Mental dualism: what it is and a Platonic variation

Background: many of us believe that the human mind includes but is larger than just what the brain produces. I hereby define the term "mental dualism" as the proposition that the human mind is a dynamical system which is some kind of symbiosis of "what you see" (with mundane eyes) and "what you don't". I tend to use the word "soul" for that second part. If you google the term "dualism" you will see an incredible variety of definitions and beliefs, most of which look pretty uninteresting to me, and in some cases crazy in a dangerous way. That's why I add the modifier "mental" here to try to bypass confusion and ambiguity.
         My two word piece of terminology is not perfect, but enough to start. According to editors of a special issue of Activitas Nervosa Superior (a Springer journal), my paper on the physical foundations of consciousness is now in press. I assert vehemently that we do not know some important things about those foundations. If fully sane, we will not only admit our uncertainty but try hard to make sense of multiple possibilities. I mostly adhere to one of the varieties of hard core mathematical physical realism, either quantum realism or even realism ala Einstein and DeBroglie. But what about the possibility that the universe/cosmos is itself a great mind, a system whose very mathematical foundations are like neural network mathematics rather than Minkowski space mathematics? I agree with Stan Klein that study of such Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI, not to be confused with the Cosmic Consciousness theory) may shed light even on finite minds in Einsteinian universes, but sanity says we should give it some direct attention as well.
    In that spirit, this month I have been slowly reading and enjoying a new novel, Vita Nostra, which, among other things, expresses a CMI viewpoint on life and mind. I immediately gave the novel five stars on Amazon, for reasons I will not repeat here. But when I got 80% finished yesterday, I was sad that it was making less sense to me.This morning, in my usual samadhi start to the day, it made more sense. Suddenly it is like the time when Freud made more sense to me.

On a rattling old ship cruising off of Brazil with no wifi.. many reasons to be brief today. Key issue: in the "Alcymical marriage" of brain and soul, who takes the inituative and how? I have long felt pity for folks who try to explain psi as things done by specific suborgans in the brain. In an Einsteinian model, it is more a question of whether the brain is in a kind of criticality state sensitive to what the dark matter making up the soul can easily connect to,  not only physically but mentally. The Platonic CMI viewpoint in this novel takes that same idea a step further. In a way, it says that all of us with a "heaven" aspect (not just the underworld aspect depicted in the great cartoon movie Coco) "are" archetypes, and that our growth is the action/manifestation/reflection of our personal soul archetype. The authors tend to assume that a great mind must be made up of words, because they do not know the mathematics of the deep structure underlying words, neural network mathematics, but it is clear to me this morning how to sharpen up their model, as once I sharpened Freud's theory of psychodynamics. But not to type on blog this morning!! The key idea is that the initiative may be even more from the soul side than I have assumed. Is it really THAT simple? Not quite. But further details are beyond scope of this post.

To space engineers: is there real hope for China in space or economic growth in general?

At one point, one of you said that China, having a top-down government, can naturally take leadership in space, because of the advantages of their system. Likewise, Narayan wrote:

And in that, sorry to point out, The People Republic of China is very much the leader, if they follow up their recent success with a systematic progression of infrastructure development on the Moon, not just the "Flags Footprints and Ticker Tape Parade" model.  Given their record, which now includes serious geo-engineering in the Tibetan Plateau and maybe Xinjiang to bring water - and wet weather, and their construction of facilities on ocean islands, I am fairly confident that they didn't go there just to Show The Flag, nor to Explore Our Origins and Our Destiny. 

Thanks for ur patience if u got this far... 

 Having been to China many times, and visited many places which few Westerners get to see, I regret to say that I do not agree.

Ultimately, my top loyalty here is to the human species. Will we survive the coming century or two of extreme challenge, and will we grasp the window of opportunity to truly settle the rest of our solar system in a long-term sustainable way? That is one of the few very big values at the very top of my chain of goals and subgoals. 

Based on those values, I have asked myself: which would I choose, a solar system with NO humans, or a solar system in which the only humans happen to be descendants of people now living in core Han China?

For me, it is no choice. I would choose a Chinese galaxy over a galaxy with no humans, if that were the choice. And so, when the US seems hellbent on destroying itself, by redirecting space and science funds to nonproductive corrupt activities (many inspired by makework or a simple desire for more PAC money), I have often hoped that China would reduce the risks to humanity, by taking a positive role itself.

