Wednesday, October 15, 2025

The real story of life and soul on earth

 Could it be that an email I recently wrote for children and sent to them and family could get close to the core reality of OUR lives? AND the science? I think so. In a way, it is in the spirit of "in vino veritas". 


The message itself (see below) is easy to read, of course, ON THE SURFACE.

But I have explored all nine of the great "rivers" of human deep culture and worldviews in great detail (hard core mathematical science, shamanisms, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduisms, Buddhisms,'Daoism, Shinto) and understood how the core real experience underlying all nine can be unified in solid, coherent mathematical insight grounded in experience, first person and third person and second person. 
At werbos.com, I have posted many of the threads which weave together now into one solid framework.

AS A CRUDE APPROXIMATION... I pay highest respect to a sort of "holy trinity" which the usual trinity mirrors in an imperfect way: the UNIVERSE ITSELF (https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/03/god-radical-more-complete-unification.html, which is far richer and now better understood than 99.99% of humans imagine); 
"Amaterasu" (the collective mind/organism of our solar system, descended from a universe-spanning species, even though she is only a few billion years old, just a teenager), and "Our Father in Heaven", exactly the person Jesus
spoke to whom I too have met just a few times, but not someone you would forget, who often watches quietly so as not to disrupt us. As For Jesus, he is a great archetype WITHIN  the brain of Ameratsu, whom we are part of.

And so, in a way, the story of carbon-based life on earth is inseparable from the life history of Amaterasu.
The development of OUR souls is the story of OUR connection through "qi" (the various levels or frequencies
and types of qi, connecting "dark matter" to carbon-based matter and to other mundane types of matter) 
to and from Amaterasu, of which OUR souls and archetypes are part. Her story is right at the center of our history 
and futures. I do hope we do not all forget who we really are. 


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Paul Werbos <paul.werbos@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Oct 9, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Subject: child's history of life on earth


Good morning, Maia and Evie and Kallie!

Almost a week ago, Maia and Roger and Leo and Ori all came and joined us at the Greek Festival. It was great to catch up.

As part of that... we learned that Leo is becoming VERY interested in all kinds of animals.  I mentioned that we discussed with Evie the possibility of our working with her to construct a kind of child's history of life on earth.
Of course, any child who gets to be lead author or coauthor of such a book is opening up great opportunities for their future.

What amazes me is how little most adults -- even "experts" -- know about the real history of life on earth, in ways that are very important to our hopes for the future. And how entertaining the real story is. I have learned a WHOLE lot myself, just as a side effect of how complicated my own life has been. 

And so... ONE possibility is that one of you might want to set up a zoom where Evie and Leo and I can just talk about the stories of where we humans came from, with guidance and leadership from Maia or from another adult,
preferably a good communicator. (I am better at finding out and answering questions than at leading such a discussion.) I doubt Peter would have time to help, but if he can help in any way, we should be very grateful and honored. 

---

SO MANY great stories which children should be able to appreciate, if explained the right way..

I learned a lot when I was studying the different types of brains out there, and where THEY came from.

But for the big picture... I learned most from trying to understand about climate changes. 
At NSF, the head of the geosciences directorate introduced us to Peter Ward. He said that Peter was the world's number one expert on the times when there was a mass death of life on earth in the past. Peter agreed to help me understand what the risks are NOW. We wrote a joint paper which is very short but very deep, backed up by the very best science now available:  https://build-a-world.org/doku.php?id=climate:risks

From that work, I learned that a very dense book for adults,
image.png

is by far the best one-volume of the history of life on earth now available. To understand the whole picture,
I have also studied important work by Robert Hazen (who works here in DC!) and work by Lee Kump
described as part of one of the chapters in Ward and Kirschvink. Hazen also has created video courses, one of which we have watched. By the way, if you have any interest in minerals or crystals, those same courses are a great start for them as well. (Hazen has gotten money from the oil&gas industry, because geology is a big part of THEIR business.) 

Advanced forms of life on earth really started about 800 million (0.8 billion) years ago.
All four of those great scientists have written about the whole history of life, starting about 4.5 billion years ago.

ONE OF THE GREAT STORIES is how the earth became habitable for advanced life. 

In the old days (when science knew less, even when I was born), they used the words "boring billion"
for the billion years from 1.8 billion years ago to 0.8 billion years. Not so many signs of advanced life and what it produces (like fossils and oil). But in one of Hazen's great video courses (which we can pass on to you), he interviews the woman professor in a Virginia college who changed that story, radically.
I remember PART of what she said.

"They should not call it the boring billion. They should call them the STINKY billion."
If you think of the earth or our solar system as a kind of Greal Soul (called "Gaia" or 
"Amaterasu"), that soul spent a billion years focusing all her intelligence on the job of cleaning out the stinkiest,
most poisonous "toilet" within light years of the earth. The oceans of the earth were full of poisonous sulfate
compounds, just like a toilet, the main reason why advanced life could not evolve. To make the oceans 
clear enough, she used natural selection -- the evolution of certain specific molecules, certain TYPES of DNA and the cells they breed, able to clean out those sulfates. If she is intelligent enough to have memory... it is amazing what she remembers!

