From covid to climate to internet -- metaphors and reality and new physics

I see three really huge issues of life or death dominating at different levels of human thought these days -- covid, climate risks, and internet risks. All three can be great "toys" for the mind, areas to test our ability to think clearly and focus effectively. I am ever so glad that I am NOT one of the people who has to devote more than about 5% of my time and energy on covid. Yes, if we are sane, we all DO have to have some clear strategies for coping with covid, but I enjoy that about as much as I enjoy trips to the bathroom in my house. Yes, I have great respect for people like Fauci working hard to"cover" that part of our world, just as I respect my kidneys,but I am... happy or content... to occupy a different part of our noosphere. Yes, I notice global political signs in the way that covid flows (e.g. to Russia right now, as I see on DW livestream), but ... For several weeks I have "crashed" on the issue of climate extinction. After all, if covid threatens about 1% of us, one way or another, and if there are simple ways to be more secure in our own lives, why not pay more attention to the issue of climate extinction which threatens ALL of us, together, as a species? That's a matter of prioritization. And if COP26 people are screwing up more than covid policies are screwing up THAT area, is that not a call for those of us who know better to try to improve it as best we can? This has been a great learning experience, involving deep ups and downs, learning to adjust my views in the way I once did when I worked at NSF and learned the depths of many new fields. It is not only about making CONNECTIONS, but about INTEGRATION. Making new connections in thought and in human networks of communication is central to any field; I see failure to make connections with reality as the main reason why COP26 is making our chances of survival worse, not better, on the whole. But connections alone are not enough; it is essential to INTEGRATE the story, and to know the mathematical way of thinking, integrating and questioning (ala Von Neumann). By the way, the new story on climate is every bit as scary as what I feared a few months ago... and the workable solutions from technology, science and microeconomics (integrative market design) are still huge but scattered, not well enough integrated even now... So when folks talk about covid versus climate, one image comes to my mind: we CAN survive the lethal challenges facing us on climate by fully connecting to the earth (and sun), and drawing together more of the fullest, highest intelligence available there. Versus poor covid folks stuck in a kind of underworld. BUT NOW: today, on a kind of sabbath or weekend day... I can wait until Monday for the next big installment of the climate struggle.. and try to reflect on the bigger picture, not losing sight of that bigger picture. Above all, I see the new risks emerging from changes in the internet (http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm) as bigger, more definite, closer at hand and more difficult even than the number two set of immminent risks from climate. To what extent is this great crusade on climate (which is far from won) just a kind of avoidance behavior for me, distracting me from the really big threats, threats closer to my own personal comparative advantage? But if we humans are too dumb even to save our own lives in the face of someting so mundane and visible as climate problems, and if the very best experts on earth can act on total blindness until their eyes are forcibly directed to clear simple numbers under their own eyes, what hope is there of us surviving something far more challenging to understand and organize? Is the "spirit of the time" (Jung, Red Book) and our local solar noosphere just too... dumb?... limited... to be able to cope with something that tricky, if it can barely come to terms with something so much simpler rooted in its own experience? (I often cite Ward and Kirschvink, and Hazen's work, lately for an image of what our noosphere has experienced in its long life so far.) Actually, I THINK I have been able to smuggle some very serious and important new and benign internet technology into the IEEE climate discussion, with encouragement from others who agree that the internet sector is also important. So it is not JUST avoidance behavior, but it has a long way to go. And I am reminded again how Jung has seen as clearly as any human into "the spirit of the times" versus "the spirit of the deep", like OUR noosphere and the greater web of life and mind we see in gravitational lensing images of dark matter. If earth can handle climate, but if internet is too much for it, then maybe internet is a matter for the sky. None of us knows what the spirit of the deep, highest intelligence is that we could see in those photos, but at a minimum I see something like a network of bayous, an ecology FULL of noospheres, many more mature than ours, connected in a society OR MORE... On the main island in the center of Lake Titticacca are twin sacred mountains, pachamamma and pachatatta, reflecting earth and sky images much older and more universal than vedas or bible. In my view, reflecting spirit of deep and noosphere, more true and more real, at a fundamental level, than the many doctrines and rulebooks invented by later human political rulers. Should they house an image of climate sustainability on pachamamma, and a kind of Godel Escher Bach geometric image depicting internet on pachatatta, complete with mathematical symbols? For there is where we must strive to connect, to understand the internet evolution enough to avoid falling to our deaths in any number of ways. ======== But: from metaphors to reality. CRUDELY, the waves and waves of monumental change coming to the internet (which go far beyond the placebos and morphine you get from commentators who do not know the math and make money by telling people what they want to hear) are divided into several whole WAVE TRAINS. The very first wave train may be called "AGI/IOT", classical artificial general intelligence and internet of things COMBINED. (Two aspects of ONE system.) See https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.0554 for a roadmap from old shops to Levels of intelligence which China, at least, is moving ahead to build, but without the understanding necessary to prevent disaster. The new book by Kissinger and Schmitt dramatically understates what is coming, but it may help as a wake up call. The details are very important, but this morning I want to put down a marker beyond that. The next big wave train MAY appear, to a useful and positive degree, in the new IEEE book. We will see. I force myself to limit what I say, because we are entering an incredible minefield, where we MUST move forward but there are a hundred IEDs we need to carefully dodge as best we can. I can say that QUANTUM effects are crucial to the next big wave train. BUT NO, it is not about any of the silly versions of Cartesian dualism which have brown up in speculations about quantum stuff. It requires real math and real experiments. The next gigantic wave train, making massive changes to internet and IOT, requires nothing more than David Deutsch's many worlds model of physics, even with Copenhagen measurement rules ( minus observer) assumed But the wave after that will benefit from experimental work by Yeshua and Marc, which I do hope will stay in the chapter in the IEEE book, which I hope will fly all the way. HOWEVER... I am bcc'ing two of the others whose work connects to the wave after that, NOT to be discussed in the IEEE book. Ironically, the latest issue before last of Scientific American carried two stories which fit very well into the new picture. The work on "wobbly muons" sends a shiver up my spine (literally) right now, as I think back to what I saw. The first implication is that it strengthens the discussion we started on how to image dark MATTER (not to be confused with "dark energy", and not just particles of matter) with a resolution finer than the light years resolution in those gravitational lensing pictures. That is already a big deal! If our local noobrain is mainly made of dark matter, this might give us a way to map it out a bit better. BUT THEN: the wobbling clearly suggests a target for folks like Nancy on this list, or like Nanjing qi researchers, to try to get some very solid physical data, and see what we can do. Some of us can, and some of us haven't yet learned how, but THAT is worthy of further consideration.