iamJohnHorgan

Enough for it to be annoying. There's also a terrorism expert named John Horgan. I once interviewed him for Scientific American.

That's a deep one. Mystics say there is only now, an eternal present. Whereas some physicists say that our sense of the present, and of time itself, is illusory. All of time, past and present, exists simultaneously. Check out the work of Julian Barbour.

I was pretty mean, I admit, but I think my criticism of SFI has held up. It applies to Big Data, which is in many respects just complexity theory repackaged. I've become friends with one of the SFI people I criticized, Stu Kauffman. I devote a chapter of Mind-Body Problems to him. https://www.mindbodyproblems.com/chapter-four In 2019 someone at SFI urged me to apply for a summer fellowship though. I did, because I thought it would be fun, but then the pandemic happened. I probably wouldn't have gotten the fellowship anyway, I think there's still some resentment toward me at SFI. Understandably.

The irony is that I loved the time I spent at SFI. All those smart, eloquent people trying to solve the secrets of the universe! The problem was that the signal/noise ratio was very poor, and I felt obliged to report that.

That's because I am a journalist.