Will YOU and I become Coco or Sian Kaan?

 

Today (Monday, 3/25/2019) is our first day back after a five week cruise to Argentina, Brazil and the Caribbean which included more than a week up the Amazon. We experienced many many things, but the choice in these pictures dominated everything.

          Most of the people on this cruise were retired. In fact, most were taking an 80 day grand cruise from Florida to Antarctic to Florida. Retirement, old age and death ALL lead to this same question about what happens to me, and what happens to others. Do we “just have fun” (or just play meaningless games) and gradually disintegrate away like the skeletons in fancy dress, like the people in the brilliant children’s movie Coco? Or do we grow up to the heavens like the sacred tree of the Mayans, the Sian Kaan? We certainly saw people going in both directions on this cruise. The older I get, and the more I understand about how these things really work, the more I see it as exactly this kind of choice. It is a serious choice we cannot escape.

      Of course our world is full of people who just “know” that this could not be the choice we are facing. In my plenary talk on conscious and machine intelligence last April (slides at http://www.werbos.com/Tucson2018.pdf and talk included in video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5QxhYner7U ) I began my summary with a quote from Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” That happens again and again in all human cultures, from island tribes to branches of science and religion. Even as a child, I wondered how people could have so much conviction about THEIR tribe’s beliefs when so many other tribes were equally convinced about something else, with about the same level of justification. Again and again, I have also seen how powerful organizations try to sell themselves by simplifying, by pushing people into simple black and white choices. In today’s world, people have mostly gravitated to two possibilities about afterlife – either it is a total fraud, or you wake up your same old self unchanged, on your way to absolute perfection of pain or joy or reincarnation.

      It really made me sad last year to see certain Hindu theologians taking strong measures, as strong as certain believers in Adam and Eve, to defend the dogma that the “you” who experiences astral travel or death is exactly the same “you” as the one in everyday life. In MY everyday life, I have learned more and more to understand the differences between the “me” thinking clearly in the early morning and the “me” late at night most nights, especially after a bit of alcohol. In fact, after the sail away party with unlimited free margaritas, I remember the feeling of having hardly any functioning brain at all and operating my body and words as one would operate a puppet from a great distance – and I remember others in the same state who were less functional.

   Logic once told me, based on limited first person experience, that afterlife is total BS, that what you see is what you get. In the airport on the way home, I received an email saying that my paper explaining how I changed my views has been formally accepted by Activitas Nervosa Superior (a Springer journal), in a special issue on consciousness. In essence, inescapable first person experience showed me that life is not so simple, but that we can still explain our experience and what we read in history WITHOUT abandoning logic and science, WITHOUT becoming mindless followers of some randomly selected tribal culture.

It fits science much better to assume that we are what Dante called “half beast half angel,” a symbiosis or alchemical marriage between familiar brain intelligence and another type of intelligence rooted in a different kind of platform. (I think of that platform as organized “dark matter,” which is not a specific type of particle but a general way which physics uses to admit that more than 80% of the cosmos is almost totally unknown to us as yet). If you and I are alchemical marriages, what happens when the angel gets to be a widow or widower?

This more scientific viewpoint, less black-and-white than today’s theologies, is actually much closer to the ancient beliefs of places like Mexico, dating back to the days before various emperors manipulated them. Once again, I highly recommend that everyone should see the happy children’s movie Coco, which does a brilliant job of explaining that culture, a culture which is much more totally true than most of the cultures with power today. The movie is correct in depicting certain technical details which I could even give you an equation for, but blogs are not the right place for equations. Still, I can give you a hint in words. Survival in Coco depends on a flow of some kind of emotional energy, like what Freud called “psychic energy,” like “qi” or “mana”, like the backpropagation flows which govern the changes made over time in ANY intelligent network. For the dead people in Coco, their survival depends on a flow of qi from a primary source, the world of the living; when it dries up, THEY dry up and dissolve into powder, like a certain passage in the Book of Esdras (a book in the modern Catholic bible we have at home  but not in the King James bible). On the cruise, I certainly saw some rich people showing signs of dissolving away into powder, kept alive mainly by connections to their grandchildren.

This way of thinking was not just in Mexico. Gavriel Kaye has written great novels conveying the old culture of China. Even under Confucius and Meng Tzu (“Mencius”), the assumptions and practices were very much like Coco, until a famous “reformer” Zhu Xi, catering to a power-driver emperor, redefined the state religion. (Many people in China blame its current problems on Jiang Zemin, the latest great secular reformer, but I blame them more on Zhu Xi. Both offered a mix of great new positive insights and great new dangerous oversimplifications.) Even Mormons might see something they agree with in Coco. Much of East Asia still maintians that culture, despite the efforts by people like Zhu Xi and Jiang Zemin to stamp it out and control them.

