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Saving the World

Monday, December 30, 2019

Lessons of history: is our real choice Terminator versus The Matrix?

Some futurists have asked us: what future do we CHOOSE? I thought a lot about that long ago in middle school, and then asked more and more: "What our our ACTUAL choices? What kinds of states are attainable and sustainable as a kind of attractor state? If you think that all you have to do is dream up what YOU think is the best social/economic/political system, yes, do dream big... but then ask yourself what would happen if your new social contract were staffed and implemented  by a family of chimpanzees?" That reminds me of a lot I have seen in this world...

I was so lucky that kids in my school could talk about Toynbee's World and the West, a book which asked important hard questions back in those years, and showed me a path to other work by Toynbee, Spegler, McNeill and others (yea unto Marx and Weber and Jefferson and more of Aristotle in college). "Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." And "those who assume dynamics without actually studying time-series data and facing up to their initiale rrors should change jobs."

I was delighted to hear of an open  journal continuing that tradition, Cosmos and History, and published a paper recently in that journal. But where is the intellectual community continuing that analysis? We have lots of well-connected would-be dictators now in the US who revere Trajan, but where are the folks who know the REAL lessons from what Trajan did to the Romans (which many folks start to do to us)?

That being so, I was delighted to hear of a major new thrust based IN JAPAN which tries to fill in that very important gap, to help inform some very serious (even urgent) decisions in front of us now at the  crossroads of history.

Here is the link I was sent today on that thrust:
========================================

On Sun, Dec 29, 2019 at 10:56 PM Bill Daul <bdaul@nextnow.net> wrote:


https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2019/12/25/commentary/japan-commentary/big-history-helps-understand-todays-issues/

Big history helps understand today's issues

BY HARUAKI DEGUCHI

==================================================
My reply:

Thank you, Bill, for informing us of this very important strand of thinking. (See his post and newspaper story below.) 
Recently, I had a paper published in the online journal Cosmos and History  (I think),
but was deeply disappointed not to find an internet venue (google groups? special package?) to dig deeper into the issues which that journal talks about addressing.

DO YOU HAVE a URL to suggest to dig deeper into those basic questions?

i4j has another mission. It can help and linkup, but a more dedicated, more cross-cutting thread is needed.
I looked up NextNow, and it too seemed to have very different goals.

In the past, I was excited by the mandate of a Lifeboat discussion list: to discuss what are the most serious threats to the very existence (extinction) of the human species, and rational strategies to minimize the risk?
Learning from past history is one of the important starting points or resources for that discussion, but it has petered out in recent years. (People told me that David Brin built on that to create a viral blog, but is he into two-way asking of tough questions?) SO WHAT WOULD YOU RECOMMEND NOW TO GET DEEP INTO IT, EITHER THE BIG HISTORY TOPIC OR THE LINK TO SURVIVAL?

For what it's worth, I was invited by JS&T to fly to Japan myself this month, to give a talk on how we can avoid a kind of future history collapse due to misuse of AI and other internet technologies, already a pressing challenge to governments around the world as the dynamics of history actually change in a serious way. Rather than fly, I chose instead to record a video talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4&t=12s 

(They tell me it has been translated into Korean, and gotten some real circulation there.) TWO of the eight slides actually depict extinction challenges discussed at Lifeboat, with the kind of details and evidence to make it more than just the usual BS. I was also asked to give a talk in Seoul on worst case climate change, one of the four:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPccNVHRFIM

For my PhD at Harvard in crossdisciplinary applied mathematics, I was asked to defend two possible topics in an intense oral examination in 1971 or 1972. One was the coupling between biological evolution of humans and the rise and fall of civilizations, with lots of reference to Toynbee and Spengler as well as Eisenstadt, McNeill ( https://www.amazon.com/Rise-West-History-Human-Community/dp/B0006AYML2/). The senior Harvard faculty became very excited by the topic. I still remember when Karl Deutsch, my adviser and president of the International Political Science Association became very uncomortable when I cited studies showing big shifts in some motivation variables in a mere 7 to 10 generations, and stated how everyone in that field knows that such shifts have effects only over millions of years. Then the top mathematical biologist, a close associate of E.O.Wilson, gently explained how political science needs to learn more about reality, and cited a host of papers himself. After an hour of listening to their debates, and saying almost nothing myself, I meekly walked out, having graduated with flying colors, but not having talked about the OTHER topic, the mathematics of intelligence or mind, which is what I actually chose. (At scholar.google.com, the version of that in Asian languages is my highest citation. US AI people are not so far along yet in using what I did long ago.) I wanted to understand brains better first, and get some practical experience with history, before trying to nail down the other topic. Now would be a great time to get back to it, in a really serious way, if anyone is able and willing to discuss it.

==========

On the Millenniums Project list, someone recently asked "what future would YOU choose"? 
I wish that were a real discussion list, but it has other purposes. If it were an open-ended discussion list, I might have started by mentioning how I started worrying a lot in high school "What are our realistic CHOICE?" We can fantasize til hell won't quit what kind of world we WANT to live in, but that is simply not realistic. I once said to a friend: " Try to design what you think is the BEST form of government, fitting your values. And then try to picture what will happen if the entire system is staffed by chimpanzees." (I have certainly seen hearings and trials which reminded me of that sentence.) Identifying what are realistic choices, informed by the empirical data of how history works over long times (for humans and also other species), is a key part of any honest, useful response to the question.

For the moment... as I look at how money and DNA once ruled humans, but computers are on track to ruling money, my gut feeling this morning is: The most accurate depiction of our real choices may be a lot like the deep, inspired science fiction series Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It starts out as something we don't understand, which turns out to be a war between a Terminator kind of AI (slightly gentler?) and a Matrix kind of AI, in which our best hope for now is to help the Matrix side win and more fully value human beings.(Of course, there is also a choice of new internet apps so primitive and devoid of real intelligence that we all fall apart like some folks' tax returns under an IRS audit. Current governments' policies actually look more like that one, a more Spenglerian possibility.) 

I doubt the Terminators would even listen to talk about people-centered internet, but that fits well in the Spenglerian options for the future.

Please forgive if I close with a photo I took in Japan a few weeks ago, which somehow seems to fit here. It is a picture of the gateway to the future, entry to the highest and most sacred of Shinto (sanzan) shrines... with an icon of the macroscopic Schrodinger cat just past the gateway. We have CHOICES now about our future history, and this multifurcation point in that dynamical system, but physics has been more and more clear that many choices actually DO HAPPEN in the multiverse we live in. Deepak Chopra sent me a link yesterday, for example, to a new article MIT Tech Review, which appears to attack objective reality but describes yet another new experiment which proves that macroscopic Schrodinger cats actually exist. Meow. 

Thanks again for your post... and I look forward to further discussion in another venue (unless others here want to dig in as well).

    Paul 


Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 8:41 AM No comments:

Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Trump impeachment hearings: a Rorshach test for the world?

trump Impeachment hearings

Do you remember what a Rorshach test is? Basically, they show you and image which is somehow very compelling, but different people have  very different strong reactions, all thinking they know what they are really seeing.

I suppose that a majority of the people look at these hearings thinking EITHER "We really need to save the world by getting rid of this evil person fast" OR "Those evil Democrats are scheming to destroy us all and must be destroyed first."

An intelligent Democrat recently said to us: "I don't understand why the Republicans don't join this. Don't they understand that they too will be destroyed if this guy continues?" My reply to her: "Maybe some of them want to wait until after the election, when they think THEY will get to decide who replaces him." But that was a big "maybe"; many possibilities are in play.

My own immediate response was: this reminds me of the severe importance of those internet design issues I have not committed enough to solve, issues which the rest of the world somehow can't see straight on, so much so that disaster seems to loom on every one of the alternative paths now in clear focus.

It reminds me of how humans alone, as the only REAL intelligence making decisions on earth, but empowered by ever stronger technology, seem to be on a path to extinction well before the hundred year climate stuff. The hearings make me think of humans killing themselves. Yes, we see one overloaded guy at the center of the hearings, lashing out in dozens of disastrous ways. But we know that there are many others in play, on far right and far left, who may not speak as openly as he does, who have even  crazier things to say.

The war between the left and the right (NOT the only war in play) reminds me a lot of Lotfi Zadeh, the famous father of fuzzy logic,whom I had a lot of contact with when he was alive. He rightly attacked irrational extreme black and white thinking. But what was his alternative? A fuzzy middle?
When I look at the choices for US President, the best I really see in the neighborhood (in a fuzzy way) would be Klobuchar, whom I think of as "the candidate from that weird unappreciated place called planet earth." Will Iowa bring her at least to consideration? Yet when I hear her echo the party lines on the Middle East... which Trump has rightly resisted... it limits my enthusiasm. And in any case, what chance does she have? (Sure I would vote for her if I lived in Iowa.)

What this REALLY tells me is that humans alone may not be on a path for survival. Even if human life is number one on the list of what we care about, is it not time to think about  the need for a bit more real coherent intelligence on this planet? Could a well designed automated dialogue system run a less silly and confused management of BOTH sides in events like this hearing and the one to come in the Senate? Or even to the messes which CAUSED the hearing, messes due to ANY President (or chairman) having greater and vgreater power not really restrained by objective reality?

No, I am not a devotee of Ethereum. I do not believe that Elon Musk or Ethereum are the salvation of humanity, Karl Schroeder's novel Stealing Worlds is closer to the spirit of what may really be coming as IT changes the entire world game, but  the reality is more than that.

BUT: instead of the misleading, cartoon promises of Musk and of Ethereum, can we come up with designs which really make good on those promises, which have a really solid mathematical foundation?

The sad fact is that I do not know anyone else on earth who knows nearly as much as I do about that stream of applied math. And yes, I know the players and the field. I see partial answers, which are important, but how could we avoid a grossly dehumanizing endgame?  Why are humans today so oblivious to how serious the threats are?

Part of it, I suspect, is that they don;pt understand basic principles which culminated in Von Neumann's book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. We are heading today towards a Nash equilibrium, which means death in the new game, and do not appreciate the needs and possibilities for a realistic progress towards Pareto optimality (building on important foundations which many of us know a little about, but not enough). Some folks think that AI is about a bunch of little apps on their smart phones (or independent robots) which will just fight it out.

