Berkeley advisor — and the man who handed him Hinton's paper
Parts of this entry are out of date. It is published anyway, because an incomplete record that invites correction is more useful than no record at all.
Professor in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Berkeley, known for dynamic programming and for foundational work on the mathematics underlying neural networks and back-propagation. Brother of the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, with whom he co-taught.
One of Jonathan Hare's two primary advisors. Also a member of Hare's mother's Hindu-Buddhist ashram — the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, known in the family as Ramagiri — so Hare knew him from childhood before he was ever a student.
The geometry he taught reaches its widest audience yet in the unification essay's chapter two — the Hilbert-space argument is the classroom material, grown up.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Dreyfus and C. Roger Glassey gave Hare Geoffrey Hinton's paper on back-propagation and showed him a neural network running on Glassey's NeXT machine. Berkeley, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon were the academic institutions backing Steve Jobs's NeXT at the time. Forty years later Hare's architecture would take a position on what Hinton says about AI safety — that giving a system something like a mothering instinct may be the only route, and that it therefore has to be built into the substrate rather than hoped for.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Philosophy against artificial intelligence — and Hare's mother's employer
Open →Hare's other advisorThe other advisor, and the NeXT machine
Open →taught in“Imaginary engineers” — third floor, Etcheverry Hall
Open →member ofThe ashram, and an unlikely overlap with Berkeley engineering
Open →the geometry he taught, made constructiveSix importations, each with its defeating condition
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-081The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.
Correct this entry → Add a story, photo or link → Browse the graph →