what space pioneers need to know about "the swamp" and the soul

Posted to the main list working to make space solar power a real option for electricity generation, followed by the larger challenge of human potential (what I planned most to do in retirement):

1. SPS and the swamp  ============================================

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Making SPS "real" (the target of supplying at least 10% of world electricity at a generation cost no more than 10 cents per kwh) is a VERY daunting challenge, with no guarantees of success. But it is SO important, I am glad that some of us keep discussing strategies and options and collaborations to TRY to get there. It is good that some of us are very flexible in HOW to get there, because goals as hard as this cannot be achieved without flexibility. It reminds me of the old saying "No battle plan survives the first few minutes.." 

And no army or commander survives long without a certain degree of situational awareness. ANY real success with SPS does require some awareness of the disposition and nature of what some call "the swamp," epitomized in my mind by the very specific lobby groups working for the oil industry I alluded to last time and by folks who are both committed to NASA development of expendable rockets by the least qualified possible workforce (ala Ares or SLS) AND to the elimination of any possible competition to that in launch services. A certain kind of bipartisan corruption in Washington  (similar to the depiction of lobbyists in Atlas Shrugged) is the REAL swamp, and I often wish Trump fully understood that so that he could better resist or even shrink it. He hasn't seen how it really works at ground level across the main relevant government agencies, but ... as the old radio show said..

"the specter knows," and so do the janitors like me (especially after having worked for Specter). His recent attacks on federal workers actually make the swamp worse, by making it easier for external puppetmasters to give binding orders to them. 

Here is one example of the evillest swamp at work, actually important to SPS:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/05/20/political-insiders-plotted-most-gerrymandered-district-in-america-left-paper-trail-maryland/

What does it have to do with SPS? Well, it turns out that Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, was the number one force for sanity on energy policy in Congress for many years, deeply respected by his colleagues, and powerful enough in the committee system. (And yes, he was important to me personally, as I worked closely at times with his two key energy staffers). 

Among other things, Bartlett was the chief spokesman for "peak oil" in Congress, the belief that national security demands greater diversity and flexibility in transportation fuel, and that it would be VERY risky to expect the US to meet its own oil demands forever. 

His colleagues respected him,  but certain well-heeled forces (the same ones who got rid of my old boss before my eyes) felt very strongly that that kind of national security effort and peak oil stuff was TABOO. And they simply got rid of him. 

What now? What can we do to keep the country from being liquidated, despite the unavoidable reality of those forces more firmly in place now than they were back then? 

You folks never had the experience of a certain type of Middle East oil guy (not the good Prince Mohammed type) come in to a US government agency and give them new orders to stop funding technologies which might create competition to orthodox oil and gas (which does not include methanol) and refocus research to ensure their dominance forever, with Lamar Smith's buddy standing next to him to reinforce the message. (Guess why I retired... along with half the other R&D leaders.) Nor the even worse experiences I have heard of from folks in other agencies we worked with. 

Ah, if only we had managed to get Exxon a stake in low-cost advanced launch services. But sounding like Roscoe Bartlett on peak oil is not the way to warm their hearts, to put it mildly.

Years ago, there was a small group called the "Propulsion Group" with chief economists of oil guys and auto guys with the legally required government presence. If THOSE guys were still like what I saw (in the year when I was the gov ernment presence), America really would become great again (and Exxon would sell a lot more methanol). But the great guy who set it up is 95 years old now, and a different breed has taken over power in so many industries. 

One key ever-present challenge is how to STRENGTHEN connections with Boeing, while AVOIDING the worst of the swamp  monsters (if possible by simply avoiding their turf except with a real pass from their real bosses).

Best of luck... 

#2. Reply to a friend committed to human potential ================================

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Good morning, ...!

Since the basic goal here is extremely important, and I owe you very special respect, I owe you some background information before we go further. ..

Immediately after the Nepal conference, I was ready put in multiple levels of energy and time into the goal of broadening education all over the world to

better fulfill the core goal: developing the skills and strengths of ALL people in the three great continents of body, brain and soul, including the skills to connect the three and accelerate harmonious integration of all three. 

By now, I know enough about brains to know in some depth why effectiveness demands that we take the time to remember a larger goal again and again, and come back to "replan" our strategy. 

if I were in China, I would perhaps write that last sentence in very big characters and post them as a (citeable) banner in many places. 

And so, I am glad you are still on target there.

