Wednesday, December 30, 2020

How do genes and hormones like gender affect the brain?

New  evidence from neuroscience wet labs and AI give us a radically new understanding of how brains really work. Saving the World: How Our Brains REALLY work: best new information on functional neuroscience (drpauljohn.blogspot.com) That in turn gives us a new, more complete answer to the basic question: How do genes and hormones like gender affect the brain?

I owe great thanks to the three brilliant women who led me to explain that answer this week. They got me started by commenting  on recent Harvard research on brain differences between males and females, and on the trouble Larry Summers got into when he speculated on that issue. They strated by citing:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/catherine-dulac-finds-brain-circuitry-behind-sex-specific-behaviors-20201214/

 

After my initial response, getting into how brains work, I received three replies, and then got deeper into how brains work in my final reply.

 

My INITIAL RESPONSE -------------------------------------------------

On a quick glance...

 

I am reminded how many papers with the words "sex" or "soul" or "God" in them activate hot buttons in the reader which tend to blot out what the authgor was really working on. But even authors can get mixed up; I remember many proposals at NSF whether the project summary and the actual project seemed to be "on different planets," showing and espousing totally different things.

 

HAVING studied brains in incredible detail... here not only published papers but unpublished ones and conference discussions which SHOULD have gone further.,.. held back by sheer complexity... I interpret the main results as follows.

 

Mammal brains like ours COMBINE a universal learning ability (to learn new weights W and new connections) TOGETHER WITH important, informative INITIAL WEIGHTS. (And also some other parameters, like cognitive style and value weights.) E.O. Wilson, whom I cite a lot in one of my early unpublished papers from Harvard days on this topic, ALSO spends a lot of pages in his classic book Sociobiology on "predispositions," which includes INITIAL WEIGHT INITIAL BEHAVIORS which are easily unlearned. There are many many examples in the animal world. (I seem to recall a teenage gorilla looking puzzled and thinking "WHY am I building this dumb nest which has no use at all here?", outgrowing a behavior which HAD been useful in an environment he never grew up in.) 

 

And that's pretty much the core of it. My understanding of how brains work (.e.g in Werbos and Davis) builds on Lashley, Pribram and Freeman, asserting a UNIVERSAL LEARNING capability in the higher, larger part of  mammal brains (including human ones). (Humans have a little more, but no difference in the new machinery between males and females.)

 

This paper also reminds me of a woman I met briefly, who spoke at one of Bob Narendra's workshops at Yale -- the woman who took over for Patricia Goldmann-Rakic, one of the world's top systems neuroscientists before her death in a car crash. 

If I were still handling brain stuff for NSF, that woman at Yale would have a central role, because of the unique importance of HER fundamental work. She was CONNECTING endocrinology and functional neuroscience, showing for example how dozens of hormones in the bloodstream change the fundamental neural dynamics which Patricia helped us understand. That is such an important connection! But males and females both experience ups and downs which sometimes strengthen and sometimes blot out their higher abstract intellectual abilities. It helps to understand what is going on.

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THE THREE REPLIES ======================================================

FIRST-------------------------------------

Larry spoke on gender differences at a private conference on the position of women and minorities in science and engineering, hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. a lengthy address delivered without notes

As an example, Dr Summers told the conference about giving his daughter two trucks. She treated them like dolls, and named them mummy and daddy trucks, he said.

 

This reminds me of a story one of us told about one of his daughters making a family out of counting bears instead of mechanically grouping and counting them. She was onto something, because the essence of counting objects is that they are identical, and whoever invented counting bears should have realized that adding a pink mama bear to a green daddy bear doesn't just create two bears, but a new object -- a family unit ;) Boys most likely don't care about such social constructs early in life. I don't know who larry's daughter became, but this girl moved on to get a PhD in hard science.

SECOND REPLY------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, women are different from men. However, insinuating that women are inferior to men got Summers in trouble -- deservedly in my opinion. He should have been smarter in how to express his belief or better a scientific fact!

THIRD REPLY-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

We always knew it is right.  This belongs to the things we should not say - women and men are different   shhhh.....  :-)

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MY FINAL REPLY:

 

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Discussing the Harvard woman's paper further..  the commenters rightly noted that universal learning ability does NOT make males and females learn the same. 

 

Male versus female is just one special case of what genes do to us -- XX versus XY in this case.

 

I mentioned THREE types of effects of genes on behavior:

 

(1) Predispositions which can be unlearned;

 

(2) Deep hardwired VALUE parameters, not for the learned values, but for primary reinforcement, for the

utility function which the rest of the brian learns to ,maximize; and

 

(3) cognitive style parameters, basically like the learning rates or learning rate parameters which any competent neural network system has (even when it has adaptive learning rates).

 

The actual circuits we observe in brains cut across many parts of the brain, and are the COMBINED result of all three genetic effects and many levels of learning. Approaching these circuits as ONE THING can be very misleading. I liked that Yale woman who disentangled dozens of hormones. 

 

The commenters mentioned a male mouse eating baby mice instead of building a nest. Yes, that example is very different from the example of a young gorilla, which was about unlearning a predisposition(genetic effect 1). It was basically about that male not loving the babies as much as the mother mouse did. That is governed by a utility function parameter, genetic effect type 2. Love is not a scalar hardwired thing, but it is certainly AFFECTED by genetic things. Like an adaptive learning rate, it changes, but there are genetic factors affecting how it changes.

 

Why don't we have a paper on this? Good point. I can help,  but I can't write. It's ironic that my English is usually so inferior to that of the rest of you. I guess THAT is an example of learning effects! (Actually, of all three types of starting point effects as well!)

 

[I actually do have an old paper buried in my deep files, which makes the key points in connections with sociobiology and international politics. In truth, Karl Deutsch asked me to wrote it for his festschrift, he liked it, but the editor at MIt said "these things have nothing to do with cybernetics." That was back when I started a new faculty job at UMCP, and was a PI on a DARPA grant I focused my energy on. No time for stuff they weren't interested in. 

 

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

How Our Brains REALLY work: best new information on functional neuroscience

 


Just this morning, it was such a great pleasure when two of the folks at Leading Edge Forum discussion asked  me "By the way, what DO we know about how brains work that 99% of the world [especially in computer industry] does not know and needs to know?" I wish I had asked them to record it, because it was more direct and human than anything I have seen really addressing this.

