extreme vetting of immigrants ala Grand Inquisition

Spain before 1492 had an extreme problem with certain Moslem leaders following their natural inclination to want to control everyone on earth. And so they, like Donald Trump, decided they had to take really unusual measures, reluctantly, simply in order to survive. Are there any lessons we could learn?

Well, here is an extreme measure ... half a joke, but is it really?... inspired by what Luda and I saw when we toured through Andalusia a couple of times in recent years.

Trump suggested somehow adding a kind of rough loyalty declaration. But the only people who might have troubles with faking that would be honest people, and those aren't the problem.
And it might seem mean.

And so: perhaps any adult entering the US ... in certain visa categories.. could be directed to a friendly place, where they are greeted warmly and offered a choice of two free snacks:

(1) a mug of good dark beer, and a tasty quality pork hot dog;

(2) a glass of cognac, and pork liver pate.

But anyone refusing to finish either would be sent back home at their own expense.

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

Yes, that's an extreme measure, but if it is well publicized to those flying to the US in those visa categories, flybacks could be minimized. It would keep out many other fundamentalists besides just
Islamic ones, but that's the definition of an extreme measure. It may be that some Trump supporters would   want to exclude anyone as unAmerican who rejects hot dogs and beer, but the experience of Spain reminds us that there are ways to soften this a little. A curious measure of basic American values, but not as crazy as it may seem at first.

Actually, we saw a story in Spain of a woman who was killed in classic Inquisition style because she refused to eat a particular piece of ugly fatty pork thrust in her face, as part of a nation-wide test for everyone (not just immigrants). She said she was simply unable to bring herself to eat something so ugly and unhealthy, and was not again pork as such. So for her, a little pork pate would have solved the problem. In any case, this measure would be a whole lot weaker than what Spain felt it had to fall into.

But if Trump himself were a German citizen, could he pass this test? His aversion to alcohol is very, very rational... but if it is rational rather than fundamentalist or ideological, he could recognize the very strict limited nature of this one-time event. (Yet I have to admit... what if it were coca leaves
entering Peru? Would that keep me out of there? Certainly coca leaf products would.)

The most extreme jihadis follow orders saying they can do anything at all (kill innocents, cavort with prostitutes the night before the grand event, unlimited drugs of any kind)... and this would not affect people at that stage... but lying on a written declaration certainly wouldn't either! The test would reduce the probability of entry of people vulnerable to certain kinds of insane propaganda or to efforts to undermine our Constitution in other ways.

Of course, I see clearly that any true Christian or Moslem (without a rare genetic disorder
on alcohol metabolism which can be verified by DNA testing) would have no troubles with this test.
It reminds me of an entertaining experience I had in Singapore years ago:

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

The fancy hotel insisted I sit at breakfast next to a rich retired businessman who came in by cruise..
on a cruise tour to "teach the word."  "That is the one commandment Jesus had for every one of us, to spread the Word." Verbus paulus replied: "Well, I read that book myself, and that isn't exactly what I remember. Didn't he and Paul say that the first thing was to open your eyes and your ears? (OK, Kerry is also right that the two great commandments came in there, another slice into the same pie.)
If all you do is talk and do not open your eyes, Yeshua himself could come right up to you,
in sandals fresh from the Sinai, look deep into your eyes and your soul, and you would just turn away
and really miss something."

The funny thing is that a few hours later, I walked into the area in front of that restaurant, and there was Yeshua (of the same family and tradition as his illustrious uncle)  in sandals, admittedly a few years since the Sinai, and he said he wanted to talk about some things. As we entered, that same old preacher man was leaving, and it happened EXACTLY as I had warned! But when we entered, he led me and a couple of other folks to the well-lit open bar area.   The old Greek guy with him ordered wine, and I ordered Guinness.   When Yeshua ordered water I felt a moment of anxiety: "Oh, does consuming alcohol bother you?" And I will never forget his smile: "Hey, no problem, no worry, I only ORDERED water. There are a few things you need to learn about water..." I would guess he would pick the cognac and pate.  Or at least porto and pate, if cognac is too expensive. (For American values, Madeira would be even better, as that's what they drank when writing the Constitution in a local Irish bar my mother's family kept the bar bills from, donated to Philadelphia historical society
when I was young.)

cracking the neural code

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00097/full?&utm_source=Email_to_authors_&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=T1_11.5e1_author&utm_campaign=Email_publication&field=&journalName=Frontiers_in_Systems_Neuroscience&id=219156

Is the brain an "Artificial Neural Network"? For years it has been almost a religious dogma that the neural network computation used by brains is radically different from what works in engineering and technology. Yet even as governments pour huge investments into brain-computer interface, it has been like recording hieroglyphics which no one could begin to read. We have now taken the "first" steps towards decoding the neural code (building on work by people like Barry Richmond of NIH), supporting a different kind of model of brain dynamics and consciousness.

Big Picture Elevator Speech to Heritage House

A few days ago, I had dinner with a group of people which included one of the folks funding the Heritage House, in real time cell phone communication with folks organizing the new era. At one point, she turned to me, and asked: “What do YOU think about our present situation?”

For a moment,  I was amused inside myself about how impossible this question was. There are SO many different life or death urgent issues requiring focused deeply informed action... but then, OK, in that situation, why not talk about where we stand right now in the big picture?

So roughly I said: “We are at a hugely difficult moment of transition in the big picture. We are debating the interactions between the economic system and the natural system of human interaction which comes from millions of years of biological evolution.   That’s still important, but it’s nothing new. What’s new, what introduces the most uncertainty and instability, is the fundamental change in human life due to two massive changes in how we organize our lives. Just as important as dollars and DNA, there are now two additional massive intelligent systems – the new IT system, and the more powerful crystallizing spiritual consciousness (not religion, but the objective spiritual reality which religions try to talk about).

“IT is not just one issue among many debated in Congress and chased by dollars. It is a massive organizing system in itself.

It will be defining what the rules really are, just as much as the Constitution does – and if we don’t get it right, soon, we are at great risk.”

“The noosphere is not new, certainly, but the crystallization of consciousness going on now is also massively important.”

“In essence, the new transitions of IT and noosphere make us like teenagers at a crucial period of life. We may grow, or our conflicts may simply kill us. There is no guarantee of survival in any level of life.” And I mentioned some of the game plans for the Internet of Things, which could paralyze and then kill us if we do not act quickly to prevent some terrible possibilities. (Guys like Lamar Smith and Tom Kahlil of OSTP have been pushing us towards disaster, but, sadly, they are not at all alone in that.)  

In another discussion by video conferencing with some lead IT people... I said: “I tell the AI people you need to build an artificial mouse before you can build a real artificial Einstein. But for this global design issue, it is even more basic. We need stable cells first, which do not dissolve into goo, before we can afford to depend  more on the designs of brains or markets. Step one is the really urgent need for deploying unbreakable operating systems, with a proper balance between privacy and law enforcement, exactly as detailed in www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, in press.”

That paper also discussed some entertaining stuff about research for forward time cameras (FTC) and backward time telegraph (BTT), which it described as 50-50 long-term maybe-possibilities. The operating system stuff is near-term and well founded, but this NATO workshop was for futurists. After the conference, I decided to look into  the FTC and BTT stuff more carefully, as in step two of the four-step exploration I proposed (even though step one is still awaiting

the experimentalists).  I was surprised to learn that the literature on quantum ghost imaging is as shaky, at bottom, as the thermal-light entangled photons turned out to be. But I found six or seven alternative, better grounded pathways, and

there may even be an experiment in process on the first and easiest (though least powerful) of the six or seven.  That could be fun.

