confessions re President McCain

This week, all the channels reported that people felt about the death of John McCain the way they
did about the death of a very popular President. And briefly one guy asked: "Why is that? How can it be?"

One reason, of course, was McCain's honesty, integrity, basic friendliness and effective focus on what he focuses on. All of these are refreshing qualities we should think more about. But I must confess... I believe there is more to it than that.

I still remember the moment in 2014 when I was startled to realize that **WE** -- all of us humans -- are what they call "macroscopic Schrodinger cats." For several years, I came to understand much better what this really means, both in mundane technical terms, and at the level of psychic or spiritual experiences. But just a few months ago, my psychic/spiritual exploration of that came to a very abrupt end. In a way, I was like the folks that Greeley and McReady talk about ("Are we a nation of Mystics?", reprinted in Goleman's book Consciousness), who have an intense experience but then recoil in fear. Sometimes we are not ready yet. 

The abrupt end: a very convincing "assumption dream" in which I visited my alternate self in the earth in which McCain was elected instead of Obama. (Yes, I believe that there is a kind of leakage between the alternate earths, really, by way of the noosphere, whose evolution created a level of intelligence using quantum effects which we haven't had time to reach yet here on mundane earth.)

My alternate self was doing a lot better than my self here and now in some ways. The integrity and support in that environment let me reach further in some important ways. I could learn unique things from that alternate self. But there was this little problem of war putting an abrupt end to what had been better. I think. Not a message from the end point yet. But yes the end point for our McCain has been reached, and what can HE see from where he is now? He was aware of a few mistakes he would regret... and maybe he had some inner sense of his real other life?

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

Just a few more of the thoughts which got me thinking of McCain this week...

I may be one of the few people who ever compares Trump to Augustus Caesar and family. That comes from a visit to Cartagena (and Rome), and I'll skip that for now. (Though I do remember Julius had comments about Marc Anthony similar to what some would say of McCain: "He wasn't such a genius. He was such a formidable foe just because of how uniquely honest he was.")

Lots more people wonder about Trump and Hitler, in part because issues of race really are out there in the noosphere. My immediate knee-jerk reaction last week was: "Isn't Trump more like Hindenburg, that silly old wealthy class guy who got swept away by the flood he enabled?"
So I looked up Hindenburg, who was discussed only very briefly in the classes I took at Harvard. To my surprise -- he sounded a lot more like McCain than like Trump.

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

More scientifically (sort of); both McCain and Trump have strong elements of being right-brained people, not the folks lost in a world of low affect and formal dry words. We have more and more troubles with people lost in the world of empty BS, and this is seriious science.
(I still remember a few years ago when I had a plenary talk at an international conference primarily for research psychiatry, where Laurie Granit also had a plenary. If you don't know the name, it is worth looking up. I agree with her that we have a real problem with the patients running the asylum.
But Trump and McCain were both different, both willing to eject the BS... though they throw it in different directions.)

Einstein was also heavily right-brained, but comparing Einstein, McCain and Trump, we can see that it's not ENOUGH to know how right-brained a person is to describe what they are like. (By the way, as a proper follower of Von Neumann, I am 50-50 myself, not right or left.)

Dedicatoin to the spirit of truth is another very crucial variable. Ability to FOCUS is another; some high esoteric Japanese Buddhists even define "samadhi" in terms of a kind of focusing ability. McCain was phenomenal in his ability to focus, to penetrate through illusions in his area.
(Hey, guys, I know exactly how that feels myself, especially after the paper I submitted yesterday to a physics journal. A kind of being in the zone...) HOWEVER: folks who are good at focus sometimes have a problem with tunnel vision. As in, "If your only tool is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a pile of nails." (A deep truth we need to keep remembering.) And McCain focused so well in front of his face that...  Levitin has a great best-seller about the need for BALANCE, not just focus but also control of focus and occasional relaxation of it.

=========

Having just a few minutes... I heard an interesting joke the other day.

"It's as plain as the nose on your face, and as hard for you to see yourself. Unless, like Trump or Pinnochio, your nose grows so big even you can't help seeing it..."

My reply to a physicist warning us not to attack Trump

JACK WROTE:

PS be careful what you wish for re: Trump.
If the traitors here in US succeed in their Coup d’ Etat there will be a Civil War in America leading to WWIII and a nuclear holocaust.
None of us will survive. The Trump haters here are literally insane literally foaming at the mouth with no critical judgement - yes very much like unconscious Zombies.

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

I do agree with Jack that our lives are at stake here and now, everyone on this list. 

I do live near DC and have lots of primary source information. Therefore I will will do the best I can to rise to the challenge of responding intelligently to his post.