"The first thing they need to know is the principle of MASS ACTION. They show you these little pictures of "how the brain works and what is there" which are basically just colorful maps of the outer surface of the neocortex, telling you what the function is of each colorful region. What they often miss is that: (1) the neocortex, that top outer part of the  brain, is only about HALF of the brain by weight; (2) those colorful diagrams what you see in adult brains after learning, and do not account for the fact that ANY part of the neocortex can learn the usual roles of any other part, if the relevant inputs are available and there is an impetus to learn.

"Maybe the greatest breakthrough ever in systems neuroscience was the work of Karl Lashley, demonstrating this principle of mass action, demonstrating that the neocortex is a kind of UNIVERSAL LEARNING machine, not just a collection of ad hoc apps thrown on the floor. Two of his students, Karl Pribram and Walter Freeman, were the world's main leaders in systems neouroscience, in my view, until they died of old age. I am grateful that I was able to work closely with both. (Robert more with Freeman, me more with Pribram, but we all connected.) 

Next they asked: Is the brain like a neural network at all? Does it do the prediction and pattern recognition stuff?

"Probably the two CURRENT leaders of systems neuroscience are Miguel Nicolelis and Buzsaki. I met Nicolelis in one of Pribram's 
workshops, before he became famous, when he showed us that LEARNING TO PREDICT is one of the core universal learning functions which guides the cortex to learn many of the more specific processing tasks you see in those color diagrams. 

MORE PRECISELY: there is a fairly direct hard-wired path from our retinas to the main part of a small organ called the thalamus, in the very center of the brain, a kind of central buffer or switchboard. We learned long ago about the cells which act as a kind of "movie screen of the brain", showing a new image every tenth or eight of a second or so. We learned that there are many fibers carrying that image to the neocortex, which is studying and analyzing that movie using a warehouse of tools much larger than the movie itself.

What Nicolelis showed is that there is a dense network of fibers coming BACK from neocortex to thalamus, supporting ANOTHER set of cells which LEARN TO PREDICT the raw input cells. The first universal function of neocortex is to PREDICT these current raw inputs as a function of earlier information. that is the number one universal learning principle/function, which causes the more detailed stuff to emerge by learning. 

But that is not the ONLY universal learning function of neocortex. Think of neocortex as something like a company which makes two or three products, and maximizes its total revenue from all two or three. It is like the UNIVERSITY OF THE BRAIN, the main site of deep analysis, modeling and prediction, but it also produces a kind of CREATIVE IDEAS, OPTIONS for actions. 

Deep under the neocortex are many important things, including a blobby gooey set of neural circuits called "basal ganglia."
When I first took  neuroscience at Harvard (1964), people knew they had something to do with muscle control, but not a lot. 
Now we know they are like the CORPORATIONS of the upper brain, organizations which take value inputs form many customers or stakeholders, and take or order big actions like movement plans and skills. The decision of WHAT TO DO is mainly made there, but they depend on the OPTIONS, POSSIBLE actions, suggested to them by the "universities," the neocortex.
{As I type this... some corporations just follow the suggestions, while others really evaluate... it depends on what they have learned about what works, but they decide.) 

Then they asked: "But where are time and space in this picture?"

In truth, I feel I know the answer to this more than anyone else on earth, because of what we published in Werbos and Davis,
based on analysis of the Buzsaki data, 

BUZSAKI is best known for his work on a DIFFERENT part of the brain, not neocortex or thalamus or basal ganglia. He is best known as leader in understanding the HIPPOCAMPUS, another key part of the higher brain., Like the basal ganglia, it is better known now than it was on 1964, and Buzsaki gets a lot of the credit. A cynical view is that Lashley, Pribram, Freeman and others had already explained so much of the neocortex, that hippocampus was more open as a place for Buzsaki to make his mark.
(By the way, I owe thanks to Uzi for pointing me to pay attention many years ago.) 

TIME: both neocortex and neocortex are governed by powerful regular timing. Ideological people often say "The brain is asynchronous, no clocks at all, not like a computer, like a nice ODE." I was so happy when I started work at NSF, met the top neuroscience funder, and he said: "Neural networks? We have no interest in that kind of math, because they are all asynchronous. From REAL neuroscience (like Llinas) we know that the brain is fULL of high precision clocks. Until you show me models which show and account for clocks, I will not even look at it." That was fun -- but gaps between communities survive to this day. "

Werbos and Davis analyzed high speed deep recording data BOTH from hippocampus AND from neocortex (from Buzsaki's lab).
Of course we studied many of  Buzsaki's papers first. He had a thorough review asking :"Where did that 4 cycles per second (theta) rhythm in hippocampus COME FROM? " He studied many possibilities exhaustively, including the possibility of clock control of hippocampus, but none of it worked. It ended as a mystery. But in MY model of decision-making neural networks (RLADP),
there is a 2-to-1 COUPLING between networks which measure value (which hippocampus is part of) and networks which learn prediction (neocortex), the known COUPLING between hippocampus and neocortex can explain the hippocampus rhythm, WHEN we have driving from the neocortex. For the neocortex, we have known for decades that there are pacemaker cells in the thalamus ("nonspecific thaalmus") which give the dumb pulse timing signals which go drectly to the central control points of all the giant pyramid cells of neocortex, the backbone of the neocortex. What's more, we measured the numbers. They do vary from animal to animal, and species to species, but in any animal it is HIGHLY PRECISE,

By the way, our paper TESTED the new, functional kind of model, with clocks, against the old (still popular) asynchronous types of model, and the new model wins hands down empirically. 

They asked; "But WHERE is the pattern recognition.."?

In MANY places, at many levels.

Think of the neocortex as a kind of great forest. Actually, it is like the forest behind our house, where great trees rise from the dirt below ("layers V and VI") to the canopy above (layers 1 and II), BUT ALSO there are long strong wires up in the canopy level carrying power over long distances. The world of our awareness is basically what we "see" as the outputs of these giant pyramid cells, like where they are rooted in the dirt.. but under each tree is a strong root, the axon, which lagter rises up, branches and crosses long distances, up into the canopy. TOGETHER, these trees make up a PREDICTIVE MODEL of the visual inputs (and other assocaited sense inputs), and some of them have roots going all the way back to the thalamus. An integrative model.

