Today (Monday, 3/25/2019) is our first day back after a five week cruise to
Argentina, Brazil and the Caribbean which included more than a week up the
Amazon. We experienced many many things, but the choice in these pictures
dominated everything.
Most of the people on this cruise were
retired. In fact, most were taking an 80 day grand cruise from Florida to
Antarctic to Florida. Retirement, old age and death ALL lead to this same
question about what happens to me, and what happens to others. Do we “just have
fun” (or just play meaningless games) and gradually disintegrate away like the
skeletons in fancy dress, like the people in the brilliant children’s movie
Coco? Or do we grow up to the heavens like the sacred tree of the Mayans, the
Sian Kaan? We certainly saw people going in both directions on this cruise. The
older I get, and the more I understand about how these things really work, the
more I see it as exactly this kind of choice. It is a serious choice we cannot
escape.
Of course our
world is full of people who just “know” that this could not be the choice we
are facing. In my plenary talk on conscious and machine intelligence last April
(slides at
http://www.werbos.com/Tucson2018.pdf
and talk included in video at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5QxhYner7U
) I began my summary with a quote from Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't
know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't
so.” That happens again and again in all human cultures, from island tribes to
branches of science and religion. Even as a child, I wondered how people could
have so much conviction about THEIR tribe’s beliefs when so many other tribes
were equally convinced about something else, with about the same level of
justification. Again and again, I have also seen how powerful organizations try
to sell themselves by simplifying, by pushing people into simple black and
white choices. In today’s world, people have mostly gravitated to two
possibilities about afterlife – either it is a total fraud, or you wake up your
same old self unchanged, on your way to absolute perfection of pain or joy or
reincarnation.
It really made
me sad last year to see certain Hindu theologians taking strong measures, as
strong as certain believers in Adam and Eve, to defend the dogma that the “you”
who experiences astral travel or death is exactly the same “you” as the one in
everyday life. In MY everyday life, I have learned more and more to understand
the differences between the “me” thinking clearly in the early morning and the
“me” late at night most nights, especially after a bit of alcohol. In fact,
after the sail away party with unlimited free margaritas, I remember the
feeling of having hardly any functioning brain at all and operating my body and
words as one would operate a puppet from a great distance – and I remember others
in the same state who were less functional.
Logic once told me,
based on limited first person experience, that afterlife is total BS, that what
you see is what you get. In the airport on the way home, I received an email
saying that my paper explaining how I changed my views has been formally
accepted by Activitas Nervosa Superior (a Springer journal), in a special issue
on consciousness. In essence, inescapable first person experience showed me
that life is not so simple, but that we can still explain our experience and
what we read in history WITHOUT abandoning logic and science, WITHOUT becoming
mindless followers of some randomly selected tribal culture.
It fits science much better to assume that we are what Dante
called “half beast half angel,” a symbiosis or alchemical marriage between
familiar brain intelligence and another type of intelligence rooted in a
different kind of platform. (I think of that platform as organized “dark
matter,” which is not a specific type of particle but a general way which
physics uses to admit that more than 80% of the cosmos is almost totally
unknown to us as yet). If you and I are alchemical marriages, what happens when
the angel gets to be a widow or widower?
This more scientific viewpoint, less black-and-white than
today’s theologies, is actually much closer to the ancient beliefs of places
like Mexico, dating back to the days before various emperors manipulated them.
Once again, I highly recommend that everyone should see the happy children’s
movie Coco, which does a brilliant job of explaining that culture, a culture
which is much more totally true than most of the cultures with power today. The
movie is correct in depicting certain technical details which I could even give
you an equation for, but blogs are not the right place for equations. Still, I
can give you a hint in words. Survival in Coco depends on a flow of some kind
of emotional energy, like what Freud called “psychic energy,” like “qi” or
“mana”, like the backpropagation flows which govern the changes made over time
in ANY intelligent network. For the dead people in Coco, their survival depends
on a flow of qi from a primary source, the world of the living; when it dries
up, THEY dry up and dissolve into powder, like a certain passage in the Book of
Esdras (a book in the modern Catholic bible we have at home but not in the King James bible). On the
cruise, I certainly saw some rich people showing signs of dissolving away into
powder, kept alive mainly by connections to their grandchildren.
This way of thinking was not just in Mexico. Gavriel Kaye
has written great novels conveying the old culture of China. Even under
Confucius and Meng Tzu (“Mencius”), the assumptions and practices were very
much like Coco, until a famous “reformer” Zhu Xi, catering to a power-driver
emperor, redefined the state religion. (Many people in China blame its current
problems on Jiang Zemin, the latest great secular reformer, but I blame them
more on Zhu Xi. Both offered a mix of great new positive insights and great new
dangerous oversimplifications.) Even Mormons might see something they agree
with in Coco. Much of East Asia still maintians that culture, despite the
efforts by people like Zhu Xi and Jiang Zemin to stamp it out and control them.