When I saw that video, I thought of a cult movie I saw years ago:
----------------------
Jupiter Ascending is considered a cult movie for its ambitious, visually stunning, yet polarizing space opera story, which features elaborate costumes, wild world-building, and campy dialogue that has earned it a dedicated following. Directed by the Wachowskis, the film stars Mila Kunis as a Chicago janitor who discovers she is the heir to an intergalactic royal dynasty and Channing Tatum as her genetically engineered protector ..
-------------------------------

I am glad I saw that movie, because it really does portray the true spirit of the earth (or of our solar system),
and what it remembers. Whenever I hear an intellectual or political person asking us to make better friends with the earth, I picture what that person would have to do to make friends with a billions-year old
Hispanic teenager, like the heroine of that movie, who has just spent a billion years cleaning out such toilets.
And I wonder what her (very intelligent, patient, but very serious ) strategy might be for dealing with human leaders intent on turning it BACK into such a toilet! 

===============

But, hey, there is another very interesting story....

Starting at 800 million years ago, advanced life BEGAN in our oceans, and crept up to the land.
However, at about 250 million years ago, there was a dramatic shift in life on earth, 
called the "Permian Triassic" (PT) discontinuity:


Peter Ward's shorter, older book, Under a Green Sky, was a real breakthrough in humans' understanding of what actually happened back then. In my files (on Alex's and Maia's hard drives!) are the most serious scientific reports from NASA expanding on key details of Peter's story. It is clear that events in the ocean caused a rise in sulfate 
poisoning in our atmosphere (H2S and its byproducts) AND levels of radiation high enough to kill all humans on earth, if there were humans alive at that time. (By the way, those events are repeating themselves now, but I am not expected to live long enough to see them. YOU MIGHT see them, if we don't use the best new technologies we now have to prevent it.)

BEFORE that catastrophe, the best brains on earth (our ancestors) were on track to developing and ruling 
the lands of the earth, before the reptiles and birds could take over. BUT ... well, mammals are not well designed for breathing poison.  If you visit the museum of Natural History... you have seen a stuffed version of "Morgie", the great common ancestor, "great grandmother", of all mammals. HER picture should certainly belong
in the child's book of earth life! BUT she was descended in turn from our very tough
"great grandfather," our great tough honorable ancestor, lystrosaurus. 

Lystrosaurus was the only one of OUR ancestors able to survive and proliferate even on the poisonous, acid muddy lands of the earth after PT. Like a rhinoceros  
in appearance. He reminds me of my stepfather, Buddy, Gordon Smith, former marine sargeant who raised the US flag in the Pacific in World War II. In fact, I first saw a proper honorable status of Lystrosaurus  on one of those Pacific islands. We probably still have it in our great photo albums, which I hope we can pass on to all of you,
when sanitized. 

BECAUSE the reptiles were able to survive the new world better than mammals, they became rulers of the earth for many billions of years. Our ancestors barely survived, scurrying around under the colossal feet of the new rulers of the earth.

That period of time, the mesozoic era, from PT to the death of the dinosaurs, reminds me of legends like those of the earlier Mongols and Jews, of the long period of oppression living under the rule of very powerful top dogs.
Those early mammals may have felt hopeless and oppressed...

BUT THE REAL STORY WAS THAT OF FIERCE FAST NATURAL SELECTION.

I can even imagine Amaterasu grinning in that period, laughing at those poor dinosaurs (and perhaps the same
at much of Trump's community or the more military warlords embedded in  modern China) who did not realize what
their role was in the  story she was writing. Being small and oppressed and heavily challenged, they evolved
THE GREAT MAMMAL BRAIN   in a way the slow dinosaurs never could. The breakthrough to a new kind of animal, the complete mammal WITH A MAMMAL BRAIN, was one of the two or three most critical, dramatic
events in the whole history of life on earth.

And there is more... Peter might explain to you that the death of the dinosaurs was not JUST the great freak event of the famous Great Comet, which ended the mesozoic era of life on earth. And the mammal brain was created a bit before that. The powers of the mammal brain (which include a kind of special creativity, unknown to dinosaurs,
which strengthened the mouse ability to locate and eat dinosaur eggs) already created dramatic changes,
and pressure on the dinosaurs. I will never forget "Maiasaurus", the great good dinosaur mother, evolved enough
BY selection in the new environment, to protect her eggs and her children far more than the earlier dinosaurs could.
Dinosaurs did suffer a lot when the new environment came into force, but they hung on in some places for awhile,
until the comet hit. To be honest, I wonder at times what Amaterasu had to do with that comet, when it came to our solar system. And Peter and I wonder about life beyond our solar system.

By the way, I do claim to know more about how mammal brains work, for aspects of higher intelligence
like creativity, than anyone else on earth. For example, there is a paper by Werbos and Davis reporting on the 
data supporting our model of how mammal brains work. The Frontiers system of journals even created a new journal, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, to try to advance that new understanding

Love, Dad

Saturday, June 21, 2025

Radical New Nuclear Options

Because the positive need for new nuclear technology is now growing fast, even as the risks also grow... and because our life expectancies are allever more unpredictable... I have decided to just write down now a few of the most important little known nuclear technologies I have learned about, relevant to the life-threatening global strategic situation https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html .


Background

First, some background on the larger strategic picture in physics. A rational global strategy, aimed at maximizing the probability of humanity surviving this century, would of course not call for a "silver bullet." Like the "spiral development" strategies which John Mankins brilliantly expounded to his review panels when he ran HR&T ( a billions-dollars efforts at NASA under Bush)... it calls for parallel tracks, connected somewhat but each focused in a very strategic way on its own.
 
