Vedanta, brains, Qatar and threats to the President

This morning, I woke with a clear picture of what's really happening in the US right now. I summarized it to Luda, who said "Ah, but what can you do about it." My reply: "I have no idea. I certainly don't want to start new conflicts making life even worse for people." But an impossible series of coincidences did move me to say a few things ... a small initial part of the answer, maybe.

Part one, reply to a guy from the Vedanta list:

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On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 6:10 AM, '... wrote (to someone else on the list):

[S.P.] I repeat for the second time: electric impulses (or the physical sensory signals) have nothing to do with my writing the replies. My reply is a product of my consciousness. Second. Electric impulses do not carry information.

I wonder. In writing the replies, did you actually use your hands, or did you use telekinesis?

If you used your hands, there were electrical impulses along the nerves of your hand. So electrical impulses had SOMETHING to do with it.

I have heard many people say "in my out of body experience, I felt a wonderful experience of being far more intelligent and conscious than in everyday life."

Yet Ingo Swann, who was one of the people most successful in displaying consciousness under such circumstances, discussed how he found it much harder to remember numbers in such situations than he did in ordinary life. Jane Roberts had some beautiful images in her "Oversoul" science fiction trilogy,

which somehow moved me more than her more formal ponderous writings did.

A physical brain is a really great thing to have and to use, as dependent as it is on electrical impulses. 

I am always reminded of the commercial "don't leave home without it." And don't be careless about chemical or electrical interventions that might weaken it, either for you or for others. 

I am reminded in a way of the time when my father had to retire, and lost access to many of his physical filing cabinets. 

"You have no idea how painful it is to be without that repository of information. They are my brains! Without them, without that information, I am far less intelligent and capable than I was." It really was a great loss to be without them. They really did contain useful information.

At times, when people ask me to explain in concrete, intelligible terms what Gurdjieff was really trying to tell people, I say:

"He said, if you have important information you want to save, work to put it on a more permanent place, like the hard disk. That doesn't mean just erasing or disrespecting what you currently have only in volatile storage."

Best of luck,

     Paul 

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Part two, another vedanta post:

Every one of us has struggles we are called to face up to, for our spiritual evolution. This morning, it was really incredible for me to see two related messages next to each other in my inbox, one of them yours, especially:

On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 4:03 AM, .... wrote:

Thus, when you say about incompleteness of machines, it perhaps can be construed that it is part of the Evolutionary transition, as everything else.

Maybe. I see it as a step toward the contemplation era. Today we are in the "production era".

(And I just now note our reference to a book by Daniel Cohen, and I wonder whether it might possibly be the same Daniel Cohen I knew at Princeton long ago)

The other being an article from the Wall Street Journal, from a network aligned with the outgoing (lingering?) science policy czars:

A Hardware Update for the Human Brain

From Silicon Valley startups to the U.S. Department of Defense, scientists and engineers are hard at work on a brain-computer interface that could turn us into programmable, debuggable machines

EMILY BORGHARD has a computer inside her skull, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. A small bump behind her left ear, the only external evidence of her implant, is partially covered by a tuft of hair that’s still growing in from the last time she had the batteries changed.
Before Borghard received a brain implant, she was having as many as 400 “spikes” of seizure-like activity a day, along with multiple seizures. This unrelenting storm of abnormal neural activity turned her teenage years into a semiconscious nightmare.
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The article strongly endorsed a vision of Brain Computer Interface explicitly intended to turn humans into well-controlled peripheral units of the Internet of Things, very similar to the helmets depicted in the most recent movie in the Star Wars sequence (or in the Winter Soldier movie which my son insisted I see).

One of the details which rattles me even more than it rattles you is the way they think of "spikes." It reminds me that all this heavy technological intervention is in fact based on deep ignorance of the actual neural code, as we see it in actual scientific analysis of 24khz data from higher centers of the brain:

See: Regular Cycles of Forward and Backward Signal Propagation in Prefrontal Cortex and in Consciousness, by Paul Werbos and Yeshua (J.J.) Davis, Front. Syst. Neurosci., 28 November 2016. (Note the clickable link to the open access paper.) It is "can do" manipulative intervention no more justified than the frontal lobotomies which once were popular.

The effect is not to develop deeper, higher bandwidth mundane communication, but rather to corrupt the reinforcement centers of the brain,

exactly like the opiate drugs which impair many people's spiritual growth along with their physical well-being, and convert people into puppets 

of greedy drug-dealers.

I do not see these stories as a call to go to extremes. On the one hand, we really are called to understand ourselves better, which includes the development of serious brain science and barin understanding as one part of it. Understanding the mathematics of intelligent systems also offers a kind of "reality testing" to our own higher intelligence, just as higher physics and pure mathematics do. But we are walking a difficult tightrope.

It is a difficult balance. These two inputs are only one example of contrasting, conflicting inputs spiralling out of balance, and it is not obvious how to stabilize the system while maintaining progress. 

But certainly the effort to being spiritual growth and science back into balance in human thinking is an important positive step.

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AND NOW FOR TRUMP AND QATAR

The sheer shock of all the many things happening at once... well, if there is someone you trust, I am very tempted, just for reasons of personal sanity. 

People do need to get things off their chest. Then again, my wife is very intelligent, and talking to her can help me maintain sanity.

But even if the US is at risk of going the way of the Roman Empire... something I can see in quantitative terms... the survival of the species as such is more important. The message about the Antarctic and the need for geoengineering needs to get out, and if it can be done in an inflammatory but nonpartisan way, that would help.

This morning, I am stunned by the insane claims on CNN that the Saudi break with Qatar was a Russian plot motivated by Saudi misperception that Qatar supports Iran. This morning, the ISIS/ERdogan/Qatar people made it quite clear how they feel about Iran, and actively refute the "Russian claim"...

But just the day before, CNN reported what the Saudis actually said, which clearly shows this new claim is trash. 

Why did CNN repeat such an insane claim, and who put it out?

In a way, the core problem is corruption. Lots of Democrats know the important book Dark Money, as well as Brock's book, but not the final chapter of "A G Man's Journal," where he describes how a kind of deep corruption entered the top management of the US government. Clinton is fully aware of how dark money corrupts elections, but it is tragic how neither she nor Trump understand how it has gone even further to take over US government agencies. 

I have seen them fall like dominoes, one by one, but I do not believe it is appropriate that I personally go too far in naming names.

(Well, I have at times discretely said that the Congressional investigations should get deep into Lamar Smith, one of the central players in the network

threatening to engulf us all.)

The key problem is that when government agencies are for sale, they end up serving the highest bidder, and doddering old fundamentalist billionnaires in 

Turkey and Qatar (supported by their governments) and in  Saudi Arabia (whose government is trying to rise above all that now, and which even knows what a "Pareto optimum" is) feed into puppets like Smith who run folks like Comey. NO elected president, whether Clinton or Trump, is safe from their growing presumption that they should be running everything, and their top goal right now is to cause a war between US and Israel versus Russia and Iran, in order to cancel out both main obstacles to a truly global Third Caliphate. Trump has been utterly disgusting and embarrassing in many ways, as he shows all his worst thoughts to everyone, but there is a serious imminent risk of even worse by folks who are very calculating about hiding how awful their plans really are.

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Trump would at times ask: "Where are the details of your methods and sources? Why don't you give them in detail on live TV?" There are many, many of those, and I am certainly not referring to psychic inputs without veridical corroboration. But unlike the folks who want to start a war, I do not want to waste energy on distraction. Nor do I have plans to show up on CNN.