Re: Genius Stifled By Populism?

From: Brent Allsop (allsop@fc.hp.com)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 14:30:09 MDT


"J. R. Molloy" <jr@shasta.com> pointed out:

> Where is the next Einstein?
> http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a9a59b12111.htm
> Professor Lee Smolin, a visiting professor of physics at Imperial
> College in London, agrees that young people find it difficult to
> explore fresh topics because of the expectation that they will join
> a large collaborative effort.

        Yes! This is so true!

        I give you the perfect example of this - Steve Lehar's work on
consciousness. Have any of you heard of him yet!? You can read about
his work here:

        http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/pub/slehar/Lehar.html

and I have my own version of a draft of a paper supporting his theory
(I focus on the simple phenomenal qualities of this subjective world
and he focuses much more rigorously on its spatial qualities) here:

        HTML version: <URL: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/qualia.htm>
        MS Word version: <URL: http://www.frii.com/~allsop/qualia.doc>

        I wish there was a real money Idea Futures out there, and one
of these days I'm going to create an idea futures entry on this. I'll
bet anyone, anything (that I can afford), that by 2025, Steven Lehar
will be popularly viewed as contributing at least as much to science
as Einstein. The implications of this theory to our immediate future
and to what we are is much more profound to us than what Einstein
theorized about. But for some reason, no one will listen to or read,
let alone publish and argue for or even against, the profound plain
and simple logic and rational contained in these works. It is very
frustrating and unbelievable to me.

        At least Lawrence Elbaum Associates has finally agreed to
publish his book! Perhaps now it will finally only be a few more
years before people finally understand the significance of what he is
saying about consciousness. (Anyone want to bet!?)

        By the way, are there any AI people out there working on
representation and reasoning about visual 3D data? I bet if you apply
some of Steven's models to an AI visual system, you'd fairly easily
get one mondo powerful system with near as much 3D visual common sense
awareness and intelligence as we have! And I bet once this is
achieved more abstract general common sense, like we have, will soon
follow using similar models of information representation. I'd love
to hear an expert on AI visual representations thoughts on such ideas.
For more detail see Steve's papers including: "Computational
Implications of Gestalt Theory: The role of Feedback in Visual
Processing" here:

        http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/pub/slehar/webstuff/consc/consc.html

        Anyone willing to take me up on a bet!? People don't seem
willing to read our papers. Perhaps they will try to take our money
and make us rich!?

                Brent Allsop



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