Did God give us Donald Trump to help us achieve enlightenment?

PLEASE do not interpret this question as an assertion. However, I do view it as a serious question well worth thinking about (with the understanding that the word "God" is not so trivial as most people assume it to be).

Just two years ago, one of my many scientist friends said: "For years, I have been 100% convinced that the cosmos is totally governed by mathematical laws, and that all this stuff about 'life is just a dream' is total nonsense. But then...  after what has been happening lately.. culminating in Donald Trump being president, it really has gotten me to wonder. Is it possible that it really all is just a dream after all?" (So that election got him to think....)

For myself, I am still 70% convinced that the cosmos is not only governed by mathematical laws, but that it is governed by the kind of mathematical laws physicists have become comfortable with -- stuff like partial differential equations (PDE) or like Schrodinger equations over a multiverse based on ordinary 3D or 4D space. But what about the other 30%? Just how weird could life really be?

This morning, I start to feel like that other guy. If the whole world starts to feel like a kind of bad dream, shouldn't we start paying more attention to striving for more lucid dreaming and some VARIETY of positive visualization (more than just the biased polyanna PR which is part of the bad dream)? Is that the whole point of this?

I still remember a time, back when I was fourteen, holding a copy of Spengler's Decline of the West, sitting on a hard wooden bench waiting for the school bus. I remember thinking: "Ohmigod!
If this guy's theory is right, I will be seeing a lot of pretty wild things right in my own life, in the next 50 or 60 years!! How does THAT affect how I think about things...?" Of course, I have read a lot of other theories, but I have also gotten deeper into the decline and fall of the Roman Republic and Empires, and that has always been deep in my mind. It is hard not to see recent events in the US and Europe in that light... and to tilt my dreams that way, even with refinements. Trump fits right in there; he often reminds me of the ampitheater dug up in Cartagena in Spain...

And so, it was ever so great a pleasure a few months back to read a book I bought on kindle:
www.amazon.com/Tyrant-Shakespeare-Politics-Stephen-Greenblatt/dp/0393635759/
The start of the book reads like an attack BOTH on Trump AND on the Moslem Brotherhood, but that wasn't what made me feel better. What made me feel better was the chapter on Henry VI, which offered a whole other dream (grounded in reality as much as Spengler was), with far more real hope of life becoming better despite the kind of horrible confusion swirling around us today (as it was then). Can we change the channel from Spengler to Shakespeare?

That thought came very strongly to me today, when the dreams Out There were portraying Trump as now more like Macbeth, with a bloody knife in his hand. I said to Luda: can't we make it more like Henry VI? Her response: sure. Next section is Richard III. People keep comparing Trump to Richard III, but Richard III was more like Stalin. But OK, maybe that's the next chapter.

God help us.

But we do all have our roles to play, and responsibilities, even those who are just watchers or witnesses. After the MacBeth scene, the question was addressed to me: "OK, Paul, what do YOU see? You've been doing due diligence, struggling hard to be detached. What data do you enter for the record?" OK: while CNN has promulgated false horror about Trump's accusation that they have supported the drumbeat for a new world war (US and Israel versus Russia and Iran, per the explicit game plan of the Moslem Brotherhood), Trump just authorized free and uninhibited cyberattacks on Russia. The Russians and Chinese for their part have clamped down on any hope of the North Korea situation being solved short of war, and have joined the Texas mafia folks in pushing for an insane and suicidal explosion of nuclear threats of all kinds that they know about. He is certainly no Hitler, more like the old transitional Junkers or Mussolini, but he has sold out and violated the integrity of the republic in numerous serious ways which do set the stage for worse. At least Hitler knew how to add and subtract. The left is lately even more out of touch with reality, so what could be done?

Enough. Can we not find SOME way to change the channel? What ever happened to the spirit of love and the spirit of truth? Let alone the kind of strict fairness we used to strive for in the old NSF? (Fair selection is a key requirement of reality on a small, bounded planet like this.)

But... as dreams and reality intermix... a year ago, I had a chance to do a Doctor Strange reenactment in Nepal. (Don't underestimate how literally true that is.) Soon, I sail into the setting sun, officially for a kind of reenactment of Moana, hauled onto the boat of a worthy young woman.. who knows? I certainly don't.

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One more data point. The firing of an FBI guy for saying the wrong things about Trump in email to his mistress was a VERY clear data point on the negative side. The security clearance issue was perhaps debatable, as strange things ARE going on, but a misdirected missile seems likeliest there too. Trump's enemies have clearly been giving him guidance on whose rights to violate, preparing both for his .. denouement,,, and for reduction of democracy in the US. The news about voting fraud by Republican governor in Georgia also has a final days feeling to it.