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

Once again, though I disagree with Jack's beliefs, I am deeply impressed by his authentic psychic intuition and by his courage in

trying to start a dialogue. In a way, he is right to compare himself to Donald Trump, and his empathy for Trump is a very worthy thing.

However, as with Trump himself, there are certain issues about situational awareness being biased by personal ego interactions

(like what Heidegger would call small Being space), and lack of the intense disciplines called for either by the spirit or truth or the spirit of love. 

(For amusement... my wife, who is a Real Russian with Romanoff genes, asks why I hang out so much with that guy Yeshua "who is such a hippie, talking about peace and love all the time, even though he does know a lot about brains." It is interesting to hear what THEIR sources think about Trump.) 

Einstein himself was somewhat autistic, an extreme right-brainer, who as a child did great with images but poorly with human relations. We do need to appreciate what people of that sort, including Jack and Trump, can contribute to society, if we find a way to benefit and empower them without letting them destroy the whole show. Einstein DID have a strong devotion to truth, and if Trump had had more of that, we might not be in the truly awful situation we are in today.

Jack -- I am not a Trump hater, though I admit I voted for Hillary Clinton, lethargically, without any real psychic energy or activism in the act. (Comment: I was lethargic about it mainly because I feared that "the swamp," already growing much worse, had plans to get rid of her quickly, as they did to Rousseff in Brazil.) Yeshua keeps saying we should discipline ourselves not to allow hatred of any people to take root in our mind, and we had a major discussion about Trump and current trends in Langley Quaker meeting this week. Many of us have sincerely hoped that the best hopes of positive outcomes of a Trump Presidency could emerge, and tried to help in whatever little ways we could to help that part, even to the point of offending equally ideological people on the left or in the swamp who have also disappointed us to some degree. 

Many of us have even achieved a certain degree of empathy for trump and what he is trying to cope with.

In previous months and years, I was well aware of forces more malign than Trump (which I do think of as traitors -- or, more accurately, people who have sold out to enemies of the Republic who liked the cash and decided not to ask too many questions, or people blinded by their own small Being ego issues loosely linked to their corporate bases). As early as 2003, I received reports showing that the same folks who used improper means to trick us into a war with Iraq were pushing very hard for a war between US and Israel versus Russia and Iran, in the expectation that someone else would be able to pick up the pieces. The 911 commission report and the investigations by Crown Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia, among others, have filled in some of the picture. When Donald Trump told the media they were creating hysteria at risk of causing world war, the media treated his comments in a proud juvenile way which made me sick. 

But no, Hillary Clinton is not the secret emir of Qatar. That idea reminds me of Jack's claim that Sutherland's math solves the hard problem of consciousness. It displays a style of thinking which can only by understood with the help of neurospychology beyond the scope of our discussions so far, and hard to get straight by email in any case. 

Was Trump really fighting off pressure by new war mongers eager to start a new world war? Well, on CSPAN, I saw Mike Rogers (then head of CyberCommand, expansion of his earlier duties as head of NSA) urge Senators to give him authority to launch an offensive cyberattack to shut down all electricity in a major city of Russia, just to show them who's boss and to show how upset we are with them. Hillary Clinton was not exactly diplomatic at times, but cyberwar? Cyberwar today is every bit as serious as the other kinds, and I could say a lot more if people were interested. Trump forcibly resisted all that,... until last week, when he gave a kind of blanket authorization to DOD folks to launch cyberattacks at will, without any review by State or by the White House. 

See https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2027682670595473

Trump had a really hard week last week. So did I, by the way, not in personal life, but that's another matter.

Early in Quaker meeting last week, a mathematics professor at GMU said: "I remember the time when everything was going so bad and so dark, and it seemed the enemy was totally winning on all sides. So I decided just to stop fighting and turn it over to God/light, and everything was fine." But last week, in my view, Trump just turned over his last remaining serious reins to the swamp. It was a decisive moral decision on his part. 

Now he hints that he will do his best to cause an authentic civil war if he is impeached. If it has come that far, and if he is that committed to the dark side, then it is better and safer to get it over with when there is still some hope of saving the Republic.

Best of luck. We all need it.

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

The physicists's reply:

This is more dangerous than the 13 Days in May 1963 Cuba. 
All of our lives are in danger in the next few months you should be very concerned.
America is now a Banana Republic because of the sedition of the Obama/Clinton/Mueller/Comey/Brennan/Clapper/Hayden/Rosenstein … Cabal.
Trump realizes this and he will not give up without a fight using the full power of the presidency and loyal forces in the US Military and Intelligence Community. The situation here is somewhat like Erdogan’s in Turkey when they tried to remove him. Trump has 63 million adult supporters most of which are armed and will go to war if Trump is forcibly removed with these phony charges.