The Golden Dome technology is one of several reasons why we need a very strong stream of effort to "FIX QED" -- to develop all the more advancedmodels needed for electronic and photonic systems, like the program I developed and led at NSF before my retirement (https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.33, like what we now know about the level of consciousness we see in mammal brains (werbos and Davis), and like the many supporting papers for my patents
( https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310 ) some of which are still private, held by several of us.

But we ALSO need a parallel, less open effort to "ADD A NUCLEAR COMPONENT TO THE RESULTING THEORY OF PHYSICS, AND IMPLEMENT THE MULTIPRONGED SPIRAL DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP TO THE FULLEST GOLDEN DOME OPTIONS." 

This entails building on the full foundation of crossdisciplinary resources summarized in the books https://photos.app.goo.gl/qAy8giPzEjp1tZkj9. Of course, this email cannot review all of these and their relevant connections, though I hope someone does someday, and I hope I can help.

A few key points --

When I got my PhD decades ago at Harvard, the common view was: "We now know the true Lagrangian which controls the universe, except for how we connect to gravity. It is defined by the standard model of physics' explained as electroweak theory (EWT) combined with Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), as defined in the official 
standard text by Weinberg [shown in that photo album], but with gravity somewhat LIKE Einstein's General Relativity (GR) but something we are working on.) QED is a well known well-proven limit case of EWT; it was invented by Feynmann, Schwinger and Tomonoga."

BUT -- I took my main courses in quantum field theory from Schwinger, whose group I stayed connected with. Feynmann and Schwinger both agreed that the canonical quantum field theory they invented was NOT CREDIBLE, and should be seen only as a place holder. I could say a LOT more...

but for now: EWT and QED do have a huge empirical foundation, which Schwinger added to far beyond what Feynmann ever learned about. nanohub.org contains great tutorials on subjects like NEGF, developed by Schwinger and extended very far by many people in electronics and photonics. It is fully consistent with the David Deutsch extended version of QED which is what he used whne he invented the modernn quantum Tyring machine, almost the only form of quantum computing known even now to most people in that field. But does not fit the foundations given in Weinberg's text. 
 
Schwinger did great work in QED, in QMHP... BUT HE ALSO DID WORK ON NUCLEAR INTERACTIONS.

Breakthroughs

I do not have this until this afternoon (at the earliest) to get deep enough even to the basics here.

BUt...

Schwinger did not believe QCD.

When I read his paper, A Magnetic Model of Matter, in Science, I was startled by the implications, but I wondered: could this be true? What is the evidence?

I worked hard, at hard core highest NSF standards, to evaluate the issue. I collected many papers, all included in my directories which I have  loaned to a few of you to copy. I was startled to see the evidence -- while incomplete -- strongly favored his views (at least in basic concepts included in his models) over QCD. Above all -- evidence indicated that the strong nuclear force is (can sometimes be) a LONG RANGE FORCE.

As a sanity check (part of the NSF tradition of CHECKING), I discussed with the empirical nuclear physicist Tetsuo Sawada of Japan. Many of his papers and our joint papers are in those folders.

When Pons and Fleischmann reported their work...

Schwinger dug VERY deep, and so did I. It changes the models a bit... but there is new empirical evidence from Japan, some even discussed in LENR conferences which Denis Bushnell, Chief Scientist of Langley, encouraged. They clearly imply nuclear transmutation, new energy sources, violation of baryon number conservation... I promised Teller and Schwinger I would cooperate with the new efforts to suppress such UNTIL HUMANITY IS READY OR UNTIL THE NEEDS OUTWEIGH THE RISKS.

Japan was ready and able to start producing the systems not so long ago. My files also point to other competent suppliers, fortunately not highlighted in the LENR conferences.

There is an obvious analogy to fusion -- an energy barrier which appears insuperable, but can be overcome by a laser. Such lasers are now closer at hand, and I even funded projects at NSF which develop necessary enabling technologies. (My papers citing Glauber and Sudarshan certainly give foundations of how advanced lasers work.)

BUT the nanopatterned devices are a better hope for now. The only POSITIVE value for knowing the real Lagrangian (better describing strong nuclear interactions) is to help in THAT kind of design, which would require help from folks like Stan Williams of Texas A&M (totally QED, but the same kind of math needed).
Or folks like quantum dot array designers. Also relevant are the nonlinear electric/optic crystals used by Leitenstorfer and those who cite him. 

Best of luck,

  Paul   

On Fri, Jun 20, 2025 at 3:49 PM Paul Werbos <pwerbos@gmail.com> wrote:
Last week, I was hoping for a chance to visit someone in reach of me by Washington Metro, to give them a "brain dump" on "existential"
nuclear variables which in my view are crucial to future possibilities,
(It is odd how France24 used the word "existential" at exactly the moment I was typing it. There are connections. A major goal would be to pass on information crucial to implementing https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html .)
I have mentioned how Ed Teller and Juian SChwinger both came to me, during my first years at NSF, and declared: (1) they could tell I was catching on to physics they knew, supported by new empirical work, which would threaten the very existence of our species if made public under the political conditions of the time;
(2) they asked me to help them keep it deeply quiet, until and unless conditions warrant a change in strategy. Conditions HAVE changed... NOT enough to make me trust email or video calls for the details, but enough for a brain dump, TO people I would trust in a place I would trust. (There are many such in the DC area,
but I will never forget my visit long ago to the "Star Wars" Headquarters in Crystal City, where the head of the place Janis (sp?) told me to expect our conversations to be overheard by  folks who also shared the technology of monitoring vibrations of windows.)  

