Contingency plans for Turkey leaving NATO

I really, really hope that US and other NATO nations have been developing contingency plans for Turkey leaving NATO.

Every day the news from Turkey becomes more challenging.

Perhaps I should have mentioned... a few days ago... the image of "back to Lawrence of Arabia?"
More precisely, oppression of other Islamic countries by Turkey was a major issue before Ataturk, and Erdogan has been relentless and systematic in destroying all the achievements of Ataturk.

His biography on wikipedia was quite objective, and far from unique... but the facts about his past are clearly something he wants very hard to hide. So no, I don't think it's the wikipedia article on gauge invariance which motivated his recent decision to create a new Great Firewall of Turkey.

What WAS Turkey like before Ataturk? Well, that's a long story. Not what I will be doing today. Today just physical cleanups around the house and quantum sorts of things.    (Yesterday, dug lots and lots of dirt... an unusually pleasant day, doing what survival requires as one ages...)

out of the box option for Korea

I was tempted to use the word "crazy," but since everything about this crisis is crazy already, I will defer to a friend who says "use the phrase 'out of the box.'" Maybe I should have mentioned this option  before, but I was hoping the folks around the president were even more fertile in out of the box and crazy thinking. Maybe. Maybe not. The recent stuff with health care suggests there is a lot less imagination and flair than one might have hoped for.

One option would have been to ship a whole bevy of IRBMs towards the southern part of South Korea, with just enough range to be able to turn North Korea into a sea of glass. And quietly announce to Kim (with a few very quiet cc's) that he has two choices:

(1) Do nothing, and prepare for the US to give South Korea full control over its new nuclear arsenal
on the way; or

(2) Turn over all of North Korea's nuclear capabilities, from top to bottom, to firm control by China or Russia, with international verification.

Either way, Kim should also be given an invitation to the best Miss Universe events Trump can possibly arrange, in whatever locations Kim would like other than  nations off limits for US citizens to travel to. Really, there is no value in adding insult to injury! And it really was an incredible serious blunder when Trump did NOT invite Kaine plus Schumer plus Sanders to come talk with him about neutral bipartisan bandaid for health care. Normal protocol is for the big guy to do the invitation.

Except, of course, when he is so fed up that a nuclear attack or a repo man is on the way.

Best of luck...  

How quantum effects could improve artificial intelligence

How quantum effects could improve artificial intelligence

That's the title of a recent article in phys.org which Chris Altman pointed us to via twitter:

https://phys.org/news/2016-10-quantum-effects-artificial-intelligence.html

My comment:

This topic has been discussed before, albeit in a form which is more general and thus harder to understand. Reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming (RLADP) is not just one of three forms of neural network learning, but a general paradigm for constructing intelligent systems and modeling general intelligence in brains. It includes many designs or methods from many disciplines, the most popular of which are relatively limited (except with clever ad hoc preprocessing), some of which have important applications and some of which pose serious global instability risks. The best overview is the book Handbook of RLADP edited by Frank Lewis and Derong Liu, IEEE press/Wiley 2013. How to implement the most powerful and general forms to fully exploit quantum computing was discussed in Dolmatova and "Analog quantum computing (AQC) and the need for time-symmetric physics”, Quantum Information Processing (2015): 1-15. A six slide overview of larger implications is posted at www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf . 

To exploit the full capability of quantum computing in this domain, one needs design simulation models which reflect the full degrees of freedom in design, which in turn require new experiments as the next important order of business. The AQC paper gives one option. On this blog I have suggested another, a bit messier but easier -- not an alternative, just a complementary way to get more badly needed data.  

objective reality

When I gave a plenary talk at the First International Conference on Consciousness, hosted by the United Nations University, the chairman (a physicist) asked me to summarize my views on consciousness and reality in a brief "haiku". (The complete talk was included in the conference book, and is posted at  https://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0311006.)

The haiku I chose was:

Reality is strange but real
We need more color in our lives but less in our quarks

Please notice that I am one of those crazy heretics who, like Einstein (and Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and VI Lenin) persists in believing that there is such a thing as objective reality, even though I fully understand the arguments of Heisenberg and Bohr against the idea.

The followers of Heisenberg have made a very important point: they have a workable mathematical model, consistent with the quantum effects we see in the lab, while Einstein never did.

For many years, I have worked to address that point, by developing a new family of theories capable of addressing what we see in the lab, but consistent with the idea of objective reality. The past few weeks, I have made significant further progress towards that goal. I have even identified a specific mathematical theory of physics which might just "explain it all", and (being impatient and old)
posted it just yesterday at the "arxiv for heretics":

http://vixra.org/abs/1704.0264

I did not even try arxiv, since I know the idea of objective reality is now considered as heresy by most apparatchiks, just as neural networks were considered as heresy for many, many years. (Now the very same people in AI who said for decades that neural networks would never work are trying to claim leadership in telling us what they are and how they work. Sad. But it taught me a lot of lessons about today's culture, how it worships innovation while doing its best to shield itself from it.)

=========

Regarding "strange but real": in today's culture, some folks love "strange," and some others
(like 'tHooft) want to get back to real, but very few people can fully accept both at the strange time.
Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger were among those rare people, who demanded realistic models of the electron even as they fully appreciated noosphere and Sufi concepts, respectively.
If only such people were in key positions in our culture today!!

One caveat on the new paper:

section 1.2 is both too short and too long. Maybe, for the restrictive rules in journals today,
it would be better just to start from the mathematical issues (the main topic of the paper), and move all the context to an appendix. After all, who really cares about how the universe works? Such odd curious eccentricities as wondering how the universe works should best be moved to a final discussion section, But on the other hand, anyone really familiar with those issues will see that a lot more could be said... and I hope they would notice citations of previous work taking care of most of those other issues.

In the end, I expect people's religious blinders will be too great for them to really notice, let alone to
do the follow-on work which will be essential, UNTIL and UNLESS the key experiments are performed, in the realm of MQED, which do at least prove that there some basis for hope in this kind of endeavor.

In the meantime, there was a nice article recently in Scientific American, showing how the mapping of dark matter has demonstrated a kind of vast network, connecting all the galaxies in our cluster of galaxies at least. Just as we need to clean up certain basic points in QED before humans can appreciate the "standard model" issues in my paper, we may need to clean up the bigger issues with "standard model" physics before we are ready to really, serious take on the full complexity of dark matter, which after all is the bulk of the matter in the universe and what connects the ecology of the universe. But even my new paper.. well, the model does predict SOME aspects of dark matter, if one applies the statistical and thermodynamic tools I cite briefly.

'tHooft has occasionally said that he too firmly believes in objective reality, and has faith that chaos theory will somehow find a way to explain why quantum mechanics emerges as a higher-level statistical description of reality, and that this will somehow get us beyond the barrier implied by the Bell's Theorem experiments. I am ever so sad that he does not connect this deep and enlightened view with the concrete challenge of how to make it real. The CHSH theorem is a THEOREM, and theorems don't just go away; one must accept the need to pay attention to the conditions of the theorem, which have the implication that we MUST have a new formulation of measurement in QED in order to explain QED as such an emergent phenomenon. We now do have such a formulation of QED, and lack only for the key experiments to be done. What that does is then open the door to the kind of issues discussed in the new vixra paper... and, I hope, open the door to people who can demonstrate they can do that kind of algebra better than I can. The cause of objective reality certainly deserves better than my own meager best.
 

Is a stage magician distracting us with conspiracy theories?

I really want to put full attention on long-term issues of human survival, human potential and science and technology, the issues I know best, which offer the most hope for a future much better than the present. But every time I try to bring people further in those directions, the realities of today’s political world come into play  -- for example, by creating obstacles to doing concrete things we need to do even just to stay alive. And so, as Yeshua asked long ago, I keep one eye on “the watch”... even watching CNN (as the President himself does!) but also other sources.

Lately, it is ever more amazing to me how far most people talking on CNN are out of touch with the larger realities in play here and now, let alone the far future.

For example, many are totally fixated on the theme that Donald Trump is a kind of stage magician, using distraction as his number one tool for manipulating us all, a kind of grand Fu Manchu, full of conspiracy theories which he uses to manipulate both us and himself. But guess what? That fixation is itself a grand distraction. And Trump himself is equally a victim, when he allows himself to be manipulated into the silly idea that Hillary Clinton is the great and sneaky shadowy spider manipulating everything sinister in the world. But there really are conspiracies out there, and if we relax a little and open our eyes a few things ought to be obvious to people.

Just a few days ago, there was a scandal about how the US bombed and killed a number of the Kurdish fighters working with us to fight ISIS. A guy appeared on TV to explain; “well, our friends told us there were ISIS bad guys there, so of course we bombed them.” Our friends?

“We must focus all of our attention on the one thing which really matters – the investigation and punishment of Russia. You have to understand, Putin is a thug, popular in Russia but unscrupulous in suppressing the real competition and free marketplace of ideas which define real democracy.”

Yet at least when I was watching, CNN said nothing at all about our great friend Erdogan. France24 did, and it was an incredible eye-opener to me. Not only is Erdogan less popular than Putin in his home country; he also has been using much more radical methods to suppress opposition, even the most highly constructive and peaceful opposition, much worse than Putin. France24 also told things about Erdogan’s background, easily verified by sources like wikipedia. The basic story: he and his ally Gul (not Gulen) were energetic leaders and founders of an Islamic party committed to the Islamization of all of Europe, apparently by a combination of force and subterfuge. Only after they spent some time in jail (an experience like what shaped Adolf Hitler’s career as well) did they emerge to start a larger, more powerful party AKP, which simply avoided discussion of their long-term aims. There is much, much more to support this analysis... Our great friends.

I certainly do not claim to know which groups control chemical weapons in Syria. But I was a bit nervous when another spokesman, like the one who explained our bombing of Kurds, said “We are absolutely certain about what happened because our friends told us.”  Hmm. Could it be the same friends?

The New York Times reported long ago about the international Moslem Brotherhood (of which the party in Egypt is just one branch, and ISIS likewise) getting primary funding from certain salafist billionnaires living in Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. (The 9/11 investigatoin revealed similar patterns in more detail.)  I did not realize exactly how close Erdogan was himself in a personal committed way to their goals, until France24 led me to check. And now, as of yesterday, Erdogan is exercising the next phase of his plan to close the noose, and eliminate most of what is left of freedom in Turkey.

What’s next? Not my business. I’m just an old retired guy, and what **I** do next will be some algebra for some math more fundamental than that quantum theory I was doing until about a month ago. A little topology, a little real analysis. The wheel will keep turning in many, many ways, and keep surprising all kinds of people.  But certainly, if I were Trump, I would worry much more about Erdogan and his network than about Hillary Clinton and Putin (important as both of those are in their own ways). 

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

Among the many striking things we have learned about Erdogan lately, from France24, is that he used the exact same tactics on Turkish officials in NATO that Lamar Smith used on a very large part of NSF. Very strange tactics. He has been blatantly dishonest abut his use of Gulen as a scapegoat and excuse for massive purges of people who had nothing to do with Gilen, and he is now performing a kind of grand inquisition of all imams in Turkey to make them a reliable force. But... this is not my priority now; I probably would not have added this at all except for the noisy push I see now of folks
who want war with Russia... 

Jobs jobs jobs: why did voters start to go crazy this year and what’s next?

There are several very serious international studies going on on the long-term problems of unemployment, and on the forces which caused a lot of public rejection of the establishment this year in the US and the EU. Those forces are not going away, by a long shot.

In one of the international discussions, a leading person from Silicon Valley suggested we read the views of a top guy at Harvard:

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/admin/offices/deans-office/presentations-and-papers/advice-for-the-new-president-and-congress

That’s a very honest and well-informed discussion, but it doesn’t get so deep into the roots of the problem, where it could lead us in the future, and what we could do about it. In response, slightly before his  post, I posted my own views:

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

A few weeks ago, I was very depressed to see the conclusions of multiple, parallel independent international studies on the future of work, coordinated by the Millennium Project:

http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/AI-Work.html

Before then, I could see ways to improve the unemployment situation drastically, especially in the EU, requiring a lot of creativity and insight and flexibility but within the established paradigms of macroeconomics, a field I worked in for ten years before moving to NSF. (Built large econometric models used in DOE official forecasts, probing data from specific sectors as would be needed for solving EU austerity versus jobs problems.) But it seems we really are entering into a radically new era, where the political discontents and problems of US and EU this past year are just small harbingers of something much bigger and scarier, beyond those traditional paradigms. I have very deep respect for David Nordfors in trying to get more real mental energy and consciousness applied to this complex challenge

(and respect for Jerry Glenn of the Millennium Project as well).

The three scenarios which survived the scrutiny of many policy analysts all over the world... included two very scary, and one "optimistic." But the optimistic one required a certain amount of deus ex machina from the IT community, and it is clear that we need a more worked out and different "third scenario" here.  (Fourth scenario?) 

At www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf, I have posted my own groping thoughts 

(just six slides!) about a possible way through the scary jungle ahead of us, requiring 

a lot of the things you all have been discussing, and more, and some integration to hold it together. Where is a full fourth scenario possible, worked out more concretely and more ready for implementation?

I am somewhat more optimistic about "permanent income" than most folks I know, because the Basques have done some great experiments; whether they should count as part of "permanent income" or not is a meaningless semantic issue, so long as they work. Yet other more powerful ideas are needed to solve most of the problem. 

As always, there is a lot more which needs to be said about these threads, but this post is already long enough.

=======

For the blog, I will elaborate on just one thought. The future scenarios now under discussion remind me a lot of what a management consultant tells me about the development of new products. At a certain stage of product development, he tells me, about half the people are jaded, pessimistic, unable to do much that is useful, while the other half is mainly delusional. Actual movement forward in reality depends on the thin green line of pragmatic or sane people between those extremes. We need a new way forward from the middle, and we need a lot of hard thinking about how to make it work. My six overview slides reflect my own best thinking at the time, but more integration and detail and action are all needed. If we care about surviving.
=======================================

Well, one more aspect should be mentioned. The growing problems are also related to issues of corporate governance. There was a very important and illuminating new book by Paulson (former head of Goldman Sachs) which I have mentioned before, on dealing with China. Paulson explains some of the important reasons why economic reform worked in China so much better than in Russia. In essence, the Russians brought in great theorists, like Sachs, while the Chinese brought in people who focused directly on changing corporate culture. As Paulson explains, it worked incredibly well in expanding economic growth for awhile, but certain limits started to emerge... relevant to what's happening in US and EU.

A family member has been looking into these issues of corporate governance, and I commented:
--------------------

In general terms... the shift from owner-run companies to manager-run companies is indeed a really major issue. Ironically, I remember my own father talking about that growing/emerging issue 'way back in the 1960s!! And Luda and I just discussed it a lot this past weekend with Stuart Umpleby, a professor emeritus of George Washington U School of Management.

Since owners and CEOs have both had enormous political power, the management of this relation has been a big issue for a long time. 

About ten years ago, I would say that two oversight organizations played a strong role in making sure that the interests of the owners are better represented, even as managers run things.

Come to think of it, Boards of Directors also do some of this. Oversight of CEO by COB and Board is one vehicle, supposed to be a bit like Congress overseeing President (which has fluctuated a huge amount).

But the two big ones were: (1) SEC; and (2) 7 sisters (now much reduced).

During the election, Hillary Clinton gave a fervent speech one day about how terrible it is that a government agency, SEC, is forcibly making sure that public corporations focus entirely on maximizing profit or net worth (by whatever metric) and not considering other larger social values and needs. Charles Koch, owner of one of the two big privately held companies

(the other being Cargill, also rather powerful but more specialized), praised that comment and asked to meet with her to talk about that. It was funny to see the expression on her face when that public invitation was publicly rejected! But in any case, there is a huge community dedicated to ethical investing (a good google search term) trying to change the worst damages from that; one of the leaders is Hazel Henderson (another google term), who has been quite friendly to me and LUda in our occasional crossing of paths, some through the global futures Millennium Project (Jerry Glenn's outfit) where she and I both serve on the Planning Committee. 

