Coming to terms with a radical possible new view of life

Months ago, a guy named Kafatos urged me to write a paper on “the time machine of consciousness.” I felt a duty to respond, because I had put a lot of energy before then in understanding the physics of time, the mathematics of neural networks and brain models that really work, and in coming to terms with the full depth of our first person experience of life. The paper I wrote was deeply shocking to the orthodox – but at the same time when they screamed, a request arrived out of the blue from Russia, and I sent a revised version, now in press, in English and in Russian. To the orthodox it may be shocking, but in my view it is a calm unification of thought, which is something this troubled world badly needs at this time. Lots on the meaning of life, of sanity, zhengqi and so on.

However.. life itself is not by nature static. There are new developments in the basic physics here, which suddenly are not quite so calming as they seemed at first.

What are these new developments? They are not really the strangest mathematical fantasies that many think of these days when they think of basic physics, fantasies which give a feeling of Fu Manchu narcissistic glory to  some of the authors because no one else can understand them, not even they themselves. No, this is the “humble’ world of empirically-based fundamental physics. This is the world I sang to my granddaughter about a couple of months ago: “one little, two little, three little photons…”

A few months ago, I worked out a new simple mathematical model of what really happens to one little photon as it passes through a very common kind of object – a polaroid polarizer. (Like some sunglasses.) To test the model, you need to do an experiment with three entangled photons, but that’s already being done. (I am waiting for permission to find out what happened… but in any case people need to do a lot more of that kind of experiment anyway, to develop some new technology.)  If you empathize a little with that little photon…. It has four choices at any moment: (1) to change its alignment to match the polarizer, and then get absorbed into heat and nothingness; (2) to realign itself exactly perpendicular to that alignment, which can be a wrenching and “expensive” change; (3) to stay as it is for one more instant, despite heavy pressure not to; (4) to “scream” that it doesn’t want to be in the situation in the first place, and retroactively make it less likely to happen at all. That fourth choice or term in the equation is the key to understanding what we now call quantum mechanical phenomena – what Kimble of CalTech has called “putting weirdness to work.” Reality is weird, and we have to accept that.

But how weird? I thought that the new three photon experiments would prove that the weirdness of the universe is far less than we had thought. Ultimately, we may be able to get back to the nice, clean, beautiful image of Einstein, where it’s all real, no magical “condensation of the wave function,” even just three dimensions of space and one of time (With a little wiggle room like what EDinstein talked about sometimes).

But.. between the first version of my paper and the second, I did have to add a new paragraph/section about a caveat. As I thought about that little photon… it reminded me a lot about what I was going through, as new polarizing forces affect life in the US government. (Those realities are more shocking to me than anything I say here today, but I am not posting on THEM!) But I don’t have that type of inner “scream” option… or do I? I start to wonder. The new section … is it the tip of an iceberg? But this morning I ask: am I avoiding reality not to face up to it}?

Our lives often seem to follow scripts or stories. I am amazed at times how powerful stories can be in shaping our lives, and our entire world. I real many science fiction stories, in part to stimulate my imagination and in part to avoid becoming too captive to any ONE story (as people do who do not read so many). Long ago, for example, I read the book of Genesis and the Ambder Chronicles of Zelazny – which were truly beautiful poetically, but which I never took even HALFWAY seriously. (By contrast, I have taken Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged and the Book of Revelations halfway seriously; each is an antidote to some degree of the excesses of the other, but I have taken some work by Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card more seriously.)

But now… I do begin to wonder.

The new physics is similar to Feynman’s in a way – where reality is in 3+1 dimensions, but everything that happens is based on an interplay between what I call “scenarios” and he calls “paths.”

But here is the zinger: we think of ourselves as realities, as part of the final scenario. Isn’t that the way it is, in an Einsteinian kind of universe? But what of that poor little possible photon? Can entire MIND states and life states also inhabit scenarios, where they FEEL as if they were the one reality (in a universe where there IS only one reality in the end across space-time)? Indeed they can. The math is pretty clear, once you start to really understand what it means. EVEN in Einstein’s mathematical vision of one objective reality… the emergent outcome for folks like us.. is that the phenomenon of mind in such a universe, with the full symmetries we know of now… is that we are very much like the people in Zelazny’s Chronicles, shadows in shadow scenarios. I am not yet at the point of seeing any reality in those parts of his stories which get to primal chaos and such (as in Genesis!)… but.. the idea that WE are parts of scenarios… takes some adjusting to.

So many meanings to the word “shadows,” not all the same…

But are we all shadows in the way Zelazny talks about?

Who knows? Right now I know it’s time to get back to bed, and then adapt to whatever this morning brings. I am not about to jump whole hog into another story, but it wil be tickling my mind as I do what I must, and I remember other stories.

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PS Speaking of Atlas Shrugged.. I received a great call yesterday from an old friend in Michigan, where we talked about a new engine... and about the time he report to John Von Ndeumann's daughter. He mentioned her book, "Martian's Daughter," which I ordered yesterday on Amazon to be sent to my older daughter, based on some things he said....

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Jan. 28, Wed, 5AM:

I have not fully absorbed this new possible viewpoint (possible? the math seems to say more)..
but it evokes many associations and memories.

First... it reminded me of the time at Lawrenceville, when I took advanced mathematics courses
at Princeton, when I seemed to understand math pretty well, but wasn't sure what to make of some "simple" nonlinear partial equations, the kind of things Einstein had studied. I wondered: "Do people really understand these things?" I didn't know the half of it until this past month! Embedded
in what seem to be such innocuous things... is a lot more than I had any appreciation for before...

It reminds me of my quest for reality in physics... how it began in the summer when I worked at the RAND Corporation just a few blocks from the beach, entertained at times by Ellsberg's circus bouncing up and down loudly in the corridors for anyone with eyes to see. I was thinking ahead to my personal future, which didn't seem to align with RAND quite as much as I had hoped.. RAND wasn't what I had hoped... I wanted to help with important larger things, but I also knew I had to be realistic about my own personal comparative advantage, in mathematics, even though I no longer thought of mathematics as a goal or religion in itself. I remembered Von Neumann's thought that three major areas where new math could make a big difference is in more unified understanding of three things -- mind, life and how the universe works. So I borrowed a book from the RAND library on quantum mechanics, to see what I could see, and maybe help prepare for me to pursue that path, in my forthcoming PhD program at Harvard. As I read that book, it seemed to \assume some very confused thinking, in need of some straightening out... and aty Harvard, more and more, restoring Einstein's vision of reality seemed to be correct, worthy and interesting... if extremely challenging.

So in a sense... this year... I finally FOUND that reality, that authentic, credible 3+1-dimensional reality that Einstein talked about. 'Yes there is an objective reality, but no, we are not part of it." OOPS!