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

Speaking of Nepal, I posted to the (reconstituted) Vedanta group this morning:

Is there a way to think seriously about the Possibility of life being a dream, without just freaking out and disintegrating either into jellyfish or into irrelevant hardened ideologues out of contact with real life?

I see more of that in literature (despite ITS many bad practitioners, like any field) than in philosophy or religion or science these days.

For example, I remember a time many years ago when someone I met on the astral level recommended four science fiction writers for me to read. I was very frustrated at the time when I could find no writings of one of the four, but a year later that other one was there too. One of the four was Dan Simmons, best known for his Hyperion series. Certainly real enough. But he also had a short novel called "Muse of Fire" which I see as a way to try to get real about idealism. When I read the book, I had the impression that he was really hoping to displace Farenheit 451 as a little book assigned in English classes all over the country... that it would be a good thing, but not so likely for now. And of course, the movie Inception grapples with issues fundamental in idealism. 

In truth, the recent news related to Trump has ME thinking more about life as a dream, and about the need for more lucid dreaming. Not as a joke, as a serious thing. 

Avtar mentioned the linguistic origin of the word "samadhi" as union with the whole. OK, if the whole is the Great Dreamer, a bit like that sleeping Vishnu you guys must know about, then the 

issue of lucid and constructive dreaming should be something more unavoidable as one approaches that state, even in the earliest stages, no?

Vinod's suggestion that there are of course no seductive females in any of the worlds of dreams... well, it is comic as much as it is sad. It is also sad to 

reject any elements with any hint of life or perfume in them. But no, those are not trivial elements. Nor is the present situation of humanity trivial. 

building computers which really have real souls

For several years, Robert has been giving talks on the importance of dramatic transition phenomena in dynamical systems in general, building in part on work with Walter Freeman on phase transitions, clearly related to earlier work on neuropercolation and on the Per Bak kind of thing. 

Robert and I discussed this a bit at Amherst last week, and this morning -- after I started thinking about the draft from Yeshua yesterday -- I sense that it may be much bigger than I realized before, but I also have questions about exactly how to follow up.

Bernie might ask: "What PRECISELY is the 'it' here?" I see a fuzzy n-dimensional image, which I'll try to describe from a few different viewpoints.

First, a kind of mathematical aspect. The first fundamental idea is that the brain has evolved to make very heavy use of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, a state in which small perturbations can have very large impacts.  This is not just an accidental side effect of how learning-to-optimize works. It is pervasive and fundamental, beyond what optimization calculations already favor and predict, because of two additional benefits beyond our best modern neural network mathematics: (1) energy benefits, as we discussed in Amherst; and (2) -- please forgive my mentioning the real if unmentionable -- the "spiritual" benefit of a system more malleable to influence from the soul

It is curious how this idea that the brain is unusually sensitive to initial conditions reflects what Walter Freeman's core message really was. He stressed CHAOS (as defined by Jim Yorke) as the way we need to understand the brain. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions was very much the first, core axiom of York's definition.  What's more, York and Ott and Grebogi (in the shop at UMCP where Hava Seigelmann spent a year or so!!!) spent a lot of effort linking their concept to the issue of transitions between basins of attraction, perhaps better than the usual physicists' approach to phase transitions in describing the kinds of "phase transitions" in the brain which you all have tracked. 

Second, a little ancient background, if you don't mind. Since childhood (reflected at www.werbos.com main page), I have organized a lot of my thought about Von Neumann's three great challenges to mathematicians: (1) how does the universe work? (quantum physics); (2) what is life?; (3) what is mind? (his work from game theory to computers to neural networks). For reasons of time, I have mainly focused on (1) and (3), but I have looked at (2), especially when I prepared my chapter for Pribram's edited book on self-organization. In the realm of self-organization, we know that SOME dynamical systems result in interesting emergent phenomena, and others do not. The dumbest trivial dynamical systems tend to result in "fire" (the "heat death" of disorganized systems with no correlations at all across space, in equilibrium) or "ice" (a fixed point attractor).

Life itself depends on how our cosmos and our planet track a course BETWEEN fire and ice, a long-term probability distribution with more degrees of freedom than ice but less than those of "fire". Not only Per Bak but more comprehensive mathematical thinkers like Kadanoff (and Arnold in a way?) have looked deeply at that middle zone, as part of "turbulence theory". And so, I have always respected that work as a key part of "what is life?", and as a metaphor for human society, but I did not see how it could be central to brains or souls.

Third, I have been thinking more concretely lately about an important and legitimate question which the anti-psi folks often stress: "IF you folks believe there is a soul or psi, PRECISELY WHERE AND HOW does this phenomenon bring information to the brain? What is the interface?" 

