John Thornton's Home Page
Author. Computer Scientist. Phenomenologist.
Recent Talks
and Totnes Consciousness Café present
Taking it Further:
Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
Saturday 19th October / Saturday 2nd November
St Mary’s Church Hall Totnes (Behind 9 High Street)
This six session course expanded on material presented at the Consciousness Café talk on 27th September 2024: What on Earth does Artificial Intelligence have to do with Consciousness? You can watch that talk here: TALK VIDEO and the question and answer session here: Q&A VIDEO.
Below is an outline of the topics covered in the course:
Saturday October 19th
Session One: 2:00pm – 3:15pm Science and the Left Brain
Session Two: 3:45pm – 5:00pm AI and the Technological System
Saturday November 2nd
Session Three: 10:00am – 11:15pm Living Systems and Levels of Being
Session Four: 11:45pm – 1:00pm Consciousness and the Right Brain
Lunch Break
Session Five: 2:00pm – 3:15pm What is Intelligence?
Session Six: 3:45 – 5:00pm Summary and Synthesis
For information about future events please email:
taec.inquiry@gmail.com
About Me
Welcome to John Thornton’s Home page. My professional teaching and research career began in 1994 when I enrolled in an Honours degree at Griffith University in Australia. After completing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, I continued at Griffith as full-time academic until returning to the UK in 2015. I continue to work as a PhD supervisor and hold an Adjunct Associate Professor position at Griffith University’s Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems.
Since 2015, I briefly taught Adaptive Systems at the University of Sussex, going on to co-found the Philosophy Group at the Free University Brighton, where I developed and taught courses on the phenomenology of consciousness from 2016 to 2022. I now live in Totnes, where I am a member the organising committee of the Totnes Consciousness Café and co-founder of the Totnes Association for the Exploration of Consciousness.
Up to now (2024), I have published three books, two research theses, and more than 70 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. In addition, I have supervised ten PhD students to completion and have been a chief or principal researcher in eight government-funded research projects.
About This Site
The site contains a digital selection of my life’s work to date. Under Research you can find nearly all my published and unpublished writings, (most of which can be downloaded for free). This material can be divided into two main subject areas: artificial intelligence research and phenomenological philosophical inquiry. Expanding on this, the Books page hones in on two of my most significant publications (The Questioning of Intelligence and The Foundations of Computing and the Information Technology Age).
The Teaching page then provides links to material developed for three philosophy courses I taught at the Free University Brighton (Introduction to Phenomenology, Science, Consciousness and the Brain, and Language and Meaning), and to lecture and tutorial material I developed to support The Foundations of Computing textbook at Griffith University. I have also recorded several of the Free University philosophy classes, and provide links to these both on the Teaching page and on the Talks page.
If you are new to my work, and want to get a general idea of what I have to say, I suggest you read the beginning of my recent book, The Questioning of Intelligence (see link below), and then listen to one of the introductory lectures on the Talks page. Finally, if you are interested, I provide a more personal biography in the About Me page.
Recent Book: The Questioning of Intelligence
In 2021, I completed my latest book – one I had been meaning to write for more than a decade. It contains a philosophical distillation of my experience of going to university in the late 1970s, dropping out, joining the commune of an Indian guru, dropping out of that, returning to university, and becoming a full-time academic in the area of artificial intelligence. After that I spent nearly two decades studying phenomenological philosophy.
Despite these autobiographical details, the book is primarily a phenomenological exploration of what it means to be intelligent. As such it is an inquiry by intelligence, of intelligence, and is the culmination of my having studied intelligence, both artificial and natural, for nearly twenty-five years.
New Publishing Imprint: FUBText
The publishing of The Questioning of Intelligence is part of the development of a publishing imprint for the Free University Brighton, called FUBText. The Intelligence book is the first volume in the Free University Brighton Philosophy Series. Our plan is to create an alternative low-cost publishing outlet for the free university movement that remains under the collective control of those who create of the material that is published.
FUBText Details
The Genesis of FUBText
The idea of creating a publishing imprint for Free University Brighton occurred while I was writing The Questioning of Intelligence. My earlier experience of publishing a textbook with Pearson Education made me question whether I again wanted to use a mainstream publisher. For, in order to get published, I first had to sign over my intellectual property rights, despite being responsible for nearly all the work that went into creating the book. Pearson’s initial editorial and marketing input had been minimal – after which they took over printing and supplying the book to my students (and anyone else who was interested). For Pearson this was a no risk enterprise, as there was a captive readership of students who needed the material in order to complete the course it supported. At that time I was only too pleased with this arrangement. Not only did Pearson pay me 10% royalties, they took over all the logistical and financial responsibilities, and they gave me the status of having publishing with one of the major players in the industry – a status I traded on in climbing the promotional ladder to associate professorship. And now sales of the book have dwindled (due to my no longer teaching the course it supports) Pearson have unproblematically handed the copyright of the work back to me. So, to be clear, I have no problem with the way things went with Pearson.
But there are also significant drawbacks in publishing with a mainstream publisher, especially of you are not a ‘big player’. The first is the inflated price that is likely to be charged for your work. In the case of my Pearson book, most copies were sold through the local campus bookshop, at a price approaching $80 (Australian). Bearing in mind the book probably cost around $10 to print, you can see the kind of game that was being played out here: my students had to have this book in order to complete the course, and Pearson had a monopoly over its supply – hence they could set the price at the very limit of what an average student could afford. I had the kudos and the royalties, Pearson had their monopoly profits, and, in an often repeated story, it was the ones at the bottom of the pyramid who picked up the bill.
The second problem with a mainstream publisher is the question of profitability. Only a book that is going to sell in large enough numbers at a high enough price is going to be acceptable. That means your book is not going to be judged for what it has to say but in terms of its perceived marketability. This may be acceptable if you are writing primarily as a way to make money. But what if you have something to say about the situation in which we find ourselves, something new, something of value, that only a few people are going to understand and appreciate, perhaps just those few people in your immediate circle, in your local community?
Well, things have moved on since my experience with Pearson. It is now much easier and cheaper to publish using one of the many print-on-demand services that are available to everyone. And that means an author can now keep control of their work, and also of the prices that readers must pay to access that work. Of course, self-publishing also means that your work is likely to disappear in a sea of all the other unreviewed, self-regarding, self-published works that appear each day on Amazon. But clearly there is also an opportunity here, an opportunity to develop a model of publication that is not based on profit margins and perceived marketability. For print-on-demand technology means each book costs the same whether you print one or one thousand. And that allows for the creation of not-for-profit publishing houses that are primarily interested in the quality of the work they produce and not purely on the quantity.
At the moment, my book, The Questioning of Intelligence is FUBText’s first experimental publication to see how things work out in practice. To this end we have created a Free University Brighton Philosophy Series, with Matt Lee and Charlie Blake as series editors, and with a growing collection of consulting editors and student reviewers. The book is still under review, as is the final structure of how we shall run FUBText, so all that has been said on this page is still somewhat provisional. Nevertheless, and one way or another, I expect to print the book using IngramSpark and have copies ready for sale on or before September 2021.