Some tricks for living longer and better with new science: science and shower

 MANY people would use this title without really knowing, just to make money, but that is not my motive here. I just feel a mral duty to pass on a small part of what I have learned since I turned 70, 5 years ago, drawing on unique sources of infrmatin and science.

In 2019, after a bad fall, my GP said: "Good news and bad news. Good news: you missed dying by a millimeter, and the dds were 10 to 1 you wuld die instanly. Bad news: for the rest of your life you will be incapacitated. Your life has changed. But 90% of the folks your age have the same or worse; they just don't like to talk about it." And indeed,  I also got advice from a doctor who has credentials to be number one in the US, who also led me to expect limited mobility ever after. And my eyes started o blur away, a few years after catarct surgery. I certainly had read the best research on long lifetime (like the great heroic efforts of Steve Jobs and such). But then I decided to look deeper.

NO, I did not just dedicate my life to longevity (even though we do have a big character poster given to me at the Jade Palace Hotel of Beijing proclaiming that idea, with an incredible history). I thought: "I decided the spend 5% of my time and energy to understand and avoid covid. One can do a lot in well-focused 5%, with resources. I will do the same with aging." 

There are short-term and easy measures, and longer ones.

Today, I will post what I sent a friend on back problems, which SEEMED permanent  but which I reversed (at leas for a few years??):

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A friend wrote to another friend cc me: 2C%20cold%20weather%20can,exiting%20the%20spine%2C%20causing%20pain.

If you are not feeling better by now, I'd recommend asking your doctor to give you MRI orders, so it can be determined what's causing the pain and how to address it, e.g., via PT. 

Paul could give you a recommendation of the miracle therapist who treated him.

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I replied:

At that time, I read SO much stuff. The links must be somewhere in my email and download files, but a quick search doesn't give them to me.

But: yes, exercise and glucosamine+condroiton (sulfonated, the usual odd formula). 

Papers on back pain made it very clear it is DIVERSE. Very different for different people. Searching on bulging disk or herniated disc yields many serious sources.

MOST people either get better relatively soon on their own, but of the rest (like me), it is caused most often by a ruptured and/or slipped spinal disc. That is due to lack of the gel which usually fills the discs and keeps them right.

It is often misdiagnosed, and people often get suckered into paying for expensive and even damaging treatments even in reputable medical centers. Misdiagnosis because pinching a nerve in one place can cause pain elsewhere. That's part of neuroscience 101, for which I have lots of books. 

The glucosamine plus chondroiton, UNLIKE other good joint compounds, can replenish the gel, but repositioning  the disc is still a key issue. It took me years to sort out which exercises work. I don't really know the exact formula from exercise inputs to outcomes, but I will never forget the final step when it was suddenly good enough to restore me.

The final step was when I came to Lisa Huff, in Select Physical Therapy at 611 S Carlin Springs Road. In December, I was overwhelmed by guilt, that I had not done enough to thank her. So we stopped by her office, to try to find out how at least to send her $1000at  least, as a kind of Christmas present and belated thank you. But she no longer works for that company. They said she moved to California, and they would try to get us an address, but that never happened.

I DO have the exercise files she sent, but those look like standard company files (added into the company web site). It was what she showed and explained in person that really worked.

I would be happy to say more, but here is a brief version.

I mostly just use walking and exercise in the shower to stay normal. BOTH are serious arts, much better if done right. 

In the shower, there is some similarity to the ancient "cat cow" ideas Luda told me about years ago. But under hot water.. the (cat?) pushes  solar plexus forward, head and feet back, to extremes, creating an arch from head to toe, held for 45 seconds.(That is how long I grind coffee, and can measure precisely without a watch, but more is fine.) That IS the most important by far. But also the (cow?) arches forward, doing curvature in the opposite direction, hands over legs. Rubbing up and down by the sides of the spine also helps a lot.

In my routine, I also stretch the leg of one side over the opposite knee, and stretch and wash a lot. (45 second is good for muscle exercise but also for soap, and I like to get both benefits at once, ALONG WITH tai qi or qi gong feelings and such). 

Hope this helps.

Best regards, Paul

P.S. I also avoid general anesthesia with horror when there is any choice at all, now that I have seen some of the research and seen what happens to a lot of people. 

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I am sorry I did not keep the link (at least on this laptop),  but this morning I see a key part of the information:

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17145758/

From many scientific sources I learned that the specific TYPE of (sulfated) glucosamine chondroitin that they sell in big bottles at Costco really works. That, plus well-designed exercise routines, brought me back to total normalcy. 

The real problem is that our life demands figuring out the details of the science, just like my old job at NSF.

It is not easy. Most supplement sellers do not understand the science even of their own product!

(That is true of climate solutions as well!) But the science is there.

[From 2019 to then, tai qi and qi gong exercises also kept me alive under stressful conditions, like climbing Mount Fuji through rubble after a typhoon https://photos.app.goo.gl/rwkhfdcUN74jGrvx9 . That is a key PART of what my new shower ritual includes. Feel the qi, feel the soap, feel the hot water, and feel the stretch.] 

