Photo from 2019 FOM Summer School (click ↑ for full-sized)

Your donation also gets you an invitation to the Foundations of Mind and Bionoetics discussion groups. These groups work from the premise that the pressing problems of mind and life need an approach including but not limited to current academia. Our posters include people from all continents and walks of life, from a rancher in Montana with one of the highest IQs ever recorded to a Nobel laureate in physics! The inventors of Deep Learning and the Josephson Junction are both regular posters. The age range is from a Princeton freshman to Henry Stapp, a nonagenarian who worked with John Wheeler, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli. We work in complete and radical intellectual freedom!

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In terms of downloads (150,000 per year), annual page views (27 million+) ,and peer-reviewed papers (more than 100 in its first 3 years, from March 2014 to March 2017), Foundations of Mind is now the world’s leading science of mind research group. While centered on cognitive science, it has featured many papers on the quantum mechanics view of mind, the foundations of physics and biology, and indeed ecology and health as manifestations of mind.

Its most recent proceedings volume, published in March 2017, received a total of 4,333 downloads in its first month, with the top papers receiving 750+, about what ACM papers typically take 25 years to achieve.

Please note we are secular, and totally independent; we have never taken corporate or state money, nor have we gamed the system as others do by asking our students to link to or download our work.

AI systems will keep us as pets. Massive unemployment as computers learn to drive cars, translate accurately, stock shelves, and much else. Silicon-based life forms reflecting on the brief carbon-based intelligence era before the singularity.

All of these themes are rampant in the second decade of the 21st century. Yet they do not reveal the full story. The “pets” idea, repeated ad nauseam by Elon Musk, is an echo of Marvin Minsky a generation ago. It is a safe bet that no, you will not be ordering a driverless taxi to take you to a random destination you specify anytime before 2022. The much-vaunted successes of Deep Thought are due to a venerable algorithm called stochastic gradient descent, which now converges to a solution because computers are about 100 million times faster than they were during the last AI scare of the 1980s and almost infinitely faster than during Minsky’s abortive 1950s scare.

This session invited papers on what computers, even now, can’t do, and above all why that is the case. It encourages participants to speculate on aspects of the architecture of the cortex that allows a 20-watt “computer” (that would be the thing under your skull) to outperform machines with terahertz speed and petabyte memory. It invited papers on quantum computation as a natural outcome of human cognition and noesis. It also welcomes those who in turn wish to usher in the new post-singularity era. After all, the phrase and concept originally derive from Johnny von Neumann, the founder of many aspects of computing as well as quantum mechanics.

Above all, we invited recapitulation of the themes broached in Penrose’s masterpiece about the relationship between consciousness and computability. His viewpoint fused elements from the theory of computability (partially recursive functions), non-determinism, tiling theory, and phenomenology. The relationship with formal language theory was not explored, nor was an explicit engagement with the fact that all observer-dependent measurement in QM involves the infinite. The re-assertion of human noesis may pave the way for that of human dignity.

Specifically, we invited papers on the following themes: