Wednesday,
August 25, 2004
National Project
Relationship to the think tanks and consulting industry
Paul,
I know exactly
how you feel. Many of us who have tried for years to challenge the ruling
paradigm have similar experiences. Sometimes it makes you feel like in the days
when some people challenged the church by claiming the earth is a sphere when
doctrine stated it to be a disk. Concerning cognition, we still live in the
disk era. I remember discussions with Heinz von Foerster about the Biological
Computer Lab works in the early seventies, when their funding
requests were shot down by peer reviews calling them plain crazy. If you
read again Humberto Maturana’s seminal paper on the "Biology of
Cognition", which he wrote while at the BCL in 1970, you will notice
that most of this stuff has not trickled down into the computer sciences
even 35 years later!. (btw it has not even trickled down into all of the
cognitive sciences).
I
attach the draft of a paper I just did on Biological Computing which
refers a lot to Maturana.
We are
in a similar situation like you: a major US university just took a look at
Pile and thought (after 30 minute phone conversation with me) that it was some
old hat indexing scheme... They missed the whole thing because they were
only looking through their old paradigm glasses. Taking them off for a
moment would require effort, which they are only willing to pay unless the old
paradigm glasses reveal something new - which, of course, they can't.
What is
the answer here? Be like the water, flow around but keep flowing, don’t get
worn down knocking against bolted doors... We go for the very small
openings, try to build slowly, and erode the castle drop by drop.
I am
disappointed and frustrated as you are, but maybe I have more basic optimism to
keep me going. Although I can't help
now, we will soon need open minded scientists and they are hard to find.
Stay in
touch and all the best,