.....

Coci Beach 2022: Our Truest Christian/Buddhist Christmas Ceremony, and hard science to look for qi

Jesus: The Big Picture 

 Who was the real person Jesus? 

Many of us believe that part or all of his soul still lives on -- but who is he, really, and how could we connect in the best highest way we can with him? How can we see through the fog of partial reflected images (a lot like some Escher prints) to the truest, living person still there? (Many of those funhouse reflections of him are truly ugly.) On this day (December 25), it is natural that we meditate deeply and connect as best we can to the true living Jesus. This meditation is an important part of our connection to the rest of humanity today as well. 

The full Jesus story I have seen is one of a human living on this earth, who worked hard to elevate his own spirit, and connect with “our Father in Heaven.” 

The Chinese have stories of many “risen gods”, like Ehrlang, who grew spiritually enough that they live on in the “City of Heaven“. We would be fools not to learn all we can from him, and build a better connection, even as we do the same with Buddha and their entire circle, which itself connects higher and further. The spirit of Jesus also has his avatars, living on this earth, capable of “partial gating” to him. And his reflections in the realm of spirit also include the great archetype “Baby Jesus”, whom we should never neglect either, but today I will not make that connection in this post.

 Jesus warned us that many would come in his name, and try to sell us horrible, destructive distortions of him. In truth, while he COULD see into details and precision far beyond most of us on earth, he could also see that the evolution of human souls is a complex business, taking time to make real. When they asked why he spoke so much in parables, he said that there would come a time in the future when we could be more explicit, but it would take time for us to get that far. 

My most spiritual Christmas Experience This Year 

Obstacles on the Path

 My truest, most authentic spiritual Christmas ceremony this year was in the Caribbean, on December 19 at Coci Beach on St. Thomas. See the cover photo of our Christmas Caribbean album for one part, one aspect of that great experience. 

 Like many great events, it was preceded by ups and downs which were very discouraging, which  required me to remember how many things require time and patience and detours to attain. That is also a very important spiritual principle, related to the multithread nature of our existence even in the living spiritual worlds we are part of, demanding an understanding of how time and mind actually work. 

 On the Holland America cruise arranged by my wife Ludmila, we were supposed to visit St. John’s that day. Just once, we visited St. Johns before, to the ocean natural heritage site which had snorkeling far better than any other place I had ever seen, even in the Pacific. That too was a spiritual experience, where for one hour I could just let go and fully immerse myself in the very rich variety of life. Connecting so deeply with life and nature, I later studied the new science and learned a lot more. I became a “sea creature" so completely that I needed about a half hour to recover from sea sickness when I emerged to the beach and stood on land. But this time, HAL cancelled all the tours to go there, because risky storms endangered the schedule of return. Ludmila found a way we could get there anyway, but because I had brought the wrong passport by accident, a delay in reaching the ship would have endangered my being allowed back in the US in time for dentist appointment the next day. These ducks really did line up to say “No St. Johns this time. "

 The tour/travel speaker on HAL described St. Thomas.. in a way which didn't sound promising. There are historic sites we had visited before, not much interest that day. The best they knew was Coci beach and Coral World. But when we were at Coci beach in a past year, all we saw were a few very small fish. Coral World was a small expensive museum of no real interest. So we took a local group taxi to Coci beach, and I did carry a snorkel in my back pack, but did not expect to use it, especially after our son complained about water leakage and I did not have floats or such.

 Manifestation of The Spirit 

 BUT THEN… After a brief basic physical exercise (underwater swimming), I walked up to my neck in the warm clear water. I found a clear spot with no other people or even small fish around.

 I decided to try to repeat a new five-movement qi gong exercise we were taught on the ship on the two previous days: “opening the heart.” (I do not see it on the web, but https://qigong.com/the-basic-movements-of-qigong-exercises/ may be similar). I had seen simpler qi gong exercises before, as introductions to tai qi classes which I found very useful to physical health and spiritual connection both, but this was the first time I had seen five whole movements including this one. 

And then, when I tried “opening the heart”.. immediately a giant school of moderate to large fish (like the moderate fish in the picture) swam right at me, flanked by Barracuda to the left and right. 

 After I returned to the beach, Ludmila persuaded me to try to use MY snorkel mask (which did not leak) and go to deeper water, past the rocks on our right, into the large cove between the rocks and the floating buoys blocking access to Coral World. It was like St. John’s all over again! Not as many types of coral, but many enough, like fans, brain coral, bushy things, and others. AND… a setting where I could just let go, for two rounds of about 10/15 minutes each, and enter a true Buddhist-like state of no being”, really merging my being with nature, more even than I could at St. John’s. 

