ANDY ROSS
PHILOSOPHER
BOOK V: GOD
1999–2011
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.
Part of the SAP campus in Walldorf
A Visit to Berlin
The Love
Parade, Berlin, 1999
Advice for parade lovers
Me in front
of the Bundestag, Berlin, 1999
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| Me beside G.W.F. Hegel's grave, Berlin, 1999 | |
Me in Speyer, 1999
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.
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| Me in a Tucson hotel, 2000 | Tucson, 2000 |
Sue
Blackmore and Sue Hurley by a truck in Tubac, south of Tucson, 2000
Later in 2000, I moved with SAP Support to the new company campus at St.
Leon-Rot, south of Walldorf. I focused on preparing training
materials for courses held at SAP University.
In 2001, I became a certified support engineer and conducted remote EarlyWatch
Check sessions.
I learned to use the SAP
tools for technical authors and editors, and to work in the
SAP intranet.
In August 2001, I delivered a talk at the next Toward a Science of Consciousness
conference,
held in Skövde, Sweden.
Me in Stockholm, Sweden, 2001
Soon after I returned from Sweden, 9/11
In April 2002, I attended the next Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, again at Tucson, Arizona. I presented a poster. Big figures in the consciousness scene were Professor David Chalmers, then at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Professor Christof Koch, at Caltech.
 David Chalmers |
 Christof Koch |
Soon after my return, I
wrote a review of recent books by Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn
for the Journal
of Consciousness Studies (JCS).
 Ted Honderich |
 Colin McGinn |
At the end of 2007, I wrote another JCS essay on the works of Ted Honderich and
Colin McGinn,
Hitting on Consciousness.
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 SAP products using multimedia materials.
My first
SAP car, a BMW 318Ci, 2002
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.
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
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.
Exeter College, Oxford, 28 June 2003
Gaudy, Matriculation years 1965-1969
I am in the front row between Christopher Kirwan and the guy in the white
jacket.
Christopher Kirwan has a paper in his hand and was my philosophy
tutor in 1970.
In July 2003, I attended my next consciousness conference, Towards a Science of Consciousness: Between Phenomenology and Neuroscience, and
held in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.
There I met Arthur Piper, who invited me to write a brief
essay for one of his
journals.
Me in Bournemouth, ca 2003
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.
I exchanged a few words with Tim Berners-Lee.
Tim Berners-Lee
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.
Atlanta, GA, July 2004
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 reviewed Roger Penrose's new book The Road to Reality for the JCS.
 At SAP University, October 2004 |
 With Shai Agassi, October 2004 |
In October 2004, I published my works on consciousness as an online book, 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.
Mannheim, December 2005
In 2006, I attended the ASSC 10 conference at St. Anne's College in Oxford.
This was a return to the college where I had taught philosophy
thirty years earlier. A conversion with Claude Pasquini that he related in his
conference report in the JCS prompted me to write another essay for the JCS:
Will robots see humans as dinosaurs?
TREX team, Fall 2006
Starting in 2006, I began to think about religion. I read Dan Dennett's 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.
My second
SAP car, a BMW
120d, 2007
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.
The "Four Horsemen" of the Atheocalypse (l to r):
Christopher Hitchens,
Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris
In 2007 and 2008, I posted numerous comments related to the New Atheism on the website On Faith.
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| Me at a Dorset pub on my visit to England in the summer of 2008 |
That summer I read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin |
In early 2009, I packaged all my On Faith and Sam Harris forum posts into a book format
to serve as the 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.
My cousin Ross and his wife and kids, New Zealand, 2009
Schwetzingen
In November 2009, I celebrated my 60th birthday and retired from SAP.
In January 2010, my new book
Mindworlds became available from
Imprint Academic and
Amazon.
In 2010, I published the Ross International edition,
G.O.D. Is Great, of my book
on Globorg.
Avro Lancaster, RAF Hendon
Avro Vulcan XH558
Views of
my Schwetzingen apartment, January 2011
Prof. Dr. V. Krawczyk-Wasilewska
In 2011, I wrote my autobiography,
PHILOSOPHER.
I published it in January 2012.
Copyright for these images lies either with me, for
some of them, or with someone unknown, for most of the rest. The latter were
on
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does not
imply any change of copyright ownership. Any copyright holder who objects to
my reuse of an image here is welcome to apply to
"me at andyross dot net"
either for its removal or for its supplementation with source information or
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My display of the images is for information purposes only.
