Deep Culture of China: reflections on neoConfucianism, China's future and the Tree of Life

Here is my response to message from Yeshua ben David which introduces these topics: ======================================================== ========================================================= I met Martin Zwick's in the 2017 IEEE conference in Hawaii. We had a good time exploring the systems similaritires between ancient Israelite wisdom (The Tree of Life) and ancient Chinese wisdom (The Supreme Pole). I am providing to you two links to his work that combine very delicate systems science to access a potential isomorphism between the two symbolic structures of these two bodies ancient of wisdom. A book chapter - Symbolic Structures as Systems: On the Near Isomorphism of Two Religious Symbols: https://www.pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.sysc/files/symbol_stt.pdf A shorter essay on the same subject - The Diagram of the Supreme Pole and the Kabbalistic Tree: On the Similarity of Two Symbolic Structures: https://www.pdx.edu/sites/www.pdx.edu.sysc/files/symbol_rew2s.pdf In the following link you will find a full list of Martin Zwick's publications on other areas of research: https://www.pdx.edu/sysc/faculty-martin-zwick-publication-abstracts -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Biological Physics and Meaning" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Biological-Physics-and-Meaning+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/Biological-Physics-and-Meaning/98768c24-ab28-430c-bcac-7ef5c9fcc794%40googlegroups.com. =============================================================================================================== ============================================================================================================ Thank you, Yeshua! Does Martin have access to these discussions now? (I hope so, because I prefer to give people access to what others say about them at this level. If his interests here are just PSI or a subcode of PSI, the presence of other things which do not interest him should be minimum burden on him.) I thank you and Martin, for making me aware of Zhou Dunyi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Dunyi All through its history, China has been divided between those who believe in what I call "PSI" (either soul or at least some kind of paranormal human abilities beyond the mundane view of humanity which Stan associates with the standard model of physics"), those who believe it exists but is not really relevant, and those who take it as seriously as we do. Simplified stories of China discuss four great worldviews -- Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Maoism, all of which still exist and are still important inputs to serious actionable research in Cosmos and History. Simplifiers once said that Taoism and Buddhism both embrace PSI while Confucianism was a state religion trying to eliminate it, or at least keep it out of power. But I have learned a lot about Confucianism through the years. I was very happy a few years ago to visit the world headquarters Confucius Institute in Shandong Province a few years ago. I was delighted there to learn the full depth of the concept of ZHENG QI, the Confucian concept of INTEGRITY, and to learn that the full, official and higher version of Zheng qi DOES INCLUDE one of our PSI topics, the full development and expression of PSI. I talked about that and gave citations in my paper for Henry Stapp's Festschrift, thanks to Stan Klein for making that happen: Quantum Measurement, Consciousness, and the Soul: a New, Alternative Position By the way, this morning I see that my webpage werbos.com/religions.htm now includes that links AND to my three followon papers this past year elaborating and giving more details, such as the Cosmos and History paper giving my theory of what the noosphere IS and how it works. In Shandong, I was delighted to be guided by a descendant of Confucius (aka KungFuTzu) who showed us the life sized statue of an eagle which his ancestor used as a symbol of his kind of qi and mental efforts. There is a long history of such eagles!! And I was delighted to visit the inner sanctum teaching room of Mencius (aka MengTzu), who was in a way to Confucius what St. Paul was to Jesus. My paper cites the seminal book The Spirit of Chinese Philosophy, which explains how MengTzu thought about his type of higher qi. Even that Chinese author found it hard to understand what MengTzu was talking about, but I was happy to recognize it immediately, something which fits so well both my experience and my understanding of how the noosphere works. Mundane it wasn't. (They also asked me to give talk to a thousand people in Lin Yi on Neural Networks and Confucianism, explaining how they fit together. I probably posted a link to those slides somewhere on my web pages under www.werbos.com.) HOWEVER: MengTzu and KungFuTzu were all Before Christ. The important Song Dynasty which Martin refers to, circa 1000AD, created NEOConfucianism and the system of examinations which rule China to this day. ZHU XI (who was to Confucianism what Constantine was to Christianity, more or less) taught in the Thousand Year Academy still there in Changsha. It was entertaining to be asked to sit in his teaching chair, and then visit the dormroom of Mao Tse Tung who wrote essays on just what was wrong with the limited views of Zhu Xi. So much of what people do to implement Confucianism is indeed anti-PSI,within the effective and well-organized but stifling limits of Zhu Xi's thought. Zhu Xi had something of a scientific world view (like a recent ruler Jiang Zemin), but as you know some people push science into narrow channels which can be dangerously restrictive. To this day, the errors of Zhu Xi are a major impediment to the growth of China. This explains why I am so grateful to learn of Dunyi, a DIFFERENT neoConfucian in China, who might even be the very center of authentic spiritual growth in the Confucian part of China at the time of the Thousand Year Academy (which includes today). I have not studied the details further, but it looks like a good lead, important not only to Chinese history but to the cukture and spirit today. Dialogue with China is an important part of the spiritual development of humanity as a whole. ============ Of course, Yeshua also mentions the Tree of Life, another subject which several of us could write many pages on, crossing from ancient sea peoples to Israel and even to Shinto (as in werbos.com/religions.htm). The Great Tree is an important archetype in our noosphere which is like a word with MULTIPLE IMPORTANT DISTINCT DEFINITIONS each requiring focused attaention and appreciation. ONE of the meanings of that tree for me.. is as a symbol for our noosphere, the noosphere of this solar system, of which we all are part. Especially after our mundane body dies away, what lives on is PART of that great tree. Our very life depends on how well we connect with other parts of that tree. Some of us may be like the great long-distance cells in a brain, which connect all the way from the roots far below (where the Disney cartoon Coco is sited) to the very top where sun and sky are located. (In my view, the sun is basically PART of that tree, as is the earth.) none of us can be EVERYWHERE in that tree, or connect directly to every other cell which inhabits it, but the connections we build are an essential part of keeping the system as a whole integrated and connected (and perhaps someday capable of zhengqi). Thanks again, and best of luck... Pual

