PSI/AGI/CH are humans building a world they cannot live in?

A few years ago, someone said: Don't worry about the horrible things the oil industry political apparatchiks are creating, where climate change will kill us all including them. That will change, as the new IT industry takes over the world, and creates a more progressive world which prizes human intelligence over bandit-like violent struggles for control of natural resources.

But how is that change of power actually working out, and will it be as benign as we thought? Will a new generation of IT leaders, trained in a culture which is highly intelligent, cooperative and powerful, nevertheless build a world which assumes that humans do not have souls, and more or less by accident oppresses and eliminates them (and, "OOps, ma, I accidentally demolished the entire human species?"). 

Now that I think of it, Jiang Zemin of China had a similar flavor. Xi Jinping is in many ways the Donald Trump of China, the result of the powerful nonverbal minds of China reacting against the power, clarity purity but dangerous narrowness of what came before. In that way, more Trump than Trump!

What happens when we build an entire world for someone, and discover we could not fit as that someone?

For centuries, the highest Western culture has tried to promote 

freedom (as in the famous book by Eric Fromm), individual self-awareness, and the idea that we can make rational choices as individuals even if society manipulates the rules to change what is rational for us. Can local police remember that they are humans first, before they are whatever job they identify with?

But what if the new world is designed by people who assume none of us have souls, and that there is no need to protect, preserve or serve them?

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All of that reminds me of two of the many real stories I come back to in my life.

Some people come back to verses in the Bible. There is a joke about two Bible people having a conversation, saying things like "Matthew 7:12" and "Job 3:3" to each other, filling in from memory and connecting smoothly to their present experience. that book is too limited, but I have often thought that it would be nice to have a list of the first person experiences which so deeply shaped my own life and understandings. So here are just two of those many stories.

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Ugly duckling redux: 

Once I was a PhD student at Harvard,finally on a path to really surviving and graduating, thanks to my thesis advisor, Professor Karl Deutsch, whose highest cited book happens to be:

Karl chose to work often in a simple desk in the corner of the library of Litauer Hall, the same building where Henry Kissinger had his office, which I visited very often that year.

Karl did not believe in PSI (which I define as that aspect of the human mind which cannot be explained by QED, the aspect which includes SOME FORM of what may be called paranormal, psychic or spiritual life). A few years before that, I was as definite as he was that PSI does not exist, based on exactly the same arguments that D.O. Hebb used in his introduction to The Organization of Behavior, one of the two great sources of the entire neural network field. But by that time, inescapable personal experiences had forced me to "open my eyes" so to speak. Deutsch had held on to the no-PSI view very fiercely. He was deeply committed to the scientific approach in all his work. 

Deutsch was also one of the real founders of the European Union (EU), then the EEC (European Economic Community). He worked tirelessly and effectively, not to attain power, but to bring peace to Europe. He was in constant communication with the people who did move power in western Europe, helping them to see the way forward. 

One day, when I visited him in his corner of the library (a strong visual memory!), I had an idea for how to make further progress in the EEC, a new policy tactic to advance the goals which Karl and I shared there. As I presented it to him, I looked carefully at his face, which became very thoughtful (not positive or negative but thoughtful, of the "I wonder" type). He then said: "Hmm. I wonder what the french would think about that." And then, I swear, I saw him look up and forwards, with a glowing ray of thought emanating from his forehead, moving up and connecting far away... and then, when something came back to him, him then turning and telling me what he saw.

My thought: "This man does not even believe in psychic powers, but what i just saw with my own eyes was incredibly real, visible and powerful."  I drew the obvious global conclusion, which TODAY I express as: "How many people out there think they are ugly ducklings, living their lives accordingly, when really they are swans? But conversely, how many people believe deeply that THEY are swans, when they are actually just ugly ducklings living their lives in formalistic or devout darkness?" (Suddenly I also remember epistles of paul, about opening of the eyes..and ears and heart and mind.) 

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Who do we think we are, worms creating a world where only worms can live?

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The other story from my personal life which came back to me is a bit less vivid.

When I ran the neural network area at NSF (one of my many strong front line jobs there), I often gave talks to the neural network community. (In fact, they told me that the following web site will soon be updated to link to my 13 minute talk on the grand challenges in research and government funding ahead of us in that field: 

https://wcci2020.org/panel-sessions/#panelsession-4 ).

One day, as I prepared a larger, longer and more technical talk I mused: "This preparation feels so weird. Here I am pretending to give a big public talk, pretending to be a great communicator when really I am just a humble mathematician/thinker, planning to put on the clothes of a great communicator pretending to be a mathematician when at that time I will be just a communicator." That was such a vivid and powerful thought, a powerful experience. 

In fact... another powerful memory emerges: final exam time, senior year at Harvard, taking crossdisciplinary courses, like an independent study with Marvin Minsky on AI, courses in economics, and another.

Memory: "TODAY, I must wipe my mind and become an economist. Yesterday I was a neural network person. Each day I have to make a sweeping change, and totally BECOME yet another role, some other viewpoint. " That felt VERY weird and unnatural, but I was glad to get used to it, to learn how to make such shifts. It reminded me of an important paper by Bitterman in Scientific American, about how SOME species of vertebrate learn to make pattern reversals more and more easily, even as others collapse. "I am a mammal," I told myself. (That was BEFORE I believed in PSI connections, but did the exercise help? Did deep listening to music, welcoming it into my deepest feelings, help? Perhaps they were part of the CAUSE of my later having experiences which forced me to change my mind about psi.) 

Some stories need to be engraved so deeply in our minds, to preserve our sense of reality, and keep us from making very dumb and dangerous mistakes. 

On this list... Deepak Chopra's fiction about Merlin is just a fictional story, but I found it more authentic than a lot of the later theory. In fact, some of my technical papers describe how human symbolic reasoning is basically just an outgrowth of a more fundamental part of the design of the human brain, the part which enabled people returning from the hunt to tell stories in a way which transferred the value of experience. This is part of the very core of mundane human brain intelligence and yes, there are specific circuits in the brain which support it. 

A Key Principle which needs more recognition: the sharp duality of states

This collage illustrates a very basic principle which people need to understand and follow up more in design of intelligent computer systems, in spiritual life and perhaps even in studying the brain.
  Do we have the kind of brain which can form and recall a BINARY dual image, so the we can get full advantage of understanding the two different states on theleft and tight above, or the duality of the top and the bottom?
  These images already give me two very important stories which I need to remember, from my own life, relevant also to the larger questions of life. On the upper left you see my mother happy and energetic, on a big rental ship in Avalon, New jersey, from her 90th birthday party. I am so grateful to my brother John and sister Suzie for arranging that party, which brought together so much of her family and friends, enough to fill a ship. At that time she was living with John in his house in new Jersey.
     But on the right, you see her in the Brandywine Haddonfield eldercare house, where she spent the last few years of her life because she did need special care. This photo is from a visit by me, Luda and Chris. Again and again she asked,"What I am I doing here, basically doing nothing? Where is my purpose in being here (on earth) at all?" Actually, I heard her ask that question intently in other places for years, but before then I heard her answer. This time, I saw her cut back on eating, and talk clearly about many problems and her past life (which she was still quite happy for). She died peacefully in bed with John's son Rob nearby, well before this year when many, many people in eldercare places died of covid. I wondered: was THEIR sense of lack of purpose a major factor in THEIR mind-body connection, and death? Purpose in life, telo, utility functions... that is a pervasive foundation we all need to know about more, from life to internet. See werbos.com/religions.htm and ,y earlier post on telos...
     So that is one important duality, our clear memory and understanding of the differencebetween the state on the left and the state on the right. Having them alli n one memory is not the samething; the duality is important in itself, for our best thinking at all levels.
   But what of the top and the bottom? The sharp contrast between the being on the top and the being on the left is also extremely important, and it's not just a matter of race or species.  We took this picture in Galway, Ireland, on January 18 2020. as part of my perpetual spiritual quest, I tuned into what i saw there and even opened up a little conversation with one or two of those creatures there.
"What about YOUR purpose? What do you think of YOUR future?" Response; "What a dumb  question. I am what I am, a cow sitting in the sun, happy to be where I am, to do what I am doing here and now, with no need and no point to ask questions beyond that. Yes, I will go to a barn again, and then back, and maybe not forever, but that is my life and I am glad of it." So different from my mother!!! Both both beings, and myself, have a natural, living connection to our noosphere(again, see werbos.com/religions.htm for my papers published in 2019 on this). Some are at higher levels of consciousness and connection than others, but we all connect.
     But: what of bigger implications? The meaning for computers of having such dual state records is clear and important, but it requires hevay prerequisites in subjects like RLADP. So let me address some human aspects.
   At a mundane level, I don't see this in the brain, sadly. we can LEARN to encode such memories and use them (two states at once), but it must be an act of will, a learned skill. that skill becomes ever more important, at the highest level of mental and policy challenges to humans, precisely because there are such stark choices before us. It is part of second-order sanity or Zhenqi, a larger topic which I discuss in those 2019 papers.
   At an esoteric or spiritual level, I remember a discussion we had a few months ago about a book called "The Technique of the master." That really is the core idea in that book, of great importance in that realm.
  And finally, I remember my own exercises or experiments with PK, in the period from 1972 to 1978. Living in Roxbury, in the slums, in late 1972, my suitemate loaned me a book which I would not have looked at before that: "How to Help Yourself with ESP." By then, I wondered very deeply what psychic or spiritual experiences mighht be based on, and I was attracted by the idea of getting first hand empirical data which would be a lot more persuasive to me than stuff I could read.
And so, I deciedd to play with a little mobile made up of plastic fishes. ("No harm in trying, to see what I can see," I thought. ) I started doing it as an exercise in trying to see more in the dark, and predict the movement. (See the discussion of Bootstrap training in my paper in Neural Networks 2012.) But as I looked and relaxed... in my mind I could somehow get a HOLD or GRIP on the entire present state... and equally clearly envision an image of a DIFFERENT possible state... and exert a little energy. That's really just an example of what that book was talking about. I haven't played with mobiles much at all since I joined the federal government in 1978 (not enough time to play!), but the sense of CHOICES BEFORE US has remained strong. But this year, 2020, I do not see what the choices really are so coherently. The elections remind me of Yeats' poem, where the bestlack all conviction and the rost are full of passionate intensity (like 1920's?).

