Is Donald Trump the Beloved Great Pig Foretold in Journey to The West?

Yes, this is a story from the watch.  Two days ago, I ordered myself to redirect attention to China (which I visited many times through 2014), and – no surprise – relevant improbable things started to happen. At least one improbable thing.

It’s not so coherent as I would like – but entertaining syncretic stories fit the Chinese theme well enough. Some folks would say that China (like Ireland?) is one of the most “yin” nations on earth – high tolerance of cognitive dissonance.  I certainly met sincere Catholic druids on the Irish half of my family, talking to plants, hearing what they say, and connecting to the Virgin Mary with love.  Taoist Confucians and Buddhist Marxists also play important roles in China. 

But of all the weird things I have seen, criss-crossing the earth both in body and in spirit – today’s tale is in SOME ways the weirdest.

Weirdest of all, perhaps: how many of you could imagine someone NOW truly loving Donald Trump, with sincere glowing love (and not just a few POSSIBLE members of his family or a few remnants of the crowd lusting for his cash)? Certainly Donald Trump is one of those people who really needs love, as psychologists have been saying all over all the networks lately -- and he hasn’t been getting much of it in his job.  Yes, he has lots of strong supporters, whom I see very often… but when they express support for Trump, they usually do it with an echoing growl, not a smile of love, and, like Bannon, they may be happy to bite almost anyone as their form of support.

But … this week… it is odd. And it involves China.

The picture above (actually, a 2D shadow puppet held in a frame) depicts the Great Pig of the Chinese classic Journey to the West.

Don’t know China? OK, I really should explain, because China is important, and so is this pig.

When strict Moslems are in a decent state, they often say “Moslems, Christians and Jews really are brothers in a way, all respected in the Koran. We are all people of the book.  One book, three books, whatever – Torah, New Testament, Koran.” (And I hear “Book of Mormon too!” ) Well, Chinese people may have been more literate historically than other countries were, and THEY had sacred books too, books really central to Chinese civilization, to Chinese ability to rise above warlords and entropy (still present!) and the famines they caused. In my view, the two most important books which made China a powerful civilization were Journey to the West and the Analects of Confucius. Very different books, both universally prominent in their own way, and I will not take time to try to compare them here. This blog will focus on Journey to the West, where the Great Pig is one of the four central characters.

Of course, the pig of Journey to the West is not the only pig in Chinese literature. Look at recent newspapers, and you will see lots of reference to Chinese families trying to have a child born at exactly the right time which by Chinese astrology makes them a “Golden Pig.” Come to think of it, I actually am one of those myself, and since I am now the same age as Trump, maybe he really is a Golden Pig, by the Chinese astrology. I’d say he fits that role  much better than I do!

Long before I traveled to China, I learned how the cartoon monkey is much beloved by Chinese children, as beloved as Mickey mouse is here (and there too?). (Don’t underestimate the mouse… but not for this blog.) We even found some children stories of “the story of monkey.” But traveling in China, I learned that this popular cartoon monkey is just a popularization of the “Monkey King,” the central character in the book of a hundred chapters, Journey to the West. I brought back a serious copy of Journey to the West, with English and Chinese versions side by side and illustrations, from the big bookstore in Beijing, not far from Tian An Men square.

I would read a chapter every night to young Chris, as a kind of bedtime story – and it was clear that the book was intended to be read that way. This book was one of the Four Great Official books of Chinese Literature, a great focus of diligent Confucian students who dominated China for at least a thousand years up to Mao (who himself was a student at the Thousand Year Academy we visited in Changsha).

One of the four, but by far the most influential. (Perhaps I will comment on the other three, but perhaps not.)

From 2005 to 2014, I visited China every year, mostly with Luda and Chris. Several times we visited the Summer Palace in Beijing, where we walked under long open corridors whose ceilings were covered with intense colorful pictures of scenes from Journey to the West, one after another. Clearly those Emperors has their story…

Journey to the West is formally the story of a group of characters (four most memorable ones) commissioned (by the emperor?) to go to Tibet, to try to bring back the scrolls of a new and more powerful form of Buddhism, powerful enough to strengthen the people and the country to be able to better resist the forces of entropy which have always been a huge problem for China. (Even under Mao, Mao had huge cultural power, but in political control of provinces and villages he was much more of a fictitious paper tiger than Americans understood.) It is one of those classic Chinese style pieces written with intention of being read at many different levels, from small child to enlightened sage.

Some of you may remember English classes, where some critic tries to infer the true meaning hidden in some novel. English speaking novelists would usually object, and say truthfully that they tried to say what they meant to everyone.  But China has often been different, perhaps in part because a lot of Chinese letters were written by people paying more attention to the difference between their intended readers, their family watching them, and the officials watching them. But for different reasons, journey to the West clearly is a multi-level construction, intended as such.

In our travels form 2005 to 2014, we were amazed at how many of the unlikely places described in the book actually were based on real places, scattered all over China.

I was of course most interested in the cave where Monkey is said to have studied under a Taoist Immortal. It seems there may have been MANY such! In Qing Chen Shan (one of the sacred Daoist mountains, in Sichuan province) we hiked on a trail to the most likely candidate, only to see a sign: “Sorry, this school was moved for its protection,” signed Chou En-Lai. I wanted to enter the cave of the Yellow Immortal, but it was blocked by a sign saying “closed at 4:30. Come back tomorrow.” (Well, I could at least feel into that one.) And another cave I really could enter, but that was an old dragon cave from further east, one of the Three Kingdoms places (Wu, I think).

The monkeys do still eat flowers and fruit, I saw…

There IS a tilting tiger tail temple…

The great cudgel in Xinjiang was made up later by fans of the book, but it IS located in the real  burning hot pink desert described in the book.  And so so.