By the way, the odd resonance I mentioned with Donald Trump seems to be over, at least for now. Not a trace for about a week. Latin America, and folks worried about their personal freedom, and (of course) some quantum physics have taken over some airways.

And I have been reminded that there are interesting parallels between the Republican Party and Russia – both very forceful but both wrestling with incredible and incredibly important inner contradictions.

In fact, I also mentioned to the Heritage person: “The apparent conflict between science and religion is one of the basic reasons why our situation seems so hard and hopeless, not only between the West and Islam, but inside the US as well.

When the contradictions are left fallow... it is like repression in the brain... it causes chronic problems as bad as the obvious acute ones. It causes erosion of ethics and morality, as people do not know what to believe and regress to myopia and incoherence. “ So maybe it is important that the principles of objective reality and mathematics, on the one hand, and of spirit and noosphere and Pater Galacticus, are utterly consistent with each other, in one universe without any kind of dualism needed, objectively, as in www.werbos,com/Mind_in_Time.pdf. Getting the foundations right is really crucial.

Best of luck...  
===========

small addendum: if my resonant circuit with Trump is off, what of other resonances that were supporting him? At least one focus of thought has been shifting from the election to economics. Serious, real economics, not the plastic ideological kind.  I meant to say that earlier today... forgot.. was reminded by CNN. 

a very large technical issue people have missed

Just before the election, when I might have put more energy into supporting Hillary Clinton, I received three very distinct tides of pushback -- one from a Mormon cluster (not Romney, but there are some links), one from a Russian tone kind of cluster, and another... you would not expect.
It was one of those "small technical issues" which could kill us all, which has been swept under the rug... or, in other language, which is a serious cancer allowed to grow in the darkness under Obama (just as "the gestapo" was allowed to grow).

Lots of notice from Obama's OSTP, actually due to Tom Kahlil (s?), who has given support to a lot of the hard core transhumanist agenda, and who might have expected to expand the already dangerous misdirected efforts if Hilary had been elected. Both with Trump and with Clinton, it is really crucial what kind of people get empowered to do what kinds of things.

The notices I was receiving from all directions... involve the use of electrical stimulation of the brain
on human beings.

I do not intend to write pages and pages on that tonight... but at the end of the day, I have been shocked that people can get away with claiming to be experts on brains or on human potential who are not fully aware of the details and significance of the experiments done decades ago by James Olds senior ... showing how electrical stimulation in certain areas is like cocaine multiplied by 100.
(That's reinforcement areas. For other, more purely cognitive areas, we have only this year even begun to decode the "neural code'.... in press... and NONE of those folks even begun to know what is involved. Just BS, like the green jobs guy Obama headed to misrule his climate change group at OSTP in 2009, well known to the head of CBO... a guy Trump should really get to know.)

Just before the election, they were having... well, let me not use the precise Freudian terms.

If there is any truth at all to backwards flow of intelligence in the noosphere...  this was
a factor even in the election. It is not a small issue.

I have often mentioned the stakeholders meeting where we were urged to line up beind a new business plan for the internet of thinmgs, in which people would be converted to things by brian-computer-interface. Those are their words, not mine, and they were a major reason to retire sooner than I had planned (as did more than half the permanent NSF technical program leaders.).

But... back to family duties..

------------

A few minutes... there was also a major IEEE conference on BCI... whose organizer suddenly got multiple forms of cancer,,,,

A Great Choice Trump could pick for NASA -- or even DOD

Trump has been facing really tough choices and dilemmas in his cabinet picks. Better not to elaborate here and now. But it occurs to me that for NASA, there is a very clear winner for the kind of criteria he has been thinking of:

Why not bring back Admiral Steidle to run NASA?

Anyone who knows NASA would remember that scary no nonsense Admiral. Everyone who wants to feed hippopotami and crocodiles in the swamp would  cringe at the memory. Steidle was George W Bush's appointment to run his first (more energetic and more credible) "return to the moon" thrust,
but he inserted so much competition and strict quality standards that everyone into pork barrel waste complained, and Bush caved in to accept the Ares pork barrel project developed by lobbyists and cancelled for gross overruns a few years later. If Trump really wants to drain the swamp, and introduce competition in aerospace procurement, Steidle would be the guy. ANYONE who goes to teh usual DC social registers of politicians and lobbyists instead... would be undermining the core
of Trump's position. (Will Trump drain the swamp, or the swamp drain Trump? Steidle would be a great step to make it the former.)

The best argument against Steidle for NASA would be Steidle for DOD.

George W Bush picked Steidle because of his famous "shoot-out" at DOD between competing new fighter planes. Could one have run that shoot out better, technically? To be honest, I would ask some people at Boeing about that. If they see a pro-Lockheed bias, that would be worth considering, since Boeing has a lot to give NASA in critical technology areas. But who else is there?

What about trying to get real economic benefit form space activity? At NASA, Steidle hired John Mankins to run HR&T (technology) competition. Mankins, again, is a human with human foibles, but he was far more serious and real about trying to get real economic benefits (and real technology quality and innovation) than any of the swamp feeders we have seen lately, in so many parts of the federal government.. rising high by lies and stealing from the public. (It really did become a swamp in recent years, and it would take great skill to avoid being tied up and conned by it.)

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

Trump is facing at least two fundamental difficulties in staffing:

(1) The skills needed to run a complex organization like the US executive branch are very different from those needed to win an election. I remember very well the importance of balancing the PR part and the issues part in Senator Specter's office! And what my father said about balancing manufacturing and marketing in complex companies with a heavy manufacturing/technology component. (Actually, my father, Walter J. Werbos, taught some classes on marketing at Wharton, and someday I should check the time... and the "J" style percolating?).

(2) From the DC scene and the election scene, Trump has been overloaded with possibilities one might characterize as ideologues (on the same message but not heavy in admin credibility) or as
killer wimps (his terms are a bit stronger, and not to be repeated, but yes he would include Jeb Bush and probably even Mario Rubio in there). Steidle is a great example of someone just as intense as Trump wants to be in draining the swamp, for that reason not part of the lobbyists' wish list, but with strong admin capability and commitment to integrity along with the nonwimp intensity needed to make Trump's best hopes real.

As I do other things.. yet respond to feedback... I am reminded that Lowell Wood, Ed Teller's old sidekick (or lead apparatchik manager) is another person of that same type. There are kooks out there who would say that Ed Teller and Lowell Wood are litmus-test-failing liberals... but hey, I do hope someone in this machine knows or can easily find out who Ed Teller really is. If winning the struggle with the Moslem Brotherhood is really top priority, and tough honest and capable people get the priority they need (Not killer wimps popular with PR types)...  Lowell Wood could do lots of important and useful things.

As , by the way, could really serious econmists from Wharton. Too bad Larry Klein is not around so much more... but I sure remember Mark French and the Annual Model group, infinitely more real and less corrupt than some companies which won more of the big model market by telling government folks "our model can tell Congress whatever you want them to hear." (I was there in the sessions organized by Wharton's competitors, and know very concretely how that part of the swamp was fed with calculated lies. They wanted to sell their stuff to folks like what I was in the 1980's, building the main models predicting more than half the energy sectors of the US economy, back when there was more investment in strict quality control and truth.)