I remember saying to a friend that I met two or three people in India from whom I might actually learn something BEYOND what we learn on the normal high level we have here in places like the old NSF and local interactions with the best people I have access to around DC. ....

And so, we had a brief flurry of discussions .. which seemed promising,  but simply ended. ..

I wanted to forward to you all of that discussion (and check to see how much you were included), but yesterday I could not find the most important part of the discussion. Maybe today it will reappear, maybe not. I do remember my greatest worry: how to make sure that new efforts are truly cosmopolitan and oriented towards skills, with an absolute minimum of indoctrination and factionalism. I am ever mindful of the way in which good intentions have led to bad results at times (not just in education but in other areas!) (Those last two sentences also may merit a big banner.) 

As an example, I think of billionnaires in the Middle East, whose great donations to education ended up producing doctrinal madressas and more secular schools producing students who can get no jobs; both have led to decay of political systems, of stability, of culture; and of the soul itself in large parts of the world. Even in the US, "Christian madressas" are a major part of the negative developments of recent years, undermining the great work of Thomas Jefferson who, for all his limitations, was a great positive force for spiritual progress in the West. I am not a devotee of Thomas Jefferson, but I am deeply appalled at how the world seems to appreciate less and less how positive he was; we cannot fdo better unless we appreciate some of the key accomplishments of the past. 

Even in the effort to avoid decay into indoctrination, it is hard to avoid the basic fact that integrated growth of body, brain and soul tends to require belief in just these specific basics -- growth, body, brain, soul and integration. (In ancient China, perhaps I would call these the Five Great Seeds of Life.) It is a kind of necessary common denominator in this effort. To demand more (other than a few basics of constructive behavior) would be very risky, and a "slippery slope." 

But discussions on the sadhu list and elsewhere have made it very vivid to me how deeply committed many people are AGAINST one or more of the Five great Seeds. Interacting with those people reminded me of two experiences from the Nepal trip -- a simple connection to the main mosque of Doha in Qatar, and the connection I made in the presence of you and Joan in Kathmandu. All these represent a kind of breaking of a serious spiritual dam. (There were two other dam breakings I experienced in Nepal, one more challenging than what you saw and one less. I did not talk about the more challenging one to anyone, and no one in our group witnessed it. If Vadaran's swami could intuit what THAT was, I will be very deeply impressed. It had a Buddhist flavor.) 

By "dam breaking", I mean a kind of connection which involves a difficult level of energy to cope with, which demands very careful patience and self-control... a good thing which can become very bad if pushed too hard, too far, too fast, too crudely. Whenever I think of "dam breaking" experiences, I remember Annie Besant's little book on thought forms, which my wife Luda and I saw on Ghandhi's shelves in Mumbai. (We still have the photograph she took, which I posted on the web.) She talks about not pushing open the eyes of the mind TOO hard and fast (e.g. with drugs) but encouraging a natural and sustainable development. What she taught really is one important resource for strengthening the soul ... as a guide to us above all, not as a doctrine to teach

(except as one of many choices in certain advanced classes, not our K-8 starting point!). 

The discussions on the sadhu list began to remind me of that experience in Nepal, as the deep energy of people opposed to one or more of the Five Great Seeds became risky. 

I decided I am not yet ready to cope with that. I do not want to look up here and see what I saw there (what you drew my mundane eyes to in fact).

Yet in my own way, just this week, I am facing up to the core issue in what you sent me: HOW to justify the reality and importance of soul JUST ENOUGH to motivate, energize and anchor Five Seeds education? Without excess doctrine?

When I signed off of the sadhu list last week, I shifted my attention on the Consciousness front to a much smaller discussion of a few people interested in scientific journal publication but still serious about soul. I hesitate to name their names now, because of certain rules. (There are levels and levels of privacy rights and of IP.) I have been doing the same with quantum physics for some time. It is like people who feel confused, overwhelmed, who do not want to risk doing something negative because of that confusion, who withdraw FOR A LIMITED TIME to core areas they know especially well. I was very happy that the topics of Carl Jung and of archetypes came up in a serious and deep way. Neuroscience is a major part of that thread. 

Again and again in my life, in more and more areas, the theme of "one step at a time" keeps coming up. Each channel of communication, mundane and spiritual, has a kind of channel capacity, both quantitative and qualitative. I often get in trouble by saying too much too soon when people are not ready, even when it seems to me that I am speaking of things which are ridiculously elementary. 

