This paper is scheduled for publication in Cosmos and History, Dec. 2019, and is now available only here and in the Foundations of Mind collection. In essence, it is a sequel to my paper in Activitas Nervosa Superior this year, outlining a new viewpoint on how to reconcile real hard core science and real spiritual experience.
The Phenomenon
of Man Revised: Evolution and I.T. Versus Extinction In the Years To Come
Dr. Paul J.
Werbos
National
Science Foundation, retired
U. of Memphis,
Dept. of Mathematics
5304 1st
Pl N, Arlington, Va 22203
keywords: noosphere, machine
learning, soul, psi, backpropagation, sociobiology, internet of things,
human-centric internet, futures, consciousness, cycles of history, evolution
The Phenomenon
of Man, Revised: Evolution and I.T. Versus Extinction In the Years To Come
© Paul J. Werbos May 25, 2019
In press, Cosmos and History
Abstract
The Phenomenon
of Man, by Teilhard de Chardin, was a great effort to truly unify hard core
science and charismatic spirit, with practical implications for better
understanding the dynamics of history and period we are now entering. This
paper presents the noosphere species theory -- a radical revision of de
Chardin's theory, as is necessary to account for what we now know about natural
selection, about the mathematics of intelligent systems and about the great
ocean of dark matter and energy connecting the galaxies of our cosmos. The
noosphere species theory still emphasizes the possibility and need for a growth
in spiritual collective intelligence, but it offers more details on how this
growth could be supported and accelerated, and it faces up to the reality that
our particular noosphere might or might not survive the difficult challenges
arising now. And yet, it accepts that we are not alone.
1. Background and Fundamental Principles
of a New Vision
1.1.The Core Vision of Teilhard de Chardin
In his seminal manifesto,
The Phenomenon of Man [1], Teilhard
de Chardin proposed a new vision of humanity and of our destiny, intended to
reconcile the core principles of his Catholic beliefs with the core facts
proven by science. He fully embraced the fact of biological evolution over
billions of years, but proposed that this process of evolution includes the
earth as a whole, the “noosphere”, as previously described by Vernadsky [2]. He
proposed that the omega point prophesied in the Bible refers to that time in
the future when we, components or cells of that larger noosphere, become more
united, and reach out like a single organism to the larger cosmos. The leading
science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote a graphic novel [3] describing
what that omega point transition might feel like to the people experiencing it.
De Chardin himself
explained more concretely what his new vision implied for meditation, spirit
and the experience of life [4]. A certain young John F. Kennedy was deeply
inspired by this vision, very popular at that time, and it was a major
motivator underneath all the excuses he used to advance his vision of reaching
out further into outer space. I do not have citations for this last point, but
it is based on many conversations with many of the people close to that
history, ranging from the janitor he spoke to regularly at Harvard to Barbara
Marx Hubbard [5], a follower of de Chardin very active in the space and futures
movements, and a mentor to Jerry Glenn, founder of the Millennium Project [6].
1.2.Problems and Corrections: A Revised Version
of the Vision
De Chardin’s vision did
not become so viral or so universal as he would have hoped, for two reasons.
1.2.1.
Political
Barriers and Need to Overcome Them
First, there are many
very powerful thought leaders who simply are not interested in reconciling
science and spirit or science and religion. They have a firm commitment to
either one or the other, insist on holding on to every last comma of some
received system of beliefs, and have little tolerance for cognitive dissonance
or novelty. They see the political benefits of painting the other side as a
strawman, citing the most extreme spokesmen for the other side, whipping up
their base as a path to power. But for that 70% or so of humanity which
believes that science and spirit both hold fundamental truths important to
their life and to their destiny, it really is important to try to reconcile the
two with a new unifying vision, just as de Chardin tried to do. Furthermore,
from a practical point of view, there is a real danger of nuclear war
eradicating the human species, if the global dialogue becomes dominated by one
group which plans to solve the conflict by eradicating religion, and another
group which tries to protect itself from the first group by imposing a stifling
fundamentalist theocracy on everyone on earth.