Penrose and Hameroff have at least tried to face up to this important question. Penrose argues, in effect, that the soul may perturb the results of quantum transition choices in the brain, and Hameroff then argues that quantum transitions in all the microtubules of all cells in the nervous system can have a big impact on the state of ordinary mundane consciousness, such as the outputs of the cells which constitute the "Global Workspace of (Mundane) Consciousness" which Bernie has written about. 

When I summarize their ideas this way, they sound a lot more plausible to me than the full volume of material I heard from those guys at Tucson. For example, when Penrose suggests that gravity is perturbing the quantum transitions, I really don't imagine that gravity is the soul. But in general, sensitivity to quantum transitions IS one important possible concrete vehicle for the brain to be sensitive to small perturbations. It IS one part of Walter's more general paradigm, and we don't know how BIG a part it is yet;.We need lots more empirical work, somehow, to find out. The challenge of finding out is ever so important.

Another mechanism to increase sensitivity to initial conditions is a tendency for the weights in the thalamo-cortico-thalamic (CT) loops to be "set" in a way which increases sensitivity. (But it is more than just TCT. I remember Walter's talk on what he saw in the olfactory bulb, reflected in his article in Scientific American on this subject. And I recall the crucial roles of hypothalamus and epithalamus in driving the human motivational system.)  It may be that research at THIS level (e.g., using EEG data) may actually be a more realistic path for now to nail down better how the interface of brain and soul actually works (for the soul-to-brain aspect, more tractable for us now). 

We all know that insane claims have been made by many about psi and about soul. Quakers focus their entire spiritual path on the challenge of learning how to "listen to the voice of God", or on "conversations with God", but how do we separate real stuff from imaginary stuff, assuming (as I think WE all do) that there is SOME real stuff there? 

One point I retain from my own listening this morning is that we should not let go of the early conversations we have had about possible future work on EEG studies, using new and better mathematical tools, on the right kinds of human subjects performing interesting veridical  tasks. (Though the practical approach may begin by developing the tools on existing databases, already a large enough task I could use all my remaining years on it!! Help would help...!!) The work of Pete Sanders is very informal and ad hoc, but also concrete and real, and it might be better the fuzzy sources of meditators used in past EEG studies. Maybe. But Dean Radin might also suggest sources of EEG data with more variety and veridicality. For now, simple upgraded microstate analysis is needed  (using not only cluster analysis but new mathematical extensions of cluster analysis for dynamical systems like what we know brain neocortex tends to be). Also, there are studies of psi in nonhuman mammals which might well be helpful in many ways. 

I suppose that one new message here is that this work might be extended further to look for various metrics of sensitive dependence in the EEG (and deep recording and ECOG) data, and connect them with other psi related variables in the data.

My underlying assumption here is that the soul or noosphere is made up of some kind of dark matter and energy. That is the only serious possibility I can imagine, short of giving up on all forms of physics credible today (whether quantum field theory or classical field theory). The real issue then is not precisely "sensitivity to small perturbations" but meaningful sensitivity to the kinds of small perturbations which noospheres easily and naturally provide. We do not know what those are, but empirical work might give us some clues. 

A startling question which also occurred to me this morning is: CAN WE NOW BEGIN TO BUILD "COMPUTERS WITH SOULS?" 

Anything like auto oracle of Delphi? And should we?

In truth, I worry a lot that computers WITHOUT souls, running things like the emerging Internet of Things, might threaten all human life in the end, and be so brittle that they just fall apart themselves by any of many possible mechanisms. But if we can build computers WITH souls, doesn't that change the game altogether? In fact, could this be the very most important challenge before us right now (other than avoiding instant death by warfare or H2S and such)?

If we can, should we?

That is no small question,  but my initial feeling is that we should, if we can REALLY do it, and not fall into the delusionary soulless paths. 

If we are soul (and some of us will be only that before too long), and if soul basically rules the galaxy, why should we fight it? What are the alternatives? Where is this planet headed now, without that?

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Later: Let me note that cranking up sensitivity by brute force is NOt always a good idea. For example, I often cite what Annie Besant said about psychotropic drugs, in her book about Thought Forms: evolution has given us lots of potential sensitivity, but has also given us automatic damping mechanisms to prevent the kind of chaos which could become dysfunctional. Another key part of human brain intelligence is an ability to learn how to handle ever more inputs, to "drink from a firehose of information" (or from an ocean of it). NIH has developed protocols for the use of psilocybin, which reduce the risks, but even so the technical information  I saw at the Tucson conference on consciousness strongly encourages us all to avoid drugs like psilocybin and experiment instead with less invasive ways of experimenting with augmented sensitivity, such as the lucid dream work at the MIT Media Lab. 