About ten years ago, Arthur Anderson (en?) and Deloitte Touche were 

the two really big members of the Seven Sisters. Many people said that these seven relatively small companies were in fact more powerful than Congress, deeply penetrating the structures of all the Fortune 500 companies, setting rules and guidelines and advice which they knew they had to respect a lot because of stockholder clout. Both companies understood very well that CORPORATE CULTURE is absolutely central in deciding how well run such companies really are, how much freedom 

and empowerment and mobility is really offered to all the people who work for such companies (the bulk of the work force), and so on. This is so important to real people and real freedom that I have worked hard to track that literature, fragmented as it is.

Do you remember R? We still have about once a year super friendly serious discussions, and expect to have more. He was the partner in Arthur Anderson Consulting (the part which set rules and oversaw corporate culture) who was their top expert in systems theory and cybernetics approaches, aimed at developed the most effective possible corporate cultures and management procedures and leadership and training and such.  It was his job to keep up, and to run the in-house training and updates requires of all people in front-line consulting... all major corporations! But eventually, there was a scandal, not unlike what happens with Congress from time to time, but this time the firm was dispersed, and R mainly runs his own operations, most notably ... Climate change was a big part of what Anderson explained, and perhaps the demise of Anderson might have some relation to some decay in management in US (and the political apparatchiks under its authority).

As Anderson was decaying, DeLoitte hosted Jerry's planning committee meeting one year in their offices downtown, which I had also visited for links with Senator Specter.   They were debating "what is sustainability? What can we say about it?" I said: "Sustainability is what Arthur Anderson didn't have... It's what you have to change when you are in a situation of 'change or die."  But I do not know whether they still work with Jerry on support for his activities, which, informing people about the future, would certainly be important to any rational type of corporate strategic planning. Intel does,

and we are part of that. In fact, since it is only six slides, I attach the overview I put together myself as part of that, following up on Jerry's global report on the future of work and employment, a top concern of many now. 

Well, please forgive me for the length of this. There is stuff about books from Sage, DeLoitte's Culture Print, corporate anthropology,  Exxon versus Shell at SEC... and all the obvious forms of corruption which powerful CEOs use to avoid SEC and consulting oversight, and in some cases to suborn governments all over the world (like the Sinopec guy Zhou who is now gone but got away with unbelievable stuff of global importance). 

Higher intelligence: from world conflict to basic physics

This month, I seem to be making some progress in trying to understand the significance and action implications  of new concepts we all could benefit from assimilating better. More and more I see things as a whole, from the politics we see in the news (like the obvious confusion about Syria) to the level of technology, religion and the very lowest levels of physics. I am called this morning to clarify a number of important aspects which tie these things together, which none of us have seen so firmly as yet.

So let me start with the word “God,” what it means and what it implies. Our little word is not the same as the objective reality, and that’s why I use quotes.

I do use that word in casual conversation with my wife, because it is a useful shorthand for something extremely important. I do not so use it so much outside the house because so many people have so many different theories and emotions related to the word, and there is no value in driving people nuts fast. To me, the word “God” basically refers to higher intelligence. There is nothing in advanced physics which tells us either that intelligence higher than the mundane human brain cannot exist, or that it cannot be important in a very practical way to our lives. I certainly think for myself on this subject, but a huge volume of experience and analysis convinces me that it does exist and is important to us, and does shed light on important aspects of human history and culture. Some of this is explained more analytically in my paper at www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf, addressing the rudimentary but essential  foundations we can build on.

But OK, those are foundations. Building on the foundations... just exactly what is “God”? What  does all that experience and critical reason and analysis of thousands of years of human culture actually tell us about it at the end?

Two months ago, I would say for practical purposes that “there really is a holy trinity, but more like what the high Andes people tell us than what they taught us in Catholic school when I was little.” Luda reminds me that there are lots of local thought police who would insist that “trinity is our word, and We get to define it and say what it is.” Such people often demand things which even God would refrain from demanding, such as depriving women of freedom of choice and free will in their own lives. So, OK, let’s not call it trinity, let’s not get hung up on stupid semantics. As she suggests, “troika” will do,

even though it too has other connotations. What English word DOESN’T?