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By the way, I should be careful not to rule out the possibility that something like this might exist evne in the machinery of the mammal brain. It DOES allow envisioning of goal states. Could the wiring between neocortex and basal ganglia actually allow an act of holding a present state and a goal state clearly in mind, clearly distinct, considered at one time as inputs? Could it be hardired? we don't know, really.

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Days later.. I was reminded that the duality is complicated, and cross species.
This morning, I went straight from bed (and a very detached state) to a comfortablechair in our study downstairs, overloooking nature therough big glass doors. And what did I see?

At first,it seemed that the same female deer who had laid down just past the edge of our land had returned, but without her Bambi. I made up a whole story in my mind, about a distraught mother deer joining the Deer Lives Matter movement (not a laughing matter), and that SHE had had s sense of purpose, not like those cows. But.. well, it all reminded me of Trungpa, the cycles ofs uffering out there. Then Luda looked and said:"No, I think that's Bambi himself, grown up, hurt (like broken leg?), here for a place of safety where there were some red berries to eat as well. That reminded me of an ancient British rock song, "Mother... I killed a man... I don;t have long.." Whatever.

My middle way response to a debate about what happens when we die

Previous;y Ram raised the question: after ordinary mortal death, do we just disappear (as in the usual mundane "materialist" view)

or do we just stand there in some other world, as in many beliefs about reincarnation and afterlife? 

I replied that I strongly believe in the "noosphere species theory," which I explain at werbos.com/religions.htm. This idea implies that PART of us may live after

mortal death (the "soul" part in our local noosphere), but there is a huge variation from person to person, just as Gurdjieff tried to explain. 

For those of us over age 70, mortal death is a VERY inconvenient truth. For the few of us who try to be rational about it, It makes sense to try to understand what it is really about, and to ditch the obvious misunderstandings propagated by people trying to keep other people under control. (As I type this, I think of the story of a Celtic cross we saw in Ireland last january. The story of how a certain Saint Patrick had a meeting with the high king, telling him that fear of hell could be used to reduce the civil strife which was pulling the country apart. The message engraved on the cross was so simple: behave, and you get heaven. Rebel, and you get.hell. To this day, Irish priests are a strange mix of oppressive people who focus just on heaven versus hell but obedience, and others with deep sensitivity often in tune with Teilhard de Chardin. Some of them told me "they don't call us catholic for nothing." But all nations on earth have such political biases.)

So what does it look like from a more scientific view, grounded in noosphere species?

First, of course, we are all just guessing. I was so happy years ago, when certain folks echoed a cdrtain dualist Hindu party line, and Alex mengtioned Aurobindo: "Could it be that what survives are just SEEDS, lots of pieces of our former soul which scatter to the far winds?" Like Buddha's comments about how the water in a drop survives, but not the drop itself. There is also the Egyptian Book of the Dead,which says we actually split into two parts, ba and ka, which live on in different ways at different levels. Orson Scott Card wrote a simple enjoyable science fiction series 

https://www.amazon.com/Gatefather-Orson-Scott-Card-audiobook/dp/B0147CRJVY/  which gets deeper into the ancient Egyptian view, which makes sense in its way. Why should our traces in the noosphere be just one integrated lobe?

Long ago, the original Bible contained a book, the Book of Esdras (an Apochrypha), which suggested that some people basically just get burned away after death, llke the worthless chaff from some farms in Egypt. This idea horrified the political authorities, but logically, if a certain lobe of the noosphere contains useless information, wouldn;t the noosphere, being an efficient information processing system, contain a "garbage collection" subroutine which simply deletes useless stuff? Human egos naturally get horrified at the insult, but the logic of the evolution of noospheres strongly supports the idea, as do centuries of reports from before the political spin doctors calculated what worked better for control. After all, who removed that book from the Bible?

When does a lobe of the noosphere (like your soul) get dissolved by the garbage collector, and when does it get preserved, and when does it actually get energized and used? 

In a normal brain, what drives the garbage collector is what Freud called "psychic energy" (which I model as modulated backpropagation, something which really works and which fits the brain data reviewed in erbos and Davis). Basically, that which is useless for sure is simply recycled to other uses. So what brings psychic energy (at the noosphere level) to YOUR soul? What connections and relevance keep you from just dissolving away into nothing, as many older people do even before they die? 