BUT: here is where Freud comes into it. Some parts of Freud were much more scientific than most people know even now (despite Pribram's great efforts to explain). The giant pyramids, the big trees, give us the "ego" of his core theory of psychodynamics.
MODEL-BASED PREDICTION. But in the shadow of these trees, in various layers of this forest, are smaller cells which 
can simply MEMORIZE or PHOTOGRAPH important past experiences. They offer a system of ASSOCIATION or MEMORY based forecasting, which fits well with Freud's "id." The "id" and "ego" work together to predict the environment. The ratio between id and ego can vary a lot, from person to person, time to time, and topic to topic. (And yes, I have addressed the math of optimal blending of the two, but more research is needed and important.) 

They even asked: Is there a connection between the alpha/theta underlying rhythms and things like heartrate?

Of COURSE I mentioned Robert Kozma and our discussions, and Walter Freeman.

"It is less about heart rates and more about sniffing. The thalamus gives a very direct movie of the visual world, but also inputs highly processed versions of most other sense inputs. But there is also a powerful secret back door to get into the neocortex. Perfume makers even hire neuroscientists who study that backdoor, the SMELL system, which is more ancient than vision and can sneak into the brain bypassing the usual front door (thalamus). Actually, the olfactory system also is a major part of our sense of taste as well.

They asked: "More ancient than vision? How could that be?"

"Well, even for our most ancient mammal ancestors, like rodents, sniffing was bigger than vision. They didn't have our kinds of big eyes, But in fact, smell is really just our main CHEMICAL SENSE, and that goes all the way back to fish... "

"In truth, Robert and I have not done all the brain data work we could to DISENTANGLE the impact of sniffing rhythms and 
nonspecific thalamus clock inputs. [More analysis of the Buzsaki data is one of the major new areas for research 
we would wish for, and been blocked on.] But of course, the images on a movie screen are the result BOTH of the rhythm 
of the projector AND the actual stories being projected on the screen."
 
Next they asked about the neuroscience of music. I cited discussions years ago with Judy Franklin 
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Judy_Franklin and Pinkert, and the views which Freeman and I shared about the origins of music and language. Walter and I were both deeply impressed long ago by videos of Kalahari bushmen done by Vanderpost for BBC.
We agreed that human language STARTED with the mirror neurons we share even with monkeys, but got a real impetus from the "bushman dance" in those videos, which was ever so impressive: a system for TRANSFERRING certain important memories from a hunter to others in the group, including receptive states in the listeners, an important step in evolution.  Formal grammatical languages came MUCH later than the word dances which emerged from those hunter-gatherers.

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So that's all. Thanks to any of you who got this far. I believe it is EXTREMELY important, to know how brains work in a functional sense, with higher learning capabilities, and new research is needed to fill in and extend, and prove, and get the word out.
But as I said, I do not have a real institutional affiliation even at this point (unless maybe as an associate of one of you).

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In that discussion, I mentioned how Werbos and Davis (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00097/full) showed how the CLOCKS work, moving from cerebrak cortex to hippocampus. How they are powered by pacemaker cells in the nonspecific thalamus, which output a dense tangle of fibers to the central control piints in the IDDLE of all those giant pyramid cells. (I often cite work by Purpura and Schebeil and Scheibel on what the anatomy looks like.) 

They also asked about "where do the valuye, the utility function U and J and lambda come from?" 
The LEARNED values, like J and lambda, and secondary reinforcement, come from the "limbic system," which I discussed at length in earlier papers. But that system is drive by the underlying values, the U, which mainly come form three places: (1) the coupled system of hypothalamus and pituitary gland, which monitor chemical flows in the blood (like low blood sugar or hormones) and give basic pain and pleasure input to the rest of the limbic system; (2) the coupled system of epitah;amus and pineal glad, just as important, but harder for neuroscientists to nail down because it includes response to social cues and things which it is harder to measure in wet labs; and (3) mammillary bodies, systems which use ancient algorithms to estimate value variables requiring some complex processing. 

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In a further LEF discussion, we discussed posting further information and a dialogue system at www.ffsii.org. We discussed language in more detail, important to people building dialogue packages.
I discussed how the ancient Bushman dances (similar to dances in other old tribes) allow a certain kind of rapt listener to ABSORB the experience of the dancer into the database of memories which the liatener can learn from. This direct and powerful system naturally leads to development of compact, lower cost condensed versions, like use of music and vocal utterances to portray a sequence of experience, either one specific memory or the dancer's internal condensed memory of a SET of similar experiences. The utterances become regularized, and lead to "word movies," the ancestors of asenetnces in the most ancient uninflected less formal  languages. (I cited Sapir.) 

We also discussed some modern languages where a more ancient, poetic "word movie" literature may exist side by side with more formalized, unnatural languages like modern English, where sentences are restricted to what follows thge kind of rules which Socrates and Max Weber would be proud of. 

Many modern writers talk about the gap between the "conscious verbal" self and the vast, unaware nonverbal self. I commented that schisms and gaps vary a lot in human brains. The old split brain experinces are a great clue. Schisms between verbal and nonverbal areas, or between left and right brain, or between neocortex and emotions (like limbic system) and even between brain and soul are all
imperfections, of lack of full development, in human brains. The need for better education, K12 and beyond, to learn greater integration and empowerment  of human minds is one of the most important grand challenges before us all today. 

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Further questions from a friend:


I have many questions, I start with four:

1- What is the (bidirectional) relations, if any, between these brain clocks and our "illusion" of time?


The hard part of this question is to nail down WHAT IS "our illusion of time."

In truth, our ACTUAL experience, the CONTENTS, is a complex multilevel system (even just considering the mundane mammal brain). The universal learning mechanisms 
are essentially unchanging, but WHAT we learn varies so much. MANY of the feelings we talk about tend to straddle multiple levels, and have many aspects. Pribram's little book on Freud, from Gill, does a great job of dissecting the MANY different real things discussed in Freud's writings on psychodynamics!

So -- which illusion of time? 

The MAIN clock, the pacemaker cells of the nonspecific thalamus, just gives timing pulses.
No LABEL of what time it is. 