Absent such an option now, at a time of some urgency, I am thinking of breaking down and documenting some things by internet. Even as Trump meditates on  what to do next, so too do I.

Friday, June 13, 2025

When and How can we just leave it in the hands of God?

A friend worries that we may have to leave some things in the hands of God. This certainly resonates with a core aspect of my own thinking, at a time when the challenges before nus are overwhelming. But to think rationally about that aspect , we need to sharpen our vision of "What IS God?" 

JULY 4 2025: Major Revision As I Look At the Math\--AFTER

Earlier version:



A higher intelligence we are connected to?

Low as we are compared to all that exists, there are many intelligences higher than us. Fuzzy or fanciful pantheism is not so clear as picking a few to pay most attention to. 
For me  right now  I focus most on a kind of great trinity: (1) the universe itself; (2) the full noosphere organism of our solar system; and (3) my wife. Only (1) is in any sense omniscient. I struggle hard every week to better understand and better connect to all three.

I bcc the friend who recommended Jung's red book to me. I now refer to it as "my New testament", the closest I have to a second trusted holy book. "God2 often reflects what Jung calls "the spirit of the times". Jung's experience of the complexity of real life in the 1920s and later is relevant to what WE are facing now, though the challenges have all grown much greater. Our connections with higher intelligence are all two way connections, giving us ever more responsibilities, unless we choose just to fold and rest in peace, or dig a hole to hide in -- which is familiar to all higher intelligences and which they will accommodate with grace and sadness.

New Version:

The universe itself IS a KIND of intelligent system, maximizing (or minmax) the sum of its Lagrangian
over space time. BUT NORMALLY this sum is a highly nonconvex function. High level but finite

intelligent systems, with or without Quantum AGI capability, normally have evolved mechanisms to

reduce loss due to nonconvexity.  And so, for"miracles" at a practical level, still higher than archetypes,

we have more hope working with "Amaterasu"(as I describe, the entire solar system)and the related entity Jesus called "Father",more of the deep. Finite intelligence requires partnership.

 

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

How mathematics is the highest priority in healing humanity

 First, definition and background:


I now believe that the entire human species is at risk of going extinct in this century, for reasons discussed in my recent paper for Yeshua and Carey on issues of great importance to it. (I also worry about issues in the next century, related to what caused decline and fall of human civilizations in dozens of cases in the past millennia, but this email will not discuss those, except implicitly at the end.)

The most obvious threads of the future killing us all involve issues like nuclear war, with AGI and drones and new aerospace technology easy to see on the horizon. 

Months ago, I would have said that the threat of such new levels of warfare is basically a psychological breakdown in our collective intelligence, like the collective intelligence studied most deeply by Carl Jung. (I refer to the collective intelligence of earth or of our solar system as our "noosphere.") I felt that the deep schism which most needed healing is the schism between belief in science/reality and belief in some sort of anti-realistic version of religion. I could imagine wars spearheaded by power-hungry priest king rulers and by ferocious armies of spiritually dead, obedient coders.

THOSE risks are very serious, and anyone with a real sense of reality will always remain aware of them.

HOWEVER... THIS MONTH... after probing more deeply into what might save or destroy human nations and organizations... and the concrete details in https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html, I now see it differently, "ON THE GROUND" at the front lines.

=======================================

Second, how I see it now:

I have at times said the one true "God", the intelligent personality which rules everything in this universe, is the universe itself. https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/08/debate-on-god-with-irish-scientist.html
Most people hearing those words would assume this is an insult to God, but that is because they do not really understand how nonlinear dynamical systems governed by 3+1-D Lagrange-Euler equations fully embody the highest attributes of "intelligence" like what we see in mammal brains, but higher.

BUT OUR NOOSPHERE IS NOT THAT HIGH!!! (The blog post says more.) 

My concern NOW: OUR noosphere, a great collective intelligence, reminds me of the use of brain modeling, as explained in my chapter published in Come Carpentier's book (draft attached). We are all part of the local collective intelligence, but IT is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, any more than any of us is. (Nor are Jehovah or Santa Claus or Jesus or Krishna or Odin or the REFLECTION of Amaterasu we saw in the muddy mirror pool we saw in Izumo, Japan). Our noosphere is like an adolescent girl, who has just spent a billion years cleaning out the stinkiest poisonous toilets you could image (how the oceans were, see Hazen's videos on the history of life on earth) and is just now beginning to experience technologies never seen before by us earth creatures. HER life (or its life or his life) is very much in danger right now, and she is undergoing a mental struggle (like the struggles some adolescents experience when sent to new schools).. which she and we may or may not survive.

HOWEVER:

"God" has much more knowledge than that to draw on, the entire universe.

And, since "God" is basically a set of nonlinear PDE... "His" native language is mathematics, a more universal language, not English or Sanskrit or Hebrew or whatnot. 

He/she/it can appreciate the NEED for mathematics to implement the "New Jerusalem" kind of technologies mentioned in that blog post. UNLIKE our local noosphere, which is drowning in incoherent misunderstandings of simple basics like reality and the limits of all finite minds, and the equivalences between what kinds of patterns can emerge or be built using silicon versus carbon versus other elements. OR the need to really "see the sky" to have much chance of survival. 