Most important, in Xian – the great main capital from the Han and Tang dynasties, arguably the greatest ever in Chinese history – we visited the actual many-story pagoda where the actual scrolls actually were brought back by the actual monk.

(What was that name? Tanzang? The actual name and the name in the book were similar, as I recall.)

As we travelled through China, we joked to ourselves (ever less of a joke) that Luda was playing the role of the monk in that story, the actual leader, trying to teach the law and seek. Chris, a child at that time, was playing the role of Monkey, very powerful but in need of instruction and guidance. And I was clearly the horse. It kept fitting. It was especially embarrassing when hordes of young children (mostly girls) would crowd around Chris, giggling, most very friendly, and we encouraged him to learn to respect and accept it. (I suspect there is also ying yang thing – especially today, when DNA reports support the theory that Chris is the most purely perfectly yang among all of us, which says a lot in the Russian-German household we have here.)

But… in any case… that was long past. Until Luda, in her local wanderings here in Arlington, runs across an old woman who says: “This is for you. It was given to me, to pass onto you, the worthy recipient. You only had the four characters in the party as you travelled, and you need to have the fourth. Here he is. The beloved pig, who was such a problem in the beginning, bit grew to be a worthy and beloved member of the party, as he sincerely tried to learn and overcome his failings and join in the fight against the hordes and hordes of terrible demons.”

Was that book actually trying to foretell the future? Read it, and you will get your own impression. I do not remember the pig part, so I just end it here, incomplete.

Could it be that this is like a personal Book of Revelations for Donald Trump??

Except.  Except for two add-ons, one on a movie, and one on immortality.

The movie:

Thanks to Alex for his great recommendation to see the NETFLIX movie Journey to the West, VERY loosely based on the book, by the same folks who gave us Shao Lin Soccer, another wonderful movie I am glad I saw.

Since that movie was more recent, and vivid, I remember it better than the book, maybe, in some ways. (I remember more things form the book, but there was more to remember.) The movie was not as nice to monkey – but that’s not a story for this blog post. The only pig part I remember was the vivid horror at all the people who want to EAT pig. (First course, they serve him new health care and tax plans. Next course they serve HIM.) I wonder what Trump would make of THAT? Certainly there are folks who smile and invite him to dinner with the intention of eating him.

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Immortality, another ancient and complex theme in China.

In truth, I have at different times in past years felt real personal love for more than one Chinese woman. I remember a surge of feeling for an incredibly beautiful woman, the sister of my cousin’s wife, whom I met only briefly (sigh) in the restaurant of the Jade Palace Hotel (now demolished, sigh) in Beijing, who gave me two scrolls as a present, one a big character hanging painting with the character “longevity” in the center,  and some serious words of explanation on it.

And so I was a bit startled, after my decision to think about China a bit, that I received an email totally out of the blue passed on from a woman of piercing intelligent from the new Western immortality/longevity movement, asking whether I would want to be interviewed on that subject. Why me? Why then?

It is true that two days ago, I did observe a livestream event with just a few sentences form Jose Cordeiro, a leader of the Transhumanists, saying he will be working with Charles Gray, a leader of the new (medical?) immortality movement, and saying that he personally intends to live forever.  But I was just watching remotely, and said nothing about this. I have VERY scrupulously refrained from telling people that I actually did study that literature, found fatal flaws (in some cases truly fatal, as in Emperor Qin kind of fatal), and found a way to make it work but ONLY with understanding and use of a level of mathematics which I doubt any of them even begin to understand.

No, not immortality, not for human bodies. The design is not so suitable for that. All I could figure out was longevity, about 1000 years I would guess.

I remember the day when I made that breakthrough, and was so excited. I started to feel: it is dangerous, but maybe not SO dangerous. (Of course, I was biased by the shadow of my own personal death, current actuarial statistics expect 20 years but anywhere from 0 to 30.) That day, however, Senator Mark Warner came to talk to us (a totally unique event), and gave a talk explaining how even another 10 or 20 years more would wreak total havoc in the poor confused world we live in now. Ok. End of that.

So why the call? Is it the recent work on  the arrow of time, which I discussed just this morning in an email to a guy I once met at Tsinghua?

Who knows. Probably just coincidence. Probably just a synchronicity kind of coincidence.

A final point on this: a Berkeley professor asked us a few days ago: WHAT kinds of physics would allow WHAT kinds of paranormal or spiritual phenomena?

Heavy paranormal stuff, I said, would require a new deeper theory, deeper than my new Modified Quantum Electrodynamics (MQED), the only theory of physics (aside from general relativity) which I really trust in full detail for what it predicts. MQED would not allow explanation of the heavy weird stuff, but MIGHT allow for maybe a little “prescience” (sbort-term anticipation) and WOULD allow for a whole lot of weird Jungian synchronicity.  So Carl Jung is as serious as it gets.

Best of luck,   Paul

From the watch: sea of glass in Korea, Turkey, Catalonia

For about three months, I have refrained from posting much from "the watch," a rather specialized thing... for many reasons. It would be grossly irrational to entangle the watch with other threads I have been pursuing; perhaps I should even set up a separate blog just for the watch, to avoid false linkages.

But: my silence has not been based on a lack of inputs. Quite the opposite. Rather, the inputs have been so complex and so tricky I have worried about creating more heat than light. Also, my recent adventures in Nepal brought home my need to rely more on "going through channels" and to work harder to avoid causing unjustified disruptions through any kind of direct action. I will say more about that, what the hell. But the spirit of truth (as well as advanced age) impel me to "let it all hang out" to a greater degree than I would in the past.

Sea of glass... this morning I woke up with a sense a bit like a headache. Certainly a kind of pulsing feeling, but bigger than my head or even my body. A headache about Korea.