All of a sudden, I find myself in Plato's cave... and we, from monkey brains to noospheres, are all just the shadows projected into the cave! (Again, please be careful with this word "shadow." Like "consciousness" and some other tricky words, it has multiple meanings, each worthy of analysis, but not to be confused with each other! )

It starts.. like Alice in wonderland.. chasing not after a rabbit, but after a photon... where does it go when it seems to do peculiar things and vanishing acts at times? And realizing: "Hey, I am not less than a photon. What it does, it could do too." Indeed I could. A typical earthy neurotic
could easily swell up with delusions of godhood, if he saw he or she could do a few of the odd things I have done on occasion. But then as I look at the whole picture, I see what it really means... yes, the manipulation of shadows is easier than the manipulation of reality would have been... because they are shadows.

It also reminds me of a quiet thought which has come at times to the back of my mind, more often this year than before... people have so MANY holy trinities.  (A high up in India was not amused when he mentioned the trinity of Vishnu, Brahma and Siva, and I told a story about the other holy trinity of mommy, daddy and baby.) I was thinking.. for me it is more like noosphere (which some call 'Gaia"), galaxy and... cosmos or universe. I knew that the optimization equations which seem like our best model of the universe logically imply "more intelligence than intelligent systems" in a way... only in a way.... but now I realize that gthis is more operational than I thought, that it is not intelloigence as we know it, but it does have the power to generate complex structures in a way even more powerful than what we see in things like noospheres. (Yes, earth has just one, but there is the galaxy out there, folks. Virtually all your spiritual experience, from high to low, is just one window into one little noosphere. For the most part, your "gods" or saints are just archetypes within one little noosphere.) And suddenly.. the greater world makes us the same kind of creatures the old Hellenes thought we were, buffeted not between literal gods or archetypes... but clusters of scenarios. Not our stories, but objective scenarios...

Whatever.

Time to go back to a relatively normal day, packing up... tying up loose ends... addressing a few scenarios..

Well, one more thought. Part of my concrete duty today relates to the work of an important famous guy named David Deutsch, from Oxford. A wonderfully creative guy.. but I didn't really believe we have evidence in physics of anything as complex as what he describes in his book The Fabric of Reality. Now... it seems there may be more complexity, similar in spirit, but more like a Jack in the box, all compressed into a tiny space, objectively.  Hmm. When do we start turning on the music?

various thoughts -- packing up, principles of economics threatening us all, old letters, ODE

Streams of thought as I pack up...

Friday the 13^th of next month is my last day at NSF. By then, I lose both my office (a major place for holding lots of books and files, with unique important information) and my access to a workable copy of Adobe Acrobat to clean and compress scanned files.

For many days past, and many to come, my top focus is the never-ending task of scanning, digitizing, mostly tossing out also refiling boxes and boxes of paper, due to retirement – losing both office and access to a working version of Adobe Acrobat.

But as I do this, huge volumes of thought still pass through my mind. So many things which did not end as hoped (whether “won” or “lost”), so many areas where the scanned record is maybe 10% of the real record and half of what I hope it will be when I am done \-- and utterly misleading. And lots of lessons learned.

Among these past threads are ideas I had which could have been the whole life’s career of a  normal successful academic, which in turn is much better then the majority who essentially had no new ideas at all.  By majority’s rules, I am penalized in many ways for being different, as if it would help the others to reduce my effective output! But when the many feel they are uncertain about survival itself in a very tough competition (and well meaning nutty ideologues strive to make that worse), it is not so surprising that they keep trying to change the rules to get int the way that way.

Whatever. Among the loose, misleading idea threads…

Back in 1964, when loosely supervised at UPenn, I put lots of effort into several things, one of them being an effort to solve some polynomial type ODE; in a general from, like Riccati, but also negative powers After transformation after transformation, it seemed to form a pattern. On some ways, like turning a Rubix cube. One simply could not “get out of the box” with certain classes of transformation. It seemed to me that I was getting a glimpse of a formal structure, like a transformation group but with modifiers making it more like an algebra than a simple group. Later, when I decided that I simply did not have time to nail this down myself, I submitted a “problem” to American Math Monthly to try to pass it in. They (like a reasonable percentage of the many people I wrote letters to when young) responded bonestly, but couldn’t make anything of what I sent. Now I know much less of the specifics I knew then (50 years ago!), but even so this feeble paragraph I am writing now conveys more of what I found than what I wrote when I knew more! And now I would know much better how to explore this territory, in part because I have learned the specific skills of creative science (and requirements of human audiences) much more than then. In part because my work on extended P representations (Both published and unpublished) gives some clues. But I also have even more of an issue in prioritizing time than then. So I write this, and plan to move back to the urgent packing.

If I could afford to, I would also write a lot on trust, and what my experience shows about that. Not enough time.

Another thread is with Milton Friedman, where there were several iterations. In cases where I got somewhere, it usually took multiple iterations anyway. It is enough to succeed in the end. But often I only continued enough to satisfy me, and did not continue with most threads. As is appropriate – focus demands that one continue a priority line, and a careerist would say I should have done more of that, not less. My values are different, but I still have to prioritize. That’s drinking from a firehose 101 – work hard to cope with more but always avoid instant drowning, hopefully via things Valliant would call… more positive defense mechanisms. And structuring.

With Friedman… I eventually explained clearly enough how imperfect competition is NOT just a matter of a finite x% loss in output and productivity. It is a loss in the rate of growth. Did I miss my chance to become the Joan Robinson of growth economics, as I had the insight and the math and enough communication ability if I chose THAT as my focus? I suppose. It is really all so obvious (to someone with a “sane” way of thinking), yet the misconceptions are all SO pervasive! Today I think of it with the aerospace industry serving government; then I thought more of the transition from dark ages to era of economic growth (e.g as Hanseatic League benefits from competition). Ojutput at t+1 is reduced RELATIVE to the base one sets at time t, due to Joan Robinson effects, and part of that reduction involves less growth in the base which would have put one in a different position and allowed one to go still further in the next time period. Accumulation of capital and of skills and of human base all suffer… and I see that happening now to a lethal degree in many area of the US economy and society now!

Dishonorable or unconstrained competition can also be problematic. Max Weber’s insights are analogous to LeCun’s convolutional networks – a clear and useful example of a more general principle. Is there hope that cultural change, tied to real spiritual energy in the noosphere, could save us from the doom it now seems to be leading us to? Maybe. Worth trying, to some degree, for many reasons on many levels.

By the way, compressing and digitizing important stuff at home is also a way to keep more of the various fields of science and society I have been involved in. So of course, lots of 

France’s 9/11: listening to the voices of the people

The voices of the people were a real zinger last night.

One voice: “This is a day which will live in infamy. It will live in infamy not only because they declared war, but because the Presidents crawled over to the radio, and announced they their plan to stay in bed, roll over, and then go play golf somewhere with rich buddies.”