There are dams which do need to be broken, but VERY carefully, and without unnecessary red herrings.

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I should mention two more small things before closing this, and addressing some deadlines here.

First, I was stunned just a few years ago when my wife took me on a car tour of the US, and she showed me the museum of West Point, the main military academy of the US. It seems that Thomas Jefferson played a key role in planning that college. To this day they revere and talk about his goals for the college -- to develop the strengths and skills of body, brain and soul! Exactly! he was there first! It was a very successful college, though it did not FULLY attain what can be done with the three continents. In their big poster on what they do for soul, they basically listed just two activities: (1) football; and (2) affirmative action (sensitivity to minorities and gender). 

Second, last week I went back to the street where I worked for a year, in an office building of the US Senate, to attend a meeting organized by the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers) on bipartisan action on climate change. At that meeting, I met the man who actually managed Friends Community School (FCS) after we created it, after the first school head had left. I was glad to hear that he continued to work hard to push hard the basic theme of strengthening body, brain and soul. I do not think they do football for the soul -- but they DO regularly do group meditation and the course in conflict resolution (an important kind of sensitivity training), among other things, and strive to do more. It is not easy HOW to do full justice to the Five Great Seeds, and we need to have a plan to LEARN MORE with time rather than expect to know the best way to begin. By the way, he is now more active in climate, and I was delighted that he understands how climate threatens human extinction better than anyone else I have met in my travels (except perhaps an oceanographer who just gave up and retired to a beach). 

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But now I have a few more practical duties I must catch up on ...

Best regards,

But now will ALL of us/you die? Seriously?

I was very glad to hear last month about a new group of people outside the US seriously focused on how to prevent the extinction of the human species. I could not make it to their first big meeting, but maybe someone out there might care. Here is my response to them this morning:
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Thank you for your patience....!

This global survival issue keeps looking more problematic every time I look at it. A week ago, I did not exactly give up, but  decided to make time to rethink. I am glad to make contact with someone else who actually cares whether we all live or die as a species, because rethinking can easily degenerate without some discussion. 

One of the things that I wanted to do was talk about getting a group of experts (not necessary all those participating in the forum) to write a paper on measures that can simultaneously reduce 5 global-scale risks to human-wellbeing:

It is worthwhile to discuss collaboration in how to address these things and more. I am feeling a bit unmoved today in putting formal words to paper. 

The limits to my communication skills are part of how I explain the incredible failures and gaps which persist in all these areas and more. 

 

global warming

Climate change would also be on my list of top three to five :"final executioners." But not global warming as such. 

In 2009, I had access to the best climate information available to the top levels of the US government, where I happened to be for a year. 

The IPCC report projected that a business as usual scenario would lead to only 5% loss of GNP over a century, real money but not as serious as the other threats. Ocean acidification turned out to be even less of an issue. Sea level rise a bit more. But the REAL issue in my view is not warming as such, but the impact of losing the ocean currents which bring oxygen to the oceans. When I talk about "euxinia," most people assume it couldn't be important, because no one has told them about it yet, but the best available evidence indicates we are on course to H2S coming out of the oceans enough to cause death of all humans on earth (and all other mammals larger than a mouse, possibly the mouse too). Given the politics in play today, and the difficulty of the problem, it is hard for me to visualize a possible path to survival. 

I attach the twelve slides I delivered last month in Chile, which were very well received... but concluded with a brief mention of this problem. (Link to those slides is also posted at http://www.werbos.com/energy.html.) The two papers it cites, www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf and www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf, give more details. The latter is fully citeable as well as available on the internet. The latter also includes some web citations you might find interesting, such as the Senate hearing which was supposed to be THEIR best assessment of global threats. 

 

nuclear war

Misuse of nuclear technology is also on my list of 3 to 5 main topics. For three years, I was actually coordinator of the interagency research initiative looking for new ways to cope with nuclear terrorism and proliferation. A couple of years ago, I spoke at a NATO workshop on those challenges, and contributed a chapter to the (published, citeable) NATO book on that topic, which I reposted at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf.

The core problems are actually cultural in nature. In principle, I can imagine a viable/sustainable end state but the obstacles to moving forward in today's environment really overwhelm me right now.  

Nuclear war is certainly not the ONLY possible final executioner in this region of state space. 

 

global disease pandemic

I have a neighbor who would add misuse of biotech in all its forms to the list of 3-5. Global disease, either natural or dleiberate or a mix, is a major part of that, but not one of my specialities. 