One important detail: in Coco, a bad guy gets energy from people who are NOT of his family. OK, he was bad, but it is not natural to restrict the flow of energy only to flows within a family. It violates nature to limit things in that way. In a previous year, we actually visited Mao Tze Tung’s dorm room in the college in ChangSha where Zhu Xi taught, and saw the echoes of his scream that it is not JUST within the family.

But I show you TWO pictures above. Only one is the simple “Day of the Dead.” The beliefs of the Mayans included Coco as ONE PART of it, but there was also that other world of “the heavens,” and the alternative real, great hope depicted by the Sian Kaan, the tree which bridges through the earth from that Day of the Dead realm to the world of the heavens. To me, this is ever so real, and I wish others could really see how real it is and how much it changes – offering our best hope not only to do better than the happy skeletons which eventually DO dissolve into powder, but also our best hope to save the mundane human species from extinction, if only we refuse to turn into happy skeletons and insist on always reaching with real energy and receptivity to the real heavens. (See http://www.werbos.com/Space_personal_Werbos.htm for my chapter in the book Beyond Earth, Krone ed, Apogee Press. Reaching out with rocketplanes actually is part of this, but no, it is not at all the whole thing.)

Of course, we saw a lot of great trees in the Amazon, and a lot of people on the cruise reaching out very energetically to try to learn and see nature and life and cultures beyond their own grandchildren. They were not neglecting their grandchildren. The Sian Kaan still always connects to the earth and to its roots,  but it adds another connection, to a primary source of qi above them, qi which flows back to the living world and to the Coco world (the world of “widow” and “widower” spirit personalities). 

How can we add this extra dimension to our lives, to our “inner life” as Quakers would say? I had the stop typing on that day, in part because I did need to file taxes, and finish a new paper on quantum theory and consciousness, now in press at Activitas Nervosa Superior, a Springer journal.

In truth, this question is of the utmost importance to us, but requires us to understand several basic facts of life beyond the scope of this blog post.

I will write a new paper on some of those facts of life, but for those who want some concrete ideas now… I have recommended that they go to www.wderbos.com/Mind.htm, and notice the links to my blogspot blog. At that blog, search on “noosphere” and “dark matter.” Or go to http://www.werbos.com/Tucson2018.pdf . (The video of the actual talk is posted at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5QxhYner7U, coming after a brief lead-in and a video of a robot speaking.) I will append a bit more theory to the end of this post.

In brief: when we enter into states of “meditation” where we really feel ourselves as part of the noosphere, the vast mind connecting our entire earth or solar system, and respond to the values and feelings and thoughts at that level, we can become channels for that higher qi, which will continue at least as long as life on earth continues, and perhaps even more.  

In the first two weeks of the cruise, I finished reading “Vita Nostra,” a one sided but great and useful novel about spiritual development. No, we are not words, but we are… partly something like that. And we need to pursue many types of discipline to connect more completely to that which may not be truly eternal, but will last billions of years, if we do not screw up all life on earth. And, as Jesus said, we need to allow a certain kind of love permeate us deeply at all levels.. including a very strenuous love for the spirit of truth which, he had, would be what really comes in later days like ours.

After the cruise, I posted some pictures with explanations which describe some of the disciplines of the soul which emerge from neural network mathematics, applied to the world of experience. But I did not show photos illustrating ways to see the night sky, which was also a great part of the cruise for me... something I tried to photograph a little, but far beyond the capacity of my cell phone. 

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A quick summary of the underlying theory:

Many years ago, soon after Newton's great breakthrough, people followed up by proposing that the brain too is governed by mechanics, and thus works like a clock. (In the twentieth centtury, many proposed it is a thermostat.)

I really believe in Newton, in brains, in clocks and in thermostats, but view the idea of the brain as a clock or as a thermostat as a kind of category error.

Likewise, I have gotten very deep into quantum theory and psi of all kinds, but mostly view the premature claims of connection as a category error.

More precisely, I view the standard of model physics today as (1) not exactly true, for technical reasons; (2) a THREE LEVEL structure, of which the lowest is special relativity, the next is quantum field theory (QFT) and the highest is the specific EWT+QCD Lagrangian which people inject INTO SR and QFT to get specific predictions.

Neither SR not QFT AS SUCH can explain psychic phenomena. If we APPLY QFT in the domain of the best known forces beyond gravity (not so plausible as a major organizer for little things), and if we don't add more than SR and QFT, we basically get QED. Quantum electrodynamics has been fairly well validated, empirically. In a way, it is for this millennium what Newton's breakthrough was at his time. Many have hoped that psi could be explained in QED, but that simply doesn't work. Thus quantum theory AS SUCH cannot explain it. Dean Radin has often explained why QED is not enough. 