Another “voice,” an image from a 1950’s B grade sitcom: A funny guy with an accent in the desert says,”Yes, boss, we really declared war. We took over the crusaders’ last main base in Nigeria, their only remaining source of oil other than the US itself, which may soon go out of business. We took over Tripoli. And now we pulled a Pearl Harbor on the very center of their civilization, and published a mein kampf about how we plan to take back that continent which is rightfully ours. But, no, they still won’t even get out of bed. What can we do? Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders and go ahead and clean it all up.”

In a variation, a reply to this image: The boss takes off his hood, smiles, and reveals a face something like Palpatine of Star Wars or Cheney or one of the Koch brothers and says: “Don’t worry. It is all set.. My time is coming soon.”

What to make of this?

First I should say that I view it as a real sacred duty for some of to listen hard to the voices of the people, even when we do not like all of what we hear. In the 1990’s, there was a time when many said “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Not exactly, but please don’t just throw away that thought..

When religious or antireligious activists try to pin down where I stand on the great cultural wars of our times, I usually reply (except in China) that I am a Quaker, or Quaker Universalist. These answers have many advantages, one of them being that they are true, even though they are far from being the whole truth.

Many religions formally believe in a million sacred things, which members pick and choose from as they will. Traditional Quakers, as in Friends General Conference (and the writings of Rufus Jones which I never read but which sound like the real culture), essentially believe in one common principle: the value of working the listen as well as one can, in weekly meeting, to “listen to the voice of God” – while also connecting as deeply as possible with other people, and seeking the light. That’s it. All else is what different people choose to build on that simple but challenging foundation.

I take that seriously, and do try to learn how to listen. I have also worked pretty hard to master the intersection of a lot of tough intellectual subjects, and, to be honest, did spectacularly well in some school stuff starting back around when I was 8 years old. But I suspect that sustained progress in those areas has depended a lot on my ability to “cheat” by being able to hear what a professor was really thinking, by being able to really listen to the views of people speaking in NSF panels, and even, with effort, to probe into the thoughts behind some of what I read. By nature, I started out like a bull in the China shop, with levels of testosterone and “yang” ‘way beyond the norm (very helpful from ages 8 to 14 or 15), but I was lucky to have a mother who said “Ferdinand, learn to smell the flowers,” and my intellect itself really understood the need to cultivate empirical data. It understood that effective small groups need to adopt a culture where everyone tries to listen to everyone, where there is a real dialogue.. and where everyone accepts the responsibility to listen, to reflect very seriously, and to communicate with a kind of deep honesty. (Sometimes NSF encourages that, but some myopic careerists  give priority to other agendas.)

And so.. There are levels and levels of learning how to listen, and it is natural for us to strive for the highest that we are capable of. Quaker universalists are a strand of Quakers who believe in reading and listening far and wide, tolearn as much as possible from the totality of our shared human experience. (I received a weird phone call from Macedonia the other day, from a guy high in Greek Orthodox, who had a nice metaphor about trying to be like a honeybee, buzzing from flower to flower. Nice metaphor, though the human version of buzzing is not exactly the same as listening. Real bees do listen to each other, however.)

As I read widely…. Many years ago, I read a lot of the writings of a Quaker named H. Spencer Lewis, who decided to work hard to develop a more systematic approach to teaching people how to listen. I can’t say more right now, because it’s time for me to stop typing and listen to my wife. Among the many interesting things he talked about (some of which I agree with more than others, and some of which I find more useful and stimulating than other parts).. was a specific idea of “cosmic consciousness”..

But it seems I must cut it off right now. Sorry. Best of luck. How does this connect to the new movie Ju[iter Rising? How could I know, since I haven’t seen it yet? Best of luck indeed.

Meaning of the destiny term Z of quantum physics in human life

Years ago, Albert Einstein made a typical human kind of error in trying to understand quantum mechanics. Einstein famously said “common sense is nothing but a collection of prejudices acquired before the age of (16).” But he himself fell victim to the same kind of thing. When his own mathematics showed us the symmetry of the universe in time and in space, and in forwards time versus backwards time… he did not assimilate the implications in his gut. He proposed an experiment, the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment (later refined into the “Bell’s Theorem” experiments), which would disagree with quantum mechanics, ONLY on the assumption that physical effects can only march forwards in time, never backwards. His common sense was proven wrong… but his mathematics still works, as I have shown (see www.werbos.com/quantum.htm).

But last year I made the same kind of mistake myself.  I too failed to fully appreciate how rich the phenomena can be which emerge in a universe with just three dimensions of space and one of time.  I even felt there seemed to be a big contradiction between my direct experience of life and what would be possible under that kind of theory of physics.

Now I know better. There is a certain term, Z, which appears BOTH in the Feynman path version of quantum mechanics and in my new stochastic path version. The math of these versions is similar on the surface, but they lead to different predictions (and different options for technology). Still, both have this term Z.  In “common sense” (a different kind of common sense, which I should perhaps call “inner subjective understanding), Z is a destiny term. Understanding Z, in your gut, is like understanding destiny and what it really means.

The new story about Z reminds me a lot of the story of another simple-looking mathematical function, J, which I learned about as an undergraduate at Harvard, in the 1960’s.  Feynman’s Z is known to lots of people now, just as J was well known in the world of optimization and optimal control back then. Engineers would say “Oh, J is just a minor technical term we use in solving inventory control problems. It’s basically just ‘cost to go.” But in trying to understand how intelligence works in the brain, I was the first to realize that J, or approximate J, is actually the mathematical basis of what we call hopes and fears, and “secondary reinforcement.” Hopes and fears are absolutely central to the human  mind. It’s a lot more than inventory control. (For more of that story, see the Handbook of Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, edited by Lewis and Liu, from IEEE/Wiley. Or just look at www.werbos.com/mind.htm.) Understanding hopes and fears and how they work is really essential to understanding any kind of mind or brain. Now – it turns out that Z is just as important, and more than I appreciated before this past month.

Is it possible to “change the past” in a really significant way? I basically assumed it could not be possible, in a 3+1-D universe. Like Einstein… I misunderstood my own math. I thought that the science fiction novel Chronoliths gave a good picture of what that math tells us. I thought that that my 3+1-D math fit what Connie Willis called “the Oxford standard model of time travel” in her two-volume novel Blackout/AllClear. But now I know better, simply because I worked out an example. Of course, I am only just BEGINNING to know better, and I don’t claim to have the new deal totally mastered! Lots more to learn better!

In a way… I owe thanks to Bernard Widrow, Marlan Scully and Chris Altman for jogging me in ways that helped me understand better. (If you google on either of the first two names, you will see I have reasons to be very grateful for the gentle guidance I received from them.)