 

cyber-attack on electricity grids

Actually, I do not view this as one of the final executioners. If a cyberblitzkrieg or a massive EMP event shuts down half the generators or big transformers in the US, it might bring the country back to the Stone Age as a whole series of dominoes start to fall. (Sandia has at times studied such "system of systems" effects.) Few people appreciate how much the global food supply now depends on technology, not only for fertilizers but for seeds. 

(The heard of ARPAE used to recommend we all read "The Alchemy of Air.") But massive famine in US and other countries and nuclear war are easily entangled. 

Two of the papers I just cited (NATO and GridIOT) give a brief but specific discussion of the NEW cyberthreat, which hardly anyone seems to know about despite all the ignorant hoopla out there. Like climate change, I suppose, where many say it's important but few know what it is. I also attach a DRAFT IEEEUSA position paper on urgent action needed for cybersecurity, but until May 30 I have no idea whether it will be approved. Whenever I try to save people's butts, there are smug lobby groups who try to prevent anyone from rocking their leaky little boat. I often think back to life guard class, where the first lesson was "Be prepared for the person you are trying to save to thrash and try to drown you first." 

large-scale radiation exposure from a nuclear power accident

Formally, I would fit this under misuse of nuclear technology, but again I don 't see it as a direct executioner. ONE more Chernobyl probably wouldn't do it. But a whole series might well have political and ecological impacts enough to kill us all, all entangled into the nuclear item. 

 

(that is, I would leave at "famines" as I don't see it as an independent risk, but rather, as a consequence of one or more of the above).

I do not see famine as final executioner either, but more as a pathway to a final executioner like nuclear war. But then again, famine might be what kills off the last few humans. In the H2S scenario, the loss of all food animals MIGHT be a kind of final executioner, but I tend to expect that radiation would kill us all first. 

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Besides those three, one or two other items would make it to my final list.

I often pick the (VERY serious) Terminator scenario as one of the two. Frankly, I have more formal academic credentials in that area than in the others -- basically forty years versus one to three. But perhaps "misuse of IT" is a better way to describe it; the Internet of things (IOT) is the focus, more than one or two thousand or million or billion little robots under its control. 

Misuse of brain-computer interface is also on the list.

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Must run.

One page obituary of my mother

Margaret Mary Donohue (Mom) died in her sleep two nights ago at the age of 93.  She had outlived two husbands, Walter Werbos and Gordon (Buddy) Smith, and asked more and more what the purpose was in her still living on after her three children were well-established and even the grandchildren all finished college (except the youngest).

            Mom started life in Bucks County, but became an orphan in the Great Depression. Her Aunt, Mary McFadden, leader of the Pennsylvania Economy League (and a key supporter of the anti-prohibition movement and the FDR campaign) took her and her sisters in, and funded her to go to a Catholic girl’s boarding school in the Poconos, where she won the mathematics prize and made life-long friends. She even boarded with one of them in the rural part of northern Virginia, as she commuted to the Treasury department in World War II, where she handled classified documents which were a great eye-opener to her at the time.

            She left Treasury to study nursing, to help wounded war veterans,  but caught TB herself from soldiers she was treating. In the hospital, she met her first husband, Walter Werbos, then a naval officer on ROTC, assigned to go to the Pacific. When the war ended as he was halfway across to Japan, he married her, and moved into the advertising/marketing business, gradually taking over and running the Harry P. Bridge Company of Philadelphia.

            Mom was a deeply devout Catholic, not the formal rules-based kind, but the kind who revered the sacred heart and brought her children up with a degree of intense, real, and palpable love which we wish more children could experience. She talked to her plants, and listened to their needs, creating huge green gardens inside the house.  She laughed at times at how strict Aunt Mary was, but she also talked a lot about Aunt Mary’s many accomplishments, and we were not surprised years later to learn that DNA analysis showed they shared a maternal haplotype straight from Scythia, the land of the original Amazon women. Soft and sociable but as intense as a laser in her way. Aunt Mary did genealogy work, confirmed by Walter, showing that Mom’s father’s was a direct descendant of Mortimer Donohue, who provided the first ships to the US Navy, for his in-law Commodore John Barry, and traced back to the “flight of the nobles” from Ireland. Why fight the British king in Ireland, when a whole new land was available?