Crude impressions on flow of events

Last night as I went to bed I told myself: "The larger world situation is basically looking hopeless. There are a few positive loose ends, where I am waiting for other people to do things... but tomorrow I will do a certain calculation in quantum optics which I am now more confident I can do (linking to experiments in Germany and possibly New Zealand)." That was then. I still hope to do those calculations, maybe even later in this hour... but ... even if it's fuzzy... I feel called to say at least SOMETHING for now about what hit me in two assumption dreams last night and subsequent discussion. (My mind is always clearer earlier in the day.)

There have actually been many interesting and important things this past week, but also lots and lots of intensity about what I am allowed to say and what I am not allowed to say, to whom. So I will give very heavily censored account of the second assumption dream: There I was in a place much less elegant than the usual Trump assumption dreams, talking to a kind of wiry shaggy guy (supposed to be me), with two folks close to Trump sitting on the couch beside/him.  It is odd to see an image of oneself from the viewpoint of someone else, but actually I have had lots of experience with that before, veridical. (It takes getting used to.... but I have seen Trump's images of some other folks and this was not so rough.) From the first assumption dream, from others I have not mentioned in the past few days, and from the news, it is clear that Trump is in 100 binds all at once. In essence, he was interested in just one or two questions: "OK, what do YOU see coming down the pike here? It would be nice to see a hint of even half of it. What would you propose I do in this situation?"

Well, it would not be appropriate to get into specific veridical details, or even to go much beyond the evening news (CNN with a touch of France24).

Hearing about a climate denier yesterday was part of what put me to bed early. I have often discussed why the H2S problem in the future might well kill every human on earth, and of course that depresses me. If that subject is off limits, and the US cannot even do the research to calibrate the nature and extent of the threat beyond what I know (e.g. at www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf)... well, if we all die, what's the point of other politics? To be honest, I tend to feel that a deeper understanding of quantum optics could maybe possibly be of objective spiritual value, even if the species dies, so that was part of my resolution.

But that is just one thread. I tend to agree with what Obama and Romney have said: "We can agree on SOME goals, and we can do our very best to help Trump achieve glowing success in those goals we both agree on."

Luda pointed me to a web site, greatagain.gov, soliciting ideas. After thinking about that a day, I went to it yesterday and put in a few sentences (It only allows a few lines.)  Logic said: hey, we should at LEAST be able to agree that it would be good if the US, within its existing budgets, could deploy
new access to space which can put 10 to 100 times as much mass into orbit per dollar as any of the current United Launch Alliance or SpaceX or other live projects being funded today.  Really serious national security people, who care about US defense more than they do for the graft for their friends,
should immediately see that this would be a good thing and worth serious effort. That's not a trivial topic (advanced rocket science), so I posted a new paper I have in press, and gave the link in my brief sentences (www.werbos.com/Fixing_NASA.pdf). One of the things which really depressed me was
a statement in the space community network saying that Trump will pick Congressman Spudis to lead NASA... exactly a case of the swamp draining Trump instead of the other way around; that was a major factor in how I felt going to bed yesterday.

Of course, there is also the issue of defeating the total long-term program of the Moslem Brotherhood
(a serious international network) to establish a third caliphate (more like the corrupt Abbas stuff than the stronger and more enlightened things after and even before)... to impose sharia on the entire world. Just before the elections, I was really depressed when I heard an international relations "expert" on CNN saying "Putin says he wants respect. we are trying to figure out what kind of specific little piece of graft he is asking for when he uses this code word 'respect.'" God help us.
What kind of international relations expert forgets that there are some human beings here?
It's not just guys in the 'hood who hate being dissed. And so, a certain kind of Putin-Trump axis might indeed offer chances to really defeat the Moslem Brotherhood, and that's certainly an important need of this species, both for mundane survival and for authentic spiritual growth. (But no, I am not saying we should require anyone to be "Christian" either, especially when that term has been abused to refer to things Yeshua would deeply abhor.)

I mentioned a Mormon and a Russian component in the "miracle" of Trump's incredible last minute surge. But I put in caveats that Mormons are diverse too. Can I say more about the nature of this miracle? I did observe some, and was alive in passive resonance and in watching... enough to know more, but, sorry, there are limits. Somewhere between Orson Scott Card, Babylon V and Star Wars there are hints, from people who in my view also have a bit of resonance and ability to see. Orson Scott Card seems a bit blind when he fulminates about Obama, but some people might therefore trust him more than they trust me!

Enough. Time for me to face up to some scary but basically tame equations.

How Could We Now Avoid a new Great Depression?

How Could We Now Avoid a new Great Depression?

In a previous blog post, I explained the crucial role of interest rates in driving the world economy, and cited some of my earlier work in economics on those kinds of issues. When Trump announced his plans for the economy, I was amazed that the two key elements were exactly what caused the Great Depression of the 1930’s: (1) a commitment to crack down on the Federal Reserve (much as some Republicans have cracked down on the Supreme Court and even NSF, quietly but effectively), and substantially cut back the world money supply; and (2) intense cutback on trade and new restrictions on trade, like the famous Smoot-Hawley action of the 1930’s. Many economists signed an open letter warning about the implications. Trump’s plan was discussed on CNN by one of the friends he brought together for the meeting which led to the plan, and nothing he said was reassuring at all.

So where are we now?

I will resist the many temptations to talk about related issues, like how the markets have gone up and down and how they might respond in the future, or like the essential lack of serious professional content in economics in any of the election debates. As of today, the key new event is:

A serious talk by Carl Icahn, who helped launch Trump in the first place, who reaffirmed and clarified the Trump economic policy.  He basically just said:

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

“It is not sustainable to maintain aggregate demand by money supply and zero real interest rates. Zero real interest rates are unsustainable because they cause instability, like the possibility of real estate bubbles and things like that. Our policy will be to maintain demand by using fiscal stimulus, which is the better way.” And I was privately informed that a new head of Federal Reserve will be a bona fide serious economist, equipped to follow through.

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

OF COURSE we should want (and work for) success here, exactly as Obama and Clinton have urged us all to do.

But: will it work, and what are the hazards?

First, it is reassuring that they really do want to maintain aggregate demand.

But to increase aggregate demand by fiscal means they must either increase spending or reduce taxes or both. Short of voodoo nonsense, that would require a big increase in the deficit – exactly what sequestration was constructed to prevent. I for one will never forget Kasich’s successful heroic effort to create a bipartisan patch to prevent the deficit bleeding which was occurring before that. If we start borrowing a whole lot more money again (with or without faith that god will magically make the numbers work for us), AND raising interest rates... we again enter territory unexplored as yet in the US, but well known in South Americn. (There is a Chilean economist, Ffrench-Davis, whose work should be required reading for any economist in the US if we really follow Icahn’s proposed path.)

So: is it hopeless?

Not entirely, but it’s a kind of “mission impossible” that would require a whole lot of flexibility and strength of mind beyond what one would normally expect possible in Washington. No, not a whole lot of narcissism; a whole lot of objective, analytic, mathematical insight.

Trump actually gave some hints of what COULD be done to make his policy viable, which I mentioned before. There are really only two big, direct options. One is a massive reversal in the growth of medical costs, even beyond the reduction in the rate of growth which Obamacare has already delivered. (Back in the real world, we all know that medical costs are still rising faster than they should, but less than they would have, due to Obama’s inability to get more than a kind of 50-50 compromise in Congress. Some lobbyists have proposed “solutions” like what certain friends-of-the-governor have done to taxpaying in Virginia: big promises of reduced costs through the magic of paying selected people in the private sector, followed by a big increase in costs due to constant efficiency plus added markups and new paperwork.) One is reduction in nonproductive tax loopholes and tax breaks – but the tax plans we have heard so far would increase them, not decrease them, and in DC “productive” often seems to be measured by how much money they give to PACs, negatively correlated with aggregate demand generated per dollar of deficit. Without a massive midcourse correction in those two areas, the Icahn policy is a prescription not for 1930’s US but 1930’s South America, maybe even worse.  