But an integrated market style system implies further risks.

In the end, in the struggle between silicon and  carbon, I see a mess as bad as these hearings. We need more from a third player, which I view as dark matter and energy ... the authentic spiritual side of human life. But where is THAT in the hearings? Nancy Pelosi has said a few things suggesting she might remember a bit about soul...

What if your best hope is something clearly present but very hard to focus on?

As a tangent... there is research which might help a bit in injecting dark matter and energy into computer systems, as well as enhancing human life in that natural way. But will people even remember it after I die of old age (the timing of which is ever harder to predict in my case)? Will humans even remember that self-destruction and extinction are not the only choices? 


Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 6:00 AM No comments:

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

A discussion of the meaning of meaning and of the meaning of life

Your question was (I think) roughly:
What is the meaning of meaning, without falling back on using some kind of quantum explanation?

My first reaction to this question was to remember all the weird debates which result from people assuming such different meanings for the word "consciousness". To understand reality at all, we need to get used to working with multiple sensible definitions, and not getting hung up[on less sensible ones.

But what of the meaning of "meaning" itself? Of course, it too has multiple sensible meanings. One is the usual interpretation of the first word in the previous sentence -- "meaning" as in the meaning of as word or phrase, which naturally leads into discussions of language. We have already discussed the basics of how language works. The world does need better support for "natural" language dialogue than what Facebook provides; a better computer network system would be better grounded, among other things, in the issues of multiple meaning in English, and of how such confusion can cause sincere confusions and fights of all kinds. 

But yesterday, another group reminded me of another meaning of "meaning." What of meaning in life, of purpose? That is even more central than language itself in our lives. After all, creatures who do not know English will often have a strong and important sense of purpose, even just in mundane neural aspect of their consciousness.

That group sent out data suggesting that the whole world has a growing problem with a lack of purpose and sense of meaningless in recent years (or decades). That is serious too. Can Cosmos and History help address THAT kind of thing? Can anyone else do so, without falling back into animal noises?

On the other list, I responded with:

====================================
John's post is an example of an issue which it is challenging to really account for analytically, scientifically and in strategic policy -- yet it also of utmost importance, demanding that any sane person should try to pay real attention, while not pretending there is an easy solution.

I have to admit that the issue of purpose becomes a personal issue for me in recent years. For example, what is the purpose in trying to explain and prove certain new directions in quantum foundations at a time when other issues are likely to kill us a lot sooner, and people's ability to care and understand seems ever more problematic lately?

For me.. believe it or not, I was heartened somewhat by some of the comments of Pope Francis, as he visited some of the same places which my wife and I visited and probed just a week or two before.

What struck me hardest: when he said (roughly): We cannot save the life of the earth unless we first learn to really love it.

On Facebook (or youtube) it is easy to locate the back to back talks of Ban Ki Moon, Jerry Glenn (leader of www.themp.org) and myself on climate, Monday (two weeks ago) on Korea TV. But the sheer craziness I see on that subject in my neighborhood (near DC) really saps morale and effort and effectiveness and so on. It was very helpful to me that my wife arranged visits to dozens of centers of nature and life in Japan, and two days in Korea before the conference, reminding me in such a direct and personal way how much we really do love the life of this planet, and really do care enough to try to strengthen the connections to it and do the best we can, however daunting the obstacles from those who do not seem to be speaking from love or from sanity. (Caveat: for me, "sanity" is a technical term, referring to a concept which this list may not want to get deep into. If anyone cares, one of my papers last year says more: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z. )

And yes, a coherent sense of purpose is fundamental to "sanity" as I use that term, but in some environments the way ahead is much clearer than in others even at an equal level of sanity.
And that can affect anyone. Design of a better environment for humans is a crucial challenge in integrative IT design, among other areas, but I see a lot more lip service than effective design grounded in the basic principles of AI, etc.
                                                                                                             
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the way, my direct, personal feeling of connection to life in general... as I experienced it in Japan last month....is illustrated in the photo album I posted at https://photos.app.goo.gl/aX9eKnuLmPLybxWc6
That was so good for morale!!! But it would take another long essay to explain the meanings and connections of all the many ... images... 
Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 11:51 AM No comments:

Saturday, November 30, 2019

YES WE COULD: Example of how climate risks could be reduced much better and cheaper than any of today's crusades

So many people still believe that we cannot reduce the worst case climate risks dramatically except at very high economic costs!! Yes, all the comprehensive plans we see at high political levels these days would be ineffective or economy busting, but better options do exist by making better use of market mechanisms and new technology. Last week on Korea national TV (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPccNVHRFIM), I gave just a general outline of a "new" five point strategy to do exactly that -- make deep cuts in the worst case climate risk at minimum cost, by using real focus and strategic thinking on all five of the points on this slide.
================
One of my friends in the energy sector asked "Is that really possible? For example, for the car and truck sector, could we make deep cuts without destroying our economy?"

Here was my initial explanation of why we can:

=========== He said:
One huge problem is giving up oil will kill the economy, and vast numbers of people will die from the collapse.

===============================================
One of the five points in the central slide I showed is listed as "reduced GHG from cars and trucks."  I don't think I used the word "oil" in the talk, because of limited time, but I pointed emphatically to www.werbos.com/oil.htm, which includes (along with less important things) the exact proposal from Senator Specter which he asked me to write and try to get to the floor in 2009, and the more recent, more thorough Transportation Policy report from IEEEUSA.

The emphasis was market-based fuel flexibility and choice, NOT the dumb pseudo-conservative bloc which picks winners and losers and tries to implement government monopolies!!

Those things grew out of a talk to 200 folks in Rayburn which I gave in 2007, invited by Congressman Kingston (then no 3 in the part in the House) to prepare for Bush's EISA bill (which was not as flexible and open in competition as we would have liked). The main slide, also in that folder, emphasizes a CHOICE, but puts more attention onb alternate liquid fuels.
Later, for another talk for Inglis (R), I showed the actual economic impact of the flexibility part. It actually would double revenue of **US** distribution companies, but cause deep cuts in money  flowing to the Middle East.

I guess the latter are who really have power in DC lately. I still remember when Lamar Smith (R-Texas) had the Director of Engineering of NSF bring in a Middle Eastern oil guy to give us all new marching orders in 2014. A big part of why I (and many others) retired. 
================================================
In more detail: He replied:

Paul, what I am talking about is a PV to synthetic hydrocarbons scheme.  Probably not a US kind of project, since these really low cost for power has shown up only in the mid east.

Current policy in China tends to support what many people told me in 2017: that PV electricity at 3 cents per kwh daytime in contracts actually signed in Chile and Middle East APPEARED real because of huge subsidies to PV manufacturers in China. Those are going away. It seems that the real cost was more like 9 cents per kwh just for daytime power in favorable locations. For the moment, PVs are no longer part of the "A team" (for earth). The "A team" for earth-based solar power is a form of SOLAR THERMAL solar farm, the form which Gary Barnhard helped educate us on at ISDC Alexandria. It is a new breakthrough in power tower technology, using new advanced Brayton cycle engines to convert concentrated heat to .. electricity. It comes with low cost thermal storage (usually estimated at $50/kwh, $50 per kilowatt of permanent reusable storage capacity, about one quarter the cost of targets for future batteries). There was a big news item recently about Bill Gates putting a big investment into taking the lead in that technology. The Middle East was pulling ahead, even though this is a US technology, because corrupt and evil politicians were shutting down the US capability, but for now Gates seems to have saved the day and kept the US in the game. 

BUT: you were asking what the implications are for how we power cars and trucks, using alternative liquid fuels. Alternative liquid fuels really are a crucial part of any rational, efficient policy to slash the net greenhouse gas emissions from  cars and trucks. 

In my view, the EISA law of 2007 passed under the leadership of George Bush junior was a really great achievement, and I was very happy to help make that happen. BUT THE TECHNICAL DETAILS MATTER,
because the supply of alternate liquid fuels has been far less than Bush hoped, because of (1) terrible regulations, terrible enabling rules for EPA, due in part to nasty intrusions into how the bill was written, but also due to oversight of EPA; (2) less progress than we would create, if we are rational (getting more from new technology options like the ones you hope for AND others; and (3) a certain kind of spirit of never doing things differently, like a little dog barking and biting at the unknown even when its very survival depends on new hopes.

Specter's bill would have solved (1), led to a massive durable increase in energy security for all of our allies as well as the US, and, as I mentioned, an INCREASE in revenue to US fuel distribution operations. Good old fashioned bio based fuels could be adding MUCH more than they are now. We spoke to Reid's staff who said "No, we MUST pass an Obama bill before we can even allow discussion of anything else." He also made promises to Specter which he did not keep, which resulted in Specter leaving. 

But yes, additional competing new technologies to make alternate liquids could have gone further. We wanted rational, fair markets to decide on the market shares of SEVERAL options, all of which should be made as efficient as possible by new R&D and such. Not PVs but there are many others.

Many years ago, UNH developed a system to create liquid fuels using the concentrated heat in the "eye of the obelisk," the place in the power tower solar farms where we now put Brayton engines. This makes a whole lot of technical sense, because alternate liquid fuels require a certain amount of free energy and a certain amount of raw delta H; the most efficient path balances a mix of both (as provided by concentrated sunlight) to drive the chemical reactions making the fuel. Using ONLY free energy (like electricity from earth or space) is inherently less efficient. 

But there are many other options as well, and several "B team" options which have real hope of doing better if we do the aggressive exploratory R&D intelligently. (Fat chance of that under the New Order!)




Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 3:08 PM No comments:

Wednesday, September 18, 2019

What do we know about war as population control or predictable outcome of uncontrolled growth?

Many space people (Musk?) have proposed that a New Frontier is what we need to avoid the Malthusian growth and collapse which we have seen in dozens of promising human civilizations through the years.

As the left and right fight it out, I have once again proposed that the truth lies in the middle, and demands that we use our brains a lot more to have any real hope to avoid extinction. Forst, what I said to them:

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



... wrote:
of the tribe are present in their female children.  Thus genes *for*
going to war were selected at close to 40% per generation.  This is a
very high genetic selection, we should expect it to be nearly
universal.

