just the watch: what if Le Pen is elected this Sunday?

No, this is not science. Just "The Watch," casual impressions as I watch the world, as friends like Quakers and Yeshua urged me to do months ago. (Previous post.)

Is it science fiction? I certainly do not predict that LePen will win. That would be a bit crazy, when France 24 reports polls saying it is 60-40 Macron, that Obama has endorsed Macron, and when all Europe has memories of fascism which they associate her with emotionally. But this year, we have learned that crazy things might happen, and that it pays to be prepared for unexpected contingencies.

In fact, I watch France24 more and more lately. Just the other day, when Trump came on CNN to gloat about the House cation on health care -- Watch or no Watch, my stomach has limited ability to cope with what my brain and my radar would report; change channels; the debate between LePen and Macron was far more within my ability to handle, and more justifiable even to The Watch, even to the US manifestation of The Watch. But even so, it was a bit hard to handle, as they screamed at each other in a more disorderly and focused fashion than any of the US debates this year (yes, that is humanly possible!), and as I tried to sort out words from two male translators having troubles with the flow and speaking at the same time. (Should I look for a better version on U-Tube today? I would if I lived in France.)

France24 reported that other EU nations (including UK for now) expressed envy of their uninhibited deep dialogue, but that most people polled said "the winner" was whomever they supported before the debate. Some other folks said "no content."

Well, to me, there was a lot of content. So much content that I would seriously consider voting for LePen myself if I had a vote... but of course if I did I would look a whole lot more closely first.

Let me emphasize that I did vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump this year, albeit in a halfhearted way without anger or prejudice or even emotional opposition to family members who voted for Trump.
I was halfhearted mainly because I feared what they would do to Hillary if she were elected, though I suppose I was also worried about her ability to connect with leaders and cultures in other parts of the world.

This reminds me of the old sufi story where a guy asks his friend how he gets so much cooperation and love form his mules or his camels. "Oh," says the guy," It's because of how much love I treat them with." "Oh," says the guy," but I tried that and it never works for me." "Well, let me show you." So guy two goes up to a new camel, hits it hard on the head, and then... Guy one says: "But that's not love." "Well," says guy two," First I needed to get him to notice me." I would strongly object to a mystical teacher who really acts that way (or really puts a student's head under water), but maybe Trump does better that way sometimes than Hillary does, or maybe Putin never really got Hillary's attention despite trying that way. Whatever. In my view, a really good sufi teacher would TELL these stories, and try to wake up his student, without really causing even mild danger or pain. But then again, when I read McLaine's "Out on a Limb," I swore I would never follow or respect a teacher who dragged a student off onto such a dangerous and unnecessary trail... but I certainly did follow Luda in Crimea when she dragged me onto a trail which was much MORE dangerous. (Past blog post mentioned our trip to Crimea a bit.)

But between Macron and LePen... the debate created a very different first-order impression.

Remembering the debate, I also remember trips Luda and I made to many far parts of Italy and Spain, where we spoke to people about their lives and their politics. talking to people added a kind of 3D reality" to what I see on France24 and other media. In essence... after the Great Recession of 2008,
the big priority issue was JObs Versus Debt. Big issue number one. A stupid problem, due to lack of in-depth vector intelligence (or knowledge of the energy sector) by folks making decisions. But that has been supplanted by the complex of Third Caliphate movement (led by Erdogan) and associated issues of terrorism and Islamization of Europe, which also lies behind brexit. In the debate, Macron made it clear he is fixated on the older issue, and committed to nice airy-fairy Kurzweil-type solutions guaranteed to make problems worse (SEE my earlier post on jobs, jobs, jobs), and grossly in denial about the second problem.   LePen has her Trumpain tendencies, which are certainly not perfection on earth... but the greatest primary danger of fascism today is from Erdogan (and his backers and fifth columns), not from her.

When Macron accused LePen of trying to sell "pixie" dust, I was amused and pleased at the rhetoric.
It was funny to see the translators and commentators trying to explain this unique Gallic concept not translatable into English... and I wonder if it came to France via the French version of Peter Pan. In any case, it was nice to hear an echo of my feeble attempts to get people to think more rationally about space policy, and to avoid being suckered EITHER by "blue pixie dust" (like Lamar Smith and his minimum-tech Space Launch System brown jobs boondoggle) OR by "pink pixie dust" (like Macron and the nice friendly elves who work for Musk, nice people but not exactly Rickovers or Carnegies). But Macron's pink pixie dust is more delusional than Musk's, and I see more hope for Musk to jump a level than I do for Macron right now.