This paper is addressed
to that 70% or so in the middle. Of course, the
number 70% is just a guesstimate; it is based in part on a recent poll
of the US on the subject of evolution [7], and in part on earlier work by
Greeley and McCready [8]. I suspect that the number would be lower in Europe
but higher in the rest of the world. This paper builds upon the foundation of
another recent paper which explains why and how I personally believe that the
truth does lie in the middle here [9].
1.2.2 Logical Gaps and How to Fill Them: A New, Revised Vision
Unfortunately, there are also
several logical problems with de Chardin’s vision which kept it from growing in
popularity among those of us in the middle. This paper proposes a new vision of
who we are as humans and of our possible destinies (we do have some choice
here!), similar to the vision of de Chardin, but revised in a few fundamental
ways.
1.2.2.1 Dark Matter: the Physical Substrate Permitting Spiritual
Experience or Psi
The first problem with de
Chardin’s formulation is that he does not offer a possible physical scientific
basis for the flow of spiritual energy (like charisma, qi, mana) which is
central to all authentic spiritual traditions around the world, even though he
wrote about his deep personal acquaintance with that energy [4]. What
mainstream science really knows about the atoms which make up our bodies, and
the quantum electrodynamics (QED) which describes most of their interactions
[9], simply cannot explain anything like the spiritual experiences common to
all major cultures on earth [10] or even that small subset verified in the
laboratory [10,11].
But now, in the
twenty-first century, science is ever more confident that our cosmos is made up
of more than just atoms. We know that more than 90% of the cosmos we live in is
made up of “dark matter and dark energy,” but we do not know exactly what dark
matter really is. There was a time a few years ago when many of us thought we
might explain the strange movements of galaxies by a new theory of gravity like
Moffatt’s, without dark matter. but many groups have been able to map the
distribution of dark matter, by “seeing” it by gravitational lensing effects
[12].
Figure 1. One of
many recent maps of dark matter (from http://www.illustris-project.org/)
In order to be consistent
with the best mainstream version of quantum theory known to science today [9],
or with new efforts to find a more realistic foundation underlying quantum
theory, while still accepting psi or spiritual energy, we have almost no choice
but to hold that “dark matter” is the physical substrate which makes psi and
authentic spiritual experience possible. We may debate whether dark matter is
made up of fields, or of particles, or of a mix of the two, but in any case it
is what Aristotle would call the “substance” underlying higher forms like
spirit, and all aspects of mind or consciousness which do not use atoms as
their substance.
Of course, we cannot
totally rule out the possibility that quantum theory and Einsteinian realism are
both false, but until and unless we have evidence which contradicts them and
which also gives us an alternative clear and coherent enough to live
by, a ruthlessly rational and sane person in the middle will act on the assumption that the
dark matter hypothesis here is probably true.
The most plausible alternative
hypothesis for a person in the middle would be that the Lagrange-Euler
equations of physics have strange properties far beyond what science
understands as yet. Could it be that psi and spiritual experience can all be
explained as side effects of a kind of universal Jungian synchronicity, without
the action of any minds but what is in our heads and what these equations
describe? I tend to doubt it, but scientific integrity demands that we do justice
to “next best” alternatives, both to the left and to the right, so that we can
remain alert to any new evidence pushing us to either side.
When I discuss this dark
matter hypothesis, some people ask: “Why dark matter? Why not moola pazoola or
prima materia or…” It is important to remember that science does not yet know
what dark matter and dark energy are in more concrete terms. If you want to
call an unknown force field “moola pazoola,” that would be fine in principle,
so long as you do not immediately attach a whole lot of unproven hypotheses
along with it. To this day, many of the nonproductive and meaningless arguments
in philosophy and religion are based on a failure to remember that the words we
use are just a recent invention of human culture. The term “dark matter” is a
good one to use for now, precisely because it does not use a semantic trick to
sneak in unproven and unnecessary side assumptions. It is fine that many people discuss more
concrete possibilities for what dark matter might be, but the vision presented
in this paper is intentionally consistent with many possibilities for those
details.
