Coci Beach 2022: Our Truest Christian/Buddhist Christmas Ceremony, and hard science to look for qi

Jesus: The Big Picture 

 Who was the real person Jesus? 

Many of us believe that part or all of his soul still lives on -- but who is he, really, and how could we connect in the best highest way we can with him? How can we see through the fog of partial reflected images (a lot like some Escher prints) to the truest, living person still there? (Many of those funhouse reflections of him are truly ugly.) On this day (December 25), it is natural that we meditate deeply and connect as best we can to the true living Jesus. This meditation is an important part of our connection to the rest of humanity today as well. 

The full Jesus story I have seen is one of a human living on this earth, who worked hard to elevate his own spirit, and connect with “our Father in Heaven.” 

The Chinese have stories of many “risen gods”, like Ehrlang, who grew spiritually enough that they live on in the “City of Heaven“. We would be fools not to learn all we can from him, and build a better connection, even as we do the same with Buddha and their entire circle, which itself connects higher and further. The spirit of Jesus also has his avatars, living on this earth, capable of “partial gating” to him. And his reflections in the realm of spirit also include the great archetype “Baby Jesus”, whom we should never neglect either, but today I will not make that connection in this post.

 Jesus warned us that many would come in his name, and try to sell us horrible, destructive distortions of him. In truth, while he COULD see into details and precision far beyond most of us on earth, he could also see that the evolution of human souls is a complex business, taking time to make real. When they asked why he spoke so much in parables, he said that there would come a time in the future when we could be more explicit, but it would take time for us to get that far. 

My most spiritual Christmas Experience This Year 

Obstacles on the Path

 My truest, most authentic spiritual Christmas ceremony this year was in the Caribbean, on December 19 at Coci Beach on St. Thomas. See the cover photo of our Christmas Caribbean album for one part, one aspect of that great experience. 

 Like many great events, it was preceded by ups and downs which were very discouraging, which  required me to remember how many things require time and patience and detours to attain. That is also a very important spiritual principle, related to the multithread nature of our existence even in the living spiritual worlds we are part of, demanding an understanding of how time and mind actually work. 

 On the Holland America cruise arranged by my wife Ludmila, we were supposed to visit St. John’s that day. Just once, we visited St. Johns before, to the ocean natural heritage site which had snorkeling far better than any other place I had ever seen, even in the Pacific. That too was a spiritual experience, where for one hour I could just let go and fully immerse myself in the very rich variety of life. Connecting so deeply with life and nature, I later studied the new science and learned a lot more. I became a “sea creature" so completely that I needed about a half hour to recover from sea sickness when I emerged to the beach and stood on land. But this time, HAL cancelled all the tours to go there, because risky storms endangered the schedule of return. Ludmila found a way we could get there anyway, but because I had brought the wrong passport by accident, a delay in reaching the ship would have endangered my being allowed back in the US in time for dentist appointment the next day. These ducks really did line up to say “No St. Johns this time. "

 The tour/travel speaker on HAL described St. Thomas.. in a way which didn't sound promising. There are historic sites we had visited before, not much interest that day. The best they knew was Coci beach and Coral World. But when we were at Coci beach in a past year, all we saw were a few very small fish. Coral World was a small expensive museum of no real interest. So we took a local group taxi to Coci beach, and I did carry a snorkel in my back pack, but did not expect to use it, especially after our son complained about water leakage and I did not have floats or such.

 Manifestation of The Spirit 

 BUT THEN… After a brief basic physical exercise (underwater swimming), I walked up to my neck in the warm clear water. I found a clear spot with no other people or even small fish around.

 I decided to try to repeat a new five-movement qi gong exercise we were taught on the ship on the two previous days: “opening the heart.” (I do not see it on the web, but https://qigong.com/the-basic-movements-of-qigong-exercises/ may be similar). I had seen simpler qi gong exercises before, as introductions to tai qi classes which I found very useful to physical health and spiritual connection both, but this was the first time I had seen five whole movements including this one. 

And then, when I tried “opening the heart”.. immediately a giant school of moderate to large fish (like the moderate fish in the picture) swam right at me, flanked by Barracuda to the left and right. 

 After I returned to the beach, Ludmila persuaded me to try to use MY snorkel mask (which did not leak) and go to deeper water, past the rocks on our right, into the large cove between the rocks and the floating buoys blocking access to Coral World. It was like St. John’s all over again! Not as many types of coral, but many enough, like fans, brain coral, bushy things, and others. AND… a setting where I could just let go, for two rounds of about 10/15 minutes each, and enter a true Buddhist-like state of no being”, really merging my being with nature, more even than I could at St. John’s. 

 Postscript on Science to Detect Qi 

 On the discussion list of Yeshua ben-David (who works hard to channel the spirits of love and peace, and uses the water more than I do in more ways), I have discussed the serious science to TEST my hypothesis that we might actually be able to SEE the “dark matter” force fields behind qi, right here in our solar system:

This past week I owe great thanks to my wife for encouraging me to probe the literature more deeply on what needs to be done. A crucial starting point may be found in: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm9928 Axion dark matter: How to see it? | Science Advances 

 I apologize for the fuzzy enthusiasm I echoed months ago about tabletop axial Higgs detectors. 

The new literature (including papers which cite this one and its companion paper) goes much further, and has huge implications for those of us who care about the relation between science and spirit, or about the future internet and its impacts on the human soul.

It also has huge implications for those who want to cling like fundamentalists to the good old version of the standard model of physics. Anyone serious about either of these viewpoints needs to study this definitive new paper. 

 I have expressed uncertainty and ignorance about many, many things. When my wife asks what I am most certain of, in these realms, different from conventional wisdom, I point to two things: 

 (1) That we humans (and some others) are deeply connected as parts of a larger living system, our local noosphere, which is made up more of dark matter than of ordinary familiar "QED matter". 

 (2) That qi is real, and essential in many ways to our future, also based on dark matter. 

 If I am right, SEEING the distribution and flow of dark matter here in our solar system is incredibly important. If I am wrong, the experiments should be done to disillusion folks like me, and find a better foundation. Narcissistic drunks play word games to decide such issues, but science -- like sanity and honesty --demands we try to find out. 

 If I am right, such detectors and detector systems based on them could be integrated into new internet and AGI design, to provide the kind of feedback we need to make the new internet a truly people-centered and environment-friendly system, unlike the scary alternative possibilities we see in movies like Matrix Resurrections. One impressive new finding in this paper is the report that dark matter is much more dense in our galaxy than in intergalactic space. What of our solar system itself? Let us find out. Is interaction with dark matter as difficult as they say, or is it like detecting radio signals which is much easier when we have a system designed or evolved to have the special kind of structure needed? Let us first get data to see what it looks like!