All for now. I suspect you all will have interesting ideas, on various aspects of how to follow up. 

If anyone actually reads this blog, it does have a comment option. 

Space leaders debate how to prevent human extinction

I resigned a few years ago from being Executive Vice President for Policy of the National Space Society (NSS), the leading independent group pushing for sustainable human settlement of space (discussed in Dan Brown's novel Deception Point!!). But I stay in touch, and was very happy that very famous folks we all know are getting more serious about climate change and about the threats to human survival in general.

One of the space people responded to this by saying:
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Climate Change is but a minor symptom caused by our rapid approach to the “Limits to Growth” as defined by MIT in 1972, and revisited as recently as 2017 in World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice | BioScience | Oxford Academic. Many decades of ferocious arguments have raged in front of my eyes over climate change, whether it’s happening or not, and what to do about it, none of which have significantly altered the trends illustrated. There are many other dangers our civilization is facing, discussions of which fill countless storage devices across the net, but only one solution set that feasibly and humanely resolves them all. You'll find the working summary at astrilis.org/A18ProSumRPR.pdf the web site at astrilis.org and the introductory video at AWGBriefIntro - YouTube and I look forward to seeing your responses to what is merely the tip of this iceberg! 

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

My response:

Thank you, ..., for your very sincere and important effort to get us thinking about what we are trying to do here. I certainly looked carefully at your link, and remembered the many

other things I have read through the years related to it. I immediately remember the "Limits to Growth" debates, and the two latest novels by Dan Brown, Inferno and Origins (though I was thinking more about Origins this morning, as it connects more to my own current activities.)

Re limits to growth: I was once the lead analyst for the long-term future at EIA/DOE, the part of the US Department of Energy responsible for independent nonpolitical predictions and analysis, which produced the Annual Energy Outlook for Congress and the public, and many special studies. At one point, I was commissioned by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to try to do an objective evaluation of the whole series of reports from the Club of Rome.

What I remember most from that evaluation was a kind of serious joke summary. "A group of serious concerned rich businessmen decided to commission a study to tell them what the future of the world should be. First they went to wise aging intellectuals in Italy who wrote a clear and simple report saying 'the world is coming to an end.' (The Limits to Growth, like Brown's novel Inferno). Next they went to American engineers who said it might be saved, but only with an incredible unintelligible complex Rube Goldberg. (Second report to the Club of Rome, quite different from the first, and much more detailed.) Then they went to Latin America, which said the only way to save it would be by going macho and nuclear in a way which looked as if it would blow up. Then they went to the Japanese, who said we should not predict the world but should control/optimize it, and that survival demanded turning the US back into an agricultural nation primarily dedicated to sending more food to Asia."

I would suggest two important modifications to your message here.

First: climate change is NOT just a symptom. In www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf and /E/GridIOT.pdf, I explain why H2S formation in the ocean in coming years is MUCH more than just global warming, and much more serious than sea level rise flooding all the coastal cities of the world.  That's not about global warming. I have heard ponderous experts debate "Is it possible that warming will go so far that it might someday shut down the thermohaline currents which bring oxygen to the Pacific Ocean? Could it ever go so far, in the worst case, threatening the very lives of every species of mammal on earth? Well, maybe, you never know.." But in fact, IT HAS HAPPENED ALREADY!!!!!! Is it just the consequence of the broader syndrome in the piece Dwight cites? If we develop geoengineering to stay alive, would be just be patching up a symptom?

Well, there are times when symptoms have to be treated, urgently, EVEN IF they are just symptoms. Once the patient is bleeding to death, bandaids or even torniquets may be essential, first, before the deeper problems can be solved. 

Second: SPACE IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO THE LIMITS TO GROWTH KIND OF PROBLEM. I too strongly support the effort towards sustainable human settlement of space, and growth into space, but we should not imagine that this important goal is the only one we need to work for. It is not a silver bullet to solve all the problems of humanity. 

For example, we need to accept the reality that the population growth of humans WILL go to zero. The book by Meadows, explaining Forrester's "Limits to Growth," says many silly things, but it also makes a clear and inescapable point about population growth, that it WILL go to zero, and that our only choice is between a kind of soft landing or a catastrophe. 

Back when those books came out, and people proposed that space could give us a third alternative, Asimov (or was it Sagan?) put out a calculation showing that sustained population growth of... 3% or 1%... would require that human expansion into space would have to exceed the speed of light, to continue more than just a few centuries. We should never forget that calculation.