A few weeks ago, my sense of responsibility said: "Paul, this quantum stuff is fun, and you ARE justified in transferring what you already know, but it's time to shift your probing from what's fun and basic to what immediately threatens the human species, the urgent developments in the Informatoin Technology (IT) space, where your design insights are needed." OK. Important stuff first, even if the problems right now SEEM unsolvable and frustrating. Figuring out how brains and quantum mechanics work ALSO seemed impossible and frustrating, until, after the right kind of effort, they could be solved.

But this morning... what's about to happen in Korea pushes this logic beyond the reasonable point. For many people, it actually IS reasonable to say "It's too hard for me; let God take care of it." But.. the watch changes a few things.

Part of "the watch" is simply opening one's eyes, starting with the mundane eyes.

I was really amazed at how oblivious the CNN reporters seemed a few days ago, reporting on Trump's recent activities. He said "This is just the calm before the storm." (People wondered: is he expressing his deep compassion for the people of Louisiana? This illustrates the difference between dreams and eyes.) He said he is putting great pressure on his military to give him the options for action he wants now. He says diplomacy has totally failed. The military have started to grumble and hint that they might dissociate themselves from what may happen soon. They all agree that silence is a necessary part of military operations. So why would people be so convinced that they are sure that the military operations have not ALREADY STARTED?

(CNN this evening says "Doesn't he know these kinds of vague threats are not likely to work in diplomacy?" Duh. he said he has pretty much given up on diplomacy. )

But then, beyond mundane eyes?

A few months back, I posted here some details of "assumption dreams" where I do believe I got to experience life as Trump was experiencing it. There was veridical content to support it, such as his views of some people working for him. But watching Trump by night most nights, and by day on CNN, got to feel a bit confining, and even uninspiring. After the truly awful healthcare proposals, I was tempted to post a joke:

"God appointed a guardian angel to look out for Trump, but after a few months, the angel pleaded for a transfer, and the position is now vacant."

I really enjoyed a couple of months in Europe, and ten days in Nepal and Qatar  -- not to mention France24 and Bloomberg TV as alternatives to CNN, at least to fill in when CNN gets repetitive, most of the time. But there are certain invisible connections which persist and cannot be just repressed. (In this period, I also got to see the series Touch on Netflix, which has a mix of typical TV stuff and very serious observations on things like connections, which I actually could describe in mathematical terms...) This morning's headache was based in part on resonance with what Trump is undoubtedly feeling right now about North Korea.

Imagine a voice wailing in pain: "Do I really HAVE to do it? Please, God, SOMEONE, can't you offer me a better way... or at least some reassurance that things will not go totally to hell?"

And as for me... well, it is certainly not MY right to try to intervene in any active way. (This blog does not count as an action.) Yet it is also my duty, on the watch, to notice. If I could be creative and come up with a better path, not just for two weeks but for twenty years, I would certainly have a strong duty to at least spell out what it is, as a possibility. Perhaps the Chinese or Russians have a path even now to make things better (NOT JUST for two weeks but for 20 years at least)... but not me. Lots of BS about "calm down little child" sure would not fix the problem, or even slow the military operations. Trump really cannot ignore the prospect of a man promising that he WILL send the US back to the stone age (with lots of mass death on the way) about to obtain the means to fulfill his promise. For decades, people have laughed at Kim's plans and promises, but clearly  that is not a rational way. So what can I say? My job, as I see it, is to pass the buck, report back, and move on to other things. (There are more details, but not for here and now.)

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It is curious that potentially fatal problems are ALSO surfacing in Turkey and in Catalonia at the same time. It is sad how oblivious so many people in the US are about those developments.

Erdogan, the strongest visible manifestation of the Moslem Brotherhood Third Caliphate movement in the world today (would-be first Caliph of that caliphate, victim of typical human ego narcissism but with more foresight than Trump seems to exhibit) has just made a deal with ISIS, to allow them to stay in operation and coordinate their joint actions against their joint foes. His deals with Qatar are also part of the recent history. I am ever so glad that the rulers of Saudi Arabia have become more aware of attempts to subvert and take over their nation, but they are not totally out of the woods yet. I am ever so depressed that even Donald Trump and his security advisors do not appreciate the power of the Third Caliphate pawns in the US, who have pushed for the US to side with Qatar!! (Of course, a really effective rapprochement with Qatar, on lines informed by tough realists in Saudi Arabia, could be great; it is the advocates of appeasement ghat should be watched. US intelligence agencies should be looking THERE, not so much at Russia, which has done far less to corrupt and suborn actual powerful political structures in the US.) It was interesting in Qatar to see how Qatar became a strong ally of the Second Caliphate, a vassal of the Caliph in Turkey, as a way of counterbalancing the bedouin tribes of their day -- but respect for the old Qatary way of life does not require sharia!

Why would Russia associate with such a thing, such a setback in the war against ISIS?
"Don't worry. The new alignment makes it easier to just find them all and kill them all, and it will help the US to wake up and realize that this is what it has to do, and ally with us on."

OK, Catalonia?

Luda is bemused by the phrase "Cat-exit." Images of cats whining at the door, finally being let back in, tail held proudly high in the air, pretending it had nothing to do with it.

We had some very serious experiences in Catalonia (really just Monserrat and Barcelona) again two months ago or so. We understand both pros and cons, and have deep feelings for what the Catalonians want. There DO exist constructive ways to restructure things... as there were for Scotland and northern Ireland, even maybe linked a bit. But will humans EVER be intelligent and calm and creative enough to find those constructive ways? The EU has ever so many positive ways forward (unlike poor Trump facing Korea)... but they have also shown ever so many ways to go to extremes which get them in trouble lately. I have at times wished my old PhD advisor Karl Deutsch were still alive and active, in a way which would let us talk through some of this and him to insert key ideas where they would really help. (Really. He did a lot, quietly, to make the EU stronger in olden times.)

