I posted a very brief note with almost this title 15 months ago, saying I was back on the job. There was not much sign of action, and here I am again saying the same thing.

This time, at least, I will say a bit more in the blog, and, fingers crossed it may translate into action on my projects.

First, I’ll say a bit about where my head has been.

Well, quite a bit of energy went into, finding a new home and sellng the one we are in. Not yet done, but I won’t bore you with any details.

Two things come to mind as significant for the future of my github projects. The first is that I had a closer look at what’s going on in synthetic biology, and that fuelled my cosmic speculations. The second is that I had reservations about whether the projects I had set uy on github were too engineering oriented and yet too far removed from reality (at least in terms of my own ability to progress the ieas). I am constantly treading this territory between engineering and philosophy, trying to find a viable patch in thier intersection which I could effectively progress, So I passed through this period when I felt I had veered too much towards engineering for my talents to prevail, and wanted to rediscover a more definitely philosophical angle.

In this period I came to think of what I wanted to do as cognitive architecture, characterised as synthetic philosophy..

In July I spent just one day at FLOC 2018, and there met Josef Urban, who is progressing the application of machine learning, or perhaps AI more generally, to the automation of mathematical proofs (and more broadly, to “scientific AI”. This helped me to get my brain, and my “pen” (aka keyboard), in gear, which I started with some blog posts (elsewhere, and still mostly drafts), and have now come back to my little constellatioh of github projects to try out te wiki format again.

When I headed back over here I was thinking that my “constellation” was a bit over the top for my new frame of mind, and that I might scrap the underlings and just do synthetic philosophy on cognitive architecture in the StarDust project. But looking over it I see the merit of the original motivation for the multiple projects, which was to separate out the greatest extremities of philosophical and futuristic thinking from the more solid bits, so that down-to-earth engineers are not put off the latter by the former. And if I am going do spread this over multuple projects, the structure I have still seems good to me.

So here’s hoping I can get it all going again, and get some substance into all four of these little projects.