Still, I do hope it works, and that sequestration is relaxed so much that we can even reverse the horrible cutbacks in education which the US is already suffering from (in great part because of pressures on states).  Technical economics offers ways to actually measures aggregate demand per dollar of deficit source, to fine tune all this, and even a few other useful options, beyond the scope of this blog post. (Those also require automatic stabilizers, looking ahead.)

In the debates, discussing how to avoid cutting social security, Trump proposed more competition in things like defense procurement. But Trump has also proposed an INCREASE in defense spending; thus more effective competition is extremely important to the PRODUCTIVITY of that defense (and related) spending, but not to the Icahn plan as such. There is an extreme need for much more competition in that sector, and I very much hope that folks like McCain and Steidel have a voice in this. (Even I have some specifics of some importance.) It has the potential to increase economic productivity through better general technology, above and beyond the issue of maintaining aggregate demand while limiting deficit.

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

Icahn’s comments about interest rates remind me of important technical issues which I can only touch on briefly today.

Real interest rates serve as instructions to the world economy about whether to care for the future (zero means the future is as important to us as the present) or not (under high interest rates, the economy is instructed to get rich now even if everyone dies a few years later). Human behavior is more stable and predictable if we simply never pay attention to anything which might happen in five or ten years – until that thing eats us alive. Creatures who do not think are more predictable than creatures who do, but there is a very heavy price to be paid. Yes, with zero real interest rates we need to be more careful about the details of economic relations, to reduce the resulting craziness (like overvaluation of Trump’s property), but failure to properly value investments in the future is fundamentally harmful to growth and sustainability.

All for now.

Well.. let me note that EU and China will also be crucial re whether the world avoids a new Great Depression, but those complexities are well beyond the scope of this blog post. There is some link between the EU issues and what we posted earlier at nss.org/EU and www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf.  For China... I only have a few reviews at Amazon now.

parallel processing of quantum optics and Donald Trump

Light stuff first ------------------------

As I was getting up this Saturday morning, it was especially striking how strong the two independent parallel threads were in my ... thinking. (I do not say "two tracks" because the word "tracks" has other meanings for me, as in multiverse quantum mechanics.) One, a quantum optics thread, and the other, a Donald Trump thread. I put a lot of energy into thinking about quantum optics yesterday, and almost none into active thinking about Donald Trump, yet the threads of thought and inputs back to my mind were substantial for both.

I do not entirely know what to make of the Trump connection, which seems rather odd and curious at one level, but exactly what I would expect at another. "This is something I really need to be super careful and gentle about," I told Luda this morning. Lots of censorship needed, and various levels of detachment. Yet we are all part of the same noosphere, too, and we all have a responsibility to the whole, which we are called not to shirk.

A few days ago, at the height of election intensity, I commented to a friend by email: on most days,
I can hear some piece of music in my mind, sometimes a piece of classical music I know from long ago, sometimes a popular song or melody I may even look up on google. But that day, the background was just a line from the Bible: There was a silence upon the face of the earth. And I felt called to reduce complexity that day, to relax and detach and not get so deep into any of the complex puzzles around me. That same day, I did watch a little CNN, and there was Donald Trump saying to everyone out loud (to the great astonishment of the press): "Stay calm, Donald. Calm, relax, Donald..." Not so veridical, but as part of a pattern...

And today, my last dream was an assumption type dream, set in a luxurious resort. (Luda and I have been to a few luxurious places from time to time, but not quite these...). The final theme was about control of angry feelings, which is an issue for all humans but hasn't been such a big deal for me lately. (It was a big deal on my first tenured job, but I felt so bad when a couple of people developed sudden medical problems I had not intended but could easily see, and worked to manage such things more than most people do, long ago.) "Not my dream." And there was a kind of miniature wild lion
in this resort... which would be very scary if it were bigger... but thank god it was miniature. Still, it was big enough that it really did concern me seriously. I interpret that as a representation of the demonstrations going on. Not at all veridical, since I knew of the demonstrations before I went to bed... but the form of symbolization was familiar by now, and not how my brain fills in.

Did I even THINK about Trump and his issues at all, other than watching a bit of CNN earlier in the day? Not much, but briefly. At a "cosmic consciousness" kind of moment... thinking of all the winds of spirit blowing through our lives... at a kind of in-focus moment... yes, I understand and accept the basic reality that we are all really together here in the noosphere, with the responsibilities that entails.

----------- then light itself

But my own initiative was entirely towards quantum optics yesterday. A curious little set of issues, which I enjoy as much as a dog sometimes enjoys chasing a duck or a bone, maybe more a duck since it seems to move. One such duck: what is the proper quantum mechanical model of what a quarter wave plate (QWP) does? A few years ago, I looked for the proper quantum mechanical model of what a polarizer does, and was surprised that I could find nothing more than the baby aggregate model they teach in quantum mechanics 1: the collapse of the wave function, a simple projection model, as a model of the polarizer. What of all the solid state physics out there? There was a lot of classical physics for the two most common types of polarizer (birefringent like calcite, or dichroic like polaroid or sunglasses), but not a quantum model.

Yesterday I did first pass of a similar search, for the QWP, an important basic circuit element for complex photonic circuits.    This time I did not find even an aggregate quantum mechanical model, so far.

In addition to texts on classical optics (most notably by Lipson and by Born and Wolf), I rely a lot on 4 texts which, so far as I know, cover all the basics of what humans know about quantum optics:
(1) Scully and Zubairy; (2) Mandel and Wolf; (3) Walls and Milburn; (4) Carmichael, volumes 1 and 2.  I found just one reference to the QWP in Scully and Zubairy (the leading text for the broad empirical or device side of this field), page 153 -- less than half a page of discussion, really just discussing a Bell's Theorem experiment USING a QWP. It cited a paper I had seen before, which I knew was important, but I had not really studied why they inserted a QWP. I will now study that paper more carefully, to see what they say about the right way to model a QWP at a quantum mechanical level. (It also cited two papers with no QWP in them, and google scholar showed me a later paper by the same group doing more with QWP). Nothing at all in any of the others; too applied and practical for them.

I may search more today, using web search into journal type papers, or just study the two papers I downloaded yesterday, or just think. In really proper quantum mechanics, as in various flavors of quantum electrodynamics (QED), one would want to model the quarter wave plate as a function of the underlying creation and annihilation operators for circularly polarized photons (the only kind which really exist, according to QED). That's important here in complex circuits, because a proper representation of circular polarization is crucial to what a QWP actually does. (In classical physics, it converts linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light, but what does it do in QED?)
So all I saw last night was a picture of that QED type model of that object.... today I will try to fill in the details. Unless we all get Trumped somehow.

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

Later: Clinton now blames her defeat on the Comey affair. As I have noted, the Comey affair was serious indeed, and if Trump has a strong enough sense of self-preservation he will rise above past hostilities towards her and work with her in rooting out the very risky and unAmerican chains of pressure and reporting which led to such a gross violation of American constitution and rights and spirit in this case (and in the Peter Worden case), as hinted at in the final chapter of the book "A G Man's Journal."

However, let's face it, the shifts in the last day or two went beyond that. I view Trump's surge as a kind of authentic "miracle," an outcome of "spiritual" energy in the noosphere surprising those who ignore such important realities. Some CNN people have started talking about "the narrative" which is a nice and sophisticated intuition, enough I can't help think: "Why don't I try to shift my resonance more to THEM?" Well... but I am on the trenches side, not the PR side.