     During her first marriage, Mom was a Democrat, wildly enthusiastic about John Kennedy and Teilhard de Chardin, unlike her husband, who became more completely absorbed in his business, his German heritage and support for Ronald Reagan. Circa 1971, she divorced and remarried to Gordon Smith, a very tough former Marine Sergeant who had actually fought in the “trench warfare” of the Pacific, of a more conservative upstate Pennsylvania family prominent in Freemasons and receivers of a land grant from William Penn, but Buddy mostly stayed away from such fancy stuff. Mom traveled with Buddy around the world at times, as Boeing called him in to fix helicopters, until they retired to the waterfront house they built in Avalon, New Jersey. There they led a pleasant sporty life, becoming a bit stricter themselves (but not teetotalers) as they hobnobbed with local political leaders and watched Fox News. But as she approached 90, Buddy died of disease due in part to malaria he caught in the Pacific reasserting itself, and she chose to sell the house and move in with her younger son, John, after comparing his house in New Jersey with the two others which were offered to her. She enjoyed living with him, with John’s three kids and their many dogs, until they also started moving on and her health became so bad she had to move into Brandywine/Haddonfield.  John’s son Rob was with her at the end, before that night, so that she experienced the full level of warmth, understanding support and intelligent professionalism which she deserved.

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That's long for an obituary. I wish we had found a nice way to check and edit and insert just a few more details while she was alive. 

There are LOTS more details we remember, of course. Zillions of pictures of her 90th birthday party, when John and Suzie rented a huge boat in Avalon to accommodate so many family members we wished we could stay more in touch with somehow. She joked that this was like an Irish wake, except that she got to attend her own funeral.

We have pictures of the little house in Oreland, Pennsylvania (Montgomery County) where we lived from about 1948 (when I turned one) until 1955 or 1956 (when I turned eight, when Suzie was two years old, and John was born, and we moved to Haws Lane in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, Chestnut Hill ZIp code). I actually have some memory of the time before I was one, when we lived with my father's parents in a rented row house -- and of the great excitement of moving to Oreland, and exploring the forest and creek across the street. For about a year (the 1959-1960 school year?), my mother and father were separated, and we kids lived with her in a row house on Gravers Lane in Chestnut Hill proper, from which I could walk to school to Chestnut Hill Academy and to the train station to University of Pennsylvania. I remember her inviting over a local Catholic priest, who showed me Teilhard de Chardin's book The Phenomenon of Man, and discussed it with her in the house. And I remember a very large Halloween party there which made me somewhat uncomfortable, with the whole big family, and my Aunt Loretta's husband wearing a scary skeleton suit and actually making me feel a bit scared. 

Of course, I also remember Mom's two sisters, Aunt Loretta (still alive) and Aunt Eleanor (who virtually died in front of my mother when they had a brief experiment living in the same retirement building in WestChester, Pa). And her brothers, John and Frankie... and.. a story of a brother older yet who died of shock when young, diving into the cold river north of Manhattan. John compiled his own book of family history; not a small family, on the Irish side.

John actually lived for a time with Buddy's mother Margaret, who had a big old house in Bucks County and rented out rooms, some said to be haunted. She also had a small beach house by the inland water off a small island in the Avalon complex, and that's why Buddy decided to build a big beach house next door to her; he did not do the plumbing himself, but he acted like a typical construction boss, supervising the groups who did the various pieces, relying mainly on money from my mother's divorce settlement.  Lots and lots of boating, clamming, fishing, kayaking and so on, and sometimes the twenty minute walk to the beach, and some cycling. Mom handled the books. 

When my mother felt she had to separate form my father, she first moved into a nice small house in the Gwynned suburbs of Philadelphia, near the Catholic girls day school , Gwynned Mercy, which Suzie went to at the time. By then, I was mostly away at Harvard, so Suzie and John were the ones who lived through the brunt of the difficult year. After that, after final divorce and remarriage, they went to live in Buddy's house in Marple-Newton (SW suburb of Philadelphia). For about a year I commuted 50-50 between Marple-Newton and Flourtown as I worked on my PhD thesis project. 

At Marple Newton, especially, there was also a long succession of dogs and cats I won't say much about, though it's hard to resist.

In fact, many many stories...

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Yes, there were times when our visits to the island of Avalon reminded me a lot of the Arthurian legends...

and I had a feeling that my father associated her at an early time with Little Orphan Annie.

