Your thesis and dissertation topics sound quite impressive, if necessarily couched in off-putting academic language. The dissertation I've been working on is called "My friend, Edmond : (I couldn't think of a subtitle but it's required so this will have to do)". It talks about the good times we've had and pretends to have something important to say even though it only talks about stuff that is by definition unique since only you and I had the experiences described. My advisor says it's quite original since he's never read anything about this "Edmond"before.

I guess you can tell I distrust ideas that are poured into academic molds. I know a lot of writers who learned the academic style only to have to painstakingly unlearn it over many years. Richard Milner's Encyclopedia of Evolution is wonderfully engaging and readable, but only because he worked hard at squelching the academic stylistic nonsense that had impressed his asshole professors. (That is "professors who were assholes", not "professors of holes of asses".)

Thank you for appreciating my reminiscences of Rusty. It's a very personal and almost embarrassing piece. I sent it to the New Yorker and they disproved the theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light because their rejection slip got to me INSTANTLY.The cat magazines haven't even bothered to send rejection slips. Hey, I'm my own publisher now. Fuck them all. I hope all publishers go out of business as authors become their own publishers in Web World. We need publishers like we need the Grand Inquisitor.

Don't be surprised that you didn't see that MIOCENE BUDDHA was an anagram. Nobody ever does. Would you like me to send you the program I use to generate them? Here are some of my favorites:

DEAN HANNOTTE = ANNOTATED HEN (I love this image — it captures my obsessiveness perfectly — an infomaniacal hen pecking annotations all over herself)

MARSHALL DEAN HANNOTTE = HO! LAST NEANDERTHAL MAN!

MARSHALL DEAN HANNOTTE = AH! NETHERMOST ANAL LAND! (Captures my interest in paleontology and something else perfectly. (Just kidding))

MARSHALL DEAN HANNOTTE = MANHATTAN'S LONE HERALD (So true so sad)

LEONARD ALBERT = 'ALLO, BARTENDER! (a lit prof friend of mine who liked to drink)

Anyway

"Is the soft machine simply multitasking like a Swiss army knife or does it differ in some way from machines of the past?"

The softness of the soft machine today is itself quite hard, forcing people to multitask in uncomfortable ways. (Remember what it was like a few years ago trying to cut and paste text between your email program and your word processor and your mailing list database?) What users do is always holistic as perceived by the user. A concert violinist doesn't play a note, then take a breath, then shift position, then look into the audience. All these individual tasks are increasingly merged into larger wholes as the skills that enable the smaller objectives are accomplished with increasingly defocused attention. When a sports figure plays a game, he goes out to WIN — not to walk towards 2nd base, put on a glove, wait for the inning to start, scratch his balls, etc, etc. So the next task for programmers must be to create an operating system that supports a model of programming that obliterates the distinction between separate monolithic name-brand programs and offers smaller program modules or cells or objects that implicitly understand one another's interaction modalities and that can be merged effortlessly by the user into larger "wholes". Like a whole secretary or a whole assistant or a whole sculpture workbench or a whole biology laboratory.

Actually, UNIX partially follows this model, but doesn't work well in a commercial ecosystem. Users of UNIX tend to be programmers. User of Windows tend to be 'nuff said.

As the soft machine gets more flexible and user-friendly we will see programs that learn new behaviors not by forcing the user to set parameters or by looking for "Options" dialog boxes, but the way dogs learn. The user will say "Bad computer!" and the program will keep reconfiguring itself until it starts behaving in a way that pleases the user. (The computer parameters and options will have become simply too complex to modify manually.)

The reason biological offspring learn this way from their parents is because the internal grammar of behavior is too microscopic for the human mind to communicate effectively. The brain of each child actually evolves in a Darwinian sense according to which behaviors and ideas survive or become extinct in response to the social environment which is constantly issuing brute force rewards and punishments. Children whose brains aren't creative enough to randomly wander into the "correct" solutions become society's rejects through no real fault of their own.

Farther than this I can't see.

You're right, psychology is not a , but something much bigger, at least the way I'm defining it in that mini-essay. But what? A radical vision, a radical assumption, a radical predicate, a radical claim? I'm trying to say that our minds really aren't as limited to focusing on "reality" as we think, and that they never could be, and that this is not a "bad" thing but a thing that, like a tool, needs to be used well. You might say that our minds evolved as a cure for the kind of reality that, say, our pets can never escape. Our minds and our creativity allow us to escape the fear of death, for instance. It gives us an amazing capacity for self-sacrifice and love for others, all of which can wander into pathological byways at times.

I don't believe that psychology's only useful function is to debunk the "higher feelings" of human beings. I think the scientific method can cure us of tons of magical, theological, nonsense, but we needn't assume that it's mandatory or "P.C." to denigrate ideas like altruism, heroism, courage, honesty, love, personal power, and all the other admirable qualities that ordinary people demonstrate every day all over the world. (That kind of reductionist agenda has been abandoned in most of the other sciences as well, by the way. It's one of the reasons I've very leery of "deconstructionism", which sounds to me like just a new version of the most cynical and reductionist kinds of psychoanalysis.)

I mentioned Gandhi's quote in my and also in the web page on as follows: When asked about Western Civilization, Gandhi said, "It would be a good idea." I would say that Paul has written a blueprint for the creation of the better world that Gandhi, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha and many others have asked us to believe we are capable of.

The has been written up in a recent prize-winning book by a former editor at the New Yorker (hiss). It's a kind of museum of half-faked museum exhibits. If you like Borges, I think you'll love it. It exists as a storefront operation on the West Coast.

I have fixed the hyperlink jumps to various poems on the page. Thanks for pointing out the problem.

More soon!