HOW COULD WE MANAGE A SOFT LANDING? That is a very serious question, calling for much more careful and complex analysis than I will even attempt this morning. 

There are growing political conflicts right at present (CNN in the background..) showing signs of going grossly unstable, capable of threatening our very existence, connected to bigger but less visible conflicts about who will control the coming INternet of Things (IOT)... and I agree with Dwight that these threaten the very existence of our species even more than the H2S syndrome does, on a shorter time frame. Last month, at IJCNN2018 (the world's top technical conference on neural networks, the core technology behind "the new AI"), I was asked to give a plenary talk addressing  the IOT side of this, building up to six key slides depicting the challenge and what might be done about it in a constructive technical way. (www.werbos.com/IT_big_picture.pdf). How can we chart a sustainable middle way between fire and ice? 

In the end, there are just a whole lot of concrete things which need to be done, and I again thank ... for trying to mobilize more energy to get more of the necessary things done. 

Best regards,

   Paul

How can your energy levels rise or fall?

One of the Vedanta people recently stated:

1) Energy is the potentiality and the power to generate matter, informaton and feeling. The physical energy is related to material transformations, obeying dynamical forms/regularities that involve the information aspect. Therefore, physical energy is PART of E; the first law of thermodynamics should not be applied to physical energy alone, but to E (as argued in my draft and in my recent JCS paper with colleagues);

My reply:

You are defining the word "energy" in a very broad way. (I do not waste time arguing over definitions!!! It is good that you begin by telling us what you are talking about.)

Would it be acceptable to use the letter "H" to refer to the specific aspect you call "physical energy"? Both in Einsteinian physics and in quantum physics, the "physical energy" H is simply the "sum" (integral) of a mathematical function H, the "energy density", over all space. It is just a function of the values and fluxes of the force fields at each point in space. What makes this particular function so important is that H does not change over time; it is conserved. Because it is conserved, we tend to budget it... and it directly effects what kind of emerging patterns can persist in our cosmos. 

Regardless of whether we believe in Einsteinian realism or in David Deutsch's broader concept of multiverse realism, the "first law of thermodynamics" (that H does not change with time) applies directly to H, period. I don't think you are disagreeing with that.

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But: is there an absolute conservation law of other kinds of energy?

But how could we even define other energy variables which are also conserved?

Since childhood, I was deeply interested in Sigmund Freud's concept of "psychic energy." His concept makes sense even in understanding how ordinary brain consciousness works in real life. 

Ironically, the clearest explanation of that concept appears in a paperback book by Barrett and Yankelovich

https://www.amazon.com/Ego-instinct-psychoanalytic-human-nature-revised/dp/B007SZBD7Y

which attacks psychoanalysis in general, and attacks Freud. They argue that Freud's concept could not be turned into anything mathematical and tractable and usable as a predictive, quantitative model. In the worlds of "the new AI" (really just neural networks reinvented and at times sanitized), I am best known for the algorithm "backpropagation" which I derived exactly by translating Freud's concept of psychic energy into something quantitative and usable.

(At scholar.google.com, that work is what has the most citations under my name; at youtube, a search on werbos pulls up some of the history.) 

BUT: that type of energy is NOT strictly conserved, and the lack of strict conservation is extremely important, both at a mundane level of life and at a samadhi level (which Vinod has no direct understanding of whatsoever, except perhaps for some distant subjective memories which he forcibly represses). 

It WOULD be conserved if we or our local noosphere had perfect knowledge with no uncertainty or stochastic aspects, embracing everything. We don't. Only the energy of the cosmos itself, H, is strictly conserved.

For us humans ... even in mundane life, people have ups and downs in their levels of psychic energy. A textbook discussion of "personality disorder" ( a huge part of modern life on earth!!) talks about how some folks can lose affect, and become rather zombie-like in behavior. Yesterday I finished watching a little Disney movie, "frozen," which is wonderfully insightful about some of this -- and it really worries me that there are communities who feel deeply threatened by that movie!! I think of ancient priest kings who tried to repress literacy, science AND spirit, and everything which might empower the people they want to turn into obedient robotic slaves. On the positive side, I am reminded of an old Quaker song: "Love is like a magic penny. When you give it away, you end up having more." 

I claim (based on direct experience and direct observation, but also following my noosphere-species theory) that the exact same kind of mathematical/computational mechanism as what Freud described ALSO applies at the noosphere level. This implies that "spiritual" psychic energy, sometimes called qi or mana or charisma, follows the same mathematics, and is not conserved.