FAMILY and PERSONAL connections are maybe the most common way for people and souls to be energized and stay alive. In my view, the Disney cartoon movie "Coco" demonstrates real spiritual sensitivity, grounded in Lagtin American cultures we would be idiots to underestimate. (Many Chinese traditions are similar.) BUT: those connections don;t last forever. The movie also depicts an old musician just dissolving away, like a Zen Buddhist monk I once saw in Korea, with a horrible rictus on her face which combined a smile of triumph and a horror of unnatural true death. If your soul survives because of feedback from X, what happens when X dies? 

In truth, there is an intermediate case, where instead of a b=garbage collector, one may be archived, like an old file. Many folks who do astral travel across levels and levels report the existence of a "causal plane," where there are "living statues," forms which are normally inert but may be temporarily activate dby others who can send energy. There is a movie about "Woland's basement" (in Master and Margarita) which seems to refect awraeness of that same kind of intermediate state.

So what is most permanent and useful and natural here?

In my view, our discussoins of "Triple Aspect MatherrmaticalMonism" (TAMM) point to a different way.

If we learn to "channel" the noosphere itself, to see through the eyes of that greater whole, we naturally connect more to the real, enduring source of energy. 

What survives is not the mundane first person eyes, or even the disconnected first person soul, but the soul which is fully connected,to be like an avatar of that soul. In my view, that is the truest "cosmic consciousness". -- but it extends even to awareness of what comes from beyond this large but limited local sphere.

Pope Francis was once cited as saying "Those who would preserve the life of this planet must first learn to truly, deeply feel the love of that life." 

Those who only have words and verbal beliefs dissolve quite quickly, like a dry parchment crumbling to powder, a sight I will never forget.  The inner connection to the noosphere is where that love can flow, if we fully commit to it and never forget.

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Clarification:

To maximize the quality of afterlife is basically the same as maximizing quality of spiritual connection here and now, but without dependence on what will be lost.

What yields the most positive feedback "psychic energy" from noosphere..is different for different people, and can be developed over time.

TAMM: the viewpoint of the noosphere as a whole is the most reliable basis. In a way, it reminds me of when I first worked for a large organization with a positive mission. It reminds me of hos it helped to understand the real missoin of the organizatoin as a whole, and how the department I was part of could contribute harmoniously to that. To survive, I also needed to understand the goals at intermediate levels, but in the noosphere or within a human brain,one is in a system where the learning rules have evolved to encourage harmony of the pieces. that has to be learned, and is not automatic, but one can draw on the learning process to connect things better. But in the end, the development of well-grounded noeic connections of some permanence, reflecting the noosphere as a whole, are the key issue. The novel Vita Nostra describes a Platonic school of development which is not exactlhy the same as this kind of connecton to basic things, but it feels similar to us.

Of course, the spirit of love and the spirit of truth (reflective of baisc lambda-U and lamda_e in a brain) are among the most permanent... variables... reflected in archetypes.. one can connect to.

hen I said "avatar" yesterday, I could have said "channel" or "gateway," which I have discussed before in discussing ordinary PSI in life today.

What is money, what will happen to it soon, and what could be done

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 12:06 AM Bernard Baars, who founded the leading scientific ojurnal and series of conferences on consciousness, wrote:

I just KNEW I was getting into trouble with that post.

But of course, Paul, now you have to give me your definition of "money" to cure my ignorance...

b11ee2da56o%40googlegroups.com.

Thank you, Bernie, for your calm reply to our accidental discussion of cryptocurrency and whatnot.

 It is hard to know where to begin in discussing the subject of money, which everyone on this list thinks about but from different viewpoints. Logically, it DOES have a place within our "CH", Cosmos and History thread, because money has always been one of the key forces in the vast changes of past and future history. The word "money" itself has meant different things to different people. CHANGES in the world financial system are big and urgent here and now, as the world enters a post covid depression.

Where to begin?

In your post you began with a review of stuff like wampum and clam shells used as a medium of exchange, which was replaced over time by gold. 

Back when I was an economics major at Harvard (AFTER having taken courses at Princeton and Penn I mention here at times on pure math and logic), paper currencies like the US dollar were linked to gold, under a complex system managed through the Federal Reserve. They would actually publish something like 16 different MEASURES or DEFINITIONS of what the money supply is, M1 to M16, and it was important to track all of them.

But in fact, the old gold standard was based on an arbitrary convention inherited from history. In a way, it was like the "social contracts" or "social norms" understood deeply by folks like Max eber, Locke and T.C. Schelling. Furthermore, back then I was a registered Republican of libertarian bent, and I could see every day in the New York Times how the gold standard favored the Soviet Union and South Africa, and weakened the US in efforts to balance out certain goals and powers of thos enations, in a very arbitrary way. I came up with an idea for how the gold standard might be replaced by a kind of Special Drawing Rights (SDR) system, under international institutions to move control form geology to humans. Most people had the usual reactive psychology ("that wampum was good enough for my caveman and monkey ancestors, so it would be heresy 

and futile to try to replace it by mere decisions of modern humans"), but I found a ;professor at yale, named Triffin, who was interested. They even offered me admission at Yale Graduate School in economics, even though I had not applied, but I felt I should give priority to other things you could see at scholar.google.com. I certainly would have been richer if I had followed what came from that track, but there were other v aria bles in play.