One important detail: in Coco, a bad guy gets energy from
people who are NOT of his family. OK, he was bad, but it is not natural to
restrict the flow of energy only to flows within a family. It violates nature
to limit things in that way. In a previous year, we actually visited Mao Tze
Tung’s dorm room in the college in ChangSha where Zhu Xi taught, and saw the
echoes of his scream that it is not JUST within the family.
But I show you TWO pictures above. Only one is the simple
“Day of the Dead.” The beliefs of the Mayans included Coco as ONE PART of it,
but there was also that other world of “the heavens,” and the alternative real,
great hope depicted by the Sian Kaan, the tree which bridges through the earth
from that Day of the Dead realm to the world of the heavens. To me, this is
ever so real, and I wish others could really see how real it is and how much it
changes – offering our best hope not only to do better than the happy skeletons
which eventually DO dissolve into powder, but also our best hope to save the
mundane human species from extinction, if only we refuse to turn into happy
skeletons and insist on always reaching with real energy and receptivity to the
real heavens. (See
http://www.werbos.com/Space_personal_Werbos.htm
for my chapter in the book Beyond Earth, Krone ed, Apogee Press. Reaching out
with rocketplanes actually is part of this, but no, it is not at all the whole
thing.)
Of course, we saw a lot of great trees in the Amazon, and a
lot of people on the cruise reaching out very energetically to try to learn and
see nature and life and cultures beyond their own grandchildren. They were not
neglecting their grandchildren. The Sian Kaan still always connects to the
earth and to its roots, but it adds
another connection, to a primary source of qi above them, qi which flows back
to the living world and to the Coco world (the world of “widow” and “widower”
spirit personalities).
How can we add this extra dimension to our lives, to our “inner
life” as Quakers would say? I had the stop typing on that day, in part because
I did need to file taxes, and finish a new paper on quantum theory and
consciousness, now in press at Activitas Nervosa Superior, a Springer journal.
In truth, this question is of the utmost importance to us, but
requires us to understand several basic facts of life beyond the scope of this
blog post.
I will write a new paper on some of those facts of life, but
for those who want some concrete ideas now… I have recommended that they go to
www.wderbos.com/Mind.htm, and notice
the links to my blogspot blog. At that blog, search on “noosphere” and “dark
matter.” Or go to
http://www.werbos.com/Tucson2018.pdf . (The
video of the actual talk is posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5QxhYner7U, coming after a brief lead-in and a video of
a robot speaking.) I will append a bit more theory to the end of this post.
In brief: when we enter
into states of “meditation” where we really feel ourselves as part of the
noosphere, the vast mind connecting our entire earth or solar system, and
respond to the values and feelings and thoughts at that level, we can become
channels for that higher qi, which will continue at least as long as life on
earth continues, and perhaps even more.
In the first two weeks
of the cruise, I finished reading “Vita Nostra,” a one sided but great and
useful novel about spiritual development. No, we are not words, but we are…
partly something like that. And we need to pursue many types of discipline to
connect more completely to that which may not be truly eternal, but will last
billions of years, if we do not screw up all life on earth. And, as Jesus said,
we need to allow a certain kind of love permeate us deeply at all levels..
including a very strenuous love for the spirit of truth which, he had, would be
what really comes in later days like ours.
After the cruise, I posted some pictures with explanations which describe some of the disciplines of the soul which emerge from neural network mathematics, applied to the world of experience. But I did not show photos illustrating ways to see the night sky, which was also a great part of the cruise for me... something I tried to photograph a little, but far beyond the capacity of my cell phone.
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A quick summary of the underlying theory:
Many years ago, soon after Newton's great breakthrough, people followed up by proposing that the brain too is governed by mechanics, and thus works like a clock. (In the twentieth centtury, many proposed it is a thermostat.)
I really believe in Newton, in brains, in clocks and in thermostats, but view the idea of the brain as a clock or as a thermostat as a kind of category error.
Likewise, I have gotten very deep into quantum theory and psi of all kinds, but mostly view the premature claims of connection as a category error.
More precisely, I view the standard of model physics today as (1) not exactly true, for technical reasons; (2) a THREE LEVEL structure, of which the lowest is special relativity, the next is quantum field theory (QFT) and the highest is the specific EWT+QCD Lagrangian which people inject INTO SR and QFT to get specific predictions.
Neither SR not QFT AS SUCH can explain psychic phenomena. If we APPLY QFT in the domain of the best known forces beyond gravity (not so plausible as a major organizer for little things), and if we don't add more than SR and QFT, we basically get QED. Quantum electrodynamics has been fairly well validated, empirically. In a way, it is for this millennium what Newton's breakthrough was at his time. Many have hoped that psi could be explained in QED, but that simply doesn't work. Thus quantum theory AS SUCH cannot explain it. Dean Radin has often explained why QED is not enough.