In ancient days in Hawaii, political leaders came to believe that mana must be conserved, just by analogy to physical energy. Thus they felt it could be stolen or stored, and that it can be increased by engaging in acts like human sacrifice. That belief, based on a simple cognitive, conceptual misunderstanding, led to all kinds of horrid behavior at high levels of society. In fact, whole societies and nations can go through ups and downs in their total, overall level of qi. This is an extremely important fact of life.

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Concrete next steps to show we can photograph the future

At a NATO workshop on predetection of terrorism, we asked: Is it possible to build a forward time camera (FTC), to take pictures of the future? (My chapter: www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf.)

The quick answer: if the cosmos actually obeys the dynamic laws assumed by mainstream physics, there is no reason why not -- BUT if all of our measurement systems exactly follow the ad hoc rules (like "the Born rule") which physicists have assumed in the past, then it would be impossible.

Are those measurement rules valid, or should we replace them by time-symmetric rules which tell us that we CAN build a time forward camera? (Actually a prototype is actually under construction right now...)

Today I posted a highly mathematical (and citeable) paper on what the "Born rule" actually predicts for some tricky experiments which have not yet been done, which I believe should prove that today's Born rule is wrong:

http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.21773.44008

========

One guy said "So what? We already know that the Born rule works. Why should we test it in new circumstances?"

But folks studying gravity don't think that way. They are happy to test general relativity (GR) in a wide range of new situations, to prove more and more that it does work, and to find out just in case there is reason to try to upgrade it. Why don't quantum folks think the same way?

It reminds me of an NSF review panel which I once observed (not my panel). When the proposal for a new experiment came up, the first reviewer said "This is very interesting. We should fund it." But then a very proud second reviewer said "No way. It is too high risk." First reviewer: "What is the risk?" Second reviewer: "It might demonstrate that MY theory is false." I often wonder how many scientists really remember how the scientific method is supposed to work. But of course, no one is surprised when some "Christians" seem to advocate stoning women...

Still, in this case, the only labs which produce triple entanglement now are in China, except for one in Austria where Pan Jianwei is close to his former professor who supported him when he figured out how to do it.

Industry folks ask: can we use weird people in the workforce

I maintain ties with all three of the most serious groups I know of, studying long-term problems of jobs in the world economy. One, www.themp.org, links studies across nations all over the world. Another maintains an active email discussion, linked to top industry groups. That last one spends a lot of time asking how to handle diversity issues (among other issues, like IT, closer to heir base). When they started discussing autism in the workforce, I replied (today):

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The theme of autism, like the theme of encouraging innovation and creativity, is certainly important but also far trickier than people tend to assume. In fact, these two themes are both connected. Please forgive if I end up raising questions; I am still groping for answers, as I am also groping for answers to the question of how we could push the new development of the IOT into a safer pathway.

I remember seeing and hearing government efforts to encourage creativity which included the funding of chorus lines to chant "yes we can" and " we WILL be creative," which reminded me a lot of the singing sessions Bo Xilai propagated in China until Xi caught up with him. (I am not exaggerating here. I remember a more serious workshop in the Westin Hotel near the old NSF, where we could hardly hear our speakers at times over the loud chanting from the government-funded innovation corps in the adjoining room.) It is true that self-affirmations can be useful in focusing the memory of those who have not yet learned deep inner self-control and focus, but it is also true that developing social commitments without the ability of people to follow through personally often leads to nonproductive forms of groupthink.  The folks who develop new engines are not the folks who love to lose themselves singing and dancing in such chorus lines. The folks who are too embedded in such social activities often fail to take the mental acts of will required to get out of current thinking, to get out of the box in reality. They remind me a bit of the couch potatoes who cheer loudly for their sports team, while they drink beer and let their OWN bodies go to seed -- worshipping physical activity but not doing much of it. 

But no, autistic people are not generally like that. They are the exact opposite of that. If we approach autism in the same spirit of charity as medieval Christian nobility did, feeling ever so good about themselves as they distributed a few bits of bread or small coins to the poor from time to time, we will not do full justice to what different ways of thinking can really contribute.

Modern neuroscience actually could discuss autism at a much deeper level than today's practical clinical guides. But the details are complicated, and you wouldn't want to see them all in an email.

(See  https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/1924099547620453

for links to a debate which included them and "the new AI" in a debate, which only set up a few of the prerequisites). But perhaps a few examples would bring out more on what the real challenges are here.

First -- it seems clear that Albert Einstein himself was autistic. (I have been to conferences for mathematicians and physicists where I spoke to people who actually knew him and Von Neumann, and who verified things in the literature.) I believe it was Hildebrand (sp?) who had access to twelve top mathematicians of the time, including those twelve, and all twelve EXCEPT Von Neumann thought in images so intensely that they had problems with ordinary verbal thinking. Right-brain types. (Von Neumann was more balanced.) Obviously Einstein was not stupid, and he did produce interesting words, but he was focused, fixated and even alienated in a way which people around him were overwhelmed by. His childhood problems integrating with society are well documented.

