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Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask (* June 28, 1928 in Derby; † March 28, 1996 London) was an English cybernetician and psychologist who made significant contributions to cybernetics, instructional psychology, experimental epistemology and educational technology.
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Pask was born in Derby, England in 1928. After qualifying precociously as a Mining Engineer at Liverpool Polytechnic, now Liverpool John Moores University, Pask obtained an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge in 1952 and a PhD in Psychology from the University of London in 1964. Whilst Visiting Professor of Educational Technology he obtained the first DSc from the Open University. From the sixties Pask directed commercial research at System Research Ltd in Richmond, Surrey and his partnership, Pask Associates, near Clapham Common during the eighties and nineties.
Pask held faculty positions at Brunel University, University of Illinois at Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Mexico, Concordia University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Oregon, and University of Amsterdam.
In 1968 Gordon Pask and his pupil Roy Ascott were elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London. Pask was chairman of the Cybernetics Society from 1976 to 1979. He advised the professional cybernetician to proceed in the manner of the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes."Adventures with Professor Flaxman-Low" by Gordon Pask MS Feb 1993
In 1995 he was awarded a ScD from his alma mater, Downing College, Cambridge, and he was a recipient of the Wiener medal from the Cybernetics Society in London.
In 1956 Pask had been married to Elizabeth Poole with whom he had two daughters. He was further active in the theatre and wrote a collection of short stories "Adventures with Professor Flaxman-Low" (narrated extract with notes) as a literary comment on his work. For many years he was Senior Tutor at the Architectural Association in London. He drew and painted and was a member of the Chelsea Arts Club and the Athenaeum Club. The memorial article which appeared in the The Independent newspaper (Scott, 1996) acknowledged Pask\'s unique approach to scholarship and life:
Gordon Pask was a rare man. He was an original; an eccentric in the best sense; gifted as a scientist, artist, lyricist. His peers in academic life have regularly acknowledged his genius. He had an exceptionally productive career (several books, over two hundred published papers). His many contributions are still being assimilated in psychology, educational technology, cybernetics and systems science.
Gordon\'s primary contribution to cybernetics and systems theory, as well as to numerous other fields, was his emphasis on the personal nature of reality, and on the process of learning as stemming from the consensual agreement of interacting actors in a given environement. Life and intelligence lie somewhere in the conflict between closed, unique, construction and open, shared, interaction. Between a specific material fabric, and a general conceptual/functional organization. In fact, his message, still very much mute to the more hardcore computationalist ears in the Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life communities, stresses that only systems striving out of this conflict can be considered to be alive and/or intelligent, and endowed with the potential for open-ended conceptual/functional variety.Luis Rocha (1996), "Obituary for Professor Gordon Pask", in: International Journal of General Systems, Vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 219-222.
Pask\'s most well known work was the development of
Pask\'s Conversation Theory Pask, 1975. is a cybernetic and dialectic framework that offers a scientific theory to explain how interactions lead to "construction of knowledge", or, as Pask preferred "knowing" (wishing to preserve both the dynamic/kinetic quality, and the necessity for there to be a "knower").
The Hewitt, Bishop and Steiger approach concerns sequential processing and inter-process communication in digital, serial, kinematic computers. It is a parallel or pseudo-concurrent theory as is the theory of concurrency. See Concurrency (computer science). In Pask\'s true field concurrent theory kinetic processes can interrupt (or, indeed, interact with) each other, simply reproducing or producing a new resultant force within a coherence (of concepts) but without buffering delays or priorityPask 1993 paras 100, 130.
Interactions of Actors is a process theoryPask (1993). As a means to describe the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Pask would make analogies to physical theories in the classic positivist enterprises of the social sciences. Pask sought to apply the axiomatic properties of agreement or epistemological dependence to produce a "sharp-valued" social science with precision comparable to the results of the hard sciences. It was out of this inclination that he would develop his Interactions of Actors Theory. Pask\'s concepts produce relations in all media and he regarded IA as a process theory. In his Complementarity Principle (see New Cybernetics (Gordon Pask)) he stated "Processes produce products and all products (finite, bounded, coherent objects) are produced by processes"Pask (1996) p.355 and Postulate (20) p. 359.
