>From: fouet@bat710.univ-lyon1.fr (Jean-Marc FOUET)
>Date: Thu, 13 Jul 95 14:57:12+020

Who I think I am, in 1995 :
Born in 49, the year a great French poet (Boris Vian) translated Van Vogt's novels on "Non A".
Since you mention that sort of things (I wouldn't have considered mentioning
it otherwise), the woman I am married to is 39 years old, and we both
contributed to create and bring up two humans, one with a penis who's
approximately 10.5 years old, and the other one with a vulva who'll soon be
7. They have many other properties beside a sex.
I graduated from Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, reading Computer
Science. Then I turned to research in Artificial Intelligence (what a stupid
name to call that science!). The title of my thesis was : "Using Knowledge to Improve the Use of Knowledge - The Gosseyn Machine".
I am now full professor at the University of Lyon, teaching AI, and
coaching a Group concerned with Meta-knowledge and Distributed AI. I'm
still developing the Gosseyn Machine, a large software.

My first encounter with g.s. was Van Vogt's novels, which impressed me
so much that 10 years later, when told to give a name to my system, the
name "Gosseyn" immediately sprang up. When I met Anne (the woman etc),
we had long chats about Korzybski's work, which she had read whereas I
talked about it without having read it. A few years ago she started
attending Neuro Linguistic Programming sessions, and bringing home
books on g.s. other than Korzybski's.

The older I get, the more thoughts I devote to epistemology, and to
"ground notions" ; right now I'm taking a look at Collective Intelligence,
artificial and natural. What goes on on the Internet fascinates me,
although it's very often frustrating. 
All forms of racism make me mad, inasmuch as they are typical semantic
troubles ; being called a f***ing frog is allright, being made responsible
for someone else's behaviour just because our passports have the same
colour is not.

The question I keep asking myself is why g.s. "didn't take". Almost none
of the people I meet has ever heard of Korzybski. Is it different in
your country or scientific field?

Best regards

=======================================================
                  Jean-Marc Fouet
Laboratoire d'Ingenierie des Systemes d'Information
           email : fouet@lisisun.univ-lyon1.fr
         url : http://www710.univ-lyon1.fr/~fouet
=======================================================