1.2.2.2. The Noosphere Species Theory: It’s Not Just Earth
Above all, modern science knows that the
process of evolution by natural selection on earth [13,14,15] simply does not
predict the kind of outcome which de Chardin envisioned. This paper proposes a
new vision of who we are as humans, which is similar to that of de Chardin, but
revised in a way which fits what we know from evolution.
In a nutshell, the theory is that we on earth are
all parts of a greater noosphere, exactly as de Chardin felt, growing towards
greater unity and some kind of collective intelligence at a “spiritual level,”
i.e. in our connections through the noosphere. Our noosphere is not some kind
of mature god, as in some versions of the Gaia theory, but more like a child,
better called Terry (for Terra, also not gender specific) than Gaia. A child
whose existence is possible, under natural selection, only because of natural
selection in a much larger environment – the environment depicted in Figure 1,
a vast connected ocean of matter and energy criss-crossing the universe more
than 10 billions years old. (How much older we do not really know.) Our
noosphere is just one member of a whole species of noospheres. I have spoken
about this idea in the past [12,16,17,18], but this is the first serious
publication in the West.
There are two major
reasons why I feel that this vision is inevitable, so long as we hold to
quantum or Einsteinian realism.
First, from what we know
of biological evolution, we should expect life to evolve, whenever
there exists the vast kind of connected ocean of matter pulsing with free
energy, as you can see in Figure 1. All but a few of the galaxies in our universe
are bright dots, or nodes, in this network, and we now know that the connection
to dark matter is crucial the birth of the stars themselves; more precisely, we
know that those few “zombie galaxies” [12] which are not connected to the
network of dark matter suffer from a dramatic lack of star formation. This
evidence speaks not only to life, but to
some kind of coupling between dark matter and atomic matter, in which the dark
matter side plays the dominant role.
Second, in order to
explain and understand basic psi phenomena like remote viewing [10,11], let
alone bilocation and prophetic dreams and such, it is not enough to have a
plausible physical substrate like dark matter or anything else. There are many
people who claim to have a “physical explanation” for psi based on some kind of
physical substrate (in the spirit of moola pazoola), but that simply is not
sufficient by itself to explain how such things could be possible. Necessary,
but not sufficient.
Consider the example of
remote viewing, where a person in one small place on earth somehow delivers
information about another small place or person thousands of miles away. If QED
by itself could explain such a thing, then technology using QED based on the
best, most advanced understanding of QED should be able to replicate it in
technology. I can say with some confidence that it cannot, despite many
billions of dollars worth of intense effort by the most brilliant people on
earth [19].
The real difficulty in
building or explaining such a capability, regardless of what kind of physical
substances are used, is the switching problem. How can a
connection be made between two points, A and B (or Alice and Bob), so very far
away from each other? It absolutely requires a highly refined switching
network, not the kind of system which emerges in a random complex system like a
muddy but lifeless dirty pond or a mass of uncontrolled clouds floating in the
sky. Unless we imagine that some weird group of space aliens chose to install
an “invisible” technical switching network or communication satellite made of
dark matter, the only way this system could have emerged here is by biological evolution. The claim,
then, is that the switching function is performed by our noosphere, a vast
living organism made primarily of dark matter (with some extensions to ordinary
matter just as snakes sometimes grow a skin, and as human bodies contain both
cells and matrix).
For many years, I tended
to assume that our noosphere basically penetrates and interfaces with the
entire earth. When I met a woman in Nepal active both in the Labor Party of
England and in higher yoga (shades of Annie
Besant?), and she asked how to bring her two worlds closer together, I
strongly urged rallies using the song “We are the Earth.” I feel a positive
shiver up my spine even as a type that. (Of course, openness to that kind of
feeling is very important to mundane sanity, let alone spiritual growth.