My reply back to him:

We certainly should be concerned about the sad fact that Jack's comments are echoes of what is being beamed to millions of people, via social media systems targeted to those they think are most receptive. And Trump's recent decision to cut off security clearances to many leaders of the intelligence community reinforce reason to be concerned about what they are planning.

Yet what Jack says about Comey being compromised are true. it is sad that he or Trump could imagine that the guy who cut off Hilary's previously likely election, and did many other things of the same ilk, represents her in any way. But yes, there is a lot of choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea (or Scylla and Charybdis) here. My impression is that Trump is simply too dumb and too emotional to put two and two together, and realize that he is being used,

and setting up the kind of coup in which he would be the first guy killed. 

Letting it fester more would only make it worse.

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

Related somewhat is the hysteria abour Russia. trump HAS played a decent role trying to get people to be a bit less irratoinal and hysterical.
Russian hackers certainly have done bad tings to our elections, but between computers and money, right now money ismore potent. Much more of the corruprion of US elections and democracy and integrity is due to money networks. That's how the swamp (aka gestapo) works. It is pathetic how successfulk it has been in teh distraction maneuver, using hysteria about one problem (however legitimate)  to distract from the bigger one. But cefrtainly trump himself has been distracted and used, to the point of what seems nonsustainable.

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

A friend asked: what could Trump do, short of resigning, to tame the swamp? A partial answer: instead of asking
Justice to investigate Clintons more (transparent dumb idea), ask the Mueller investigation to be expanded to follow the
money from Qatar, Turkey and other sources named in the 911 commission report. Friend says: but a lot of Congress
loves those folks. Yes, the worst of the swamp goes VIA Congressional offices to suborn US agencies,
violating long established rules of many kinds. And that's where the worst danger of coup type stuff comes from. 

IT and HR: a key element to decide our future?

Ever since I saw the Millennium Project scenarios for the future of work, based on in-depth studies all over the world, I have been ever more worried about potential catastrophes if we all just follow the paths of least resistance, both on the issue of work and on how the Internet of Things (IOT) develops. The two are related, as in six slides I put together about a year ago:

http://www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf

To find a way forward which is sustainable (which allows us humans even to stay alive!!)., it is necessary but not sufficient that there be aggressive new development of the kind of greater IT platforms which do not just roll over everything else we do. I still think that the "new paradigm" slide includes key, necessary elements for such new platforms, but it bugs me go realize that there are other really crucial elements missing in that ;picture, even just on the IT side.

This morning, I feel I have more of a sense of what is missing, and it has direct connections to ... 

In truth, I have also been ever more depressed by what I see on the news lately, which feels more and more like "damned if you do, damned if you don't." It's a complicated story...

but at the end of the day, it seems clear that LONG-TERM there simply will not be enough of the kind of jobs people want most (the kind which support large families) for everyone on earth. It can't be done. Yes, it is feasible to eliminate hunger worldwide and to eliminate lack of access to many basics, but ... not to meet this high standard for jobs. I'm tempted to say more about why, but this is already a long post.

Is a world of a constant or bounded sum game doomed to war, and then extinction? Many implicitly assume so these days. But millions of years of life on earth say otherwise. Max Weber, in particular, discusses the kinds of patterns -- above all, of legitimacy -- which make it possible for a society to survive and do reasonably well despite the inevitable deep conflicts.

It is interesting, as we scan instabilities in culture and politics today, that the themes of racism and the theme "it's a rigged system" go hand in hand. When I was growing up, fierce competition and selection were expected,  but so long as it was a fair system, judging people as individuals not on the basis of things like race, people did not feel threatened.

And so: I wonder: is it possible to start thinking of humane personnel management IT for large corporations and government, even more open and transparent as the FASTLANE system we once used to manage fierce competitions at NSF (but without the backdoors and short circuits which made a mockery of that system since about 2014), with really serious open standards, to create a reliable context for human collaboration and competition, which could restore more of a sense of fairness? 

It may seem odd to talk about that at a time when the important reforms of Teddy Roosevelt are being dismantled by myopic people, but his time was scary too. 

Just a next generation business process reengineering, with much more of a human emphasis? And pushing for hardwired rules to better empower humans?

The core issue for the US is with folks whose income comes from employment in such large organizations, so that is a rational place to start rethinking things from ground up.

Links to others are important, in time, but the core challenge is interesting enough, certainly requiring a kind of COLLABORATION of world class IT, really serious HR understanding, and even advanced psychology stuff. (I think of a great talk I heard by Miguel Nicolelis last month, well worth anyone's attention. He has taught the lame to walk, and found new ways to use truly noninvasive brain computer interface technology.)