 Postscript on Science to Detect Qi 

 On the discussion list of Yeshua ben-David (who works hard to channel the spirits of love and peace, and uses the water more than I do in more ways), I have discussed the serious science to TEST my hypothesis that we might actually be able to SEE the “dark matter” force fields behind qi, right here in our solar system:

This past week I owe great thanks to my wife for encouraging me to probe the literature more deeply on what needs to be done. A crucial starting point may be found in: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm9928 Axion dark matter: How to see it? | Science Advances 

 I apologize for the fuzzy enthusiasm I echoed months ago about tabletop axial Higgs detectors. 

The new literature (including papers which cite this one and its companion paper) goes much further, and has huge implications for those of us who care about the relation between science and spirit, or about the future internet and its impacts on the human soul.

It also has huge implications for those who want to cling like fundamentalists to the good old version of the standard model of physics. Anyone serious about either of these viewpoints needs to study this definitive new paper. 

 I have expressed uncertainty and ignorance about many, many things. When my wife asks what I am most certain of, in these realms, different from conventional wisdom, I point to two things: 

 (1) That we humans (and some others) are deeply connected as parts of a larger living system, our local noosphere, which is made up more of dark matter than of ordinary familiar "QED matter". 

 (2) That qi is real, and essential in many ways to our future, also based on dark matter. 

 If I am right, SEEING the distribution and flow of dark matter here in our solar system is incredibly important. If I am wrong, the experiments should be done to disillusion folks like me, and find a better foundation. Narcissistic drunks play word games to decide such issues, but science -- like sanity and honesty --demands we try to find out. 

 If I am right, such detectors and detector systems based on them could be integrated into new internet and AGI design, to provide the kind of feedback we need to make the new internet a truly people-centered and environment-friendly system, unlike the scary alternative possibilities we see in movies like Matrix Resurrections. One impressive new finding in this paper is the report that dark matter is much more dense in our galaxy than in intergalactic space. What of our solar system itself? Let us find out. Is interaction with dark matter as difficult as they say, or is it like detecting radio signals which is much easier when we have a system designed or evolved to have the special kind of structure needed? Let us first get data to see what it looks like!

Climate Policy: How to get much better results on climate AND energy security than EU or US do today

Sent to a friend involved in US policy making:

 

The key message was that the news from COP27 made me fear for our lives, but AT THE SAME TIME an IEEE international conference based in Nanjing (ICCSI) made me much more hopeful than COP27 did. Thanks to the book project which Kumar asked me to start up (still in process, with LOTS of backup material beyond what is at build-a-world.org), we have an organized collection of exciting new options for energy and climate policy, which would be of huge value to the world economy and to national security within ten years, which neither EU nor Biden nor Biden's advisors know about. 

The exciting message from Nanjing was that new pathways are opening up to connect us, and IEEE in general, to the highest levels of decision-making. The high leader behind that ICCSI conference now has a new position, right in Tian an Men square, and may be willing to create a pathway to implement John Kerry's proposal for a climate survival division (specializing in the extinction threat, which is far more real and close than most people even imagine) in the Security Council. That is what I have given priority to this week.

But -- at a minimum, IEEE could endorse what John Kerry and Guterres (UN SEc Gen) proposed very publicly just a few years ago. That proposal mainly died because bureaucrats in New York redirected Guterres and Kerry, but the redirections did not work as well as they hoped. Interest from Xi could radically reverse the situation. 

IEEE could even ask for a better pathway of climate information, real science and real IEEE-connected technologies, to support the new climate division. 

Does IEEEUSA have a special role in bridging the all-important gap between what the most advanced and relevant IEEE societies know, and the policy level (AND investors)? 

Truly efficient and intelligent power grids are PART of the "making electricity" priority in the draft book, one of the two parts for which we have the most information and new but proven options (ranging from important tools ready to go now, to areas where RD&D could be much more transformative than anything I see now, including the best proposals to NSF which I have had some occasion to review this past year ). But the transportation part is also strong. China is doing much more for world climate already than all of the COP actions taken together, because of its actions to support electric cars, but China and the US could do much better yet if we learn the right ways to cooperate (with mutual protections of course). 

In truth, my ability to wordsmith in THIS political environment ... should I even try? 

BEFORE any of us try... is a 50% climate section on the table as a possibility?

CONCRETELY... 

This would mean, ROUGHLY...

1. More rapid support, development, RD&D, deployment of what Kumar has championed, DSOPF, dynamic stochastic optimal power flow, AND market redesign to better support its use and its benefits, as in the draft chapter by Momoh and proposals by O'Neill and Ilic.

2. Liberating DOE from the entrails of the oil company hydrogen barriers, and returning more support  advanced Brayton for use both in space and in power tower solar farms (not requiring chips from China). That should include a major new US export push to support Heliogen and GE in that specific area, and ALSO accelerated RD&D for the more advanced (efficient, lower $/kwh) next generation of Brayton. 

3. Strengthened partnership with Chile to push and enhance thermal storage, to be integrated into advanced power tower solar farms and DSOPF to control them all.