As an example, consider how a remote viewer or a telepath can perceive very small scale details in a selected site far far away. Well funded technology research has tried to get closer to that kind of capability in technology, drawing on practical and empirical understanding of how QED works far beyond what Sarfatti begins to dream of. Yet they can't get close. In technical terms, there are problems figuring out the SWITCHING required here, to connect point A on earth to point B, at will. There is only one plausible way to do that in realistic physics (either Einstein realism or quantum realism): there has to be some kind of switching .out there, which begs the question of HOW such a switching network could be there, especially one connecting all the humans on earth, what we are most sure of. (Caveat: two backup possibilities could be cosmic mind idealism, CMI, an ALTERNATIVE to Einstein and quantum realism; and positive Lagrangian synchronicity, a relatively conservative idea I doubt and you would doubt more, rejecting all types of psi except for Jungian synchronicity.)  

There are not many ways this could come to be, within the scope of Einstein or quantum realism. It basically comes down to my noosphere species theory. The idea is that the "switching network" which connects us is not some weird artifact produced by UFOs (made of what anyway?),  but a manifestation of life, of evolved biological life, based on a material substrate other than the matter we can easily see in our laboratories (a requirement when we can in fact not see it yet with our instruments). 

Some people think of "dark matter" as some kind of particle number 75 or the like. But what our phrase "dark matter" really refers to is the >90% of the mass of the cosmos which we understand hardly at all as yet, except to know it is implicated in the birth of stars and forms a vast pulsing network or ocean of life crossconnecting all the galaxies except for a few weak zombie galaxies. The idea is that the "noosphere" idea of de Chardin does describe our earthly experience, including psi, and needs fixing ONLY in regards to where the noosphere of our solar system comes ffrom -- that it emerged as a member of a cosmos-spanning species of noospheres. In fact, from what we know of evolution, we should EXPECT such life to emerge in such a vast ocean of life and matter as we know know exists. To explain human experience of psi, we basically must assume a kind of symbiosis or "alchemical marriage" between the brain we see (with mundane eyes) and the brain we don't. Not much choice. In fact, my exploration of first person experience and of reports from others through history over the world is fully consistent with that theory, a theory which engages with the specifics of the menu of various types of psi experience. 

To explain psi that way tends to involve a pathway of signals from brain to personal soul either directly or indirectly to "invisible muscles" of dark matter which can then perturb ordinary matter. SOMETHING has to perturb ordinary matter for PK to be possible, either if we believe Einstein realism or if we believe quantum realism, and that something has to be something we don;t see with today's instruments. To say that its "dark matter" is no more narrow or specialized than saying it is a hardly known form of material substrate. 

The challenge we are best equipped to address is not so much how to strengthen the "invisible" muscles but how to connect better with (and train) the "invisible neural networks" which connect our brains or our conscious selves to what those "invisible" muscles do. In essence, it's not about pilot waves; it's about training (and understanding) neural networks.

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One reader asked:

I like your final statement that we need to understand neural networks but I know from your other post about airplanes [ search on true legends ultrafast on this blog] that you feel multi-pronged approaches are required as well and you need not express that every time for me to expect that is contextual. While you question if there may be some substrate of soul through dark matter I wonder at your distaste for any substrate not specifically labeled dark matter. ..

Fair enough. Let me try to clarify.

It makes life complicated that I am not 100% committed to one possible theory about the ultimate laws of physics. But I do give a subjective probability of about 70% for now that Einsteinian realism or Fock-space/quantum realism is correct. (i.e. 70% that ONE of them is the ultimate truth of our cosmos.)

IN THAT CASE, I see little alternative to the noosphere species possibility, once we accept the experiential evidence for psi. 

The noosphere species theory basically says that noospheres (and maybe some other stuff) are a complex form of life, an evolved emergent pattern, made up mainly of dark matter just as our mundane brains are made up mainly of electrons, protons and neutrons. 

The leaders of modern vedantism seem very deeply committed to the idea that consciousness as such IS a SUBSTANCE. I disagree very strongly with that idea. It is like saying that our consciousness resides the mass-energy of our protons, electrons and neutrons as such, and that any collection of electrons, protons and neutrons would therefore be equally conscious. 

To be more precise -- Einsteinian realism proper would posit that dark matter and energy are ultimately attributes and patterns of continuous "force fields," unknown as yet. It would not include any "aether" like the aether assumed by older interpretations of Maxwell's Laws, before the model version based on E and H or A. In that view, dark matter is in the same (ontological) category of "substance" as electrons, protons and neutrons, something which at a deeper level is itself a set of emergent patterns (coupled to waves, just as electrons are coupled to electromagnetic waves). Noosphere consciousness is NOT identified with dark matter, but COMPOSED of it. 

Mental dualism: what it is and a Platonic variation

Background: many of us believe that the human mind includes but is larger than just what the brain produces. I hereby define the term "mental dualism" as the proposition that the human mind is a dynamical system which is some kind of symbiosis of "what you see" (with mundane eyes) and "what you don't". I tend to use the word "soul" for that second part. If you google the term "dualism" you will see an incredible variety of definitions and beliefs, most of which look pretty uninteresting to me, and in some cases crazy in a dangerous way. That's why I add the modifier "mental" here to try to bypass confusion and ambiguity.
         My two word piece of terminology is not perfect, but enough to start. According to editors of a special issue of Activitas Nervosa Superior (a Springer journal), my paper on the physical foundations of consciousness is now in press. I assert vehemently that we do not know some important things about those foundations. If fully sane, we will not only admit our uncertainty but try hard to make sense of multiple possibilities. I mostly adhere to one of the varieties of hard core mathematical physical realism, either quantum realism or even realism ala Einstein and DeBroglie. But what about the possibility that the universe/cosmos is itself a great mind, a system whose very mathematical foundations are like neural network mathematics rather than Minkowski space mathematics? I agree with Stan Klein that study of such Cosmic Mind Idealism (CMI, not to be confused with the Cosmic Consciousness theory) may shed light even on finite minds in Einsteinian universes, but sanity says we should give it some direct attention as well.
    In that spirit, this month I have been slowly reading and enjoying a new novel, Vita Nostra, which, among other things, expresses a CMI viewpoint on life and mind. I immediately gave the novel five stars on Amazon, for reasons I will not repeat here. But when I got 80% finished yesterday, I was sad that it was making less sense to me.This morning, in my usual samadhi start to the day, it made more sense. Suddenly it is like the time when Freud made more sense to me.

On a rattling old ship cruising off of Brazil with no wifi.. many reasons to be brief today. Key issue: in the "Alcymical marriage" of brain and soul, who takes the inituative and how? I have long felt pity for folks who try to explain psi as things done by specific suborgans in the brain. In an Einsteinian model, it is more a question of whether the brain is in a kind of criticality state sensitive to what the dark matter making up the soul can easily connect to,  not only physically but mentally. The Platonic CMI viewpoint in this novel takes that same idea a step further. In a way, it says that all of us with a "heaven" aspect (not just the underworld aspect depicted in the great cartoon movie Coco) "are" archetypes, and that our growth is the action/manifestation/reflection of our personal soul archetype. The authors tend to assume that a great mind must be made up of words, because they do not know the mathematics of the deep structure underlying words, neural network mathematics, but it is clear to me this morning how to sharpen up their model, as once I sharpened Freud's theory of psychodynamics. But not to type on blog this morning!! The key idea is that the initiative may be even more from the soul side than I have assumed. Is it really THAT simple? Not quite. But further details are beyond scope of this post.

To space engineers: is there real hope for China in space or economic growth in general?

At one point, one of you said that China, having a top-down government, can naturally take leadership in space, because of the advantages of their system. Likewise, Narayan wrote:

And in that, sorry to point out, The People Republic of China is very much the leader, if they follow up their recent success with a systematic progression of infrastructure development on the Moon, not just the "Flags Footprints and Ticker Tape Parade" model.  Given their record, which now includes serious geo-engineering in the Tibetan Plateau and maybe Xinjiang to bring water - and wet weather, and their construction of facilities on ocean islands, I am fairly confident that they didn't go there just to Show The Flag, nor to Explore Our Origins and Our Destiny. 

Thanks for ur patience if u got this far... 

 Having been to China many times, and visited many places which few Westerners get to see, I regret to say that I do not agree.

Ultimately, my top loyalty here is to the human species. Will we survive the coming century or two of extreme challenge, and will we grasp the window of opportunity to truly settle the rest of our solar system in a long-term sustainable way? That is one of the few very big values at the very top of my chain of goals and subgoals. 

Based on those values, I have asked myself: which would I choose, a solar system with NO humans, or a solar system in which the only humans happen to be descendants of people now living in core Han China?

For me, it is no choice. I would choose a Chinese galaxy over a galaxy with no humans, if that were the choice. And so, when the US seems hellbent on destroying itself, by redirecting space and science funds to nonproductive corrupt activities (many inspired by makework or a simple desire for more PAC money), I have often hoped that China would reduce the risks to humanity, by taking a positive role itself.