Widrow and Scully both gently suggested a general approach to coming down to earth from the worlds of mathematical abstraction which were the main foundations of my intellectual life. Scully’s encouragement got me to work out the concrete examples of a new formulation of physics which I have written this past year (as well as publish more details of a new type of P formalism beyond the scope of this simple blog post).  Following that track, I forced myself to do the mundane job of  working out the continuous time equations for what happens to a photon going through a polaroid type polarizer – a rather mundane thing, but someone had to do it, and I was unable to get anyone else to do it (though I tried).  The equations which I came up with are explained in some detail in a paper posted at vixra.org, and in a more complete paper forthcoming in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, March 2015.

As I worked out those equations… I could not help empathizing a bit with that poor little photon going through a polarizer. After all, Washington D.C. is also a very polarizing environment. That’s not a joke. It’s very serious.

To make it work, I had to be very clear that the photon essentially had three possible actions it could take, aside from doing nothing, at every instant of its life in that polarizer. It could spin itself around to perfectly match the spin that the polarizer wanted of it. Or it could go 90 degrees against the prevailing direction, and get totally eaten up. Or it could “scream” that “I don’t want to be in this situation”, and change the destiny term Z such that this whole scenario would be much less likely to arise in the first place. In a sense, it could change the past (with some probability) to prevent the situation altogether.

I did not take this serious at the time, but it seemed like a wonderful joke. New forces have appeared in the executive branch of the US government this past year, which are very much like that polarizer. What to do, when facing a choice between totally aligning with the spin of the new order, or being eaten altogether?  Certainly the option of screaming inside myself  was part of the game. (But actually one must be very careful about doing that, “even just” within one’s own mind.)

But now, as I reflect on other situations… I realize… why should human minds, in their fullest capability, be less capable than photons?  Even if we give up “multiverse” theories of physics, which assume that parallel time tracks really do exist… the mathematics of multiple scenarios competing for probability (either in my stochastic path physics or in the more classical Feynman path physics) can have a similar effect, to minds embedded in such a universe. The weird thing is that this is true even if the stochastic path effects result from “deterministic” models like the mathematics of Einstein! If you ever feel a bit nervous looking at Einstein-type nonlinear field equations, and you worry that you might be missing something… please remember that even Einstein himself did not fully understand all the implications of equations which he himself formulated!

And now… as I have other things to do this New Year’s day, let me just repost an email I sent a day or two ago to Yeshua Ben David:

Good morning, Yeshua!

Today, in the time when I still have energy to think out of the box, my priority is to rewrite that cosmology paper on consciousness and the physics of time, to try to improve the impact somewhat. But before I do... it is interesting to think a bit more about the larger picture. 

I am very grateful for a tolerant ear, of someone who will be willing to put up with someone who does not see reality in the same way as many others.

Centuries ago, if a person rejected every part of life that he could not yet understand in a fully mathematical way, he would not be listened to much. he would be lucky to survive at all. Yet, as our mathematical knowledge has grown... a good thing... there has been a bad side effect of people rejecting and forcibly ignoring all else. I often think about George Valliant's discussion of the various types of defense mec hanisms which pervade our culture. I see such bad tendencies in myself too... but, being aware of them, I at least try to keep them under control while so many others fall gleefully into things which may destroy them... and the rest of us as well.

But... beyond what I understand mathematically... well, there is also a zone of things I can understand but not discuss.   

Sometimes I feel so frustrated with the DOZENS of levels of compartmentalization which seem necessary in today's world here -- some due to differences in disciplines, some cultures, some matters of safety.

Yet... many years ago, I was an active member of the Rosicrucian order, and read through a lot of their old stuff, which includes stuff going back millennia. I remember one viewpoint... that the lowest level stuff is open, and ALSO the highest stuff, because it gives positive benefit for those who can truly understand it and not so much harm to those who don't. "The middle stuff is the problem," they said.

Our mathematical understanding of intelligent systems in general -- brains and minds and what we could build -- is one of the most important threads for the destiny of the human species. Yet, in the larger space, I do not really know where we are going with that thread.

Back in 1991 (I think, after IJCNN Seattle), I listened to advice from Boeing, and saw Terminator II. I am glad I did, even though I did not enjoy the movie. I have a post on that on my obscure personal blog. Since then, I have been fully aware of a need to walk a tightrope... to try to develop the kind of mathematical understanding which would be crucial to full human potential and spiritual existence, while avoiding the dangers of losing the human species. Thus I put major effort into promoting the COPN topic at NSF, focused on developing that understanding. (see www.nsf.gov.)

When the attack of 7/14/14 hit me, in this place... well... I have not yet fully absorbed all the many-level implications of that huge shock. I certainly do think of it as a multi-level situation, where it would be misleading to think only of one level.

On a deep level... the attack did occur just hours after my return to NSF from WCCI, and a major implication will be to terminate not only intelligent systems technology but also central elements of hope to understand the brain better.  (Of course, many will still wave the flag of these things, as well as the flags of openness and transparency and accountability and the future of humans in space and so on... but accomplishing things in reality requires a wee bit more than PR.) I have wondered very intensely: should I take this as a signal that I was walking a bit too close to one side of the tightrope, risking negative misuse of knowledge? Several lines of evidence supported that. Though I have also wondered: why then, would reality tolerate the intense efforts, just as dangerous, to develop "Star Wars clone army" brain helmets?

In the meantime... I understand time a little better this week than I did two weeks ago. Perhaps I ought to put in a paragraph or two in the revised paper to give some hint of that better understanding.

At www.werbos.com/quantum.htm, I give the link to the directory where the slides and audio of my Australia talk are located. But I also have some level of draft of my work on CMRFp, the new continuous time model of polaroid type polarizers, which is also posted at vixra and in press at IJBC. In the past two weeks, I have had a chance to digest more fully the meaning of the new math.

In the past, I have wondered at times: is it possible to change the past or not? Of course, we have not seen anything at all like that in the physics lab. Following the constraints explained by Thomas Kuhn, for third person science, we basically cannot even discuss that subject  in normal scientific venues.

Yet on a first person level... I have a list of about eight personal experiences which seem to say that maybe we can. That is one of the main reasons why I report the feeling (in my time/consciousness paper) that there is only a 10% chance that the cosmos is only 3+1-D.  

Yet now, for the past two weeks... I now realize that the emergent phenomena possible is a large, complex 3+1-D space are much richer than I had assumed... even though I was aware of more richness than most people already. I am reminded of the time when I was very young, when I saw the theorem that the even numbers are a subset of all integers... AND VICE-VERSA... by the curious was that holomorphism can work with infinite systems. 

In "reality", in a 3+1-D universe, only one scenario becomes real... yet the set of scenarios... well, all the scenarios are "partially real" in the sense that they interact, as per the "destiny term" Z. For intelligence embedded within that kind of universe, it can OPERATIONALLY be like a type of many-worlds situation.

