Greetings from Phoenix

Dear Jeffrey,

How are you doing? I've been visiting a workshop ("Origin of Meaning") at Paul Davies' Beyond Center at ASU, and it is quite lovely. From my perspective, Paul's views on where exactly meaning is generated in the universe are possibly a bit muddled, but I like his intellectual taste and kindness.

Some of the participants were really interesting, most of all Chris Adami. Chris has a sharp, original, opinionated and wide ranging mind, mostly focused on the intersection of physics and information theory, and very little social padding around it. He is currently planning to build a center at ASU. You might enjoy him. I also liked Lee Cronin, who is an unusual mixture of apparent ego and self disdain, which he happily extends to everyone else. His assertion that he doubts his own ideas more than those of all the others seems almost credible, and if true would make him devoid of a good baseline to judge the quality of his own ideas, but he has some original ideas about building chemical computers. Simon DeDeo is currently at Santa Fe. He is really bright and well educated and very articulate, but too much of a poseur to amount to much as a thinker in my view. He has some depth because his superficial charms grow from depression and existential unease, but the need to appeal holds him back. Sarah Marzen is almost the polar opposite. She is currently still at MIT and studies information theory of living systems. Her mind is quite beautiful to behold. I specifically liked the deadpan delivery of her presentation that did not make any concession to audience appeal. There was a palpable sense of exhaustion when she pulled the lever in her brain that made the relevant equation appear, and again, and again, until she had done what she needed to get the required result, don't you think I have nothing better to do than this here, no really it's true I don't, so here you go, next slide.

One of the most interesting insights for me was that a lot of people are coherentists instead of foundationalists: they don't aim at a world view that rests on solid foundations, but start with a given view and patch it until they no longer see contradictions. I think that perception is coherentist, as is intuitive thought. Rational thought is constructive and should be made foundationalist in my view, because its role is to repair perception. A coherentist will be inclined to miss the fact that they are usually stuck in a local optimum, whereas a foundationalist has a chance to get a look at the whole model space and go for a global optimum. It appears that this non obvious to a lot of people. (The intuition that one has to decide a priori between coherentism and foundationalism is wrong of course; we can usually add an additional branch near the root of an epistemology and reuse almost everything that is downstream from it in the other variant.)

Al Foundation treats me very well so far. They hired the young psychologist and weird machine learning genius I suggested (Brendan Rupp), based on their own assessment. They have given me two programmers to implement a version of my motivation model for their Al bots, and Sandor Gardos who is a deep, very Jewish and intellectually compatible psychologist and sex researcher to spar and build theories with. (Do you know him? He's in NY.) For the time being, I feel this move was very much the right decision and I should have made it much earlier instead of crying in front of the door of MIT.

All the best from Phoenix. Your's,

Joscha