Mundane sanity is what led me from hard core “materialism”
to experiences beyond it in the first place [9].) However, logic suggests that
our noosphere would not be limited to just our planet. Stars like our sun are
also connected to dark matter, and exploration of our solar system seems
unlikely to weaken our spiritual connection. So now I tend to think of us as
part of the Sol noosphere, not just the one planet. I interpret the manifesto
of Akhnaton declaring the sun as the One God as an attempt to channel the
nervous system part of the Sol noosphere, the vast neural network in which our
personal “souls,” our common ideas and archetypes all reside as subsystems.
A key aspect of this
theory is that we humans are what Dante called “half beast, half angel” – a
symbiotic life form, such that part of us is the system of atoms which science
now understands far better than most people know, and part is dark matter. It
is also what Rosicrucians have called an “Alchemical marriage.” Some marriages
are good, and some are dysfunctional. Another aspect is that there exists more
mature life and mind beyond our solar system, “in the heavens’ (in Figure 1!).
In the remainder of this
paper, I will use the term “soul” to refer to the “angel” side of us, that part
of us made primarily of dark matter, a part of the noosphere. Section 2 of this
paper will give my own personal views on what this means in practical terms for
us as humans, either as individuals or as agents in history.
1.2.2.3. Information Technology (IT), DNA, Money and Soul – Four Forces
which Could Save Us or Kill Us
One key test of human
sanity is whether we are capable of facing up to “inconvenient truths,” without
hiding from them or giving up altogether. Do we give in to the common ego
defense mechanism called “denial”, or do we use a more mature way of coping
with unpleasant news, the kind of mechanism which leads to success more often
in life than denial does [20,21]?
The original vision of de
Chardin [1] basically said that the human species is destined to rise to a
great and higher level of existence. Many religious dogmas became popular, even
though they contradict each other in ways which should make them think twice,
in part because they say what many people want to believe, that their
apotheosis is guaranteed, at least if they follow certain rules.
The noosphere species
theory clearly does not guarantee that the human species or any part or product
of the human species will survive the challenges of this century, as they play
out over the next few thousand years. It predicts that the noosphere has a
“body, brain and immune system” (among others) which will play an important
role, which are the product of billions of years of evolution making them far
more helpful than random chance, but that does not provide a guarantee. In
nature, not all little fish grow to adulthood, despite the billions of years of
evolution driving them to the behavior and learning which maximize their
chances. Are noospheres like fish or like bonobos, who have a better chance of
survival? We don’t know, but we do know that we face very severe risks as a
species, and we know that soul is only one of the underlying forces which will
shape our destiny.
There have been many
recent efforts to analyze more concretely what the most serious, highest
probability risks are to the very existence of the human species [6,22,23].
Having studied these in some depth, I believe that the biggest four threats
now, in order, are: (1) nuclear war and misuse of nuclear technology in general
[24,25]; (2) extinction due to future release of H2S from the oceans, due to
climate change [26,27,28,29]; (3) misuse of biotechnology; and (4) the
“Terminator” scenario for AI [30], which could happen in many different ways if
my own work in that field [31,32,33] is misused by people who do not understand
the underlying principles.
1.2.2.3.1 DNA and Soul as Drivers of Extinction versus Survival
Unfortunately, the normal
process of evolution by mundane natural selection on earth suggests relatively
little hope that humans could avoid extinction by at least one of these four
mechanisms. Ecosystems which seem relatively stable, after billions of years of
world-spanning species being deleted, normally go unstable when large, random
changes are made in the relations between organisms [14]. Many of the starry
eyed visions for a new human species, using new techniques for genetic
manipulation to create more beautiful people, remind me of how the trilobytes –
who once ruled the earth – became extinct as a result of excessive selection
for sexual attractiveness leading to a brittle catastrophe at the global,
systems level. From the viewpoint of game theory, the great pastoral societies
like Afghanistan which led to the rise of most human civilization [15] change
dramatically when nuclear weapons are added to the game. If war is inevitable
sooner or later, due to conflicts and zerosum thinking, and if nuclear
capabilities are widely distributed, nuclear “kembi” will be very, very hard to
avoid [24].
