Commencement Speech, University of Toronto Judea Pearl, June 21, 2007

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(http://www.danielpearl.org/news_and_press/articles/Pearl_University_Toronto_Speech.html

Click here for video of Dr. Pearl’s commencement address. Click on “Start Presentation” and scroll the index for “Thursday, June 21 Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, 10:00 – 11:30am.” Introductions and Dr. Pearl’s address start about 21 minutes into the commencement.

Chancellor Peterson, President Naylor, members of the faculty, parents, and especially, the graduates:

It is a great honor for me to receive this Doctorate degree from your esteemed university, and it is also a timely honor –

— I’ve been waiting more than 40 years for an opportunity to consummate my PhD degree in an official graduation ceremony because, and this is a difficult confession for me to make — I skipped my other graduation ceremonies, all three of them.

When my Bachelor degree was awarded, I was on board of a ship, heading to America.
And when the time came to get my PhD degree, I had a tough dilemma, the ceremony fell on the very same day that I was to receive a Master degree in Physics, in a different University, and I could not make up my mind between the two. At the end of the day I stayed home and had the two diplomas delivered by mail.

This was my teenage rebellion, very fashionable in the 1960’s: “Who cares for ceremonies and symbols, caps, gowns and speeches? It is the knowledge that counts, right?”

Wrong!

I have another confession to make today — a secret that I kept even from my wife. I truly regret not having gone to my graduation in 1965 which, in some strange sense, caused me to feel that my degree is somewhat fake or improperly earned, even though the diploma itself is properly signed and well encased, I am sure, in a very safe place at home.

And I should have known better.

Coming from computer science — the science of symbols, I should have known the importance of symbols to the workings of the mind, and to the workings of society.

I should have known that, in all primitive societies, initiations to adulthood are consummated not by signing documents, not even by passing a test, but by a ritual communal dance, with feather hats and dragon masks and all the tribal chiefs and the village elderly and women and children present.

And I should have known that the neural architecture of modern man is not much different than that of the hunting caveman.

I know better now. I know that it is not the signature on your diploma that counts, but the statement of deservedness that you will be making by stepping up to this stage and receiving your degree in the presence of your teachers, families and peers who will bear witness to, and cheerfully approve of your claim for accomplishment — that is what counts, and that is what you will remember.

And that is why we put on these funny caps and gowns, so you will retain a visual memory of this tribal dance.

Why?

Because it is only through a communal testimony that your accomplishments becomes embedded in a relevant and meaningful context, larger than yourself, and it is through this context of an extended tribal community that you will be able to apply what you have learned in a way that would make it meaningful and rewarding to you for the rest of your life.

What is this tribal community that you are joining today?

The cap and gown that I wear unveil its identity; it is the tribe of “scientific freedom fighters.”

This cap and gown were first worn at the University of Padua, Italy, in the 13-14th century, the place where Galileo later taught and where he invented the telescope (1608) and discovered the amazing fact that physics listens to the language of algebra, (1632.)

Galileo is one of my heroes because, to me, he represents the essence of scientific pursuit.
Just to have the illusion that I am emulating Galileo, in his funny outfit, sends a thrill down my spine.
———————-

Galileo always reminds me of the inextricable connection between science and freedom.

————-*——————–

How? Because Galileo showed that to be a scientist you must have both: respect for the truth, and the audacity to believe that you can find it.

This might sound trivial — science, by definition, is about truth, so what’s all this talk about freedom.

It is not so trivial. Truth can be elusive, even in our times, covered by the heavy fog of fear and hidden agenda. It is only after the murder of my son Danny that I came to appreciate how hard it is, even in the age of Internet, to stay the course of truth.

Just two weeks ago, Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, and Israel Lau, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel made an interesting observation, published in the Wall Street Journal: “the countries in which Holocaust denial is most rampant also tend to be the ones that are most economically backward and politically repressive.”

Now what is the connection, you might ask, between Holocaust Denial and repressiveness? Is lack of freedom the cause of truth denial, or the other way around? The idea is, said Wahid and Lau, that “Those who are dishonest when it comes to the truth of the past, are hardly in a position to reckon honestly with the problems of the present.”

What Galileo showed us is that you cannot have one honesty without the other; scientific truth demands scientific honesty, and scientific honesty demands intellectual honesty overall.

We all remember the 1000 years of zero scientific progress through the middle ages — what caused it?
The conventional answer is that the Church was repressive of scientific discourse. But this could not be the whole story, there was no repressive Church in the Muslim world. And Muslim scientists had access to the richest libraries of the time, well-funded astronomical observatories and all the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers. So why didn’t a genius like Galileo emerge in Cordoba or Alexandria or Baghdad in the 8th or 9th century?