But even so, I can't help remembering what happened on our first day on this trip to Barcelona, when Luda and I both showed up by accident in shorts in front of the main Cathedral. Since spiritual connection is at or tied for the top of my list in all of our travels, and since Luda has her own sensibilities, we decided to try to walk in anyway. The guards at the door looked at her shorts and said firmly "NO," would not let her in.

Me, in shorts.. well, neither of us is twenty hears old any more, but me he just waved in.  Inside, I went to a side enclave marked at "for prayer and meditation only." In Rome, I had had great experiences meditating in exactly that kind of room, so I went in. But just a few minutes later,
as I sat quietly meditating. a Catalan guy in the back stood up, aggressively approached me, shouted at me in Catalan loudly and threateningly and would not stop threatening physically until I got up and left. Of course I know some Spanish, and can even make sense of a little Catalan written down, but I have no idea what he was saying -- only that this holy man was wholly... to put it gently, auditioning for the book of Esdras. Yet expressing a major part of the thoughts floating around in the local lobe of the noosphere. How could Spain be much more truly constructive, respecting the best on Monserrat, while being realistic about the horrid scum which has also been growing on the ponds in that area?
not my job; I just do due diligence, report, and move on.

By the way, when I tried to move on, I learned that things were Very Well Organized there at that time. (It reminded me of Moltrasio in Italy, a little town where bus tickets can only be bought in ice creams shops and folks who don't just know that face "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." A town ruled by joint venture of Christian Democrats (a meeting of women in the local church) and the Communist Party (a meeting of men in the bar next door), who jointly develop ever so many rules. I remember the janitor who told me about the ice cream shop and explained "We have so many rules here. We here are ever so much better organized than those sloppy Swiss just over the hill, who don't even know what rules are about. Someday they will learn what it takes to  make a modern well-organized economy... ) By the rules, I was required NOT to return to my wife, but to travel thorough a long path to another street in a city strange to me, and find her again maybe an hour later.
(As a half-naked woman posed for cameras just at the front of the Cathedral...)

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More? Why not. What the hell.

Long long ago, when I was first getting to know Luda, a time came when I owed her some confession in confidence, so she would know what she is getting into. "You know my feelings, and you know me as a person in normal life and in scientific activities. But before going further, you need to know just how crazy I really am. I have heard your attitude towards parapsychologists and towards the orthodox church, and I know of your two PhDs in hard science and former high jobs in the USSR, so you really need to be fully warned..." I was ever so happy when she replied: "Oh, don't worry. I have contempt for people who make strong statements about things they have no understanding of. But no, I am not out of touch with Reality. Since you have confided in me, let me say something about my own family.

"It is well known, when people shake hands with a real member of our family, as matter of honor, registered as a matter of honor, and they later break that... first to go ate their pets, then their elderly relatives, then closer relatives, and if they don't get the message... But no, we don't use nay kind of direct action or violence. When they violate an agreement of honor, we just look closely, fully register what is happening, and pass it on up. That's all. We do not even indulge in hate, let alone violence." (No hate, but I have seen a few smiles of contempt at times. But I have also seen Azderbaijanis show sheer terror at mention of the name.)

A few weeks ago, in Nepal, on the entry path to the  Pashupatinath temple, a British woman (Joan Walton) and I were confronted with deeply malicious soldiers pointing automatic weapons right at us at a checkpoint, yelling "No Westerners." The Hindu monks kindly leading our group tried to explain that they had had troubles with jihadi terrorists there recently, so we should understand it that way, but it was obvious that the word was "Westerner" and they they were discriminating against light eyes not beards. (We knew these were probably a legacy of Maoist guerillas, and that Maoists still control the government, folks much more Communist than anyone with real power in China.) To make things worse, just before that event, I had tried to reach out and open up some connection with the Shiva Temple visible past the checkpoint down a long alley -- something which raises energy. Within a minute after that violent shock, one of the monks pulled out his phone and told me that the hotel where I had a reservation had decided suddenly to cancel it and throw me out; he explained that he was working to convince them not to just throw away all my things in the hotel room. And suddenly my wife's google cell phone (which I had been using the take photos) went dead.

OF COURSE, I did not initiate any escalatory behavior. That would be ultradumb. Though I did mention to the monks that the hotel was violating an agreement not only of law but of honor.
I suddenly realized that it would be a major challenge for me to keep my own qi from becoming a threat to myself and others. yet there is also a rule NOT TO JUST repress one's reaction to wrong things. My first response -- remembering what Luda had said, which was not my normal total modus operandi -- was to stand not far from those soldiers, and focus very hard to register the full four-dimensional realities as precisely as possible, from guns to qi to connections and so on. To try to take a kind of precise 4D photo in my mind. as I stood there, one kind and sensitive guy in our group, from India, appraoched Joan and me gently, and suggested we move out of sight of the soldiers, clearly hoping to just stop all this. I was calm but did not move, until the picture was clear enough and well enough registered at the right level.

Sometime then, Joan mentioned "If anyone tried to pull that kind of discrimination in the UK, they would be sent to jail instantly."

But then we walked just a few meters more, where I sat down on a low stone wall, and explained that I really needed a bit of time to restructure and stabilize my emotional reactions, and properly register everything, to calm down the right way. The Indian guy was delighted he could then focus on Joan, to describe his ideas for a new education initiative he wanted Joan and me to work with, as I tried to work on a meditative level. I felt really overwhelmed with feelings and energy and thoughts. As I groped for a constructive stability, I included in my groping both reaching out to "pater galacticus"
(more or less my view/synonym to Jesus's old buddy) and to the Vishnu archetype, suitable for someone desperate for a bit of constructive order confronted with incredible shivaite violence.
"Hey folks, any hints would be appreciated." But of course, I tried to focus my own mind VERY hard...