Many look at the great economic growth of the last couple of decades and the headlines you mention, and conclude that there is real hope there. Also, when the Marshall Institute tried to get real attention to realistic reduction in launch costs (something Charles Miller and I both supported and even helped make happen, though the bad guys then shut down Marshall's security operations), I really wanted to be able to say "The Chinese are coming! If you don't do this, there will be new sputnik crisis, after they can orbit 100 times the mass per dollar as we can for any purpose whatsoever." But in all honesty, I could not say that. For awhile, I said "there is a 30% risk of a sputnik in space from China," but the hope has steadily declined since then.

There are THREE main reasons why prospects for space progress and economic progress in general look much worse in China than they did a few years ago:

(1) The details of the transition from Jiang Zemin and his followers to the collection of people whom Xi Jinping depends on

      (see https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/12/report-to-watch-on-xi-jinping-and-three.html and more below);

(2) The global reaction against globalization, for which China was the biggest beneficiary;

(3) No change in the lingering problems with China space policy, VERY similar in nature to the problems in the US.

The biggest fluctuations in the world stock market in recent months have resonated more with uncertainty about growth in China than any other issue; for the moment, the zig is a bit back up, due to hopes of a new treaty between US and China, but it seems somewhat unlikely that Trump (or Elizabeth Warren) would sign a treaty as one-sided in its benefits as those of the past. 

I have had very intense debates over the past few years, in which I tended to argue in favor of Xi Jinping while others argiued against. Well, I must concede that some of my smart friends are right, in practice, at the end of the day. Before Xi was selected, he put out a position paper in QuiShu, the Journal of thr Communist Party of China, which argued for a kind of unification of the subjective and objective frameworks for policy analysis (a bit like yin and yang, but actually like a talk I gave to the main Confucius Institute in Shandong province, reflective of my paper published in Russia www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf.) Jiang Zemin and his followers were great supporters of science and objectivity as the foundation for everything. They packed the Politburo with engineers who graduated from Tsinghua ("the MIT of China," a school founded as a place for Chinese students to learn English and prepare for graduate school in the English speaking world). Anyone who wants to understand what happened to cause such great growth in China (unlike Russia after less intelligent reforms, based more on DC politician types than MIT engineers), really should study Paulson's book cited in my blog post. (Really. Don't just trust twitter feeds from friends who are loyal but uninformed. Paulson was there, as his book explains.) A main part of why I was able to visit China so much was that Chinese scientists had a mandate to  bring scientists and engineers from the US to come talk, and to learn about China.

But Jiang went to far in some ways. Yes, his follower Hu put forward a "one world" philosophy which was sincere and constructive and pushed hard for better partnership (even alliance) with the US.

But he also slavishly imitated our kind of space program, with an outer program  designed to recruit NASA groupies and enhance world PR with lots of glorious moon talk  but no real economic or military impact, and a hidden program, in Sichuan province (where China has traditionally put things they did not want Russia to see or to threaten), slavishly copying the NASP RLV approach which never worked. 

(Too much reliance on copying is an old problem...) He took a  violently anti-spirit position, attacking not only Western religions but also homegrown Chinese culture. I still remember visiting Shenyang, where Bo Xilia (a top Jiang lieutenant) once ruled, and I was stunned to see that the usual crowds of people in the park were almost all doing western dance or yoga, not qigong or Tai chi as in the past; "No, they explained, we do not even do that in our undergraduate program any more. We are forced to do yoga instead, because that is all that the authorities in this area now allow, since Bo." (I doubt that their yoga included vedanta either...). That was the number one reason I had hopes for Xi, who declared that he was serious about his courses  both in Buddhism and in Marxism (which is quite different from Maoism!), and fought Bo Xilai. But even what Paulson described went too far; it called for some kind of balance, just as"ethical investing" and such has its place in the West.

Sadly, Xi or the folks manipulating him went too far.  The news of the latest Party Congress was quite clear and quite graphic. My blog post summarizes a few points which you can see more graphically and completely in the coverage by the Financial Times, which is biased in a way  but reliable on these points.  I am not sure what to believe about the driving elements here,  but much of it reminds me of 

the policies of an ancient guy named Zhu Xi, who ironically was like the Jiang Zemin of his time. Anyone who wants to understand should google on Zhu Xi. He believed in a form of family values more like Sicily than like Idaho, and that biased, oversimplified belief is what has given us criminal tongs and warlords and famines in the past in China. How long can economic growth continue under regression to that kind of ultra-yin, as devoid of soul as Jiang was? 

I do hope the story will not remain so bad. being more of Gderman culture than Chinese, I keep hoping that thesis and antithesis will give way to synthesis, and more serious objective strategy,

including competence in space and cooperation on earth. But as I observe the rise and fall of civilizations ov er the centuries, I would not take that for granted. Hope, but do not assume. of source, I say the same about Trtump and GND in space as well. 