Depressing, but evolutionary psychology analysis is often depressing.
It's so depressing that I have never finished an article on it.
But if someone wants to see a draft, ask.

This is an important area. There are many areas where I have figured out ways to "get out of the box" of rigid, thoughtless assumptions... but not enough time to wfrite them all up. Therefore I have often sought collaborators I could trust, and have even found a few. (See scholar.google.com.) 

This is one of those.

A new way to do evolutionary psychology specifically for human history was one of the two topics I defended in the oral exams for the PhD at Harvard. The faculty was much more interested in the new positions I presented on this, the first topic, but I chose instead the second topic. (The thesis has thousands of citations at scholar.google.com, which gives you some idea why I regretfully neglected the first topic, and why I also stepped down as first Presidnet of Harvard Committee for a Space Economy. I am so grateful that Mark Hopkins took up THAT  baton.)

The faculty were excited in part because THEY, acknowledged leaders in their diverse fields, learned so much in heated arguments between EACH OTHER, where they learned that the assumptions in one field about another are sometimes wrong. For example, I suggested that the typical lifetime of human civilizations (a few centuries, citing folks like Toynbee and Spengler and Eisenstadt and many others) is similar to the seven to twelve generations which are enough to cause huge changes in the genes for social behavior, reflected in part in books like E.O. Wilson's classic text Sociobiology. (In my view, that is STILL a fundamental, seminal source, cited less lately because of simple stupid political correctness pressures. I am tempted to say more about those, but let me wait until it seems more appropriate.) Ed Bossert, a sometime collaborator with Wilson, explained to my advisor (Karl Deutsch) that six to twelve is a very precise number, backed up by a huge mass of experiments, quite different from conventional wisdom in fields like political science. As Wilson says, there are multiple time scales at work here. Wilson did not understand the brain or culture learning dynamics as well as some of us now do (as in my ACTUAL thesis topic!), but that does not wipe out the huge value of the insights he DID include.

Keith mentions depressing conclusions. Yes, it is a major challenge how to rise above those scary things -- but, as with climate change, the best way to reduce the probability of bad outcomes is to understand WHY they happen so often. AFTER one takes a lot of time and effort to understand it right, without stupid ego defenses getting in the way and stimulating stupid reactive guessing left or right. 

Depressing?

Beyond E.O. Wilson, another seminal source (still deeply respected) is the book Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems, which came as a huge shock when it came out.
MOST ecological networks lead to massive crises and extinctions. We don't see that so much now in nature because so many extinctions have ALREADY occurred, and things did not change SO much after that.

Well, folks, things have changed and are still changing now, massively. In my view, we either use our full brains (yes, including space development, but also including some of the other stuff Barbara Marx Hubbard sensed), or we have little chance of surviving the many emerging threats becoming ever more real every day. (As I type this, I see news in the background of Iran joyously sending autonomous new weapons to folks like Houthis to threaten the world oil price. Just a hint of what may be to come. Is it impolite to describe what the IRG is?)

But a New Frontier is not enough, for the moderate long term. One reason why I did not choose this topic was that I knew I was missing something. Now I have a better idea of what.
At ONE important level, it comes down to nonzerosum n-player games, like what Von Neumann and T.C. Schelling described. It comes down to something LIKE a certain kind of social contract or immune system. It IS possible in principle, but it is not easy. Do enough people really care and understand? 

But this email is probably too long for this list already, as it does address a different subject. 

Best of luck. We all need it.

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

Addendum: At Facebook, I have posted several posts with links on what I learned about this subject in many cruises 
and treks through the Pacific and Latin America. MANY societies had terrible Malthusian collapses, but viable new social contracts 
based on visible, transparent new social contracts offering honorable competition on a new "worldview" foundations often worked very well.
Better management of new emerging IT (from  cryptocurrencies to information to weapons, with new security mechanisms) 
and global climate threats, COULD WORK if we face up to the need for cooperation of the most important powers. 
"Smart brains and apps,smarter integrative platforms, and clear simpler 'immune system' rules for everyone." 
New technical standards for IT to make it real, and to safeguard the fuzzy broader concerns we hear of from governments all around the world.
If regulation of IT is managed like the tax code, we all die.

ReplyReply allForward
Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 1:43 PM No comments:

Tuesday, September 10, 2019

To EU and E Warren: is a sledgehammer the way to fix google etc?

Finally people start to realize that massive changes in the world internet have just begun, and that massive problems could emerge if we don't develop a better system of cooperation. The EU has promised to develop a global regulation system to control AI, and Warren says she will just break up Google, Amazon and Facebook.

There really are many lethal problems moving fast, but do any of these folks have any idea how to fix them?

I keep being haunted by an image on an unshaven auto mechanic wielding a huge hammer, saying: "I ain't no engineer. I don't know how cars work. but I sure can fix YOURS but good.."

======

In parallel with that, there are a few discussions starting up about how one could do it right.
Here is one example:

A really crucial issue here is metrics, and truth in metrics.

My wife has told me more about "B" corporations, which do not HAVE to be organized around maximum
profit. I hope SEC allows that, not just some states. From what I have seen of oil company shareholder meetings in the UK (well publicized for good reason in FT), THEY have big and powerful shareholders who want a strong signal that a weighted sum of profit (however measured) AND climate change benefit is what they want, at a minimum, starting ASAP, because a lot of people might suffer if we don't get going, in the opinion of those (well informed) shareholders.

THIS IS NOT JUST a cause in itself, but a great TESTBED example of structural changes needed to really accomplish stuff like that.

For IT folks:

What would be needed to allow creation of a new corporate "spreadsheet" (or"blockchain" or certified ledger) with entries which predict LONG-TERM benefits to reducing risk for climate change?

Short term measures just won't do the job (e,g, allow sustainablepolicies to results), because myopic measures like the number of solar panels on roofs tend to force BAD, counterproductive decisions. (For electricity in Europe, better than solar panels in houses in the north would be big well-designed solar farms in southern Europe hooked up by new transmission, giving Germany the HUGE side benefit of redirecting money for loans or governments to money which buys them electricity and creates real jobs in the South.) 

=======

SINCE the world IS going to change very massively in the next decade or two, due to new IT far beyond the wimpy zero generation "AI" which you see in the press these days, we need to think more clearly and concretely about what the possibilities MIGHT be like,
grounded in the more advanced new technology. 

I will soon recommend that anyone interested in these transitions read Schoeder's new sci fi,Stealing Worlds. I am only 100 pages in, 
and may or may not end up agreeing with the final conclusions (even he misses some important stuff), it includes many possibilities which we need to account for. I was amused by discussion of a new platform (used by only a few companies) where an AI runs an entire company instead of the CEO. (After all, of shareholders do not NEED a CEO...).

No, that would not be a face recognition program. (Some versions of Watson IOT sound exactly that dumb. My slides at www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf depict a few options relevant to corporations and larger systems, which some folks tried to take over big parts of the US government, folks who still try.) It would be a decision-making system. Alpha Go is a very simple decision system, but MUCH more powerful are in the works, some in use.

But good decisions by human, by AI, or by some kind of conglomerate (designed how?), require FORESIGHT. 

In fact, the time-series kinds of networks which can offer that (with probabilities and scenarios etc)are important to HUMANS as well, since they are crucial to accurate "state identification," and even to humans learning what was FOUND in massive data trawling exercises. 
If people's data disappears into a black hole, and is not input to networks trained to output TRUTH... there are many sinkholes ahead of us in the unregulated IT world. Is truth essential both to automated corporate spreadsheets and to preserving the full rights of consumers and workers? And how do we enforce truth in those neural networks or hybrid neural/human networks?

Of course, the management of short-term performance metrics (not the same as long term bottom line larger scale goals) is also a challenge requiring lots of training and truth.

Many old style AI folks want to go back to digital expert systems using Boolean words for the next big step. That won't work, but DIALOGUE with humans is a key element as well. It is an interesting question what LEVEL of AGI should be used/allowed for now in such functions.

Best of luck,

    Paul 
============

My old alumni association cites an editorial on the problem of truth in news:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/impartiality-is-the-source-of-a-newspapers-credibility-11568109602

This is just one of the many serious manifestations of the issue of designing truthful networks.
Of course, the folks who deduce things about YOU from YOUR data is also serious.

Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 10:24 AM No comments:

Sunday, September 1, 2019

climate threats as a testbed for new AI to cope with pervasive fake news

People have asked: Why should we feel any need for any change in corporate management laws, structures and culture, even as new IT
is about to change it all not just with local apps but with the overall system and its metrics?

I don't believe that climate change is the number one threat to human life, or that the changes should all be about climate change,but it IDS part of the picture, and it is a beautifully clear example of the LIMITATIONS of today's information networks. If we want to think realistically about how to design (more intelligent) information networks, it is good engineering practice to think in realistic concrete terms about how the present networks are screwing up.

And so, here is an example which haunts me. A top engineer made some comments about climate change which I replied to as follows:

=======================================
When climate was the main part of my job (working for Senator Specter in 2009, on loan from NSF),I was amazed to have close contact BOTH to:

(1) the folks funded by the oil and gas lobbyists pushing hard to tell us that warming of the poles is a myth;
(2) the planners for the oil industry, putting billions into new efforts to take advantage of the huge opportunities of the ice-free Arctic coming soon,
asking for billions in policy support to make sure WE get the good stuff before our competitors do.

That reminds me somehow of a hearing where people asked for support to sequester CO2 by piping it at high pressure into chambers deep in the ground. "This is absolutely safe; we have proven it," When asked what they need most:"We need federal guarantees that the government will bear the cost when it escapes and explodes." (There are better ways to handle CO2, but there was more money in lobbies trying to extract more money from the taxpayer.)

As for all those fires raging out of control in the Amazon, are they just a sign that Bolsonaro is an obnoxious person with evil capitalist policies? Even if that is PART of the story, is it really the whole thing? Proudly correct people have told me that it is,  but then came Bolivia. And then, somehow missed by our press, is the story of unprecedented new fires across Siberia, more serious than the ones which DID get world shock and press about ten years ago. Could it be that it is a secret cabal of Putin, Bolsonaro and Morales, as the current spirit of  thought seems to suggest? Or could it be that we actually live on planet earth?