Just some initial thoughts...

Did God give us Donald Trump to help us achieve enlightenment?

PLEASE do not interpret this question as an assertion. However, I do view it as a serious question well worth thinking about (with the understanding that the word "God" is not so trivial as most people assume it to be).

Just two years ago, one of my many scientist friends said: "For years, I have been 100% convinced that the cosmos is totally governed by mathematical laws, and that all this stuff about 'life is just a dream' is total nonsense. But then...  after what has been happening lately.. culminating in Donald Trump being president, it really has gotten me to wonder. Is it possible that it really all is just a dream after all?" (So that election got him to think....)

For myself, I am still 70% convinced that the cosmos is not only governed by mathematical laws, but that it is governed by the kind of mathematical laws physicists have become comfortable with -- stuff like partial differential equations (PDE) or like Schrodinger equations over a multiverse based on ordinary 3D or 4D space. But what about the other 30%? Just how weird could life really be?

This morning, I start to feel like that other guy. If the whole world starts to feel like a kind of bad dream, shouldn't we start paying more attention to striving for more lucid dreaming and some VARIETY of positive visualization (more than just the biased polyanna PR which is part of the bad dream)? Is that the whole point of this?

I still remember a time, back when I was fourteen, holding a copy of Spengler's Decline of the West, sitting on a hard wooden bench waiting for the school bus. I remember thinking: "Ohmigod!
If this guy's theory is right, I will be seeing a lot of pretty wild things right in my own life, in the next 50 or 60 years!! How does THAT affect how I think about things...?" Of course, I have read a lot of other theories, but I have also gotten deeper into the decline and fall of the Roman Republic and Empires, and that has always been deep in my mind. It is hard not to see recent events in the US and Europe in that light... and to tilt my dreams that way, even with refinements. Trump fits right in there; he often reminds me of the ampitheater dug up in Cartagena in Spain...

And so, it was ever so great a pleasure a few months back to read a book I bought on kindle:
www.amazon.com/Tyrant-Shakespeare-Politics-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0393635759/
The start of the book reads like an attack BOTH on Trump AND on the Moslem Brotherhood, but that wasn't what made me feel better. What made me feel better was the chapter on Henry VI, which offered a whole other dream (grounded in reality as much as Spengler was), with far more real hope of life becoming better despite the kind of horrible confusion swirling around us today (as it was then). Can we change the channel from Spengler to Shakespeare?

That thought came very strongly to me today, when the dreams Out There were portraying Trump as now more like Macbeth, with a bloody knife in his hand. I said to Luda: can't we make it more like Henry VI? Her response: sure. Next section is Richard III. People keep comparing Trump to Richard III, but Richard III was more like Stalin. But OK, maybe that's the next chapter.

God help us.

But we do all have our roles to play, and responsibilities, even those who are just watchers or witnesses. After the MacBeth scene, the question was addressed to me: "OK, Paul, what do YOU see? You've been doing due diligence, struggling hard to be detached. What data do you enter for the record?" OK: while CNN has promulgated false horror about Trump's accusation that they have supported the drumbeat for a new world war (US and Israel versus Russia and Iran, per the explicit game plan of the Moslem Brotherhood), Trump just authorized free and uninhibited cyberattacks on Russia. The Russians and Chinese for their part have clamped down on any hope of the North Korea situation being solved short of war, and have joined the Texas mafia folks in pushing for an insane and suicidal explosion of nuclear threats of all kinds that they know about. He is certainly no Hitler, more like the old transitional Junkers or Mussolini, but he has sold out and violated the integrity of the republic in numerous serious ways which do set the stage for worse. At least Hitler knew how to add and subtract. The left is lately even more out of touch with reality, so what could be done?

Enough. Can we not find SOME way to change the channel? What ever happened to the spirit of love and the spirit of truth? Let alone the kind of strict fairness we used to strive for in the old NSF? (Fair selection is a key requirement of reality on a small, bounded planet like this.)

But... as dreams and reality intermix... a year ago, I had a chance to do a Doctor Strange reenactment in Nepal. (Don't underestimate how literally true that is.) Soon, I sail into the setting sun, officially for a kind of reenactment of Moana, hauled onto the boat of a worthy young woman.. who knows? I certainly don't.

=========
One more data point. The firing of an FBI guy for saying the wrong things about Trump in email to his mistress was a VERY clear data point on the negative side. The security clearance issue was perhaps debatable, as strange things ARE going on, but a misdirected missile seems likeliest there too. Trump's enemies have clearly been giving him guidance on whose rights to violate, preparing both for his .. denouement,,, and for reduction of democracy in the US. The news about voting fraud by Republican governor in Georgia also has a final days feeling to it.