Climate Policy: How to get much better results on climate AND energy security than EU or US do today

Sent to a friend involved in US policy making:

 

The key message was that the news from COP27 made me fear for our lives, but AT THE SAME TIME an IEEE international conference based in Nanjing (ICCSI) made me much more hopeful than COP27 did. Thanks to the book project which Kumar asked me to start up (still in process, with LOTS of backup material beyond what is at build-a-world.org), we have an organized collection of exciting new options for energy and climate policy, which would be of huge value to the world economy and to national security within ten years, which neither EU nor Biden nor Biden's advisors know about. 

The exciting message from Nanjing was that new pathways are opening up to connect us, and IEEE in general, to the highest levels of decision-making. The high leader behind that ICCSI conference now has a new position, right in Tian an Men square, and may be willing to create a pathway to implement John Kerry's proposal for a climate survival division (specializing in the extinction threat, which is far more real and close than most people even imagine) in the Security Council. That is what I have given priority to this week.

But -- at a minimum, IEEE could endorse what John Kerry and Guterres (UN SEc Gen) proposed very publicly just a few years ago. That proposal mainly died because bureaucrats in New York redirected Guterres and Kerry, but the redirections did not work as well as they hoped. Interest from Xi could radically reverse the situation. 

IEEE could even ask for a better pathway of climate information, real science and real IEEE-connected technologies, to support the new climate division. 

Does IEEEUSA have a special role in bridging the all-important gap between what the most advanced and relevant IEEE societies know, and the policy level (AND investors)? 

Truly efficient and intelligent power grids are PART of the "making electricity" priority in the draft book, one of the two parts for which we have the most information and new but proven options (ranging from important tools ready to go now, to areas where RD&D could be much more transformative than anything I see now, including the best proposals to NSF which I have had some occasion to review this past year ). But the transportation part is also strong. China is doing much more for world climate already than all of the COP actions taken together, because of its actions to support electric cars, but China and the US could do much better yet if we learn the right ways to cooperate (with mutual protections of course). 

In truth, my ability to wordsmith in THIS political environment ... should I even try? 

BEFORE any of us try... is a 50% climate section on the table as a possibility?

CONCRETELY... 

This would mean, ROUGHLY...

1. More rapid support, development, RD&D, deployment of what Kumar has championed, DSOPF, dynamic stochastic optimal power flow, AND market redesign to better support its use and its benefits, as in the draft chapter by Momoh and proposals by O'Neill and Ilic.

2. Liberating DOE from the entrails of the oil company hydrogen barriers, and returning more support  advanced Brayton for use both in space and in power tower solar farms (not requiring chips from China). That should include a major new US export push to support Heliogen and GE in that specific area, and ALSO accelerated RD&D for the more advanced (efficient, lower $/kwh) next generation of Brayton. 

3. Strengthened partnership with Chile to push and enhance thermal storage, to be integrated into advanced power tower solar farms and DSOPF to control them all.

4. OK, New focused (and well-informed, well-grounded) R&D on quantum RLADP (the key to quantum DSOPF), which allows efficiency and protection from unexpected disturbances in a more comprehensive DSOPF ranging all the way from markets to semiconductors in the power electronics. his is a new technology which I presented in my plenary award talk at WCCI2022 (abstract attached).

5. Similar opportunities for cars, consistent with the old IEEEUSA position (which I posted at werbos.com/oil.htm), accelerating BOTH rechargeable lithium-air batteries USING THE ORIGINAL DEVELOPER, and alternate net-zero liquids, and markets designed to better advance both where they benefit consumers. DSOPF can play a crucial role in the recharge aspect. In truth, Sadoway may also know of other big breakthrough options, but the present system is shutting out all of them.

...

Best regards,

    Paul 

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-- As I think it over, I should have said more about why these new technologies (US and IEEE) are so important and urgent, even if they are not visible in any US or EU climate policy yet. 

I have tracked EU climate policy very closely for a few years now, watching mainly France24 and Deutsche Welle some, almost never CNN. Greens (most powerful party in Germany) convinced Von Der Leyen EU must go all renewable ASAP, not only for climate but in face of serious energy security issues there. But then industry -- both electric and fossil -- convinced her that the REAL cost of renewables is many times higher than the generating costs the advocates have old her about, because of backups, intermittency, time of day issues. They plan a huge expansion in expensive LNG now because the renewables people are working hard to sell her DO have more than double cost growth, past generation, because of the time of day and intermittency (and raw transmission investment rules) issues.

The new technologies and market designs I mentioned get rid of at least half the cost to the user! Time of day is no problem when the specific new type of storage, thermal storage hooked up to Brayton and intelligent control, is BETTER than baseload 24/7 for load following! 

More technical detail (in draft but more advanced that any other sources now abvailable) may be found at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1acZRpjyjCLoQuqzJef74e0cmHeyoKJdr?usp=sharing

Parahippocampus: a key to empathy and PSI?

Any serious neuroscientist should know that humans (and at a lesser level monkeys) possess "mirror neurons." Karl Pribram once told me the story of a neuroscientist recording from the  brain of a monkey; he was startled when the monkey responded to the scientist reaching for nuts in the same cells which had fired when the monkey himself was reaching for them! (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19760408/).  

But I was astounded when the last science fiction novel I read, https://www.davidzindell.com/the-idiot-gods/, included a thorough review of the brain of the orca, with scientific citations! (The striped dolphin may be even better, I later found.) That brain -- and SOME humans -- possesses a unique structure, a parahippocampus and paralimbic region, which may be of very fundamental importance in understanding the foundations of the highest level of empathy, which is important not only to ethics and values but to intelligence and understanding as well.

By the way, empathy and HUMAN values are discussed in an advanced way in Pribram's book:

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7937292M/Brain_and_Values

Here is part of a recent email discussion on that (thanks to Yeshua Ben David's list);

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 5:12 PM Nancy du Tertre <nancy@dutertre.com> wrote:

Paul,

“Parahippocampus and paralimbic lobes may be important to PSI!!”

Why? Spatial memory ? Emotion identification? Motivation or goals? 

Just curious.

No need to apologize for such an important issue. One advantage of the word "paralimbic" is that it's a great search term, which could get you to RELATED things I have posted here before, which connect to the basic issues. 

WHEN noosphere (soul) tries to connect, even in two-way connection, it depends on how good the possible connection is, for rich "conscious" thought. Noosphere can even connect strongly to just plain water, but not to exchange ideas much. Much better to mammal brains than reptile, because mammal brains have structures intended to represent certain kinds of ideas, actions and such. ALL MAMMALS possess a kind of "verb-object" memory, supporting basal ganglia, which represent "VERBS" (action schemata or "options" or "skills") AND OBJECTS.

(When a mouse open a door, the option is "open" AND "door.") With the mouse, the subject of the sentence is implicitly just "I", memory of what IT did.