Many look at the great economic growth of the last couple of decades and the headlines you mention, and conclude that there is real hope there. Also, when the Marshall Institute tried to get real attention to realistic reduction in launch costs (something Charles Miller and I both supported and even helped make happen, though the bad guys then shut down Marshall's security operations), I really wanted to be able to say "The Chinese are coming! If you don't do this, there will be new sputnik crisis, after they can orbit 100 times the mass per dollar as we can for any purpose whatsoever." But in all honesty, I could not say that. For awhile, I said "there is a 30% risk of a sputnik in space from China," but the hope has steadily declined since then.

There are THREE main reasons why prospects for space progress and economic progress in general look much worse in China than they did a few years ago:

(1) The details of the transition from Jiang Zemin and his followers to the collection of people whom Xi Jinping depends on

      (see https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/12/report-to-watch-on-xi-jinping-and-three.html and more below);

(2) The global reaction against globalization, for which China was the biggest beneficiary;

(3) No change in the lingering problems with China space policy, VERY similar in nature to the problems in the US.

The biggest fluctuations in the world stock market in recent months have resonated more with uncertainty about growth in China than any other issue; for the moment, the zig is a bit back up, due to hopes of a new treaty between US and China, but it seems somewhat unlikely that Trump (or Elizabeth Warren) would sign a treaty as one-sided in its benefits as those of the past. 

I have had very intense debates over the past few years, in which I tended to argue in favor of Xi Jinping while others argiued against. Well, I must concede that some of my smart friends are right, in practice, at the end of the day. Before Xi was selected, he put out a position paper in QuiShu, the Journal of thr Communist Party of China, which argued for a kind of unification of the subjective and objective frameworks for policy analysis (a bit like yin and yang, but actually like a talk I gave to the main Confucius Institute in Shandong province, reflective of my paper published in Russia www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf.) Jiang Zemin and his followers were great supporters of science and objectivity as the foundation for everything. They packed the Politburo with engineers who graduated from Tsinghua ("the MIT of China," a school founded as a place for Chinese students to learn English and prepare for graduate school in the English speaking world). Anyone who wants to understand what happened to cause such great growth in China (unlike Russia after less intelligent reforms, based more on DC politician types than MIT engineers), really should study Paulson's book cited in my blog post. (Really. Don't just trust twitter feeds from friends who are loyal but uninformed. Paulson was there, as his book explains.) A main part of why I was able to visit China so much was that Chinese scientists had a mandate to  bring scientists and engineers from the US to come talk, and to learn about China.

But Jiang went to far in some ways. Yes, his follower Hu put forward a "one world" philosophy which was sincere and constructive and pushed hard for better partnership (even alliance) with the US.

But he also slavishly imitated our kind of space program, with an outer program  designed to recruit NASA groupies and enhance world PR with lots of glorious moon talk  but no real economic or military impact, and a hidden program, in Sichuan province (where China has traditionally put things they did not want Russia to see or to threaten), slavishly copying the NASP RLV approach which never worked. 

(Too much reliance on copying is an old problem...) He took a  violently anti-spirit position, attacking not only Western religions but also homegrown Chinese culture. I still remember visiting Shenyang, where Bo Xilia (a top Jiang lieutenant) once ruled, and I was stunned to see that the usual crowds of people in the park were almost all doing western dance or yoga, not qigong or Tai chi as in the past; "No, they explained, we do not even do that in our undergraduate program any more. We are forced to do yoga instead, because that is all that the authorities in this area now allow, since Bo." (I doubt that their yoga included vedanta either...). That was the number one reason I had hopes for Xi, who declared that he was serious about his courses  both in Buddhism and in Marxism (which is quite different from Maoism!), and fought Bo Xilai. But even what Paulson described went too far; it called for some kind of balance, just as"ethical investing" and such has its place in the West.

Sadly, Xi or the folks manipulating him went too far.  The news of the latest Party Congress was quite clear and quite graphic. My blog post summarizes a few points which you can see more graphically and completely in the coverage by the Financial Times, which is biased in a way  but reliable on these points.  I am not sure what to believe about the driving elements here,  but much of it reminds me of 

the policies of an ancient guy named Zhu Xi, who ironically was like the Jiang Zemin of his time. Anyone who wants to understand should google on Zhu Xi. He believed in a form of family values more like Sicily than like Idaho, and that biased, oversimplified belief is what has given us criminal tongs and warlords and famines in the past in China. How long can economic growth continue under regression to that kind of ultra-yin, as devoid of soul as Jiang was? 