When we say "time seems to be passing faster now," we usually mean that the CHANGES from moment to moment seem larger than usual. Than usual? SOME kind of time labelling is present in all the many kinds of memory we have. But LARGE CHANGES from alpha time pulse to alpha time pulse can be experienced as "time passing faster than usual," even without memory. (By the way, in a rat, that would include the rate of sniffing.)

Buzsaki's HIPPOCAMPUS is usually seen as the place WHICH PUTS LABELS on episodic memories (memories of sequences of "images" drawing on one or more senses). THOSE LABELS are responsible for how fast things seem to move when we recall an episodic memory. 

Of course, neocortex itself is where we actually form actual images of actual clocks and watches, and our "experience of time" also includes feelings and images we experience as we look at actual clocks and watches.

The basal ganglia, which execute complex actio  skills (like "open the door"), entail 
various senses of time, ranging from frustration if it does not open fast enough, to
the sense of time about "before and after" the time it is opened.

By the way, everything I have said so far here  addresses... the usual "conscious mind," the bulk of the brain. But lower parts of the nervous system are also important. Above all, the
CEREBELLUM  (receiving orders from above, basal ganglia and other pathways output from neocortex) has its OWN cortex, a faster and simpler structure, but timing is certainly important in motor coordination as well. I sometimes compare the cerebellar system to a football player, and the upper brain as a coach. The football player is much faster and more coordinated, but has a kind of tunnel vision, not seeing the big picture or seeing far into the future. So there are lower clocks too. Llinas was the number one guy outside Japan in studying that system.
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**** IF we ever get a chance to get research to build on what we have learned, one
of the first simple tasks is to REPLICATE what Joshua and I did for one of Buzsaki's sessions
with the OTHER sessions. (That may include trying new spike sorting algorithms we have sketched out, algorithms to add annotations to the full database from Buzsaki.)

I expect that the same rat will show exactly the same UNDERLYING clock cycle as in our paper
(though Fourier analysis may yield different time units related to changes in sniffing and such). 
BUT WHAT OF how the clocks behave, in neocortex and hippocampus, when the same rate is sleeping, deep sleep or dreaming? This would be an interesting thing to learn, and Buzsaki's data does include that kind of alternate session of brain recording. This is a case where a new empirical result would be totally new and important. 


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2- Can we change the pace of these clocks say by drugs/chemicals?


**** I do not know whether anyone has ever studied the outputs of the thalamic pacemaker cells (or other pacemaker cells) as changed by drugs or chemicals.  For the general alpha and theta rhythms (like ouputs of cells in neocortex), I would EXPECT many such papers, but I haven't looked for that. Do humans or rats sniff more when on LSD? 

By the way, when my wife Luda and I visited the German embassy years ago, they had an open ceremony to honor the German researchers whose work they liked the most in the Society for Neuroscience big meeting in DC that year. One was a woman who discovered some kind of smaller pacemaker cells, pulsing out higher frequency local rhythms used in local circuits within middle levels of neocortex, they said. I have ideas on how they fit, maybe analogous to cerebellar pacemakers. It is another area for future research. LOWER frequency pacemakers like alpha and theta are crucial to synchronizing highly recurrent networks where real time is especially important, over larger chunks of it.
But even local fast feedforward networks can benefit from precise synchronization as well, as is usually just assumed when we build such systems in engineering. 


3- How do these brain structures work during the hallucinations induced by psychedelics?


I have been unusually strict in avoiding psychedelics for my whole life.

That resolve started in high school (when it was an issue in my class.) More precisely, from 1962-1964 I attended Lawrenceville school in New Jersey, where Turqi Faisal was a classmate. Not counting him...
I was told one year than in a class of more than 100, my close Chinese friend and I were the only ones who never even came near a joint of marijuana. Why was an outlier?

By then, I understood the neural networks of the human brain as an incredibly evolved system,
tuned TO WORK. I wanted mine TO WORK. Have you ever seen that sommercial where they first show an egg ("This is your brain"), and then crack it and fry it and say "This is what drugs do to your brain"? In my crazy old age, I actually believe that I broadcast that thought SO loudly that it helped create the commercial. 

But tea was always there, and in the working world coffee and even times of highly controlled  alcohol use.. 

In a visit to Udaipur in India a few years ago, we were showed a new article in Smithsonian magazine reporting the big change at NIH, allowing controlled experimentation on psilocybin. "Does it open up
the windows of the soul to seemore?" I cited a book by Annie Besant (Thought Forms, one of the books in Ghandhi's personal sacred shelves we visited later in Mumbai) STRONLY opposing that use of psychedelice. "Your windows will open NATURALLY if you develop the ability, in brain and soul, to make positive use of the information. Before that, you just hurt yourself. Just this morning, in a state of higher meditation in bed, I thought back to her and to that Daoist teacher I once met who said: "Enlightenment is easy. we could give you that in five minutes. The purpose of our intense long discipline is to allow you to cope and survive after that happens."

So maybe my main answer here is that I don't know, and don't really want to know. 

At NSF, I always stressed "my goal is to understand how HEALTHY brains work. Disease and physical aberrations complicate things so much; I am happy to leave some of these issues to our friends at NIH, whom we work with at times but do not crave their turf. And we have enough work to do as it is, without diluting it."

Life being what it is, I HAVE learned some stuff about various chemicals, but it's not about clocks, so I won't elaborate here.

HOWEVER: the action of hormones and genes ISan important part of the normal healthy mammal brain, from mice to humans. These chemicals (and the old trio of tea, coffee alcohol) DO have implications for the interface of brain and soul as well. If you folks are interested, I should maybe someday forward what i sent our local friends responding to work from Harvard and Yale on brans and gender, and going further.

4- Finally, when you talk about prediction, is that in the sense of future times or as an estimation or reconstruction of an ongoing state such as with an observer or Kalman filter? 


FOR NEOCORTEX, it is strictly pacemaker time that drives the error signal that implements the main function of neocortex. For the "outer loop", I am thinking of the SEDP equations (a simplified model, but correct in spirit I think) given in chapter 10 of the Handbook of Intelligent Control, a chapter I posted at www.werbos.com/Mind.htm. The prediction cells measured by Nicolelis predict the raw input cells
(actually, whisker tweak sensing cells, the "barrel system") in the thalamus, WITH a lag time he reports.