As I probe these kinds of thoughts floating around human cultures and leaders... I am reminded again of the more ancient (and less fundamentally corrupted/biased) thoughts of the shamanic people who try to connect to "Mother Earth" and "Father Sky" (or vice-versa). Should I even retrieve my photo from the island in the center of Lake Titicacca, showing the meeting place of the trails leading up to "pachamamma" and "pachatatta"? They are not enemies, BUT perhaps the conflict between key visions THEY possess are a more important schism than the one I was most worried about last year. The deep understanding and use of the more mathematical perspective is a key target for the kind of healing needed to save us... even in this century!

The key point is that better "seeing the sky," INTEGRATING what we see with new scientific instruments WITH first person experience AND with our connection to the noosphere itself, is essential to healing our noosphere enough to understand and survive what is "out there" in all directions.

By the way, some in the BPM list have said "But what of  molecules?" That too fits the Approximation4 paper, and is related to the new existential threats of the coming century, above and beyond the obvious ones in this century. 

On Tue, May 13, 2025 at 10:06 PM 'Howard Bloom' via Scientific Council of the Alt Planetary Futures Institute (Ap-Fi) <scientific-council-Iof-the-alt-planetary-futures-institute-ap-fi@googlegroups.com> wrote:
victor, you are right.  our living in the world experience must be part of our science.

the first two laws of science, the laws that grabbed my soul when i was ten years old, are:
  1. the truth at any price, including the price of your life; and
  2. look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then proceed from there.
science is an aspiration to omniscience.  to achieve its goals it must look at the lens of emotion and the infrastructures of habit that determine how we see our world.  science must comprehend the selves below the floorboards of the self.

with warmth and oomph--howard

Thursday, April 24, 2025

From Golden Dome to New Jerusalem: Breakthroughs Now Available

 When Trump declared he would support a "Golden Dome" thrust developing the most advanced breakthroughs now on the horizon, able to stop murderous missile attacks anywhere on Earth.. I was excited at first. But when he turned it over to Musk, I remembered how many other great thrusts Musk has worked on which fell short, because Musk is not keeping up with the best available advanced technology.

ALSO... In June, 2023, in the first UN Security Council session on AI, representatives of the great powers (except Russia and China, abstaining) all agreed that the number one need for humanity, for the sake of global security, is a new global warning system open to all nations on earth, to warn them when and where they are being attacked, if and when it happens. (After all, sheer confusion about who attacked whom was a major cause of World War I.) We need a new GLOBAL system to "see the sky," especially -- the first of the list of new technologies I advocate. 

I call this list the "New Jerusalem" list, because, when I first received information about them, I was amazed at how many of them match real, new technologies I recognized when I saw them in the Book of Revelations, when I read it for the first time, locked up in an apartment in Dupont Circle when visiting Washington DC.  I would do my best to help get any ONE of them deployed, though my highest hope would be for a space habitat in geosynchronous orbit actually over Jerusalem proper. 


A quick list would be:

1. ABSOLUTE priority, extending the UN discussion for which I sent you the link: "seeing the sky," which is itself a portfolio.
My recent patent https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos included several papers filed at USPTO not published yet (to my surprise!). The key point is that a new type of quantum information processing, based on the same physics as the standard Quantum Turing Machine (invented by David Deutsch of Oxford) but radically different in capability and architecture, gives order of magnitude in all image processing tasks, including "seeing the sky" either just overhead or deep into the universe. 

It builds on work I funded at NSF by David Hyland, which later became classified after NASA and DOD used that same technology to achieve higher resolution on earth. I was allowed to see follow-ons AFTER China also achieved high resolution in seeing the earth -- but this new technology is also crucial to more intelligent USE of high resolution databases. I often cite China and Israel as world leaders in such aspects, in neural networks based on classical physics, but the quantum one is orders of magnitude beyond that.

All of this "sees" light (electromagnetic radiation), but the same design could be connected to new sensor networks focused on nuclear force signatures, which certainly cry out for further development, on an urgent basis.   [SEE  APPENDIX B FOR SOME TECHNICAL DETAILS ON HOW TO DO THIS.]

If humanity were truly deep enough with enough collective intelligence, we would give the highest priority to build such open international sensor networks, building on electromagnetic sensing but moving strategically to "see the sky" (and see our own solar system) for nuclear forces, with the highest possible resolution. This would require
a better understanding of the underlying Lagrangian, which I discussed with people like Schwinger and Teller when I was at NSF ( 
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391442087_Proposal_for_a_Theory_of_Everything) and new empirical work making better use of nanopatterned heterostructures, with alternating planes in design. 

2. High power Intelligent Guidance Navigation and Control (IGNC). This includes how we steer an interceptor vehicle to destroy an attacking missile or drone. You know that "iron dome" technology is an important tool preventing total disaster in Israel, but few people know the full history. We should get into details at some time. Long ago, Patriot missiles became very famous, back when their success rate was only 1 or 4% .
I had many connections to BMDO and USAF and Boeing, from my program at NSF. 

I funded one of my PIs, Balakrishnan of U-Missouri Rolla (Now MST), who passed "shoot out" competitors, which led to a partnership with Lockheed and a ten-fold improvement in reducing failure to intercept.  But Lockheed never deployed the stage two version, which would have reduced failures by another factor of ten, simply because they did not have an economic incentive. Bala is dead now, but (1) the stage 2 design is fully understand by his research group leader, who is now in Bangalore, India; (2) the new quantum version of the algorithm will give orders of magnitude improvement, and important qualitative improvements. 