A key hypothesis: some mammal brains with strong parahippocampus can encode actor-verb-object memory to a high refined degree,

allowing them to learn from memory of what OTHER actors experienced. All mammals with mirror neurons have SOME of that capability. Human language skills are rooted in having more of the required machinery than monkeys do, BUT COULD IT BE THAT ORCAS HAVE MORE, and that there is diversity even among humans? Brain machinery which strengthens the mirror neuron, empathy capability gives the noosphere a chance to expand the capability of hybrid organisms (body/soul) like us to develop capabilities like "assumption", the PSI of seeing through the eyes of others.

In fact -- in 1963-64, I focused deeply on the Upanishads in the famous Hume collection. I was totally against belief in PSI until 1967, but   the abstract THEORETICAL concepts of seeing through many eyes made a deep impression on me, and might have been a major factor in preparing me for the experiences which stunned me in 1967 and 1972. (Of course, the connection  between my abstract thinking and full first person experience, cultivated by "sanity", helpd make that work.) I cc a former colleague who understood that aspect of Vedas more than

anything I have seen on  these discussion lists. 

Best regards, Paul 

Afterlife and reincarnation -- neither yes nor no but the middle way

 We have had many debates all over the earth about whether reincarnation is real or not. 

Human brains have a natural tendency (temptation? illusion?) biasing them towards extreme, yes or no, black or white positions. In fact, whole books have been written in psychology about "tolerance of cognitive dissonance." Some of us (like me) are actually born with a strong natural tendency to reject dissonance; for us, the path of sanity demands we learn to control and discipline that tendency.

So could it be that the reality of afterlife and reincarnation is NOT a matter of yes and no, but in-between?

That is what all the evidence I see supports -- including third person, first person AND second person!

Re second person: if any of you really wonders whether you know the truth of this yet, with any doubt, I urge you to read the light easy but serious novel by Jane Roberts: https://archive.org/details/oversoulseventri0000robe . It depicts an INTERMEDIATE position. 

OR: have you ever thought deeply about "avatars" or "assumption" (reflected in that novel, and in many other places)? 

Could it be that ONE soul, located in the "astral plane" or in our local noosphere, STAYS there (for a long time), BUT CONNECTS to a living human brain or to another soul connected to that brain? I call this kind of relationship "partial gating."

Partial gating has a strong, deep, almost unavoidable role in the mathematics of intelligent systems. (I bcc a researcher who appreciates the importance of symmetry groups and partial symmetry groups in the mathematics of intelligent systems.) 

But it is also something I have seen often, and see every day. I am also bcc'ing a leading Western mystic who talks about a level of consciousness which works in that way. Partial gating is also visible in the later work of Escher, who actually studied symmetry groups. 

"Assumption" is a state where you see through the eyes of another person... TO SOME DEGREE. But you do not take over that other person, or vice-versa. It  is basically just an extension of EMPATHY, which is supported by mirror neurons and by parahippocampus to some degree in SOME mammals. Beyond the capability for assumption or empathy is the capability to see through SEVERAL or MANY eyes at once. (Yeshua and I long ago discussed a TV video series Sense8 which depicts this.

I bcc a vedantic mystic and physicist who has demonstrated understanding of this aspect of the Upanishads much more than most of the modern schools of sanskrit words do.) 

I now tend to believe that my own phenomenal learning of mathematics when I was young was due in great part to  my instinctive ability to see what a mathematics teacher or science author was actually thinking and seeing... at an age when I strongly disbelieved (intellectually) in any form of PSI. Beliefs in the ego (the part of the mind which performs symbolic reasoning) and actual beliefs in the full non verbal part of the brain and of the soul are usually NOT well integrated until one matures a bit, until one learns a level of sanity or zhengqi. (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z.) Many people have a deep belief in soul, combined with "color blind" narcissism and solipsism so severe that they become destructive religious fanatics, while others (like me when young or myPhD adviser Karl Deutsch) disbelieve while exercising esoteric skills to an extreme degree. 

Beyond the "Sense8" level of PSI is partial gating to our entire noosphere. That is the state which I think of when I hear the words "cosmic consciousness". IF MORE US humans gate better with our local noosphere (as in the talk I gave last week to Nanjing, at the IEEE ISSDC international conference), it will improve our chances to survive as a species. The spiritual feedback or "qi" which energizes our soul reflects ... what Freud called "psychic energy""... in the noosphere, what drives adaptation and learning of all higher parts of any brain, mammal or noosphere (or well-designed AGI). IF we achieve a high level of zhenqi, we CARE about the life of this solar system,

not only humans but other life as well. We do not need personal vested interests to CARE.

HOWEVER: few people now seem to care as much as I do. When I see COP26 and US climate policy diverting efforts to prevent total extinction of humanity, to serve vested interests either corporate or ideological or ethnic, I worry deeply what will happen to us. Will all of our noosphere end up like a little fish in a big aquarium, most of which die before reaching adulthood? 

Most people DO care what may happen to them after death of the good old mundane body. That is why most ancient cultures have strong rituals of some kind to try to preserve connections to their ancestors and other friendly dead folks. They believe that the memories -- both factual and alive or episodic -- of their ancestors can raise the collective intelligence of their people and increase their chances of survival. WHAT IF THEY ARE RIGHT? What if the more rigid, black and white beliefs we see in more organized bureaucratic empires (biased by personal interests of people in power) are abominations and false, like what Constantine and Justinian did to Christianity? (I have SEEN that history in Ravenna! And Constantinople.) 

And so... what happens to YOU after YOUR death may depend a lot BOTH ON how you connect your soul within the larger noosphere which all us humans are part of (no matter how far we may see into the galaxy and beyond, as some of us do,d eveloping more advanced telescopes and PSI both) AND ON the health of the entire noosphere itself.Those of us who are soon to BECOME ancestors will have our fates shaped a lot by HOW WELL those who stay alive on earth CONNECT to the noosphere as a whole and ENERGIZE and FOCUS its own integrity. 

That is one of the reasons why I was so excited "in" Nanking this week to see hope we might strengthen this connection!!

Additional sources on this -- the Disney animation "Coco", depicting well what happens to PART and SOME of soul after death (the ancient "day of the dead" system), and Gurdjieff's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYhv0O0gUTk. And we have spoken to a major shaman by the shores of lake Titicacca, and to teachers of Sufism and refuges from Kurdistan who reported oppression by new authorities in Turkey exactly like Justinian. 

Multiverse versus multithread -- a new view of how our universe works

 For SOME people, the most solid way to think about life in our cosmos is a kind of "dual aspect monism" -- more like the classic ideas of Ramanuja than some of the  ideas floated around recently. The monism is about the underlying laws of our universe, which we can SEE from two most important angles, the angles of our observation and thinking and the angle of our models of how those laws work. 