Furthermore, ongoing
population growth [34] makes it almost inevitable that zerosum thinking will
become prevalent, once again, in earth, unless there are dramatic, conscious
changes in global trends. There has been a lot of wishful thinking on this
subject, based on the same kind of social pressures which cause other forms of
denial, but a detailed study of the literature on biology and fertility shows
strong reasons to doubt the good news. The details of that literature are
beyond the scope of this paper, but a few examples are in order.
In 1982, when I
contributed to the OTA assessment of competing quantitative models of the
future of humanity (https://ota.fas.org/reports/8212.pdf),
we found that the “UN population projections” cited by so many groups trying to
sell their plans for economic development were actually selected from a large
set of scenarios, which the UN stressed were not forecasts, and did not include
any real modelling of fertility. Research by Sally Quinn of Census and research
by the World Bank got much deeper into the drivers of fertility, and found that
population growth in advanced nations in recent years was slowed, not by rises
in income as such, but by four key variables: (1) women’s empowerment and
education; (2) availability of public health, especially the whole range of
family planning; (3) urbanization; and (4) cultures which do not force women to
have children. I was in fact invited to a meeting on the United Nations Fund
for Population Assistance, which did study these things in great detail, and
started a major push to push these four variables in order to prevent the kind
of catastrophe which present trends really do predict.
These efforts can be of
great value to reduce instability in the next few centuries, but natural selection is still very much at
work. Already, cultures which force more children do produce more children,
producing demographic imbalances already starting to grow around the world. Some
aspects of genetic selection require millions of years to have any effect, but
it is well known that a mere 7 to 10 generations are enough to cause massive
changes in the mix of genes already “well known’ to biology [10]; genes related
to sexual behavior and aggression are certainly among those genes. Sociobiology
[10] did underestimate the power of personal experience and learning to change
behavior, to transcend that is in the genes; however, even the highest level of
learning [35,36] in the brain is still anchored in the properties of “telos” or
“happiness” specified by these genes.
The prediction, then, is
that we will not live forever in a world where more intelligent and prosperous
women have fewer children. The prediction is that there will be a selection for
massively competent women who also have massively powerful hormones,
overwhelming the social pressures. When I realized this in graduate school, I
have to admit I visualized such women and wanted to meet them. That goes beyond
the scope of this paper, but may help the reader in remembering what is going
on here.
The current exponential
growth of the human species is not so different from the growth which earlier
civilizations have experienced for a few centuries [37,38] or even from the
“quantum leaps” which other world-spanning new species have experienced [13].
In the past, it has always been just the first half of an “S” curve which then
comes to terms, sometimes well and sometimes badly, with various types of
constraints.
In touring a wide variety
of island cultures in the Pacific, I have had a chance to look very closely at
some of the very general types of possible paths. It started mostly with
adventurous “people of the boat” from Taiwan, expanding with great hope into a
new frontier, very similar in spirit to more recent European settlers of the
Americas. In some areas, the culture was deeply committed to maximizing its population
when it could. But in bad years (a stochastic event, mostly connected to El
Nino), there was a sudden imbalance. This led to war in some cases, but more
often to human sacrifice in cooperative societies (like the great Moche
civilization of Peru), and to cannibalism in societies even more committed to
maximizing carrying capacity and recycling.
A fascinating exception
was the culture of Easter Island [39], which, contrary to self-serving European
myths, was a great success in adapting to nature, devastated more by Europeans
at times than by native cultures. A relatively stable native society, based on
ancestor worship not unlike old Chinese culture and the culture depicted in the
movie “Coco,” became unstable when the first, brief European visitors showed
that a higher standard of living was possible in a prosperous and growing
society. The resulting time of troubles was a monstrous experience. It is very
unfortunate that anthropologists have not fully recorded the oral traditions of
the competing tribes which found a way out. The way out was a strong system of
maximally honorable competition, the Bird Man competition, which I suspect was
inspired in part by the esoteric secret society of navigators based on Raiatea
which I also had a chance to visit, which also had a serious spiritual input.
