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Try the experimental new thinkers site here ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Great Thinkers and Visionaries This is a list of people whose ideas on how and where the world is - and should be - evolving, may be of interest to those who want to understand the frontier of human thought, at least according to my opinion. Originally I created it to give credit to people who influenced my ideas but as it often happens the project took a life of its own. Please enjoy these resources. It would be great if you could support this site or help me improve it. Now you can also take part in the discussions on the Visionaries mailing list or on the Delphi Thinkers Forum I apologize if my selection of thinkers is not sufficiently balanced. In Russia, reading most of them could get me into Big Trouble. I hope to fix these gaps now - with your help. You may also want to take part in the efforts that should lead to distribution of visionary ideas based on their merits rather then cute facade or interests of social power structures. ---- Quick guide to this page: face home page of a thinker books Books by this thinker Related web links - live search with AltaVista Other web pages (live search) usenet Current usenet discussions Douglas Hofstadter Douglas Hofstadter books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Daniel Dennett Daniel Dennett books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Andrey Kolmogorov Andrey Kolmogorov books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Albert Einstein Albert Einstein books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Isaac Newton Isaac Newton books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Natasha Natasha Vita More Essays Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Leonardo Da Vinci Leonardo Da Vinci books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Terence McKenna Terence McKenna books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Robert Anton Wilson Robert Anton Wilson books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Robert A. Heinlein Robert A. Heinlein books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Bruce Sterling Bruce Sterling books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Arthur C. Clarke Arthur C. Clarke books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Alvin Toffler Alvin Toffler books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Ayn Rand Ayn Rand books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet FAQ John McCarthy John McCarthy books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Robin Hanson Robin Hanson Essays Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Timothy Leary Timothy Leary books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Peter Russell Peter Russell books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Vernor Vinge Vernor Vinge books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Buckminster Fuller Buckminster Fuller Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet FAQ Marvin Minsky Marvin Minsky books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Linus Pauling Linus Pauling books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Hans Moravec Hans Moravec books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Francis Heylighen Francis Heylighen books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Sasha Chislenko Alexander Chislenko Essays Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Stanislaw Lem Stanislaw Lem books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet George Gilder George Gilder books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Eric Drexler Eric Drexler books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Howard Bloom Howard Bloom books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Stuart Kauffman Stuart Kauffman books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Krishnamurti U.G. Krishnamurti books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Ilya Prigogine Ilya Prigogine books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Carl Sagan Carl Sagan books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Max More Max More books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Richard Feynman Richard Feynman books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Marshall McLuhan Marshall McLuhan books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Friedrich Hayek Friedrich Hayek books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Alan Turing Alan Turing books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Galileo Galilei Galileo Galilei books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Nicholas Copernicus Nicholas Copernicus books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Charles Darwin Charles Darwin books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Rupert Sheldrake Rupert Sheldrake books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Teilhard de Chardin Teilhard de Chardin books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Hypatia Hypatia books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Vladimir Vernadsky books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Christian de Duve Christian de Duve books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet Kurt Goedel Kurt Gödel books Related web links - live search with AltaVista usenet ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Make payments with PayPal - its fast, secure and FREE! Get $5 to sign up + $5 per referal! Sign up with PayPal to support this site - and get up to $1000 that you can use to buy books by these authors! Candidates to the list Here are some people I am considering adding to the list of Thinkers, while I am learning more about their work and the impact of their ideas and activities, and trying to find time to include them, and their books, into the list. I would probably have to redesign the site (see ideas below) before I expand it any further, as this page already takes too long to load. Visionary Scientists * David Friedman - anarchist-anachronist-economist -- books * Wolfgang Pauli * Friedrich Nietzsche -- books * John Von Neumann-- books * Claude Shannon - the father of information theory-- books * Carl Friedrich Gauss-- books * Henri Poincare-- books * Alfred Korzybski - General Semantics -- books * Bernhard Riemann * Jean Piaget -- books * Ray J. Solomonoff - author of algoritmic complexity and probability theories.