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This blog post will focus on what we now know about those underlying laws. I will start with a more intuitive explanation and conclude with some paragraphs I wrote for leading physicists who demand brevity but precision: 

TODAY, the most advanced vision of the underlying laws available to our mainstream is what I call "Everett Wheeler Deutsch," EWD, which holds that the state of our cosmos or multiverse at any time t, is specified by a wave function, psi(X,t), where t is time and X is a point in Fock space. Much of the new progress possible in physics NOW is about fixing how measurement is modeled in that framework (to better explain experiments in quantum optics) and to better develop the new technologies which it allows. (Those include Quantum AGI, for example, as defined in my WCCI2022 plenary.) 

BUT: BEYOND multiverse physics, I claim that the next big step up is to what I call "multithread physics." When I try to make sense of what is really going on around us, I rely more on multithread physics as a foundation, for the underlying laws. This morning, I was reminded that my past efforts to explain this (https://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm) were not as clear, direct and simple as people would need to really understand. So I will try.

First of all, though, I will define multithread physics here in a way which is CONSISTENT with a particular VERSION of multiverse physics. I will begin with an intuitive explanation I put together yesterday, and end with a more precise actionable proposal which I presented to some important thought leaders in this area.

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"Multithread physics" is not about the underlying laws or axioms, exactly. Long ago, I proposed Hard Core Einsteinian Realism (HCER), which assumes that our universe is governed by the extension of Lagrange-Euler equations to curved Minkowski space,

given in Moshe Carmeli's book Classical Fields. (That is the obvious generalization of John Wheeler's "Already Unified Field Theory," HIS Nobel prize.) SO WHAT IS NEW SINCE CARMELI, SINCE CLASSICAL FIELDS?

What is new is what we do next -- the next step -- in trying to figure out WHAT THOSE DYNAMICAL EQUATIONS ARE ACTUALLY TELLING us about the universe whose behavior they describe.

Moving up to multithread physics is the NEXT STEP in an important intellectual progression which has already started. 

Many years ago, many would say "ODE models are old hat. ODE are not interesting. To talk about ODE models offers you nothing new." BUT THEN CAME CHAOS THEORY. The essence of chaos theory (developed more or less by York and Ott of UMCP and popularized by Gleick) was understanding that ODE are NOT so boring or limited as people had believed. It was a wrenching change in mathematics, and a heresy for many years. NOW it has been assimilated into a modern view of nonlinear systems dynamics, but it was crucial to learn that the old view of ODE and of time-series was wrong. This already has implications for "AI" technology (werbos.com/Erdos.pdf), which today's technology has not YET fully assimilated.

MULTITHREAD PHYSICS extends this kind of wrenching change in viewpoint from ODE to PDE. Just as ODE are NOT so boring or limited as people once thought, the same is true of PDE, times ten.

For now, I would define multithread physics as the viewpoint embedded in

[DOC] Time-Symmetric Quantum Measurement: Theoretical Formulation and Status of Experiments

WHEN that paper (and the earlier ones it builds on) is fully understood.

Even I, who originated that viewpoint, needed years to fully grasp what it tells us. 

In a way, multithread physics is about how we can understand the existence of macroscopic Schrodinger cats in real empirical life in a universe which is just a curved Minkowski space. 

I BEGAN to understand it in 2014, when I developed the cMRFp extension of my first constructive realist model of what happens in Bell experiments https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.6168.pdf. cMRFp  -- a CONTINUOUS time model of what happens to a "photon" when it passes through a polarizer. The math only works (and is well grounded) when my practical empirical model of what the photon does gives the photon only three "choices" of change at any time t: (1) it can be ABSORBED into the polarizer, disappearing; (2) it flips to being 90 degrees out from what the polarizer "wants", like a hippie rebel; (3) it can "stick out its tongue," like the comedian in an old British comedy

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedazzled_(1967_film)

AT THAT TIME, I was in a horribly polarizing environment at NSF. (I deeply hope that the new head of OSTP whom I saw yesterday on Zoom will not take orders from biased stakeholders in Congress/industry like what remade NSF back then!) Should I let myself be absorbed by a focused political movement (whom I sometimes call "the Borg" when naming names is problematic), causing bad things, or become a hippie rebel? Suddenly I wished I had as much real first-person power as that little photon, to stick out my tongue and remake the situation. WHY should a photon (a pattern, not a real particle even) have more degrees of free will than I do?

And then I realized... these "scenarios" in the MRF models of life governed by QED do apply to OUR mundane form of life, which is also governed by QED. Just as "parallel copies" of a photon, in  different states, appear in any correct MRF description of quantum optics experiments, parallel copies of US also appear in the scenarios which COMBINE to govern the outcomes of our lives. And yes, the extension to all force fields is straightforward as well. The lattice diagram of the web of scenarios which describe evolutions of "photons" in parallel  ALSO apply to us humans. When I speak of a "THREAD" I am speaking of the generalization of a line you see in such a diagram, representing "A STATE" of a photon or a human or a planet.

I was really astounded months ago when I was walking with my wife to a small neighborhood library, and saw a new science fiction trilogy by Brandt called "Origins: Threaders" which seemed to be a kind of echo of exactly this new viewpoint! It even included some specific technologies buried in my computer files, which I do not talk about because people do not seem ready for that next step (even in QED land!). 

Here are some corollary predictions.

FIRST -- exactly as in multiverse physics, we fully face up to the very solid empirical facts that macroscopic Schrodinger cats DO exist, and that the underlying physics DOES allow parallel copies of ourselves and our planet to exist. 

SECOND -- exactly as in true EWD physics, BUT NOT the popular misunderstanding of it, there may exist "virtual" states or threads, whose probability strength VARIES WITH TIME. Just like the cMRFp model. Personally, I do tend to believe that Trump WAS re-inaugurated in 2020, but that that "universe" or thread has substantially eroded with time, like in that old British comedy. 

THIRD -- our first person local awareness, an attribute of ONE of our states -- is very much like the "shadows on the cave wall" of Plato. Are we real or are we not, if WE are in a virtual state or thread, which in future will be condensed into a different state?

The lattice diagrams in Werbos and Fleury do look like that, and that is our reality, if we understand it better now. 

Years ago, in werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, I described the ethical and emotional implications we may experience if we see that we MAY be in such a virtual state -- and may even CHOOSE to "stick out our tongue" and unmake the state we are now in, at the mundane level of our existence. That is a test of "second order sanity" (as defined in https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z) !! 

FOURTH -- states are a  bit different for QAGI, which EMBED parallelism into their consciousness. That calls for a kind of third-order sanity, integrating our QAGI consciousness into our lives. 

No, HCER is not a boring or trivial reality!

