Three signposts for cosmic mind ultraweirdism eg tunneling

My first task for today lies within the realm of Einsteinian realism (solitons), but various things reminded me of my promise to look more actively for signposts to the possibility that great Mind Idealism (a member of the ultraweird family of possible models of physics) might be true in the end. Since Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI?) often freaks people out, either in favor or against, let me begin with an analogy which seems safer to me ... the issue of communicating with the past in a way which could actually change it, leading to various paradoxes. When I get past that, I will move on to something in Brian's domain. (See https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/search?q=Fockian+weirdism for discussion of three gtypes of theory of how the universe works -- Einstein realism, Fock space realism, and weirdism.) =================================== Past analogy Back when I attributed 70% probability of truth to Einstein realism, and therefore could not imagine that I myself am a macroscopic Schrodinger cat, an obvious question arose: what happens when we try to send a message back in time which would change a past which we clearly remember? Why did I even worry about that? Please forgive that some readers would need reminders of the background. First, I already knew that BOTH physics versions of realism, Einstein realism and Fock space realism,  REQUIRE the specific form of time-symmetric physics described in plain English at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf. I had written about that many times before; Huw Price had an even more vivid paper making the same point in favor of Einstein realism which Jack and I have cited at times (though Jack believes some additional things which do not represent Price.) Thus I knew we should be able to build a "backwards time telegraph".  So what would have happened if we had built such a backwards time telegraph, and tried to use it to give warning to ourself about a bad event we could have avoided (see www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf) or try to make money in the stock market in a way which would change the price history? When I was 70% a believer in Einstein realism, and did not think I could be a macroscopic Schrodinger cat, I believed that efforts to build and use such a system would turn it into what I called a "weirdness" generator. For example, when you try to transmit today's stock price back, your mind blurs for a moment (as Jack's may have blurred when he typed words attacking Brian for being "politically incorrect") and you type something you didn't mean which prevents the market from  changing. Or the Chinese hacker who intercepted your message, and tries to trade many billions in the past which (unlike your petty cash) would really disrupt the market... somehow ends up in a car crash or a typhoon or an earthquake, just at the right moment to prevent the change. If we assume that the Einsteinian universe is governed by Lagrange optimization, it turns out that this kind of weirdness is what the hard core PDE actually predict, as the universe "tries to reconcile tricky boundary conditions across time." (The math of this is a cousin of the math of absorbing and emitting a photon, something I was ever so familiar with long ago).  I remember wondering for a moment: based on what I see around me, I wonder whether someone from somewhere has actually built and used this kind of weirdness machine. It sure looks like it...  I remember two science fiction authors who tried to convey this idea in richer, more intuotive form. There was a short, light novel Chronoliths which did it. There were longer deeper novels by Connie Willis , a proud but gentle Irish woman Sean might love, including her thick two-volume novel Blackout and All Clear, where she first explains this "Oxford standard theory of time travel," but raises questions about whether she really believed it... at the time when I was doing the same. Yes, I "believed" it (but with 70% probability, as I now believe realism in general), but I also felt some duty to try to focus on experiences which might lead me to question it. At one point I had a list of about seven fairly compelling personal experiences which made me wonder... So now, after more experiences, and more thinking about the mechanics of quantum superposition, and reading the growing literature on macroscopic Schrodinger cats,  I have put more credence into Fock space realism. I feel little doubt that I myself am a macroscopic Schrodinger cat. (Whenever I say "meow", that is an assertion of that identity.)  The natural way to think about life from that viewpoint is Fock space realism, and almost all my efforts in physics last year were to upgrade the Fock space approach. And in life, to adapt to living in the "ocean" of 4D Fock space. And yet... I have also started to wonder whether I should go back and remember that old weirdness generator. In extremis, could it be possible to imagine that all of the things we call psychic or spiritual phenomena are actually just strong clear manifestations of "Jungian synchronicity," the action of a weirdness generator (which nonetheless would still require something like dark matter and energy to allow such manifestations as we have experienced).  Or, more simply, that "we" are not patterns of what is real in Minkowski space but of the POSSIBILITIES which the Lagrangian optimization math implicitly requires ("the shadows of a cave jointly owned by Plato and Einstein").  ============ moving on So that's all ancient history for me. I drew up a list of curious signposts, and thought about it. Now I begin to wonder about Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI), and start collecting a similar list. There are lots of things which people attribute to great mind which are NOT on my list, because the concept of Noosphere allowed in Einsteinian or Fock space realism (with dark matter and energy assumed) easily and naturally accounts for most things people think thehy need a Great Mind for. In fact, I started this post by using the term "Great Mind Idealism", but changed it to CMI because our noosphere already is a Great Mind... Great but local. Signposts to CMI would have to be a bit more. I have a list of three in my personal notes... VERY fuzzy now... incomplete of course...  (1) "reconstruction/ extreme visualization" (2) freakouts like reaction systems depicted in Inception (3) gateways like mass tunneling I will not elaborate for many reasons, except on (3). Having just read Stanislaw Lem's novel "His Master's Voice" (which I found for free on the web, just a regular google search, nothing exotic), I noted a few interesting ideas in the book (some interesting only when used as metaphors or near misses). One concerned the possibility of  the tunneling of macroscopic objects. That really should not be possible, even though it "feels plausible," in any of the QED technologies I have ever seen, but I wonder? Could it possibly be both "illegal" (even by MQED rules) but doable nonetheless? I wonder. It turns out that GATING phenomena are very fundamental in any true intelligent system at the spatial level or higher, and therefore should be predicted to exit in any CMI cosmos. Also, in my various travels, I have found "gateways" to be a very  persistent part of my first person psychic/spiritual experience (https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/11/right-brain-exploration-of-life.html). So I wonder. But... for now just wonder. I am not prepafed to propose an experiment on macroscopic tunneling, and what I do next is such hard core Einstein and math it won't fit on this list, ReplyReply allForward

Report to the Watch on Xi Jinping and the Three Stooges

The noosphere of our planet is full of people asking what to make of the incredible political changes of the past two weeks. The most dramatic change was Donald Trump suddenly giving up on the fight against what he called “radical Islam” (a bad term but a serious problem), declaring it won and over, shutting down our protection of the Kurds and shutting down the US government itself, turning over the Department of Defense to a corporate lobbyist, and aligning with Erdogan, a major stooge of the Third Caliphate movement – supporting even the use of murder by Erdogan in his efforts to build a new global caliphate under himself. I found it equally sad when Putin himself a few days before made it clear he had no constraints in supporting Erdogan’s ambitions, even to the point of hurting the Ukrainian people in an unnecessary and gratuitous way, and giving a great personal insult to the same Trump who was willing to carry his water. As of now, much of my mind now insists on considering Erdogan, Putin and Trump as the Three Stooges, Erdogan being the chief Stooge. Stooge for exactly whom? Putin and Trump clearly both dramatically underestimate the people and forces behind Erdogan.