My mother

international debate on interface of soul and brain, and quantum stuff

On the Vedanta discussion list, there has been serious discussion about Pribram's views of the mind, and about the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness.
Here is what I sent them this morning, with a few extra details at the bottom:
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From Pribram to quantum and brain-soul interface

Yesterday, Alex mentioned the traditional debate about whether quantum mechanics tells us anything real or useful about the soul or about consciousness, I was impressed to learn that Alex studied under Stephen Weinberg, who is one of the two or three most accomplished theoretical physicists alive today. 

But this morning, as I think about an assumption dream which might well be precognitive, I realize that we might be better off thinking about sensitive or critical systems rather than quantum, in order to better understand (and expand) such experiences. Someone on this list (Alex? Kashyap?) mentioned long ago the importance of "edge of chaos" critical systems in understanding consciousness, and maybe I see that more clearly now than at that time. 

To begin with -- it is a very practical issue for me in my life to try to understand how the noosphere ("soul") imprints messages on my brain. The relation between my brain and noosphere is not a one-way thing, nor is it limited to certain states of mind,  but in any serious study of psi (whether in third person science as in Dean Radin's activity or in first person approaches as I have taken), it is a central core issue how information gets from a nonmundane level to the consciousness of the brain. (This list has illustrated the social difficulty in learning form each other about that issue. If half the people think they have no mind  beyond brain, and the other half think they have no brain consciousness, it is difficult to analyze the connection between the two levels.)

It is clear that dreams are one of the most important mechanisms or vehicles for that communication. Those who prefer to read ancient books over seeing it for themselves should know that Mohammed and many of the prophets in the Judeo-Christian traditions, and shamans from  before the perversion of religion by politicians, all have included dreams as one major way in which spirit (I would say noosphere) impresses messages on the brain.

Why are dreams so powerful that way? Very simply, dream time is a time when higher parts of the brain are not locked into narrow specifics of the immediate programmed activities of the mundane self. In a way, it reminds me of old computers where memory and time where committed during the word day and cycles became free at night for other activities off of the urgent needs of the hour. Above all, the stochastic simulation capabilities of the brain (clear in LaBerge's work and mine) set loose a situation where the amount of energy needed to perturb the system to "see" things different from what comes to the eyes is far less than it would be when the eyes and brain are focused energetically on something in front of them. 

Many have been attracted to quantum effects AS A WAY for spirit or noosphere to perturb brains efficiently. Indeed, Roger Penrose seemed much more committed to quantum consciousness at Tucson this year than before -- yet his "ORCH" model assumes that gravity is what perturbs condensation of the wave function, and it remains a bit fringey to assume that it has a big effect on the brain. But pervasive "DELIBERATE" stochastic mechanisms, inserted by evolution to make brains more effective in maximizing "telos", are right there in front of us, in our dreams.

For millennia upon millenia, serious spiritual questers have experimented with various types of drugs, which, like dreams, can unleash the stochastic circuitry of the brain (which appears to be designed based on principles like chaos more than like quantum measurement, which reminds me of Walter Freeman). Karl Pribram did think about the question of what LSD might show us about the functioning of the brain (a natural question for anyone with true scientific or first person curiosity about mind and brain). Annie Besant, Ghandhi's spiritual teacher and a mentor of Krishnamurthy, had a little book called "thought forms", where she urged people NOT to use drugs, because the mind will open itself when it is ready, and we need to work on readiness.

In my one and only trip to India, with my wife on a Gate1 tour, we certainly saw Jodhpur, though perhaps it was Islamic mysticism more than Hindu which tried drugs so much. In Udaipur, people showed me an issue of Smithsonian magazine urging us to reconsider the total legal ban on any study let alone use of drugs like psilocybin associated with LSD. They argued that ancient shamans knew how to use psilocybin in particular in a safe and elevating way, and that proper protocols should be developed through research.

At the Tucson conference, I was impressed by what I learned on the fruits of that research. To put it simply -- even psilocybin is worse than I had imagined (when I read  the Smithsonian article), but MIT has developed a new system using computers which can prolong the hypnagogic and lucid state in a way which seems totally safe. Skip the drugs 100%, follow up on the MIT stuff. Even psilocybin (like ketamine and LSD) short circuits the primary reinforcement system in a way which should be 100% verboten, but the MIT protocols do not. 

Of course, there are even more natural and easier ways to stimulate hypnagogic states. Staring into a camp fire is a classic which i can relate to. Mhy wife reminds me of people who historically used water that way, which I can't relate to... but why not walk to the white water creek near us, and stare at it the way people stare into campfires? But I can remember connecting while staring at Niagara falls and in the place at China where they filmed the movie "Avatar". (The movie is a bit less fictional than one might imagine.) 