**** IF we could find Buzsaki type deep recording data for SUCH RATS, with tha;amus cells also tracked, we could show how precise the agreement is between the lags in the predictions Nicolelis reported, and the clock cycle which Joshua and I measured. In theory, maybe one of Nicolelis' rats
could be instrumented LATER ala Buzsaki. 

*** The key point, in our understanding of how brains work, is that the timing signal which hits the middle of the giant pyramid cell, is similar in a way to an on-off switch. SEDP is a nonlinear generalization of the Kalman filter, so yes, it is a good analogy.  The smaller cells in neocortex PERTURB it, as do changes in actual input images like sniffing, but the pacemaker is the basic rhythm.

Now that I think of, some kind of Kalman filter simulation could illustrate how periodicities (like sniffing) in the inputs can result in frequencies and emergent rhythms different from simple t/t+1 of the pacemaker.
 

I would like to encourage you to write these systemic/integrative brain findings in a more elaborate manner with drawings for illustration purposes; no math though unless necessary!

As I wrote this, I thought often of slides I have shown which do that. I included some in my 2009 paper in Neural Networks, for which I received the Hebb award. 




Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Is race war unavoidable in the end, given human biology and natural selection?

 There are two dominant annual conferences on the Science of Consciousness. The founder of one of them, the hard core realistic conference (author of the Global Workspace Theory of Conscioussess, explained in the classic advanced book on the brain by Freeman and Kozma), recently posted an argument that race war is basically inevitable. Sometimes he has deduced that we should support Trump, but this time he suggested we need new measures t get sex under control.

These are very serious issues. Here are my responses, first to sex and then to race and how human society works:

(I) SEX

Have you ever noticed how often we can write two or 20 pages, on a serious topic,
but human readers react intensely to just one sentence, often out of context, and neglect all the rest?
We humans all have such "hot buttons," which Freud discussed in detail and which we even have mathematics for.

In YOUR post below, you finish by proposing the abolition of sex. Well, sorry, since I am human, that really hits a very powerful hot button for me. Freud would say that this is evidence of sanity. 

Seriously -- our lives on earth this year have become SO complicated, SO confusing, SO out of the old bounds and diverging even more... Fighting alcohol and fighting despair are HUGE parts of life all over the earth lately. For ME, an important way to fight despair
is to get my thoughts together in the early morning, in many ways, and forcibly remember the ancient pgradse LLL: Life, Love, light. 
That's something I really can feel complete commitment to, resonating at all levels of myself. And in truth, it really helps to focus on that lying in bed in the early morning, after a basic "cosmic consciousness" episode, rolling over and looking at my wife, who is an equally complex and entangled personality, with another whole world of connections. No, I didn't go THAT far this morning (reaching 73 has reduced certain hormone levels, to my regret), but even so, forcible renunciation is something I forcibly reject. Likewise, when cdertain TYPES of Zen Buddhists renounce mind and consciousness as such, I, like the Us spokesman for Tibetan Buddhism, forcing reject THAT, and strive always for MINDFULNESS, even though that implies work and effort (and life) forever. And yes, we have to pay a price, appreciate what it is and how it is justified to pay it. 

In truth, I tend to think of that time of communication with my wife as a kind of next stage above that pure typical cosmic consciousness. She too can be pretty cosmic.  It would be a VERY serious error to underestimate that, but 
let me get back to what YOU wanted to talk about, which is also important. 

===========

RACE AND THE DYNAMICS OF HUMAN HISTORY:


On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 the scientist I referred to wrote:
Paul, are you seriously proposing that there are any humans who are
not, in a broad sense, racists? If ethnic loyalty is racist, so are
all 9 billion of us. AND, of course, there is an enormous moral
difference between ethnic loyalty and murdering x number of human
beings.

I certainly understand that race is comparable in importance in the human brain to sex and love themselves.
(Not AS important, but visible on the same scale of fundamental reality.) People often have good reason to control or suppress their discussion of sex, BECAUSE it is so important -- but I am glad that some of us can handle such discussions better and can avoid neglecting such basic issues.

But race is also a BIG subject, multidimensional, which can be viewed from so many true viewpoints (as well as many hallucinations hanging over it like bad ghosts). Where should I start?

Certainly humans do not HAVE TO destroy their species through the escalation of race wars. We have that option now, but we have other choices just as real in our deep minds. I certainly remember seeing Donald Trump on the stairs of an Episcopal Church I have visited, imitating George Wallace holding a Bible, hoping to use the resulting racial conflict as a way to get re-elected. Some Black Lives groups were eager to join Trump in creating such a race war, but he  chose an Episcopal Church in the shadow of George Washington himself (whose land I may sitting on right now as I type this) who remembered OTHER ways of establishing viable social contracts more sustainable for all of us. DON'T ASSUME I am just throwing empty words here; I am actually doing what I can to give you a concise English translation of more complex and complete mathematical analysis; see http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/03/reformulating-game-theory-mathematics.html . (Xi Jinping really knows what a win-win solution, aka Pareto optimum, is; more of us need to understand that basic principle and how it works.)

DO human brains have deep seated primary instincts to fight for THEIR race at all costs, as in a zerosum game where intelligent players do automatically seek the opposite of what THe OTHER PLAYER seeks? No. The history of life on earth DOES
include lots of cases where species ended up getting to extinction, but many others where n player games ended up with stability and diversity, even though selection and DNA were inevitable facts of life. Diversity WITHIN groups is a source of competition more than differences between groups, though a correct analysis simply cannot be scalar.

Honorable competition, subject to intelligible rules, is our best hope forwards, based on PEOPLE and their connections much more than race as such. Fixation on one binary variable, like black versus white, is a recipe for a kind of brain with only one brain cell in it,'not exactly an intelligent or capable creature. 

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

On another list, which has some Black Lives type participants, I recently posted:

This morning, a guy in India sent us a link to  an article arguing that philosophy in the US has become very sterile and ossified because it is 90% Euro. I agreed, but remembered how radically different it was in Engineering.
When I worked in the Engineering Directorate of NSF, heads of leading departments would come and complain about how hard it was to find qualified graduate students born in the US, less than 10% in some cases.
I remembered when I attended the annual conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (meeting inNorth Carolina that year), when an Afro American guy strode up to me with a big smile and a hearty handshake saying: "Brother! It is always great to meet another of us underrepresented minorities here in these meetings."