I was more right than I realized at first, in empathizing with that little photon with the power to just dial down the entire scenario. Z is "just a scalar" -- but so is J in dynamic programming. Scalar functions can contain a lot of information, though I suppose I still have a lot to learn about that. Just as DHP goes 'way beyond HDP and TD and Q, perhaps a gradient form of Z could be of use in better understanding destiny effects and interfacing with intelligence. 

But I digress.

I stopped to get a decaf coffee... and received an email from IEEE about some kind of message from Elon Musk. Back to Terminators...

When I saw Terminator II,. it was a high-impact experience for me, because so many of the details exactly matched what I was actually starting up at that time. Even the evil nanorobot looked like an exact morph between me and the guy from Cyberdyne I was funding to develop a new robot arm . I tried to calm myself down... and recalled that the movie must have been filmed before all these new things had happened... and then, the final scary thing for me was to see the final emphasis, that the information was being sent back through time in order to help people prepare. (later, when I met Luda, she reminded me at times of Sara... but that was later.) I knew enough about the physics of time to take that a bit more seriously than most people would.

 At some level, my sense for several years was that it was a near thing, in actuality, and that we actually narrowly avoided something which "actually happened" at some level, like a living scenario.

This past year... I began to downplay that idea... since I have learned some crucial tricks which I didn't know back then, important to really fully doing the scariest stuff. (Yet even what I knew then could be very scary even now in the wrong places and the wrong hands).  

=======

And then, last Saturday, the final event for us in a long family Christmas sequence (unless we will get a visit from others in College Park).

My eldest son drove me and Chris to a 3D IMAX showing of the Hobbit, the final episode. Mostly just relaxing fun, typical stuff... though I could draw a crude analogy to the dwarf place under the mountain and the place where I am sitting now, and my hope to get out before the various armies start killing each other. But ...before that... multiple 3D IMAX trailers for things to come.

One -- a major new remake of the Terminator II kind of story. This time, the evil robot is Asian. This reminds me... the events of 7/14/14 will thoroughly expunge the relevant technology in the US, but China is moving ahead faster than ever, now WITHOUT whatever steering influence I might have had, and Xi Jinping is clearly having some difficulties in coping with the tightropes he needs to walk.  It is more than a balancing act really, as there is also a need for synergy between things being balanced; a fuzzy middle is not the highest form of harmony. They have not been able to think out of the box more effectively in learning lessons form Hong Kong (which SHOULD be less painful for them than 7./14/14 was for me... but it takes special discipline to be truly constructive in the face of such pains.)

OK, that was a zinger.

But...

well... there are levels and levels in the noosphere, even of this narcissistic silly little blue marble. And thoughts from other levels, however compartmentalized, do tend to have reflections at times, to leak out. I THINK I saw a trailer... about a new movie from The Matrix guy... about discussions beyond this marble of "the harvest." Interesting. I wonder.

But now...   back to the task of the morning.

Best regards,

      Paul

P.S. The afternoon will be more technical things... from computers to packing up to nanofabrication. This email is my new "NSF alter ego," though maybe my access to it at NSF will be compromised if I install Thunderbird as my client for it at home; NSF permissions will not let me use Thunderbird here. So many levels of compartmentalization! 

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How life and the brain are like a backpack

From personal stuff to some points about how the brain works in a very technical way….

This past week  was exciting in many ways.  Last Saturday (December 13) we flew to  Chile. We got back yesterday (Sunday December 21).  But at one level – my life was also about constantly adjusting and using what I had in my backpack. Despite a whole lot of complexity, sleeping in three different places and adapting to climates from  hot and dry to freezing cold and wet, and from formal to rough wilderness, I was able to juggle it perfectly – until the final stage, when I packed my housekey in a pouch in a suitcase (not in the backpack), and we had an incredible mess yesterday when the suitcases did not arrive. We are still waiting for them, from the lost luggage department of American Airlines. An incredible mess.

It certainly was a mistake not to put the pouch in the backpack, so why didn’t I? Aside from excess trust in American Airlines (and the baggage handlers who ripped off the colorful cloth we used to identify my garment bag) – I was overreacting to the mess of having too much in the backpack many times this week, making it very hard to find things fast enough for it to be useful to have them. Some things just fell to the bottom, so that I really didn’t have them when I needed them anyway. In the final packing stage, I was happy to put so many things into my two small suitcases, and to make my backpack lighter and more manageable.  But that little pouch with the housekey in it would not have interfered; it would probably sink to the bottom, and be hard to find – but in an emergency (like what happened!) we could take the time to find it anyway.

So – life is like a backpack, and I think it’s useful to make some time to think about that. Some people and some religions would want to go to extremes – pack everything possible into it, or keep it totally empty, but the extremes simply are not the right way. (Well, OK, the backpack is empty right now, sitting next to a small vacuum cleaner so that I can remember to clean it out. But that’s only for part of the time.) Life, for us, is an exercise of our mind and our intelligence – and that always means coping with complicated choices.  When we push too hard towards either  extreme – packing in to much or not packing in key things we need – it doesn’t work out as well, for WHATEVER values we are pursuing. At one time, I erred by packing too much, and at the last time, too little – but it wasn’t so bad, even at that one final time…

Always and forever a balancing act..

But I promised some technical brain science here too.

On Monday in Chile, I gave another talk on how to build and understand four levels of brain or consciousness – all the way from a low level, which I call “vector intelligence,” up to level four, the mouse, which science might build in about a hundred years if it continues on the path it is on.  In 1990, I thought that my new mathematics of “vector intelligence” could explain how human brains work; I gave lots of details in my chapters in the book Handbook of Intelligent Control. I was in fact the first to develop a class of true intelligent system, able to learn the best possible strategy of action and prediction of life “in any environment.” But in the next few years, I realized that more powerful intelligent systems could be built, by exploiting additional mathematical principles. The next step up was a level I call “spatial intelligence,” brains which can handle much more complicated streams of in input data. Vector intelligence can EVENTUALLY get to the right predictions and behavior , but when life gets complicated, it gets much much slower. I developed new neural network designs which possess spatial intelligence in a very general way, much more general than what people have reinvented this year under the name of “deep learning.”  But then I also understood better ways of organizing experience through time, as we look ahead seconds or years into the future; I developed and published new mathematics to handle that case, which I think of now as “reptile level” intelligence. Only in 2009, when I published a paper in the journal Neural networks, did I understand how to go to the next stage, the mouse level, by adding a certain kind of creativity system. (I knew it was needed, but only then did I see the basics of how to do it.)

So where does the backpack come into it?

The systems with spatial intelligence only are always “living in the present.” In a way, they are like an empty backpack. Their feelings of what they like and what scares them ARE based on their experience of what might come next… but they do not really visualize what might happen more than a split-second ahead. But at the reptile level, they look ahead. Looking ahead requires some awkward decisions about HOW FAR to look ahead.