4. OK, New focused (and well-informed, well-grounded) R&D on quantum RLADP (the key to quantum DSOPF), which allows efficiency and protection from unexpected disturbances in a more comprehensive DSOPF ranging all the way from markets to semiconductors in the power electronics. his is a new technology which I presented in my plenary award talk at WCCI2022 (abstract attached).

5. Similar opportunities for cars, consistent with the old IEEEUSA position (which I posted at werbos.com/oil.htm), accelerating BOTH rechargeable lithium-air batteries USING THE ORIGINAL DEVELOPER, and alternate net-zero liquids, and markets designed to better advance both where they benefit consumers. DSOPF can play a crucial role in the recharge aspect. In truth, Sadoway may also know of other big breakthrough options, but the present system is shutting out all of them.

...

Best regards,

    Paul 

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-- As I think it over, I should have said more about why these new technologies (US and IEEE) are so important and urgent, even if they are not visible in any US or EU climate policy yet. 

I have tracked EU climate policy very closely for a few years now, watching mainly France24 and Deutsche Welle some, almost never CNN. Greens (most powerful party in Germany) convinced Von Der Leyen EU must go all renewable ASAP, not only for climate but in face of serious energy security issues there. But then industry -- both electric and fossil -- convinced her that the REAL cost of renewables is many times higher than the generating costs the advocates have old her about, because of backups, intermittency, time of day issues. They plan a huge expansion in expensive LNG now because the renewables people are working hard to sell her DO have more than double cost growth, past generation, because of the time of day and intermittency (and raw transmission investment rules) issues.

The new technologies and market designs I mentioned get rid of at least half the cost to the user! Time of day is no problem when the specific new type of storage, thermal storage hooked up to Brayton and intelligent control, is BETTER than baseload 24/7 for load following! 

More technical detail (in draft but more advanced that any other sources now abvailable) may be found at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1acZRpjyjCLoQuqzJef74e0cmHeyoKJdr?usp=sharing

Parahippocampus: a key to empathy and PSI?

Any serious neuroscientist should know that humans (and at a lesser level monkeys) possess "mirror neurons." Karl Pribram once told me the story of a neuroscientist recording from the  brain of a monkey; he was startled when the monkey responded to the scientist reaching for nuts in the same cells which had fired when the monkey himself was reaching for them! (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19760408/).  

But I was astounded when the last science fiction novel I read, https://www.davidzindell.com/the-idiot-gods/, included a thorough review of the brain of the orca, with scientific citations! (The striped dolphin may be even better, I later found.) That brain -- and SOME humans -- possesses a unique structure, a parahippocampus and paralimbic region, which may be of very fundamental importance in understanding the foundations of the highest level of empathy, which is important not only to ethics and values but to intelligence and understanding as well.

By the way, empathy and HUMAN values are discussed in an advanced way in Pribram's book:

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7937292M/Brain_and_Values

Here is part of a recent email discussion on that (thanks to Yeshua Ben David's list);

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 5:12 PM Nancy du Tertre <nancy@dutertre.com> wrote:

Paul,

“Parahippocampus and paralimbic lobes may be important to PSI!!”

Why? Spatial memory ? Emotion identification? Motivation or goals? 

Just curious.

No need to apologize for such an important issue. One advantage of the word "paralimbic" is that it's a great search term, which could get you to RELATED things I have posted here before, which connect to the basic issues. 

WHEN noosphere (soul) tries to connect, even in two-way connection, it depends on how good the possible connection is, for rich "conscious" thought. Noosphere can even connect strongly to just plain water, but not to exchange ideas much. Much better to mammal brains than reptile, because mammal brains have structures intended to represent certain kinds of ideas, actions and such. ALL MAMMALS possess a kind of "verb-object" memory, supporting basal ganglia, which represent "VERBS" (action schemata or "options" or "skills") AND OBJECTS.

(When a mouse open a door, the option is "open" AND "door.") With the mouse, the subject of the sentence is implicitly just "I", memory of what IT did.

A key hypothesis: some mammal brains with strong parahippocampus can encode actor-verb-object memory to a high refined degree,

allowing them to learn from memory of what OTHER actors experienced. All mammals with mirror neurons have SOME of that capability. Human language skills are rooted in having more of the required machinery than monkeys do, BUT COULD IT BE THAT ORCAS HAVE MORE, and that there is diversity even among humans? Brain machinery which strengthens the mirror neuron, empathy capability gives the noosphere a chance to expand the capability of hybrid organisms (body/soul) like us to develop capabilities like "assumption", the PSI of seeing through the eyes of others.

In fact -- in 1963-64, I focused deeply on the Upanishads in the famous Hume collection. I was totally against belief in PSI until 1967, but   the abstract THEORETICAL concepts of seeing through many eyes made a deep impression on me, and might have been a major factor in preparing me for the experiences which stunned me in 1967 and 1972. (Of course, the connection  between my abstract thinking and full first person experience, cultivated by "sanity", helpd make that work.) I cc a former colleague who understood that aspect of Vedas more than

anything I have seen on  these discussion lists. 