And so: "Pick the psychosis of your choice. Vote for mania or vote for depression, but whatever you do, vote." I certainly would vote, if I had a vote in this election. We are all part of humanity, and should not pretend that failure to vote is not an affirmative action in itself. I do hope we do not see a Frexit or a loss of NATO... let alone a loss of human rights in France like some of the sad things Trump is doing right now... but Islamization of Europe  under Erdogan's style of control would not be so good (or so stable) either.

Sad things: "Who came up with that complicated system in the Senate?" Jefferson, that's who. Should we really replace the Jefferson book with a new Trump book? Does Trump appreciate the challenges and requirements of stable democracy as much as Jefferson did? Likewise, separation of church and state, where George Washington and the Free Quakers may have understood the higher needs of the human spirit a bit better. It's even more complicated than health care, folks! Hitting the car with a sledge hammer is not such a good idea.

The sledge hammer of our choice?

In the larger picture, no, do not choose ANY sledge hammer!! But when voting, it's a different story.

Best of luck. We need it.

Coming_New_AI

The whole world is now excited by the "new AI" based on deep learning. Even Hillary Clinton emphasized it in her new interview. Since I am a grandfather of sorts to this area, I leave soon to give another plenary talk on the subject, at the big IEEE conference in the area (IJCNN2017). Today I turned in the abstract for the following plenary I will give in China (ISNN2017): For many decades, mainstream AI refused to believe that deep learning with neural networks and backpropagation offer true brain like general intelligence, despite numerous successes on tough engineering problems and mathematical advances. The tide changed in 2009 due to a $2 million grant I gave to Ng and LeCun, despite fierce objections which in today's government environment would have prevented the action. Empirical success on well known challenge problems led to follow-ons by DARPA, then by Google, and then a flood of interest by competitors trying to keep up. This past year, new analysis of the best time-series data available for the brain shows that it fits the core principles of backpropagation and deep learning much better than it fits the Hebbian and spiking types of model inherited from the previous century. As the flood of deep learning, internet of things, RNN, BCI, CNN and security technology grows, it may grow out of control. (See www.werbos.com/IT _big_picture.pdf). It is urgent that we move quickly to develop and implement additional new technologies and paradigms, lest the current imbalances and instabilities engulf us all.

Contingency plans for Turkey leaving NATO

I really, really hope that US and other NATO nations have been developing contingency plans for Turkey leaving NATO.

Every day the news from Turkey becomes more challenging.

Perhaps I should have mentioned... a few days ago... the image of "back to Lawrence of Arabia?"
More precisely, oppression of other Islamic countries by Turkey was a major issue before Ataturk, and Erdogan has been relentless and systematic in destroying all the achievements of Ataturk.

His biography on wikipedia was quite objective, and far from unique... but the facts about his past are clearly something he wants very hard to hide. So no, I don't think it's the wikipedia article on gauge invariance which motivated his recent decision to create a new Great Firewall of Turkey.

What WAS Turkey like before Ataturk? Well, that's a long story. Not what I will be doing today. Today just physical cleanups around the house and quantum sorts of things.    (Yesterday, dug lots and lots of dirt... an unusually pleasant day, doing what survival requires as one ages...)

out of the box option for Korea

I was tempted to use the word "crazy," but since everything about this crisis is crazy already, I will defer to a friend who says "use the phrase 'out of the box.'" Maybe I should have mentioned this option  before, but I was hoping the folks around the president were even more fertile in out of the box and crazy thinking. Maybe. Maybe not. The recent stuff with health care suggests there is a lot less imagination and flair than one might have hoped for.

One option would have been to ship a whole bevy of IRBMs towards the southern part of South Korea, with just enough range to be able to turn North Korea into a sea of glass. And quietly announce to Kim (with a few very quiet cc's) that he has two choices:

(1) Do nothing, and prepare for the US to give South Korea full control over its new nuclear arsenal
on the way; or

(2) Turn over all of North Korea's nuclear capabilities, from top to bottom, to firm control by China or Russia, with international verification.

Either way, Kim should also be given an invitation to the best Miss Universe events Trump can possibly arrange, in whatever locations Kim would like other than  nations off limits for US citizens to travel to. Really, there is no value in adding insult to injury! And it really was an incredible serious blunder when Trump did NOT invite Kaine plus Schumer plus Sanders to come talk with him about neutral bipartisan bandaid for health care. Normal protocol is for the big guy to do the invitation.

Except, of course, when he is so fed up that a nuclear attack or a repo man is on the way.

Best of luck...  