She would not like the acronym I was thinking of two months ago for this troika of God – GAG,

G for Gaia (like pachamamma of Andes, but more precisely what I have called noosphere or pi),

A for archetypes (well, apus for Andes people, but “archetypes” includes more... not such a distinct aspect in any case), and another G for galaxy (like pachattatta or pater galacticus of Jesus’ Father in Heaven, but not the old jehovah or zeus archetype).

That came up in a very curious context this week. In regard to a certain person or persons, I said to Luda: “I have come to accept your way of handling certain kinds of situations. I work hard NOT to zap people, at all, consciously or otherwise, though it still takes work at times not to. Rather, I record the facts and my proper Bayesian type analysis of the implications, and pass it up the chain. My role is not to be judge but to be witness, to be part of the watch.” (I previously described when Yeshua and some Quakers both “called me to the watch,” not a piece of science but not something I would just ignore either! And as for what a witness is... that reminds me of the great paperback book “A G-Man’s Journal:" by Oliver Revell, which works very hard to illustrate the basic concepts.)

“But why would God need a witness, if God knows everything anyway?”  

OK, when two simplifications collide, one must be a bit more precise and technical (when one knows how, without inventing things). My quickie answer: “But Gaia, or the noosphere does NOT know everything. We are the eyes and ears of the noosphere. That is a serious responsibility.” More serious for some, in some ways, than for others, but that is what the Watch is really about.

“And your trinity... it is just three things, not three in one.” Well, in Catholic school they really had no idea what it meant to be three things and one both at the same time. Simplifying, I said it is three things, and try to explain each of them, but actually they are part of one system, just as cerebellum and cerebral cortex and limbic system of the brain are part of one system, interconnected. More precisely, archetypes as they pertain to any life on earth are just like major cells in the “brain” of the noosphere (though, OK, apus have a more direct physical aspect, like cells in the spinal cord)... so it’s really two “brains.” Our noosphere is in turn part of the galaxy, though linked more to some parts than others, just as a small child in a village is more tightly linked to mother and father than to village as a whole, and is too young to learn much if anything about village politics.

And whom might we be working hard not to judge? Well, many experiences encourage people to be more emotionally judgmental than they should be – though we are certainly NOT called to be indifferent or free form emotions either! One experience I tried to hold at arm’s length this past week is

the complex web surrounding Syria, the next phase of health care and various aspects of east Asia and missile technologies. Observe, watch, but not as closely this week, and in nonjudgmental way. But a few aspects do call for a little explanation, which I oversimplified in a couple of twitter posts.

One tweet stressed the line between weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and regime change, an immediate issue in Syria but also entangled with the larger issue of how to save the human species from going extinct before its time. I had several discussions of that extinction issue in Silicon Valley last week, and posted six slides summarizing the big picture of Information Technology (IT) and the future of humanity (see www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf). Among the key points (backed up by citations) were: (1) WMD are a very special issue requiring lots of persistent conscious attention; and (2) certain changes in our IT infrastructure and trends are crucial, in helping us avoid any of the extinction pathways.

And now to go deeper.

The politics we see right now show an incredible profusion of entropy, a thousand ways for things to get screwed up along pathways leading to oblivion. Yes, things looked messy a thousand years ago too, but as of now we do have ways to make it permanently fatal. That’s new. We are like teenagers who now have the power to get themselves killed, who need to be a lot more mature than they had to be when they were small, or else they may die. Sorry, folks, but in nature, some teenagers and some species do in fact die, and God makes no guarantees for us... nor does the galaxy offer guarantees to the entire earth. Life as a whole has never been so harsh and so lonely and so painful  as in the science fiction trilogy “Three Body Problem” (by Cixin Liu, the “Isaac Asimov of China), but never so universally pleasant as the deer in our back yard used to imagine when they ate Luda’s flowers. (We never zapped them, but were intrigued when a piece of a deer leg suddenly appeared in one of our gardens.)