In short, if you look up Triffin and SDR on the web, you will see a HUGE literature on the massive changes which were possible, were made, but are not the final story. Yesterday, Jelel recommended we again cite the more recent work by Stiglitz, who was indeed a ray of hope and insight back when UK decided to enter the EU, and back when we were trying to cope with the 2008 crash. 

HERE AND NOW, Trump has announced that we should not worry about economic recovery in the US after covid, because "the Federal reserve controls all the money in the world, and qwe can spend whatever it takes on anything we please." Oops. I can hear my Russian friends saying "Learn your lessons about unintended consequences and good intentions." But no, Trump just does not understand how the new systems work, or what is coming next. There is a scary analogy between the situation of these 20's and the 1920's, back when Germany overestimated its role in world money supply, and got into enormous long-lasting trouble. 

What kind of trouble? 

To begin with, there are massive changes coming fast in the world internet system. Many global financial people have gotten used to the idea that the It sector, including the internet, is just one of the plots of land in THEIR vast territory. They will be in very deep trouble if they do not better understand that we are moving to the reverse situation, where "money", like consciousness itself, is just a set of patterns of information in an emerging new information system, which may even be growing to become a kind of brain in itself.

Last fall, the world president of IEEE arranged for me to give a kind of rerun of a talk I gave to him in Japan. I did not accept the travel and honoraria to the two big conferences in Japan and South Korea, for practical reasons, but agreed to give a technical overview of what the issues are by youtibe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6togqN9Cvt4 . There are many scary problems, and what happens to world money and world economy are just part of them. 

And so, my discussion with Amanda about money was an offshoot of a larger discussion with IT people about what kind of new arrangements would be possible IF HUMANS CHOOSE, sustainable in terms of money and other variables, in press at a company called TFIE. 

My wife has shown me that a well-known popular author named Clancy

has shown remarkable predictions, based on what seems to be a combination of access to intelligence agencies and a ouch of real precognition. He died, but foresaw a need to continue that enterprise. And so, a few days ago, I saw what THEY know about what is coming (so much more real than the feel-good PR you see from the White House and other places lately): https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/3286579038039157.

I trust that about as much as I trust what Jack and the folks in Florida are saying about UFOs lately, but there are very real massive changes in process and their confusion about key aspects makes me more worried. 

https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/3286579038039157 

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P.S. I saved a lot of that early correspondence, including some of Triffin. I have a huge "scans" folder, also up on the cloud, on the :dark web."

Major yogin asks "Are you people materialists or not? "

He actually directed his question to Bernie Baars, who was editor in chief of the leading journal of consciousness studies (which published lots of neuroscience) and has a new edition of his classic book coming out. But I too chimed in:

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Ram asked Bernie Baars, in effect, "in your theory of consciousness (the Global Workspace Theory PLUS other things Bernie believes) are you basically assuming the materialist theory of consciousness, life and whatever else?"

In my view, this discussion has led to huge misunderstandings because of how people throw words around. Therefore, in the spirit of mathematics and Von Neumann, I will try to DEFINE a new term, Dual Aspect Mathematical Monism (DAMM), for a more sharply defined set of assumptions or hypotheses. Bernie and I do not agree on EVERYTHING in the cosmos,

but I suspect that Bernie, like me, would give more than 50% probability to the idea that DAMM is true. (In fact. I suspect he gives it a higher probability than I do, more like 90% versus 70%, but he can speak for himself.)

{Assumption 1] DAMM assumes that everything in the cosmos we live in, including every bit of feeling and experience we have, is nothing but the emergent patterns and behavior defined over a finite number of "fields" defined over some vector space (which may or may not be "flat" or governed by a metric of differentiable geometry, or governed by dynamics which fit BOTH).

Monism, as in just one cosmos.

"Materialistic" if you view any set of functions over a vector space as "materials." (That stretches he English language a lot, and that's why I prefer to avoid putting too much weight on that word.)

[2] DAMM also assumes that the state of these fields over all space time 

obeys one or more differential or integro-differential equations which may informally be called "the Law of Everything". (Physicists tend to use that term in popular writings or manifestos, but usually prefer terms like"dynamic equation. Stochastic PDE count in the set of possibiloities assumed by DAMM, I so define DAMM. To rule them out, talk about deterministic DAMM.) 

[3] All mind, consciousness and life which humans really have any right to claim they know about are emergent patterns of these fields (where a "pattern" is basically a statistical ensemble of possible states of the fields).