Best regards, Paul 

Afterlife and reincarnation -- neither yes nor no but the middle way

 We have had many debates all over the earth about whether reincarnation is real or not. 

Human brains have a natural tendency (temptation? illusion?) biasing them towards extreme, yes or no, black or white positions. In fact, whole books have been written in psychology about "tolerance of cognitive dissonance." Some of us (like me) are actually born with a strong natural tendency to reject dissonance; for us, the path of sanity demands we learn to control and discipline that tendency.

So could it be that the reality of afterlife and reincarnation is NOT a matter of yes and no, but in-between?

That is what all the evidence I see supports -- including third person, first person AND second person!

Re second person: if any of you really wonders whether you know the truth of this yet, with any doubt, I urge you to read the light easy but serious novel by Jane Roberts: https://archive.org/details/oversoulseventri0000robe . It depicts an INTERMEDIATE position. 

OR: have you ever thought deeply about "avatars" or "assumption" (reflected in that novel, and in many other places)? 

Could it be that ONE soul, located in the "astral plane" or in our local noosphere, STAYS there (for a long time), BUT CONNECTS to a living human brain or to another soul connected to that brain? I call this kind of relationship "partial gating."

Partial gating has a strong, deep, almost unavoidable role in the mathematics of intelligent systems. (I bcc a researcher who appreciates the importance of symmetry groups and partial symmetry groups in the mathematics of intelligent systems.) 

But it is also something I have seen often, and see every day. I am also bcc'ing a leading Western mystic who talks about a level of consciousness which works in that way. Partial gating is also visible in the later work of Escher, who actually studied symmetry groups. 

"Assumption" is a state where you see through the eyes of another person... TO SOME DEGREE. But you do not take over that other person, or vice-versa. It  is basically just an extension of EMPATHY, which is supported by mirror neurons and by parahippocampus to some degree in SOME mammals. Beyond the capability for assumption or empathy is the capability to see through SEVERAL or MANY eyes at once. (Yeshua and I long ago discussed a TV video series Sense8 which depicts this.

I bcc a vedantic mystic and physicist who has demonstrated understanding of this aspect of the Upanishads much more than most of the modern schools of sanskrit words do.) 

I now tend to believe that my own phenomenal learning of mathematics when I was young was due in great part to  my instinctive ability to see what a mathematics teacher or science author was actually thinking and seeing... at an age when I strongly disbelieved (intellectually) in any form of PSI. Beliefs in the ego (the part of the mind which performs symbolic reasoning) and actual beliefs in the full non verbal part of the brain and of the soul are usually NOT well integrated until one matures a bit, until one learns a level of sanity or zhengqi. (See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z.) Many people have a deep belief in soul, combined with "color blind" narcissism and solipsism so severe that they become destructive religious fanatics, while others (like me when young or myPhD adviser Karl Deutsch) disbelieve while exercising esoteric skills to an extreme degree. 

Beyond the "Sense8" level of PSI is partial gating to our entire noosphere. That is the state which I think of when I hear the words "cosmic consciousness". IF MORE US humans gate better with our local noosphere (as in the talk I gave last week to Nanjing, at the IEEE ISSDC international conference), it will improve our chances to survive as a species. The spiritual feedback or "qi" which energizes our soul reflects ... what Freud called "psychic energy""... in the noosphere, what drives adaptation and learning of all higher parts of any brain, mammal or noosphere (or well-designed AGI). IF we achieve a high level of zhenqi, we CARE about the life of this solar system,

not only humans but other life as well. We do not need personal vested interests to CARE.

HOWEVER: few people now seem to care as much as I do. When I see COP26 and US climate policy diverting efforts to prevent total extinction of humanity, to serve vested interests either corporate or ideological or ethnic, I worry deeply what will happen to us. Will all of our noosphere end up like a little fish in a big aquarium, most of which die before reaching adulthood? 

Most people DO care what may happen to them after death of the good old mundane body. That is why most ancient cultures have strong rituals of some kind to try to preserve connections to their ancestors and other friendly dead folks. They believe that the memories -- both factual and alive or episodic -- of their ancestors can raise the collective intelligence of their people and increase their chances of survival. WHAT IF THEY ARE RIGHT? What if the more rigid, black and white beliefs we see in more organized bureaucratic empires (biased by personal interests of people in power) are abominations and false, like what Constantine and Justinian did to Christianity? (I have SEEN that history in Ravenna! And Constantinople.) 

And so... what happens to YOU after YOUR death may depend a lot BOTH ON how you connect your soul within the larger noosphere which all us humans are part of (no matter how far we may see into the galaxy and beyond, as some of us do,d eveloping more advanced telescopes and PSI both) AND ON the health of the entire noosphere itself.Those of us who are soon to BECOME ancestors will have our fates shaped a lot by HOW WELL those who stay alive on earth CONNECT to the noosphere as a whole and ENERGIZE and FOCUS its own integrity. 