Reformulating Game Theory: The mathematics underlying human societies, conflict and cooperation

Basic Background Principles and an Important Example Previously, I posted a condensed overview of the basic concepts of telos, cardinal utility functions and the design of intelligent systems such as that part of the brain which manifests intelligence, true machine intelligence ("AGI"), and the "brain" part of noospheres. https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/02/neural-math-foundations-telos-purpose.html The mathematics of one intelligent system learning to maximize (the expected value of utility U over future time) is one of the two core foundations of neural network mathematics, and of "reinforcement learning" (e.g. systems like Alpha Go.). See http://springer.iq-technikum.de/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-1-4471-5102-9_100096-1) for an up to date review of that area. GAME THEORY is the general theory of the strategies of action in a system which has N actors, N intelligent systems, each of which has its own utility function Ui ( i = 1 to N), its own choices of action and (in some variations) its own imperfect knowledge of the situation. Game theory was invented in the classic book by von Neumann and Morgenstern, the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. This past week, my wife and son asked me to look at some current models they have for the interaction of political and economic forces in China, grounded in game theory. This reminded me that there are certain aspects of modern game theory which are essential to really understanding many of the issues we have discussed, from what Spengler discusses to what locke and Yeshua have said about social contracts. Some aspects have yet to appear in an integrated way in the literature of game theory even now. Here I will summarize what those pieces are, and some of the implications. (It clearly calls for new papers by folks who are mathematically competent, and I would of course be happy to support such work as a junior coauthor.) Principles of Extended Game Theory: Key Extensions of Von Neumann and Morgenstern The book by VonNeumann and Morgenstern addresses the case of STATIC games, where each actor i chooses his actions ui from a list of finite choices. The outcome (Ui for each actor i) is a function of the set of choices ui. This reminds me a bit of early work by computer scientists on 'reinforcement learning" where simple maximization of a static function U(x) was discussed as an example of "reinforcement learning." (See Neural Networks for Control, by Miller Sutton and Werbos, MIT Press, for how the communities thought about this in 1988.) Modern reinforcement learning, or RLADP, deals with decisions over TIME, as do brains. In that case, intelligent systems choose a vector of actions u(t) at each time t. To model the flow of human decisions in history (e.g. models of modern China), we need to assume the more general form of game theory in which each actor chooses ui(t) at each time t, and maximizes , the expected value of Ui(t) over future times t. in fact, there are THREE generalizations or extensions of Von Neumann and Morgenstern which are essential to understanding the kind of historical system which my wife and son are looking at now: (1) The theory of dynamical games. This is actually a huge set of fields by now. I usually cite the work by Bob Axelrod of U. Michigan, who is the best known thought leader of how to go from static games to dynamical games, and apply that to real social interactions. It has been applied to the issue of "how can we get to peace?", to strategies of action by the actors which lead to "better outcomes." ABSOLUTELY CENTRAL to this work is the effort to get closer to "Pareto optima." ROUGHLY SPEAKING --- a "Nash equilibrium" is what happens when each actor decides on his own, treating the other actors "like cardboard," like inanimate objects, and going for his own maximum in a myopic kind of way. a "Pareto optimum" is any one of the MANY possible choices which would be better for ALL the actors than a Nash equilibrium would be. (Some games exist where they are the same, but it is great challenge to design such games. The field of MARKET DESIGN addresses that challenge; the design of today's modern electric power system ("RTO/ISO") comes from serious mathematical efforts to address that challenge, and will be essential to building a sustainable internet of things and escaping the descent to chaos we now see in the new emerging global internet.) unfortunately, many people in engineering and internet design and modern military strategy think only in Nash terms; that THOUGHT is itself a major threat to our future history. When I think of those people, I think of the popular book about Nash, a Beautiful Mind, where the author is sadly oblivious to what Von Neumann was trying to say to Nash. (This is somewhat personal to me, after many trips to Princeton, but not for this post.) (2) The theory of "tact norms" in T.C. Schelling's easy-to-read classic book "Strategy of Conflict." This is