According to my model, we creatures organize time into things I call “decision blocks,” for which I have published the new mathematics. But we only get to have a limited list of possible decision blocks. I think of decision blocks as “verbs,” which may be passive or active. The active ones are like what people in robotics call “skills” – but they do not have the full mathematics.

So how many verbs do we learn in a lifetime? Not so many. Maybe thousands in our whole lifetime, even though our brains have something like 100 billion neurons. It’s really very awkward, having the ability to learn only a few thousand verbs. It is very much like a backpack.  There is a book on motor control by Vernon Brooks (not the MIT Brooks) on motor control, which gives a good feeling for what’s it’s like in the transition period when people learn a new verb.

Folks like Sutton have also talked about systems which learn “options,” which can be seen as a kind of verb – but not real verbs, since they don’t have nouns and adverbs to go with them; to add the nouns and adverbs the right way requires more complete mathematics and approximation methods. Maybe you could reinvent that mathematics if I say enough about it – but it was already published, and cited in the Neural Networks paper of 2009.

Meanwhile – in 2012, my newer paper in Neural Networks goes on to discuss the more advanced progression from mouse brains to monkey brains to humans to sane humans.  And a couple of my blog postings here go on to discuss the two next fundamental features beyond that – quantum intelligence and a specific type of multimodular learning system.

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

Many people would think that MEMORY is the aspect of brain like a backpack. Yes,

awkward decisions must be made there too, even at the humble level of vector intelligence  --

but for many purposes, the problem with memory is usually more a problem how to FIND what we want. Pribram talks about "holographic memory," where we seem to lose things only because they are buried under other memories which we find more easily. (Well, OK, that was a major issue with the backpack too.) In Neural Networks 2012, I talked about the importance of ACTIVE memory... like deciding actively to remember where we left the car in the parking lot, or like filing important emails in special folders. (Just this past week, I decided NOT to buy a chromebook, because of how important active organization is to my life, awkward or not.)

To a student: how YOU could give us faster than light travel

A graduate student in Latin America recently sent me an email saying that what he REALLY
wants to work on is helping the human species to SOMEDAY get to faster than light (FTL) travel,
as soon as possible, whatever it might take to make it real.
His question reminds me of a time long ago, when I told one of my kids: "You are excited by Star Trek, and by heroes like Captain Kirk and Captain Picard.  Those were nice guys, but they were not the most important heroes of that story. The real hero is the guy or girl who GIVES us the starship in the first place; without that, none of those captains would have anything to drive, and humans would never be part of the larger galaxy at all (unless we just get run over).
 
"And in truth... YOU have the opportunity to become that hero. What it really will take is a new understanding of basic physics, the understanding which has to come before the engineering. No guarantee it can work -- there are never guarantees for this kind of thing. But in truth, I have spent most of my life doing the most unpleasant and hardest starting part of the job, developing a starting point.  I would be very happy to turn it all over, for the next, more rewarding part of this great probe into the unknown..."

So what I wrote this starting graduate student was:

=========

Thank you, Alan!

I am glad that you have decided not to forget really important questions, and you are right to ask me.

Most people who get past the PHD now tend to forget the important larger questions -- which creates an opportunity for those few who do.
But it is still extremely difficult.

I remember a time in graduate school when someone said: "Ah, so you are interested in learning how the universe really works. You need to understand that this pursuit is now like art.
You need to find a day job, which is different from what you really want to do, but which helps as much as possible in letting you do the important work on your own time. And you must be very patient."

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

Transportation faster than light (FTL) will not be easy, and of course we do not yet know whether it is possible.  The effort to achieve it is a stochastic game.
(When I taught engineering optimization in a video course to Memphis a year or two ago, we spent about two weeks on the approach of Howard Raiffa, to understand in qualitative terms what stochastic optimization is really about.)
It will require connected efforts of people in many areas; no one person can do it all. Each person would have to decide which part of the puzzle they think they could help with.

The most obvious piece is that we need a  better understanding of gravity, of bending space. Which model of gravity is really true, general relativity (GR) or the theory of Moffat or something else?
Moffat, at the Perimeter Institute, has an interesting theory (well-defined PDE) which tries to predict HOW the speed of light actually varies. I think it is far more mature than Dirac?s ideas in that area.
(Lately, I begin to see ways that variable Planck?s constant might be understandable, but not speed of light, in my own modeling efforts.) There are HUGE anomalies when people try to predict the movement of galaxies using GR;
with GR, it only works when we assume a lot of unknown dark matter and dark energy, but Moffat?s theory predicts what we observe without such epicycles. But there are other theories of gravity. Many gravity researchers are really honest about looking for alternative theories, and using experiments to learn which one is true. That is a vital field, but it is not engineering. I do not know whether the Perimeter Institute would accept PhD students coming from an engineering background.

Once a good theory is developed, there are still many issues in how to use it to design FTL communications and travel.  Engineering design methods become important there. In fact: it is almost an engineering task to
study the question: can we develop designs for Moffat?s theory which would achieve FTL, like the Alcubierre solutions for GR, but without a need for exotic matter? Is it possible? I do not know whether anyone has ever studied that issue. Optimal design may indeed be very important in addressing that question ? or maybe not. I should not pretend to know.

For myself, I have put much more effort into trying to improve our understanding of the electronic, photonics and nuclear sectors, beyond the limited power of today?s standard model of physics.
That is abject heresy, but perhaps I am beginning to make some progress on the cultural barriers to this area:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-build-quantum-brain-more.html

I tend to believe that we will need more understanding of nuclear force, before we can actually have enough local focused energy to actually do FTL.
But I also worry that experiments in that area might accidentally blow up the entire earth. (There are curious hints of planets elsewhere in the galaxy which
blew up for reasons we do not begin to understand.) Thus I hope that experiments in space can be started as soon as possible, for things which might be dangerous.

Juan Robalino of Ecuador/Austria has also been working to juggle these worlds, and may be active long after I am not. Actually, I retire on February 15, and probably many areas of science and technology I have started will
be cut off at that time (or, really, even before that).