Whose fingerprints are on that miracle? Hard to say. If at all local... there is some whiff of some folks in the Mormon world with a special worldview (NOT ATK or THEIR centers of corruption!)... and some of Russia itself (not a weak place)..... or maybe even something much further... BUT certainly not ANY stream of thought which would be encouraged by anything anti-female.
 

more space people ask about Trump

What I told them:

Predicting what Trump will REALLY mean for space is like predicting dice. Trump has at times said he really wants to be hard to predict, whenever there is serious international competition and strategic stuff going on. Even with Obama, there were position papers on climate legislation VERY different from what Boxer and Reid tried to ramrod through, which resulted in legislative debacle. Which issues will Trump delegate to his (more energetic) equivalent of Boxer and Reid and mafia, and which will he try to rise to a new level through greater personal involvement?? I have done a few analyses for a few people, and LARGE UNCERTAINTY bounds are a major theme for all of us (with the POSSIBLE exception of Trump himself) at this time.

One may hope that his rapprochement with Putin, and making up with McCain, will get us out of the swamp we were in on RLV (without which all we had were dreams and hopes of pixie dust)... but lots of pixie dust salesmen have high hopes that the swamp will grow even bigger than before, with room for even more false salesmanship and ripping off of the nation.  I hope... but... we will see.

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

More thoughts, lots of things on this topic in the noosphere....

"Why will Trump ask IMMEDIATELY for a plan from his generals to wipe out jihadis and madressas of death? Why not instead convene a quiet 'council of war' inviting them AND a variety of key people in Russia, for a really serious all-out new direction, perhaps in the strictest security available in Russia with higher than usual protections on all sides, as soon as the right cast of characters can be set?

"And... since he needs more fiber and omega 3, why not

partake of the many great forms of fish which a real man like Putin can appreciate? "

Though red herring is part of that diet... good but to be treated with care. I am grateful that I get all those great varieties (and Japanese varieties) at home, though the most joyous is the red caviar with appropriate cheese and porto or madeira. (The US Constitution was mainly written in a bar, by folks drinking madeira. My mother's family owned the bar, on Elfreth's Alley in Philadelphia as I recall, and my father donated the bar bills to the Philadelphia Historical Society

or Association -- I forget its exact name.) That would perhaps be too much for Trump, and perhaps alcohol really can be a slippery slope without limits in Russia... but we will see.

But as for space... I do not know whether even the Russians appreciate what Boeing did for hot structures technology, vetted by WPAFB (and beyond what anyone at NASA or SpaceX knows). Also, there is a serious risk that Trump will give high-level access to people who helped him in the campaign who plan to rat him out to folks who want to take over as soon as he is inaugurated.

If Trump is VERY wise, he will realize that the folks preparing to violate the constitution and human rights in the cases of Hillary Clinton and Pete Worden are now preparing to tarp HIM... unless he limits his circle and finds a way to uncover who they are and break their power. He could trust Boyden Grey, Bush's old General Counsel, but certainly not the guys Cheney suborned in order to force his (Moslem Brotherhood's ) war in Iraq. Not any of the guys pushing Lamar Smith or Chafettz around (though Smith probably didn't need much pushing). 

The difficult times are anything but over.  

3PM: Will Trump drain the swamp or will the swamp drain him? Already it is starting to look like the bleak side of this. CNN is comparing the role of Pence to that of Cheney. And the new chief of staff is expected... well, maybe it is time for me to go back to Z stuff.

Elections the morning after

This morning, my wife asked: "What is Bernie Sanders saying now?" Well, Sanders is a pretty sober kind of guy, but it occurred to me he might prefer to go off quietly drinking with some buddies to work it out. In fact, I am myself thinking of violating my usual rule of no alcohol in the morning.

Why? In part because of the HYUGE uncertainties. Why make public statements when it is premature? The reality of even greater uncertainty now than before begins to take hold.

Uncertainty means a mix of things which COULD be good, as well as things which COULD be bad. Many, many things.

For example -- how many people remember when Hayden showed up on TV, and said, "Donald Trump might give those orders he said he would, but he would... well, we simply wouldn't obey." Hayden is not in the government now, but he had no troubles saying he may be in a position to override orders of a President Trump. Will Trump wake up to discover he is not really president, but queen of England (much as Sanders would have become if he had been elected), empowered to strut and represent but not make any decisions at all?

In fact, there are very powerful groups who tend to thing he made a deal with them already -- that he will drain just enough of the swamp for him to settle down into, and make the corruption in Washington even worse than it was. A lot of the specific position papers out there sure sound like exactly that.

Trump said he wants to be president of all the people (mumble grumble, what he is expected to say, mumble grumble), and will work to also support those good people who didn't support them -- what few there might be. Sure, he won, so who else is there who opposed him?

Well, aside from the Democrats, there is the Bush world (even Cheney world), and Romney world.

Could he try rapprochement with McCain and Romney?  Or will he prefer Rove and Cheney? Hard to tell. 

Will he focus on trying to crush the US economy, in the mold of many oil PR minions like

Lamar Smith or folks who want to zero out the money supply, or will he really give a priority to talking first to Putin AND other key nationalistic Russians, to discuss taking a much less

inhibited approach to wiping out jihadism? Will his friends in the mafia be able to root out the larger network of gestapo types now embedded in the US government, particularly FBI and the computer networks going back to Hayden and IBM? Which will THEY give priority to,. the struggle against women or the struggle against radical islam?

Time to calm down, maybe have a sip of egg nog with my wife, and watch and see.

If he does pick McCain, and does make good on trying to crack down on corruption which weakens US technology, who knows? Maybe there will still be hope for the kind of RLV which all of humanity needs to make dreams of cost-effective SSP a reality.

But I don't know.

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

3PM: after lots of egg nog with Luda... she notes that Trump's celebration was held in
the hotel where we last visited New York, ironically where we had a luxurious breakfast with the leading
physical oceanographer who encouraged me to shift my climate emphasis from Arctic to Antarctic THC and to pay more attention to the Teller/Wood/Caldeira ideas for geoengineering -- both very important leads, if we ever want to survive.

Another curious aspect... privacy rules are really important in the noetic world, and I do follow them very strictly, even as it often appears otherwise, and even as it is sometimes painful and harmful in a local way to follow them. But on this morning... I think I can say... Trump's surprise has more Mormon resonance than Koch resonance by far.

And I begin to understand the web of rules regarding resets and such much better than I did a week ago. The issue of managing bandwidth is central there.

In truth, however, it is also possible that some issues which do not appear as big now might have turned out to be
bigger than anticipated along a Hilary Clinton track. As was the unchecked growth of gestapo stuff under Obama, due not to his intent but to his ignorance and neglect of reality at the level of management and administration.
Tom Kahlil in OSTP has encouraged lots of stuff with such potential.  

Best of luck,

    Paul

Elections the morning after

This morning, my wife asked: "What is Bernie Sanders saying now?" Well, Sanders is a pretty sober kind of guy, but it occurred to me he might prefer to go off quietly drinking with some buddies to work it out. In fact, I am myself thinking of violating my usual rule of no alcohol in the morning.

Why? In part because of the HYUGE uncertainties. Why make public statements when it is premature? The reality of even greater uncertainty now than before begins to take hold.

Uncertainty means a mix of things which COULD be good, as well as things which COULD be bad. Many, many things.