Putin and Trump clearly support the greater use (AND CENTRAL CONTROL OF) of the kind of information technology which would create a top-down system of control of human thoughts and actions, which would fit the vision in the book 1984. This is clearly the kind of cynical “multipolar world” which FSB people have been pushing for for at least ten years.  (It is curious, when I go to google image search, the 55 faces it now shows include three Russian bankers I met only once… who explained their vision to me, along with many other folks at Rhodos.) (By the way, the capital letters in parentheses were Google’s idea. I accept its emphasis.) But Erdogan’s vision is quite different; he has shown a remarkable ability to cynically manipulate others like Trump, even as Trump does the same to his base.

Erdogan’s system, supporters and vision for the future of the earth remind me a lot of what I read in McNeil, Rise of the West, discussing the First Caliphate, the Abbasids.  Moving towards a combination of very strict sharia top-down restrictions on all commoners, combined with cynical corruption, hedonism, lies and repression by folks in power with pretensions to spiritual leadership. It is dramatically different from the more enlightened second Caliphate, centered on Istanbul and Sufi disciplines, which Erdogan and his allies want to kill off. Kill, literally. France24 has had a great series on Tripoli, showing how the Moslem Brotherhood (MB) types have been killing and oppressing sufis in that area… as in Pakistan… as in India… even trying to do the same in XinJiang and Xian itself!!! (Do they covet Lop Nor as the next addition to their caliphate? Hey, I have seen their operatives in Urumqi, fiddling with elevators…) Oh, and funding and supporting allies like folks in a certain Texas Mafia (think of Cruz, Lamar Smith, Tom Delay… whom I have also seen all too close up.

I have to admit, I was somewhat reassured when the Kurds linked up with Assad and Russia, and when Putin did provide at least some local limit to the Third Caliphate. But Putin has waffled like Loki for many, many years here, and shows no sign of understanding the limits to the vision for the future, in the novel 1984 which would ultimately crush the souls of humans and result in my view in the termination of their bodily existence as well. (In technical terms, the problem is that glorifying Nash equilibrium prevents rational cooperation and even prevents efficient market design in the general case.)  His involvement in the Airport Fake Coup in Ankara makes that clear enough, as do many other things, yea unto the blood which flows from blood sacrifices in certain places in Russia itself.  The movement behind Erdogan is in many ways a serious spiritual force as well, just like the thoughts of the Unabomber (do see the great Netflix video!). The hopes of the human species… are a matter of finding a sustainable path between Scylla and Charybdis, between fire and ice, between the “ice” of misued technology which folks like Taliban rightly oppose to the death, and the “fire” of the wild chaos and oppression which unabomber types would also wreak upon the world, also crushing the humans. How to develop advanced science which we really need, without being used and abused by the Three Stooges trying to re-enact 1984? (Obviously Xi Jinping is facing these questions, and this is part of the background leading to what he must face,

And what we must face very gingerly in order to be positive and constructive.)

There have been a couple of bits of real good news in the past two weeks. One, in advanced technology, is probably not appropriate for pubic posting yet. Another was the bipartisan sentencing reform, where a spokesman for the Koch brothers spoke clearly and decisively in favor of the deep value of human potential, which I view as “God’s main bottom line on earth which we must meet or die.” That was so great to hear. CNN also says that Trump is listening more to Rand Paul, who also speaks for freedom and human potential. Great fundamental values which we should never forget.  But we should never just kowtow to them, with eyes closed and rear ends in the air; the challenge is how to make real inner freedom and diversity of thought really available to real humans all over the earth, while also supporting voluntary human connections, also a deep part of natural human brains and soul both. The sad fact is that many well-placed people employ apparatchiks who implement the diametric opposite of what their bosses think they are getting; Koch money is often allied with money from folks like what Michael Lewis depicts who want to get rid of humans altogether, channeled through groups in DC, supporting folks ala Cheney who are the most severe threat to real freedom in the US today. When I worked at DOE, I remember being bemused when the House would send orders to DOE which seemed to rotate about 20 degrees on each layer down through the hierarchy, such that the orders on the ground were to oppose 180 degrees with maximum energy what Congress asked for. But now I know much more about the “wires” from the outside which inject that kind of spin. The (very serious and very real) antiAmderican “deep state” is actually the spin coming from an antistate, which simply wlil become more oppressive if the legal one subject to oversight is weakened. And so, well-meaning followers of God from Ankara to Texas end up injecting their energy to support oppression of the human spirit, which may simply put us all in the red and terminate our enterprise, if we do not do a bit better.

And so: could Xi Jinping help us somehow to muddle through in this century and not be killed  by the Three Stooges?

In truth, I have often hoped for that.

Xi even published an article in Qiushi (sp?) before he rose to power, which discussed the need to fuse objective and subjective viewpoints, a key part of what we need to do to develop sane policy, sane cooperation, and a sustainable path between fire and ice (subjectivism fire and cold formal ice). He learned BOTH about Buddha AND about Marx, imperfect thinkers who nonetheless offered a few key seeds needed to fill in the potentially fatal gaps both in Mao thinking and Jiang Zemin thinking. It seemed like a promising base from which to develop a new synthesis. I was so happy, in visiting Guangzhou last year, to see banners saying that the communist party in that area defined itself by a series of principles which really do point beyond the barnacles of the past, and offer hope.  But in that same city, we saw the stark barriers both in geography and in food between the military caste and the others, showing that all was not quite well yet. In Qufu, we saw great leadership and understanding of the basic Confucian principle of Zhengqi (see my paper at www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf, published in Russia), but in recent years we have also seen decay to the degenerate version taught by Zu Xi (sp?) which twisted it towards extreme nepotism (the father of much of corruption in China) which Mao rightly opposed very directly… and opens the door also to the spirit of warlordism which destroyed many formerly great dynasties in China in the past.