How quantum effects could improve artificial intelligence

How quantum effects could improve artificial intelligence

That's the title of a recent article in phys.org which Chris Altman pointed us to via twitter:

https://phys.org/news/2016-10-quantum-effects-artificial-intelligence.html

My comment:

This topic has been discussed before, albeit in a form which is more general and thus harder to understand. Reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming (RLADP) is not just one of three forms of neural network learning, but a general paradigm for constructing intelligent systems and modeling general intelligence in brains. It includes many designs or methods from many disciplines, the most popular of which are relatively limited (except with clever ad hoc preprocessing), some of which have important applications and some of which pose serious global instability risks. The best overview is the book Handbook of RLADP edited by Frank Lewis and Derong Liu, IEEE press/Wiley 2013. How to implement the most powerful and general forms to fully exploit quantum computing was discussed in Dolmatova and "Analog quantum computing (AQC) and the need for time-symmetric physics”, Quantum Information Processing (2015): 1-15. A six slide overview of larger implications is posted at www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf . 

To exploit the full capability of quantum computing in this domain, one needs design simulation models which reflect the full degrees of freedom in design, which in turn require new experiments as the next important order of business. The AQC paper gives one option. On this blog I have suggested another, a bit messier but easier -- not an alternative, just a complementary way to get more badly needed data.  

objective reality

When I gave a plenary talk at the First International Conference on Consciousness, hosted by the United Nations University, the chairman (a physicist) asked me to summarize my views on consciousness and reality in a brief "haiku". (The complete talk was included in the conference book, and is posted at  https://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0311006.)

The haiku I chose was:

Reality is strange but real
We need more color in our lives but less in our quarks

Please notice that I am one of those crazy heretics who, like Einstein (and Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and VI Lenin) persists in believing that there is such a thing as objective reality, even though I fully understand the arguments of Heisenberg and Bohr against the idea.

The followers of Heisenberg have made a very important point: they have a workable mathematical model, consistent with the quantum effects we see in the lab, while Einstein never did.

For many years, I have worked to address that point, by developing a new family of theories capable of addressing what we see in the lab, but consistent with the idea of objective reality. The past few weeks, I have made significant further progress towards that goal. I have even identified a specific mathematical theory of physics which might just "explain it all", and (being impatient and old)
posted it just yesterday at the "arxiv for heretics":

http://vixra.org/abs/1704.0264

I did not even try arxiv, since I know the idea of objective reality is now considered as heresy by most apparatchiks, just as neural networks were considered as heresy for many, many years. (Now the very same people in AI who said for decades that neural networks would never work are trying to claim leadership in telling us what they are and how they work. Sad. But it taught me a lot of lessons about today's culture, how it worships innovation while doing its best to shield itself from it.)

=========

Regarding "strange but real": in today's culture, some folks love "strange," and some others
(like 'tHooft) want to get back to real, but very few people can fully accept both at the strange time.
Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger were among those rare people, who demanded realistic models of the electron even as they fully appreciated noosphere and Sufi concepts, respectively.
If only such people were in key positions in our culture today!!

One caveat on the new paper:

section 1.2 is both too short and too long. Maybe, for the restrictive rules in journals today,
it would be better just to start from the mathematical issues (the main topic of the paper), and move all the context to an appendix. After all, who really cares about how the universe works? Such odd curious eccentricities as wondering how the universe works should best be moved to a final discussion section, But on the other hand, anyone really familiar with those issues will see that a lot more could be said... and I hope they would notice citations of previous work taking care of most of those other issues.

In the end, I expect people's religious blinders will be too great for them to really notice, let alone to
do the follow-on work which will be essential, UNTIL and UNLESS the key experiments are performed, in the realm of MQED, which do at least prove that there some basis for hope in this kind of endeavor.

In the meantime, there was a nice article recently in Scientific American, showing how the mapping of dark matter has demonstrated a kind of vast network, connecting all the galaxies in our cluster of galaxies at least. Just as we need to clean up certain basic points in QED before humans can appreciate the "standard model" issues in my paper, we may need to clean up the bigger issues with "standard model" physics before we are ready to really, serious take on the full complexity of dark matter, which after all is the bulk of the matter in the universe and what connects the ecology of the universe. But even my new paper.. well, the model does predict SOME aspects of dark matter, if one applies the statistical and thermodynamic tools I cite briefly.