I do hope the story will not remain so bad. being more of Gderman culture than Chinese, I keep hoping that thesis and antithesis will give way to synthesis, and more serious objective strategy,

including competence in space and cooperation on earth. But as I observe the rise and fall of civilizations ov er the centuries, I would not take that for granted. Hope, but do not assume. of source, I say the same about Trtump and GND in space as well. 

Best of luck,

   Paul

Understanding climate change and fimbulwinter by watching your shower

Just yesterday a CNN announcer said that Trump needs to learn the difference between climate and weather. But actually, it’s trickier than that. Another guy in Ireland looked forward to the coming warm Riviera in Normandy, but actually what is coming to him relentlessly and relatively soon is more like the fimbulwinter of the Ragnarok prophecy, just for Western Europe (which depends on the Gulf stream).

People who are not trained as mathematicians jn subjects like chaos theory tend to assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday, that trends will always keep going in the same direction. Their subconscious minds have often not had the kind of experience which lets them really appreciate, emotionally, what may come next. When things push into the initial election of Obama, say, some people get full of euphoria and wishful thinking, imagining that that is the beginning of a trend, when in reality it is more like a swing going all the way up one way, leading to momentum in the opposite direction. Likewise the election of Trump, and the recent midterms.

Today I still plan to do simple concrete things, like helping my wife with taxes and organizing physical objects around the house, but the “voice of God” (oversimplified description of something real and important) had some exact words which I feel I should pass on [adding some side comments; I apologize for not remembering how to be more concise].

When right-brained, concrete thinkers (including autistic people or people who actually practice “be here now” mindfulness all the time) take a shower, they “just take a shower.” In the shower, they do not think great thoughts about the future, the coming day, the grand world, science, or people they know. They really look at those weird controls which turn the water on or off and change the temperature. [Comment: water. Temperature. What do water and temperature have to do with the Gulf Stream or global warming. Can you imagine any possibility of a real connection?] They feel the water, its flow and temperature, on every part of their body, and notice when they like it and when they don’t. They notice parts of themselves adjusting to the flow, and they notice when they have to change the valve a little to make it better. Unless they are very lucky, they notice it doesn’t work best just to turn it on initially and forget it. If they travel, like us, they notice that showers tend to be different, and that different showers require different adjustments. They do all this without words or mathematics; they just do it directly and physically, the same way that a raccoon would, if raccoons took shower. [Comment: we once had a Jacuzzi in our backyard, but a family of raccoons started to use it, and one of their kids, not knowing mathematics got stuck. Not long after, we decided just to build over that little bit of land.]

Left brained people (like what Temple Grandin calls people with Williams syndrome) liberate their thoughts and their spirit from the here and now. Usually on earth they rely mainly on a great flow of words to express grand thoughts which they tend to be very proud of. They sometimes forget about the importance of reality testing, but many of them question the concept of reality itself. They hardly notice the shower, because they have more important things to think about. In discussing climate change, they tend to notice other people more than they notice the sun or the sleet on their faces, let alone what icebergs are actually doing.

Sane people fully integrate the left and right brain, to a degree which is rare on our planet, in part because humans are only part of the way through a major transition in the evolution of intelligence, and in part because our education systems and culture do not bring us to our full potential.  People with second order sanity notice not only the sleet on their faces but the flow of spirit or qi, but those who talk about those things without a firm attainment of first order sanity tend to be confused or even dangerous.

And so… taking a shower is a great example or testbed of some of the basic principles of nonlinear systems, chaos and control.

When I get frustrated that the shower water is suddenly too cold or too hot, I always remember Norbert Wiener’s classic book Cybernetics, and the insanely complex elaborations which engineers sometimes write down which basically just express what Wiener said about overshoot and undershoot and time delay. I even remember what the great chemical engineer, Tom McAvoy, taught me about sticky valves in big chemical plants which he taught the big companies how to control. [See www.werbos.com/Mind.htm or html for a link to chapter 10 of HIC, which I coauthored with him.] Really, it is like the swing, where moving too far in one direction may work at first, and then immediately cause an opposite motion. It may cause excess mass in one part of the plant, and not enough in another. The flow of water in the North Atlantic and the Arctic is just like that, a mathematically precise mix of inflow and outflow balancing each other, warming some places and cooling others… and then reversing if we don’t REALLY wake up and really do the best we can in a rational way to save western Europe, and avert the rest of the ragnarok prophecy.  