IGNC can be used EITHER on interceptor vehicles, OR on directed energy weapons.  

3.  Low cost access to space, far beyond what Lockheed or Musk know about. In building a space habitat, or even just deploying interceptors, cost per kg to LEO or GEO are of central importance to what can be built. I was delighted to read that Jewell of Purdue, Trump's nominee for S&T head of DOD, has a strong background in hypersonics with some background to good old pre-corruption Boeing engineering. This is a huge topic... but in brief, Musk has his own very narrow stable, and we have LOTS of data on what makes him so far behind what China and others know. I was one of three frontline
USGOV funding agents who funded work aimed at understanding very advanced hypersonic work leaking out long ago from Russia. I am still in regular contact with people from DARPA, AF and BMDO, which could assist a New Jerusalem project get us orders of magnitude more than what Musk could get.
 
4. New electrooptic crystals to be made in space. This is one of the two "OLD" breakthrough options! I will never forget 1972 when I accidentally read the Book of Revelations ( a story which might amuse you, but for later), and saw what crystals were displayed in the space habitat depicted in that book (named "New Jerusalem"). Most were easy to understand for me... getting a PhD then in the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Physics, but one puzzled me. I had a classmate from GE Aerospace, and I asked him what THIS crystal would be good for. He was shocked 
and promised me that GE could get every copy of the book removed from circulation, whatever it was! I just laughed... but later learned that that kind of nonlinear photonic crystal is fundamental to starting quantum nonlinear optics. There is also a similar nonlinear electro-optic crystal whose capabilities go beyond what almost anyone knows as yet. (There was a group by Lake Konstanz in Switzerland with amazing results; on a recent web search, I learned of quantum computing work in Japan almost unknown in US which verifies the startling new results.)

5. New energy sources and detection. This has a link to 1, but is the least proven of all five so far. Circa 1990, when Julian Schwinger visited me at NSF, he described new empirical work already done strongly supporting his general claim, published in Science (A Magnetic Model of Matter), supporting a family of Hamiltonians quite different from the usual QCD, which we may now have a need for. See https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.aac9788 for a family on nonlinear electric/photonic crystals which need to be studied much more exhaustively because of their potential both in "seeing the sky" in new dimensions, and energy sources which might change the game. 

6. MORE CLASSICAL... large AI servers of any kind need power. From our IEEE climate technology work, we know of high  efficiency Brayton-based 
solar thermal energy, and thermal storage, ready for more immediate deployment both on earth and in space. It is SO well proven and developed already... but vested interests in the energy sector have had huge biasing effects, weakening the US. If Project Golden Dome, mutated into New Jerusalem, could just get this piece deployed, it would be worth more than the entire life's product of >99% of people in these fields!
As I type this, I note that Abdul Kalam's proposal to use solar sail mirrors to create zones of high illumination on earth could be combined with the new solar technology, which is described in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14JNhumdUGzAkoOadlXiR1fqE79WPOLsL?usp=sharing, to possibly produce renewable clean electricity on earth at a cost many times lower than  any alternatives in sight. 

===================================
=====================================
Appendix A:

In the original email, I said I was leaving out many details (all filled in in my files, too long for one email)
BUT ALSO some related topics.

One topic is the place of our life -- the life of this solar system -- in the much larger ecosystem of our universe,
discussed a bit more in my chapter in https://www.amazon.in/Exploring-Consciousness-Non-Locality-Come-Carpentier/dp/9391759947 . When a space enthusiast asked me what the chances are of our descendants 
reaching out beyond the solar system and establishing a stable existence there... I replied that it depends on an equilibrium probability distribution, which I derived and published in a paper in the con-mat part of arxiv. In practice, it depends on what kinds of sources of free energy we can use. That is not easy. The New Jerusalem proposal in motivated in great part, underneath, by the hope of making it possible. 

Appendix B: Seeing the Sky in Nuclear Bands

In truth, I now give this task a higher priority than all the others combined, simply because I know how it interacts with the others and with many complex threads into the future.

To make it real has three main parallel requirements:

(1) To fully implement quantum cognitive prediction, a key part of the patent already granted, as suggested by the paper of Hyland and Werbos, and further work in our folders, such as the paper now under submission by Christopher Werbos quantifying some of the benefits to nonconvex optimization going well beyond the papers already available in our files;

(2) A new Lagrangian function, as needed to fill in the complete new foundation of physics (Hard Core Einsteinian Realism HCER), especially to unify and fix the treatment of strong and weak nuclear forces, important to design of
more advanced sensor devices;

and (3) A vast new experimental database exploring what can be done, near nuclear sources of many kinds, near and near, using 2-D nanopatterned surfaces for sensing, using many types of heterostructure materials.

Task 3 reminds me of an "EFRI topic" proposed soon before my last year at NSF (2015), on "graphene plus," things that can be done with 2D nanopatterned sheets, related to the quantum dots part of a comprehensive DOE review of hardware options for quantum computing, in our folders. In truth, it also reminds me of those episodes of the 20-episode Chinese TV series on The THree Body Problem," where they hint at what can be done with "nanoblade technology," but simple 2D arrays in quantum dot televisions also show how much richness is there -- both for sensing and for actuation. INPUTTING such rich data to very powerful cognitive prediction may help us notice, see and use patterns we had not seen before, on earth and in sky. 