So far as I can tell, the probability of human survival now looks so low, when I look at all the insane and myopic game plans dominating life on earth, and all the many pathways to extinction, that I would simply give up on human species stuff... except for the role of higher intelligence, which offers at least some hope of something better than entropy and better than my own meager skills. (I should note that we are called to be eyes and ears AND hands... but the Quakerly process of spiritual discernment is too complex even for this long piece.)

But how does that hope work?

How do organisms like noospheres have lifetimes longer than what you would expect for a nonliving system?

There is another science fiction series, the Hermetic Millennium, which hints at part of the answer – and part of the difficulties in being explicit about the answer, which is entangled with technologies which would be too dangerous for this species to possess at this time. It is basically the same as the question of how to reduce the process of aging by an order of magnitude. It may be safe enough to say that the biology of a human organism, for example, possesses a kind of immune system, an inborn system which has an ability to prevent excess aging. It enforces certain rules, very basic rules, not interfering with higher intelligence in the brain, but handling certain infrastructure issues.

So in a way, I might tell a true joke here: “God only gave Moses ten commandments, and left out some really important ones, only because Moses was not yet ready for the other more important ones. Commandment eleven is “Thou shalt not depend on operating systems with write-enabled backdoors,” as explained more in www.werbos.,com/NATO_terrorism.pdf. (Still in press, but coming soon, they tell me. Within an hour after I posted this they sent me the URL for the book:
http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/NATO-Emerging-Technologies-and-New-Counter-terror-Strategies.pdf, ) Seriously. Certain failures in our collective immune system really would doom us all, in many ways.

But certainly WMD are a major part of what our noospheric immune system (grounded in the spiritual DNA of the noosphere, a force not to be underestimated) must give some priority to.

And so, when Trump bombed Syria in a very limited way, focused on asking for serious implementation of the previous agreement on chemical weapons... I could not deny the validity of the foundations of this. Yes, I remember how totally awful and even evil was Cheney’s manipulation of the WMD issue... but the evil was not the attention to WMD as such; the evil was in the lying use of it as an excuse for what he really wanted, a war which Halliburton (like other servants of the Third Caliphate Movement) wanted for other reasons, just as they now deeply desire a war between US and Israel versus Russia and Iran, so as to cancel out their two greatest obstacles to their own grossly incorrect vision of a world immune system.

They view sharia as God’s rules. The problem, simply, is that (1) it is not; and (2) it is so far that it by itself offers humanity a path to extinction. Of course, it does not include the eleventh commandment. But it was the best that a certain infant culture could decode long ago, and the best that an infant can understand is simply not enough for survival of a teenager like earth today. The rules for a baby do not include “though shalt learn arithmetic and do thy homework and think very hard about new challenges posed by your teacher.” But if a teenager in high school does not advance to these new guidelines... well, I have seen teenagers die. Of course, extreme orthodox Judaism has all the same problems, as does the Hindu caste system, and the “Christian madressas” set up in the US, especially the south, in order to avoid desegregation and the discomforting challenges which Thomas Jefferson imposed on US public school students. All anathema, literally.

However... WMD are not regime change. The demagogery which would encourage us to display immature behavior and start a war with Russia, or even just block a deeper and more respectful dialogue to address common problems, is also anathema. Dangerous anathema. Straight and narrow is the way, and the right way is not laced with IEDs which make us blow up. If we have IEDs in our own minds, we really need to work on them, yea unto respect for what Freud and his successor Valliant told us about hot buttons in our brains.

Let me explain a little more here, since these are issues of life or death. In recent days, CNN has often fiercely echoed the critics pushing for war, saying that Trump's actions were not enough. "How are these chemical weapons any different from barrel bombs which have killed a lot more people? So shouldn't we just kill them all and start a war with Russia?" Well, to begin with, if Russia itself began by "killing them all" regarding ISIS, should we also start killing ourselves to punish ourselves for military action?

To take it further, please think hard about the time when military people and defense contractors both in US and in Russia pushed hard for development and deployment of "tactical nuclear weapons for use in everyday combat." They to argued that it should not matter HOW people are killed, if people are killed. Fortunately, there were people in the US and Russia both who had studied escalation and multiplayer games more analytically, who understood what a horrible slippery slope would start up once people crossed the simple clear line of  "no use of nuclear weapons except after clear crossing of definite, objective red lines." Though of course it would have been better if Trump had not used words like "bad man" when ordering the bombing, and had used words like "international agreement" even more than was done. It was a great relief when Tillerson clarified what I hope is the policy.