Thinking back -- I remember a huge plenary session where the leaders in many design arrears (e.g.appliances)
spoke, and the  were asked: "WHY is policy made in Dc so hopelessly out of touch with reality? Why do they keep doing things which any of us know are utterly stupid? " The chair (whom I still know) said: "My guess is that the policy offices all use US-born US citizens, and none of them were trained to know what all of us know."

So now, as a new VP takes over key roles like climae, without those old racial barriers, will it be fixed?

Yet on TV, I see how active racial lobby groups want to define the candidates for high decision making positions.
Will there be consideration of folks NOT on their radar, folks who are only just the world's leading technical (or microeconomisc) experts knowing what changes would be needed to meet the larger climate goals IN REALITY,
not just empty symbolism?

How could such a grand thing as climate  change have any relation to humble stuff like the technology to make electricity? But what if 80% of the actual CO2 emission comes from making electricity (in utilities and industry both_ and from vehicles which can be electrified?

I funded much more than my share of minorities when I handled electric power at NSF, and certainly James Momoh of Howard did so too when he ran the area. But that was a NATURAL CONSEQUENCE of looking for new ideas and high capability, without any race aspect -- just getting past conventional biases and thinking. On the other hand, some groups would fund important areas based on racial correctness, and they ended up doing little EITHER for 
diversity or for the actual research challenge. 

Kamala Harris's priorities, and Kerry's understanding of the precautionary principle, could be great for climate change AND diversity, for the entire world... but not if the flood of usual DC lobby groups and gatekeepers keep selling the same old stories, neglecting the  very specific kinds of people who really could save our skin. Our skin needs saving. 

I do wonder lately how Lonnie Johnson of Atlanta is doing. Unlike most of the other great minority engineers, he might even be a Democrat, but I doubt that Kamala would be opposed to supporting minority Republicans who also get real things done for minority education (like Momoh or Venayagamoorthy or...).

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


 

In the last century we've seen black people in Africa massacring other
blacks who look much like them (Hutus and Tutsis, in Rwanda); we've
seen Saudis murdering Americans (9/11), we've seen Japanese sinking
most of the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, and even more Japanese
killing Chinese in the rape of Beijing. Today we are seeing Chinese
killing Uighurs and also other Chinese who worship along the lines of
the Falun Gong.

Yes, I have seen all that and more with my own eyes. (Well, I did not DIRECTLY see blood dripping in Xinjiang, but I saw the
militant groups in action and the knives, and a big confrontation between police and separatists in Zhong .... airport on the way to Urumqi). In truth, there has been a lot of blood and war in human history, and a lot of serious efforts to understand how that works, and what choices await us now in the new period of history. Many people know that m Harvard 1974 PhD thesis was the actual origin of "backpropagation" and of deep learning in general (e.g. scholar.google.com), but few know that this was the SECOND of two topics I tried to defend at my PhD oral exams. the Harvard faculty was much more excited by the FIRST topic, the interaction of evolutionary biology and the ups and downs of human civilizations. I chose the second topic, mathematics of intelligence, instead, because it is a kind of prerequisite to a full rounded understanding of the first, which has complexities it took me decades to figure out. Perhaps someday I should try to post the initial paper on topic ONe? But oswald Spengler is one of the essential sources to understand these ups and downs; a full understanding of Spengler requires accounting for the role of the noosphere, which I understand a lot better now than then. In brief, it is a multivariate dynamical system: race, and the other inputs to our
built in mundane  U system (hypothalamus and epitathalmus primarily), are only PART of the story, and they interact with the other parts, and with our hopes and risks for the future, in a complex way.

Given the complexity, the question which REALLY has haunted me lately is: are humans just too stupid, too unable to cope with complexity, to be able to find a way to survive? Can they even cooperate enough to  build the new institutions and computer apps necessary to accommodating their limitations enough to allow simple mundane survival, let alone a full development of human potential? 

Best regards,

   Paul 

Saturday, December 5, 2020

Hard core Einsteinian realism predicts that our lives are illusion

Yes, this title calls for some explanation of what I mean.

This year, I understand better how the key pieces really fit together under Einsteinian realism,

and today I see more clearly what they imply for real life today in a world which does seem to be on the  verge of dissolving away into goo, like waking up from a dream. Some people believe that Trump leaving the White House will be enough to prevent that dissolving away into unreality, but it is not at all so easy.

 

I.               What Einsteinian Realism is and Why I Know About It

 

But first: what do I mean by “hard core Einsteinian realism?” It is a type of hard core belief in objective reality.

I defined Einsteinian realism already in papers published in 2019, linked to at Werbos.com/religions.htm, and earlier.

Here, I define “hard core Einsteinian realism” as the belief that we live in a curved Minkoswki space, the same kind of spacetime continuum which Einstein discussed in his theory of general relativity. EVERYTHING which exists in reality exists in that space. The underlying reality is just the state of “force fields” which vary over space and time in that continuum. What’s more, they are “governed” by hard core partial differential equations, as is discussed in the nook Classical Fields b Mshe Carmeli.

 

How could I imagine that an old man like me sitting in his kitchen in December 2020 could be the first person of earth to really understand the implications of an idea which came from Einstein himself long ago?

 

First, because very few serious physicists who understand this math have really looked into the question.

Most physicists, like Weinberg, who really understand the math gave upon Einsteinian realism long ago, because it does not SEEM to fit a lot of important empirical results in quantum mechanics. At OUR level of life, as revealed in physics experiments, we currently seem to be governed by the equation psi dot = i H psi (sometimes called the “modern Schrodinger equation”), which assumes that we ae living in an infinite dimensional multiverse. Just a year ago (see those papers linked to from  werbos.com/religions.htm), I thought that this was more likely to be due than Einsteinian realism is. When I was younger (from age 15 to 2009), I did believe in Einsteinain realism, but more and more evidence came in proving the existence of “macroscopic Schrodinger cats”. The multiverse theory also fit very naturally with a lot of experiments in hard core quantum optics, which I funded and oversaw from the National Science Foundation.

(See https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0709/0709.3310.pdf.)

 

Second, because I was the first to derive the full mathematical mapping which tells us how any statistical mixture of possibilities over ordinary spacetime corresponds to a “density matrix” in the multiverse theory.

