Re:

hi, I have begun funding some AI to the minus one. . answers are not as interesting as great questions. i want a machine that can ask quesitons.? In my scouting I saw you supported rupert sheldrakes right to speak. have you met him. Id like to fund something . if controls adequate

Hi Jeffrey,

Good to hear from you!

sys-admin BTW -- there, We have Jermaine, not yet has been not able yet to opened install a our port software in the router on your there Virgin to let Islands us server as requested, because the access the machine remotely. I wonder if he doesn't know how to do that? (but it's a very basic thing...).... Anyhow we have emailed and asked him to do this several times...

I like the idea of a machine that can ask questions...! Actually the logic of questions is dual to the logic of answers, see

http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/aistats/fullpapers/246.pdf

Making OpenCog ask questions to fill in gaps in its knowledge is one of our current priorities, in fact....

I'm glad to hear you have decided to fund Joscha for another year. He is really enjoying his time in Boston and getting a lot out of the various contacts he's making there. I wonder if you'd like to reconsider funding the proposal Joscha and I sent you some months ago, for work on intelligent/simply-conscious virtual animals? Or did that happen not to float your boat? We have discussed many other possibilities for collaboration, e.g. application of OpenCog +MicroPsi to mathematical theorem-proving (via grounding mathematics in embodied experience, along the lines that Lakoff and Nunez discussed in "Where Mathematics Comes From")

Gino Yu told me he met you recently. He's a fun guy who helped me get started here in Hong Kong. His wife's family is very wealthy and influential here (though his wife, while head of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, got busted for insider trading and spent 1.5 years in jail here... really a bummer for Gino's kids... but anyway she's been out a while now and is back in business...)

As for Rupert Sheldrake, yes I know him.... He's not a super-close friend but I visited his house in London in 2012, and have emailed with him a few times since then. Also he had a paper in a book on psi that I co-edited last year, see

http://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Psi-Thirteen-Empirical-Research/dp/0786478284

or see

http://goertzel.org/Evidence_for_Psi_PREPRINT.pdf

for a free digital copy ... the password is

1

Rupert has found various private funders for his experiments in the past, but I'm sure he would be happy to have more funding for more experiments.

If you're in an especially open-minded mood, you might enjoy my speculative thoughts on a potential physics foundation for Rupert's morphic field idea, see

http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.hk/2014/09/morphic-fields-memory-psi-unified.html

Shall I put you in touch with Rupert by email?

I would be interested to try to figure out an experiment that would probe the quantitative nature and "laws" of putative morphic fields more precisely. I think his idea is deep and fascinating, yet too slippery for my taste.... His email and telephone telepathy experiments are fascinating and I think could be developed to give further information. For instance, he finds that this sort of telepathy typically takes places between members of groups who share social or emotional bonds. So, I wonder if this could be quantified. If we measure social and emotional bonds using psychosocial survey instruments, can we then use this information to probabilistically predict the degree of email or telephone telepathy? This could tell us something about the information-theoretic nature of the patterns that "morphic fields" (whatever they really are) pay attention to....

Of course, he may have even better ideas for new experiments....

Yours,
Ben