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

Speaking of Nepal, I posted to the (reconstituted) Vedanta group this morning:

Is there a way to think seriously about the Possibility of life being a dream, without just freaking out and disintegrating either into jellyfish or into irrelevant hardened ideologues out of contact with real life?

I see more of that in literature (despite ITS many bad practitioners, like any field) than in philosophy or religion or science these days.

For example, I remember a time many years ago when someone I met on the astral level recommended four science fiction writers for me to read. I was very frustrated at the time when I could find no writings of one of the four, but a year later that other one was there too. One of the four was Dan Simmons, best known for his Hyperion series. Certainly real enough. But he also had a short novel called "Muse of Fire" which I see as a way to try to get real about idealism. When I read the book, I had the impression that he was really hoping to displace Farenheit 451 as a little book assigned in English classes all over the country... that it would be a good thing, but not so likely for now. And of course, the movie Inception grapples with issues fundamental in idealism. 

In truth, the recent news related to Trump has ME thinking more about life as a dream, and about the need for more lucid dreaming. Not as a joke, as a serious thing. 

Avtar mentioned the linguistic origin of the word "samadhi" as union with the whole. OK, if the whole is the Great Dreamer, a bit like that sleeping Vishnu you guys must know about, then the 

issue of lucid and constructive dreaming should be something more unavoidable as one approaches that state, even in the earliest stages, no?

Vinod's suggestion that there are of course no seductive females in any of the worlds of dreams... well, it is comic as much as it is sad. It is also sad to 

reject any elements with any hint of life or perfume in them. But no, those are not trivial elements. Nor is the present situation of humanity trivial. 

building computers which really have real souls

For several years, Robert has been giving talks on the importance of dramatic transition phenomena in dynamical systems in general, building in part on work with Walter Freeman on phase transitions, clearly related to earlier work on neuropercolation and on the Per Bak kind of thing. 

Robert and I discussed this a bit at Amherst last week, and this morning -- after I started thinking about the draft from Yeshua yesterday -- I sense that it may be much bigger than I realized before, but I also have questions about exactly how to follow up.

Bernie might ask: "What PRECISELY is the 'it' here?" I see a fuzzy n-dimensional image, which I'll try to describe from a few different viewpoints.

First, a kind of mathematical aspect. The first fundamental idea is that the brain has evolved to make very heavy use of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, a state in which small perturbations can have very large impacts.  This is not just an accidental side effect of how learning-to-optimize works. It is pervasive and fundamental, beyond what optimization calculations already favor and predict, because of two additional benefits beyond our best modern neural network mathematics: (1) energy benefits, as we discussed in Amherst; and (2) -- please forgive my mentioning the real if unmentionable -- the "spiritual" benefit of a system more malleable to influence from the soul

It is curious how this idea that the brain is unusually sensitive to initial conditions reflects what Walter Freeman's core message really was. He stressed CHAOS (as defined by Jim Yorke) as the way we need to understand the brain. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions was very much the first, core axiom of York's definition.  What's more, York and Ott and Grebogi (in the shop at UMCP where Hava Seigelmann spent a year or so!!!) spent a lot of effort linking their concept to the issue of transitions between basins of attraction, perhaps better than the usual physicists' approach to phase transitions in describing the kinds of "phase transitions" in the brain which you all have tracked. 

Second, a little ancient background, if you don't mind. Since childhood (reflected at www.werbos.com main page), I have organized a lot of my thought about Von Neumann's three great challenges to mathematicians: (1) how does the universe work? (quantum physics); (2) what is life?; (3) what is mind? (his work from game theory to computers to neural networks). For reasons of time, I have mainly focused on (1) and (3), but I have looked at (2), especially when I prepared my chapter for Pribram's edited book on self-organization. In the realm of self-organization, we know that SOME dynamical systems result in interesting emergent phenomena, and others do not. The dumbest trivial dynamical systems tend to result in "fire" (the "heat death" of disorganized systems with no correlations at all across space, in equilibrium) or "ice" (a fixed point attractor).

Life itself depends on how our cosmos and our planet track a course BETWEEN fire and ice, a long-term probability distribution with more degrees of freedom than ice but less than those of "fire". Not only Per Bak but more comprehensive mathematical thinkers like Kadanoff (and Arnold in a way?) have looked deeply at that middle zone, as part of "turbulence theory". And so, I have always respected that work as a key part of "what is life?", and as a metaphor for human society, but I did not see how it could be central to brains or souls.

Third, I have been thinking more concretely lately about an important and legitimate question which the anti-psi folks often stress: "IF you folks believe there is a soul or psi, PRECISELY WHERE AND HOW does this phenomenon bring information to the brain? What is the interface?" 