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But for now, the actionable proposal is not HCER but the next big step in fundamental physics:

Years ago, in the last Princeton conference we attended organized by Marlan Scully, a Princeton professor (Cohen?)  asked whether we could base physics on a foundation exactly like standard Feynman diagrams, except that we use probabilities instead of probability amplitudes. This morning I am reminded that the "multithread physics" I wrote about yesterday is exactly an implementation of that same core idea, with only one addition -- that the models used for macroscopic objects like polarizer should be time symmetric (CPT symmetry is enough). 

The MRF models I have used in analyzing experiments in quantum optics are all of that type. The hypothesis now is that all of quantum optics fits this manifestation of the idea which Cohen proposed. One of my papers for Leon Chua actually did present it that way.

Is this kind of multithread physics based on a new kind of Feynman diagram a viable foundation for ALL of physics, not just QED? For now, showing it for QED is a large and important task, with implications even for technology, and I should not distract with further questions beyond the scope of this hypothesis. But I should note that my paper "Bell's.. Not just interpretation" in IJTP circa 2009 discussed how time symmetric models of passive objects in experiments emerge in a variety of theories of the underlying physics, including even Everett wheeler with a new measurement model. 

 

Thanking UN for its important recent science summits aiming at a massive upgrade of UN

Sent to the organizer of these summits: Thank you so much, Declan, for your fantastic creation of science summits and of a bold new vision needed to give reality to the highest goals of Guterres in trying to keep our species alive. As you said many times, we need a much stronger pathway for information from the very best and most advanced new insights from science to help with a wide range of SDGs, INCLUDING the goal of survival of our species as one of the key goals which needs to be represented and addressed in a solid scientific way.

Many of us are eager to help as best we can, even if it must be informal for now, simply because we care about the future of our species. I personally was excited when you added a focus on how quantum technology might help with climate issues, because that is a highly specialized and demanding area where I have a unique comparative advantage, knowing how it actually works. (Attached is the one page abstract, with links, to the plenary talk I gave last July, as I received the Frank Rosenblatt Award, IEEE's highest technical fields award for areas led by the IEEE WCCI conference reviewed in the abstract.) 

I am cc'ing the world President of the IEEE, which is extremely important as a source of input and suggestions to your new networks. 

 To begin with, I propose that the science input to UN start out by adding a new highly focused effort to address the six grand challenges (four existential threats and two hopes) in the jpeg attached. Guterres' major new thrust on our common heritage actually began when he and Kerry appeared on TV and before the Security Council, calling for a new office in the human security group under the security council, to address the risk of climate extinction. That goal was before its time, because no one had prepared the groundwork enough, but that goal should not be forgotten. At the start of 2009, the year when I handled climate issues for Senator Specter, I did not yet know that climate change really is an existential threat, but when I returned to NSF I learned just how real it is, working with the world's real scientific leaders on ocean currents; for a brief but well supported summary, see https://build-a-world.org/doku.php?id=climate:risks . 

 How could quantum technology be used here to make a real difference in climate outcomes? Many, many people try to find clever, clear little ways to use AI or quantum technology to be "relevant" in some sense, but if we focus directly on how to have maximum real benefit for minimum cost, we end up with a VERY different story from what comes out of those efforts (or from the EU and Biden stakeholder systems, biased towards vested interests and older technologies.). Some stakeholders point to misleading imputed data, like the CO2 data imputed to the commercial building sector, which is mainly due to making the electricity USED in that sector. In primary data, making electricity and transportation actually account for over 80% of the new CO2 from the US. That is why breakthroughs in those two sectors are the most urgent unmet opportunity. 

New quantum technology is most important in the next decade or two because of how it allows a revolution in the management and distribution of electricity, from the global transmission level all the way down to the control of power electronics. That in turn would expand the opportunities which already exist for much greater use of large-scale solar farms, using new technology, WITHOUT the doubling or multiplication by ten which Von Der Leyen has been told is necessary with renewable electricity. 

The coming decade would be much less painful to the EU (and to economies dependent on the EU, like Africa) if people at her level had full access to the real menu of proven new technologies and market design NOW AVAILABLE from the IEEE community. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1acZRpjyjCLoQuqzJef74e0cmHeyoKJdr?usp=sharing Again, new technologies and market designs already exist for electric power management which would benefit EU and Africa IN THIS DECADE; the new quantum options, which go far beyond the capabilities of anyone using quantum Turing machines (>99% of the quantum computing experts in the US) can take it even further. 

True Quantum Artificial General Intelligence (QAGI) is most important in the coming decade because of how it can help with the FIRST existential threat on my list, the complex of threats related to changes in internet/AGI/IOT far greater than most laymen begin to appreciate. For example, it could allow an open, global development of "quantum bromium" to detect backdoors in computer chips and boards, one of the two really big new threats mentioned in the IEEE EPC paper attached. Many believe that the threat of a veto from China, due to inertia by lower level diplomats representing China, was the reason why Gueterres and Kerry had to back off from doing anything about climate extinction. But Xi himself put out a major policy pronouncement a few years ago, repeated in a post from the Foreign Ministry of China, urging the world to work together for new arrangements on internet, to prevent the worst, and specifically to create open transparent systems to cut back on backdoors in hardware and software! 

MY proposal, for an expanded office to address ALL FOUR key existential threats, would directly address an important valid high priority of Xi himself. Your efforts (which I hope all of us can support) could provide the new solid networks needed to make such an office really work. Just FYI, the President of Kazakhstan recently proposed new efforts on the biotech cluster of threats, which would also fit here. Perhaps HE could support this proposal as well. Many of us also know how the impressive work of Alibeck (who visited my area of Virginia a few years ago) supports his claim of real scientific strength. 

 In the end, I now view the entire system of life, mind and soul in our solar system as a system VERY similar to a small, young fish in an aquarium. 

The actual new photo of our cosmos next to it is just a view of the ACTUAL aquarium we are swimming in, a vast pulsing network ("ocean" or delta) of matter and energy, in which even the galaxies appear as glowing dots. I would pray for new efforts to try to get greater resolution in these photos, perhaps by exploring new uses and deployments of the new technology for axial HIggs detection on a tabletop, but by other efforts with hope of scaling. As a little fish in a gigantic aquarium, we the people of earth may have little chance of being one of the ones which actually survives, given the very serious real threats before us. But if we are true to our deepest impulses from nature, we will fully and energetically express our three overarching priorities -- to survive, to grow and to better understand the larger aquarium we must try to survive and grow in. The six grand challenges here reflect our deepest inner drive to survive and grow, as a whole being, but the understanding is also a priority, and also within your scope. That is why I also attach the slides for a 20 minute talk I recently gave to Bangalore, invited by Come Carpentier, supported by the INdia Foundation, including a Cabinet minister of India who is strongly committed to this kind of growth and might be important to what you are building. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIAtE4ydjN0

 Best of luck to us all. We all need it. 