===========

In a different discussion, a more visionary engineer pointed me to some important news on the science side:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/priyashukla/2019/08/31/scientists-may-have-discovered-what-caused-one-of-the-planets-worst-extinctions/#74e0b1a63c7c

That represents real progress on the basic science side, reinforcing what I summarized in my vimeo interview about the coming H2S threat, for which we have maps from NOAA from actual data. 

But again, this is just an example. My PhD thesis advisor once wrote a famous book, the Nerves of Government, and I ask: how can we really design neural networks that actually lead to availability of some real information, for situations like this an others? The "fake news" problem is not about hiring censors repressing independent thought, or about Russia interfering with our elections; those are just symptoms of a more fundamental unsolved design problem. 

===========

Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 3:57 AM No comments:

Monday, August 26, 2019

Lungs of earth on fire? No hope unless we rise above BS.

Climate challenges threaten the very existence of the human species, but attracts a kind of BS distortion effect which undermines any hope of meeting these challenges in a clear rational way, without which there will not be much hope.  Key message: we need better information flows, somehow, freeing us from the twin BS effects of fake solutions and fake indifference.

The debates this week about what's happening in Brazil are a beautifully clear example. The entire EU has united behind President Macron at the G7 in attacking Bolsonaro of Brazil, for allowing "the lungs of the planet to catch fire" through his Trump-like policies encouraging unrestrained development. But the counterreactions have been even more distracted and off-beat:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/08/26/why-everything-they-say-about-the-amazon-including-that-its-the-lungs-of-the-world-is-wrong/#338d78a65bde

Yesterday, when Luda drive me to Quakers, I said; "I will NOT be EITHER a hippie or a berserker. We have too many of both those irrational attitudes out there already. " So what ABOUT Brazil?
After all, we have really been there, and what we see in the press doesn't seem to have been there.
We have met strong Bolsonaro supporters AND opponents, and see how BOTH groups have important points to make. What about that real, hard truth? What is REALLY going on, for all us earth people, not just Bolsonaro or Macron or Macri?

Luda's first observation: Why isn't the press covering the big new fires in Siberia too? It is not just Brazil.

That was a zinger to me! About ten years ago, there was LOTS of publicity about Russian soil and permafrost burning, during a summer which was then the hottest on record. That was not Russian development policy; that was global climate change. (NOAA posted color maps by month, showing record heat almost everywhere, though Afghanistan was a bit cold back then, fitting the spirit of the place at the time.) This is a key input to accelerated methane release, and a major worry for folks considering a coming breakout. Why WAS a new larger event not reported? Personalities?

It reminded me of our visit last spring to the best organic chocolate farm by the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil. So MUCH has happened in the politics and culture of Brazil that I was happy to have a quiet conversation in broken Spanish in the forest with a guy who had been working there for decades. "What do you feel about the big changes here? Such very big changes?" I thought a civil war or two might count, but he surprised me  by pointing to the trees and talking about the huge effect of climate change on their life. I don't think he got that from CNN! (Hint: he pointed to what he saw in his life.)

So it's not all development policy, but policies have effects.

I could even imagine a fake news story ("the voice of Loki"): "It was all about Trump. Chinese are trying to get revenge on Trump by cutting back on US soybean exports, and they have to ramp up imports from Brazil -- mainly via Cargill -- to make up for them. So of course they are putting pressure on Bolsonaro and Cargill to do a massive ramp up, to hell with long-term impacts on the soil, just to get over the short-term problem.  And yes, long-term impacts could get lots of people killed and impoverished, but does Beijing care? Do they even care about the people of Hong Kong?"

(I do keep hoping Xi Jinping will find a way to "make lemonade out of lemons" with Hong Kong, but few political leaders are creative and mature enough to really go THAT far.)

More seriously, the critics at Forbes are right that the Amazon has not been recycling that much
carbon to the soil, for generations untold. We read many sources on the Amazon when we visited there last March, such as the book "River of Doubt" and books I showed pictures of on Facebook.
Most of the soil is quite shallow. The current wildfires remind me a lot of the wildfires in California and Pennsylvania forests, which were important when we worked on truly rational strategies to reduce net CO2 emissions. (The good old days of rationality...). Since Bolsonaro, like Trump, relies heavily on advisors (some of whom know more but have strong corrupt vested interests), this may be the whole story, so far as he knows.

But there are very important things people haven't talked about as much.

The first thing which struck me is :"Do these guys know about tera preta or biochar?"

The soil around the Amazon is NOT all shallow or irrelevant. We even posted photos on Facebook of the fertile American-looking town Bel Terra, founded by Henry Ford, not far from Santorem. (Thanks much, Pierre!) In THAT region, the local tribes followed a very distinctive practice of agriculture which vastly increased the carbon content AND fertility of the soil. For hundreds of hears, there was a mix of tribes, some just burning away (like some Mayan cultures heading towards disintegration), but some building foundations of a new sustainable, high-product ecofriendly culture. Grazil had spent lots of money supporting ALL tribes, but more emphasis on the SUSTAINABLE stuff could be hugely valuable both to Brazil and the world. It is not Bolsonaro's fault, exactly, but it is a continuing lost opportunity. Trump was right not to imitate the gross ineffective waste of the Obama climate bill or certain past EU efforts, but why not do something more efficient, more product, less cost, less waste? Will the new EU investment in the Amazon expand (and upgrade) terra preta and biochar? One may hope. Any truly rational carbon fee for the US would include rational payments to US farmers, managed by programs USDA was prepared to implement, which incentivize effective new practices which enhance the soil AND sequester more carbon. But if we don't know how to be rational, can the Brazilians?

By the way, google "Lovelock biochar terra preta" to learn a bit more, a very big part of the global situation. A hell of a lot cheaper than the dangerous underground CO2 storage favored by certain lobbyists hoping for fees much larger than what biochar needs...

And then there are new sources of biofuel and renewable electricity, two other really big political failures in Brazil so far. Lost opportunities, still available in case of human intelligence. I could write about them in even greater length, since I know THOSE players too. But this is long enough, and I wouldn't want any berserkers to give ME priority today. They have done enough already, and we have enough real hot wars going on.



Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 7:54 AM No comments:

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Debate on God with an Irish scientist friend

His post to a neuroscience discussion list:

Why not get rid of God altogether? And indeed get rid of the self altogether? We may eventually catch up with Buddha  

Another guy's post:

OK, I'll bite. Where self is the primary object of consciousness in the sense of "self-awareness", you can't get rid of self without also getting rid of consciousness. But you can't get rid of consciousness, because it's the primary experiential fact of your mental existence.

My response:

We all come from different cultures. You may be amused to consider what a big difference it makes that Yeshua and I have different associations ("meanings we hear in our minds") when people use the words "bite," "God" and "consciousness." Do we even live in different cosmoses, some real and some less so?

"Bite": Yeshua and I have spent many hours poring over real-time data (>1khz) from brains of rats and mice, and remember very well what Pribram and Freeman said about those creatures. Most important: how 99% of the human brain is equivalent (at the level of mass action and primary learning systems supporting brain level consciousness) structures. We have seen lots of political leaders REALLY bite (really exercise brain structures they don't advertize), so when a human promises to act like our leaders.. some of us might take that seriously. But I will try to be discreet about it. 

"God": Some would say it is just a fine point. What is the difference between getting rid of the word "God" and getting rid of God? I would sooner ask what is the difference between a sane or sapient organism and one who does not make this distinction. It is in fact all about differences in how we use words, in how we use loaded words central to the relation between our values and feelings (in 99%) of our brain and what we say to ourselves in words or other symbolic reasoning. We have a very serious problem with sanity or sapience in decision making in this world, and the need for folks who make the distinction and learn a higher level of discipline is very important in a very practical way. 

Since I learned a fair amount about the spiritual side of life (say, in the fall of 1972, after some new experiences), I have had very deep but quiet respect for those ancient Hebrew mystics who simply did not use MANY of the names translated as "God" out loud, because of the terrible confusions and false associations. Only after the relation with my wife became closer, and many years of Quakers, did I feel it would SOMETIMES convey more truth than entropy when I use that word out loud.

Above all, if we are sapient/sane, we will never forget that "God" is JUST AN ENGLISH word, defined by social conventions which themselves are variable and untrustworthy, embracing a wide VARIETY of legitimate possible definitions. For this particular word, legitimate definitions (in human cultures) include a mix of real things, mistakes, ill-defined noises and fuzzy mixes. A sane human would not embrace ALL of these definitions, and would be very careful in using the word for that reason. 

Sean has criticized certain Hindus for worshipping "God" defined as "consciousness" equated to"the Absolute." In truth, I have seen SO much variety in people who call themselves Hindus -- likewise for Christians, for Moslems, for scientists, and even for oil company people. But sapience demands that I show SOME (variable) degree of respect for people who assume different meanings to the word "God." 

What I would assume is NEITHER the "empty" universe of Einstein (the most nonspiritual of the four great founders of quantum mechanics, the others being De Broglie, Schrodinger and Heisenberg) NOR the purified ultra formal cosmos... of certain formalists all over the world. Rather, per my papers for the Stapp issue of Activitas Nervosa Superior or Cosmos and History, I generally associate the word with THREE real entities or forms:

(1) Our noosphere, surprise. (Teilhard used the term "the Son" at times, did he not?) A real person, in my view. A real brain too, maybe dark matter and such, but a real personality.

(2) Less precisely -- "our Father" (as Jesus would put it, but he was not 100% alone), our ancestral link to the larger species of noospheres of which our own is just one juvenile member;

(3) MAYBE the cosmos as a whole, depending on your arbitrary taste in definitions, recalling that a Lagrange Euler equations represent the limit of intelligent systems in the limit as uncertainty goes to zero. Don't underestimate those PDE! Or the adjoint momenta or "qi"which are part of that.
Should I even say this is actually the"Holy Spirit" of that other trinity? An interesting thought.

I interpret the various 'gods' of narrow religions mostly as archetypes, as patterns WITHIN the noosphere, somewhat similar to associative memory, often just a kind of mental image reflection of something more objective.
 
All for now. Best of luck,

   Paul





 
Try it and you become a self-negating nihilist, opposed to your own existence and existence in general. Spiritually, that's not a good or rewarding place to be.    