To maintain a rapid pace of economic growth, and develop more advanced understanding of political economy as well, requires a fully scientific approach, including even the first person scientific method I discussed in the paper published in Russia. That is really just an APPLICATION of the mathematical principles of learning (well developed in the most advanced machine learning). But my probes tell me that Xi has fallen in practice to a more subjectivist approach, like a mild form of Trump’s way of thinking, making him MORE of a stooge than he should be to subjectivist forces of all kinds in china, creating unstable ad hoc accommodations rather than a real powerful unity (which REQUIRES diversity of missions and ideas, coupled together in a more intelligent framework).

This became very vivid to me a week or two ago, when the Financial Times published an excellent in-depth report on the latest Party Congress, which is more meaningful to me because of some background information I have.

Xi acknowledged that economic reform has been of central importance to the real people of China, whom the Party is supposed to serve to the utmost, keeping oil companies and the military especially in line. (They and nepotism are the greater threat to China). But then he echoed the midlevel analysts who said that the typical iron rice bowl state enterprises and historic culture were the key to that recent economic growth and to the future. Oops. That simply is not true, and shows that Xi himself has been living in a fishbowl of filtered information (a bit like Trump and the equally dangerous Texas Mafia). Paulson’s great book

https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-China-Insider-Economic-Superpower-ebook/dp/B00CO7FMDC

gives us all really essential information about reform in China; even though Paulson goes too far in the direction of Jiang Zemin and ice, and really needs balancing out, it is essential to understand what caused the great growth in China (along with the reverence for education and science) in order to achieve the kind of balance which could MAINTAIN growth but ALSO protect us from the worst possible ice. To protect the real rights of the real humans who work in factories and schools, for example, while still supporting vigorous multidirectional feedback in the university sector, like what NSF stimulated in the US until the Texas Mafia screwed it all up (hurting the US far more than most people understand as yet).

The Financial Times reported that China does have serious economists who, like real scientists, disagree but do so honorably, test theories, and are open to new theories and approaches… what could save China.

But Xi has also somehow managed to empower APPARATCHIKS, WOLF PACKS, GESTAPOS (Google chose capitals) which repressed that discussion, and made sure it was not part of the planning for the future, and of what reaches him. It was like the time when Trump thought of hiring a psychologist to run OSTP, to shield him from the best real story known in the US.  No hope that way., No wonder that other folks who read FT suddenly contributed to the movement of the world stock markets…

One major technical issue here: if places like Facebook were going unstable before Zuckerborg was hauled in before a hearing in the House, but if the use of human censors as in China leads to an unsustainable situation of central control as in China... a slippery slope... can anyone build an IT System without censors which is less unstable than the old Facebook? Is collaborative communication in depth possible, like what Xi Jinping needs? Could machine intelligence help?