[4] This is a "dual aspect" theory in that it recognizes the importance TO US of the mental aspect of what we experience in our minds, whihc we experience as fundamental TO US. That aspect is the foundation of everything we say, write, believe and think. But, based on experience and learning, many of us conclude (with some probability) that that aspect is all an emergent consequence of the "law of everything" as it works its way out over the one and only cosmos,of which we are part. Evidence suggests to many of us that there is NO special aspect of the "Law of everything" as such which is mental or consciousness, WITH ONE EXCEPTION, which I have discussed before. If the "Law of everything" happens to be the Lagrange-Euler equations of a certain kind... those equations might be SEEN as a kind of "mind"; whether they qualify or not is an empty exercise in semantics, an exercise better replaced by a more concrete effort to understand that law and how it operates on us. 

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Is that definition of DAMM specific enough to "draw the lines" here?

But: the proposition that DAMM is true does not specify many of the foundamental facts of life in this cosmos which it leaves open. After all, special relativity is a very specific theory, but it too leaves open many possibilities. DAMM is consistent with a cosmos which has no PSI, but also consistent with the noosphere species theory I point to at werbos.com/religions.htm. It is consistent with the (experience-based) concept of the "astral plane" which I defined in a previous post here. 

It is consistent with Einstein's concept of hard core realism (which I think Shiva has spoken up for here). But it is also 100% consistent with the Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of quantum field theory, the mainstream version of QFT which has been most completely tested and verified in the 

realm of QED, where more than 90% of the solid experiments on quantum measurement have occurred. (See my posts of QuIST. Tons of experiments.) It is generally consistent with the approaches of Streater and Wightmann and of Glimm and Jaffe, though the math needs a little tweaking in those cases to bridge the gaps with the rest. It does not require metaphysical observers,
at least if minor tweaks to the measurement formalismconsistent with all experiments to date are made. (See https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf.)

Why do I personally assign a subjective probability of only 60-70% for DAMM? (For me, the aspect which assigns probabilities, ala Von Neummann's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, and Raiffa, is more fundamental to MY thinking.) Mainly, because I think of Cosmic Mind Idealism as postulating a cosmos which is NOT a continuous vector or geometric space. I do not know of ANY clear enough formulatoio of CMI, but I do not assume that the cosmos MUST fit a form I can wrote down right now. Does CMI violate DAMM, or are there some versions of CMI which do and some which don't? I do not know enough to have strong feelings yet on the answer to that question.

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Later:On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 9:57 PM 'Ram Lakhan Pandey Vimal' via Scientific Basis of Consciousness <scientific-basis-of-consciousness@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Hi Paul,

In your DAMM, one of the aspects is the mental aspect, what is the other aspect? Are the aspects are of a state of an entity?

Really, this concept of two aspects is a very ancient one, which I should not take credit for.

As I think about it... the two aspects are similar in a way to the archetypes which Jung talks about, basic themes which get repeated over and over again in different cultures. I do not think of these aspects as THINGS, as material objects... yet as I look across the cultures of the world, the two aspects may be more similar across cultures than the usual "universal archetypes" are!!

If they are not objects, what are they?

VIEWPOINTS, I suppose. When we look at the world and everything we can see through our own two eyes , and try to make sense of it... I would call this the "subjective" viewpoint, the first person viewpoint. Some would say

"Of course, that is THE fundamental viewpoint, since that is what drives our thought."This is the viewpoint which neural network mathematics has risen to represent. 

But the second viewpoint is OBJECTIVE REALITY. It is important to us NOT because it is what we know, but because it is HYPOTHESIZED to include everything we know but also more, and to include even ourselves. 

In a way, the discovery of the concept of objective reality was like the real discovery of the mirror. One of the great moments of past life which all of us should engrave into active memory is to look into that mirror, which shows us 

ANOTHER HUMAN, another example of the same sort of objective thought we were looking at through subjective first person eyes. Can we reconcile what we see in the mirror with what we experience in first person?

This is not one small blip we should be repressing; it is a pervasive basic principle across the largest domains of life. Looking down on our own personal selves objectively is a very important discipline, and it does have some relation to the "mirror neurons" which we have only just begun to evolve. 

I think of this view of subjective and objective viewpoints as a logical, minimal extension of debates which have raged in India for millennia. Many in India advocated a view now called "Cartesian dualism" (from before Descartes), the view that there are two universes out there, the universe of mind and the universe of matter, two domains governed by different laws which interact only under debatable special rules. (Descartes talked about the pineal gland, and others about Copenhagen theories of observation and consciousness, clear examples of metaphysical dualism.) Monists in India replied that no, there is only one universe. In the conference in Kathmandu, I will always remember the Monist with dark flashing eyes who kept saying "These are all just made up stories you [dualists] are telling... stories, stories, and more made up stories.." 

But at the Kaiser library in Kathmandu, I saw the three volume cultural history in this photograph I took:

if I believe that history, it was Ramanuja who properly resolved the debate between Dualism and Monism by saying that Monism is right about ONE objective reality, but that the two ASPECTS -- which I would call subjective and objective -- are equally fundamental to US.