I have often thought: if he had gone to a modern, more benevolent kind of school, they would have treated his autism more effectively, and he would have grown up as a more normal, well-integrated person. How many potential Einsteins have been cured in that way in modern US and China, converted into more docile personalities better integrated into our enthusiastic chorus lines? 

Second -- when I ran several technology-oriented research programs at NSF from 1988 to 2014, we worked hard to find out who the most truly creative, ground-breaking thinkers were across many fields. That database of experience really shaped my attitudes on many things, and did not support the conventional ways of thinking about them. I was reminded at times of what a teacher once told me about Sophocles, about how all the great heroes had to have fatal flaws as well. I remember one woman who complained to be about the irrascible behavior of one guy I funded, and I replied: "EVERYONE I have funded, who does visible or useful work, has SOMETHING truly weird or challenging about them." She replied: "WHAT? You fund ME, and I am perfectly normal." Relatively speaking, she really was -- but she was also a practicing witch and a teacher in a school of flamboyant belly-dancing.  (By the way, the guy she complained about spoke just like Donald Trump. It was really unnerving for me to hear Trump a few years ago for the first time, and to recognize so many familiar mannerisms. The guy also made a lot of money, getting into one of those lists at Inc, until he had a major collision with a major defense company engaged in corrupt practices.) Lamar Smith put a stop to that kind of thing, all across the board, and put more emphasis on chorus lines; that's basically why I chose to retire in 2015, as did a lot of other NSF Program Directors. 

How can we make full room for the very most extreme and productive potential of such people, without crushing them (or even the Von  Neumann types) into useless nonthreatening docile behavior, but also without unleashing their OWN less social possibilities to make life hell for the rest of us? I remember trying hard to fund an irrascible guy who reminded me a lot of the Koch Brother's father, whose new engine could have really remade the whole world economy... but he kept offending people .. and I wondered what he might have done IF he had become a billionnaire, as he really should have. 

Many years ago, when I worried about local schools crushing my OWN children, I did help create a kind of local partial solution. I worked with a local Quaker meeting, to set up a new K-8 school (still doing quite well), which made it a firm mission: "Our mission is not to indoctrinate. Our primary mission is to develop SKILLS. Above all, we will maximize development of the powers of the body, the brain and the soul -- NOT belief but practice and skills." How to do that? Not easy, but the key was to keep trying and learning. Years later, I was surprised to learn that Thomas Jefferson played a key role in founding west Point, which still remembers that same mission! The same three skill sets! I wondered: what does West Point do to develop skills of the soul, as Jefferson called for? Their big display on that one stressed social diversity and football. But in the end, I should probably concede that West Point may have done more to foster the unique potential of autistic kids than our Quaker School did. But then again... (But: to the big three, we should have added the integration of the three. And the fostering of just enough "humility" to be able to learn things.)

All for now. If anyone read this far, I thank you for your patience. 

Must we choose between Trump and war? The deep story.

This is serious, folks, and urgent.

Can any of you consider the possibility that I personally have had access to information on all sides, which dramatically changes the simplified guesstimates we see on CNN or in Trumps's statements?
Without any requirement to believe any psychic type inputs? Maybe not, but as a matter of due diligence, I do feel some duty to say a few things at a time when it would be possible in principle to avoid the worst. THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM ON A SUPERFICIAL QUICK LOOK.

Last week, in Rio and in airports and airplanes to and from Rio, I had lots of conversations with well-placed people from all over the earth. In fact, my paper given at the WCCI2018 conference,
www.werbos.com/E/GridIOT.pdf, gives lots of references you can check if you do not believe me, including:

[23] U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Open Hearing on Worldwide Threats, Feb. 13, 2018, https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/op en-hearing-worldwide-threats-hearing-1 and https://www.c-span.org/video/?440888-1/nationalsecurity-leaders-testify-world-wide-threats&live

As one part of that hearing, you can see that ALL major US intelligence agencies place great emphasis on understanding what's next in "the new AI." Since this was the world's most advanced conference in that field, sponsored very visibly by McAfee, is it possible that very interesting people were candid with me (a key technical leader there) , in environments relatively free form recording?
People from all over the world?

Key people from outside the US were generally livid about Trump. Let's face it: personal insults (and flattery) DO have big effects on people all over the world, even political leaders. When humans are insulted, their brains are flooded with hormones which tend to block the higher rational faculties. Trump knows that, obviously, but equally obviously considers it rational to allow in his own brain.