'tHooft has occasionally said that he too firmly believes in objective reality, and has faith that chaos theory will somehow find a way to explain why quantum mechanics emerges as a higher-level statistical description of reality, and that this will somehow get us beyond the barrier implied by the Bell's Theorem experiments. I am ever so sad that he does not connect this deep and enlightened view with the concrete challenge of how to make it real. The CHSH theorem is a THEOREM, and theorems don't just go away; one must accept the need to pay attention to the conditions of the theorem, which have the implication that we MUST have a new formulation of measurement in QED in order to explain QED as such an emergent phenomenon. We now do have such a formulation of QED, and lack only for the key experiments to be done. What that does is then open the door to the kind of issues discussed in the new vixra paper... and, I hope, open the door to people who can demonstrate they can do that kind of algebra better than I can. The cause of objective reality certainly deserves better than my own meager best.
 

Is a stage magician distracting us with conspiracy theories?

I really want to put full attention on long-term issues of human survival, human potential and science and technology, the issues I know best, which offer the most hope for a future much better than the present. But every time I try to bring people further in those directions, the realities of today’s political world come into play  -- for example, by creating obstacles to doing concrete things we need to do even just to stay alive. And so, as Yeshua asked long ago, I keep one eye on “the watch”... even watching CNN (as the President himself does!) but also other sources.

Lately, it is ever more amazing to me how far most people talking on CNN are out of touch with the larger realities in play here and now, let alone the far future.

For example, many are totally fixated on the theme that Donald Trump is a kind of stage magician, using distraction as his number one tool for manipulating us all, a kind of grand Fu Manchu, full of conspiracy theories which he uses to manipulate both us and himself. But guess what? That fixation is itself a grand distraction. And Trump himself is equally a victim, when he allows himself to be manipulated into the silly idea that Hillary Clinton is the great and sneaky shadowy spider manipulating everything sinister in the world. But there really are conspiracies out there, and if we relax a little and open our eyes a few things ought to be obvious to people.

Just a few days ago, there was a scandal about how the US bombed and killed a number of the Kurdish fighters working with us to fight ISIS. A guy appeared on TV to explain; “well, our friends told us there were ISIS bad guys there, so of course we bombed them.” Our friends?

“We must focus all of our attention on the one thing which really matters – the investigation and punishment of Russia. You have to understand, Putin is a thug, popular in Russia but unscrupulous in suppressing the real competition and free marketplace of ideas which define real democracy.”

Yet at least when I was watching, CNN said nothing at all about our great friend Erdogan. France24 did, and it was an incredible eye-opener to me. Not only is Erdogan less popular than Putin in his home country; he also has been using much more radical methods to suppress opposition, even the most highly constructive and peaceful opposition, much worse than Putin. France24 also told things about Erdogan’s background, easily verified by sources like wikipedia. The basic story: he and his ally Gul (not Gulen) were energetic leaders and founders of an Islamic party committed to the Islamization of all of Europe, apparently by a combination of force and subterfuge. Only after they spent some time in jail (an experience like what shaped Adolf Hitler’s career as well) did they emerge to start a larger, more powerful party AKP, which simply avoided discussion of their long-term aims. There is much, much more to support this analysis... Our great friends.

I certainly do not claim to know which groups control chemical weapons in Syria. But I was a bit nervous when another spokesman, like the one who explained our bombing of Kurds, said “We are absolutely certain about what happened because our friends told us.”  Hmm. Could it be the same friends?

The New York Times reported long ago about the international Moslem Brotherhood (of which the party in Egypt is just one branch, and ISIS likewise) getting primary funding from certain salafist billionnaires living in Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. (The 9/11 investigatoin revealed similar patterns in more detail.)  I did not realize exactly how close Erdogan was himself in a personal committed way to their goals, until France24 led me to check. And now, as of yesterday, Erdogan is exercising the next phase of his plan to close the noose, and eliminate most of what is left of freedom in Turkey.

What’s next? Not my business. I’m just an old retired guy, and what **I** do next will be some algebra for some math more fundamental than that quantum theory I was doing until about a month ago. A little topology, a little real analysis. The wheel will keep turning in many, many ways, and keep surprising all kinds of people.  But certainly, if I were Trump, I would worry much more about Erdogan and his network than about Hillary Clinton and Putin (important as both of those are in their own ways). 

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

Among the many striking things we have learned about Erdogan lately, from France24, is that he used the exact same tactics on Turkish officials in NATO that Lamar Smith used on a very large part of NSF. Very strange tactics. He has been blatantly dishonest abut his use of Gulen as a scapegoat and excuse for massive purges of people who had nothing to do with Gilen, and he is now performing a kind of grand inquisition of all imams in Turkey to make them a reliable force. But... this is not my priority now; I probably would not have added this at all except for the noisy push I see now of folks
who want war with Russia...