(See https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5116.) Because of how important that breakthrough was, I was invited b Marlan Scully

(a world leader in quantum optics) to present this in 2014 and 2015 in his elite workshop on quantum foundations at Princeton – but I disappointed him in 2015 by asking to discuss a different subject, some radical new experiments in quantum optics b Yanhua Shih and Tao Peng, which have yet to be fully published because of important unanswered questions.

 

Even by 1985 or so, very few serious physicists believed that hard core Einsteinian realism had any hope of being true, because of EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE from two generations (now four) of ever more precise experiments called “Bell’s Theorem experiments.” But most people who knew about his evidence learned about it from popularized accounts (which always tend to stretch a few points) or from the semi al book by J.S. Bell, The Speakable and Unspeakable In Quantum Mechanics. Those who actually read the book learned that the theorem being tested was actually the CHSH Theorem, by Clauser, Holt Shimony and Horne; I learned about in in the early 1970s from oc hard Holt himself, a classmate, who gave me a preprint.

 

The popular book by Bell says that these experimental resoluts rule out “local realism.” No, that is not what the theorem said. It ruled out what it called “local, causal hidden variable theories”of physics. It defined the word “causal” in a very special way. Many times I published papers showing that Einsteinian realism can still fit, if we look closer at the way that CHSH DEFINED the word “causal” and find Einsteinian theories which do not fall under that restrictin.

In later years, I published a paper (also posted at arxiv) DEMONSTRATING actual modlesof quantum optics, consistent with Einsteinian realism, which DO give the right predictions for the CHSH experiments. At research hgate, I have gone further, in more examples of this type of model in new types of experiment.

 

II.            And Now: Connecting Underlying Reality to Our Level of Reality

 

Here is a key point. Obviously, since I was the first to build a working, predictive model in that category, I have some idea of how they work. They were not models of the deepest underlying reality, the Lagrange function of the universe.

In a way, they were the kind of approximations used in thermodynamics, DERIVED from underlying principles, but simplified in a way which lets us understand specific experiments and predict them without unnecessary distraction by irrelevant minutiae. They involve a network of POSSIBLE scenarios or time tracks, in which the “imaginary objects” or “emergent patterns” we call “photons” follow MULTIPLE possible paths. These paths are NOT parallel universes.

They are not really things that DID actually happen. They exist only in a mathematical sense as terms in a complete, infinite dimensional expansion of how to solve the underlying, Einsteinian partial differential equations over Minkowski space. They “live: in approximation space”, not the teal space of space and time.

 

I came to understand the link between what a photon experiences in such an experiment and what we experience in our lives in 2014, when I compared what a photon experiences in a new, precise model of how polarizers work (CMRFp,

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.6168.pdf ), versus what I was experiencing at NSF when a certain group (called “the gestapo” by several of my colleagues) created a new polarizing environment. See https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Links-Between-Consciousness-and-the-Physics-of-Time-Werbos/ce9d366d584ce130b549f276d8b1135d331f8547?p2df for a stable web-based copy of the paper I wrote on that connection.

 

When a “photon” is “moving forward” along such a path, going through a standard type of polatrizer (like your sunglasses!!), it seems to have three choices at any moment in time. It can give up its own, “personal” polarization which it experiences at that time, either by (1) jumping suddenly to the polarization of its environment, then ebing absorbed and disappearing form view; or (2) jumping to a defiant polarization 90 degrees out, which will let it continue hat way until it escapes from the polarizer altogether. But it can also “screw up its face,” like the lead actor in an old British Comedya about the Seven Deadly Sins, and cause a “remake” which removes that entire time track from existence, INCLUDING that ‘self” which makes that decision.

 

In 2014, when the new “gestapo” was forcing that kind of choice, I wondered: “AM I less powerful than a little photon? Do **I** have a third choice?”

 

Bit by bit, I came to believe that I do. Just as that photon is nothing but a possible pattern of fields LIKE electric and magnetic fields, my mundane consciousness is just a possible pattern of the atoms and fields which make up my brain.

It is just an emergent pattern, one of many, in the same kind of mathematical space which this photon lives in.

 

If we ALSO have some kind of “soul” (see Werbos.com/religions.htm), which I do not expect all of you to believe quite yet, that soul would be made of a broader suite of underlying force fields, with a brain more like a quantum computer than a classical computer.

 

III.          Bottom Line: Who You Are

 

That aspect of “you” which lives in your brain is just a possibility, a possibility which might indeed “dissolve into goo” as your present time track interacts with other possibilities, as SOMEONE in your illusory world decides to screw up his face like that photon or comedian I just mentioned.

 

THIS IS THE HARDEST CORE REALISTIC THEORY OF WHO YOU ARE CONSISTENT WITH WHAT WE NOW KNOW FROM ENDLESS EXPETIMENTS IN HARD CORE PHYSICS. Those experiments, and the new ones of macroscopic Schrodinger cats, DO allow for the mathematical possibility that a different theory might be rue, BUT ALL THEORIES WHICH FIT ARE EVEN WEIRDER THAN THIS.

 

We ARE what Penrose once called “shadows of the mind,” the shadows of Plato’s cave. Not really real.

We are what Deepak Chopra has called “fictional characters”.

 

At www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, I posted my chapter in a NATO book from a workshop where I was asked: what do the new results actually imply for our level of life? That chapter BEGAN my exploration of that very real, very practical issue. No matter what happens after the recent US election, we know hat a lot of peoplewill be screwing up their faces as hard as they can for awhile, and what would happen in they also possess souls, in varying degrees?

 

If we do… and if hard core Einsteinian realism is true… the entire time track we live on now on earth may indeed “dissolve into goo.” It may prove to be what some folks call “maya” or “delusion.” Not only our future but our present and our past will go away; they will not be part of the ACTUAL final state of the 4D space-time continuum.

 

Will they leave ANY trace at all of having existed?

 

Yes, if there are souls. The memory of our lives would echo, and “live on”, only as it influences the memory and state of our noosphere, which COMBINES tracks in much the way that a quantum computer can ( but it would be more powerful than the limited concepts of quantum computing in use today in the US).