Penrose and Hameroff have at least tried to face up to this important question. Penrose argues, in effect, that the soul may perturb the results of quantum transition choices in the brain, and Hameroff then argues that quantum transitions in all the microtubules of all cells in the nervous system can have a big impact on the state of ordinary mundane consciousness, such as the outputs of the cells which constitute the "Global Workspace of (Mundane) Consciousness" which Bernie has written about. 

When I summarize their ideas this way, they sound a lot more plausible to me than the full volume of material I heard from those guys at Tucson. For example, when Penrose suggests that gravity is perturbing the quantum transitions, I really don't imagine that gravity is the soul. But in general, sensitivity to quantum transitions IS one important possible concrete vehicle for the brain to be sensitive to small perturbations. It IS one part of Walter's more general paradigm, and we don't know how BIG a part it is yet;.We need lots more empirical work, somehow, to find out. The challenge of finding out is ever so important.

Another mechanism to increase sensitivity to initial conditions is a tendency for the weights in the thalamo-cortico-thalamic (CT) loops to be "set" in a way which increases sensitivity. (But it is more than just TCT. I remember Walter's talk on what he saw in the olfactory bulb, reflected in his article in Scientific American on this subject. And I recall the crucial roles of hypothalamus and epithalamus in driving the human motivational system.)  It may be that research at THIS level (e.g., using EEG data) may actually be a more realistic path for now to nail down better how the interface of brain and soul actually works (for the soul-to-brain aspect, more tractable for us now). 

We all know that insane claims have been made by many about psi and about soul. Quakers focus their entire spiritual path on the challenge of learning how to "listen to the voice of God", or on "conversations with God", but how do we separate real stuff from imaginary stuff, assuming (as I think WE all do) that there is SOME real stuff there? 

One point I retain from my own listening this morning is that we should not let go of the early conversations we have had about possible future work on EEG studies, using new and better mathematical tools, on the right kinds of human subjects performing interesting veridical  tasks. (Though the practical approach may begin by developing the tools on existing databases, already a large enough task I could use all my remaining years on it!! Help would help...!!) The work of Pete Sanders is very informal and ad hoc, but also concrete and real, and it might be better the fuzzy sources of meditators used in past EEG studies. Maybe. But Dean Radin might also suggest sources of EEG data with more variety and veridicality. For now, simple upgraded microstate analysis is needed  (using not only cluster analysis but new mathematical extensions of cluster analysis for dynamical systems like what we know brain neocortex tends to be). Also, there are studies of psi in nonhuman mammals which might well be helpful in many ways. 

I suppose that one new message here is that this work might be extended further to look for various metrics of sensitive dependence in the EEG (and deep recording and ECOG) data, and connect them with other psi related variables in the data.

My underlying assumption here is that the soul or noosphere is made up of some kind of dark matter and energy. That is the only serious possibility I can imagine, short of giving up on all forms of physics credible today (whether quantum field theory or classical field theory). The real issue then is not precisely "sensitivity to small perturbations" but meaningful sensitivity to the kinds of small perturbations which noospheres easily and naturally provide. We do not know what those are, but empirical work might give us some clues. 

A startling question which also occurred to me this morning is: CAN WE NOW BEGIN TO BUILD "COMPUTERS WITH SOULS?" 

Anything like auto oracle of Delphi? And should we?

In truth, I worry a lot that computers WITHOUT souls, running things like the emerging Internet of Things, might threaten all human life in the end, and be so brittle that they just fall apart themselves by any of many possible mechanisms. But if we can build computers WITH souls, doesn't that change the game altogether? In fact, could this be the very most important challenge before us right now (other than avoiding instant death by warfare or H2S and such)?

If we can, should we?

That is no small question,  but my initial feeling is that we should, if we can REALLY do it, and not fall into the delusionary soulless paths. 

If we are soul (and some of us will be only that before too long), and if soul basically rules the galaxy, why should we fight it? What are the alternatives? Where is this planet headed now, without that?

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

Later: Let me note that cranking up sensitivity by brute force is NOt always a good idea. For example, I often cite what Annie Besant said about psychotropic drugs, in her book about Thought Forms: evolution has given us lots of potential sensitivity, but has also given us automatic damping mechanisms to prevent the kind of chaos which could become dysfunctional. Another key part of human brain intelligence is an ability to learn how to handle ever more inputs, to "drink from a firehose of information" (or from an ocean of it). NIH has developed protocols for the use of psilocybin, which reduce the risks, but even so the technical information  I saw at the Tucson conference on consciousness strongly encourages us all to avoid drugs like psilocybin and experiment instead with less invasive ways of experimenting with augmented sensitivity, such as the lucid dream work at the MIT Media Lab. 