[I previously posted a more technical substantive summary of the fimbulwinter threat at
https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/01/response-to-policy-options-for-new-us.html.
as usual, I started from math and physics and tried to translate step by step..]

[OK: duty done. Back to earthy things. Notice that I don’t object to “be here now;” it’s just that we need to be effective in our focus AND capable of shifting it consciously, and we need to use our whole mind when we make sense of what we see in the here and now. Levitin has a nice best seller grounded in neuroscience which explains part of this. Actually, the science of taking a good shower is more than just this simple early stuff, but “the voice of god” did not ask me to get into such details today.]
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I was bemused by Trump saying that Senator Klobuchar "looked like a snowman" at her presidential announcement in Minnesota, a place we have been to recently. In fact, her announcement on CNN looked a lot like my little video of "happiness in Iceland"! Could she or other folks we know in Minnesota somehow cool things down? Way beyond the scope of this blog... 

Warren's speech and the Green New Deal: evaluation for space people

When a space engineer conc erned about energy talked about the relation between his new book on energy and the Green New Deal (GND), I did not comment, because I have not really studied the GND material. One of the best people in the core IEEE energy policy group recently posted a link:

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1. H.Res.109 — 116th Congress (2019-2020)Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.Sponsor: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria [D-NY-14] (Introduced 02/07/2019) Cosponsors: (67)Committees: House - Energy and Commerce, Science, Space, and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services, Judiciary, Ways and Means, Oversight and ReformLatest Action: House - 02/07/2019 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Science, Space, and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services, the Judiciary, Ways... (All Actions)

Note it is  a resolution, not a Bill.

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I certainly noticed Elizabeth Warren's commitment to the GND idea in her speech, which I heard in its entirety on CNN (while also doing sudoku and emails, as avoidance behaviors while trying to ponder difficult basic problems in quantum optics).

Warren's speech was extremely powerful, but at the end I remembered the three questions I would ask of any proposal to NSF: What? how? Why?

In the "how" department, would she as President be capable of   leading an aggressive creative effort to prevent major climate damage, taking full advantage of important "out of the  box" options like realistic SSP (which requires structure testing at WPAFB among other things), like productizing and rationally incentivizing biochar, and like developing and testing new geoengineering options? My response is: I don't know. Reading that GND link probably wouldn't tell me, either. It seems she is a lawyer, as was Obama (who also electrified people with good early speeches), but she doesn't play golf and she pays more attention to SOME numbers, but for now I just don't know. 

My sense of humor injects: maybe GND is more a product of Ocasio-Cortez, who looks a little like the woman in Bezos' lewd pictures. Since Bezos is pro-space, what would happen if he started hanging out with HER? But I doubt they would bring their thermal and mechanical stresses in repeated reentry to WPAFB for testing. 

So much I do not know...

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In truth, one of the emails I responded to yesterday concerned a quantum optics experiment proposed by Julia Mossbridge. That's what really got me thinking about our three questions. In that case, the question was "what."

These three questions were all part of our evaluation work, a very fundamental aspect of any effective organization, discussed at:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2268415836522154&set=a.176850262345399&type=3&theater

But is evaluation just a matter of scoring or choosing according to some specific value function J?

It is more complicated. Even the more powerful evaluation methods of "vector intelligence" would give a whole vector of values, lambda. There were people in constructive, functional psychology decades ago who would ask about "affordances;" instead of asking "is it good?" they would ask "good for what?" That's a useful practical way to think at times, and there is new math behind it; however, the new math is so powerful that I have decided not to push it much now, when so much of the world is hell bent on misusing AI in ways which could create hell on earth. Could Warren or Ocasio-Cortes support effective ways to get us out of THOSE boxes? Again, I don't know. There is certainly no base solution. 

Trump has also made serious promises to build a new space force, but will HE get out of the box, past the lobbyists and the swamp, enough to make it real? We hope but we worry.