As I sat there.. trying to center... suddenly a kid of about ten or twelve sat down next to me on the stone wall, and asked questions like "what is the name YOU used for God?" He WAS a child, and Joan was almost freaked out at how he spoke in child-like words, yet he did seem to have been speaking to a fairly enlightened teacher, and his many odd questions were helpful as I worked on focusing my own quite turbulent mind. I replied "pater galacticus", but felt some hesitation in doing so, because of all the complex unvoiced caveats and explanations' I was later thinking that I should at least have added the word "cosmos." In any case, things worked well, and the experience helped me be clearer about the depth and complexity of "connection" (important a few days later when I passed through Qatar).

As the boy and I calmed down, and perhaps he even left, the Indian guy tapped me on the shoulder and said, "By the way Paul, you have been just looking back, where the boy was along the wall, where we came here. Look across the 'street' and see what you see." What I saw, starting just a few feet in front of me but continuing far beyond, was the most extreme physical devastation I have ever seen with my mundane eyes in this life. A clash of extreme earth energies, focused right there, echoing from a few years ago... perhaps when Maoist guards were first posted there? Who knows? But wild energies can cross space and time....

I certainly did absolutely nothing, and struggled hard to do nothing. (Struggled not to repeat a few accidental experiments done farther away from people in the past.) I only REGISTERED... Just due diligence.

But it is sad how much due diligence is now called for in so many places, over the whole world, from DC to Turkey to even a bit of Tsinghua University itself. What will happen? We will see, and we will register.

I am also very grateful to the kind Bhakti guy who led us to the sleeping Vishnu shrine, next stop for our tour after that Shiva place (and lunch? I forget. Notes are on my tab, but I won't read them now).
Calm and improved reconnection were a good idea. So many reconnections are needed all over the earth... and our survival as a species is ever so much at risk from every so many directions.

Best of luck....

The physics of who we are, like Plato, Zelazny, Willis

After a technical discussion of collapse of the wave function, new experiments, and what it all means for the question of "who are WE?", someone asked me:

On the other hand, were Zelazny's Amber works not fiction?

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

My views have changed again today, to a new tentative position which i find somewhat startling but hard to escape, based on the best mathematics now available: 

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

Thank you very much, and thanks also to others who asked this pointed questions yesterday, for getting me to revisit the question:

IF the math of Einsteinian realism fully works out, and if it will eventually be logically justified as a deeper replacement in principle of MQED (the version of "quantum mechanics" I advocate)... what does it tell us about time and parallel selves?

I now think that what I wrote in a groping way yesterday was correct, but I felt some uncertainty as it emerged late in the day. Now I have had time to meditate on it.

Sometimes I wish I could afford to wait a day like that, and meditate at a higher level, before responding to ANYTHING by email. The differences in levels of intelligence are an important story in itself, and maybe I will even say just a little more about that too if there is time this morning.

ARE WE (like I as I write this) a configuration/pattern/form of the one true 3+1-D reality or not, if Einsteinian realism is the deeper reality and truer physics, and MQED just an approximation?

I remember the exact moment when I "realized that we are just shadows," IN THE MQED framework. Our mundane level of existence, the "half" of us which is body and brain but not soul, only connected to soul... is governed by MQED, almost exclusively. There are nuclear forces holding together the nuclei of the atoms of our body, but all we really see in the material properties of atoms and their interactions, and their interactions with electromagnetism, are nuclei as point ions, charges particles with mass,

connected and vibrating together  quantum mechanical way -- but those quantum mechanical vibrations are all within the realm of MQED. All knowledge which actually gets imprinted in or remembered in the brain is fully within the realm of MQED, whenever it is expressed in the brain. 

I remember focusing VERY hard on the issue of "what does a photon experience and do, from femtosecond to femtosecond, as it passes through a polaroid type polarizer (like simple quality sunglasses!)?" This focused thought resulted in a new continuous-time mathematical model of that phenomenon, which worked, which fit the Bell experiments, and which I posted at arxiv.org. (Actually, two such models, a traditional KQED kind of model, and an MQED kind of model.) In this model, the wave function does not collapse instantaneously, but step by step, fitting what we know about polarizers as real physical objects, not just metaphysical observers. 

We too, like those polarizers, change in a relatively incremental way, but at times we (and they) change so fast it APPEARS like an instantaneous jump on a normal time scale. (Cavdat: I resist saying more about the deeper time scales of the mundane brain. Not for now. This story is complicated enough, and does not need that digression/footnote.) At one point, as I thought about that little photon passing through sunglasses, I had a very sudden change of perspective on who were are.. but it was not TOTALLY instant; it was like a fast dawning realization.

There is some VERY viscious polarization right now in the US government. I was thinking about that photon, in 2014, still working for the National Science Foundation (NSF), at a time when the viscious conflicts were especially painful for me. I was thinking: "That photon has its own orientation, an angle theta. The sunglasses want it to conform to ITS angle , theta-a. At any moment there is some probability that the photon WILL jump to that angle, conform, and then be totally absorbed, and virtually nonexistent from the viewpoint of the macroscopic experimenter. There is some probability that it will jump to the 'opposite' angle, 90 degrees away from theta-a, which will make it absolutely independent and able to pass through unchanged after that (though it still loss its original self.). That reminds me of the horrible situation I face right now! But that photon has a third possibility, crucial to the physics, without which the model cannot work in making correct predictions (within the constraints which yield MQED): it can simply object to being in that situation, and  create pressure to the cosmos to rewrite the past so that it won't be in that situation in the first place." (I was reminded of an insightful wry British comedy movie, maybe something about deadly sins, where a  :guy makes a deal with the devil, who says he can just stick his tongue out to remake any situation he chooses to reject -- just seven times. The photon has the power to stick out its tongue in the same way.) It took a bit of time to nail that down, and express it as a very clean differential equation, which anyone can see on the web at arxiv.org. But the fast realization began with the question: "If a little photon can do that in ITS polarizer, how is it that I, a full human being, do not have the power to do the same in the polarizing place I am in right now?" And then very quickly, after I posed that question I realized: "oops, maybe I can."