Most importantly Pask believed that no two concepts could be the same because of their different histories. He sometimes called this the "No Doppelgangers clause". Pask 1993. Later he reflected "Time is incommensurable for Actors". Pask 1996. He saw these properties as necessary to produce differentiation and innovation or new coherences.
In 1995 Pask stated what he called his Last Theorem: "Like concepts repel and unlike concepts attract". For ease of application Pask stated the differences and similarities of descriptions (the products of processes) were context and perspective dependent. In the last three years of his life Pask presented models based on Knot theory knots which described minimal persisting concepts. He interpreted these as acting as computing elements which exert repulsive forces in order to interact and persist in filling the space. The knots, links and braids of his entailment mesh models of concepts, which could include tangle-like processes seeking "tail-eating" closure, Pask called "tapestries".
His analysis proceeded with like seeming concepts repelling or unfolding but after a sufficient duration of interaction (he called this duration "faith") a pair of similar or like-seeming concepts will always produce a difference and thus an attraction. Amity (availability for interaction), respectability (observability), responsibility (able to respond to stimulus), unity (not uniformity) were necessary properties to produce agreement (or dependence) and agreement-to-disagree (or relative independence) when Actors interact. Concepts could be applied imperatively or permissively when a Petri (see Petri net) condition for synchronous transfer of meaningful information occurred. Extending his physical analogy Pask associated the interactions of thought generation with radiation : "operations generating thoughts and penetrating conceptual boundaries within participants, excite the concepts bounded as oscillators, which, in ridding themselves of this surplus excitation, produce radiation" Pask 1993, paragraph 84.
In sum, IA supports the earlier kinematic Conversation Theory work where minimally two concurrent concepts were required to produce a non-trivial third. One distinction separated the similarity and difference of any pair in the minimum triple. However, his formal methods denied the competence of mathematics or digital serial and parallel processes to produce applicable descriptions because of their innate pathologies in locating the infinitesimals of dynamic equilibria (Stafford Beer\'s "Point of Calm"). He dismissed the digital computer as a kind of kinematic "magic lantern". He saw mechanical models as the future for the concurrent kinetic computers required to describe natural processes. He believed that this implied the need to extend quantum computing to emulate true field concurrency rather than the current von Neumann architecture.
Reviewing IA Pask, 1996. he said:
Interaction of actors has no specific beginning or end. It goes on forever. Since it does so it has very peculiar properties. Whereas a conversation is mapped (due to a possibility of obtaining a vague kinematic, perhaps picture-frame image, of it, onto Newtonian time, precisely because it has a beginning and end), an interaction, in general, cannot be treated in this manner. Kinematics are inadequate to deal with life: we need kinetics. Even so as in the minimal case of a strict conversation we cannot construct the truth value, metaphor or analogy of A and B. The A, B differences are generalizations about a coalescence of concepts on the part of A and B; their commonality and coherence is the similarity. The difference (reiterated) is the differentiation of A and B (their agreements to disagree, their incoherences). Truth value in this case meaning the coherence between all of the interacting actors.
He added:
It is essential to postulate vectorial times (where components of the vectors are incommensurate) and furthermore times which interact with each other in the manner of Louis Kaufmann\'s knots and tangles.
In experimental Epistemology Pask, the "philosopher mechanic", produced a tool kit to analyze the basis for knowledge and criticize the teaching and application of knowledge from all fields: the law, social and system sciences to mathematics, physics and biology. In establishing the vacuity of invariance Pask was challenged with the invariance of atomic number. "Ah", he said "the atomic hypothesis". He rejected this instead preferring the infinite nature of the productions of waves.
Pask held that concurrence is a necessary condition for modeling brain functions and he remarked IA was meant to stand AI, Artificial Intelligence, on its head. Pask believed it was the job of cybernetics to compare and contrast. His IA theory showed how to do this. Heinz von Foerster called him a geniusvon Foerster pp 35-42 in Glanville (1993), "Mr. Cybernetics", the "cybernetician\'s cybernetician".