For example -- how many people remember when Hayden showed up on TV, and said, "Donald Trump might give those orders he said he would, but he would... well, we simply wouldn't obey." Hayden is not in the government now, but he had no troubles saying he may be in a position to override orders of a President Trump. Will Trump wake up to discover he is not really president, but queen of England (much as Sanders would have become if he had been elected), empowered to strut and represent but not make any decisions at all?

In fact, there are very powerful groups who tend to thing he made a deal with them already -- that he will drain just enough of the swamp for him to settle down into, and make the corruption in Washington even worse than it was. A lot of the specific position papers out there sure sound like exactly that.

Trump said he wants to be president of all the people (mumble grumble, what he is expected to say, mumble grumble), and will work to also support those good people who didn't support them -- what few there might be. Sure, he won, so who else is there who opposed him?

Well, aside from the Democrats, there is the Bush world (even Cheney world), and Romney world.

Could he try rapprochement with McCain and Romney?  Or will he prefer Rove and Cheney? Hard to tell. 

Will he focus on trying to crush the US economy, in the mold of many oil PR minions like

Lamar Smith or folks who want to zero out the money supply, or will he really give a priority to talking first to Putin AND other key nationalistic Russians, to discuss taking a much less

inhibited approach to wiping out jihadism? Will his friends in the mafia be able to root out the larger network of gestapo types now embedded in the US government, particularly FBI and the computer networks going back to Hayden and IBM? Which will THEY give priority to,. the struggle against women or the struggle against radical islam?

Time to calm down, maybe have a sip of egg nog with my wife, and watch and see.

If he does pick McCain, and does make good on trying to crack down on corruption which weakens US technology, who knows? Maybe there will still be hope for the kind of RLV which all of humanity needs to make dreams of cost-effective SSP a reality.

But I don't know.

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

3PM: after lots of egg nog with Luda... she notes that Trump's celebration was held in
the hotel where we last visited New York, ironically where we had a luxurious breakfast with the leading
physical oceanographer who encouraged me to shift my climate emphasis from Arctic to Antarctic THC and to pay more attention to the Teller/Wood/Caldeira ideas for geoengineering -- both very important leads, if we ever want to survive.

Another curious aspect... privacy rules are really important in the noetic world, and I do follow them very strictly, even as it often appears otherwise, and even as it is sometimes painful and harmful in a local way to follow them. But on this morning... I think I can say... Trump's surprise has more Mormon resonance than Koch resonance by far.  

And I begin to understand the web of rules regarding resets and such much better than I did a week ago. The issue of managing bandwidth is central there.

Best of luck,

    Paul

A Word From Loki and Trump

Please forgive, but the following skit is impossible for me to ignore:

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

A little monkey watches TV, and runs to his mother:

“Please, mamma, we have to help that poor man. He is straining so hard, and his face keeps puffing up, and he says  he has a HYUGE movement coming on... he is straining and puffing so hard it looks like he will explode. We really need to help him with his big movement. Let’s give him some dulcolax right now.”

Mother:”Well dear, did you hear the name of that man.”

“Ah... yes... yes... I did.. it is Drumpfkopf.”

Mother: “Hmm. That DOES sound serious. So serious you need to talk to your Father.”

“Dad...”

“Yes, I hear you. But you know we are not supposed to butt into people’s problems like that. If I just solved everyone’s problems the easy way, they would never learn anything, and what’s the point of that? He really has to learn to include more fiber in his diet, and get more omega 3.”

“But Dad, what will he learn if he puffs up so much that he explodes, and ends up dead in the hospital? And what about all the other people?”

“OK, son, that’s a valid point. I will think about it, and let you know in a day or two. Will he get what he asks for, and suffer, or will we be gentle for once?”

Later: “Mom, if Hilary gets elected does SHE have enough dulcolax for all that stuff?”

Mother: “Well, if she has a lot of dulcolax, there is a whole lot of stuff out there, and the whole earth could end up like

that bathroom you saw in the Gobi desert near where your old cudgel is on display...”

“THAT place? I don’t want the whole earth to become like THAT place...”

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

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

The skit is simple, but the analysis is not. Which to start with, Jungian or Freudian or cybernetic?

This time, Jungian is fits best. Jung claims that the “collective unconscious” includes powerful mental entities or objects which he calls “archetypes.” My more modern, cybernetic view agrees with that – more precisely, it agrees that there is a kind of real collective intelligence here on earth (a major part of the “noosphere,” maybe all of it, depending on how you define words), and that the entities which Jung talks about correspond to certain types of cells or local circuits in that “global brain.” Real thoughts, as real as thoughts can be.

Jung has a short list of specific archetypes which, he says, have emerged as especially important in a practical sense in real human life. Humans learn many behaviors, like being careful when crossing a street full of cars, which were not hardwired into our brains, but which tend to be very pervasive in practical life. I view Jung’s “most important archetypes” as that kind of thing, practical emergent phenomena important in everyday life, but not part of the laws of the universe, not unique and not cast in stone.

On his short list of important archetypes is “the trickster,” often manifested as Loki, the monkey god or Hermes; each of these is a kind of archetypes (or set of archetypes) in itself, but they merge into each other as well.

The skit above is ironic, since from a Jungian point of view Trump has been working as a kind of avatar of Loki lately, speaking unspeakable jokes (yes, like the skit above), violating social conventions, questioning established order and so on. What should sane and rational people do about that archetype?

One important group, the scientologists, wants to get rid of all “loaded engrams” in the human mind, and that would include the archetypes, or at least the wild Dyonisian archetypes like the trickster(s). (Friedrich Nietzsche has a book talking about Apollonian styles versus Dionysian styles, and I had no hesitation long ago when I read it in identifying in a patriotic way with the Apollonian style.) From a Freudian viewpoint, these folks are basically saying we should get rid of the “id” and rely 100% on the ego only. But Freud, Jung and our modern viewpoint would all agree that this is an irrational extreme, as bad as the fetishists in ancient China who would tie up girls’ feet in string to prevent natural growth and thereby weaken the organism. The id (the associative memory or syncretic part of the mind/brain) and the ego (the global understanding) naturally support each other, like theory and experiment in natural science. If humans follow an ideology which gives total control to EITHER side of this duality, totally repressing the other, they meet the definition of “nonsanity” discussed in my paper at www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf. The same is true if they give total control EITHER to the part of the brain which performs symbolic reasoning, or to the nonverbal intelligence; in a sane person, the two are well integrated and mutually supportive.

And so... “Sane folks don’t serve the monkey God or Loki, but they don’t try to exclude them from the inner dialogue which we are all naturally part of.”

So we don’t go as crazy as Trump, letting a kind of Loki type sense of humor crush the spirit of truth, but we DO listen and listen seriously.  We maintain a strong sense of humor, which we really need, but we don’t let it get out of hand.

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

One more curious thought from the void: Is it Trump’s karma that he should work hard to serve a boss, who then turns around and doesn’t pay him? Does his karma demand that? A few days ago he said the world: “Let’s cancel the election. Just make me president without that pesky voting stuff.” Did he just make a deal? he certainly HAS made deals with a certain type of person, that’s clear. So to really learn his lesson, should he be elected and then discover that he isn’t president after all, that he was only hired to do a reality TV show while corruption in Washington gets elevated to a new high and the US is weakened much more than it has been in the last few unpleasant years? Well, the skit echoes that more serious kind of issue.

If he were a REAL trickster, would he find a way to withdraw in favor of Kelly Conway? There are many reasons why not, but it would be an interesting joke.

Let us hope we all find better ways to learn the many lessons we all have yet to learn.  