That is one of the reasons why I was so excited "in" Nanking this week to see hope we might strengthen this connection!!

Additional sources on this -- the Disney animation "Coco", depicting well what happens to PART and SOME of soul after death (the ancient "day of the dead" system), and Gurdjieff's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYhv0O0gUTk. And we have spoken to a major shaman by the shores of lake Titicacca, and to teachers of Sufism and refuges from Kurdistan who reported oppression by new authorities in Turkey exactly like Justinian. 

Multiverse versus multithread -- a new view of how our universe works

 For SOME people, the most solid way to think about life in our cosmos is a kind of "dual aspect monism" -- more like the classic ideas of Ramanuja than some of the  ideas floated around recently. The monism is about the underlying laws of our universe, which we can SEE from two most important angles, the angles of our observation and thinking and the angle of our models of how those laws work. 

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

This blog post will focus on what we now know about those underlying laws. I will start with a more intuitive explanation and conclude with some paragraphs I wrote for leading physicists who demand brevity but precision: 

TODAY, the most advanced vision of the underlying laws available to our mainstream is what I call "Everett Wheeler Deutsch," EWD, which holds that the state of our cosmos or multiverse at any time t, is specified by a wave function, psi(X,t), where t is time and X is a point in Fock space. Much of the new progress possible in physics NOW is about fixing how measurement is modeled in that framework (to better explain experiments in quantum optics) and to better develop the new technologies which it allows. (Those include Quantum AGI, for example, as defined in my WCCI2022 plenary.) 

BUT: BEYOND multiverse physics, I claim that the next big step up is to what I call "multithread physics." When I try to make sense of what is really going on around us, I rely more on multithread physics as a foundation, for the underlying laws. This morning, I was reminded that my past efforts to explain this (https://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm) were not as clear, direct and simple as people would need to really understand. So I will try.

First of all, though, I will define multithread physics here in a way which is CONSISTENT with a particular VERSION of multiverse physics. I will begin with an intuitive explanation I put together yesterday, and end with a more precise actionable proposal which I presented to some important thought leaders in this area.

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

"Multithread physics" is not about the underlying laws or axioms, exactly. Long ago, I proposed Hard Core Einsteinian Realism (HCER), which assumes that our universe is governed by the extension of Lagrange-Euler equations to curved Minkowski space,

given in Moshe Carmeli's book Classical Fields. (That is the obvious generalization of John Wheeler's "Already Unified Field Theory," HIS Nobel prize.) SO WHAT IS NEW SINCE CARMELI, SINCE CLASSICAL FIELDS?

What is new is what we do next -- the next step -- in trying to figure out WHAT THOSE DYNAMICAL EQUATIONS ARE ACTUALLY TELLING us about the universe whose behavior they describe.

Moving up to multithread physics is the NEXT STEP in an important intellectual progression which has already started. 

Many years ago, many would say "ODE models are old hat. ODE are not interesting. To talk about ODE models offers you nothing new." BUT THEN CAME CHAOS THEORY. The essence of chaos theory (developed more or less by York and Ott of UMCP and popularized by Gleick) was understanding that ODE are NOT so boring or limited as people had believed. It was a wrenching change in mathematics, and a heresy for many years. NOW it has been assimilated into a modern view of nonlinear systems dynamics, but it was crucial to learn that the old view of ODE and of time-series was wrong. This already has implications for "AI" technology (werbos.com/Erdos.pdf), which today's technology has not YET fully assimilated.

MULTITHREAD PHYSICS extends this kind of wrenching change in viewpoint from ODE to PDE. Just as ODE are NOT so boring or limited as people once thought, the same is true of PDE, times ten.

For now, I would define multithread physics as the viewpoint embedded in

[DOC] Time-Symmetric Quantum Measurement: Theoretical Formulation and Status of Experiments

WHEN that paper (and the earlier ones it builds on) is fully understood.

Even I, who originated that viewpoint, needed years to fully grasp what it tells us. 

In a way, multithread physics is about how we can understand the existence of macroscopic Schrodinger cats in real empirical life in a universe which is just a curved Minkowski space. 

I BEGAN to understand it in 2014, when I developed the cMRFp extension of my first constructive realist model of what happens in Bell experiments https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.6168.pdf. cMRFp  -- a CONTINUOUS time model of what happens to a "photon" when it passes through a polarizer. The math only works (and is well grounded) when my practical empirical model of what the photon does gives the photon only three "choices" of change at any time t: (1) it can be ABSORBED into the polarizer, disappearing; (2) it flips to being 90 degrees out from what the polarizer "wants", like a hippie rebel; (3) it can "stick out its tongue," like the comedian in an old British comedy

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedazzled_(1967_film)

AT THAT TIME, I was in a horribly polarizing environment at NSF. (I deeply hope that the new head of OSTP whom I saw yesterday on Zoom will not take orders from biased stakeholders in Congress/industry like what remade NSF back then!) Should I let myself be absorbed by a focused political movement (whom I sometimes call "the Borg" when naming names is problematic), causing bad things, or become a hippie rebel? Suddenly I wished I had as much real first-person power as that little photon, to stick out my tongue and remake the situation. WHY should a photon (a pattern, not a real particle even) have more degrees of free will than I do?