Honorable competition provided a way to allocate resources, and limit
population growth to what is sustainable, and what makes people happy and
fosters more authentic spiritual growth. It provides a kind of ecosystem in
which natural selection does not force fatal and degrading warfare.
The first challenge here
in reality is how to avoid extremes like dishonorable competition leading to
unsustainable levels of war and violence
and degrading of the spirit, or like illusions that everyone can have all they
want without constraint and without some kind of selection mechanism. The second big challenge is to converge on
some kind of sustainable social contract [40,41,42] which can maintain
honorable competition based on natural types of selection mechanism which do
not cause us to degenerate into silly outcomes like those of the trilobytes or
like the dangerous, brittle speciation of caste systems or early Carib and
Arawak.
To the extent that we try
to channel the will of the noosphere, the challenge is to provide societies
which really support a high level of collective intelligence and personal
spiritual growth, which requires a high level of education, diversity, freedom
and dialogue. It requires designing both formal and informal education and
research systems in a way which fully incorporates these bottom line values. Given
the great and growing power of the noosphere, those of us who do not choose to
work with it may encounter many strange surprises and unnecessary difficulties,
as in any bad alchemical marriage. A higher level of collective intelligence,
both spiritual and mundane, would be essential to improving our chances of
rising with all the threats to the existence of the human species.
1.2.2.3.2 How New Information Technology and Money Change the Game
Spirit and DNA are
certainly not the only deep, fundamental forces driving the course of future
history. We are now at the early stages of a massive growth in the use of
Information Technology (IT); unless there is some kind of massive war and
return to dark ages (which itself would raise our chances of extinction and
impede spiritual growth), we need to plan for a world in which all flows of
money, all corporations and many other activities will be redefined as files in
the emerging global Internet of Things (IOT). This redefines the nature of what
it means to create a new, viable social contract for nations and for the world.
Careless deployments even
of simple, weak information technologies has already begun to destabilize the
limited, partial social contracts we have come to depend on, like the US
Constitution. Many business plans have emerged, based on myopic social and
economic pressures, which would be nonsustainable in a number of ways if present
trends continue and they basically take over the world. Manifestos for a
human-friendly internet have started to appear, but unless we do the hard work of
translating them into actual system specifications for the emerging foundations
of hardware and software, it will all be like the pious words one often hears
before an organization starts creating a disaster. The enemy here is a kind of
entropy, which can only be overcome by a maximum use of consciousness and
intelligence in concrete, mathematically grounded design implementing very
basic mathematical, ethical and spiritual principles. This is one more reason
why we need a stronger cadre of people in the middle, capable of integrating
and appreciating all the critical aspects of this challenge.
In 2018, the French
research group INRIA and the leading French electric power market funded me to
go to Rio De Janeiro, to present a paper on how the new “deep learning” or “new
AI” technology changes the game in energy markets (and climate change). As this
paper went through review at many levels of the IEEE, I was asked to give more
details on how to address the larger challenges of the coming IOT in general.
Because that paper is already widely available, and contains many further
citations available on the web, I will not repeat the details here [34].
As a general matter, I
doubt that the earth is the first planet in this universe to reach this
adolescent stage of its development, when its survival is at risk. I would
expect that noospheres which have survived in this cosmos have strongly
developed “brains,” which support intelligence and mind, and “immune systems,”
which encourage the kind of social contracts and rules which make it possible
to survive difficult times like ours. Could it be that the “Ten Commandments”
were the best social contract or covenant which could be communicated to foster
such things, and to foster intellectual growth, at the early time when they
appeared? Could it be that the US Constitution, which was influenced by
authentic spiritual inputs from Scottish Rite Freemasons and Quakers as well as
readers like Jefferson of Locke, Francis Bacon and Newton, were an improved Gen
II social contract, supported by the noosphere for many years, until… Could we
be entering a new era, when a more sophisticated Gen 3 social contract,
implemented in advanced IT, is essential to survival through the next phase of
our growth?
2.
Selected Examples of What
the new Vision Implies
This new vision is
intended to integrate many, many threads of activity and thought, the details
of which are beyond the scope of any one journal article. Here I will give just
a few examples where a new viewpoint changes many things.
