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...  
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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.