Best of luck,

    Paul

review of "Map of Heaven"

At Costco last week, I ran across the new bestseller "A Map of Heaven." Later, for various reasons, I decided to go ahead and buy the kindle edition, which I read on my Kindler paperwhite (A great product for me). Here is my review for Amazon, and then some further comment:

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

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

This review is from: The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife (Kindle Edition)

This book could be very useful to some people in breaking free of restrictive illusions about life, but it really needs a bit of balancing as well.
It reminds me of what I tell some friends: "After all my work to understand many things, I feel as if I were a hundred miles up suspended on a huge ladder. When I look down, I feel as if I know and see so much co mpared to all the craziness and small scale confusion down there. as I look up, I still feel like a worm compared to what I don't know and the vastness of what is out there." This book, too, is somewhere in the middle, though it has its uses and the topic is very important.
If you are one of the many people who would be inspired by the book (legitimately), I would urge you not to stop there.The book has interesting references, but I would urge you to also read (in order) Connie Willis's book Passages, Steiger's In My Soul I am Free, Jane Roberts' trilogy of oversoul seven, and -- if you can find it -- Joel Whitton's last book. Above all, it's important to keep a sense of balance and not underestimate your uncertainty as you grope with these important issues. More can be said about the important topic of reconciling science and mysticism ( I have a little introduction on that myself up at the open online journal Rose-Croix), but that gets to be beyond the scope of a review. All of us have a lot more to learn here.

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

In other words -- the book is half true in a very important way, and I might even follow up on a few of the things it says, but it is also half false in a very important way. 

The  book reminds me of the movie "What Dreams May Come"  which I was glad to see years ago. I even bought the video for my mother who is about 90 now. But it was a shock when Robin Williams, who played the lead in that movie, committed suicide. That's one of the things I think of when I say people need balance. (Hell, after Luda rightly got me to read Clancy's book Threat Vector, I very deliberately bought and reread Olaf Stapleton's First and Last Men, because I could tell I needed more balance; it was about $1 on kindle.)

==========

In my review, I didn't mention that quantum physics should be changing a whole lot this year from what it was last year. This book, like many others (Pribram and Neville?) tries to use quantum mechanics to try to reconcile the world of science and the world of our personal experience -- but it relies on semi-popularized versions of various strands of quantum mechanics from last year. My previous post gives a much more up to date account, which is quite different. It talks about consciousness and quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of someone who would build a conscious system. In a way, the issue is one of mathematics, and mathematics remains a valid language no matter what spiritual plane you could ascend to.  "Even in heaven, 1+1=2 in the realm of integers."

I have a more recent paper which addresses the relation between real, emerging quantum mechanics and the experience of spirit or soul in a much more definite and fine-grained way than this book could (given that the author is not aware of the new quantum mechanics), requested by Menas Kafatos collaborating with Deepak Chopra -- but for now I must wait; you don't want to hear all the details of where it sits. 

A key element of reconciling personal mystical or paranormal experience with hard core physics is a concept which serves as a bridge between those two worlds: the idea of a "noosphere," a kind of shared collective mind which we are part of. This is a very old concept (which raises its credibility in my view), but my new paper strengthens that bridge. The brain itself has a certain level of consciousness, but the noosphere has a higher level, fully incorporating all the principles in my previous post and some more which I left out because humans are not really ready for them yet at a scientific level of discourse.

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

And so, I would claim that all this "travel in heaven" or "astral travel" that people have talked about for millennia is really just a kind of journey of the mind in the Mind, processed allegorically through constructs created by Mind.

If you have read vedas and upanishads and yoga  enough to have a map of THEM in your mind, you will immediately notice how familiar this view is.

Many groups talk about the ascent from lower levels of consciousness to higher levels. It is possible to reconcile and make sense of this diversity of views.

In a way -- the progression from "OOBE in this world" to etheric to astral to mental to cosmic is a progression from a part of the outer senses of the noosphere to more intermediate and abstract things (coded by constructed metaphor, just as brains use the hippocampus to encode stuff), moving on up to more direct contact with Mind as such. This book talks about that progression, from the author's personal experience -- but it is only a fuzzy introduction to the progression.

From late fall 1972 to about Christmas 1978, I experimented VERY intensely with my own personal experience, to try to get direct primary personal data on what goes on at the "spiritual" level. 

(Based on that experience, BEFORE I had the theory background I do now, I wrote a 100 page very simple manuscript which I showed some Rosicrucians. My understand is 'way past that now, but it gives a nice very comprehensible explanation  for experience, practical not theoretical, giving some of the real history of how I got where I am today. I scanned it into my computer a few weeks ago, and may eventually post it somewhere.) The period started when a suitemate of mine showed me a simple paperback book, called something like "How to Help Yourself with ESP," which I would have laughed at and ignored two years before. But then, in 1972, I wanted more data; I did not even ask whether I BELIEVED the book. I just tried the experiments it suggested, so that I could get data to find out for myself. When two of the experiments worked much better than I had really expected... that opened a door, and I explored many things. But in Christmas 1978, I started work for the US government, and had to change my schedule. I already had a lot of data to digest anyway. 

And... there are plenty of things which kept happening even when I did not have time for the specific kind of personal experimentation I had time for then. In a way, I mostly gave up the astral but developed more on what they call the cosmic consciousness level. That's serious.

Some people, when they first reach that level, get blown away with euphoria.

(That reminds me of another book I could have recommended, Voyage to Arcturus by Lindsay,

where he talks about a next-to-final stage where people get blissed out and need to move on.) Maybe some people feel that way about their first day away from home at college.  If they visit only one day, they can stay vague and blissed out forever. I guess it's good for them that they go through that stage (though my path was always a bit more balanced and steep).  It's also very good that they properly value their new life... and (as above so below) get down to work. Challenges never end for us here on earth.

But stages of life certainly do vary. On February 15 this coming year -- three months from now --- I am scheduled for the final break from the National Science Foundation (NSF).  THAT'S a complex and important story, but not for this morning. Maybe I'll start back more experiments then. The one resolution I have converged on is that I will go to Quaker meeting almost every Sunday -- NOT as part of an effort to "get into heaven" which sounds silly to me) but as a natural part of experimentation and growth, the most reliable vehicle I know of, robust with respect to the other fluctuations and uncertainties I know of. But that will account for only a few hours every week. There will be plenty of other stuff, which I will adapt from day to day in a way I could not before 2/15/15.

I am glad that one of the central people in the local Meeting is a long time mental health practitioner. From one quick, oversimplified viewpoint -- the most important spiritual task before us right now is to try to assist our noosphere to get into a state of greater "sanity," a concept which we can now understand much better than we could in earlier decades when we understood less about mind and intelligence in general. (My 2012 paper in the journal Neural Networks talks a lot about sanity or zhengqi for the individual human, but "as above, so below.")   

In fact -- in past years, many people have asked "Is God crazy?" The God of Luria's cabbalistic mysticism... is basically a schizophrenic. It is not sane just to run away and hide from the scary nature of that question.

Especially when someone might have a plausible answer.