Hard core Einstein realism through two eyes fused, mathematics and mysticism

A person on one of the quantum consciousness lists said: Wake up. That's what I have done. That reminds me of popular song I really liked, decades ago: "waking up is hard to do...." Deepak's post this morning is certainly more "alive" and on target than the bulk of our email exchanges have been lately. I apologize for not following up right now. I have at times wished for a thread on "brain-soul interface to neuroscience" ... but this morning, I have woken to some different realizations. Three subjects really attract my attention this morning -- the state of the world, a return to a kind of Einsteinian physics, and  the importance of doing justice to Christmas. Since this thread is called "interpretations of quantum mechanics," I suppose that the Einsteinian thoughts are speakable here, even though they are grounded in realism. Still, since spiritual connection is of interest to most of you, I should say a few words about context. I haven't seen any of you refer much to certain big but scary names, like de Chardin, Nietzsche or Marx. Even Hegel. It is sad that our world is so restrictive, ever more restrictive, in the depth of dialogue ands thought.  One of the great debates in meditation is what de Chardin discussed in his book on the Activation of Human Energy (qi? mana?). Is meditation about withdrawing from all the illusions and false connections of this world, or about reaching inside (as de Chardin and his follower JFK) to make stronger and better connections with the entire noosphere of earth? I have often leaned more towards the latter approach, and most of my recent quantum work is of that type, engaging with what physics needs next to take one REAL step forwards, a baby step, towards really assimilating what some call "retrocausality", NOT because it explains psi (it doesn't) but because humans need to master baby stuff before they are ready for heavier and more dangerous stuff. But between the withdrawal approach of ancient Hindu ascetics, an ancient thesis, and the immersion approach of de Chardin and JFK (a modern antithesis), Nietzsche had a nice little metaphor which is more of a synthesis: withdrawal and return. (Indeed, the neuroscientist Levitin has a popular book, The Organized Mind, which takes that a little further, if a bit more narrowly.) And yesterday, being tired of endlessly repeating and trying to explain baby stuff, not only here but elsewhere, I decided I should withdraw a bit and shift to longer-term, no-holds-barred no-planet-barred, efforts to look as deeply as I really can into foundations of physics. "To hell with limiting myself to what local media can understand. Reality itself deserves some attention, at the very deepest I am capable of."  Fockian realism is really the mainstream today, at its best, when it is coherent and capable of actually building devices that work, mathematical systems which are well-posed and self-consistent and do what they claim, and so on. The garden varieties of Fockian realism (the ρQED and MQED I have tried to expand people's minds to comprehend) basically portray our cosmos as a :"firehose of information," a hugely complex multiverse space squeezed into one simple time dimension, endlessly squirming and tending towards gross instability (exactly like the political and cultural systems of our world). But in the end, I doubt that could be true. As my wife once said: "Don't think of it as a firehose. Think of it as an ocean." I have found that extremely important and correct in my meditative practices as well. I COULD believe in a kind of 4D Fock space -- something which Streater and Wightman  (SERIOUS mathematical physicists) attempted but never quite got right. (The problems involved stuff like infinite norms, the kind of problem which von Neumann fixed for ordinary 1920's Hilbert space kinds of stuff, but are not the next baby step needed today.) Maybe. Very practical, good for meditation, but for physics I find myself wanting to focus instead on better fleshing out the ultraweird alternatives (NOT by empty ungrounded words) and, today, the alternative of Einsteinian realism. Einsteinian realism is what De Broglie and his part-time follower Bohm really wanted to revive. The new experimental data do at least give me renewed hope that the Einstein/deBroglie approach may work out in the end, at a deeper level, even though it WOULD require us to accept that we here are just "the shadows in Plato's cave,"  a TYPE of ontological shock I have tried to spare you since everyone here seems a bit sensitive in some ways. (Meow.) I mentioned before what de Broglie and I agreed on, in our very friendly correspondence, which I still have here in my house: it was actually the problem of explaining the spectrum of helium, NOT the EPR/Bell/CHSH experiment, which motivated the great Congress at Solvay (sp?) where they "voted out reality."  The great shock was when someone solved the Schrodinger equation over six dimensions, "two for each electron," and IT WORKED in accurate prediction, and when nothing in a mere 3+1 dimensions ever did. Einstein once said that the great success of (1920s!) QM in such predictions could be explained someday as a kind of emergent statistical relation. He, like Jack and Paul Z recently, said "Just look at that configuration space... isn't it obviously a space of possible configurations of something which is really in 3+1-D."  That was a nice conjecture, but where and how do exactly what statistics emerge? (Reminds me of a cartoon. Reporter asks a physicist: "You say your theory tells us how to build a starship. Just how do we build that starship, starting from your ideas?" Physicist: "Oh, I leave that little thing to my student as an exercise." Students beware whom you chose as your advisor if you ever want to graduate... though I did well with an ambitious advisor.) Wiener and Von Neumann tried, and failed. De Broglie also had a student who tried very hard, but failed in the end. I tried, and succeeded, but it was the hardest math I ever did. Before me, the closest were an Indian guy named Sudarshan, Wigner and Glauber. Later when I briefly met Glauber, I did have a chance to say that one of the worst mistakes I made in my life was NOT to take his course in quantum optics at Harvard; all the folks I talked to thought it was "mere engineering," not relevant to the real foundations. It was an important life lesson to learn not to take such beliefs too seroiusly. No, that was not just a digression. It is a low key introduction to one key resource: my papers at arxiv of extended glauber-sudarshan mathematics, which is the real key to making Einstein's program actually work. And this morning, thanks to "withdrawal" (to a larger world), I now see new ways to actually USE that mathematics. In a way, it begins with a "simple" question: "What is an electron?" Before Einstein, the mainstream approach, led by Lorentz (the guy with the "t", not Lorenz, who is also important), assumed that space is filled with just two kinds of "objects" -- fields, continuous functions over space, and "particles," exact perfect Grecian points. Einstein and Lorentz both agreed that Lagrangian mathematics (which already includes mathematical terms which some people INTERPRET as back action) is a proper tool for modeling such things. The Sutherland papers I have seen take the Lorentz approach, exactly. Einstein and deBroglie pushed hard for a change in visions beyond Lorentz; NOT point particles, but forces only. It is like the old Kybalion claim, that everything is vibration and energy, that particles are either "illusions" or, more precisely, vortices of force. Wheeler developed a Lorentzian electrodynamics long ago which, in my view, shows very vividly why Einstein's vision makes more sense than Lorentz's, in my view. Wheeler's (classical Lorentzian) electrodynamics works ONLY when you append a weird "renormalization" formalism as bad as its cousin in modern QED, a monstrous glob which those of us who wield Occam's Razo naturally itch to cut off. The problem is not with quantum field theory as such, but with the assumption that a charged particle like an electron is a perfect point. Once we know that E=mc**2, we know that such a charged point particle would have an infinite energy of self-repulsion. But let me say no more about the problem, but instead move on to the solution, which many of us have known IN THEORY for decades. HOW can we model the electron in a way which fits the empirical evidence, with a radius more than zero, as a stable, quantized vortex of force? There is a fairly large literature on "solitons" (physicists' fuzzy term for stable vortices of force) in physics. If you go to scholar.google.com (as any serious physicist often does), you will see thousands of citations of the terms "skyrmion" and "BPS," the two most popular soliton model in physics. (That compares with just a few dozen citations to the highest-rated physics papers either by Jack or by myself, but I do a bit better in mathematics and neural networks, and important papers often do not immediately "hit the Oprah hit parade.")   It is a huge literature, which I will not get too deep into right now.  Crudely, both types of soliton model HINT at a model of the electron as a "hedgehog" (porcupine), a little creature with "needles" (vectors) all pointing outwards from its center. Formally, that gives it a "winding number of one," crucial to its stability. But this morning I ask: do two hedgehogs on a row really add up to one big superhedgehog? I doubt it. I need to revisit things like Manton's classic book on Topological Solitons, but I really doubt that two hedgehogs, viewed at a distance, have a collective winding number of two. I need to strengthen my resolve to find a different way. What I have worried/wondered about for a long time: if there is stability WITHOUT their kind of topological charge, could boundary conditions be crucial in holding together electrons (as in holding together what passes for  civilization on this tiny planet)? But how could one ever find a mathematically tractable way to live without stability in free spac e, or even to find stability without the usual type of opological charge? Tow possible approaches. first, see what ENGINEERS like Roger Lake have done with more than one "skyrmion" in a less pure but more realistic model. Second... use my extended P map as a tool for analysis of discrete spectra in a thermodynamic cosmos. The math is all worked out only for continuous fields, but in the Einstein picture that's all that exists anyway. (Fermions and point particles are just for approximation. This is another point which Streater and Wightman got wrong, by ofllowing the crowd and not re-examining the fundamentals.) Discrete spectra of the bosonic operators gives quantization FOR THE EINSTEINIAN systems which the new P maps from.  And by heh way, it gives a bit more -- technologies far more dangerous than the baby time machines which MQED allows. But not so interedsting as the "gateway" options which Stanislaw Lem speculates about, which would be allowed under ultraweirdism.  Best of luck. May we all someday be capable of understanding, before we disintegrate into powder.  ReplyReply allForward

Has Trump sold out to the Moslem Brotherhood?

A few days, I was wondering what would happen when Trump responded to a gross personal insult form Putin. Like the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. And also when Putin made it clear that alliance in defense of the world from sharia extremism (really, Moslem Brotherhood, a very specific and very effective international organization which many of us, including MBS, know a lot about).

Well, something impossible was to be expected...

But the evidence is now accumulating about what happened.