Regarding (2) -- at researchgate, I posted a paper Ouroboros4 FROM 2017, which may or may not demand upgrading based on our folders on topological solitons of various types. In an ideal world, I would be happy to transfer ALL the relevant files (circa 1-2 terabyte) to a stable secure UN site where they would be open to the world. 

IN FACT... Task (2) reminds me of an important episode in the life of Einstein, which I have studied rather deeply
in some directions.  I was rightly asked today: "SINCE you believe people must learn to crawl first, before they can stand, walk, run and fly.... YOUR Lagrangian is like standing. WHY are you making the same mistake Einstein made, devoting his later life to getting the Lagrangian right (in his case, the choice of metric in Riemannian geometry), BEFORE crucial basics which can be used even in the realm of quantum electrodynamics (QED)?"
And so, my new paper in JCER CITES my crucial earlier work on mappings (like extended Galuber-Sudarshan, published but also in arxiv) which solved the FIRST problem which Einstein left to Von Neumann, Wiener, Wigner and others, which they did not solve. I did because of my access... to newer work, but I owe the world a paper on that story someday. THAT mapping, PLUS the new Lagrangian, are the foundations which can get usback to reality, just as Einstein asked for, BEFORE he veered off into alternate geometries for which there is still no evidence of a need. 


Wednesday, April 23, 2025

How Freud Gave Us Backpropagation and Links to Jung

Long ago, IEEE gave me its Neural Network Pioneer award for the original discovery of backpropagation -- the main foundation of the deep learning sweeping the world today, which was transferred and disseminated only because of very great efforts over many years. However, only recently have psychiatrists and psychologists started to learn the true story -- how I derived backpropagation BY translating certain ideas from Freud into mathematics. Here is part of that story. I wrote it down when asked for a discussion of it... ===================================================== Direct human contact, even by Zoom, allows a depth and richness I value a LOT. However, when I worked at NSF (1988-2015), I also learned how some conversations can go off course, and generate misunderstandings and false memories. IN THIS CASE, I feel it calls for me to put certain facts on "paper" now, as a kind of foundation, reality testing, whatever. Also, to be honest, I strongly believe I reach higher levels of awareness in the early morning, on most days, before I get distracted by many other things. Over time, I have gotten VERY deep into many approaches to psychoanalysis and psychiatry. The first big step for me was when I was 7 or 8 years old,when my sent me to a summer camp, Long Acres, where I met George Davis Gammon ("Davis"), whose father was chairman of neurology (they said) at the University of Pennsylvania. When I turned 9 (1956), I entered Chestnut Hill Academy, located in northwest Philadelphia, where Davis was in my class, living near the school. In the many, many conversations we had, he passed on what his father and other family members had taught him about psychology and psychiatry, mainly from a Freudian point of view. He showed me Gray's anatomy and the book by Sherrington on the brain. I pored over Sherrington, but for anatomy and physiology I mainly studied a text my mother had used when she took nursing many years before that. In those days, everyone I knew was aware of Freud, but feelings were very polarized. (As they are today about many topics!) I had an image of young girls who would violently tease boys about how confused and distorted their thinking was. (I did not even think at the time that there might be a friendly aspect of such teasing. But I was never teased that way, so I did not think of that aspect.) IN FACT -- at age 8 I was injected with testosterone by a Dr. Bone (just a precaution, he said), and that, combined with normal stuff, put me on the extreme side of yang. Like many other yang boys, I was disgusted and repelled by a lot of what people said about Freud, and I was aiming for a logical mathematical understanding of brains, mind and universe, which tends to make people too disgusted by what was said about Freud to pay much attention. However -- thanks in part to what I learned from Davis, and from conversations with people like my sister's classmates... I decided to take a third path. I UNDERSTOOD the first basic concepts of Freud's theory of pyschodynamics, based on his studies of neurons in medical school. I understood the idea "if there is a forwards association from A to B, based on causal learning, there will be a corresponding flow BACKWARDS from the B neuron to the A neuron, for chemicals representing 'cathexis' or 'psychic energy.'" Instead of rejecting Freud as nonscientific, I decided to translate his idea from a bgroping effort to develop a mathematical theory by Freud, into real mathematics. That was just the START of a rather complex journey -- as the brain and mind are also complicated. In the early 1960s, I took advanced computer summer course for high school students at the Moore school of University of Pennsylvania, which led to a summer job in 1964 at a research project under Dr./Prof. Karreman, a cardiologist. He had me study Hebb's classic book, still important, The Organization of Behavior. As I pondered Hebb's ideas for a universal learning rule, I realized quickly it could not even do as well as simple linear regression in learning how the world works; for a mathematically viable design, I needed derivatives, and by then I simply knew the relation between Freud and how to calculate derivatives, a kind of childhood memory by then. FINALLY -- a decent documentary record of sorts: https://vixra.org/abs/1902.0046 from 1972. SO much happened related to this story between 1964 and 1972! In early 1967, I believed fiercely that this view of the brain -- grounded in Freud whose works I studied much further in visits to the Harvard Adams House library -- totally explained human intelligence. But (werbos.com/religions.htm) from spring 1967 until winter 1972 I had many startling personal experiences which totally changed my views, step by step. NOW -- when people ask me "what are your holy books?", I say that Von Neumann and MOrgenstern is my Old Testament (the foundation of my neural network models of the brain as supported by data analysis in Werbos and Davis in Frontiers in Neuroscience), but now Cawhich just came outrl Jung's Red Book is my New Testament. The same mathematical models built up from Freud and Einstein can be extended to understand and justify concepts of collective mind which Jung worked so hard to probe. And yes, that kind of extension does require seeing how Freud's concepts of chemical or electrical "cathexis" signals must have PARALLEL , mathematically similar flows to implement backpropagation BETWEEN PEOPLE. In 1967-72, that seemed crazy to me at first.. but I took courses from Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for inventing "the second quantization," who led me on a path showing a very solid path to the physics which allows that. That path is outlined in the attached book chapter, from 2024 https://www.amazon.in/Exploring-Consciousness-Non-Locality-Come-Carpentier/dp/9391759947 .