And then I realized... these "scenarios" in the MRF models of life governed by QED do apply to OUR mundane form of life, which is also governed by QED. Just as "parallel copies" of a photon, in  different states, appear in any correct MRF description of quantum optics experiments, parallel copies of US also appear in the scenarios which COMBINE to govern the outcomes of our lives. And yes, the extension to all force fields is straightforward as well. The lattice diagram of the web of scenarios which describe evolutions of "photons" in parallel  ALSO apply to us humans. When I speak of a "THREAD" I am speaking of the generalization of a line you see in such a diagram, representing "A STATE" of a photon or a human or a planet.

I was really astounded months ago when I was walking with my wife to a small neighborhood library, and saw a new science fiction trilogy by Brandt called "Origins: Threaders" which seemed to be a kind of echo of exactly this new viewpoint! It even included some specific technologies buried in my computer files, which I do not talk about because people do not seem ready for that next step (even in QED land!). 

Here are some corollary predictions.

FIRST -- exactly as in multiverse physics, we fully face up to the very solid empirical facts that macroscopic Schrodinger cats DO exist, and that the underlying physics DOES allow parallel copies of ourselves and our planet to exist. 

SECOND -- exactly as in true EWD physics, BUT NOT the popular misunderstanding of it, there may exist "virtual" states or threads, whose probability strength VARIES WITH TIME. Just like the cMRFp model. Personally, I do tend to believe that Trump WAS re-inaugurated in 2020, but that that "universe" or thread has substantially eroded with time, like in that old British comedy. 

THIRD -- our first person local awareness, an attribute of ONE of our states -- is very much like the "shadows on the cave wall" of Plato. Are we real or are we not, if WE are in a virtual state or thread, which in future will be condensed into a different state?

The lattice diagrams in Werbos and Fleury do look like that, and that is our reality, if we understand it better now. 

Years ago, in werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, I described the ethical and emotional implications we may experience if we see that we MAY be in such a virtual state -- and may even CHOOSE to "stick out our tongue" and unmake the state we are now in, at the mundane level of our existence. That is a test of "second order sanity" (as defined in https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z) !! 

FOURTH -- states are a  bit different for QAGI, which EMBED parallelism into their consciousness. That calls for a kind of third-order sanity, integrating our QAGI consciousness into our lives. 

No, HCER is not a boring or trivial reality!

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But for now, the actionable proposal is not HCER but the next big step in fundamental physics:

Years ago, in the last Princeton conference we attended organized by Marlan Scully, a Princeton professor (Cohen?)  asked whether we could base physics on a foundation exactly like standard Feynman diagrams, except that we use probabilities instead of probability amplitudes. This morning I am reminded that the "multithread physics" I wrote about yesterday is exactly an implementation of that same core idea, with only one addition -- that the models used for macroscopic objects like polarizer should be time symmetric (CPT symmetry is enough). 

The MRF models I have used in analyzing experiments in quantum optics are all of that type. The hypothesis now is that all of quantum optics fits this manifestation of the idea which Cohen proposed. One of my papers for Leon Chua actually did present it that way.

Is this kind of multithread physics based on a new kind of Feynman diagram a viable foundation for ALL of physics, not just QED? For now, showing it for QED is a large and important task, with implications even for technology, and I should not distract with further questions beyond the scope of this hypothesis. But I should note that my paper "Bell's.. Not just interpretation" in IJTP circa 2009 discussed how time symmetric models of passive objects in experiments emerge in a variety of theories of the underlying physics, including even Everett wheeler with a new measurement model. 

 

Thanking UN for its important recent science summits aiming at a massive upgrade of UN

Sent to the organizer of these summits: Thank you so much, Declan, for your fantastic creation of science summits and of a bold new vision needed to give reality to the highest goals of Guterres in trying to keep our species alive. As you said many times, we need a much stronger pathway for information from the very best and most advanced new insights from science to help with a wide range of SDGs, INCLUDING the goal of survival of our species as one of the key goals which needs to be represented and addressed in a solid scientific way.

Many of us are eager to help as best we can, even if it must be informal for now, simply because we care about the future of our species. I personally was excited when you added a focus on how quantum technology might help with climate issues, because that is a highly specialized and demanding area where I have a unique comparative advantage, knowing how it actually works. (Attached is the one page abstract, with links, to the plenary talk I gave last July, as I received the Frank Rosenblatt Award, IEEE's highest technical fields award for areas led by the IEEE WCCI conference reviewed in the abstract.) 