2.1.Afterlife: What Choices do You really face
as you retire, age and die?
Figure 2. Choices which
each of us faces as we retire, age, die
Like it or not, every one
of us is destined to change in a major way as we age, retire and die. Many
religions tell us that we will be the same person after we die, but first
person experience tells me that I already change in a major way from periods of
clarity and attunement in early morning to late night periods of exhaustion,
especially after alcohol. The noosphere species model essentially predicts that
when we die the Alchemical marriage also ends, leaving one part alive but only
one part. What is the destiny of that part?
Some mystics claim that
the answer to that question varies a lot from person to person, depending on
what they level of development they have
achieved in their lifetime [44,45]. The noosphere species model
basically predicts that this is true. More precisely, it predicts that our
lifetime and training will lead us towards a fate like the left side of figure
2, or the right side, or a mix, depending on what we learn as a whole system of
brain and soul.
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 in 2018 [17], 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.
But 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.
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,
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 my latest cruise on Holland American, 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 maintiains 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 Figure 2 shows you two pictures. 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 our latest cruise
up 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). The duality Figure 2 is also consistent with
the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which asserts that each of us actually has two
souls, one more like the part on the left and one like the part on the right.
How can we add this extra dimension to our lives, to our
“inner life” as Quakers would say? That subject is very important to each of
us, but beyond the scope of this subsection.
2.2.Challenges in the Training and Growth of
the Soul
Important as these challenges are, this paper can only
provide a few crude starting points at best.
Many years ago, I worked with a group of Quakers
dissatisfied with the choices for K-12 education in our neighborhood. In
creating a new K-8 school, we focused on a clear mission: to develop, through
exercise and training but not indoctrination, the skills and strength of body,
brain and soul, and the integration of the three. It really helps to remember a
clear and central focus when engaged in a difficult new endeavor.
But how to do that? Because no one on earth really knows the
most effective way to fulfill that mission, we drew on deep cultures from all
over the world. In addition to standard Quaker meditation and practice (which
entails the absolute minimum of indoctrination and dogma consistent with making
the effort), we drew on the best yoga exercises we could find, Sufi dances,
Western mystical traditions and exercises, native American practices, and so
on. There is a huge need for more systematic research to see how these various
methods work, for different people, and to use our new understanding of
intelligent systems to try to do better [46].
That school certainly does not tell us what the best
practices really are, but there were interesting lessons learned. The most
enduring successful exercises were probably: (1) the Quaker meditation period,
which stresses learning to listen to an inner voice; (2) an English composition
class in which children learned to give feedback on each other’s work, in a way
which supports communication and listening and understanding skills both
mundane and deeper; (3) the conflict resolution class, which had much the same
benefits, and also helped prevent the waste of time on neurotic conflict
behavior which slows down many schools today.
Similar considerations apply to adults as well, of course.
There is a deep spiritual imperative to keep learning and growing at all ages.
At the old National Science Foundation, following the vision of Vannevar Bush
before it was degraded by certain politicians circa 2014, many of us reached
high towards a system of honorable competition and very deep dialogue,
especially in well-managed panel reviews, which in my view activated spiritual
connections and higher intelligence much more than what goes on in many
churches and temples. Authenticity and commitment to truth were alive and well
in that high-energy environment, as strenuous (but exhausting) in its way as
the most professional athletic events.
A great challenge to the IT systems of the future is how to
foster that kind of deep dialogue all across human society. Today’s email and
social network systems clearly do not create that level of authentic deep
dialogue, in part because of phenomena like trolls, in part because words on a
page do not automatically evoke natural deep human connections to humans, in
part because people need more training in simple sanity [16, 20, 21], and in
part because research on It had yet to harness the full power of intelligent
systems to support collaboration. In my experience, weekly or monthly
international video conferences can work far better than the usual social
media, but this is just one small step.
The technical requirements for IT platforms to allow humans
to collaborate more effectively, without any need for risky, questionable and
unnatural “cyborg” interfaces, are too complex to discuss here in great detail.