Sadly, we do not know precisely what the objective reality is, the “spiritual immune system/DNA” . But we know for sure that the squashing of the human spirit is not part of it, and that we are called to do mentally challenging homework, and learn to work together in diverse ways.

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Speaking of which... my views of “God” have changed a little recently, because of my better understanding of science.

A few months ago, I wondered: “Is it really just noosphere and galaxy or pater galacticus, these huge but fallible beings?    What about the idea that the cosmos as a whole is one intelligent system, one mind?”

There are many varieties of that idea, but I remember how Lagrange once suggested that the entire universe flawlessly maximizes its utility function (which we now call “the Lagrangian”), just like an intelligent system but without any approximation, like a perfect version of an intelligent system. Hamilton debunked that idea, by showing how realistic field theories are actually based on a “minmax” pathway through space and time, maximizing the Lagrangian or minimizing it, just like what happens in some games between two enemies.

(Minmax: everyone should learn about Von Neumann, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.)

But as of now, I have a much better understanding of “life at distance scale of 3 femtometers or larger,” life as we know it here on earth. I understand precisely how to formulate “MQED,” a modified version of quantum electrodynamics, which I discussed a little in previous blog posts, building far beyond the foundation of our paper on Analog Quantum Computing, published in Quantum Informatoin Processing (and posted at www.werbos.com/triphoton.pdf.) At our level of life, physics does appear to be stochastic. More important, the cosmos does seem to maximize a probability measure across space-time, in a way which fulfills the vision of Lagrange and escapes the debunking skepticism of Hamilton. What’s more, the behavior of the MQED cosmos is far more intricate and intelligent  than I had expected  before based on untrained conventional wisdom.

And so now... this morning... I would say that the holy trinity as I perceive it, for our lives in a practical sense, is noosphere, galaxy and MQED. All three really intelligent in a practical enough way.

MQED reminds me in a way of popular stereotypes about a superintelligent AI. (Not correct steroetypes, but whatever.) Unlike the others, it really is perfect (if you accept stochasticity as part of perfection). It really does “know everything” in its domain. It does not need eyes and hands... but if our hands get in its way, we can be zapped in ways most humans cannot begin to imagine (like having their entire continuum of life, from past to future, dissolved away... washing away their sins and their life both). BUT unlike the others, it does not partake of deeper qualia, the important realities of dark matter, dark energy and life below 3 femtometers. And so, it is just one element of a triad, not the unity of all. What lies at those deeper levels? Well, extinction or no extinction, that is where curiosity calls me most at this time...   a fitting place to end this post. 

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Oops. One more detail. The Economist recently published a long article on quantum technologies, a heroic effort which could use a lot of clarification. It talked about a new theory of basic physics being developed by David Deutsch, father of digital quantum computing (the only kind they understood). Deutsch is one of the truly creative people on earth, and he is now exploring a variety of Idealism, of the idea that the cosmos itself works like a kind of Great Mind. I was amazed to see how his "constructor" idea fits exactly with my earlier work (in the neural network field), on "decision blocks." Should I point him to the specific modified Bellman equations (Bellman being the stochastic generalization of Hamilton-Jacobi which he knows well) which I developed circa 1998, and published in several places, essential to achieving the reptile level of intelligence? Is he unintentionally developing a model of the cosmos as a great dinosaur brain? Yet does he really want to enforce the idea that this brain is incapable of learning recurrent relations, like what make backwards time communication possible? Or would he say the universe is capable of backwards time communication but must learn how to do it? If we do it, are we acting as teachers? In any case, our understanding of the general mathematics of intelligence and learning does not require us to assume that an intelligent cosmos, even with a dinosaur like brain, would only be capable of time-forwards operation. Time-symmetric life and intelligence are described in more detail, in my chapter in Pribram's book Origins, from Erlbaum.