Best of luck,

   Paul

Understanding climate change and fimbulwinter by watching your shower

Just yesterday a CNN announcer said that Trump needs to learn the difference between climate and weather. But actually, it’s trickier than that. Another guy in Ireland looked forward to the coming warm Riviera in Normandy, but actually what is coming to him relentlessly and relatively soon is more like the fimbulwinter of the Ragnarok prophecy, just for Western Europe (which depends on the Gulf stream).

People who are not trained as mathematicians jn subjects like chaos theory tend to assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday, that trends will always keep going in the same direction. Their subconscious minds have often not had the kind of experience which lets them really appreciate, emotionally, what may come next. When things push into the initial election of Obama, say, some people get full of euphoria and wishful thinking, imagining that that is the beginning of a trend, when in reality it is more like a swing going all the way up one way, leading to momentum in the opposite direction. Likewise the election of Trump, and the recent midterms.

Today I still plan to do simple concrete things, like helping my wife with taxes and organizing physical objects around the house, but the “voice of God” (oversimplified description of something real and important) had some exact words which I feel I should pass on [adding some side comments; I apologize for not remembering how to be more concise].

When right-brained, concrete thinkers (including autistic people or people who actually practice “be here now” mindfulness all the time) take a shower, they “just take a shower.” In the shower, they do not think great thoughts about the future, the coming day, the grand world, science, or people they know. They really look at those weird controls which turn the water on or off and change the temperature. [Comment: water. Temperature. What do water and temperature have to do with the Gulf Stream or global warming. Can you imagine any possibility of a real connection?] They feel the water, its flow and temperature, on every part of their body, and notice when they like it and when they don’t. They notice parts of themselves adjusting to the flow, and they notice when they have to change the valve a little to make it better. Unless they are very lucky, they notice it doesn’t work best just to turn it on initially and forget it. If they travel, like us, they notice that showers tend to be different, and that different showers require different adjustments. They do all this without words or mathematics; they just do it directly and physically, the same way that a raccoon would, if raccoons took shower. [Comment: we once had a Jacuzzi in our backyard, but a family of raccoons started to use it, and one of their kids, not knowing mathematics got stuck. Not long after, we decided just to build over that little bit of land.]

Left brained people (like what Temple Grandin calls people with Williams syndrome) liberate their thoughts and their spirit from the here and now. Usually on earth they rely mainly on a great flow of words to express grand thoughts which they tend to be very proud of. They sometimes forget about the importance of reality testing, but many of them question the concept of reality itself. They hardly notice the shower, because they have more important things to think about. In discussing climate change, they tend to notice other people more than they notice the sun or the sleet on their faces, let alone what icebergs are actually doing.

Sane people fully integrate the left and right brain, to a degree which is rare on our planet, in part because humans are only part of the way through a major transition in the evolution of intelligence, and in part because our education systems and culture do not bring us to our full potential.  People with second order sanity notice not only the sleet on their faces but the flow of spirit or qi, but those who talk about those things without a firm attainment of first order sanity tend to be confused or even dangerous.

And so… taking a shower is a great example or testbed of some of the basic principles of nonlinear systems, chaos and control.

When I get frustrated that the shower water is suddenly too cold or too hot, I always remember Norbert Wiener’s classic book Cybernetics, and the insanely complex elaborations which engineers sometimes write down which basically just express what Wiener said about overshoot and undershoot and time delay. I even remember what the great chemical engineer, Tom McAvoy, taught me about sticky valves in big chemical plants which he taught the big companies how to control. [See www.werbos.com/Mind.htm or html for a link to chapter 10 of HIC, which I coauthored with him.] Really, it is like the swing, where moving too far in one direction may work at first, and then immediately cause an opposite motion. It may cause excess mass in one part of the plant, and not enough in another. The flow of water in the North Atlantic and the Arctic is just like that, a mathematically precise mix of inflow and outflow balancing each other, warming some places and cooling others… and then reversing if we don’t REALLY wake up and really do the best we can in a rational way to save western Europe, and avert the rest of the ragnarok prophecy.  

[I previously posted a more technical substantive summary of the fimbulwinter threat at
https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/01/response-to-policy-options-for-new-us.html.
as usual, I started from math and physics and tried to translate step by step..]

[OK: duty done. Back to earthy things. Notice that I don’t object to “be here now;” it’s just that we need to be effective in our focus AND capable of shifting it consciously, and we need to use our whole mind when we make sense of what we see in the here and now. Levitin has a nice best seller grounded in neuroscience which explains part of this. Actually, the science of taking a good shower is more than just this simple early stuff, but “the voice of god” did not ask me to get into such details today.]
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I was bemused by Trump saying that Senator Klobuchar "looked like a snowman" at her presidential announcement in Minnesota, a place we have been to recently. In fact, her announcement on CNN looked a lot like my little video of "happiness in Iceland"! Could she or other folks we know in Minnesota somehow cool things down? Way beyond the scope of this blog... 