==========

One trivial note: I did not even know what dulcolax was until my prostate cancer surgery last April. What an intense literature review THAT required, with lots of empirical testing... 

More on the Comey election situation

When the new Comey "suspicion" letter came out just a few days ago, some folks felt most threatened by what he said. "Egad, Huma's ex-husband got to see a few emails which the Secretary of State thought were not so sensitive. What a threat!" Others, like the ranking member of the House oversight committee, more reasonably said: "The Director of the FBI just violated hundreds of years of fair and constitutional procedures, which had protected both human rights and the integrity of democracy. The threat to democracy is more serious than any of the policy issues between the two candidates." MY view stated here was: "The most worrisome thing is WHAT KIND of pressures would be enough to break an FBI director like Comey, who must have understood how serious this was for democracy and the American system of government. WHO are the moles in the FBI, reporting to WHICH outside forces, who were ready to enact something as bad as a coup d'etat... AND STILL STAND READY to do so regardless of whether it is Trump or Clinton? Who had the leverage and power to do this, and also to get a guy like Chaffetz to switch his position in an embarrassing way re Trump and offer to stand in line with boots clicking to support the new coup d'etat? " Hey, if I hadn't seen a lot of this with my won eyes, I would have been vey skeptical... but the TV news has made a lot of things very very clear.

So: will Comey help in the investigation of who put improper pressure on him, who is a threat to the US Constitution itself?

If so, there might be some hope for democracy in the US after all.

===

It was so entertaining before the latest note when RT was exuberant, praising Comey as "our man." I am glad it is not so simple.

But .. I am not immersed at all myself. This is just a 5-minute break between other things.

Does Trump still have a chance?

During Quaker meditation this morning, an image came to mind: once George Bush senior was asked by W to take out (manage, run, drive) the family pickup. With hindsight, should he have said "no" and saved the pickup -- or was it more important for W to learn a lesson? In that case, the lesson was more important, and perhaps our Father in Heaven might permit such a thing now. But what of the passengers in that truck? What if nuclear weapons are involved, after an initial great depression?
Wonderful spiritual good intentions are simply not enough to prevent that, if the numbers are clearly wrong and the specific plans a disaster.

Who knows? 'Way beyond my pay grade. And also beyond random chance.

Secrets of the Soul Mark 3

This will be very fundamental new stuff. Because I am posting it, it is not secret now, but it was a secret from me even yesterday. Should I have kept it secret from other people for now? I thought about that, and may comment later, but for now, let me get straight to what I have figured out in the past 24 hours. Then later a few local aspects/applications.

Up until now, I have been building everything (in all fields and activities) on the foundation spelled out in my paper published in Russia, and posted at www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf/ That is still my foundation, but I have built an extra layer on it.

In that paper, I describe a kind of three-step progression of human minds. Step one is the level and type of intelligence we are born to, in our individual minds, even as we are embedded in normal human societies. Step two is when we achieve “sanity” or “integrity” or “zhengqi,” an enormously important achievement all too rare in the world about us today (though almost everyone is progressing that way). It is hard for me to refrain from saying more about that transition and calling, because it is so important in the lives of everyone, but that paper already says a lot, and today is time to move on. That previous paper also talks about transition to a third level, which I called “the Alchemical Marriage,” which includes not only an awareness of feelings from your soul but a kind of full-fledged symbiotic union of the brain and the soul, based on a mathematical foundation essentially the same as that of a maximum perfect marriage. My claim is that true, complete mundane sanity includes an openness to direct feelings and logic which leads one inevitably towards the third level, maybe kicking and screaming and maybe many years later, but inevitably.

As of this morning, I develop a more complete understanding of the fourth step which comes after that, which seems to be Alchemical Marriage with the noosphere as a whole. Leading up to this has been development of an understanding of the noosphere, expressed logically and formally in that previous paper, but also informally and concretely (and more completely) in the Spanish language posting on this blog just a couple of weeks ago. Also leading up to this is a deeper revisiting of quantum physics (in particular of MQED as in my post yesterday, following on some issues raised in my new paper posted at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf.). Today I simply bring those two threads more completely together. In doing so, I come closer to achieving the fourth level here.

Already (what I knew well before today) we are a symbiotic form of life. Dante used terms like “half beast half angel,” essentially the same point; is alchemical marriage like “beauty and the beast”? (No, not Trump and Clinton, but there are interesting parallels of a sort.) Well, if it is a good marriage, not entirely beauty and the beast, and our nature(s) impel us towards developing a better marriage.

The intelligence of the noosphere seems to involve two discrete levels of mental power or consciousness beyond that even of a fully sane individual human brain: (1) a special kind of “multimodular” capability, not at all like the crude cartoon versions of multimodular systems people develop when building teams of robots, but systems exploiting the deep mathematical principles of nonEuclidean symmetry more than the human brain does; (2) the full potential of quantum information technology. I used to feel that the multimodular capability does more than the quantum capability to make the noosphere level of intelligence feel different; the multimodular capability is responsible for the kind of gating of information responsible for things like assumption dreams which I have discussed before. But today I realize that the quantum capability is a much bigger deal than I realized yesterday.

In my paper for the NATO book, I talked about “forward time cameras” and about paradoxes of time. During the second half of 2014, when I developed the CMRF model for what happens to a photon as it passes through polarizer sunglasses, I realized that the photon has three “choices” at any instant of time: to conform to the sunglasses, and be absorbed; to jump to an orientation exactly orthogonal to what the sunglasses want and thereby continue smoothly and make it through the sunglasses; and to “Z-ify”, to object to the horrible choice and thereby reduce the probability or strength of the entire universe of experience it is part of. “Z” is a term in the mathematical model, and to fully understand it, there is no substitute for going to my paper posted at arxiv.org which gives the equations.

I think of “Z” as the “destiny” term, just as “J” is the “global hope and fear” term in intelligent systems, a term I have explained in great detail in many papers (e.g. in the journal Neural Networks). In the past few years, I have begun to understand destiny much as I understood hope, fear and values long ago. (Understanding hope and fear and values is essential even to the mundane level of sanity.)

In the NATO chapter, I discuss a question raised in the NATO workshop I wrote it for: what happens if we send a warning message to the past, which results in the gradual dissolution of the entire reality we are part of? I stated that of course we WOULD send such a warning, if we are entirely sane (even at the mundane level) because of the fine points of how evolution and sanity work, though I did not elaborate. In fact, I had previously thought about this, in part because about six times before in my life I felt I had done something which seemed exactly like that. I did those things back when my understanding of physics violated such possibilities, and I was in a state of conflict for awhile.. really eliminated only this very morning as I see how the math and the experience fit together. (There is also a bit about dark energy and matter related to level three, but I will not elaborate on that complex aspect here and now.) Ironically, the most dramatic and inescapable experience of that kind occurred in a hotel dining room and a van at the time when I gave a talk on energy to the Singularity University class at NASA Ames: I clearly remembered the “before” and “after” tracks, before the talk.

The “Z” math is a bit tricky. I often thought: the destiny effect is not really just one scalar number; is this like the J and U scalars of intelligent systems, where the gradient (a much more complex vector or graph) is what really interfaces with the experience of life? But I could not see how, at that time. Like yesterday.

When I spoke to the NATO workshop on predetection of terrorism, I thought of the backwards message as something like a great big reset button. It results in a kind of temporal loop, such that the world of the sender... slowly evaporates.. a bit like “turning into green goo” (as in a kid’s novel on “qoopy,” QP, I read a few months ago) ... but more like the fate of a virtual particle in ordinary quantum field theory. The issue of hitting the reset button seemed like an academic kind of issue to me, not something I am facing or would want to face in ordinary life.