My first answer to their questions: I compared him to another person (a very well-meaning Democrat,  not Hillary) who firmly believes in a kind of "honesty" and "spontaneity" which means saying whatever pops into one's mind without a whole lot of censorship, even for objective analytical truth or for what one might say the very next day. And yes, Trump has DONE some truly horrid dumb things. And yet... I qthen uoted (without naming) a person who recently left the Trump White House, who never spoke to the press, who was far more candid with friends than most of the folks CNN talks to.

Her position: "Trump is not so bad. He really wants to do some very important things which need to be done. The problem is that he is surrounded by  so many bad people, advisers who were thrust on  him by the swamp, because he did not have enough personal contact with people who have the technical, substantive knowledge he needs. Their power struggles are MUCH more than the simple personality conflicts the press seems to imagine. They are the ones who digest most of Trump's efforts to do good things, and output .. digestive products... many of which make the swamp much worse."

Yes, Trump has done some truly horrid things, which threaten the Republic. Perhaps the worst is to carelessly appoint judges likely to maintain the ban on limits to legalized corruption, money in politics, which is FAR worse now than just the partial view shown in the well-documented book Dark Money (one of Hilary's favorites, her friends tell me, along with Brock's book, equally partial). The wires from dark money to the offices of the whips to so-called "secret societies" (outside groups improperly warping operations within government agencies, undoing the work of Teddy Roosevelt) are the core of the REAL swamp, not the little puppets who get forcibly danced around on those strings.

And yet, I warn them all: Trump himself is NOT the worst threat here and now. Ironically, though he has done much to serve the swamp (unwittingly, through his lack of understanding), he has also resisted far more effectively than Hillary would have been able to do. Her outcomes in the State Department show clearly that she did not understand the puppet strings  and more than Trump did,
and she really would have ended up like Rousseff of Brazil if she had been elected. The "swamp" was undecided about whether to get rid of Trump or not, since he has done so much to advance their interests long-term.

BUT JUST YESTERDAY, the scene changed.

What I told folks last week was: "Be careful. There are folks around Trump who are far less talkative, and far less spontaneous, far more calculated, and far more dangerous in what they want to do."
For example, DON'T UNDERESTIMATE Crown Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia. Please, folks, whatever you do, pray for his long life and success -- which should not be taken for granted." Some of the most important wires go back to the Moslem Brotherhood. More precisely, that Brotherhood has integrated a group of billionnaires in Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia itself, along with the Gulf-based service company Halliburton which services them, and several of its colleagues. Years ago, with my usual improbably good luck (sorry, folks), I obtained a planning document directly from that group, showing that they depend above all on a war between US and Israel versus Iran and Russia as phase two atfer phase one, the war with iraq which they and their lackeys engineered. To let them pick up the pieces, and prevent them from uniting against them. "Third Caliphate" they say.

Yes, folks, I am accusing the head of a Persian Gulf service company of being a traitor to the Republic, and very much imitating the role of Palpatine in the Star Wars movie. Did he really try to poison "W" after the SOTU on addiction to oil? In truth, a courier actually did bring me information on his meeting of friends after that speech. (Not so strange, but what was that about methods and sources? No, I didn't seek the information; it just came to me, very very physically. By the way, there probably is a press story somewhere about the big talk I gave at Rayburn two weeks before that SOTU, arranged by a House Republican helping "W". In the smaller Senate one, I was part of a two-man show with Woolsey, and maybe that got press.)

It was in the press that Cheney got rid of "lawyer barriers" in the government, and forced all kinds of intelligence sharing and even private sector access. I think that Senator Feinstein, in that hearing above, noted that the worst leaks which now endanger the power grid, came form CONTRACTORS, private sector firms with full access to everything. Maybe, thanks to Watson, more access and reality information than what the President has.

So now the folks whose top priority is to be loyal troopers to that extragovernmental network (which does not tell its puppets whose money pulls the strings) are pushing VERY hard for that war with Russia.

Sure, Putin is not perfect any more than Trump. Nor was Saddam Hussein. But careless war hysteria would end up worse than what Trump is doing.

Any hope to stop that war? Not if CNN and Dems let themselves be manipulated into hysteria,
per "edge of chaos" regime change (well-known to folks who plan regime changes), into war.
Hysteria is not the most effective policy, to put it mildly.

Swamp wants Rouda, to avoid risk of anything added to the conversation... to suppress any voice against war.

==========

Added at 3PM: Trump caves to the swamp just now and to the House, clearly lies. God help us.
Purchases nonimpeachment by promising money, guaranteed to cause future sequestration or devastating deficits. A step towards liquidating the US public sector, and deeper cutbacls to education.