There are no Doppelgangers is a fundamental theorem, edict or clause of cybernetics due to Gordon Pask in support of his theories of learning and interaction in all media (Conversation Theory and Interactions of Actors Theory). It accounts for physical differentiation and is Pask\'s exclusion principle Pask (1993) para 82 and Table 4. It states no two products of concurrent interaction can be the same because of their different dynamic contexts and perspectives. No Doppelgangers is necessary to account for the production by interaction and intermodulation of different, evolving, persisting and coherent forms. Two proofs are presented both due to Pask.
Consider a pair of moving, dynamic participants A and B producing an interaction T. Their separation will vary during T. The duration of T observed from A will be different to the duration of T observed from B Pask (1996) Pask (1993) para 102.
Let Ts and Tf be the start and finish times for the transfer of meaningful information.
Where <> stands for "is not equal to" we can write:
|
TsA <> TfB, TsB <> TfB, TsA <> TsB, |
TfA <> TsB TfA <> TsA TfA <> TfB |
Thus
A <> B
Pask remarked Pask (1996):
Conversation is defined as having a beginning and an end and time is vectorial. The components of the vector are commensurable (in duration). On the other hand actor interaction time is vectorial with components that are incommensurable. In the general case there is no well-defined beginning and interaction goes on indefinitely. As a result the time vector has incommensurable components. Both the quantity and quality differ.
No Doppelgangers applies in both the Conversation Theory\'s kinematic domain (bounded by beginnings and ends) where times are commensurable and in the eternal kinetic Interactions of Actors domain where times are incommensurable.
The second proof Pask (1993) is more reminiscent of R.D. Laing R.D. Laing (1970): Your concept of your concept is not my concept of your concept- a reproduced concept is not the same as the original concept. Pask defined concepts as persisting, countably infinite, recursively packed spin processes (like many cored cable, or skins of an onion) in any medium (stars, liquids, gases, solids, machines and, of course, brains) that produce relations.
Here we prove A(T) <> B(T).
D means "description of" and
TA = A(T) =
TB = B(T) =
or, in general
TZ = Z(T) =
also, in general
AA = A(A) =
AB = A(B) =
and vice versa, or, in general terms
ZZ = Z(Z) =
given that for all Z and all T, the concepts
TA = A(T) is not equal to TB = B(T)
and that
AA = A(A) is not equal to BA = B(A) and vice versa, hence, there are no Doppelgangers.
Q.E.D.
Pask attached a piece of string to a bar Green (2001) with three knots in it. Then he attached a piece of elastic to the bar with three knots in it. One observing actor, A, on the string would see the knotted intervals on the other actor as varying as the elastic was stretched and relaxed corresponding to the relative motion of B as seen from A. The knots correspond to the beginning of the experiment then the start and finish of the A/B interaction. Referring to the three intervals, where x, y, z, are the separation distances of the knots from the bar and each other, he noted x > y > z on the string for participant A does not imply x > z for participant B on the elastic. A change of separation between A and B producing Doppler shifts during interaction, recoil or the differences in relativistic proper time for A and B, would account for this for example. On occasion a second knotted string was tied to the bar representing coordinate time.
To set in further context Pask won a prize from Old Dominion University for his Complementarity Principle: "All processes produce products and all products are produced by processes". This can be written:
Ap(Con Z(T)) => D Z(T) where => means produces and Ap means the "application of". This can also be written
Pask distinguishes Imperative (written &Ap or IM) from Permissive Application (written Ap)Pask (1993) para 188 where information is transferred in the Petri net manner, the token appearing as a hole in a torus producing a Klein bottle containing recursively packed concepts Pask 1993.
Pask\'s "hard" or "repulsive" Pask (1993) carapace was a condition he required for the persistence of concepts. He endorsed Rescher\'s Coherence Theory of Truth approach where a set membership criterion of similarity also permitted differences amongst set or coherence members, but he insisted repulsive force was exerted at set and members\' coherence boundaries. He said of Spencer Brown\'s Laws of Form that distinctions must exert repulsive forces. This is not accepted by Spencer Brown and others. Without a repulsion, or Newtonian reaction at the boundary, sets, their members or interacting participants would diffuse away forming a "smudge"; Hilbertian marks on paper would not be preserved. Pask, the mechanical philosopher, wanted to apply these ideas to bring a new kind of rigour to cybernetic models.
Pask has written several books and articles. Books, a selection:
Other papers:
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