Warren's speech and the Green New Deal: evaluation for space people

When a space engineer conc erned about energy talked about the relation between his new book on energy and the Green New Deal (GND), I did not comment, because I have not really studied the GND material. One of the best people in the core IEEE energy policy group recently posted a link:

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1. H.Res.109 — 116th Congress (2019-2020)Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal.Sponsor: Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria [D-NY-14] (Introduced 02/07/2019) Cosponsors: (67)Committees: House - Energy and Commerce, Science, Space, and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services, Judiciary, Ways and Means, Oversight and ReformLatest Action: House - 02/07/2019 Referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce, and in addition to the Committees on Science, Space, and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services, the Judiciary, Ways... (All Actions)

Note it is  a resolution, not a Bill.

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I certainly noticed Elizabeth Warren's commitment to the GND idea in her speech, which I heard in its entirety on CNN (while also doing sudoku and emails, as avoidance behaviors while trying to ponder difficult basic problems in quantum optics).

Warren's speech was extremely powerful, but at the end I remembered the three questions I would ask of any proposal to NSF: What? how? Why?

In the "how" department, would she as President be capable of   leading an aggressive creative effort to prevent major climate damage, taking full advantage of important "out of the  box" options like realistic SSP (which requires structure testing at WPAFB among other things), like productizing and rationally incentivizing biochar, and like developing and testing new geoengineering options? My response is: I don't know. Reading that GND link probably wouldn't tell me, either. It seems she is a lawyer, as was Obama (who also electrified people with good early speeches), but she doesn't play golf and she pays more attention to SOME numbers, but for now I just don't know. 

My sense of humor injects: maybe GND is more a product of Ocasio-Cortez, who looks a little like the woman in Bezos' lewd pictures. Since Bezos is pro-space, what would happen if he started hanging out with HER? But I doubt they would bring their thermal and mechanical stresses in repeated reentry to WPAFB for testing. 

So much I do not know...

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In truth, one of the emails I responded to yesterday concerned a quantum optics experiment proposed by Julia Mossbridge. That's what really got me thinking about our three questions. In that case, the question was "what."

These three questions were all part of our evaluation work, a very fundamental aspect of any effective organization, discussed at:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=2268415836522154&set=a.176850262345399&type=3&theater

But is evaluation just a matter of scoring or choosing according to some specific value function J?

It is more complicated. Even the more powerful evaluation methods of "vector intelligence" would give a whole vector of values, lambda. There were people in constructive, functional psychology decades ago who would ask about "affordances;" instead of asking "is it good?" they would ask "good for what?" That's a useful practical way to think at times, and there is new math behind it; however, the new math is so powerful that I have decided not to push it much now, when so much of the world is hell bent on misusing AI in ways which could create hell on earth. Could Warren or Ocasio-Cortes support effective ways to get us out of THOSE boxes? Again, I don't know. There is certainly no base solution. 

Trump has also made serious promises to build a new space force, but will HE get out of the box, past the lobbyists and the swamp, enough to make it real? We hope but we worry.

Are the House Democrats committing suicide? Why?

If Nancy Pelosi has a high level of sanity, and if she saw the first Star Wars movie, the situation she is in now should remind her of the scene where the good guys got stuck in a garbage room, with the walls closing in, and no way out they could see except a door leading to the Imperial star troopers trying to kill them. It IS a box, and their survival depends on seeing that there IS a way out of the box. Metaphors are important to understanding the situation well enough to see the way out. (Equations are better, but life taught me long ago to translate the math into metaphors when speaking to 99% of the people of earth.) I did propose a way out a few days ago (https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2019/01/letter-sent-to-my-congressman-about-how.html), but maybe I need to explain a bit more why we need it, how it would work and why certain details are important.

I am very impressed by those CNN reporters who have asked House members on their show: when will the Democrats put something themselves on the table, a real compromise? I was deeply depressed by the confused feelings (ultimately suicidal) of some of the people who replied by saying "this is about border security" and "we can't get substantive because it would set a bad precedent." No, not quite. those are understandable thoughts, but survival depends on getting past understandable inhibitions to seeing a way out beyond them.

First, IS it about border security? Does it HAVE to be, or that a losing constraint?

Let me stry to explain with another metaphor, more useful and precise than the Star Wars metaphor here. Relations between Democrats and Republicans have become more and more like relations between Russians and Americans at the height of the Cold War. We can make lemonade out of those lemons: we can learn from the very serious and deep literature from that time on how to avoid total destruction and get better outcomes. (In those days, I took seminars from Hermann Kahn and Tom Schelling, and courses from many others aware of that literature, including advanced game theory. )

At the height of the Cold War, a guy named Henry Kissinger showed up and proposed "linkage politics." He proposed that negotiations with Russia should COMBINE several key ideas together in one negotiation. Pelosi CAN extend the agenda beyond just border security, if she so chooses. She has very good reason to do so here, since NO motion which the House could pass on border security alone would be anything but a disaster in the end.