Why was science held back, in almost total stagnation for 1000 years, until, as though by miracle, the genius of Copernicus, Vieta and Galileo emerged in dark-ages Europe, of all places? Can you imagine where mankind would be today had the renaissance and the scientific revolution taken place in the 5th century instead of the 15th?

What Galileo taught us is that permission to read, translate, observe and use fancy equipment is not enough; the development of Science requires a restless and rebellious spirit, a spirit that puts the individual at the center of the universe and proclaims: “I don’t care about Aristotle and his fancy books, I want to see these two rocks dropped from the tower of Pisa, and I want to see them with my own two eyes.”

In other words, what Galileo showed us is that you cannot truly search for the truth unless you are free to rebel against the detractors of truth: conventional wisdom, peer pressure, sacred cows, wishful thinking, revered authority and hidden agenda, in short, free to perceive yourself as an AGENT, in control of your destiny, not an OBJECT, at the mercy of destiny.

Remarkably, this Western perception of man as a free agent, sometimes called the “scientific philosophy”, it not always taken for granted, even today.
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“The West is morally bankrupt” declares Professor Tariq Ramadan, the darling star of European intellectuals.

“Take from the West all its science and technology,” says Scheik Yusuf Qaradawi to his Al Jezeera listeners, “but you must reject Western philosophy, because it is corrupt at its roots by the pagan philosophies of Greece and Rome”

Sorry to disappoint you Scheik Yusuf Qaradawi, but you can’t have science and technology without Western philosophy of freedom, honesty and individual AGENCY; it has been tried before, for 1000 years, in your own courtyard, and failed.

And Sorry to disappoint you Professor Ramadan, but Western civilization is mighty proud of its ethics, values and achievements, and “bankruptcy” is not in its lexicon — far from it.

The spirit of the West shines brightly today through the works of hundreds of humble yet courageous and principled young scientists and engineers who are graduating from this great university.

This spirit is rooted indeed in the skeptical inquiry of the pagan Socrates and the moral clarity of the Biblical Jeremiah, and the rebellious spirit of Galileo, but behold, it shows no sign of bankruptcy or decline — it is, in fact, the only beacon of hope and moral courage for humanity today.

So, I congratulate you all today on joining the extended family of Socrates, Galileo and Einstein, and I welcome you to the tribal dance of science, the dance of freedom and humanity.

Thanks you.

Commencement Speech, University of Toronto Judea Pearl, June 21, 2007

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AUTHOR

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv and is a graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He came to the United States for postgraduate work in 1960, and the following year he received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering, now New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 1965, he simultaneously received a master’s degree in physics from Rutgers University and a PhD from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, now Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Until 1969, he held research positions at RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey and Electronic Memories, Inc. Hawthorne, California.

Pearl joined the faculty of UCLA in 1969, where he is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. He is the author of more than 350 scientific papers and three landmark books in his fields of interest: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000; 2009).

A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pearl is the recipient of numerous scientific prizes, including three awarded in 2011: the Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning; the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition, and the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Other honors include the 2001 London School of Economics Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science for the best book in the philosophy of science, the 2003 ACM Allen Newell Award for “seminal contributions that extend to philosophy, psychology, medicine, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and social science”, and the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute.

Pearl is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which he co-founded with his family in February 2002 “to continue Daniel’s life-work of dialogue and understanding and to address the root causes of his tragedy.” The Daniel Pearl Foundation sponsors journalism fellowships aimed at promoting honest reporting and East-West understanding, organizes worldwide concerts that promote inter-cultural respect, and sponsors public dialogues between Jews and Muslims to explore common ground and air grievances. The Foundation received Search for Common Ground’s Award For Promoting Cross-Cultural Understanding in 2002 and the 2003 Roger E. Joseph Prize for its “distinctive contribution to humanity.”

Judea Pearl and his wife Ruth Pearl are co-editors of the book “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl,” winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for Anthologies, which provides a panoramic view of how Jews define themselves in the post 9/11 era.

Professors Pearl and Akbar Ahmed (American University), the founders of the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding, were co-winners in 2006 of the Civic Ventures’ inaugural Purpose Prize, which honors individuals 60 or older who have demonstrated uncommon vision in addressing community and national problems.

Pearl lectures throughout the United States on topics including:

1. I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl

2. Being Western, American and Jewish in the Post 9/11 Era

3. Creating Dialogue between Muslims and Jews

4. The Ideological War on Terror

5. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Case for Co-Existence

He has written commentaries about these topics for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jeddah), and the Jerusalem Post. He writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and is frequently interviewed on major TV and radio stations.


Read all stories by Judea Pearl