After all, Flynn himself sold out to Erdogan years ago. Trump seems to be doing the same. Suddenly to say he is working on selling Gulen to Turkey. And now doing an action in Syria aimed at allowing Erdogan to do the mass murder of those allies who have been working hardest to protect us all from MB people (even as he hypocritically talks about death of one guy in his army). If Putin imagines this helps Russia, he is as myopic as .. well, the most mypoic people I have ever met in DC.

It is a very serious, very dangerous line he has crossed. It is a test of how much integrity the rest of us have. Some of the protections which go to his office will certainly be withdrawn.

Has CIA been misusing social media? What could anyone do?

A colleague recently pointed me to a press report on this very serious issue:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/

My reply:

My concern is that there are dozens upon dozens of unscrupulous groups all over the world taking advantage more and more of what technology allows them to do 

with censorship, harsh measures against anything which does not fit a narrow playbook, and dishonest manipulation of public opinion.

In many ways, it is a classic "race to the bottom," erosion towards a Nash equilibrium. 

I feel a bit guilty I have not done more on the technical side, to start addressing the concrete issue: how could Facebook have reduced the fake news problem by automated, transparent technical means WITHOUT hiring lots of new human censors (let alone the horrible subcontracts and links to outside political groups). I am "biased" by an experience I had myself while outside the US, which I described after a lot of humor buried in a long blog post: https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/11/from-obama-and-zuckerberg-to-oumuamua.html

But we should not be steadfast in ignoring horrible first person experiences. 

This technical approach is at least one way to start groping for a kind of moral highground here, a path to avoid becoming just one more cannibal in the war of all against all, 

a path towards a hope for something more like a Pareto optimum. But several things discouraged me as I started to get into it. 

First, one well-connected guy insisted that Facebook is now a media company, and should be managed the way they manage other media companies they buy up for political purposes. Fair IT not welcome. In truth, when there are dozens upon dozens of nasty wolf packs out there from all over, all of the front line wolves would unite to try to bite anyone who would have tech to partially defang them. Maybe the folks who pay their salaries hope for some result other than blood and gore, but the wolves are there on the front lines. 

(Again, let me emphasize that I am not even thinking of the CIA much as I say this. There are lots of other wolf packs out there besides the one(s) they run, and they themselves are victims of others.) 

Second, Google decided to shut down its competitor to Facebook at about the same time. I wonder what to make of the new New York branch as well, but that's just a question mark. 

My next task assigned by me to me is to look for Xi Jinping's latest speech. The relation between human subjective judgments and market design for a free marketplace of ideas... will be crucial all over the world. 

Quantum reality 101 --- living in a real Fock space

I have pushed hard to ask for new experiments to test my new theory of quantum electrodynamics, MQED, against the best standard mainstream version of QED most widely used today in predicting real experiments. I call that mainstream version ρQED, because it makes heavy use of "density matrices" ρ. 

However... not everyone knows what practical, mainstream quantum mechanics really says, today. 

There are hundreds of philosophies and beliefs out there about what quantum mechanics actually is; that's why I am doing this blog post on "quantum realism 101," explaining what ρQED is. When I ran the NSF research program ("QMHP") to support quantum modeling for practical use in electronics and photonics, the practical work was mostly all based on ρQED in practice (though they didn't spend a lot of time on the philosophy of what they were doing). 

So... in quantum realism 101, in ρQED , we always assume a distinction between what the state of the cosmos actually IS at any time, the wave function ψ, and the state of our knowledge,  represented by the density matrix ρ. That's difference from the old 1920's version, when they thought that the wave function ψ represents all of our knowledge; turns out, that didn't really work. (I got to see that ever so vividly in NSF reviews of ideas for quantum computing.) 

In ρQED, we assume that the "law of everything," the dynamic equation which governs everything in the cosmos, is just dψ/dt=iHψ, the usual "Schrodinger equation", where H is the usual normal Hamiltonian operator well-known in QED. That IS unitary. We often think of the wave function ψ as a vector in Fock-Hilbert space (the Hilbert space of functions like ψ defined over Fock space, over "the multiverse.") 

But the big problem lies in how we model actual measurement processes.  

What happens when we put two or three polarizers between a source of entangled photons and the detectors behind them? Many philosophers believe that this is where God, free will, or metaphysical consciousness intervene and perform a miracle in the real world. Sometimes I call it "looking for the soul in your sunglasses" (if you have polarizing sunglasses). Many mezzo people believe that the polarizers perform a UNITARY TRANSFORMATION, that they input one definite wave function ψ and output another definite wave function, according to a well-known formula, their version of the "Born rule."

But in ρQED, we assume that the polarizer is a stochastic object, somewhat unpredictable to us human experimenters because we DON'T KNOW the state of every atom and electron in the polarizer. Thus when a definite known wave function ψ comes into the polarizer, we use the modern version of the "Born rule" to tell us what MIGHT come out, with what probability. If the incoming wave function represents just one photon reaching the polarizer, then there are only two possibilities for what might come out: (1) nothing, represented by the wave function ψ=0, the vacuum state; and (2) a photon aligned to the polarization angle which that polarizer supports. 

(I think that good ordinary sunglasses just pass through photons polarized sideways, so as to protect you from the up-and-down photons coming from the sun. Zielinger's group in Austria -- the worlds leader in this entangled photon stuff -- writes the wave function for a horizontal photon, what the sunglasses pass through, as ψ=|H>, where "H" means horizontal.)

And so, ρQED predicts that the output of the polarizer is a stochastic mix of the wave function 0 and the wave function |H>. That is NOT a unitary model of the polarizer!!!

The density matrix   ψ   for a definite known state ψ is defined simply as

(ψ)(ψ-transpose), where ψ is considered as a vector. The density matrix coming out of the polarizer is predicted to be  ρ=a*ρ0+b*ρH, where a and b are just scalars, and where ρ0 and ρH are the density matrices representing the vacuum state 0 and the horizontal state |H> respectively.

In summary, ρQED models the polarizer as a stochastic input-output process, not unitary -- as an ordinary Markov process. This kind of input-output behavior cannot be the result of a unitary Schrodinger equation by itself; it requires that we assume some kind of stochastic noise in the polarizer itself. But modern ρQED also includes lots of work on "master equations," equations for describing what happens to density matrices inside of solid objects. They are not unitary over Fock-Hilbert space; they are usually written in "Lindblad form," which makes them linear in the density matrix. 