Crudely, it seems that we each START from the subjective viewpoint, and then LEARN to appreciate the power and truth of the concept of objective reality,

if Dual Aspect Mathematical Monism is DEFINED as this concept, with the further axiom that the one cosmos (not necessarily just one "universe" in the modern more general viewpoint) evolves according to knowable mathematical principles, then I assign more than 90% probability to that idea, because cosmic Mind Idealism includes theories which would still follow mathematical law (even though it is not the same old PDE stuff). 

In fact, my real personal assumption is NOT "Of course the cosmos follows mathematical law;" rather, it is that we naturally WANT to understand the dynamics of this cosmos, and we do not have justification to believe it is impossible in principle.  It has always been a great challenge for us humans to better understand that larger objective reality beyond our personal selves, but rising to that challenge has led to more understanding. 

Many years AFTER I was clear about that, however, I have come to believe strongly that we are part of larger mind, the mind/brain of the Noosphere of our solar system, which could be seen as a kind of third aspect. It is another viewpoint. And we can try to shift and to unify all three viewpoints, concretely, looking at things from the simple subjective viewpoint we inherit from the "mice" in our ancestors (from what biologists call "morgie") , from the objective physics viewpoint, and from a noosphere viewpoint. So maybe the person who talked about triple aspect monism (TAMM) had a point. These three are all viewpoints we can learn to see through and unify. There is intelligence beyond this solar system as well, but it is more than enough challenge for us here and now to try to integrate the three viewpoints we CAN implement.

Carl Jung and Karl Schroder on the Crisis of World Civilization today

This is a big topic, but there are times when we do need to focus directly on big questions without flinching. This morning, I see better how to reconcile and make sense of a body of information so large and complex that I will forget the integration myself if I do not try to type it while the basics are clear in my mind. When the issues at stake involve meaning and fate, it is rational to try to take the effort to remember some basics.

To begin -- I again thank Jelel for encouraging me to read Carl Jung's Red Book, which Jung described as his final understanding of the human mind, brain and soul. Because of the great role of Freud and Jung in our cultural history, a lot has been written about Jung (and more is being written), but a lot of it misses the forest for the trees. I did not even try to read ALL of the large scholarly book yesterday,  but I am now beginning to assimilate the crucial parts which he wrote himself in very powerful words, which I scanned somewhat to the end. As I was reading by our back patio doors, overlooking a huge forest park, there was a kind of ... explosion?... and billowing smoke down across the creek, and sirens and helicopters; as a result,  I moved back up here to the kitchen, where a video interview with Jung appeared on the small TV hanging on the kitchen wall. That video is also input to what I learned about and from Jung.

One amusing detail providing background... Jung commented on the differences between his type of thinking and Freud's.

Jung's view of this difference remind me of what I learned from Bernie Baars in 1999, as we ate at a local sushi bar near UNU where we were attending the world's first international conference on Consciousness. Modern personality psychology discusses many variables to try to describe human personalities; among the most important and heritable are "tolerance of cognitive dissonance" and "novelty seeking." After World War II, some VERY serious historians (like Lippmann??) explained the Nazis in part as a demonstration of low tolerance of cognitive dissonance -- an insistence on order and coherence even at the expense of willfully blinding oneself to data and experience which contradicts the beliefs which give order to one's life. Ordnung uber alles. (Vishnu over Shiva?) Novelty seeking works against the frozen thinking which ordung can give rise to, as we are driven to experience and see and accept what did NOT fit our old limited conceptions. In general, Bernie told me, most people tend to be low tolerance of cognitive dissonance AND low novelty seeking, OR high on both traits.  Deep progress in science tends to depend on less common and less satisfied people where the traits do not align; for example, I was born with a low tolerance of cognitive dissonance and a high novelty seeking, which constantly puts stress on my beliefs, the kind of stress which often creates new beliefs or theories. 

On the whole, Freud was more the ordnung kind of thinker, and Jung the novelty seeker, though Jung would use different categories. Jung's concept of "introverted' and "extroverted" spawned a whole industry of business consultants developing things like Briggs-Meyer tests' I still remember when Joe Young, who ran cognitive science research at NSF, fulminated about the terrible confusion caused by the folks selling those tests who did now know what more modern research really shows.

But in any case, ung's novelty seeking caused him to explore and write about so MANY areas, so many types of people and ideas, that he gives a unique  challenge to anyone who tries to summarize it all. I will not try to summarize it ALL here!! But there is enough, in clearly seeing some basics.

Having been born in 1875 and lived to 1961, and treated patients in Europe for most of that time, Jung was DEEPLY engaged in what caused the World Wars, and what will flow from them. He was deeply impacted by detailed dreams predicting his experience at the start of World War I, when he had issues getting back home from talks he was giving in Scotland. I did not yet read the specific meditation exercises he developed, but he was deeply engaged in what some would call exploration of the astral plane from that time to the end of his life. He occasionally wrote about theoretical explanations like ancestral memory, but mainly these writings focus on "the facts, not the editorials." 

HIS feeling about World Wars I and II was that they were mainly caused by a crisis of meaning and spiritual disconnection, similar in a way to what a group centered on the University of Toronto (I cc Dave Clement to thank him for informing me of that group) concerned about a new crisis of meaning growing stronger even today. (I really hope that the US does not go the way of Nazi Germany!! Trump is not Caesar or Hitler, but many make such associations.) 