just as fundamental as the theory of dynamic games itself!!! the theory of dynamic games reformulates what a "game" IS. Schelling's work explains aspects of COOPERATIVE Strategy, of how to get to a Pareto optimum, which are far beyond what Von neumann offered EVEN FOR THE STATIC CASE. (Of course, we need to integrate his insights into dynamic games, and apply to real human interactions. Schelling got deeper into those interactions even than the Axelrod family did, which is saying a lot. When I was a student of Schelling, he was frequently went to the telephone to advise Robert McNamara, then the secretary of Defense. His OTHER books connect to a lot of hard core even first person experience.) Von Neumann's book mainly uses the idea of COALITIONS as a way to find solutions for action in a many-player game. Though he assumed a static game, in principle, his idea of "coalitions" naturally fits REPEATED static games, and begins to shade into the world of dynamic games. It has been widely used in practical economics and political economy, where people do of course know about Von Neumann and Morgenstern. It is sad, then, that they do not know about Schelling. In a way, what Schelling argues(with LOTS of empirical examples, both from experimental games and international politics) is that games of mixed conflict and cooperation (or just cooperation) ARE NOT CLOSED. The mathematical definition of a game is simply NOT SUFFICIENT information to get us to a Pareto optimum, even when we know the dynamical rules as well. We already knew that the formal rules cannot tell us WHICH Pareto optimum to go for, but in fact that is at the core of the difficulty of real "games" of human history. Microeconomists sometimes play shell games trying to convince us that there is only one possible Pareto optimum, and thus that we should vote for it, but that IS a shell game, and is rarely one of the choices we get to vote for. Schelling basically argues that we need to have "tacit norms," a specific concept of POSSIBLE Pareto optima or norms of behavior which lead to them (or to outcomes better than than the Nash equilibrium; usually there is actually a "ladder" of possibilities up from Nash to better, partial Pareto eqiulibria to ideal never quite reached). Of course, the historical EVOLUTION and LEARNING of tacit norms is a crucial part of the longer term history of how humans learn to connect to each other even in the mundane world. The concept of learning has been applied in the past to dynamical games. Mathematically, it can be seen as en extension of the theory of learning by single actors, which is one of the many mathematical roots of modern neural network mathematics. FROM the theory of single actor neural networks (and its obvious extension here), we know that systems often fall into LOCAL MINIMA, which are often grossly suboptimal, like Nash equilibria. (Like war of all against all, which with autonomous weapons or nuclear weapons or both leads most easily and naturally to extinction of any species with our new technological capabilities. The efforts of Von Neumann himself were essential, in my view, to our not having gone extinct already, and it scares me that we have new generations of decision makers who do not really understand what he was telling them.) A key issue here is then: how can we FIND and COMMUNICATE ALTERNATIVE strategies, to get out of a local minimum, and find a discretely better basin of attraction? this is basically just the N-player extension of the challenge of local minima which some of us know inside-out after many decades of work in neural networks and in nonlinear dynamical systems. This is basically the same math which I used in discussions with Kozma and Freeman, in discussing "phase transitions" in brains and other systems. (It was also a major part of "chaos control" as studied by Yorke, Grebogi and Ott at the University of Maryland years ago, another group I have fond memories of.) This is the mathematical foundation necessary to really understand relations which many most sensitive and effective first person actors have learned at a subjective, intuitive level, essentially to the actual historical success of the groups of humans most successful over centuries in getting to better, more Pareto-like outcomes for their societies. What they learned is an example of what I call "first person science." Among the names which come to my own mind are Thomas Jefferson, Moses, George Washington, and Meng Tzu -- all creators of a CRUCIAL PART of what Spengler called "weltaunschaung," the mass of thought which makes possible large scale human civilizations, the erosion of which leads to collapse and death. (As today's world civilization is in danger of doing, to be ACCELERATED by what is happening on the internet unless we ALSO develop new tacit norms to undergird new social contracts between apps and hardware on internet). Jefferson, in particular, cited the work of Locke on "social contract" (as well as Francis Bacon and Newton) as the most important foundation of the new public school system which he promoted