Why not get rid of God altogether? Because when properly defined, God coincides with the Absolute, the wellsprings from which you flow. (Any separation of God from the Absolute would imply that there is something higher and more comprehensive than God, namely the Absolute, which would contradict the definition of God in virtually every major strain of monotheism.) By denying God, you deny your own highest (absolute) level of Self, and again you become a nihilist.

There's not a Buddhist alive who can rationally deny any of this. Any Buddhist who claims otherwise is peddling sandalwood-scented mumbo jumbo, in which case he is responsible to defend it. (This includes the Buddha.)

Posted by Dr. PaulJohnW at 10:43 AM 1 comment:

Monday, August 12, 2019

Synthesis of hard core science and spiritual reality


This paper is scheduled for publication in Cosmos and History, Dec. 2019, and is now available only here and in the Foundations of Mind collection. In essence, it is a sequel to my paper in Activitas Nervosa Superior this year, outlining a new viewpoint on how to reconcile real hard core science and real spiritual experience.



The Phenomenon of Man Revised: Evolution and I.T. Versus Extinction In the Years To Come

Dr. Paul J. Werbos
National Science Foundation, retired
U. of Memphis, Dept. of Mathematics
5304 1st Pl N, Arlington, Va 22203
paul.werbos@gmail.com

keywords: noosphere, machine learning, soul, psi, backpropagation, sociobiology, internet of things, human-centric internet, futures, consciousness, cycles of history, evolution


The Phenomenon of Man, Revised: Evolution and I.T. Versus Extinction In the Years To Come  

© Paul J. Werbos May 25, 2019
In press, Cosmos and History

Abstract

The Phenomenon of Man, by Teilhard de Chardin, was a great effort to truly unify hard core science and charismatic spirit, with practical implications for better understanding the dynamics of history and period we are now entering. This paper presents the noosphere species theory -- a radical revision of de Chardin's theory, as is necessary to account for what we now know about natural selection, about the mathematics of intelligent systems and about the great ocean of dark matter and energy connecting the galaxies of our cosmos. The noosphere species theory still emphasizes the possibility and need for a growth in spiritual collective intelligence, but it offers more details on how this growth could be supported and accelerated, and it faces up to the reality that our particular noosphere might or might not survive the difficult challenges arising now. And yet, it accepts that we are not alone.





1. Background and Fundamental Principles of a New Vision

1.1.The Core Vision of Teilhard de Chardin

In his seminal manifesto, The Phenomenon of Man [1], Teilhard de Chardin proposed a new vision of humanity and of our destiny, intended to reconcile the core principles of his Catholic beliefs with the core facts proven by science. He fully embraced the fact of biological evolution over billions of years, but proposed that this process of evolution includes the earth as a whole, the “noosphere”, as previously described by Vernadsky [2]. He proposed that the omega point prophesied in the Bible refers to that time in the future when we, components or cells of that larger noosphere, become more united, and reach out like a single organism to the larger cosmos. The leading science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a graphic novel [3] describing what that omega point transition might feel like to the people experiencing it.

De Chardin himself explained more concretely what his new vision implied for meditation, spirit and the experience of life [4]. A certain young John F. Kennedy was deeply inspired by this vision, very popular at that time, and it was a major motivator underneath all the excuses he used to advance his vision of reaching out further into outer space. I do not have citations for this last point, but it is based on many conversations with many of the people close to that history, ranging from the janitor he spoke to regularly at Harvard to Barbara Marx Hubbard [5], a follower of de Chardin very active in the space and futures movements, and a mentor to Jerry Glenn, founder of the Millennium Project [6].

1.2.Problems and Corrections: A Revised Version of the Vision

De Chardin’s vision did not become so viral or so universal as he would have hoped, for two reasons.

1.2.1.      Political Barriers and Need to Overcome Them

First, there are many very powerful thought leaders who simply are not interested in reconciling science and spirit or science and religion. They have a firm commitment to either one or the other, insist on holding on to every last comma of some received system of beliefs, and have little tolerance for cognitive dissonance or novelty. They see the political benefits of painting the other side as a strawman, citing the most extreme spokesmen for the other side, whipping up their base as a path to power. But for that 70% or so of humanity which believes that science and spirit both hold fundamental truths important to their life and to their destiny, it really is important to try to reconcile the two with a new unifying vision, just as de Chardin tried to do. Furthermore, from a practical point of view, there is a real danger of nuclear war eradicating the human species, if the global dialogue becomes dominated by one group which plans to solve the conflict by eradicating religion, and another group which tries to protect itself from the first group by imposing a stifling fundamentalist theocracy on everyone on earth.

This paper is addressed to that 70% or so in the middle. Of course, the  number 70% is just a guesstimate; it is based in part on a recent poll of the US on the subject of evolution [7], and in part on earlier work by Greeley and McCready [8]. I suspect that the number would be lower in Europe but higher in the rest of the world. This paper builds upon the foundation of another recent paper which explains why and how I personally believe that the truth does lie in the middle here [9].

1.2.2 Logical Gaps and How to Fill Them: A New, Revised Vision

Unfortunately, there are also several logical problems with de Chardin’s vision which kept it from growing in popularity among those of us in the middle. This paper proposes a new vision of who we are as humans and of our possible destinies (we do have some choice here!), similar to the vision of de Chardin, but revised in a few fundamental ways.

1.2.2.1 Dark Matter: the Physical Substrate Permitting Spiritual Experience or Psi

The first problem with de Chardin’s formulation is that he does not offer a possible physical scientific basis for the flow of spiritual energy (like charisma, qi, mana) which is central to all authentic spiritual traditions around the world, even though he wrote about his deep personal acquaintance with that energy [4]. What mainstream science really knows about the atoms which make up our bodies, and the quantum electrodynamics (QED) which describes most of their interactions [9], simply cannot explain anything like the spiritual experiences common to all major cultures on earth [10] or even that small subset verified in the laboratory [10,11].

But now, in the twenty-first century, science is ever more confident that our cosmos is made up of more than just atoms. We know that more than 90% of the cosmos we live in is made up of “dark matter and dark energy,” but we do not know exactly what dark matter really is. There was a time a few years ago when many of us thought we might explain the strange movements of galaxies by a new theory of gravity like Moffatt’s, without dark matter. but many groups have been able to map the distribution of dark matter, by “seeing” it by gravitational lensing effects [12].















Figure 1. One of many recent maps of dark matter (from http://www.illustris-project.org/)

In order to be consistent with the best mainstream version of quantum theory known to science today [9], or with new efforts to find a more realistic foundation underlying quantum theory, while still accepting psi or spiritual energy, we have almost no choice but to hold that “dark matter” is the physical substrate which makes psi and authentic spiritual experience possible. We may debate whether dark matter is made up of fields, or of particles, or of a mix of the two, but in any case it is what Aristotle would call the “substance” underlying higher forms like spirit, and all aspects of mind or consciousness which do not use atoms as their substance.

Of course, we cannot totally rule out the possibility that quantum theory and Einsteinian realism are both false, but until and unless we have evidence which contradicts them and which also gives us an alternative clear and coherent enough to live by, a ruthlessly rational and sane person in the  middle will act on the assumption that the dark matter hypothesis here is probably true.

The most plausible alternative hypothesis for a person in the middle would be that the Lagrange-Euler equations of physics have strange properties far beyond what science understands as yet. Could it be that psi and spiritual experience can all be explained as side effects of a kind of universal Jungian synchronicity, without the action of any minds but what is in our heads and what these equations describe? I tend to doubt it, but scientific integrity demands that we do justice to “next best” alternatives, both to the left and to the right, so that we can remain alert to any new evidence pushing us to either side.

When I discuss this dark matter hypothesis, some people ask: “Why dark matter? Why not moola pazoola or prima materia or…” It is important to remember that science does not yet know what dark matter and dark energy are in more concrete terms. If you want to call an unknown force field “moola pazoola,” that would be fine in principle, so long as you do not immediately attach a whole lot of unproven hypotheses along with it. To this day, many of the nonproductive and meaningless arguments in philosophy and religion are based on a failure to remember that the words we use are just a recent invention of human culture. The term “dark matter” is a good one to use for now, precisely because it does not use a semantic trick to sneak in unproven and unnecessary side assumptions.  It is fine that many people discuss more concrete possibilities for what dark matter might be, but the vision presented in this paper is intentionally consistent with many possibilities for those details.

1.2.2.2. The Noosphere Species Theory: It’s Not Just Earth

 Above all, modern science knows that the process of evolution by natural selection on earth [13,14,15] simply does not predict the kind of outcome which de Chardin envisioned. This paper proposes a new vision of who we are as humans, which is similar to that of de Chardin, but revised in a way which fits what we know from evolution.

In a  nutshell, the theory is that we on earth are all parts of a greater noosphere, exactly as de Chardin felt, growing towards greater unity and some kind of collective intelligence at a “spiritual level,” i.e. in our connections through the noosphere. Our noosphere is not some kind of mature god, as in some versions of the Gaia theory, but more like a child, better called Terry (for Terra, also not gender specific) than Gaia. A child whose existence is possible, under natural selection, only because of natural selection in a much larger environment – the environment depicted in Figure 1, a vast connected ocean of matter and energy criss-crossing the universe more than 10 billions years old. (How much older we do not really know.) Our noosphere is just one member of a whole species of noospheres. I have spoken about this idea in the past [12,16,17,18], but this is the first serious publication in the West.

There are two major reasons why I feel that this vision is inevitable, so long as we hold to quantum or Einsteinian realism.

First, from what we know of biological evolution, we should expect life to evolve, whenever there exists the vast kind of connected ocean of matter pulsing with free energy, as you can see in Figure 1. All but a few of the galaxies in our universe are bright dots, or nodes, in this network, and we now know that the connection to dark matter is crucial the birth of the stars themselves; more precisely, we know that those few “zombie galaxies” [12] which are not connected to the network of dark matter suffer from a dramatic lack of star formation. This evidence speaks not only to life,  but to some kind of coupling between dark matter and atomic matter, in which the dark matter side plays the dominant role.