After that, I quickly inserted a new paragraph or so into www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf, a paper which had been accepted for publication in an obscure Russian journal, subject to some minor revisions; I just added this new insight to the revisions. (It was an invited paper, the kind of thing I can afford to publish much more than things which take more time, particularly when I get involved in many different areas.) Some key points: since we live our mundane lives AT THE LEVEL of MQED, the full mathematics of MQED DO actually describe our lives. That includes the "many worlds" KQED claim that we ourselves DO live in mixed states," ALL THE TIME. No, there are no metaphysical observers, but YES, we are "Schrodinger cats" OURSELVES. MQED is not the deepest reality, in my view, but it IS what governs our mundane experience of life directly. 

This was a really huge shift in my views. It is curious that I am now started reading a new novel by Connie Willis, Crosstalk, who has also written very important novels about the nature of time, perhaps the most valuable and relevant science fiction on that topic as such ever by anyone.  Before the new shift, my views about time and retrocausality were generally similar to what was expressed in her earlier novels (and in a simpler novel Chronoliths). I have never made any claims about actual TRAVEL into the past (as in these  novels), but even so, I could clearly see that physics MUST allow backwards communication of information in order to explain certain paradoxes from experiment. In her novels, Willis talked about an "Oxford standard model of time" in which there is only ONE actual state of the space-time continuum, in which somehow despite the backwards time effects we cannot splinter the cosmos into different possibilities or outcomes.

Following that view, before my shift, I naturally asked: "IF we can design backwards time communication devices, HOW do we avoid the old 'grandfather paradox' of time travel stories? For example, if we use the device on the stock market (as we might well do, by the way!).. what happens to disturbance of the market in the past due to the change in trades?" Looking at the Einstein/Lagrange mathematics as best I could at that time, I concluded: "A system which threatens to change the past can not ACTUALLY

change the true past, since there is only one true past, but it can have an impact within the constraints of what we KNOW about the past, in a way which is ultimately the same as our limited impacts on the future. If people build powerful enough systems which 'threaten' to change the ;past, these systems will end up being 'weirdness generators.' Folks who try to make trades which change the past will be stopped by unexpected weird coincidences, like taxis stalling as they ride to the stock exchange, somehow screwing things up regularly and reliably in a way which SEEMS to be surprising coincidence." No folks, this didn't come form imagination, it came form understanding what Lagrange style maximization actually implies when translated to our realm. And no, it wasn't quantum mechanics, but good old fashioned Einstein/Lagrange math. 

As I live in the DC area, my instant emotional response to this realization (long before the shift in 2014) was: "Hey, has someone ALREADY built one of those weirdness generators? It sure feels like it in this neighborhood." But in fact, such capabilities do exist in the noosphere,and that is part of what creates patterns in human life. 

Not long before my shift , I read Connie Willis' two-volume novel, Blackout and And Clear, where she begins asking whether she really believes that old "Oxford standard theory of time travel." COULD we change the past after all, even beyond what seems hard and fast? If WE are forms of the one true reality of 3+1-D spacetime, no, we can't. 

BUT in my shift in 2014, I realized: WE are not the one and only reality. For all practical purposes (the MQED level of life), we are just ONE of many copies of ourselves, like the shadows in Plato's cave (or yes, like the story in Zelazny's Amber series, roughly). That new viewpoint is also expressed in the paper I wrote last year for a NATO workshop  on predetection of terrorism, published in a volume in the NATO book series, and posted at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf.

===========

But, Whit and others ... just yesterday you got me to reconsider: was I right AFTER that shift?

If the true(r) reality is still Einstein underneath, and not MQED, is there or is there not just one true reality, and are we or are we not part of it?

How do I deal with the paradox of two viewpoints SEEMING to make very different predictions for this one point?

Logic immediately said to me even yesterday (when I was at a lower level of intelligence than this morning) that any weirdness contained in MQED must be present in the deeper reality, PLUS more, if MQED is ultimately just a fuzzy approximation to that reality. So all the weird new stuff about ACTUALLY changing the past still holds, somehow. (To be honest, that is also a bit more consistent with my first person experience.) But how?

Even as I never forgot that part of the logic, I found myself wondering for a moment yesterday: IF MQED works NORMALLY, but Einstein/Lagrange wins in any direct confrontation, COULD some of the new time technologies I have in mind (for detailed discussion only AFTER key experiments are done) end up letting us build ACTUAL weirdness generators which give us the power to defeat MQED in ways which no classical or simple experiments could? Certainly I have been thinking about new computing architectures which really would test the ability of our cosmos to implement astronomical numbers of "parallel universes,"  and bring out any granularity or discreteness in the underlying force fields if such is there. BUT: ordinary Deutsch style quantum computing ALREADY tests that kind of thing, and no anomalies of that kind have been found. We should have our eyes open, for many reasons, but the logic does still hold.

But how COULD it still hold, if the Einstein/Lagrange view is totally correct? Where are we in the one true reality, if there is really only one at bottom?