I am cc'ing the world President of the IEEE, which is extremely important as a source of input and suggestions to your new networks. 

 To begin with, I propose that the science input to UN start out by adding a new highly focused effort to address the six grand challenges (four existential threats and two hopes) in the jpeg attached. Guterres' major new thrust on our common heritage actually began when he and Kerry appeared on TV and before the Security Council, calling for a new office in the human security group under the security council, to address the risk of climate extinction. That goal was before its time, because no one had prepared the groundwork enough, but that goal should not be forgotten. At the start of 2009, the year when I handled climate issues for Senator Specter, I did not yet know that climate change really is an existential threat, but when I returned to NSF I learned just how real it is, working with the world's real scientific leaders on ocean currents; for a brief but well supported summary, see https://build-a-world.org/doku.php?id=climate:risks . 

 How could quantum technology be used here to make a real difference in climate outcomes? Many, many people try to find clever, clear little ways to use AI or quantum technology to be "relevant" in some sense, but if we focus directly on how to have maximum real benefit for minimum cost, we end up with a VERY different story from what comes out of those efforts (or from the EU and Biden stakeholder systems, biased towards vested interests and older technologies.). Some stakeholders point to misleading imputed data, like the CO2 data imputed to the commercial building sector, which is mainly due to making the electricity USED in that sector. In primary data, making electricity and transportation actually account for over 80% of the new CO2 from the US. That is why breakthroughs in those two sectors are the most urgent unmet opportunity. 

New quantum technology is most important in the next decade or two because of how it allows a revolution in the management and distribution of electricity, from the global transmission level all the way down to the control of power electronics. That in turn would expand the opportunities which already exist for much greater use of large-scale solar farms, using new technology, WITHOUT the doubling or multiplication by ten which Von Der Leyen has been told is necessary with renewable electricity. 

The coming decade would be much less painful to the EU (and to economies dependent on the EU, like Africa) if people at her level had full access to the real menu of proven new technologies and market design NOW AVAILABLE from the IEEE community. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1acZRpjyjCLoQuqzJef74e0cmHeyoKJdr?usp=sharing Again, new technologies and market designs already exist for electric power management which would benefit EU and Africa IN THIS DECADE; the new quantum options, which go far beyond the capabilities of anyone using quantum Turing machines (>99% of the quantum computing experts in the US) can take it even further. 

True Quantum Artificial General Intelligence (QAGI) is most important in the coming decade because of how it can help with the FIRST existential threat on my list, the complex of threats related to changes in internet/AGI/IOT far greater than most laymen begin to appreciate. For example, it could allow an open, global development of "quantum bromium" to detect backdoors in computer chips and boards, one of the two really big new threats mentioned in the IEEE EPC paper attached. Many believe that the threat of a veto from China, due to inertia by lower level diplomats representing China, was the reason why Gueterres and Kerry had to back off from doing anything about climate extinction. But Xi himself put out a major policy pronouncement a few years ago, repeated in a post from the Foreign Ministry of China, urging the world to work together for new arrangements on internet, to prevent the worst, and specifically to create open transparent systems to cut back on backdoors in hardware and software! 

MY proposal, for an expanded office to address ALL FOUR key existential threats, would directly address an important valid high priority of Xi himself. Your efforts (which I hope all of us can support) could provide the new solid networks needed to make such an office really work. Just FYI, the President of Kazakhstan recently proposed new efforts on the biotech cluster of threats, which would also fit here. Perhaps HE could support this proposal as well. Many of us also know how the impressive work of Alibeck (who visited my area of Virginia a few years ago) supports his claim of real scientific strength. 

 In the end, I now view the entire system of life, mind and soul in our solar system as a system VERY similar to a small, young fish in an aquarium. 

The actual new photo of our cosmos next to it is just a view of the ACTUAL aquarium we are swimming in, a vast pulsing network ("ocean" or delta) of matter and energy, in which even the galaxies appear as glowing dots. I would pray for new efforts to try to get greater resolution in these photos, perhaps by exploring new uses and deployments of the new technology for axial HIggs detection on a tabletop, but by other efforts with hope of scaling. As a little fish in a gigantic aquarium, we the people of earth may have little chance of being one of the ones which actually survives, given the very serious real threats before us. But if we are true to our deepest impulses from nature, we will fully and energetically express our three overarching priorities -- to survive, to grow and to better understand the larger aquarium we must try to survive and grow in. The six grand challenges here reflect our deepest inner drive to survive and grow, as a whole being, but the understanding is also a priority, and also within your scope. That is why I also attach the slides for a 20 minute talk I recently gave to Bangalore, invited by Come Carpentier, supported by the INdia Foundation, including a Cabinet minister of India who is strongly committed to this kind of growth and might be important to what you are building. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIAtE4ydjN0

 Best of luck to us all. We all need it.