Second, in order to explain and understand basic psi phenomena like remote viewing [10,11], let alone bilocation and prophetic dreams and such, it is not enough to have a plausible physical substrate like dark matter or anything else. There are many people who claim to have a “physical explanation” for psi based on some kind of physical substrate (in the spirit of moola pazoola), but that simply is not sufficient by itself to explain how such things could be possible. Necessary, but not sufficient.

Consider the example of remote viewing, where a person in one small place on earth somehow delivers information about another small place or person thousands of miles away. If QED by itself could explain such a thing, then technology using QED based on the best, most advanced understanding of QED should be able to replicate it in technology. I can say with some confidence that it cannot, despite many billions of dollars worth of intense effort by the most brilliant people on earth [19].

The real difficulty in building or explaining such a capability, regardless of what kind of physical substances are used, is the switching problem. How can a connection be made between two points, A and B (or Alice and Bob), so very far away from each other? It absolutely requires a highly refined switching network, not the kind of system which emerges in a random complex system like a muddy but lifeless dirty pond or a mass of uncontrolled clouds floating in the sky. Unless we imagine that some weird group of space aliens chose to install an “invisible” technical switching network or communication satellite made of dark matter, the only way this system could have emerged here is by  biological evolution. The claim, then, is that the switching function is performed by our noosphere, a vast living organism made primarily of dark matter (with some extensions to ordinary matter just as snakes sometimes grow a skin, and as human bodies contain both cells and matrix).

For many years, I tended to assume that our noosphere basically penetrates and interfaces with the entire earth. When I met a woman in Nepal active both in the Labor Party of England and in higher yoga (shades of Annie  Besant?), and she asked how to bring her two worlds closer together, I strongly urged rallies using the song “We are the Earth.” I feel a positive shiver up my spine even as a type that. (Of course, openness to that kind of feeling is very important to mundane sanity, let alone spiritual growth. Mundane sanity is what led me from hard core “materialism” to experiences beyond it in the first place [9].) However, logic suggests that our noosphere would not be limited to just our planet. Stars like our sun are also connected to dark matter, and exploration of our solar system seems unlikely to weaken our spiritual connection. So now I tend to think of us as part of the Sol noosphere, not just the one planet. I interpret the manifesto of Akhnaton declaring the sun as the One God as an attempt to channel the nervous system part of the Sol noosphere, the vast neural network in which our personal “souls,” our common ideas and archetypes all reside as subsystems.

A key aspect of this theory is that we humans are what Dante called “half beast, half angel” – a symbiotic life form, such that part of us is the system of atoms which science now understands far better than most people know, and part is dark matter. It is also what Rosicrucians have called an “Alchemical marriage.” Some marriages are good, and some are dysfunctional. Another aspect is that there exists more mature life and mind beyond our solar system, “in the heavens’ (in Figure 1!).

In the remainder of this paper, I will use the term “soul” to refer to the “angel” side of us, that part of us made primarily of dark matter, a part of the noosphere. Section 2 of this paper will give my own personal views on what this means in practical terms for us as humans, either as individuals or as agents in history.

1.2.2.3. Information Technology (IT), DNA, Money and Soul – Four Forces which Could Save Us or Kill Us

One key test of human sanity is whether we are capable of facing up to “inconvenient truths,” without hiding from them or giving up altogether. Do we give in to the common ego defense mechanism called “denial”, or do we use a more mature way of coping with unpleasant news, the kind of mechanism which leads to success more often in life than denial does [20,21]?

The original vision of de Chardin [1] basically said that the human species is destined to rise to a great and higher level of existence. Many religious dogmas became popular, even though they contradict each other in ways which should make them think twice, in part because they say what many people want to believe, that their apotheosis is guaranteed, at least if they follow certain rules.

The noosphere species theory clearly does not guarantee that the human species or any part or product of the human species will survive the challenges of this century, as they play out over the next few thousand years. It predicts that the noosphere has a “body, brain and immune system” (among others) which will play an important role, which are the product of billions of years of evolution making them far more helpful than random chance, but that does not provide a guarantee. In nature, not all little fish grow to adulthood, despite the billions of years of evolution driving them to the behavior and learning which maximize their chances. Are noospheres like fish or like bonobos, who have a better chance of survival? We don’t know, but we do know that we face very severe risks as a species, and we know that soul is only one of the underlying forces which will shape our destiny.

There have been many recent efforts to analyze more concretely what the most serious, highest probability risks are to the very existence of the human species [6,22,23]. Having studied these in some depth, I believe that the biggest four threats now, in order, are: (1) nuclear war and misuse of nuclear technology in general [24,25]; (2) extinction due to future release of H2S from the oceans, due to climate change [26,27,28,29]; (3) misuse of biotechnology; and (4) the “Terminator” scenario for AI [30], which could happen in many different ways if my own work in that field [31,32,33] is misused by people who do not understand the underlying principles.

1.2.2.3.1 DNA and Soul as Drivers of Extinction versus Survival

Unfortunately, the normal process of evolution by mundane natural selection on earth suggests relatively little hope that humans could avoid extinction by at least one of these four mechanisms. Ecosystems which seem relatively stable, after billions of years of world-spanning species being deleted, normally go unstable when large, random changes are made in the relations between organisms [14]. Many of the starry eyed visions for a new human species, using new techniques for genetic manipulation to create more beautiful people, remind me of how the trilobytes – who once ruled the earth – became extinct as a result of excessive selection for sexual attractiveness leading to a brittle catastrophe at the global, systems level. From the viewpoint of game theory, the great pastoral societies like Afghanistan which led to the rise of most human civilization [15] change dramatically when nuclear weapons are added to the game. If war is inevitable sooner or later, due to conflicts and zerosum thinking, and if nuclear capabilities are widely distributed, nuclear “kembi” will be very, very hard to avoid [24].

Furthermore, ongoing population growth [34] makes it almost inevitable that zerosum thinking will become prevalent, once again, in earth, unless there are dramatic, conscious changes in global trends. There has been a lot of wishful thinking on this subject, based on the same kind of social pressures which cause other forms of denial, but a detailed study of the literature on biology and fertility shows strong reasons to doubt the good news. The details of that literature are beyond the scope of this paper, but a few examples are in order.

In 1982, when I contributed to the OTA assessment of competing quantitative models of the future of humanity (https://ota.fas.org/reports/8212.pdf), we found that the “UN population projections” cited by so many groups trying to sell their plans for economic development were actually selected from a large set of scenarios, which the UN stressed were not forecasts, and did not include any real modelling of fertility. Research by Sally Quinn of Census and research by the World Bank got much deeper into the drivers of fertility, and found that population growth in advanced nations in recent years was slowed, not by rises in income as such, but by four key variables: (1) women’s empowerment and education; (2) availability of public health, especially the whole range of family planning; (3) urbanization; and (4) cultures which do not force women to have children. I was in fact invited to a meeting on the United Nations Fund for Population Assistance, which did study these things in great detail, and started a major push to push these four variables in order to prevent the kind of catastrophe which present trends really do predict.

These efforts can be of great value to reduce instability in the next few centuries,  but natural selection is still very much at work. Already, cultures which force more children do produce more children, producing demographic imbalances already starting to grow around the world. Some aspects of genetic selection require millions of years to have any effect, but it is well known that a mere 7 to 10 generations are enough to cause massive changes in the mix of genes already “well known’ to biology [10]; genes related to sexual behavior and aggression are certainly among those genes. Sociobiology [10] did underestimate the power of personal experience and learning to change behavior, to transcend that is in the genes; however, even the highest level of learning [35,36] in the brain is still anchored in the properties of “telos” or “happiness” specified by these genes.

The prediction, then, is that we will not live forever in a world where more intelligent and prosperous women have fewer children. The prediction is that there will be a selection for massively competent women who also have massively powerful hormones, overwhelming the social pressures. When I realized this in graduate school, I have to admit I visualized such women and wanted to meet them. That goes beyond the scope of this paper, but may help the reader in remembering what is going on here.

The current exponential growth of the human species is not so different from the growth which earlier civilizations have experienced for a few centuries [37,38] or even from the “quantum leaps” which other world-spanning new species have experienced [13]. In the past, it has always been just the first half of an “S” curve which then comes to terms, sometimes well and sometimes badly, with various types of constraints.

In touring a wide variety of island cultures in the Pacific, I have had a chance to look very closely at some of the very general types of possible paths. It started mostly with adventurous “people of the boat” from Taiwan, expanding with great hope into a new frontier, very similar in spirit to more recent European settlers of the Americas. In some areas, the culture was deeply committed to maximizing its population when it could. But in bad years (a stochastic event, mostly connected to El Nino), there was a sudden imbalance. This led to war in some cases, but more often to human sacrifice in cooperative societies (like the great Moche civilization of Peru), and to cannibalism in societies even more committed to maximizing carrying capacity and recycling.

A fascinating exception was the culture of Easter Island [39], which, contrary to self-serving European myths, was a great success in adapting to nature, devastated more by Europeans at times than by native cultures. A relatively stable native society, based on ancestor worship not unlike old Chinese culture and the culture depicted in the movie “Coco,” became unstable when the first, brief European visitors showed that a higher standard of living was possible in a prosperous and growing society. The resulting time of troubles was a monstrous experience. It is very unfortunate that anthropologists have not fully recorded the oral traditions of the competing tribes which found a way out. The way out was a strong system of maximally honorable competition, the Bird Man competition, which I suspect was inspired in part by the esoteric secret society of navigators based on Raiatea which I also had a chance to visit, which also had a serious spiritual input. Honorable competition provided a way to allocate resources, and limit population growth to what is sustainable, and what makes people happy and fosters more authentic spiritual growth. It provides a kind of ecosystem in which natural selection does not force fatal and degrading warfare.

The first challenge here in reality is how to avoid extremes like dishonorable competition leading to unsustainable levels of war and  violence and degrading of the spirit, or like illusions that everyone can have all they want without constraint and without some kind of selection mechanism.  The second big challenge is to converge on some kind of sustainable social contract [40,41,42] which can maintain honorable competition based on natural types of selection mechanism which do not cause us to degenerate into silly outcomes like those of the trilobytes or like the dangerous, brittle speciation of caste systems or early Carib and Arawak.