as an essengtial foundation to any hope of maintaning the more Pareto-like Republic he worked to help create. (It is painful for me not to say more about Washington, as it may even be his land I am typing on at this moment, but that is a topic for later, if anyone is interested.) But as Yeshua has often reminded us, the Ten Commandments and concept of Covenant from Moses are also so important as living memories in our noosphere, memories which fit the mathematics and really should be supported =, cultivated and extended. This is more or less just another was of talking about Max Weber's concept of "legitimacy"; indeed, Weber (a colleague of sorts of Spengler) expressed this concept somewhat more explicitly in its vast historical context. A proper presentation of the NEXT PHASE of general game theory, embodying tacit norms AND dynamics, should CONNECT that extension to actual historical dynamics (just as werbos.com/religions.htm BEGINS to connect OTHER parts of Splenger's weltaunschaung to one of the relevant PIECES of human history). (3) The work of Raiffa and its many uses I promised (3). ALSO important, and never to be forgotten or relegated to a footnote: the work by Howard Raiffa, who EXPLAINED a lot of Von Neumann's core concepts (from Von Neumann and MOrgenstern), and connected them to the realities of social dynamics IN INDUSTRY, IN THE ECONOMY. (Before information technology, I might even say I view DNA, money and the noosphere as the true underlying dynamics of human behavior through history. Well, I suppose that that was too informal. To ignore the economy is to be rather dumb and blind in the study of human history, and yes I also cite E.,O. Wilson, Robert May and Marx and Ken Arrow when I get into those details.) In the example of China, I often think of the incredibly important first person data we can share with Paulson (his essential book on Dealing with China) on how these systems really work, which of course fits nicely with work by Raiffa in other areas later in life. (He, not Trump, was perhaps the true expert on the real art of the deal, but in the end communication and marketing ARE important parts of the larger system, just as our toes and certain other organs are. I often think back to where trump actually learned SOMETHING about marketing and the middle "J" at Wharton... another weird overlap with my own first person experiences.) A Few Thoughts on by Response Received From Joshua Davis (Anglicized version of Yeshua ben David) After seeing this Yeshua also noted important work by Ron Howard of Stanford, whose work was also a crucial inspiration for the work on reinforcement learning, discussed in my previous post. Of course, when Yeshua says "we need a new social contract", I certainly agree. We really need to know what we are doing then, at a higher level than we did when facing less monumental social challenges, to have any chance of survival. We need to use everything we have. And, as that video from India (thanks to Varadan) said, that has ever been the way for groups of creatures trying to grow and survive in nature. Some Important Examples Taking the Basics Further: Sanity of The New Internet and the New China Extended game theory applies, of course, to all kinds of interactions of people and of "apps" (computer systems which live on larger platforms of hardware and of software rules). On the day when I copied over the text above from discussions with Yeshua, the cotonavirus crisis is stimulating people all over the world to discuss the huge changes already started all over the world. My previous note on Telos pointed to three new papers I published in 2019 explaining how the new neural network ADP mathematics tells us important thinks about the mental growth and experience of individual humans, and individual brains of all sorts, Ironically, you can find links to these three papers at werbos.com/religions.htm, which suggests that our entire noosphere can be understood as a single intelligent system, governed by one-actor mathematics! In the first part of the first paper, it discusses a very mundane starting point, essential to understanding maturity (stable convergence??) of a single intelligent system at the level we see in the human brain: the concept of "sanity" or "zhengqi." In my view, this concept is essential to really understand new possibilities both for China and for the Internet, In an INDIVIDUAL HUMAN BRAIN, we have a huge learned repertoire of how we use words in performing symbolic reasoning, in decideing what we believe and deciding in words what we decide to do. But the verbal part of the barin is just one layer of emergent things we have learned; it is not the foundation (which is non verbal) or is it the highest level of our symbiolic reasoning (which certainly includes mathematics). **IF** our symbolic reasoning is maure and coherent enough, we learn a few FUNDAMENTAL AXIOMS which we hold to; this is very much like the FIRST great work of Von Neumann, the axiomatization of set theory, (I am grateful to our local frined who showed us the readable and important book