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Lessons From travel to Alaska and Yukon -- brains, indigenous culture, Vietnam, etc

 I owe great thanks to my wife Ludmilla, who has unique world-class skills in leading us to places all over the world, where we have learned many things known to VERY few Westerners. One month under her unique planning equates to about three advanced graduate courses across many new disciplines.

ONE of those trips, in the summer of 2025, was to Alaska and the Yukon. I recently sent a summary of what we learned on that trip, that few others ever learn, to a group of friends and family:

============

1. New discoveries about how our brains work:

FOR EXAMPLE -- Frontiers in Neuroscience asked me to organize a special issue this year, bringing together all the best radical advances in our understanding of how brains really work to generate intelligence. I put together a position paper on this ( https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2024/09/position-paper-for-next-great-advances.html). Section iii, just past halfway through the paper, reports on radical improvements in our understanding of how mammal and bird brains attain the highest levels of general intelligence that they are capable of. The final improvement can be credited to this tour (though it also reflects a foundation we built on from previous trips we have photos for.)


2. Indigenous People

The second group of incredible learning involves indigenous cultures. From earlier trips, we knew how human civilization arose from three MAIN streams of progress beyond the hunter-gatherer stage: "people of the boat, people of the horse, and people of the vegetable." (After our recent trip to Indochina and Thailand, I would refine this a bit, paying more respect to highlanders and elephants.) We knew that the Tlingit people, especially, were important well-integrated people in the ancient high civilization of the people of the boat of the Pacific, crossing the ocean, ranging from places we have seen from Pacific islands, like Hawaii and Maori, to
Peru, to the Champa people of Vietnam. In this trip, we saw more of them (and other great fisher people), BUT ALSO of inland Athabascan people who have a lot to teach us, and others. 

BEFORE this trip, I mainly thought of  early shamanism as MAINLY "mother earth, father sky" (or  mother sky, as Hava has taught us about early Israeli culture). HERE, the role of clans and connections with specific species was VERY striking. For example... in the Yukon (around Dawson) we saw the place where gold was first really discovered, causing a massive change in the world economy. We saw the faces of the group, and the real leader.. a Tlingit guy living inland, whose house (we visited) displayed a prominent statue of an orca, his clan, and ... a bird.  My brain paper mentions orcas... but we now know a lot more about them, about this guy's spiritual connections. And WE met a lot of creatures, like a family of friendly ravens we connected to. 


3. Human-huskie collaboration and brain synchronization


OK -- third most important, but some would say first. In Denali, especially, but also other places, we saw lots of cooperative behavior of humans and huskies, especially. Suddenly I add the names of my long-time friend and collaborator, Robert Kozma, and Scott Kelso, a world leader in the study of brain synchronization. Last year I was amazed by the collaborative, synchronized behavior I saw (unique in the world, in many ways) connecting humans and huskies. At Denali, a lead place of USGS, I saw VERY serious well-funded research teams studying these teams, connecting very important basic science with practical realities of life important to the lives of people in Alaska and Yukon, now and in the past, Euro-American and indigenous both. (I DID see great teams of humans and horses in Iceland, as well, but both places are unique, and I have to say THESE teams in Alaska and Canada were the most impressive.) Above all -- I see exciting NEW opportunities for very important fundamental research strengthening these connections and understanding, making full use of the newest mathematical and cybernetic  tools. 

A lot to learn for those with open eyes... and ears and hearts. 

The geology and the worlds of rocks, the economics and history were ALSO very interesting, but this post is already long enough. 

WAIT: MORE:

History of earth and Champa people of the boat:

SEE https://youtu.be/ghmjIBD2Fd4

After our return from Vietnam, which made me wish SOME of the people in UDSGOV knew half of what we learned, Ludmilla said: "You still have a lot to learn. Watch this video, and the others in the series." I was astounded at how much NEW I learned, complementary to the things Ludmilla and I learned (not in that video), but consistent, and crucial to the whole story. Since we visited the main center of the Champa people in Vietnam, and even met some, and knew the history in Vietnam... we knew SOMETHING, but did not realize how much power they had in earlier centuries. At one point, their power in Southeast Asia...  reminds me a little of my own ancient Viking ancestry (which visited all of Britain and Ireland and penetrated into Germany and France and... on Ludmila's side as far as the Black Sea). Creative and innovative and open people, but a bit oppressive to others at times. Essential parts of humanity and even the genome of humanity, but only PARTS, always in need of balance. As the video made clear!!