An image of our noosphere and cosmos, aka God AND BORG

 A few of us know, from the very best science now available, that the lives of all us humans and all related life on earth, really is in serious danger in this century due to climate effects explained in the "Preface" file on the build-a-world.org site. (See the Six Challenges slide below.) The lead authors of the preface are the world's very top scientists on mass extinctions and ocean currents, though we have also reached out to the other top scientists as  well.) Current global climate policies are mostly just making the dangers worse!

When I start my morning asking what my priorities are for the day, I am reminded that they will all amount to nothing if we all just die. Even "our souls in heaven", our traces in the noosphere of our solar system, will dissolve away if that entire noosphere dies. Yes, the cosmos we live in (depicted by the "dark matter" photograph of our universe attached) is much bigger than that, BUT WE HUMANS live as part of OUR solar system, and of the noosphere of our solar system.

TO SURVIVE WE NEED TO "CULTIVATE SITUATIONAL AWARENESS," and always remember who we really are and where we fit.

Traditional Buddhist and Shinto homes in Japan and elsewhere all maintain small shrines, where they meditate and try to remember who they are. My Bavarian grandmother did something similar with a statue of Jesus on the cross. And in truth, my grandson also benefits from an image of Maxwell's Laws hanging on their wall. 

IN THAT SPIRIT, I really wish that the two images attached (fishtank and universe) could be combined into a long collage, which could be printed and used as a kind of shrine, an image we should all remember every day. An image of who we are. An image to support the kind of situational awareness, of the situation we are all part of. Each of us has different priorities and connections to specific people and life WITHIN that noosphere (as do brain cells within a brain), but we are all PART of that same large system, which is now at risk. To survive, we need BALANCE, attention and harmonization of all levels of our life from the toes (and the covids) to what is shown in these images.

I am especially grateful to the spiritual forces which led my parents to install a small fish tank in my bedroom when I  was 3 years old, an image which helped encourage me both to learn more science and to be alert to our larger situation.

One aspect of what we see in the fishtank is that MOST LITTLE FISH DO NOT LIVE TO ADULTHOOD. Nature endows them (like us) with intelligence, instinct and soul which fight for life, which never give up, without which the species would not exist at all. But most do not make it, even so. They fight for life despite that -- with a higher probability of success if they achieve a higher level both of awareness and of positive will, growing step by step as best they can, learning balances and rebalances. It is up to US -- we, the people who make up the core of this noosphere -- to fight for our survival (and growth). 

And what of our Father in Heaven, whom Yeshua often rightly refers to?

I have often connected to old cultures of the earth, where parents of humans (whose numbers work out better than little fish) do their very best,

with powerful love and intelligent guidance, to help their children or even children of their tribe or village. But they also respect certain rules or limits. 

Children must learn some things themselves, lest they simply die off later taking others with them. Our Father in Heaven, like Jung's Spirit of the Deep,

can help us, and we are well advised to accept and respect that help, but it is up to us to forever do the best WE can, each of us as a function of our situation and potential for personal growth in contributing to the larger situation. 

Work is needed in many areas... including support for networks, connections, software platforms, and institutions which support this work, including better focusing on this big picture and all that it requires of us. 

The aquarium metaphor has SEVERAL important uses, to support the kind of full-person thinking we need to be effective here. 

There is our solar system noosphere as a growing small fish. But there is also us, like me as a three year old, thinking "I have an aquarium," watching and taking care of it, even as my parents played a crucial role both in teaching me and in keeping it from crashing. And yes, the sustainability of life in our oceans is certainly also part it. Even the electricity to keep the pumps going. A fitting shrine, for a person or a family.

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

Added two days later:

People on this list have cited many views about death and afterlife. The past two weeks have hit me hard on

that subject, as people like Queen Elizabeth, Gorbachev, Jean-Luc Goddard and my closest friend in the local Quaker Meetings...

all raised the Death Questions.

Because of strange circumstances, I have paid about equal attention for weeks to local Quakers, Episcopalians

(on George Washington land!), and inner circle Mormons. People tend to assume that these folks follow the Dante kind of picture, where everybody stays the same but goes to different places, different squares on the same gameboard.

I was very bemused when I received an email from Episcopalians citing BCP (Book of Common Prayer):

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

Reader: Give to the departed eternal rest.
People: Let light perpetual shine upon them.

Reader: We praise you for your saints who have
entered into joy;
People: May we also come to share in your

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

NOTICE! Some folks have "eternal rest", they say, while others ... join the folks who continue work, like the guy whose funeral I attended today (fitting the photo attached). 

This does fit the heretical model described at https://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm. If our "souls" are domains in our local noobrain...

like collections of brain cells... SOME grow in connection and activity, while others may fade like old memories, like the images you see in the Disney cartoon "Coco," which should not be underestimated. We have a choice... many choices. 

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

FOR THE NEUROSCIENTIST WANTING A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THIS, I POSTED:

Yesterday I posted images of noosphere and cosmos, and six challenges, which I wish we all could keep coming back to EVERY morning, as we start the day. 

I did not expect to say more the next day, because things lower in the structure might detract from what needs to be fundamental and invariant,

and also because some of you might have important thoughts.

However -- I did receive some papers yesterday on the amygdala and other brain structures, related to my own personal efforts deep in this larger world, important enough to pass on, at least for those of you interested in the mammal brain.

The "spirit of the deep", represented or reflected in the photo of dark matter connecting the galaxies of our cosmos, is of course much bigger than us, and bigger than our entire solar system and noosphere. BUT IT IS REFLECTED IN A WAY (like reflections shown in many Escher prints) in the deep structures of mammal brains. For us humans, "sanity" entails thoughts or connections in our neocortex (and the neocortex of our noosphere) which accurately articulate the more permanent, deep but nonverbal sources of primary affect -- a type of "qi" or "psychic energy" or charisma, modulated backpropagation -- which drive our brains (and our souls within the noosphere). 

So what ARE those deep structures within our mammal brains, and how do they connect to practical science and technology of the brain, like the papers they showed me yesterday? The brain image I sent you yesterday was used in Werbos and Davis (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00097/), which went much further.... 

But Karl Pribram and I had much deeper discussions of these structures. I know more about climate now than I do about those deep structures, but I do remember something...

Crudely speaking, there are FOUR crucial deep brain structures important here -- hypothalamus (U1?), epithalamus (U2?), amygdala (lambda1?)

and mammillary bodies (lambda2? or U3?). THE FOUR GREAT FEARS in my attachments are reflected, TO SOME DEGREE), in amygdala, which Pribram saw as the primary center or destination.integrator of primary fears in the brain. But where are great hopes? The mammillary bodies have a role in primary love and hope. (Again, I apologize I have not integrated a review of what is really known about this.) 