Turing's Cathedral, by George Dyson, which talks about Von Neumann's ligfe "in many worlds."). At a time in life, when the person is mature enough to make use of words in a powerful way, but when the AXIOMS learned for words are too weak or flawed in a dangerous way, conflicts arise. Indeed, this tends to fit Freud's picture of how nervous breakdowns happen. The key to survival and growth is to UPGRADE THE AXIOMS, and rise past the forces of reverting back to animal nonverbal behavior. But: "Ab below, so above." ENTIRE N-PLAYER systems like mundane human societies or collections of apps competing on the internet, CAN ALSO have this problem of a time of transition. In China, Jiang Zemin and his people represented a truly great advance in the "social norms," in the wletaunschaung underlying the society and economy of China. (Actually, Zhu Xi of an earlier dynasty played a similar role.) A beautiful, clear and powerful new synthesis, opening the door to growth and verbal consciousness. But in both cases, the new axioms had fatal gaps. In China, the attacks on QI were thge real cause, in my view, of the Xi JinPing antithesis. The crucial problem now is whether China will simply descend into chaos yet again (as it has many times in the past) by a process not ulike a nervous breakdown, or will it rise to a new synthesis, a new weltaunschaung? At this time, it looks bad, but there is hope if China does NOT GIVE UP ON SCIENCE, but ENHANCES it (both in learning and in social contracts), to be more like the original concept of science, which I discuss in those 2019 papers I just mentioned. FURTHERMORE... the new organizing axioms for the entire world (China included) WILL INCLUDE the new integrating platform used for both hardware and software of the world internet. (The main alternative would be somehow to destroy the internet, wihch mostly seems possible now only by violence so great it would probably kill all humans too. But any true expert on cosmos and history should consider Stapleton's fiction on that larger subject.) For a general overview of this challenge, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4. That talk discusses what the mathematics of intelligent systems tells us about what our choices are for the new integrating rules of the internet, which are an urgent matter of life or death right now. The movement towards a fatal Nash equilibrium in that game are very scary right now, scary than the scariest things people worry about as worst case possibilities for China. Futurists have told me that the FIRST PART of that video is not so relevant; indeed, it revews the powers of the US and EU today, whose solutions are indeed mainly irrelevant, to scary degree, but we do need to know where we are starting from. MUCH MORE relevant are the two greatest forces towards a new integration of the internet, which I call "Godzilla" and "King Kong." In essence, competition and incremental policy is moving us towards a top-down control system which does not provide the feedback and recurrence (let alone channels for the noosphere to express itself) necessary for real sustainability. There is also an emerging "Borg" power (really, I have seen those people!!)aimed at building "the new human" which they conceive of as a reliable puppet in the future top-down internet of things, compliantly doing what myopic humans at the top ask for. The novel Stealing Worlds by Karl Schroder gives a beautiful sense of reality on how unstable susch systems can be, but in fact we already have neural network tools which take it a step even beyond his novel. It is serious and urgent, and if we don’t get our ostrich heads up out of the dirt and face up to the need for a new ... EXPLICIT norm integrating the global internet... well, nature is full of "sink or swim" situations. =========== A few weeks ago, at the last Quaker Meeting I went to before the social distancing, many people meditated on the question: "IF God... or even just the noosphere,, is real, how could the world be falling apart as much as it seems to? Is this level of pain necessary?" And I remembered (with reminders from Yeshhua and Varadan) that even noospheres have parents, as best I understand. OUR LIVES are mainly in interaction with EACH OTHER, other parts of the noosphere, OUR duties and OUR nature as individual humans, body and soul. But in very special and unique circumstances, Jesus would ask us to call on our "Father who art in Heaven." When I asked for a bit of clarity on that... the image which came to me was: "Paul, you know what it means to be the father of a teenager. YOUR ENTIRE noosphere, from the sun to the depths of the earth and the Oort cloud, is one big teenage noosphere. Yes, teenagers go through growing pains. Some try to suppress the pain, with chemical or mental or electrical opiates, ALL FATAL. You MUST feel all that pai;, it is necessary to your growth, but you also need to become MORE AWARE, MORE CONSCIOUS (and yes, more scientific and mathematical) to get a grip on it all." And so the analogy to human personal sanity applies at all levels...