All for now. I suspect you all will have interesting ideas, on various aspects of how to follow up. 

If anyone actually reads this blog, it does have a comment option. 

Space leaders debate how to prevent human extinction

I resigned a few years ago from being Executive Vice President for Policy of the National Space Society (NSS), the leading independent group pushing for sustainable human settlement of space (discussed in Dan Brown's novel Deception Point!!). But I stay in touch, and was very happy that very famous folks we all know are getting more serious about climate change and about the threats to human survival in general.

One of the space people responded to this by saying:
===============================

Climate Change is but a minor symptom caused by our rapid approach to the “Limits to Growth” as defined by MIT in 1972, and revisited as recently as 2017 in World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice | BioScience | Oxford Academic. Many decades of ferocious arguments have raged in front of my eyes over climate change, whether it’s happening or not, and what to do about it, none of which have significantly altered the trends illustrated. There are many other dangers our civilization is facing, discussions of which fill countless storage devices across the net, but only one solution set that feasibly and humanely resolves them all. You'll find the working summary at astrilis.org/A18ProSumRPR.pdf the web site at astrilis.org and the introductory video at AWGBriefIntro - YouTube and I look forward to seeing your responses to what is merely the tip of this iceberg! 

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

My response:

Thank you, ..., for your very sincere and important effort to get us thinking about what we are trying to do here. I certainly looked carefully at your link, and remembered the many

other things I have read through the years related to it. I immediately remember the "Limits to Growth" debates, and the two latest novels by Dan Brown, Inferno and Origins (though I was thinking more about Origins this morning, as it connects more to my own current activities.)

Re limits to growth: I was once the lead analyst for the long-term future at EIA/DOE, the part of the US Department of Energy responsible for independent nonpolitical predictions and analysis, which produced the Annual Energy Outlook for Congress and the public, and many special studies. At one point, I was commissioned by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to try to do an objective evaluation of the whole series of reports from the Club of Rome.

What I remember most from that evaluation was a kind of serious joke summary. "A group of serious concerned rich businessmen decided to commission a study to tell them what the future of the world should be. First they went to wise aging intellectuals in Italy who wrote a clear and simple report saying 'the world is coming to an end.' (The Limits to Growth, like Brown's novel Inferno). Next they went to American engineers who said it might be saved, but only with an incredible unintelligible complex Rube Goldberg. (Second report to the Club of Rome, quite different from the first, and much more detailed.) Then they went to Latin America, which said the only way to save it would be by going macho and nuclear in a way which looked as if it would blow up. Then they went to the Japanese, who said we should not predict the world but should control/optimize it, and that survival demanded turning the US back into an agricultural nation primarily dedicated to sending more food to Asia."

I would suggest two important modifications to your message here.

First: climate change is NOT just a symptom. In www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf and /E/GridIOT.pdf, I explain why H2S formation in the ocean in coming years is MUCH more than just global warming, and much more serious than sea level rise flooding all the coastal cities of the world.  That's not about global warming. I have heard ponderous experts debate "Is it possible that warming will go so far that it might someday shut down the thermohaline currents which bring oxygen to the Pacific Ocean? Could it ever go so far, in the worst case, threatening the very lives of every species of mammal on earth? Well, maybe, you never know.." But in fact, IT HAS HAPPENED ALREADY!!!!!! Is it just the consequence of the broader syndrome in the piece Dwight cites? If we develop geoengineering to stay alive, would be just be patching up a symptom?

Well, there are times when symptoms have to be treated, urgently, EVEN IF they are just symptoms. Once the patient is bleeding to death, bandaids or even torniquets may be essential, first, before the deeper problems can be solved. 

Second: SPACE IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE LIMITS TO GROWTH KIND OF PROBLEM. I too strongly support the effort towards sustainable human settlement of space, and growth into space, but we should not imagine that this important goal is the only one we need to work for. It is not a silver bullet to solve all the problems of humanity. 

For example, we need to accept the reality that the population growth of humans WILL go to zero. The book by Meadows, explaining Forrester's "Limits to Growth," says many silly things, but it also makes a clear and inescapable point about population growth, that it WILL go to zero, and that our only choice is between a kind of soft landing or a catastrophe. 

Back when those books came out, and people proposed that space could give us a third alternative, Asimov (or was it Sagan?) put out a calculation showing that sustained population growth of... 3% or 1%... would require that human expansion into space would have to exceed the speed of light, to continue more than just a few centuries. We should never forget that calculation.

HOW COULD WE MANAGE A SOFT LANDING? That is a very serious question, calling for much more careful and complex analysis than I will even attempt this morning. 