To the extent that we try to channel the will of the noosphere, the challenge is to provide societies which really support a high level of collective intelligence and personal spiritual growth, which requires a high level of education, diversity, freedom and dialogue. It requires designing both formal and informal education and research systems in a way which fully incorporates these bottom line values. Given the great and growing power of the noosphere, those of us who do not choose to work with it may encounter many strange surprises and unnecessary difficulties, as in any bad alchemical marriage. A higher level of collective intelligence, both spiritual and mundane, would be essential to improving our chances of rising with all the threats to the existence of the human species.

1.2.2.3.2 How New Information Technology and Money Change the Game

Spirit and DNA are certainly not the only deep, fundamental forces driving the course of future history. We are now at the early stages of a massive growth in the use of Information Technology (IT); unless there is some kind of massive war and return to dark ages (which itself would raise our chances of extinction and impede spiritual growth), we need to plan for a world in which all flows of money, all corporations and many other activities will be redefined as files in the emerging global Internet of Things (IOT). This redefines the nature of what it means to create a new, viable social contract for nations and for the world.

Careless deployments even of simple, weak information technologies has already begun to destabilize the limited, partial social contracts we have come to depend on, like the US Constitution. Many business plans have emerged, based on myopic social and economic pressures, which would be nonsustainable in a number of ways if present trends continue and they basically take over the world. Manifestos for a human-friendly internet have started to appear, but unless we do the hard work of translating them into actual system specifications for the emerging foundations of hardware and software, it will all be like the pious words one often hears before an organization starts creating a disaster. The enemy here is a kind of entropy, which can only be overcome by a maximum use of consciousness and intelligence in concrete, mathematically grounded design implementing very basic mathematical, ethical and spiritual principles. This is one more reason why we need a stronger cadre of people in the middle, capable of integrating and appreciating all the critical aspects of this challenge.

In 2018, the French research group INRIA and the leading French electric power market funded me to go to Rio De Janeiro, to present a paper on how the new “deep learning” or “new AI” technology changes the game in energy markets (and climate change). As this paper went through review at many levels of the IEEE, I was asked to give more details on how to address the larger challenges of the coming IOT in general. Because that paper is already widely available, and contains many further citations available on the web, I will not repeat the details here [34].

As a general matter, I doubt that the earth is the first planet in this universe to reach this adolescent stage of its development, when its survival is at risk. I would expect that noospheres which have survived in this cosmos have strongly developed “brains,” which support intelligence and mind, and “immune systems,” which encourage the kind of social contracts and rules which make it possible to survive difficult times like ours. Could it be that the “Ten Commandments” were the best social contract or covenant which could be communicated to foster such things, and to foster intellectual growth, at the early time when they appeared? Could it be that the US Constitution, which was influenced by authentic spiritual inputs from Scottish Rite Freemasons and Quakers as well as readers like Jefferson of Locke, Francis Bacon and Newton, were an improved Gen II social contract, supported by the noosphere for many years, until… Could we be entering a new era, when a more sophisticated Gen 3 social contract, implemented in advanced IT, is essential to survival through the next phase of our growth?

2.      Selected Examples of What the new Vision Implies

This new vision is intended to integrate many, many threads of activity and thought, the details of which are beyond the scope of any one journal article. Here I will give just a few examples where a new viewpoint changes many things.

2.1.Afterlife: What Choices do You really face as you retire, age and die?

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvPWgC9w5R31feznl-G3qOaRTHhmKewnSFbszs968V34NKpUSsGf4jea6e1ZEkO1AJ7YxIP4iPWtNX9sfLOrtoQGXVZLx8NY0Ngeuyb7Vd4l8uNTQ4cNCtDLPcIi-gkg9Abj07g_ivGx8/s320/Afterlife_choice.jpg
Figure 2. Choices which each of us faces as we retire, age, die

Like it or not, every one of us is destined to change in a major way as we age, retire and die. Many religions tell us that we will be the same person after we die, but first person experience tells me that I already change in a major way from periods of clarity and attunement in early morning to late night periods of exhaustion, especially after alcohol. The noosphere species model essentially predicts that when we die the Alchemical marriage also ends, leaving one part alive but only one part. What is the destiny of that part?

Some mystics claim that the answer to that question varies a lot from person to person, depending on what they level of development they have  achieved in their lifetime [44,45]. The noosphere species model basically predicts that this is true. More precisely, it predicts that our lifetime and training will lead us towards a fate like the left side of figure 2, or the right side, or a mix, depending on what we learn as a whole system of brain and soul.

Of course, our world is full of people who just “know” that this could not be the choice we are facing. In my plenary talk on conscious and machine intelligence in 2018 [17], I began my summary with a quote from Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” That happens again and again in all human cultures, from island tribes to branches of science and religion. Even as a child, I wondered how people could have so much conviction about THEIR tribe’s beliefs when so many other tribes were equally convinced about something else, with about the same level of justification. Again and again, I have also seen how powerful organizations try to sell themselves by simplifying, by pushing people into simple black and white choices. In today’s world, people have mostly gravitated to two possibilities about afterlife – either it is a total fraud, or you wake up your same old self unchanged, on your way to absolute perfection of pain or joy or reincarnation.
      
It really made me sad last year to see certain Hindu theologians taking strong measures, as strong as certain believers in Adam and Eve, to defend the dogma that the “you” who experiences astral travel or death is exactly the same “you” as the one in everyday life. In MY everyday life, I have learned more and more to understand the differences between the “me” thinking clearly in the early morning and the “me” late at night most nights, especially after a bit of alcohol. In fact, after the sail away party with unlimited free margaritas, I remember the feeling of having hardly any functioning brain at all and operating my body and words as one would operate a puppet from a great distance – and I remember others in the same state who were less functional.

But if you and I are alchemical marriages, what happens when the angel gets to be a widow or widower?

This more scientific viewpoint, less black-and-white than today’s theologies, is actually much closer to the ancient beliefs of places like Mexico, dating back to the days before various emperors manipulated them. I highly recommend that everyone should see the happy children’s movie Coco, which does a brilliant job of explaining that culture, a culture which is much more totally true than most of the cultures with power today. The movie is correct in depicting certain technical details which I could even give you an equation for, but blogs are not the right place for equations. Still, I can give you a hint in words. Survival in Coco depends on a flow of some kind of emotional energy, like what Freud called “psychic energy,” like “qi” or “mana”, like the backpropagation flows which govern the changes made over time in ANY intelligent network. For the dead people in Coco, their survival depends on a flow of qi from a primary source, the world of the living; when it dries up, dry up and dissolve into powder, like a certain passage in the Book of Esdras (a book in the modern Catholic bible we have at home  but not in the King James bible). On my latest cruise on Holland American, I certainly saw some rich people showing signs of dissolving away into powder, kept alive mainly by connections to their grandchildren.

This way of thinking was not just in Mexico. Gavriel Kaye has written great novels conveying the old culture of China. Even under Confucius and Meng Tzu (“Mencius”), the assumptions and practices were very much like Coco, until a famous “reformer” Zhu Xi, catering to a power-driver emperor, redefined the state religion. (Many people in China blame its current problems on Jiang Zemin, the latest great secular reformer, but I blame them more on Zhu Xi. Both offered a mix of great new positive insights and great new dangerous oversimplifications.) Even Mormons might see something they agree with in Coco. Much of East Asia still maintiains that culture, despite the efforts by people like Zhu Xi and Jiang Zemin to stamp it out and control them.

One important detail: in Coco, a bad guy gets energy from people who are NOT of his family. OK, he was bad, but it is not natural to restrict the flow of energy only to flows within a family. It violates nature to limit things in that way. In a previous year, we actually visited Mao Tze Tung’s dorm room in the college in ChangSha where Zhu Xi taught, and saw the echoes of his scream that it is not just within the family.

But Figure 2 shows you two pictures. Only one is the simple “Day of the Dead.” The beliefs of the Mayans included Coco as ONE PART of it, but there was also that other world of “the heavens,” and the alternative real, great hope depicted by the Sian Kaan, the tree which bridges through the earth from that Day of the Dead realm to the world of the heavens. To me, this is ever so real, and I wish others could really see how real it is and how much it changes – offering our best hope not only to do better than the happy skeletons which eventually do dissolve into powder, but also our best hope to save the mundane human species from extinction, if only we refuse to turn into happy skeletons and insist on always reaching with real energy and receptivity to the real heavens. (See http://www.werbos.com/Space_personal_Werbos.htm for my chapter in the book Beyond Earth, Krone ed, Apogee Press. Reaching out with rocketplanes actually is part of this, but no, it is not at all the whole thing.)

Of course, we saw a lot of great trees in our latest cruise up the Amazon, and a lot of people on the cruise reaching out very energetically to try to learn and see nature and life and cultures beyond their own grandchildren. They were not neglecting their grandchildren. The Sian Kaan still always connects to the earth and to its roots,  but it adds another connection, to a primary source of qi above them, qi which flows back to the living world and to the Coco world (the world of “widow” and “widower” spirit personalities).  The duality Figure 2 is also consistent with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which asserts that each of us actually has two souls, one more like the part on the left and one like the part on the right.

How can we add this extra dimension to our lives, to our “inner life” as Quakers would say? That subject is very important to each of us, but beyond the scope of this subsection.

2.2.Challenges in the Training and Growth of the Soul

Important as these challenges are, this paper can only provide a few crude starting points at best.

Many years ago, I worked with a group of Quakers dissatisfied with the choices for K-12 education in our neighborhood. In creating a new K-8 school, we focused on a clear mission: to develop, through exercise and training but not indoctrination, the skills and strength of body, brain and soul, and the integration of the three. It really helps to remember a clear and central focus when engaged in a difficult new endeavor.

But how to do that? Because no one on earth really knows the most effective way to fulfill that mission, we drew on deep cultures from all over the world. In addition to standard Quaker meditation and practice (which entails the absolute minimum of indoctrination and dogma consistent with making the effort), we drew on the best yoga exercises we could find, Sufi dances, Western mystical traditions and exercises, native American practices, and so on. There is a huge need for more systematic research to see how these various methods work, for different people, and to use our new understanding of intelligent systems to try to do better [46].