ECONOMIC impacts of coronavirus challenge, and grossly inefficient choices

Many, many groups are saying that we all need to pull together and use all we have to prevent serious damage due to coronavirus impacts. It is clear that the economics impacts will be just as serious as the direct disease impacts.

This being so, I am amazed at the gap between the level of economic analysis I see coming from US and EU today versus what we were discussing on this list at the height of the 2008 crisis, drawing on what I learned at the Office of Energy Information Validation at EIA/DOE (where I handled model evaluation and later developing new models from 1979 to 1989, when I moved to NSF).

I certain remember how the best standard scalar macroeconbomic models generally had errors on a factor of two, and Jorgensen's famous DGEM had even worse, because of the complex structural effects of energy shocks, which we WERE able to understand with effort, though few others ever did. (The Stanford Energy Modeling Forum back then showcased the industrial energy demand model I developed using new approaches, improved hugely from DGEM and the Wharton Annual model, the best previous alternatives.) It sounds as if the same general KIND of structural\change (involving different industries of course and additional complications) is what is coming now, and the  various plans in US and EU are even less optimized and thought out than the least efficient plans of the 2008 era, and even less thought out than what Biden is ;proposing these days for climate. (Maybe less than one tenth the impact/cost ratio which a rational climate strategy would allow.) Since I was THERE in EPW during the 2009 failure... well, it scares me that we are on course now to replicating triple unnecessary failures, simply due to the growing gaps in communications between policy and reality in all these sectors. 

The Millennium Project got me invited to do two overviews on youtube (search on Werbos and "climate" or "AGI") aimed at trying to fill those life or death gaps in communications, but can you guess why my plans to go back to Korea this spring are on hold? And why sheer chaos and noise get in the way here?

But some of YOU may know better channels. if so, after retirement, I really just want to find ways to help SOMEHOW. 

Best of luck,

Who could save us from a global disaster via the internet in this decade?

Many people in Japan and Korea actually understand how huge the risks are coming to all of humanity, risks bigger than climate change (serious as that is). The Korean Institute for AI (budget bigger than US government AI R&D) and the  Japan Science and Technology ministry invited me in November to come give the technical truth of thos risks, which I chose to give by youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4&t=71s

I probably spent too much of that talk discussing what US and EU are doing to try to solve the growing problems on the internet, and then I gave pointers to technical requirements. Here is a more up to date and understandable response (to the Cosmos and Hisa\tory discussion):

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Once again -- the tsunami of changes coming relatively soon on the internet (which will include Internet of Things IOT, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and a redefinition of money and anything involving money_ will move human future history into new patterns, beyond the old patterns familiar to those of us who have studied past history. What MOST people discuss (including most regulators and policy people) is transitory stuff which will be made moot by the tsunami. Right now, it seems as if the future will be dominated by the three higher-reaching forces I mentioned in my"brain dump" post -- "Godzilla" (a focused effort(s) from China, involving lots of technologies which talking heads in the West doubt will happen even in the future or which they do not even conceive of), "King Kong" (the thoughts of Eric Schmidt are a good reference point), and this new or reborn cluster which was announced as the new GeoTech center and commission at the Atlantic Council, what I heard ... yesterday. One reason I focus on these three efforts is that the future is NOT about a shopping bag full of little apps; it is about the INTEGRATION, the larger system which includes the apps (and the humans interacting with it).

In my post yesterday, I forgot to mention a technical point which needs to be fit in somewhere. They noted how companies like facebook (FB) may be paid to generate more clicks, and thus set up rules which favor anything which goes viral.  They cited a study which shows that posts full of anger or fear tend to be the ones which go viral. This there is a network of incentives, from higher profit down to creation of interaction rules and apps which magnify the fear and the anger. ONE PART of the big design challenge is at the app level, I suppose, developing AND SOMEHOW encouraging social network systems which are governed by DIFFERENT rules of the road, less destructive in nature. I always think back to the example of NEURAL networks, with feedback following rules (which I was the first to discover back in the 1970s) which cause the system as a whole to converge to maximum truth or maximum goal effectiveness. 

There was another technical point... but back to the Big Picture.

There are severe risks in where THIS effort could take us, even though many of its players have higher goals which give it real hope. 

This is also very connected to the Oxford futures group and transhumanists, which Shiva has tried to connect with our discussion. (Please, I hope! What some of us call "dialogue".. is like long-range connections in a brain (what Kozma and Freeman have discussed so emphatically).. a key part of coherence.. mindfulness. Folks who walk through hazardous terrain need mindfulness or they die.) In fact, the GeoTech group has strong connections to the Singularity Institute and some streams of transhumanists, AMONG OTHER connections. 

Risks: MANY human organizations end up going to hell because of UNEXAMINED TACIT assumptions. That GENERAL principle is nothing new, but it is like what Bernie Baars has mentioned, that people often do badly because they fail to remember and ppaly yhings they SHOULD know. This principle of examining tacit assumptions is one of those basics. The most powerful tacit assumptions in human thinking tend to be things which are ASSUMED but never even articulated. One way of freeing ousrelves from ovbersimplified and dangerous tacit assumptions is simply to ARTICULATE "What WAS I trying to do, and why?" Marshall Loeb had an important book, the Battle for Investment Survival, which gave an example of how important it is to ARTICULATE and remember WHY... 

