Valentin Fyodorovich Turchin (russian: Валенти́н Фёдорович Турчи́н, 14 February 1931 in
Podolsk
Podolsk ( rus, Подольск, p=pɐˈdolʲsk) is an industrial city, center of Podolsk Urban Okrug, Moscow Oblast, Russia, located on the Pakhra River (a tributary of the Moskva River).
History
The first mentions of the village of Podol, ...
– 7 April 2010 in
Oakland, New Jersey
Oakland is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States and a suburb of New York City. As of the 2010 United States census, the borough's population was 12,754,cybernetician
A cyberneticist or a cybernetician is a person who practices cybernetics.
Heinz von Foerster once told Stuart Umpleby that Norbert Wiener preferred the term "cybernetician" rather than "cyberneticist", perhaps because Wiener was a mathematician r ...
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...
and a proponent of the
global brain
The global brain is a neuroscience-inspired and futurological vision of the planetary information and communications technology network that interconnects all humans and their technological artifacts. As this network stores ever more information, t ...
hypothesis.
Biography
Turchin was born in 1931 in
Podolsk
Podolsk ( rus, Подольск, p=pɐˈdolʲsk) is an industrial city, center of Podolsk Urban Okrug, Moscow Oblast, Russia, located on the Pakhra River (a tributary of the Moskva River).
History
The first mentions of the village of Podol, ...
,
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
. In 1952, he graduated from Moscow University in Theoretical Physics, and got his Ph.D. in 1957. After working on neutron and solid-state physics at the Institute for Physics of Energy in Obninsk, in 1964 he accepted a position at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...
. There he worked in statistical regularization methods and authored REFAL, one of the first AI languages and the AI language of choice in the Soviet Union.
In the 1960s, Turchin became politically active. In Fall 1968, he wrote the pamphlet ''The Inertia of Fear'', which was
quite widely circulated in
samizdat
Samizdat (russian: самиздат, lit=self-publishing, links=no) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the document ...
, the writing began to be circulated under the title ''The Inertia of Fear: Socialism and Totalitarianism'' in Moscow from 1976. Following its publication in the underground press, he lost his research laboratory. In 1970 he authored "The Phenomenon of Science", a grand cybernetic meta-theory of universal evolution, which broadened and deepened the earlier book. By 1973, Turchin had founded the Moscow chapter of
Amnesty International
Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and s ...
with Andrey Tverdokhlebov and was working closely with the well-known physicist and Soviet dissident
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov ( rus, Андрей Дмитриевич Сахаров, p=ɐnˈdrʲej ˈdmʲitrʲɪjevʲɪtɕ ˈsaxərəf; 21 May 192114 December 1989) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident, nobel laureate and activist for n ...
. In 1974 he lost his position at the Institute, and was persecuted by the KGB. Facing almost certain imprisonment, he and his family were forced to emigrate from the
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
in 1977.
He went to New York, where he joined the faculty of the
City University of New York
The City University of New York ( CUNY; , ) is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges and seven pro ...
in 1979. In 1990, together with
Cliff Joslyn
Cliff Joslyn (born 1963) is an American mathematician, cognitive scientist, and cybernetician. He is currently the Chief Knowledge Scientist and Team Lead for Mathematics of Data Science at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle, Wa ...
and Francis Heylighen, he founded the Principia Cybernetica Project, a worldwide organization devoted to the collaborative development of an evolutionary-cybernetic philosophy. In 1998, he co-founded the software start-up SuperCompilers, LLC. He retired from his post of Professor of Computer Science at City College in 1999. A resident of
Oakland, New Jersey
Oakland is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States and a suburb of New York City. As of the 2010 United States census, the borough's population was 12,754,Peter Turchin and Dimitri Turchin. Peter Turchin is a specialist in
population dynamics
Population dynamics is the type of mathematics used to model and study the size and age composition of populations as dynamical systems.
History
Population dynamics has traditionally been the dominant branch of mathematical biology, which has a ...
The philosophical core of Turchin's scientific work is the concept of the metasystem transition, which denotes the evolutionary process through which higher levels of control emerge in system structure and function.
Turchin uses this concept to provide a global theory of
evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
and a coherent social systems theory, to develop a complete
cybernetic
Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson ma ...
s philosophical and ethical system, and to build a constructivist foundation for mathematics.
Using the REFAL language he has implemented a Supercompiler, a unified method for program transformation and optimization based on a metasystem transition.
Major publications
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*Refal-5: Programming Guide and Reference Manual, New England Publishing Co. Holyoke MA, 1989 Principia Cybernetica Web (as editor, together with F. Heylighen and C. Joslyn) (1993–2005) Most cited publications according to Google Scholar