There are growing political conflicts right at present (CNN in the background..) showing signs of going grossly unstable, capable of threatening our very existence, connected to bigger but less visible conflicts about who will control the coming INternet of Things (IOT)... and I agree with Dwight that these threaten the very existence of our species even more than the H2S syndrome does, on a shorter time frame. Last month, at IJCNN2018 (the world's top technical conference on neural networks, the core technology behind "the new AI"), I was asked to give a plenary talk addressing  the IOT side of this, building up to six key slides depicting the challenge and what might be done about it in a constructive technical way. (www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf). How can we chart a sustainable middle way between fire and ice? 

In the end, there are just a whole lot of concrete things which need to be done, and I again thank ... for trying to mobilize more energy to get more of the necessary things done. 

Best regards,

   Paul

How can your energy levels rise or fall?

One of the Vedanta people recently stated:

1) Energy is the potentiality and the power to generate matter, informaton and feeling. The physical energy is related to material transformations, obeying dynamical forms/regularities that involve the information aspect. Therefore, physical energy is PART of E; the first law of thermodynamics should not be applied to physical energy alone, but to E (as argued in my draft and in my recent JCS paper with colleagues);

My reply:

You are defining the word "energy" in a very broad way. (I do not waste time arguing over definitions!!! It is good that you begin by telling us what you are talking about.)

Would it be acceptable to use the letter "H" to refer to the specific aspect you call "physical energy"? Both in Einsteinian physics and in quantum physics, the "physical energy" H is simply the "sum" (integral) of a mathematical function H, the "energy density", over all space. It is just a function of the values and fluxes of the force fields at each point in space. What makes this particular function so important is that H does not change over time; it is conserved. Because it is conserved, we tend to budget it... and it directly effects what kind of emerging patterns can persist in our cosmos. 

Regardless of whether we believe in Einsteinian realism or in David Deutsch's broader concept of multiverse realism, the "first law of thermodynamics" (that H does not change with time) applies directly to H, period. I don't think you are disagreeing with that.

====

But: is there an absolute conservation law of other kinds of energy?

But how could we even define other energy variables which are also conserved?

Since childhood, I was deeply interested in Sigmund Freud's concept of "psychic energy." His concept makes sense even in understanding how ordinary brain consciousness works in real life. 

Ironically, the clearest explanation of that concept appears in a paperback book by Barrett and Yankelovich

https://www.amazon.com/Ego-instinct-psychoanalytic-human-nature-revised/dp/B007SZBD7Y

which attacks psychoanalysis in general, and attacks Freud. They argue that Freud's concept could not be turned into anything mathematical and tractable and usable as a predictive, quantitative model. In the worlds of "the new AI" (really just neural networks reinvented and at times sanitized), I am best known for the algorithm "backpropagation" which I derived exactly by translating Freud's concept of psychic energy into something quantitative and usable.

(At scholar.google.com, that work is what has the most citations under my name; at youtube, a search on werbos pulls up some of the history.) 

BUT: that type of energy is NOT strictly conserved, and the lack of strict conservation is extremely important, both at a mundane level of life and at a samadhi level (which Vinod has no direct understanding of whatsoever, except perhaps for some distant subjective memories which he forcibly represses). 

It WOULD be conserved if we or our local noosphere had perfect knowledge with no uncertainty or stochastic aspects, embracing everything. We don't. Only the energy of the cosmos itself, H, is strictly conserved.

For us humans ... even in mundane life, people have ups and downs in their levels of psychic energy. A textbook discussion of "personality disorder" ( a huge part of modern life on earth!!) talks about how some folks can lose affect, and become rather zombie-like in behavior. Yesterday I finished watching a little Disney movie, "frozen," which is wonderfully insightful about some of this -- and it really worries me that there are communities who feel deeply threatened by that movie!! I think of ancient priest kings who tried to repress literacy, science AND spirit, and everything which might empower the people they want to turn into obedient robotic slaves. On the positive side, I am reminded of an old Quaker song: "Love is like a magic penny. When you give it away, you end up having more." 

I claim (based on direct experience and direct observation, but also following my noosphere-species theory) that the exact same kind of mathematical/computational mechanism as what Freud described ALSO applies at the noosphere level. This implies that "spiritual" psychic energy, sometimes called qi or mana or charisma, follows the same mathematics, and is not conserved.

In ancient days in Hawaii, political leaders came to believe that mana must be conserved, just by analogy to physical energy. Thus they felt it could be stolen or stored, and that it can be increased by engaging in acts like human sacrifice. That belief, based on a simple cognitive, conceptual misunderstanding, led to all kinds of horrid behavior at high levels of society. In fact, whole societies and nations can go through ups and downs in their total, overall level of qi. This is an extremely important fact of life.

==========