Jung felt that the great triumph of modern rationalism and impersonal social organization caused a great disconnection from spirit and inner connections which hold life together, causing... World wars. (He did not mention links to depression, rural to city migration, flu, Spengler and Weber, all of which I would comment on if this were another red Book. In general, they do fit the picture.) It is interesting to compare the reaction in China to Jiang Zemin to the reaction in Germany to modern impersonal rationalism in the early twentieth century; Trump and Xi have some deep things in common. 

He himself did NOT feel such disconnection PERSONALLY, but could feel how strong it was all around him in the individuals and populations he felt deeply connected to.

In the later parts of the book, as he saw deeper and deeper, it did NOT feel like a kind of seance, as one of his better critics has described. Rather... well, you have a right to accuse me of bias, but it felt more and more familiar, like the view of astral plane and connection experience which I tried to explain (on a more scientific foundation, as in Freud's way of thinking but even more ordnung) via werbos.com/religions.htm. "Travels in the noosphere." Verdansky's theory of noosphere (like de Chardin) viewed noosphere as earth or Gaia, but as I look at the flows of dark matter out there and other effects, I view our noosphere as "stretching from the archaea deep in the mud below us to the convolutions of the sun above." More like Ameraterasu than Gaia,  but better even "Terry", a young child.

Jung's ultimate experience was more like that than like Verdansky. He spoke of maturing past the naive neurotic view of oneself as a kind of god, but more as a kind of ... servant... of... he described communication with a kind of avatar of..

what I might call Terry. (But no, I don't use such words much in my own engagements there. Jung also said he often used images rather than words when working on that level.) 

So meaning and purpose in real human life comes from those CONNECTIONS.

Jung felt very disappointed in the end that he could not continue let alone expand that connection within the noosphere all the way to "Terry", to  the highest reflection of that core ego mind level of noosphere. He was ushered out with respect and support, not at all to termination or diminution, but simply back to the ordinary levels of connection which keep almost all of the best of us alive, more like connections with other people, groups of people and archetypes, many of them reflections of reflections of reflections. (These reflect the levels and levels of "matching" that Pribram talks about in Brain and Perception.) 

So how does that connect to the writings of Karl Schroder, a living futurist, government advisor and science fiction writer whom Heiner and Amanda and I have had the honor of discussing the future with? (The AGI part.) Even as people like 

Trump and Xi Jinping remind us of the great cycles of history such as Spengler wrote about, and as Jung casts light on those cycles, we are entering now a radical transformation due to the emergence of... another form of life on this planet.

See  https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/press-releases/atlantic-council-launches-geotech-center-and-commission/

if you don't believe me, if you suffer from intolerance of cognitive dissonance. 

Schroeder has asked, in effect: "Which should we CHOOSE, the future as depicted in my new novel Stealing Worlds [which I highly recommend] or my novel(s?) VENTUS, which depict the later stage of history we may be moving towards, where all technologies and resources are more fully utilized?" (Comment: I remember novels by Zindell and Vinge touching on similar issues. In fact, Karl himself mentioned Vinge in our discussions.)  How human do we want our solar system to be? How can we retain our sense of meaning and purpose, as humans, in the face of choices like THAT?"

One of my own first reactions is: "It is beyond my pay grade.' Indeed, it is above anyone's pay grade when the ultimate context goes even beyond this solar system. (The noosphere itself is after all like a child not yet clear on its role and identity in a cosmos which is much much larger, with technologies not available here.) And when the fighting blind factions on earth keep reminding me of ANOTHER contemporary of Jung, the poet Yeats, who talked of a time when "the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity", feelings which Jung deeply engaged with and mostly coped with. Jung's coping mechanisms may be just as important to HIS source of meaning and purpose, which basically get grounded most effectively in the noosphere. (Though what is his "spirit of the deeps?" Compatible, I suppose. Maybe compatible with Yeshua's particular "Father" channel?) 

That source of meaning and purpose, and the psychic energy which can keep us alive, also reminds me of the final part of the FT article on a Dalai Lama viewpoint:

https://www.ft.com/content/b697c88a-a419-11ea-92e2-cbd9b7e28ee6    

In a way, our connection to support the life of the earth is ONE way ro be the kind of "good doggie, like Hachiko" which Jung tried to be but failed at in the ultimate experience he relates. Jung did OK anyway, but it is possible and natural to try to do better. And yes, I remember the quote attributed to pope Francis that "Those who would preserve the life of this world must learn first to deeply feel the love for that life. [At the full PSI level, in my view. Perhaps he would say "spiritual."

Same meaning here.] 

But what kind of internet design would allow us to escape the DEEP danger to the whole earth from present designs, like what Jung described as causing World War, by actively strengthening the deep human and nature dimensions? What kind of new human networks could collaborate and connect enough to rise to this challenge? I still wish I knew.