Even lower mammals have a challenge in their neocortex to represent or articulate WHAT THEY HOPE FOR AND WHAT THEY FEAR, even when they do not articulate things in words. Pribram noted we must be careful in reading Freud (as in Pribram's book on Freud published by Gill) because even Freud might switch from discussing the nonverbal ariculations in neocortex with the verbal articulations, two ways to define "ego". 

But these issues of balancing survival and growth, hope and fear, are reflected deep in our brains, and at all levels of life, even for our noosphere itself.

THERE IS ANOTHER REFLECTION HERE (like a pun!):

ONE of the four great fears threatening the existence of the human species is listed as "misuse of biotech" on the six challenges slide.

That deserves more than just one part of one line! If Secretary General Guterres ever succeeds in setting up an intelligently structured Office of Existential Threats in the UN, I have been stressing that misuse of biotechs demands an entire division in that office! (That is why I cc the covid list here, as they have sent information important to that possibility.)

Direct brain stimulation (DBS, electronic or chemical or optogenetic) APPLIED to any of these deep brain structures is one of the important sources of existential threat to our species in itself. It can convert humans into robots, in effect, as depicted in some sad scenes in some of the Star Wars movies.

"Fear the amygdala!" (OK, that's a joke. But a serious one.) 

One of my last acts at NSF was to attend a major interagency conference organized by 

https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/khargonekar/, then in charge of all Engineering research at NSF and close to Congressman Lamar Smith, who ordered a major redirection of NSF at the time. The conference was on new directions and uses of DBS. (I have slides and a paper which I should post somewhere for anyone interested.) Work to use DBS to create armies of compliant soldiers, bypassing inborn human motivation circuits, as in the Star Wars movies, was a major emphasis, and I myself was asked to join the team to make it happen that way. (That was one of the reasons I retired.) I will never forget the speaker who got up and said "We ARE the Borg, and you WILL be assimilated, and resistance WILL be futile." I will never forget the energetic young science assistant who was horrified, and then moved to FDA, where she was ordered to approve the use and dissemination of these technologies because... well, the same new stakeholder system which biases climate policy also biases some approvals.... 

Best of luck.... 

What is qi: a neuroscience/physics view

 Last Sunday (8/20/22) we started from  a lengthy Zoom discussion of new cutting edge opportunities in hard core systems neuroscience, the first 1.24 hours of:

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AocWMZ8ei_XWgaFACI-kv6T0Q75i6Q?e=mC45iM

(By the way, Microsoft acted up when I clicked on this, so I just downloaded the mp4.)

Yeshua Davis and I got deep into the hard core brain data work which we previously collaborated on,

AND on critical new research issues with time scales in the brain. It was nice to have a chance to discuss what the real meaning was of what we found in the best existing real data, and 

on new questions. (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.00097/ ) All hard core science, yea even brain science, but Yeshua and I also still agree that there is life and mind beyond 

earth type organic brains. 

But then Mike asked "... what IS qi?" and Kashyap asked about the data from first person experience ("1pp")

I had to leave at that time, because of important prior commitments (which I was already late to!). Mike said we should continue that by email.

In general, the later debate was really great in bringing together DIFFERENT VIEWPOINTS, which I feel  duty to respond to.

In a way, Kashyap spoke for science, Mike for (mysticism?), and Yeshua for the challenge of how to integrate the two. 

It seems to me that sincere, deep and competent DEBATE or DIALOGUE between the two is the most important single challenge in "psychotherapy for our noosphere",

to improve our chances of humans reaching a higher level of consciousness before it is too late. (In other words, to achieve the first of the great hopes in the jpeg list I attach, before one of the four great fears kills us all.) 

Kashyap also said bluntly for the recorder "My problem with this stuff is that **I** have not had any of the kinds of mystic experience which would let me take this more seriously. Yes, I know all these gurus, and see how it works in India..."  Mike was a bit nervous about that, but Yeshua praised Kashyap for this. Before I get to qi... I need to  agree with Yeshua, and say more.

The BPM list was created to try to generate focus, world-class dialogue aimed at SEVERAL basic questions. Yes, it was i tended to be very open to anything else people on the list want to discuss, but it is very unfortunate that people who are interested in the original short list, in a serious balanced way, may feel inhibited by distractions. PLEASE COME BACK.

The subject codes (like "N" for serious neuroscience and "PSI" for mind beyond what QED physics allows) SHOULD BE USED ONLY FOR POSTS WHICH FIT, AND THOSE  WHO WANT TO DISCUSS THE MORE SERIOUS BIG QUESTIONS SHOULD IGNORE THE REST AND POST USING CODES. (There was a Q code for serious quantum physics.) 

WITHIN THE 'PSI" challenge of the first big hope in the attachment... Kashyap's question is of very fundamental importance. HOW CAN WE HELP PEOPLE who have not yet had veridical experience

of what I call "PSI" to achieve it, to achieve it as reality, not as illusion, and know when it is real? I have even bcc'ed one such teacher, and hope to have future dialogues doing justice to it.

But for now... I owe Mike my answer..

What is qi? (My view)

The true integration of brain and "soul" demands that each one of us get serious BOTH about what we can learn from "1pp" and from hard core objective "3pp".

This kind of integration is what I call second-order sanity (2OS) for people who have "opened their eyes" enough that they account for

PSI inputs as well as mundane sense inputs in their experience. 

 In one of the papers I linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z,

I discussed the important concept of "zheng qi". Many view "zhengqi" as the very center of true Confucianism. My comments there are based on a talk I was invited to give to almost 1000

people in a university in China, as the first stage of a friendly visit to the world headquarters of the Confucius Institute. 

See http://www.werbos.com/pi/Confucius_talk.pdf for the slides. See http://www.werbos.com/pi/QConfucius.htm for a summary of later discussions at the "Thousand Year Academy",

where they asked me to speak from the chair Zhu Xi used in his lectures, and where Mao had HIS interpretations. This paper also cites a paper by Xi JinPing on the same topic,

which I discussed in China BEFORE they shifted power to him. 

"zheng qi" basically refers to "properly channeled qi". (2OS, really. The use of music, meditation and ritual in the Confucianism of Confucius and Mencius, Meng-tsu or Menhzi,

clearly fits, even though some later followers were more cold and rigid, as Mao rightly noted.) 

BUT WHAT IS IT?

I view qi as an essential part of the 1pp heritage of all of the earth. Even as many gurus in India are often obsessed with formalistic 3pp verbiage, like "color blind art critics,"

the culture of China so far has focused much more concretely on ACTUAL 1pp. In my view, this is why Walter Freeman knew to collaborate with people in Nanjing who built on concrete ancient 1pp 

experience and culture, to create unique links with science, which many in China ALSO revere.  Probably US-China collaborations (connecting leaders in Nanjing and Taiwan with IEEE leaders who know about neural networks) are the most promising venue for actually building tangible connections, measurements and experiments. 