The tacit assumption which worries me most in the GeoTech community is the assumption that people SHOULD be reconstructed and rebuilt so as to become the maximally profitable components of the new IOT. Really, it reflects the earlier IBM Watson vision from 2014. That SUBSET of the GeoTech community (and of the military) I think of as "the Borg".

Are the real choices on the menu before humanity now just Godzilla, King Kong and the Borg? (I actually remember an NSF workshop ordained by Pramod Kargonekhar where a key speaker, from Temple University representing some major DARPA programs, actually did get up and assert "We ARE the Borg, and you WILL be assimilated, and let me tell you why it is our only realistic hope, and how our community will make it happen." That was just the START of a discussion, but I do need to be less verbose, hard as that is for me.) Such folks are quite happy when some of you do not believe any of this, or believe it is not in this decade, because gthat makes it easier for them to just do what they want to do.

BUT: BACK TO DESIGN ISSUES. My complaint is that they are all designing and implementing a new global system WITHOUT considering how systems design actually works, and what the consequences are of innocent looking design assumptions. 

All three basically assume atop-down control model by the humans whose values they think they will serve, managing all other humans as instruments to their decision and control. They do not really understand the basic principles of what a utility function IS, which I reviewed in my first post on telos. Even the nonBorg members of GeoTech do not understand how AGI AUTOMATICALLY ALREADY learn value functions (J or lambda, which I hate people calling "V") , and depend in an essential way on the essential way on the U (telos, utility) DRIVER which humans always supply, whether consciously or unconsciously. AGI are out there now, and are proliferating much faster than naive nontechnical people imagine. (What is INSIDE those Iranian killer drones circling already all over the Middle East, for one example? Or the control centers managing them? Stuart Russell is famous for his "slaughterbot" videos,but unlike me, he has not spoken to the folks whose algorithms have been used.)  

ONLY with new systems which determine U in new ways, and forcibly value humans as more than just workers, is there hope of creating a kind of buffer zone in cyberspace which does not decay into a fatal war between Godzilla, King Kong and the Borg. And yes, greater mobilization and mindfulness of the noosphere is probably NECESSARY to making that strong enough to be real. Shiva and Dean Rdain are right that this is a tall order, but survival itself will be a tall order for the human species in the face of what is coming. 

Crucial to a new systems design (an IT system!) is also a system of TWO WAY feedback, crucial to the level of intelligence and mindfulness which the system is capable of. Again, when you walk on dangerous terrain, a lack of maximum, full mindfulness is fatal. None of those three existing serious efforts really do that yet, but there might be hope of expanding their scope to make them more sustainable.

Ironically, one of the threats to GeoTech saving us all are the most militantly ANTIBorg people in the group. (Think of the polarization in the US Congress.) The most vigilant antiBorg faction reminds me of Ocasio Cortez in her worst moments, glorifying a new stakeholder process guaranteeing utopian happiness to everyone under all conditions. That reminds me of the deer who eat my wife's flowers in our back yard. We can and should defend their lives, and even feel real love for the deer, WHILE ESTABLISHING red lines, a modern ten commandments (on new IT principles, not the old stuff) which prevent cyberpopulation crashes or entropic selection processes. System design should perhaps not maximize human output but human spiritual  freedom and connection, valuing both obvious connections (friends, family kinds of qi) and deeper but real connections. 

It may seem near impossible, but I HAVE accomplished a few things which seemed impossible. By now, we should remember that it requires multiple stages. Even Mao kept saying "the hardest step is the first step.' the real first step is to figure out where we are going, to create real visions connecting brain and souls. And yes, IT systems design.

Best of luck...

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The "post yesterday" was just a stream of consciousness record of my impressions when I listened to the webcast of the launch of the new GeoTech Commission and Center, in care of the Atlantic Council, b=with bipartisam Congressional support. But by now that launch may be posted on youtube. 

In defense of science -- and my view of what it is

When Deepak Chopra first commented on the limits of "science" as a way to understand our consciousness, I am sorry to say that my first reaction was a quick knee-jerk reaction:

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The words "science" itself is just another word meaning different things to different people. My preferred definition

is based on certain versions of the concept of the "scientific method" which are quite different from simplified

and extremist versions used to galvanize the bases left and right. My preferred definition is reviewed in papers I cite at werbos.com/religions.htm and www.werbos.com/Erdos.pdf, drawing of course on folks like Occam and Bayes and Kant and Popper and Francis Bacon, with apologies about the idiots on both sides of extremist positions.

