Re: Introduction of two creative minds

Hi Rupert,

Hope you're doing well! I will soon contact you about potentially supplying a paper to a new book Damien and I are going to edit, on theories of psi and consciousness, a sequel to "Evidence for Psi" ...

But for the moment, I'm emailing to introduce you to Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of mine from New York who is interested in your work ... he is a creative scientific thinker and a successful businessman, who often donates to interesting scientific projects (often at major universities or institutes, but sometimes to independent maverick scientists as well)

I have known Jeffrey since 2001 and have enjoyed many conversations and interactions with him. I have also passed to him your paper in "Evidence for Psi" ...

Jeffrey may follow up with a direct email and you should please feel free to discuss with him directly ;-)

Yours,
Ben

Ben Goertzel, PhD
http://goertzel.org

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

Dear Ben,

Many thanks for your email and thanks for introducing me to Jeffrey.

Thanks so much for your interest. Do please free to email me, and if you have any plans to come through London let me know, then we could meet in person.

All best wishes
Rupert

Jeffrey: You mentioned Zipfs Law and a possible connection to morphic resonance

That reminded me of this paper:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.0448.pdf

roughly discussed here

http://m.phys.org/news/2014-08-physicists-eye-neural-formula-zipf.html

Basically, they show that under certain pretty broad conditions, Zipfs law will occur in the context of a set of elements all guided by some unobserved, hidden variable...

On the one hand, this provides a potential explanation for the prevalence of Zipf's Law that doesn't require any funny stuff like morphic resonance

On the other hand, it also provides a mathematical mechanism via which morphic resonance could potentially lead to Zipfs Law.... For instance, they show that a hidden variable causing a set of neurons to time-vary together, causes temporal neural spiking patterns that obey Zipf's Law. Qualitatively, this suggests that "morphic resonance" enabling distant, apparently causally unrelated phenomena to vary together, could be associated with Zipfian properties...

Interesting stuff, though I am unsure the best way to explore it experimentally.... I'll think about it in the background ;)

-- Ben