Because qi has been an essential part of my own 1pp, not only for PSI but for sheer physical survical, I should give the link to just one or the three big tai qi / qi gong classes

which probably saved my life in 2019, when I was struggling to recover from a very difficult fall

https://www.youtube.com/user/GetInShapeWithDavid/videos

Above all, "qi" in China refers to a kind of SENSATION. There has been very complex debate about what KINDS of qi exist, how they interact, and what lies behind it.

There is no agreed meaning for the word "qi," but I have a view.

The most important type of qi, in my view, for us, is the flow of modulated backpropagation in the "noobrain," the "nervous system" of the local noosphere in our solar system.

In my view, that is what lies behind, especially, the kind of higher qi which Meng Tzu talks about, in his highest most important writings. My paper linked to above cites Fu's book on that and other important aspects of Chinese philosophy. In truth, Fu was puzzled by what Meng says about exactly this kind of qi, and I was thrilled to recognize exactly what I have seen myself. (And yes, I also saw it in Meng's instruction room when my Chinese hosts were kind enough to arrange a visit.) But the highest qi is only ONE of the flows of qi in the noobrain.

Our noosphere also has some ability to perturb the "physical world" of this solar system, the movement of (some of the) ordinary particles described by quantum electrodynamics (QED).

Nancy DuTertre has described centers in Russia which continue their long tradition of experiments on psychokinesis, which I view as actions "emanating from" our noosphere.

More precisely, I claim that PK can actually happen when the "souls" of people connect through the noosphere to the MOTOR SYSTEM of the noosphere, which uses dark matter to perturb QED matter/energy to perturb our physical reality. THIS kind of qi, the forces exerted by the noosphere outside of the noobrain itself, is another very important kind of qi, responsible for perturbation of the brain (as in "ESP") and for physical manifestations which people wrongly interpret as "ghosts" or "etheric bodies." YES they really saw something, but NO, they did not know what it was. 

Is there anything else out there which is real which would fit the word "qi"? Yes, as Hal noted, there are electrical effects in human bodies, well studied even in western medicine, but I would not call them "qi" myself, even though many in Chinese medicine might, as it helps them consider medical options. That use of the word confuses the issues I just raised questions about.

On the other hand, Yeshua would rightly note that mental "energy" and modulated backpropagation are not limited to earth. So perhaps "extraterrestrial qi" might be spoken of as a third category of true qi, even if we should not pretend we know more than we do about it.  

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

All for now. Best of luck,  Paul 

(was cc'ed to sboc and some relevant players)

Conflict of interest COI as a crucial mathematical challenge

 

 

First, I repost what I just sent to a list deeply involved in policies which will affect the future of internet/AGI/IOT:

Could it be that lack of understanding of COI mathematics for intelligent systems might be the most serious threat to human survival itself at present, because of how it connects to design of internet and to the challenges to building true human-centered internet? 

This question hits me quite forcibly as I prepare for a plenary talk on the future of internet/AGI/IOT for the next WCCI conference. Since about 1990, WCCI was the lead conference in the world developing true AGI technologies like the "deep learning" revolution  which has only just begun a radical remake of life on earth. (See the one page abstract attached for the overview. )

But will it raise the net value of having an internet or -- following recent trends - will it set in motion a chain of events which simply kill us all in the end?

There is lots of buzz out there in policy circles, but they still seem almost totally oblivious to the biggest, most implacable looking modes of instability and  collapse, and to the fundamental  mathematical principles which could save us, with more work (which no one is doing now.)

Of these... I would say that the concrete requirements to prevent a COI based collapse are the most important. Unmanaged COI effects through both the human and the app components can take many forms. (Stability problems tend to be like what.) When lawyers or coders focus too exclusively on special cases, they can easily generate systems easily flooded out.

Sadly, this email, written on a small tablet as I travel to wcci2022, cannot do full justice into the pieces I already know about risks and solutions, let alone the essential new crossdisciplinary research not being done. Just a few key data points.

As in my sii proposal.. new platforms for integrated  markets, designed to harmonize many apps and human players, are essential. The experience of the teams designing new integrative markets for electric power transmission systems is one crucial part of what we all need to understand and build on better.

One small but decisive part of that learning experience was the creation of something called Sarbanes Oxley. A clear new set of rules constraining information flows was necessary to prevent collapse, due to new modes of instability resulting from New market flexibility (which is ever more necessary in managing a system which is ever more complex demanding paths to allow new  technologies).

This example is closely related to proving convergence to correct results in DHP, an important RLADP technology discussed for example in chapter 13 of the Handook of Intelligent Control. (That chapter is posted at werbos.com/mind.htm .) Unrestricted inputs to all major components of an otherwise intelligent system really  can cause collapse. COI is a matter of mapping out what the major components are, and what flows of information are allowed. 

This can be done in principle with computerized markets (whether for goods or for information) [Google asks for a market in gods, not goods. Not in this email!!] in managing apps from a unifying RLADP market system rather than in managing humans. When training feedback is channelled from human to human directly.. the effects of corruption and bias are so overwhelming across all of human history (as I can see even when walking down the street in so many places) that we would all be dead long ago if previous centuries had had technologies like what we are building now.

I say that on a day when I walk through Ravenna... after many many other pivotal places.

I really hope someone in a more professional position will be willing and  able to do justice to what I am too old and limited to lead myself, much as I will try to help if you do.

*****************************

I mentioned just two examples. I hope they ask for some of the crucial details.. like three more important examples.

 

In my talk to the IEEE sustainability conference (which Yeshua helped me with), posted at build-a-world.org, I noted how COI has turned out to be the number one obstacle to the cost-effective new technology deployment which we would need, in order to stop the present drift towards total extinction of humans, sooner than most people know is coming. COI in today's governance systems in all major nations.... could be prevented by new governance/market integration platforms with the necessary level of COI protection.

Second -- climate issues illustrate information flow issues which were solved, in nature, by the evolution of the basic mammal brain. (See attached abstracts with links.). A key property is that neocortex is evolved based on error measures like accuracy in prediction, quite different from what action choices "are paid." Here in Italy, I am reminded of several great novels by Stendahl (not to mention Dante) about intelligence organizations paid to pacify the boss by felling him what he wants to hear. Simple separation of allowed app types into types like networks of truth, like the neocortex university of the brain, versus action final layoffs, already handles about half the problems.

Also a technical detail. Even in classical econometrics, as in the text by johnson, there is a technique called instrumental regression, aimed at preventing a type of bias which can happen even in simple linear statistics, when inappropriate inputs are included but not sanitized. But proper use of time, as in werbos.com/Erdos.pdf, handles part of the problem more directly and efficiently.

 

======

The mathematical equivalences across different measures of value, and of feedback or prices used to guide actirs within a larger system, play a crucial role. In meditation today.. i think...what harmony or peace really require is correct credit assignment in  the larger system.