Well.. do we even exist or not? Or are we like "the dreams of the sleeping vishnu?" Logic seems to suggest more firmly to me this morning that this is the most credible picture of who we are after all. (But still with caveats and uncertainty both.) 

There is a strong analogy to another situation very familiar in science fiction. Most of you have read some story about people who create really detailed computer simulations of an imaginary world, so detailed that the characters in the simulation are just as complex as people with brains in our world. Their simulated brains have ALL the properties and dynamics of mundane brains in our world. If asked whether they are conscious, they will of course say that they are, and they will pass every version of the Turing test.

THEY have no way of knowing they are "just a computer simulation," unless we tell them. Stephen Baxter has some novels like that, asking the questions of ethics about how we deal with such creatures. Are our ethical duties towards a fully intelligent simulated humans more or less than our duties, say, to a mouse? There is also a really great collection called Far Futures, where lead science fiction authors were asked to write realistic scenarios about the human future -- the best story of which described the life of computer simulated humans on earth. I have heard that Elon Musk now believes that WE are computer simulations ourselves. By the way, in 1962 or such I wrote one of those types of stories for the school literary magazine in high school, based on stories I told myself many years before that as a child going to bed. (Still there, scanned into my files.)

And so, if the cosmos is LIKE a grand computer or mind of sorts, solving an extremely complex and tricky optimization problem, are WE basically just part of the simulations it uses in order to solve that optimization problems? 

Even as I type this, a shiver runs up my back as I see/remember a connection to something I saw years ago which I could not quite make sense of. 

Yes, like the MQED picture, but weirder still. Just as "Gaia" is a distorted but mostly reasonable reflection or shadow of something real, the noosphere of our solar system, it seems most logical that the dreaming Vishnu is also a kind of reflection or shadow of something real. That we are those dreams or simulations, when we get deeper than MQED down to the Einstein/Lagrange level.

Of course, I will now resolve to be even more vigilant to look for any REAL signs of a level deeper still, but I still see no real basis at all in logic for expecting it. Life really IS weird, after all, at least from a lowly human viewpoint. 

======

And I should say a few words about Connie Willis, who in SOME ways reminds me of my wife and of levels of intelligence. In the first few pages of her new novel, Crosstalk, 

I remembered what Woody Allen said in one of his movies: "I would never stoop to join a club so crude and insensitive that it would accept ME as a member." (My wife says he stole that from Groucho Marx. Well, she notices lots of stuff I don't. Like Willis.) My instant response at that time: "I really would have wanted to marry this woman, but she would not have given me a second look. But then again, Luda is just as intense, much more suitable for me because of her much deeper understanding of heavy science and such, and definitely beautiful... who knows about that other one?"  But that was just the start; the book goes on to address issues of the Internet of Things, which is now remaking the entire world and which I have not at all come to full terms with yet, and seems to be located where my younger daughter is (though her employer is much stronger). At the end of the day, my wife, Willis and I are all very intensely "high bandwidth people." She clearly experiences life with more high resolution than any other science fiction writer I have ever read. And she clearly experiences the other dimensions of life which are unfamiliar to those who embrace the worst form of Cartesian dualism, where all they live is life in black and white without seeing any of the colors which come from spirit. It is intensely REAL... like my wife.. though perhaps I am a bit more astral. What other authors can I think of with such intensity and bandwidth? maybe Dickinson is closest in Science fiction? Or Dickens in the larger world? 

And all three of us do ask questions intensely and always, asking what we know and what we don't... which of course always makes one aware of important things we DON;T know... 

Best of luck,

see the naked "swamp" Puerto Rico example

Trump has rightly talked a lot about "the swamp", but can he ever figure out where it is and how it works, and how to save us from the extinction it is on course to bring us?

My previous post on electric power problems, which could become as big on mainland US within the year as they now are on Puerto Rico (watch the example closely folks). That's more urgent than this post.

But even so, it was amazing to see on CNN just a few minutes ago the woman who now runs DHS explaining why the request for a special waiver allowing foreign help was ignored in the case of Puerto Rico, when it was approvcd quickly for Texas and Florida.

Since she did the work, I tend to think that the White House rationalization was just post hoc PR, which we have seen a lot of this past year. (Not invented  by Trump, of course, but also not something a sane observer would not be aware of.)

WHY did the two previous requests get immediate attention, but not this one?

This one just came from Congress. the others cam,e form industry (from large stakeholders).

Some folks imagine that the President runs the executive branch, and Congress provides just budget and oversight. Authoritative academics can find lots of authoritative books saying that this is how it works. But we live in a new world now, folks. Those who have seen at ground level know better. In ever more agencies, instructions come from visiting "stakeholders," empowered by selected members of Congress. No, it's not those civil service folks who do this (except when they are too scared to let anyone know, but the new whistle blower systems point back to the folks who represent the stakeholders.) Roughly speaking, actual power is proportional to the size of large campaign donations, and there are numbers out there for those who watch closely, like certain intelligence agencies.

The Moslem Brotherhood itself is actually bigger there than Russia, but their friends steer us elsewhere, and poor Trump believes a lot of what certain folks tell him.

All for now.

Puerto Rico's problems: are you next, and what could be done to save you?

On a technical level, it is well-established that the whole US power grid is in real danger this year of being shut down as badly as Puerto Rico, a real disaster we need to understand better and face up to. (No electricity for months to come, suddenly no food.) For example, James Woolsey (former CIA head under Clinton) says that Kim may be poised this year to do an EMP attack which would shut down half the generators in the US, and I have given details and citations for a cyber threat even worse at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf. 
Why hgve our leaders done nothing to correct problems which could actually be corrected quite easily? 

As people start to realize this is real, even for the political leaders living in DC, one leader has asked a group of us:

I wouldn’t know the first thing about this, but is it possible to put parts of the grid, not just wires but smaller if not larger transformers underground?  And if that were done, would it help much?