So all of that is ρQED. My modified version, MQED, still assumes that the state of the cosmos at time t is defined by the wave function ψ. It still assumes that the cosmos is governed by the same Schrodinger equation. The underltying dynamics of the cosmos are still unitary The only difference lies in how measurement devices like polarizers are modelled. MQED requires that ALL passive macroscopic objects (objects which do not channel free energy from some source other than the light or electricity we are modeling explicitly) have a time-symmetric stochastic model. That means that complicated experiments or devices, which involve more than one macroscopic object, must be modeled as a kind of MARKOV RANDOM FIELD over time, rather than a Markov process. 

In theory, this is a bit more complicated than ρQED. However, in practice, the predictions of MQED are easier to calculate than the predictions of ρQED for many experiments, like the classic experiments with entangled photons. MQED predicts that we can use a simple lumped input-output analysis to predict those experiments, without even using wave functions at all. 

I have a new paper in draft which gives a nice example of this, with supporting data, but for now I must hold it in confidence, for many reasons (not least of them the terrible political sensitivities and activist groups emerging in the world lately). 

Comments on Zen Buddhism

Like all great religions on this backwards little planet we live on, Zen Buddhism is a mixed bag. Some of its practices and stories certainly would deserve a place of honor (albeit with caveats in some cases) in any really rational, effective system for human spiritual development for the whole earth. Perhaps the prayer Sean mentioned would fit there, or perhaps not; I don't know. 

But there are also things to watch out for, and even some false things propagated for the benefit of folks in power, as with all great world religions. 

For example, some bits of history. At least in China, they tell me that Zen Buddhism is a missionary development of Chan Buddhism (which fits everything I have seen), which was promulgated in the first place from the Shao Lin Monestary. In fact, I do remember American Zen guys talking about Bodhidharma who ... whatever. Shao Lin has pushed very hard for political support in China, arguing that this is the one branch of Buddhism which truly originated in China -- a national treasure. But others in China note how the leader has used it as a great cash cow, with lots of questionable ways to hype the money making. Great theatrics, but..? From an article in the great magazine Tricycle, I learned how the real origins were in a debate, from which the losing side emigrated in disgrace to China. (I have names and dates deep in my notes.) 

So far as I know, there are three really serious dominant strands of Buddhism to be found in China today -- Tibetan, Chan and "Vatican" (near Xian). The Tibetan has been a great embarrassment to the current government, which is why there seems to be more and more support for the "new Vatican of Buddhism" supported by the government (and various other vicissitudes I will spare you for now). I am grateful to have had a chance to experience all three. 

A couple of years ago, Tricycle reported a great structured debate between the leading teachers of the two main strands of Buddhism active in the US today -- Tibetan and Zen. The story was written by a Zen guy, who was delighted that "his guy" won the luck of the draw, to have the last word. By the rules, each debater got to summarize his position in one or two words in the end. The Tibetan summarized it as "mindfulness". The Zen summarized "no mind." The reporter conveyed a very self-satisfied clever chortle, but in my view this really clarified which one is sane and which is ultimately misguided nihilism. 

I also can't help thinking back to a quiet little tea ceremony in Nara, Japan, overlooking the ;place where Buddhism came to Japan. Our hostess said, "yes, here is where they came to us saying we should learn to be peaceful and give up our old Shinto ways. The monks with blue hats came, saying this, and the monks with yellow hats said the same thing. Then on that hill, we saw them killing each other in the most dishonorable bloody fight we ever saw." 

But Buddhist groups in Japan have since had some degree of peaceful combination, and there are esoteric groups in the high mountains which are not Zen but are well grounded.

I remember when a cousin of mine working for Paul Allen mentioned he was a Zen Buddhist, and asked me what Quakers do. "Well, there is no doctrine, really. The core foundation for traditional (FGC) Quakers is practice. The practice is a quiet group meditation every week, and and imperative that we all try to listen and listen to our own individual conscience." He had a wistful look and said "that's exactly what we say we are doing, but somehow not fighting over doctrine is hard..." 

Whatever.

Perhaps I should have mentioned instead what some of the specific treasures are from Zen, but not today. This is too long as is. Symptom of a day when I worry a lot about ways to get into trouble in other areas (like what the Chinese military acts on in quantum technology). 

Best of luck,

     Paul 

What happens if experiments do NOT allow even quantum realism?

First, I accept Hal’s suggestion, seconded by Chris, that I should use the word “ultraweirdism” to refer to any theory of how the cosmos works outside the families of theories I have called “Einsteinian realism” and “Fockian realism.” Ordinary quantum dynamics, as in mainstream Fock space, is already weird enough; something weirder than that should better be called “ultraweird” than “weird.” Since I personally attribute about 1/3 probability to each of the three main possibilities, I should pay more attention to ultraweirdism than I have lately, just to keep a balance. Also, as Stan has hinted, a careful analysis of ultraweird possibilities may be relevant even to an Einsteinian or Fockian cosmos.

That really came home to me a few weeks ago when my old friend Yeshua, who is starting up one of the experiments, stressed: “you should let the chips fall where they may.” Logically, if the relevant new experiments do NOT support time-symmetric statistics as I defined it in my IJTP paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf), that would imply that Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism are both false. For a few days it seemed as if it MIGHT come out that way, raising the question of what the alternatives might be.
(For a slightly more technical version of this, see https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/12/is-idea-of-objective-reality-still.html.)

One major difficulty with ultraweirdism (which does not disprove it!) is that there are so many, many possibilities. Most of those in the literature come from biased sources down through the ages, limited in many ways, usually not internally consistent or truly coherent. (Some are collections of words which do not really answer crucial questions about how it works and what it really means for us.) If I were forced to accept ultraweirdism, there are only two possibilities which I personally (in my ignorance) would look more into now: (1) the Great Mind or Idealism idea, the idea that the greater cosmos is … something like a dream generating system..; and (2) the Subset idea, the idea that everything we experience (in “Process 2”) is just a subset, a kind of emergent subset, of the larger true cosmos. Ultraweirdism 1 is certainly similar in spirit to what Deepak Chopra, many Buddhists and many Cabbalists (and others) have been saying. Certainly I remember the time when Roger Penrose, at a younger age, standing next to Karl Pribram, echoed the idea that “the universe feels more like a Great Mind than a Great Machine … so what is the mathematics of mind?” Since I think I know something about the mathematics of mind, and have also had lots of first person experience with incredibly weird things, I have wondered about the great Mind possibility for some time, mostly not pushing too hard or getting very far… but a week or two ago after the email from Yeshua, I tried to push just a little further.