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But then he and I went a bit deeper:

On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 8:33 AM Deepak Chopra <nonlocal101@chopra.com> wrote:

Well then - does the scientific method - created in human consciousness - explain its source - human consciousness ? 

First let me apologize for the way I violated a wise guideline we have in our local Quaker Meeting... to leave time to meditate on what another person has said before saying ANYTHING oneself. As I think over your original message about "science", I realize that I should have referred to a DIFFERENT definition of "science," different from my concept of "scientific method," but equally clear and thoughtful and far more mainstream today than mine. I should have referred to Thomas Kuhn's definition in his very famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In fact this was the favorite book, close to a Bible, of the longest serving NSF director we ever had.  My concept of scientific method is closer to Francis Bacon's viewpoint and yours than Kuhn's is, but Kuhn did make many points which are very important and real, even if we would phrase them differently.

I actually do not use the words "science" or "God" in personal discussions with anyone but trusted friends, because of how badly those words both get misconstrued with conflicting definitions.  Kuhn has told us important things about THIRD PERSON science. When HE says "science", he means third person science, which does have serious limitations. He DEFINES the word "science" to mean what I would call "third person science."

Third person science has an important role to play in helping humanity understand itself better. The problem lies when people extrapolate further and try to exclude the greater capabilities of the scientific method as such. Perhaps as fewer people know about Francis Bacon etc and more about Kuhn, we do risk falling into a narrow hole culturally all across the entire world. Developments in China are becoming VERY important to the future of humanity, and it helps to understand that Jiang Zemin and his followers were also as narrow as Kuhn, and that there is an old stream of Confucianism taught by Zhu Xi (in the school which Mao Tse Tung attended but rebelled against) which moved in that direction (albeit not so far). Yes, there is a problem there.

In essence, Kuhn's science tries to build all of its conclusions based on AGREEABLE, REPLICABLE experimental evidence which can be universally shared and tested. I think of it as working out the conditional probability of what might be true, conditional upon that limited database. In a way, it is like forms of behaviorism which focused SOLELY on animal experiments viewing animals from the outside without empathy. (By contrast, I will never forget the faces of monkeys used in NIMH experiments, faces in a video shown by Barry Richmond when he discussed HIS interpretation of what those experiments showed.Tthey reminded me of the old question "Was Skinner training his frats or were his rats training him to give them more food?")

YES, my understanding of consciousness is limited by the limits of MY neural networks (brain plus soul working together), and therefore has limits. Those limits apply to ALL humans on earth, and to ALL life and minds we would consider to be organic/living. (The cosmos itself is different, but use of human words to describe it is usually misleading now because of the way we tend to extrapolate what does not fit.) 

BUT the full first person scientific method (as per my definition, building on earlier work by Von Neumann explained by Raiffa) DOES include the FULL database available to any one of us, including not only shared experience but also data which we have that others do not, which allows for inputs not only from the retina but from ears and nose and even PSI inputs, all subject to intelligent scrutiny as our nonverbal brains were evolved to perform, enhanced by symbolic intelligence fully in harmony with that nonverbal intelligence.

Kuhn's method IS useful, as ONE input to our personal understanding. Yes, it has serious limits.

But equally serious are the limits on those who exclude ANOTHER type of important input, the input we get from looking into the mirror and seeing a mammal there. (Whether we see the "angel" side as well to any degree depends on how well we have trained our inner eyes. To see better , we need to build on what we CAN see, by an honest kind of "bootstrap" procedure, like what I described in my single authored paper in the journal Neural networks.

2012. (I was also a junior author on another paper in the same issue.) The ability to FUSE the first person subjective view of ourselves WITH what we can see in the mirror, and with all the mathematical insight which accompanies BOTH, is my definition of first order sanity, as in the first of the three 2019 papers i link to at werbos.com/religions.pdf. 

I was rather surprised to learn, through unexpected first person experience, that an authentic full implementation of first order, mundane sanity LEADS TO psi and such, the path to second order sanity, simply because it entails a kind of openness to experience which opens up more. (But at times, I also think of the music I was open to and listened to often back in those years. Stuff like classic Russian composers and Bartok and whatnot, at that time. Long ago.) Rejection of the scientific method is rejection of a VERY powerful mirror, which reminds me a little of the mirror of Ameratsu, part of another link at werbos.com/religions.htm.

Once again, the path of life is BETWEEN the two extreme paths so popular in today's cultures. 

Best of luck,
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By the way... just FYI... Francis Bacon was one of the three authors whom Thomas Jefferson recommended as the MOST necessary reading in the curriculum for a sustainable republic. The others were Locke and Newton. I learned that on a visit to the Library of Congress, in their Jefferson special exhibit.