Thanks very much, ...

At some level, the real problem may be a gap in communication between the engineering people and the mysterious politically shielded process of stakeholder influence in the Senate. Nobody in the latter seems to know the first thing about the EMP threat to burn out and shut down half the big transformers, or the cyber threat to burn out and shut down half the generators, on the continental US. There are only a few parts of the US (like Texas) where the water threat to the grid is anywhere near as serious, but a better understanding of the CONSEQUENCES of losing electricity for a long time might help a little, maybe, in getting policy-makers closer to reality on nature and importance of the EMP and cyber threats. 

For the EMP threat... putting wires underground is expensive. In October 2001, I organized a joint NSF-EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) workshop on urgent opportunities to harden the grid, at EPRI headquarters in Palo Alto. For transmission, underground wires cost about ten times the ordinary wires, which were already hard enough to get build because of issues of regulatory barriers and costs running into the billions BEFORE any multiplying by ten.

But there are much simpler and easier technical fixes. Under the Congressionally chartered EMP Commission, an engineer named Kappenman worked with others to develop (and I think patent and incorporate) much cheaper, easier and more reliable fixes. The estimate was on the order of $100 million to harden the ENTIRE US grid from all kinds of EMP (other than lightning, which was already being addressed in other ways). When I hear Woolsey on TV talking about how Kim could shut down the US with one single H bomb, and about how Kim does know this and is preparing to do so, I find myself really wondering about the sanity of people who could have engineered the fix ten years ago, and did not. Part of me says -- I am not a professional politician; I do well enough in passing information on to people who are, for someone who is more a scientist, engineer, economist and Quaker than politician; but even so, the total failure to get even such a simple fixable problem fixed makes me ever more enervated in the face of equally fatal problems in other areas, likely to kill us all if we don't learn better how to walk a straight line.

With EMP, the required fix to the grid is not only cheap and easy but known to the House. More precisely, Congressman Trent Franks (with strong support from folks we knew like Roscoe Bartlett) introduced a bill, the Shield Act, which passed 3-1 in the House (obviously bipartisan), which would have hardened the grid against EMP, years ago. 

Franks is a conservative Congressman from Texas, so of course there was nothing socialist or weird about his solution. The bill would simply have empowered and mandated FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate gas and electric transmission systems) to ADD EMP resilience to the many other existing reliability standards enforced by FERC. Just one more health and safety kind of standard, less expensive than others long on the books. At a (one time) cost of $100 million, it would end up as about a $1 one-time charge to the average rate-payer (if as a rough guess we have 100 million of them in the US), with maybe a continuing cost of 10 cents per year thereafter for maintenance. Just part of the cost of having a reliable source of electricity.

I remember very vividly an important "inner circle" meeting of Franks and other supporters of the Bill at the Senate Visitors Center, where even the top people in the House in both parties were deeply mystified about why the Senate simply did nothing with an easy matter of life or death which they could have taken care of quickly. There was a lot of speculation. My natural response was; "Holy cow! If even THESE guys are baffled about what is going on, what are my chances to figure it out... with Specter now gone from the Senate." But my year working in the Hart building did give me SOME basis for my own guessing... and I remember how Reid operated, with his own view of the Stakeholder System, which is probably similar but worse under McConnell. On the tombstone of the US, will it be written "Death by shared new procedural ideology"?

Could McCain save us somehow, as the most reality-oriented guy left now that Specter is gone? Or will Murkowski, Cantwell, Kaine and Schumer be the last remains of hope?

Anyway, the fix to save us is easy, and it may be all it would take is for the right Stakeholder (maybe BP could do it) to gently tap the shoulder of McConnell or whomever, and note that Franks is still alive and happy to reintroduce the bill. I don't know.

BUT: the cybervulnerability is just as urgent, and even bigger as a threat. (Folks in the House speculated: maybe senators just wanted to solve EMP and cybervulnerability of the grid TOGETHER. But clearly waiting for A before B and B before A is a dumb and even fatal strategy here!!)

It is EVEN MORE technical than EMP. At www.werbos,com/NATO_terrorism.pdf (published in a book in the NATO series), I give technical details of that threat and of HOW TO fix it. It certainly depresses and enervates me very deeply that we show no signs of progress in making THAT fix either. It is so obviously a matter of national survival that I find myself wondering about the patriotism of the powerful folks who have chosen to do nothing here. (Yes, I share the deep worries of the public about the "swamp," but I often wish Trump had a better understanding of what it actually is.) But my son in law, who is closer to the specific technologies, suggests it is simply a case of old fashioned cover-your-ass psychology. More specifically, in the 1970's, when the Multics operating system was being developed (in front of my eyes literally), there was a collaboration of folks who really knew what a computer is and of folks who really know what a theorem is, yielding among other things "the orange book." (If you look up Multicians on the web, you will see I am just one junior member of a larger group, if they haven't all died of old age yet.) THE ESSENTIAL FIX of open machine-verified compliance testing of operating systems for critical infrastructures (starting with power) requires that kind of crossdisciplinary cooperation, which may have simply been lost with time (just as we may have lost Boeing's hot structures capability crucial to economic access to space either for missile defense or power generation). It COULD be reconstituted, and not take all that many years, but when key people in power do not want to admit what they have lost and what it would take to fix... well, maybe that's the political problem which needs to be solved somehow or other.

But again, I am not so involved in such politics any more. I was invited to Trent Frank's meeting due to connections which are pretty much gone now. Tomorrow I do go back to revisit IEEE HQ in DC again for the first time in a long time -- but only to give a technical talk to the aerospace electronics society, focusing on exciting nuts and bolts related to IT.