelerator,
via SAP Press as volume 42 in their SAP Essentials
series.
In early 2009, I packaged all my On Faith and Sam Harris forum posts into a book format
and presented them as a rough draft for my (fourth) book Godblogs.
In early 2009, I prepared a thoroughly revised second edition of my (second) book
Mindworlds and arranged for its
publication by Imprint Academic.
In June 2009, I attended ASSC XIII in Berlin.
In late 2009, I helped SAP team colleagues prepare several technical papers
for publication.
2009-2010: Schwetzingen
In November 2009, I celebrated my 60th birthday and retired with a golden
handshake from SAP.
 My car
In January 2010, my new book
Mindworlds became available from
Imprint Academic and
Amazon.
In early 2010, I wrote my next book,
G.O.D. Is Great.
My publications
Article about me in SAP World, December 2007
PDF: 2 pages, 105 KB
My curriculum vitae
PDF: 2 pages, 60 KB


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