-- books * Alexander Shulgin -- books Modern Visionary Technocrats * Howard Rheingold * Mark S. Miller * Ted Nelson * Peter Drucker * Tim Berners-Lee * Esther Dyson * Chris Langton (father of ALife) * Ben Goertzel * John Brockman Visionary Philosophers * Bertrand Russell -- books * Martin Heidegger -- books * Ludwig Wittgenstein -- books * David Bohm -- books * C. S. Peirce (American philosopher, pragmatist) * Rene Descartes * Jean-Paul Sartre * Blaise Pascal * John Dewey * Thomas More * Claude Levy-Strauss * Alan Watts Visionary Leaders and Activists * Alexander the Great * L. Neil Smith (libertarian) * Mahatma Gandhi * Dalai Lama * Flemming A. Funch * Bill Wilson - founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Visionary Writers * Aldous Huxley * George Orwell I had a privilege of starting 1984 on the eve of 1984, hiding it from the Russian Thought Police and being scared of torture... * Ken Wilber Taken with a grain of salt, mystical wordlviews present an inspiring intellectual dish... ;-) Don't consume too much on an empty mind - makes you dizzy and disoriented. * William Gibson * Greg Egan * Philip K. Dick * Ursula K. Le Guin * H.G.Wells * Jules Verne * Omar Khayyam * David Brin * Charles Platt Visionary Inventors * Nikola Tesla * Paolo Soleri * Harvey W. Bailey * Thomas Edison * Alexander Graham Bell * Wright brothers Also (partly classified, advice welcome) * Edward DeBono -- books * Freeman Dyson -- books * David Deutsch -- books * Giordano Bruno -- books * Lao Tzu -- books * Sri Aurobindo -- books * Gerard O'Neill -- books * Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock (Gaia theorists) -- books * J. Willard Gibbs -- books * Patrik Gunkel - author of ideonomics * Gregory Bateson (anthropologist, early memeticist) -- books * Dewey B. Larson -- books * Olaf Stapledon -- books * Stafford Beer -- books * Gerald F. Joyce * Joseph Campbell -- books * Howard Scott * Michael Tippett - composer and humanist philosopher * Malthus Famous Non-visionaries I am opening this section to answer multiple requests to include some people that I subbornly refuse to consider visionaries. If you have good arguments to the contrary, I'd gladly listen to them. * Noam Chomsky His older works on formal grammars were revolutionary, but his recent theories of "Language Organ" seem unsubstantiated and his political criticism, while undoubtedly guided by good intentions, doesn't seem grounded. I attended his talk once and listening to rather dull list of somewhat exaggerated criticisms of corporations, without understanding of their absolutely essential role in the modern society (how can you run a complex system without aggregating agents into task-specific groups and allocating resources for their activities - every other system, from ecosystems to organisms to computer programs does that!), and he refused to either suggest any scenarios of the future, or offer any suggestions how to fix the situation. Some visionary... You can read his books and make your own conclusions. Villains and Kooks There are many people wose ideas about the future are reasonable or respected but who are misguided about the subjects of methods of their visions. Even though they may not lead to constructive results, erroneous visions deserve a special study. Here is a modest initial selection: * Karl Marx - his main mistakes, in my opinion, were the seductively misleading idea that complex social processes may be explained and governed by a simple set of rules, similarly to those suggested by Newton for mechanical systems, and undue extrapolation of social trends of his time. Something we could learn from now... * Adolf Hitler One of the most successful proponents of nationalism in history, Hitler gave us some very good lessons. We paid too much for these lessons not to learn from them. * Vladimir Lenin did the same thing for communist ideas. * Nostradamus - an author of a set of vast, vague, and unsubstantiated claims about the future, which were less unexcusable in his time than in ours. * Jeremy Rifkin. - In the words of Charles Platt, "I believe Rifkin is the commentator who poses the greatest threat to attempts to transcend limitations of the human condition." Godling's Glossary defines Rifkin's kind of theories as Disasturbation * All religious thinkers that ever lived, for mistaking emotionally charged metaphors for the objective reality? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ If you have any opinion on these people and URLs of their pages, or have other candidates who you think should be listed here, please mail them to me! (I do not promise to include them, however. They may be wonderful people, but I may not understand - or agree with - their work, or think that they belong more to Great Scientists or Activists than Visionaries, etc.) Please do not suggest me to represent more women or other physiological groups. This is a page about minds, not flesh! If you have a candidate, please mail me the name, URL, and why you think the ideas of this person are so crucial for understanding the progress of the Universe today. The selection process is getting more and more difficult for me, as the amount of suggestions I receive has outgrown both my knowledge of important people and the amount of "free" time I can devote to maintaining this page. I am working on a formal set of criteria for accepting and classifying nominations, and would like to turn this page - already with about 60,000 visitors a year - can turn into an objective public resource. For that, I would need assistance and funding. Please let me know if you can help in any way. Meanwhile, you can at least click on a few ads on this site, to add a few cents to its development. If you are interested please read the the draft proposal for the Thinkers site development and suggest your comments. I have absolutely no time to answer criticisms of the current state of the site coming from people who haven't read the proposal, and are not suggesting any help. Sorry. Other Lists of Great people o Halcyon List of thinkers o Estimated IQs of some of the greatest geniuses o InforSeek list of Internet Celebrities o Technoprophets o Celebrities in Cognitive Science o Dave Krieger's list of Exceptional people o Warped People page o Glass Bead Game - Biographies of great people o Eric's Treasure Trove of Scientific Biography o Scientists: biographies o UTNE Reader list of Visionaries They can't tell the difference between thinkers, dreamers, executives, and social activists, and the choice is somewhat mainstream (not extreme like mine ;-) ) but some people there are interesting. o Great Mathematicians o Prominent Anarchists and Left-Libertarians o Great Writers and Poets o Prominent sociologists o Great Canadian Scientists o Celebrity Atheist List and Famous Dead Non-theists - people who have advocated living life without deference to a higher power. o Major Western Philosophers Some people whose example you may not want to follow: Kooks museum Kooks museum ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The best way to understand great thinkers is to join them! If you are an aspiring visionary, you may find the following Web resources useful: Self-Publishing solution from BookNooks >H Anders Transhuman Page Nobel Nobel Foundation, Nobel Prize Internet Archive WFSGBC World Future Society (Greater Boston Chapter) [IMAGE] Frontier Organizations on the Web Best mailing lists on the Net Cafe The Great Books of Western Civilization Cafe Events Upcoming visionary events ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Friendly sites Guestbook Discussion Participate Link to this page! Click here to be notified when this page changes or moves Home Feedback and participation Frontier Organizations Hotlist Thinkers AI,VR Essays WebServices museums News software Education Fun and Play Intelligent Humor page Animated backgrounds russian boston Sponsors and money ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ [serve?bfmid=1375646&siteid=20127308&bfpage=af0004] Sick of paying bills? 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