When people ask "Is God (really, just our local noosphere) crazy?" --  I always think back to an event on our breakfast porch in College Park years ago, when I shared a house with the McGrath family and with Wedge Greene. We had a fun evening playing with the Losscher sp?) color card psychology test. The test said: "Do not use on children under 18."  But we did anyway, just for fun; we all did the test. When Katie (then quite young) took the test, it said something like:

"You feel so threatened by some younger and up and coming that you have really deep mental problems which need immediate treatment -- unless you are under 18, in which case it's just part of the normal development process." So, in a way, Gaia is like what Katie was. However, earth, unlike Katie at the time, really has the means of its own destruction at hand, already moving, and I see no guarantee that we will survive -- bodies OR souls. I have a lot more thoughts about where we are headed, and the difficult challenges we really need to face up to -- but we are NOT called to just assume that all will be well (or that we are doomed).

===========

I am tempted to go on a bit more and mention and encounter with a real big dragon a few weeks ago 

in "the astral plane" -- the first one like that in my life, despite decades of awareness of many metaphorical dragons of many types. But I suppose it would have to be too long, especially given the complex connections to politics in the US today. (And the US itself is of course not an isolated system.) Maybe later. Best of luck.

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

Maybe I should be a bit more precise here, for those who seek the whole truth or prefer precision.

The first question may be: "Does heaven exist or not?" Yes or no?

Well, it doesn't have to be yes or no. Very often we humans create binary choices, in cases where the truth is something else altogether.

Could we say... that the "heaven" which Alexander has indeed experienced, and is indeed important, is as real and as important as an internet chatroom? Even more real, insofar as it engages more of our senses and feelings and has more powerful supporting hardware and apps?

In my view, the true map of this heaven is like unto a map of the contents of the internet... which is not the same as a map of the physical internet and underlying algorithms and architectures which support it.  Many Hindus would say that this heaven is totally an illusion, a construct of the mind. Some go further and say that the reality we call physical and material is itself just a hard part of the same coral reef of illusion. But I do not go that far.  Actually, I do not claim to know the answers to all the questions which arise at this level -- but it seems clear to me that internet chat rooms and
"heaven" as Alexander has experienced it are useful, respectable constructs created by our minds.
How could one possibly see a movie like What Dreams May Come (which is very close to what Alexander depicts) without understanding that one is looking at constructs of the mind in that place?

At a deeper level than the map of content in this internet of the mind... is the map of how it works,
of what it interfaces with, and of the dynamics which actually govern and change the content.

This is where the "noosphere" concept comes into it.  The noosphere is not just a very big mammal brain or human brain. It has at least two additional capabilities hardwired into how it works. One is a capability to send information forwards or backwards in time -- as in my other recent post on what can be done with quantum computing.  Another is what I call "multimodular architecture,' which is vey different from what computer scientists usually think about when they string a lot of fixed modules together. In essence, the noosphere is made up of lots and lots of "individual souls" or primary modules, along with matrix and miscellaneous types of support neurons.  The mathematical principle which underlies multimodular design is SYMMETRY.

Symmetry is important even in the design of less intelligent and less conscious systems, like mouse brains and even fish brains. Even fish brains have an ability to create mages of what the fish sees, images which somehow map from what the fish sees to an image of what is there. There is a surface in those brains, which contain "maps" representing an image.  Symmetry is crucial, because explains why and how these "maps" can actually represent DIFFERENT parts of what the fish sees. There is an old paper by Olshausen  (in Arbib's first compendium)  which gives  a beautiful simple mathematical sketch of that limited kind of symmetry.  They key idea here is this: the neurons in that part of the surface can handle images taken form DIFFERENT parts of what the fish sees; they can learn universal relations, applicable to all the different parts of what the fish sees.

The noosphere exploits the same principle, at a higher level. It includes a mechanism to map between what is seen by one individual soul and what is seen by another.  This is hugely important to understanding the "spiritual experience" of our lives.

Even human brains do include a very primitive version of this same noosphere symmetry mechanism, which helps us in understanding and strengthening the spiritual side of our nature. We have the most advanced form of "mirror neurons" to be found in organisms on earth. These neurons give us a capability for empathy, an ability to see or even imagine the direct experience of other people,
and to encode it into our memory as if it were our own experience. (Of course, in those memories, we can encode which subject is having the experience -- "I" or someone else.) When society encourages the exercise of empathy,  it raises the level of intelligence or consciousness of the society, and also assists in the evolution of the soul, all else equal. (Of course, if society does this by discouraging independent thinking, it may end up making things worse.)

But the noosphere system is much more powerful than the mirror neurons built into human brains.

For me, even after 1978, half or more of my spontaneous "astral type" experience has involved what Roscrucians call "assumption." Basically, I get to experience life directly from the viewpoint of another person, usually because that person calls out inside himself or herself for someone like me to come in and help out somehow. ( I do remember the old books Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick, and Players at the Game of People by Blish. Both books deviate in some major way from the reality, but they help a bit.) Sometimes I just observe. Sometimes I observe and comment to the person. Sometimes the person even asks me to come in further and actually speak or do something -- and sometimes they ask for more, while other times they recoil and I get out of there very quickly.

This relates to the old concept of "avatar" in India. It reminds me of the scene in Jane Robert's trilogy where there is character in a mental institution who says he is Jesus Christ. The odd thing, in her novel, is that he is and he isn't, both at the same time. He fills himself deeply enough with that "spirit" (soul or archetype?) that he can do amazing things with healing and positive feelings, real things, but he is not really the same person.

It is actually possible to stack these relations.  The most I have seen is A visiting B who visits C who visits D.

This is not just theory for me, by any means. I have had enough veridical stuff  to leave no doubt in my own mind.

But at the end of the day -- the earth and its noosphere is just a very, very tiny and mature part of a large galaxy, within a much larger universe, which may or may not be part of something even larger still.  We need to avoid delusions of grandeur -- delusions which have been the downfall of many many otherwise advanced minds. The earth itself presents enough  challenges to us.

Many followers of spiritual or mystical paths focus all their energy on trying to improve their personal soul. That is an extremely important activity, in my view.  Our ability to survive physically as a species on earth depends a lot on our mobilizing a higher level of sanity and consciousness than what I see right now in the dangerous politics of earth, and the spiritual side is essential to our hope of doing that. Yet it is also important to remember that "we are all one," that the soul of the earth as a whole  needs to rise. In fact -- it is meaningless in a way to say that an individual soul has attained a higher level, just as it is meaningless to say that an individual neuron in a brain has reached a higher level ITSELF; it is meaningful only in the context of the larger mind or brain of which it is a part. Governments have often abused this idea, by confusing our connections to the noosphere with connections to the commissars they appoint to foster the personal interests of a few people; such people are not devils, but they are a real threat to our survival and to their own survival as well.

I have mentioned a lot of worthwhile authors here -- but not yet Orson Scott Card. Card clearly has extremely deep and important spiritual experience, and I have even learned a few fundamental (veridical) things from some of his books -- yet some of his writings on politics worry me to the extreme. The higher we rise on some levels, the more essential it becomes not to accidentally "step on a big nail."

Best of luck,

    Paul