When I visited Nepal last year, there were at least two really seriously weird experiences in Kathmandu, one of which shook me up, enough that I was very grateful to Bhakti Muni for helping calm me down more than I was able to on my own (though I did try very hard, with SOME degree of success). The next stop was to the shrine of the sleeping/dreaming Vishnu, said to be dreaming up the entire universe or cosmos. That image also comes to mind when I think of Great Mind ideas, though of course I do not attach all the mythology to it. But even when I hold onto Einsteinian realism, I do respect the reality of Jungian archetypes as objects in the local “great mind” of the noosphere of our little solar system. So I was grateful to accept a little help from Vishnu as well as Muni that day.

The most .. traditional… forms of the Great Mind cosmos idea… would say that our experiences of “Samadhi” (as defined by high Japanese esoteric Buddhism) are not JUST connections to the local noosphere (and its connections), but also, if elevated enough, to the Great Mind of the cosmos itself, dreaming up everything which exists, with power to make and unmake our local physical realities more than any mere dark matter could. Ultraweird enough?

I can imagine some folks saying, “Wait a minute. Would verification of the Born rule, asymmetric as it is, imply stuff as weird as this?” That reminds me of a poem which my girl friend in high school once showed me: if one little pebble in your back yard suddenly just shot up into the air, with no magnets or anything else to explain it, would you just say “Oh THAT little pebble happened to feel like jumping up that morning?” I forget how the poet explained it… but the point is, when something clear and simple substantially violated everything you thought you knew about how things work (“Process 2” as Henry or Grundlagen would say), … logically it is like Pandora’s box. Ignoring it is like ignoring climate change, but worse.

Great Mind people might say: “You are not discovering the laws of physics with your experiments. You are just making them up as you go. It’s really just a contest of which dream is stronger. Even if realism works in your experiments, all it proves is that you are a stronger dreamer. You shouldn’t consider it as proof that realism is true.” So now, as new more definite data appears supporting realism, I remember that.

During the 2016 elections, I remember when a hard core math/physics friend said to me: “I used to just laugh at those theories that life is just a dream. But now when I look at the TV news… it seems more and more real as a possibility… hard to avoid… this can’t really be real. And is the dreamer crazy now?”

This leads into one of the difficulties with the Great Mind idea. Back in the early 70’s, I remember reading one of the canonical kabbalah texts while standing up in a local bookstore. Their theory was that there is just One Great Mind, but that it fragmented long ago into the little pieces or sparks like us. Our mission, it said, is to bring the sparks together again, and unify our mind. So, looking at this idea objectively, it seems to say that a lonely mind floating around in sensory deprivation (no external stimuli) just fragmented into pieces, as one would expect, and that the most we can achieve is to put it back to that original state of emptiness and loneliness. A beautiful metaphor, useful in its way, but clearly not a solid enough foundation for those who really build on their beliefs. (I’d say that Zen has similar problems.)

More compelling to me was a book called What Dreams May Come, by Matheson, which was later made into a movie with Robin Williams. I have the impression that it reflected a Swedenborgian school of thought, which did regard our mundane world as a subset of a larger astral plane, such that the dreamlike nature is more visible in other parts of this larger cosmos. A key message was that dreaming good dreams leads to good outcomes (outcomes we like), and dreaming bad dreams can produce something like a living hell. (It is interesting that Donald Trump really is a sincere believer in positive thinking, but it seems he has not yet mastered the art of how to avoid a living hell.) Many years ago, I gave a friend a copy of Seeing With the Mind’s (Eye? I?), by Samuels, a beautiful color paperback which I found for only $10, which gets very deep into the first person issues of visualization and positive visualization: not just Belief in dreams but praxis. And of course, LaBerge’s book Lucid Dreaming is solid science and relevant.

But: how is it possible to engage with the realities of human life as it is today and still engage in thinking which is both realistic and positive? In truth, this is the number one struggle I face in my own life lately. Everything else does seem to be part of that.

Years ago, when I tried to put Matheson’s ideas on a more precise, mathematical footing, it pointed toward certain equations by Kohonen. But there was a very disturbing… arbitrary quality to it, which was not entirely convincing.

More recently, in the great movie Inception, I saw clues both about how we as people might test ultraweirdism versus (weird) realism and about a few of the real practical challenges before us on this planet right now.

But as Stan has hinted, testing is hard, since a careful review of Lagrangian mathematics does allow for a whole lot of weirdism. I suppose that it is more important that we figure out how to adapt to the phenomena themselves, wherever they may come from. 

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Addendum: one important practical point about positive visualization. Years ago, I had a lot of contact with Barbara Marx Hubbard, who accomplished a number of very solid and real things, and also taught people a lot about positive visualization. Some would summarize: "Be VERY CLEAR about what you want, but don't worry about HOW." That works fine for some managers, who have the right kind of people working for them, but SOMEWHERE the "HOW" must also be addressed. In the present state of the earth, competence in visualizing HOW in a coherent viable way is ALSO a crucial ingredient.  Lack of it may well result in extinction of the species. 

Is the idea of objective reality still tenable as Everett and Deutsch have claimed?

Many people were very excited when Heisenberg invited a well-known guru to speak about the nature of reality in his place. Ayn Rand and VI Lenin  both assailed the risks of what could happen if people totally gave up on the idea of objective reality, but most physicists shrugged their shoulders and followed Heisenberg, even as some fundamentalist gurus went wild with joy. Later, three great physicists -- Everett, Wheeler and David Deutsch (who won the Dirac award for inventing the new paradigm of universal quantum Turing machine) -- argued that we can restore the concept of objective reality in physics, so long as we accept that we live in a cosmos of quantum reality, a Fock space instead of Einstein's type of Minkowski space. 

BUT IS QUANTUM REALITY, PHYSICS WITHOUT OBSERVERS, CONSISTENT WITH EXPERIMENT?