As an example, consider how a remote viewer or a telepath can perceive very small scale details in a selected site far far away. Well funded technology research has tried to get closer to that kind of capability in technology, drawing on practical and empirical understanding of how QED works far beyond what Sarfatti begins to dream of. Yet they can't get close. In technical terms, there are problems figuring out the SWITCHING required here, to connect point A on earth to point B, at will. There is only one plausible way to do that in realistic physics (either Einstein realism or quantum realism): there has to be some kind of switching .out there, which begs the question of HOW such a switching network could be there, especially one connecting all the humans on earth, what we are most sure of. (Caveat: two backup possibilities could be cosmic mind idealism, CMI, an ALTERNATIVE to Einstein and quantum realism; and positive Lagrangian synchronicity, a relatively conservative idea I doubt and you would doubt more, rejecting all types of psi except for Jungian synchronicity.)
There are not many ways this could come to be, within the scope of Einstein or quantum realism. It basically comes down to my noosphere species theory. The idea is that the "switching network" which connects us is not some weird artifact produced by UFOs (made of what anyway?), but a manifestation of life, of evolved biological life, based on a material substrate other than the matter we can easily see in our laboratories (a requirement when we can in fact not see it yet with our instruments).
Some people think of "dark matter" as some kind of particle number 75 or the like. But what our phrase "dark matter" really refers to is the >90% of the mass of the cosmos which we understand hardly at all as yet, except to know it is implicated in the birth of stars and forms a vast pulsing network or ocean of life crossconnecting all the galaxies except for a few weak zombie galaxies. The idea is that the "noosphere" idea of de Chardin does describe our earthly experience, including psi, and needs fixing ONLY in regards to where the noosphere of our solar system comes ffrom -- that it emerged as a member of a cosmos-spanning species of noospheres. In fact, from what we know of evolution, we should EXPECT such life to emerge in such a vast ocean of life and matter as we know know exists. To explain human experience of psi, we basically must assume a kind of symbiosis or "alchemical marriage" between the brain we see (with mundane eyes) and the brain we don't. Not much choice. In fact, my exploration of first person experience and of reports from others through history over the world is fully consistent with that theory, a theory which engages with the specifics of the menu of various types of psi experience.
To explain psi that way tends to involve a pathway of signals from brain to personal soul either directly or indirectly to "invisible muscles" of dark matter which can then perturb ordinary matter. SOMETHING has to perturb ordinary matter for PK to be possible, either if we believe Einstein realism or if we believe quantum realism, and that something has to be something we don;t see with today's instruments. To say that its "dark matter" is no more narrow or specialized than saying it is a hardly known form of material substrate.
The challenge we are best equipped to address is not so much how to strengthen the "invisible" muscles but how to connect better with (and train) the "invisible neural networks" which connect our brains or our conscious selves to what those "invisible" muscles do. In essence, it's not about pilot waves; it's about training (and understanding) neural networks.
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One reader asked:
I like your final statement that we need to understand neural networks but I know from your other post about airplanes [ search on true legends ultrafast on this blog] that you feel multi-pronged approaches are required as well and you need not express that every time for me to expect that is contextual. While you question if there may be some substrate of soul through dark matter I wonder at your distaste for any substrate not specifically labeled dark matter. ..
Fair enough. Let me try to clarify.
It makes life complicated that I am not 100% committed to one possible theory about the ultimate laws of physics. But I do give a subjective probability of about 70% for now that Einsteinian realism or Fock-space/quantum realism is correct. (i.e. 70% that ONE of them is the ultimate truth of our cosmos.)
IN THAT CASE, I see little alternative to the noosphere species possibility, once we accept the experiential evidence for psi.
The noosphere species theory basically says that noospheres (and maybe some other stuff) are a complex form of life, an evolved emergent pattern, made up mainly of dark matter just as our mundane brains are made up mainly of electrons, protons and neutrons.
The leaders of modern vedantism seem very deeply committed to the idea that consciousness as such IS a SUBSTANCE. I disagree very strongly with that idea. It is like saying that our consciousness resides the mass-energy of our protons, electrons and neutrons as such, and that any collection of electrons, protons and neutrons would therefore be equally conscious.
To be more precise -- Einsteinian realism proper would posit that dark matter and energy are ultimately attributes and patterns of continuous "force fields," unknown as yet. It would not include any "aether" like the aether assumed by older interpretations of Maxwell's Laws, before the model version based on E and H or A. In that view, dark matter is in the same (ontological) category of "substance" as electrons, protons and neutrons, something which at a deeper level is itself a set of emergent patterns (coupled to waves, just as electrons are coupled to electromagnetic waves). Noosphere consciousness is NOT identified with dark matter, but COMPOSED of it.