 

And so, if you rise up in the morning from a spiritual kind of state like cosmic consciousness, and enter the solid realities of mundane life, and seek to have a real impact…

 

What is real? The impact on the imaginary world of your mundane experience, a time track likely to dissolve

In time, maybe sooner than expected (if you all keep screwing up your faces so much)? Or the impact you can have when connected to the noosphere, leaving at least SOME trace in a place which is more real and more permanent than this one?

 

In truth, I believe that traces or memories of OTHER dissolved existences have had an impact even on ours, even in the mundane world, as traces of those other memories touch the communities of the arts, where we in our souls can even remember some of that more directly. And in our own connections to the noosphere, where it is especially important to be careful about screwing up our faces.

 

IV.          Footnote – alternatives

 

In another post, I mentioned some “PARWIN” (People are Real, World Is Not” theories as alternatives to Einsteinian realism. When Deepak once proposed some very nonmainstream theories, Hal Cox once observed: “That theory might be totally wrong as physics, but still describe our lives in an important way.” His post follows that spirit, but reality might be even weirder than this. Maybe. But perhaps this viewpoint already contains all the weirdness we really need,

at our level of existence. We already have enough to adapt to and connect to. At least, we humans do, even if body and soul are both included. Like humble villagers in prehistpric China, we also know and accept the fact that there is something ELSE over the horizon, but we have “dharma and karma” enough in our own little village solar system right now.

 

 

Thursday, December 3, 2020

Hatd core spritual reality: Einstein can explain it all but astral reality/PARWIN might be true

 True science, whether first person or third person (Kuhn's story on what science IS), never views itself as  a propaganda organ telling people what the one true theory of the cosmos is. Yes, it does include the search for the "law of everything," the mathematical principles which describe the underlying dynamics of objective reality. we usually do try to find at least ONE candidate which fits all the third person evidence, but even when we think we have a credible candidate which fits, we don;t just say "Hey, it fits, therefore I have proven it is true." In treal science, we immediately look for the most promising ALTERNATIVE theory (or a few of them), and try to do justice to those aspects of experience.


I. BEFORE the alternative: what Einsteinian realism is and why I give it 50%

As of now, I do believe that hard core Einstenian realism  actually does fit everything we know not only from physics but also from a wide variety of credible "psychic" or "spiritual" phenomena.. That is a small minority opinion now, but I have probed vey, very deep into all these things. For example, werbos.com/religions.htm links to papers (and photos) giving a few basics. Strict Einstenian realism assumes that we live in a curved Minkoswski space, where the underlying dynamics are PDE exactly in the form given by Moshe Carmeli in his book Classical Fields. 

A year ago, I gave this view of reality only a 30% probability of being true. (This is a first person probability assessment, the kind of probability explained by Howard Raiffa in his great popularization and explanation of Von Neumann's view, expressed for example in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.) How could a theory in a mere four dimensions of space-time accommodate the macroscopic Schrodinger cats we now see so much evidence for? But this year, I have reviewed the mathematics of my extended P representation (see arxiv), an infinite dimensional generalization of the old Sudarshan/Glauber P map. The underlying dynamics give rise to a statistical mix of possibilities which LOOK like a kind of Schrodinger equation. In practice, applied to quantum optics, it leads to a network of posisbilities which BEHAVE like quantum interference in the middle world we live in, even though the underlying level is deterministic. It fits everything, from the lab to PSI. An old style propaganfdist would say "Agha! This MUST be the whole truth."  But --

  How sure are we?

  Aside from certain weird unpublished spreadsheets from certain ttriphoton experiments... 


People like Deepak Chpora have hinted that there might be another levelof PSI beyond what my noosphere species model could allow.

This is why anyone who believes in true science would naturally ask for alternatives, NOt as an exercise in neurotic attacks on modern life and on the search for truth itself, but as an attempt to be open to very different, new unifications opening us up to new experience and experiments we can try to explore. That is what leads me to

II. TWO ALTERNATIVES (SOMEWHAT OVERLAPPING): ASTRAL REALISM AND PARWIN

Astral realism I have mentioned before. In truth, I first heard of that theory from an old friend, whom I bcc here,
and will say more about if and only if he is interested in joining this discussion, 

The simplest version of astral realism is formally EXACTLY the same as the noosphere species theory I discuss at werbos.com/religions.htm (and a whole lot of later comments and applications). In that theory, we here are basically just part of a great organism, the noosphere of this solar system. What changes is where WE are in that picture.

In the original version, we look out at the real galaxy we live in through our telescopes. We are a symbiosis of a body which hard core real, made of solid atoms, linked to a PART of the "\brain of that noosphere, somehting like a special brca region for the "soul" of each person or archetype. But in astral realism, WE are ALL "astral", all just images held in the brain of that noosphere. The world we THINK we live in is "just another astral plane," subject to mental alteration like all those other dreams we visit in astral travel.

However, "astral realism"  also includes alternative, more general theories in which these astral planes ae all that is here, in which the apaprent atoms are JUST mental constructs.

And so, when deepak says "You guys as you see ourselves are really just fictional characters.You are asral projectsoins of hyour real sleves, just like the made up other people, clouds, dragons and so on which people do project t9 at times in astral travel." So in the end, these illusions may all dissolve away, and we may find ourselves.. where? A cocktail party in the REAL REAL world (if that exists)? Or as a totally different mental kind of entity in a world without anything like physical bodies?

I have often wondered: IF that MIGHT be true, what would it change? How should we change our behavior>
(I have spoken a lot about how Arjune responded to that thought, but the details are too complex and varied for here and now.)

My main response: it would call for more attention to the PARWIN concepts of how we should lead our lives, the idea that the People Are Real World Is Not. (Or SOME people? To varying degrees?)

I have been reminded lately again and again of the ancient western commitment to LLL: Life, Love, Light. 

Could love be more fundamental than consciousness in some VERY fundamental way? If LLL is the primary source of q1i or energy which keeps us alive, both in a spiritual AND material level, in these seriously challenging times, 
this is much more than just a formal intellectual concept. And yes, it connecte sto a certain strand of Christianity which urges us to pay ral attention to how we interact with people, on a deep emotinal level, regardless of whether thge material world around us just dissolves into nothing.

As it may well do sooner than we would like. Those very real risks are part of what gets me thinking on these ,ines.

This is just an opening to a VERY large area of discusiosn, with lotsofcontent, but right now there are real peopleinthe room where I am typing, so I will wait for later before syaing more.