But then... last night... 2AM.. in “cosmic consciousness” state... I saw an important loose end in what I posted here yesterday on MQED (and the much more detailed journal entries leading to it): why not communicate with my former self about the very minor changes which could have been made in the experiment of Yanhua Shih funded in the year 2000 for the “backward time telegram”? (That award is still posted at www.nsf.gov, search awards; I looked at that just a few days ago.) Should I “push that reset button”? That sent a bit of a shiver up my spine (only half metaphorically). I couldn’t go back to sleep for awhile after that; I even walked downstairs to calm down, before returning to bed and really willfully going to sleep. A thought like that really called for sleeping first, and a lot of careful evaluation. I certainly wouldn’t want to “dissolve this reality into green goo” without a whole lot of care and thought and due diligence first. (No, it wouldn’t be green goo in a literal sense, like the children’s novel, an inexpensive 4-volume paperback set I saw lying around at Costco awhile back; it would be more like the “weirdness generator” I thought about when I had a narrower understanding of what it means to live in 3+1 dimensions.) In general, this was really just an extension of the challenge of finding balance which I have struggled with for some time, balance between listening and speaking, between the need for humility and realism versus the need to be responsible in caring about what happens to life on earth.

And then... a few hours later... back to the old cosmic consciousness and dialogue...

Even when I walked downstairs at 2AM, a shivering mundane consciousness, I told myself: “OK, I do have one loose end in what I posted yesterday. I need to think more and understand more about the Integration of Consciousness Across Scenarios (ICAS).” The point is that mundane human brains are wired in origin (please forgive the simplified words) to experience just one scenario of reality, as a stream of experience. But the noosphere is more like a proper, David Deutsch style quantum computer (albeit with the time capabilities implied by AQC, see our 2016 paper in QIP). Such a quantum computer is designed to integrate ACROSS “parallel worlds.” That’s hard-wired into its design. Thus full symbiosis with the noosphere entails linking to this capability to integrate across scenarios in consciousness. I now see how my memory back at Singularity University was a simple local manifestation of that. (Sorry, but posting the details and mechanics here would be a bit much.)

Actually, the image here is a lot like the image of “Gaia computer” in one of the stories in the sci fi anthology “Far Futures.”

And so... it seems that the “reset button” is not so odd, not to be treated with excessive inhibition any more than other things I have lived with – though a sense of caution, care, humility, listening, utter truthfulness and responsibility is already quite important in such realms. But still...

And then, just a short while ago, I began more and more to think: “Could it be that someone ELSE is already hitting the reset button, explaining why DC politics really do seem to be ‘dissolving into green goo,’ acting as if someone was operating a ‘weirdness generator’?” Yes, it is real math and real physics, that weirdness generator stuff, but math ‘way beyond the level of folks who don’t even fully grasp what is a Pareto optimum. (I was recently shocked when someone publishing papers in areas like economics and optimal decision was not totally familiar with Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior!!! That is such a crucial prerequisite to so many things... like U and J, and real understanding of negotiations such as Raiffa and Schelling learned about... much harder stuff than little Trump towers.)

But yes.. if the “reset buttons,” the communication between now and past, are a normal and healthy part of the function of the noosphere... after all, even in a Bell experiment, multiple polarizers work IN PARALLEL... so yes, there IS a weirdness generator already active here in DC, it is not just a possibility. (How could anyone resist that plain reality after watching CNN the past few months?) And it is not like a scalar Z in our experience, not like simply Z-ifying the world, because of the rich communications aspect – subject to the normal common sense rules about communication but not really more.

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So – Alchemical Marriage Mark 2. It also reminds me... how much my mundane ordinary life, marriage with Luda, is ever so important in the kind of feedback and analogy it provides to relation to noosphere, which requires a WHOLE lot of respect but not a self-destructive weakening kind of groveling. A learning of balance.  Poor Trump and poor Pope that they do not have such wonderful challenging feedback in their lives... though actually, Trump’s new relation with Conway may be giving him a bit of that (obviously a lot less intense).

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Where does THIS go? What weirdness will another 24 hours bring? I guess it’s too late (8AM now, I started at 7)... to just go back to bed... but we will see. The logic seems tight enough, but I also remember “what dreams may come” and some stories by Dan Simmons... and the need for caution...

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Oh yes, as I save and copy this, I am reminded that today is opening day for the movie “Doctor Strange.” Fitting? Many years ago, I enjoyed the TV version, and associated it with a guy I knew in Canada, Joel Whitton; in fact, I went back and really read the summary of his last book, “Life Beyond Life,” as part of downstairs 2AM activity. He had his own view of the progression of the soul.. parallel metrics, in a way... but the full book is buried in Eudora email, I think, along with a lot of other things which became very hard to access circa 2009...

foundations of physics and some new technology

Werbos, Paul J., and Ludmilla Dolmatova. "Analog quantum computing (AQC) and the need for time-symmetric physics." Quantum Information Processing 15.3 (2016): 1273-1287.

A few months ago, Luda and I raised some very fundamental questions about what we really know about how the universe works. I recently put it this way to some former colleagues at NSF: "In graduate school, they told us that the physics of electricity, magnetism and charged particles is totally a done deal, totally known, totally explained with high precision by Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). To learn anything new and fundamental, one should look at nuclear or gravitational physics. BUT -- having run the research program in applied QED, I learned very quickly that this was not true. It was NOT a done deal at all!"  And so our new paper proposed a new experiment crucial to resolving some of the outstanding questions. (By the way, Springer let me post the paper and some details at www.werbos.com/physics.htm, but not at places like arxiv.) It also raised major questions about where this takes us.

This past month, I had a chance to revisit some of those questions. Life being what it is, I have no plans for massive dissemination of what I have learned, but ... for whatever reason... after a pleasant evening, I do feel like posting a few key parts of what I have learned:

1. "MQED" works based on the USUAL Schrodinger equation of ordinary QED, married to a new measurement formalism. In other words, no need to change the usual Schrodinger equation at all (except to formulate it as "Louiville equation" in the density operator rho as in normal quantum optics); only to get rid of the collapse of the wave function and similar de facto models of macroscopic objects like polarizers and detectors.

2. That's for physics at the level of 3 femtometers or so, and above. Below that, of course, it is the nuclear realm, where I still support a radical viewpoint, viewing MQED as an emergent statistical description of 
something involving topological solitions, spinors and even twistors and of course W and B instead of A. Not the Lagrangians I have published yet, but variations of them. 

3. Under MQED, it does indeed seem possible to construct not only a forward-time camera by 
analog triphoton "ghost imaging", but even to make the old biphoton concept of "backward time telegram" work by relatively simple variations of what Yanhua Shih once proposed. But the biphoton ghost imaging for astronomy as recently proposed using thermal light is not predicted to offer such capabilities; it departs from the insights of Klyshko, which were crucial, and which are supported by MQED, but lost by folks who did not fully respect Klyshko. But ghost astronomy using simple BBO's and polarizers seems possible.

4. MQED easily shows why the concept of simulating asymmetric GHZ states by thermal light alone, without
nonlinear crustal component, cannot work. Under the old model, it should work, but the new model explains/predicts why it does not work.  Ironically, that is itself a decisive test of the new model versus the old model!

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So it's nice to know how the story comes out... and the progression to nuclear stuff is not so healthy on this planet now anyway. 

What next, now that this curiosity is gratified? Who knows? Will review some energy stuff and some food tomorrow, and then we'll see...