That school certainly does not tell us what the best practices really are, but there were interesting lessons learned. The most enduring successful exercises were probably: (1) the Quaker meditation period, which stresses learning to listen to an inner voice; (2) an English composition class in which children learned to give feedback on each other’s work, in a way which supports communication and listening and understanding skills both mundane and deeper; (3) the conflict resolution class, which had much the same benefits, and also helped prevent the waste of time on neurotic conflict behavior which slows down many schools today.

Similar considerations apply to adults as well, of course. There is a deep spiritual imperative to keep learning and growing at all ages. At the old National Science Foundation, following the vision of Vannevar Bush before it was degraded by certain politicians circa 2014, many of us reached high towards a system of honorable competition and very deep dialogue, especially in well-managed panel reviews, which in my view activated spiritual connections and higher intelligence much more than what goes on in many churches and temples. Authenticity and commitment to truth were alive and well in that high-energy environment, as strenuous (but exhausting) in its way as the most professional athletic events.

A great challenge to the IT systems of the future is how to foster that kind of deep dialogue all across human society. Today’s email and social network systems clearly do not create that level of authentic deep dialogue, in part because of phenomena like trolls, in part because words on a page do not automatically evoke natural deep human connections to humans, in part because people need more training in simple sanity [16, 20, 21], and in part because research on It had yet to harness the full power of intelligent systems to support collaboration. In my experience, weekly or monthly international video conferences can work far better than the usual social media, but this is just one small step.

The technical requirements for IT platforms to allow humans to collaborate more effectively, without any need for risky, questionable and unnatural “cyborg” interfaces, are too complex to discuss here in great detail. Those interested might consider a case study, a discussion of how such a system might have avoided the kind of risk and damage which can be seen at the present time in the Brexit debates of March, 2019 (which I hope will be overcome through some kind of “miracle”). [47].

2.3 Comments on Advanced Mysticism

This paper is not a proper place to try to recount all my personal experiments with psi and spirit since the time in 1967 when I first decided it would be worthwhile to try to understand them more concretely. But a few general comments are in order.

First, I have found that the noosphere species concept does more than just justify the idea of psi and soul at an abstract level. The idea that the “brain” of the noosphere is governed by the same universal mathematical laws which apply to any intelligent system turns out to be very useful in finding order in an otherwise very chaotic and diverse ocean of information. For example, if we accept that growth and adaptation of the noosphere brain is governed by modulated backpropagation, just like higher biological and computer intelligent systems, and we recognize that the word “qi” is simply a subjective way of talking about the (several types) of modulated backpropagation operating in the noosphere, we can more easily adapt to the reality that we are a part but not the rulers of an extremely large and intelligent system. We can avoid the twin hazards, the Scylla and Charybdis of spiritual development – delusions of grandeur and delusions of helplessness. These twin hazards remind me often of an initiation lecture I received for certain Senate staff, which they summarized as: “You must play. You can’t win.” We are called to engage enough to learn, to contribute as much as we can, but not to try to control or bias the process (which is not only unwise and unnatural but also very hazardous at times).

Many mystics talks about “planes of existence,’ like travel to astral planes and so on. The noosphere species theory would interpret these important and valid experiences as experiences in a realm less real than our mundane world of atoms, experiences in something like an internet chat room of the noosphere. At a higher level, when
we enter into states of “meditation” where we really feel ourselves as part of the noosphere, the vast mind connecting our entire earth or solar system, and respond to the values and feelings and thoughts at that level, we can become channels for that higher qi, which will continue at least as long as life on earth continues, and perhaps even more.  It requires great discipline over time to learn to cope with the resulting “firehose of information” [48]. None of this requires accounting for the quantum mechanical aspect of noosphere level intelligence [33,49], but once we do, it is somewhat easier and more natural to think of it as an ocean of information across space time and the cosmos rather than a firehose or volatile kaleidoscope.

In my last cruise, in early 2019, I finished reading “Vita Nostra,” a one sided but great and useful novel about spiritual development. No, we are not words, but we are… partly something like that. And we need to pursue many types of discipline to connect more completely to that which may not be truly eternal, but will last billions of years, if we do not screw up all life on earth. And, as Jesus said, we need to allow a certain kind of love permeate us deeply at all levels, including a very strenuous love for the spirit of truth which, he had, would be what really comes in later days like ours.

In summary: St. Paul Letter to the Galatians, Revised Standard Version, 3:5: “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law [i.e. rules like kosher, five pillars, etc.], or by hearing with faith?” Learning to really listen and hear, with faith in the idea that it is worth the effort, is a central part of all of this.


2.3.          Comments on interface of soul with brain and psychokinesis

A key aspect of the noosphere species theory is that the dominant partner in the brain-soul interface is the soul or dark matter side. Thus in attempts to connect traces of psi with data like brain recordings, we should not expect to find anything like a psychic reception or transmission organ in the brain or the peripheral nervous system. In actuality, different people should be expected to learn different interfaces, as they train the neural networks both of their soul and of their brain. This fits well with the more practical, earthy experience reported by people like Sanders [50], by yoga experience with chakras and by other experiential mystical traditions from all over the world.

This suggests that the neural correlates of psi also vary from person to person, but entail in general having some parts of the brain or ganglia tuned to “criticality” states which make it relatively easy for the soul to perturb them. It also suggests that soul might or might not also be able to connect to intelligent critical systems made up of electronic or photonics components, but because the development of such systems was not tweaked by billions of years of low-level inputs from the noosphere, we really do not hyet know what the possibilities for such systems are. Because “embodiment” is crucial to any intelligent system, we do know that the usual dreams of immortality through downloading are grossly misplaced.

Likewise, to explain phenomena like PK, we need to consider the pathway of signals from brain to personal soul either directly or indirectly to "invisible muscles" of dark matter which can then perturb ordinary matter. Something has to perturb ordinary matter for PK to be possible, either if we believe Einstein realism or if we believe quantum realism, and that something has to be something we don’t see with today's instruments. To say that its "dark matter" is no more narrow or specialized than saying it is a hardly known form of material substrate. 

The challenge we are best equipped to address is not so much how to strengthen the "invisible" muscles but how to connect better with (and train) the "invisible neural networks" which connect our brains or our conscious selves to what those "invisible" muscles do. It’s not about quantum mechanics; it's about training (and understanding) neural networks.

For my own personal self-training, in addition to trying out a variety of exercises and learning how to be open while doing them, I have also made heavy use of the “bootstrap” principle [46] important to training all kinds of neural network, from brains to soul. The key idea is that all intelligent systems include subsystems which learn to make predictions of what they see. If we see a partial but fuzzy image, like the light in relatively dark but slightly lit room, if we focus hard on try to predict what we see and feel and “see in the dark,” and become receptive to clues from any kind of inner sensation anywhere, there is hope that our natural (nonverbal) neural networks will learn to use and thus respond to those other inputs. Focusing on inputs like moving bits of fog can help one to learn to “look sideways” and see them more easily, partly just by mundane pattern recognition but partly by more. Procedures for testing which rigidly separate mundane and psi inputs and outputs can be useful for testing, but terrible for training. However, all of this can be seem as just a set of thoughts requiring testing in future research.

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[31] P. Werbos, The New AI: Basic concepts, and urgent risks and opportunities in the internet of things,  in Kozma, R., Alippi, C., Choe, Y., & Morabito, F. C. (Eds.), Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Neural networks and Brain computing. Academic Press, 2018
[32] P. Werbos, From ADP to the Brain: Foundations, Roadmap, Challenges and Research Priorities, in Prof. Int’l Conf. Neural Networks, 2014. IEEE. http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554
[33] Werbos, P.J. and Dolmatova, L., 2016. Analog quantum computing (AQC) and the need for time-symmetric physics. Quantum Information Processing, 15(3), pp.1273-1287.
[34] Ehrlich, Paul R., and John P. Holdren. "56 Impact of Population Growth." Environmental Ethics: The Big Questions171 (2010): 426.
[35] P. Werbos, P. Intelligence in the brain: A theory of how it works and how to build it, Neural Networks, Vol. 22, Issue 3, April 2009, Pages 200-212
[36] Werbos, Paul J., and Joshua JJ Davis, Regular cycles of forward and backward signal propagation in prefrontal cortex and in consciousness, Frontiers in systems neuroscience 10 (2016). www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5125075/
[37] Toynbee AJ. A Study of History. In 12 Vols. Oxford University Press; 1934.
[38] Spengler, Oswald. The decline of the West. Oxford University Press, USA, 1991.
[39] P. Werbos, Seeing the World Through a New Worldview, and Eastern Island
https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/10/seeing-world-through-new-worldview-and.html
https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/05/what-kind-of-warning-does-collapse-of.html 
[40] Locke, John. "Second Treatise on Civil Government in Social Contract." Oxford University Press, 1962.
[41] Schelling, Thomas C. The strategy of conflict. Harvard university press, 1980.
[42] Davis, J. J. J., Hobi, S. F., & Schübeler, F. A Reflection on Future Strategies for Farming, the Use of Technology and Environmental Restoration - Towards Social Harmony and General Wellbeing. Open Science framework, December 22 2018,  osf.io/f5rzj
[43] P. Werbos, AI Intelligence for the Grid 16 Years Later: Progress, Challenges and Lessons for Other Sectors, in  Proc. Int’l Joint Conf. Neural Networks, IEEE, 2018. Also posted at www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf
[44] Ouspensky, Peter Demianovich, and Petr Demʹi︠a︡novich Uspenskiĭ. In search of the miraculous: Fragments of an unknown teaching. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.
[45] The First and Second Book of Esdras, in the New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Cambridge University Press, 1970
[46] P. Werbos, Neural networks and the experience and cultivation of mind. Neural Networks 32 (2012): 86-95.
[47] P. Werbos, Consciousness, intelligent systems and Brexit
https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/04/consciousness-intelligent-systems-and.html
[48] Besant, Annie, and Charles W. Leadbeater. "Thought-forms (1901)." Quest Book edn. Wheaton (1961). Also see
https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2422239401139796
 
[49] P.Werbos, Self-organization: Re-examining the basics and an alternative to the Big Bang,      in K.Pribram, ed, Origins: Brain and Self-Organization, Erlbaum, 1994
[50] Sanders, Pete A. You Are Psychic!: The Free Soul Method. Simon and Schuster, 1999.



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