Today, foundations are rife with tribalism. I’m no exception, but I have no tribe members, except maybe Bohr, who is dead. I mean, I am not totally alone, though. I think I resonate with George Ellis from South Africa, and with the views of people like Stuart Kauffman (even though he isn't a quantum foundations person). In my age group, I find Flavio Del Santo's work interesting, but I’ve only spoken with him once by email.

To begin with, there are not many Bohr-style foundations researchers, as far as I know (QBism and relational are not Bohr-style, even if they claim to be). And among existing foundations researchers, many seem to think being "Bohr style" is essentially "shut up and calculate," so why bother with foundations at all? That's a caricature of Bohr.

I think there's also another caricature of Bohr stemming from the mistaken claim that "Bohr wants classical physics," but in truth Bohr never meant classical mechanics to be primitive; his emphasis was semantic—natural language and the definiteness of experience are primitive. I think Bohr has a deeper epistemological lesson worth probing, which may yield results in physics as well as in philosophy.

Another reason I am lonely in this is perhaps my relative social isolation as well—I am a PhD student at a university where my advisor is a mathematician, and I'm a physicist, and I chose my own project and had the freedom to pursue it. Maybe that's also a causative factor. If I had been in a traditional foundations research environment, I might have joined an existing tribe. I was part of a couple of tribes in the past, in my own department, but I kicked myself out either for being too critical of the tribes' basic tenets or for my tenacity in my pursuits.

Also, I'm still in the trail of the lingering Mathew effect, which started with my poor grades in high school!

I am going to present my work at a conference someday, and I have mixed feelings about it: on the one hand, I fear standing there like a fool who missed obvious facts, which I hope isn't true, because I'm quite widely read and studied despite my isolation. On the other hand, I look forward to meeting kindred spirits.