Invitation to dialogue to learn YOUR views of how humanity could coherently meet the 7 big challenges

 Yeshua Ben David has challenged me to lead a dialogue at 3:20-4:40 Pm EDT this coming Sunday on what we humans can and should do to better to address the 7 big life-or-death challenges in the list attached.

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FULL miniconference details:

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 010:00 AM PDT

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 011:00 AM MDT

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 12:00 PM CDT

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 1:00 PM EDT

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 06:00 PM London

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 07:00 PM Poland

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 08:00 PM Lithuania/Israel/Saudi Arabia

Sunday 1st September 2024 at 10:30 PM India

Monday 2nd September 2024 at 05:00 AM New Zealand

ZOOM MEETING DETAILS:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89302932352?pwd=saT3bMW0lUdccEu

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==============================Many of us have discussed these challenges, separately, because each one of them is very complicated.

each one requires very deep new efforts to build connections between people and groups with serious knowledge or capabilities WITHIN each of these challenges.

But Yeshua has challenged us all to switch focus in this hour to the bigger questions:

HOW CAN WE INTEGRATE the strategies we pursue to do justice to essential connections BETWEEN all seven challenges, and build an INTEGRATED

vision of where we are going here?

I promised to spend only the first 15 minutes or less giving my present views, because -- like Yeshua -- I believe deeply that deep dialogue,

ranging from words to personal presence to deep spiritual connections between people -- is at the very core of how humans could make real progress.

WE WILL BE LISTENING VERY HARD.

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Because I am just introducing the topic, I will NOT try to impose my own personal views, which are very much in flux right now. However, since my retirement from NSF in 2015,

I HAVE worked hard to get very deep into all seven, to see connections, and to begin each day by serious meditation on how we all could do better and on 

what the present situation looks like. Here are just a few scattered thoughts. I hope some of you can push much further on the many important follow-ons.

Many of you have already thought deeply about the incredible conflicts I see every day on France24 and in emails, especially. The wars in the Middle East, Ukraine-Russia, Sudan and

Azerbaijan-Armenia, and conflicts linked to important elections, have reached the level where I believe (as in the list attached) they threaten the very existence of the human species

in this century. I say that, being far more aware of what the frontier science and technology shows, well beyond what the popular press teaches us about. 

In SERIOUS discussions of species extinction, I often wish more people better appreciated the classic book by R. May, Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems.
that book used serious mathematical analysis to disprove a lot of the tacit assumptions made by many people about the process of evolution. (Of course, many of us built on the insights of George Gaylord Simpson in understanding this. In the risks paper by Ward, Wadhams and Werbos at build-a-world.org, we discuss important more modern work.) 

May reminds us that extinction of a top dog species would be nothing new in the history of our planet. When the web of economics or ecology changes radically enough,

it is quite typical for the top dog to go extinct. OUR global economy IS changing very radically. If we do not raise our level of consciousness (and integrated thinking) more than

we get by just playing by ear... the probability of THIS species surviving would not seem especially high.

But how can we raise our level of collective consciousness enough to survive? How can we force ourselves to "think out of the box" enough to engage well enough with new realities

which seriously threaten to kill us all already in this century, by any of the four "existential threats" on my list? 

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS has always been a crucial piece of survival under tough circumstances. Better UNDERSTANDING of how intelligent systems work -- from brains

to "AI" to the entire system of life in our solar system and beyond -- is one essential part of what we need to know. It has an obvious connection to risk number one, as do the papers 

included in my new patent https://patents.justia.com/patent/20230252334 and the related links at werbos.com. 

But understanding of the mathematics of intelligent systems is crucial to OUR understanding of ourselves as well. Mathematics provides a unique tool for organizing our thinking, achieving integration and coherence, and understanding what it MEANS to learn and articulate an effective and global strategy of action which can avoid pitfalls -- pitfalls like the classic

"minefield" decision problems fraught by many, many local minima or maxima. The new patent explains how very solid new quantum technology can overcome such local minima, and might even be an essential feature of higher levels of intelligent system in our universe.

The attached draft of my chapter in  https://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Consciousness-Non-Locality-Come-Carpentier/dp/9391759947/

goes further in discussing SOME of the connections. FIGURE 8 in that chapter is what I think of most when I think of the big challenge Yeshua has posed to us.

It reminds me of how much Yeshua and I understand about WHAT INTEGRATION AND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS really require of us intelligent systems.

Above all, it reminds me of the living example we see in the neocortex of the mammal brain, which he and I have probed with mathematical and laboratory tools and understand perhaps more than anyone else on earth now (at the functional level of its higher intelligence, in  our open access paper of a few years ago).   

The neocortex part INCLUDES a stratum of "giant pyramid cells" which learn an INTEGRATIVE GLOBAL IMAGE (AWARENESS) of the larger reality faced by the organism.

That integrative level is NOT a monolithic "podcast" system disseminating its views in a top-down way; rather, the neocortex works because of RECURRENT two-way networks connecting the whole. ALL the cells work together, but they also show great DIVERSITY AND CONNECTION.  And yes, that takes us back to where I started in this post, the great need for greater diversity and connection, and a stronger "giant pyramid level."

People ask me at times what this has to do with great powerful cultures like Judaism, Christianity and Islam. My view is that we need more rational integration, doing justice to the deep

emotional and human roots and experience in all these cultures. But even for a simplified integration, we need to do justice as well to Hinduism, Buddhism, hard science and shamanism -- especially the emerging new mathematics and neuroscience, physics and astronomy which is where my connections are most unique on this backwards small planet.

Best of luck. We all need it.