It was consistent a few weeks ago. The evidence up until then was that it is. But we don't yet know; the experiments are not yet definitive... and we really don't know.

So here is what I sent a few days ago to a kind of discussion group concerned about such issues and their larger implications about a week ago....

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It is curious how hard it is to discuss issues other than personal ego or group identities, in all kinds of human discussions. For example, I tend to regard debates about extensions of monism as continuations of ancient debates, similar to Protestants versis Catholics or liberals versus conservatives -- inherently fuzzy stuff since it is about group definitions and the fuzzy semantics (semiotics?) they entail. Can we break out of that?

So, first, I wonder where people on this list stand on an issue I have posed as "realism (Einsteinian or Fockian) vfrsus weirdism"?? 

Am I the only person on this list who feels that the probability is more than 50% that Einsteinian or Fockian realism are the ultimate truth of how things work underneath in our entire cosmos?

Sometimes, when Deepak Chopra complains about "physicalism," maybe what he really means to complain about is Einsteinian or Fockian realism. I do not like his description of what people like me believe, and we do have a right to speak for ourselves. It is better described as "mathematicalism" than "physicalism." 

Physics proper demands that we seek a VERY specific, well-defined theory, but for this list we need to define FAMILIES or  CATEGORIES or sets of theory. For example, there are many possible theories consistent with special relativity; in a way, special relativity is not a theory, but a FAMILY of theories. 

So let me define "Einsteinian realism" here as the theory that EVERYTHING which really exists in our cosmos and our lives is some kind of pattern or form of a finite number of underlying force fields, defined over a finite dimensional mathematical manifold, governed by deterministic local differential equations, like the usual Lagrange-Euler or Hamiltonian equations or metric equations extending Einstein's work on general relativity. (Really, though, I like to think about "extended Einsteinian realism" where it may be local stochastic differential equations). 

Am I the only person on this list who believes there is a serious possibility that Einsteinian realism may be the true "law of everything," and that life and consciousness may all be just emergent phenomena which result from the operation of the underlying differential equations?

And, by the way, is Einstein realism itself a form of monism?

In truth, I used to believe Einsteinian realism with more than 50% personal subjective probability. As did De Broglie and even Bohm, at least before ... whatever.

Psychic phenomena are not really a problem for Einsteinian realism, as I have discussed often enough.

But -- macroscopic Schrodinger cats are another matter. The deeper I get into that... I now tell myself, 1/3 probability for Einsteinian realism, 1/3 for Fockian realism. 

And 1/3 for "something very different," a very heterogeneous collection of possibilities which I call "weirdism." Crudely, Einsteinian realism is the conservative/reactionary position, Fockian realism 

the real proper mainstream, and "weirdism" a collection of the left, the idealism, off-beat mathematical concepts, and any of the crazy things which could actually mean something if properly re-examined.

Fockian realism is just as hard core mathematical as Einsteinian realism, except that it postulates an infinite dimensional cosmos containing "parallel universes" as in macroscopic Schrodinger cats (and even Schrodinger planets). The Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of quantum field theory is just one example of a theory in this category/family/set of theories. Everett's PhD thesis, the real birth of these ideas (long before some Bohmians reinvented a Rube Goldberg convoluted version of the same idea), was crystal clear in its commitment to hard core realism. 

Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism BOTH agree that "measurement processes" are not magical. The operation of measurement devices is just one more collection of emergent phenomena.

But is realism (Einsteinian or Fockian) true in the end? 

Conventional wisdom says that the Bell experiments conclusively disprove, empirically, the possibility that Einsteinian realism might be true. I was very disappointed yesterday to see a Scientific American article asserting that "all the loopholes have been closed." They haven't been. Back in 1988, in the same book edited by Menas Kafatos where Zielinger first announced the idea of GHZ states and GHZ experiments, I had a chapter "Bell's Theorem: the forgotten loophole." The article I saw yesterday still forgot it. 

I have proposed three sets of quantum optics experiments by now to TEST that loophole -- and more precisely to test whether objects like polarizers obey time-symmetric statistics or the old Born rule. 

Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism BOTH imply that polarizers should obey time-symmetric statistics. If the new experiments come out one way, they tell us that Bell experiments are not evidence against Einsteinian realism. But if they come out the other way, they disprove NOT ONLY Einsteinian realism but Fockian realism as well!!! (That's the core point in my IJTP paper in 2008 or 2009.) 

A sane, honest follower of the scientific method (first person or third person) must be prepared to learn from these experiments, and push them very hard to be sure of what they say and not rest until all aspects are clear. As my friend Yeshua says, to "let the chips fall as they may." 

A few months ago, we got back the first citeable results on one of the three streams of experiment, which I posted at researchgate and submitted for publication. We are still waiting to hear back. Given the realities of politics in science, who knows? But the scientific method would clearly demand full publication of the status of this important issue. The results so far do tend to favor realism.

But in the meantime, I have heard from two other groups with empirical results. Initially, I had to face the question: WHAT IF we really are compelled to give into weirdism? HOW could we even learn to live with something so fuzzy, so ill-defined? ( But conversely: even realism implies a lot of weird stuff we still need to learn to adapt to!!!) Many aspects of our planet today do resonate with weirdism. That IS a major part of our first person empirical reality, which keeps growing weirder and weirder every week for me. Even when I say the probability of weirdism being true is 1/3, that already implies I should try harder to make real sense of weirdism -- and  not by using it as an excuse to get hallucinogenic like a lot of folks who embrace weirdism basically because they want an excuse to go nuts. 

But the latest data strongly supports realism. Unfortunately, there is the nasty aspect of political realism, the many strait jackets in our world forbidding full open communication of everything, yea unto abuse of IT to put strait jackets even on the kinds of conversations which were once open and free in the US. Maybe I will be able to say more in a few weeks, or maybe not.

What IF weirdism should be true?

I don't spend a lot of time studying the nice placebo things which many "teachers" proliferate, to try to calm people down. Sure, we all need to "calm, relax" at times but that is a recipe for suicide if taken too far as a complete philosophy. (Hypocrisy and subsapience is what saves the lives of many people who Believe crazy things.) Where is the content, beyond realism?

I do often think about two old movies -- "Inception" and "What Dreams may come." Possibly important EVEN IF realism is the ultimate truth, but certainly important if not. What do they REALLY point to?

Not to a bunch of empty words, but what?