But no, it's not quantum mechanics. JS Bell, the Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics, explains nicely how the usual Bell state cannot be used to move actual information faster than light, even though it "feels" as if it should be possible. There has also been another Fermi paradox about FTL informationn flow, and limited impossibility theorems assuming traditional Copenhagen measurement rules. But current popular theories about measurement were not written on stone tablets, and experiments are certainly within reach which in my mind outweigh what Heisenberg thought he read in the Vedas.

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I am withholding details on new empirical results in quantum optics which are very exciting to me, but not yet ready for a blog post, for many reasons. 

In Tucson, I made time to bring my Samsung Galaxy Tab A. On my brief, cryptic notes for Tuesday were: (1) the name Florio for MIT hypnagogic work (one of about seven projects in that group, all on the web);

and (2) empirical results typtophan serotonin DMT pineal for all 3 drugs mentioned above.

People much worse than Bannon are preparing to manipulate folks hard

On one of the technical committees reviewing the Facebook/Analytica scandal, a weighty colleague recently posted:
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Never say, "...it can never get worse..."

I attended ... where the speaker gave a passionate/animated talk on neuro-ethics...that's not the electronics neural net but the actual brain and associated ethics. 

The investment in nanomedical technology by international players suggests that there are serious attempts being made towards human manipulation for therapeutic purposes but the potential for abuse makes social media manipulations look like child's play.  Hopefully, human beings can embrace the value in protecting there personal "beings"....if not, the future will be bleak.  [Our] efforts to characterize rational privacy legislation may actually help in defining some bio-chemical endeavors coming down the pike very soon...

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My reply: 

Yes, I agree 100%. It reminds me of Trent Frank's old saying; "You folks are only worried because you don't have all the facts. if you had all the facts you would be terrified out of your mind." (When I heard him say this, he went on to describe how he himself gradually calmed down, after he took charge of the House committee which gets the hairiest threat information.)

One of several good sources on this problem is:

https://bioethicsarchive.georgetown.edu/pcsbi/events/bioethics/130819/

Because it was close to what I was working on at NSF at the time, I watched carefully the whole day. 

I still remember the AfroAmerican woman who got up (you can see her on the video!) and asked the NIH guy, roughly: "And if you guys decide you don't like our behavior, are you going to force this stuff on us, implant it against our will, to make us do and feel what you want us to do and feel?" His response: "Why not? Why are you making such a big deal of it? After all, that's what we ALREADY do with drugs. Society has the right to decide what is acceptable behavior and what is not."

I am also worried how far the concept of "inalienable rights" seems to have been forgotten in a lot of modern culture. So if an employer decides to require a brain implant as a condition of employment, who is to stop him, or even to limit him if he wants an implant designed to change the personality to make it more docile and obedient with less of any kind of independence or ethical values other than serving the employer, 24 hours per day? 

I still remember the day (not the date, the day) when a guy came to my office at NSF looking for money for his neural stimulation technology. "Look at the great things I have already accomplished on DOD funding. Here is my helmet which can beam microwaves to the reinforcement centers of the brain, and turn a soldier into an ideal warfighter,  not distracted by anything but his assignment. No fear, no inhibitions, no need for surgery. Noninvasive that way. But I can do more, so much more, just fund me.." He did have evidence of his accomplishments. 

I also remember a small workshop on "convergence," combining nanotechnology and cognitive technology, which was basically the same thing. The neuroscientists there certainly knew the classical story of Delgado, which made it to the press, but I learned of worse cases which had been hushed up, including a doctor/researcher who used brain stimulation on female patients in a predictable sort of way. 

There actually were folks who were surprised and upset that I never became a "team player" enthusiastically pushing this kind of thing further. But let me not go on at too great length... though I should mention how FDA has been stakeholder oriented for years. 

Congressman Chakkah Fattah and a guy at OSTP were among those who pushed especially hard for more of this kind of thing. Though Fattah did other more positive things, I have to admit he may have earned it when the FBI took him down (for yet other things, probably for less benevolent motives). Still, the lobby groups which crave the benefits of this are still very active and very powerful.

The analogy to drugs (made by the NIH guy) is actually quite precise, scientifically. The short circuiting of the primary reinforcement centers of the brain is serious  business.

Best of luck,