Back at the time of Kissinger, there were lots of intense debates for and against linkage politics. In the end, there were good arguments for and good arguments against; the best choice depends on the situation. Linkage politics CAN cause breakdown due to complexity and confusion; that is why my proposal calls for just three very clear, very transparent demands ONLY to be attached to funding for the wall (and restarting the government). Even that complexity is justified ONLY when the issues in the narrow scope (here, border security) are simply not balanced enough in terms of importance to the parties. Pelosi knows full well that even a strengthened version of Trump's proposal, giving permanent relief on Dakka, would appear as caving in and embolden Trump in ways she would not like. That is why issues from OUTSIDE the realm of border security are the best hope of creating enough REAL balance.

One reason I like my little proposal for a House bill is that it puts a spotlight on Trump and the Senate, forcing them to make a very public choice. I love situations where people are asked to judge themselves, and not be judged by others. (It is a basic option in game theory, dating back in a way to the old Pari Pascal.) IF Trump hates the ideas of upholding the spirit of the Constitution (as embedded in the Muller report and public disclosure) or averting a bloodbath of the Kurds endangering our ability to limit the expansion of the worst sort of fundamentalist jihadism, then even if he vetoes the bill he will be sending a VERY strong signal to folks who previously supported him. Doing that at a time of shutdown would not embolden him at all. (Likewise the Senate of course. It is good that Pelosi is already on to THEIR bag of tricks.) But if he agrees, under the new public pressure, I doubt it would embolden Trump to create such opportunities for Pelosi again.

It's nice that so many people in DC rightly care about Daca folks. They should continue to talk about that in the future. But here and now, the threat of a new genocide of our allies in the Middle East is simply bigger and more urgent. Could it be that more people know about Muller and about ISIS than about Daca? People like the swing voters? If each side believes the advisors who say "just wait for the other guy to totally publicly cave"... well, they should know by now not to just believe whatever they wish were true.

Letter sent to my Congressman about how to end the shutdown

Urgent Need for Better Tactics in Standing Up to Trump

By now, you have have heard from hundreds of federal workers asking “Why do WE have to suffer to save us from Trump’s wall? Isn’t the cost of the shutdown more than the $5 billion for the wall?” CNN hates Trump, but they too have been repeating these concerns, especially important to your office.

Nancy Pelosi has good reasons to look ahead further, and stand up to Trump. But, like Cameron after the Brexit vote, she hasn’t been able to relax enough to look ahead more calmly and consider more creative options.

Above all, I urge you to work with Hoyer, and urge her to pass a bill immediately in the House which combines two key elements: (1) yes, $5 billion for the wall; (2) specific additional provisions which REALLY stand up to points which irritate people in the middle of the road and which mobilize new support from the people worried about Trump’s recent betrayal of US national security. Consider: if Trump or the Senate say no, you will at least be able to look at your constituents and say what this says about Trump.

(2) is very tricky. (Years ago, I got my PhD from a guy at Harvard who was the world’s expert on nations falling apart through internal conflict, and in 2009 worked for a year as a Senate staffer. How to explain a complex game in less than a page? I’d love to come in and discuss more if there is a value in that.)

What I would propose is:

(1)  Include the recent proposal that all Federal candidates and present officers MUST make their tax returns public;

(2)   Guarantee support for the Muller investigation and public release of its report;

(3)  Require concretely (with enforcement mechanism) that the Administration live up to Bolton’s recent promise not to leave Syria until ISIS is truly defeated and the Kurds are protected from genocide.

If Trump refuses these points, he signals that he does have a lot to hide, and that he has defected from the effort to defend us from the Third Caliphate movement. The genocide of the allies which have been most crucial to our struggle on the ground would be a disaster for national security. If he agrees, you save a lot of lives. If he doesn’t, he exposes himself as… someone a lot of his base might abandon, if you make the point clear.

The situation with the Third Caliphate movement is complex. I do not blame him for having made a deal, but the KIND of deal which he and Putin have made is a disaster for the future of all of humanity if it sticks. It is not the kind of win-win Pateto optimal deal which some of my old teachers (Schelling and Raiffa) studied, or which the US was founded on (Locke and Hobbes), but more like the novel 1984. PLEASE take action on this! Win or lose, we need someone (hopefully including Pelosi) to stand up NOW for these principles.

Sincerely,

Dr. Paul J. Werbos