Those interested might consider a case study, a discussion of how such a system
might have avoided the kind of risk and damage which can be seen at the present
time in the Brexit debates of March, 2019 (which I hope will be overcome
through some kind of “miracle”). [47].
2.3 Comments on
Advanced Mysticism
This paper is not a proper place to try to recount all my
personal experiments with psi and spirit since the time in 1967 when I first
decided it would be worthwhile to try to understand them more concretely. But a
few general comments are in order.
First, I have found that the noosphere species concept does
more than just justify the idea of psi and soul at an abstract level. The idea
that the “brain” of the noosphere is governed by the same universal
mathematical laws which apply to any intelligent system turns out to be very
useful in finding order in an otherwise very chaotic and diverse ocean of
information. For example, if we accept that growth and adaptation of the
noosphere brain is governed by modulated backpropagation, just like higher
biological and computer intelligent systems, and we recognize that the word
“qi” is simply a subjective way of talking about the (several types) of
modulated backpropagation operating in the noosphere, we can more easily adapt
to the reality that we are a part but not the rulers of an extremely large and
intelligent system. We can avoid the twin hazards, the Scylla and Charybdis of
spiritual development – delusions of grandeur and delusions of helplessness.
These twin hazards remind me often of an initiation lecture I received for certain
Senate staff, which they summarized as: “You must play. You can’t win.” We are
called to engage enough to learn, to contribute as much as we can, but not to
try to control or bias the process (which is not only unwise and unnatural but
also very hazardous at times).
Many mystics talks about “planes of existence,’ like travel
to astral planes and so on. The noosphere species theory would interpret these
important and valid experiences as experiences in a realm less real than our
mundane world of atoms, experiences in something like an internet chat room of
the noosphere. At a higher level, 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. It requires great discipline over time to learn
to cope with the resulting “firehose of information” [48]. None of this
requires accounting for the quantum mechanical aspect of noosphere level
intelligence [33,49], but once we do, it is somewhat easier and more natural to
think of it as an ocean of information across space time and the cosmos rather
than a firehose or volatile kaleidoscope.
In my last
cruise, in early 2019, 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.
In summary: St. Paul Letter to the Galatians, Revised Standard
Version, 3:5: “Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among
you do so by works of the law [i.e. rules like kosher, five pillars, etc.], or
by hearing with faith?” Learning to really listen and hear, with faith in the
idea that it is worth the effort, is a central part of all of this.
2.3.
Comments
on interface of soul with brain and psychokinesis
A key aspect of
the noosphere species theory is that the dominant partner in the brain-soul
interface is the soul or dark matter side. Thus in attempts to connect traces
of psi with data like brain recordings, we should not expect to find anything
like a psychic reception or transmission organ in the brain or the peripheral
nervous system. In actuality, different people should be expected to learn
different interfaces, as they train the neural networks both of their soul and
of their brain. This fits well with the more practical, earthy experience
reported by people like Sanders [50], by yoga experience with chakras and by other experiential mystical traditions
from all over the world.
This suggests
that the neural correlates of psi also vary from person to person, but entail
in general having some parts of the brain or ganglia tuned to “criticality”
states which make it relatively easy for the soul to perturb them. It also
suggests that soul might or might not also be able to connect to intelligent
critical systems made up of electronic or photonics components, but because the
development of such systems was not tweaked by billions of years of low-level
inputs from the noosphere, we really do not hyet know what the possibilities
for such systems are. Because “embodiment” is crucial to any intelligent
system, we do know that the usual dreams of immortality through downloading are
grossly misplaced.
Likewise,
to explain phenomena like PK, we need to consider the 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. It’s not about quantum
mechanics; it's about training (and understanding) neural networks.
For my
own personal self-training, in addition to trying out a variety of exercises
and learning how to be open while doing them, I have also made heavy use of the
“bootstrap” principle [46] important to training all kinds of neural network,
from brains to soul. The key idea is that all intelligent systems include
subsystems which learn to make predictions of what they see. If we see a
partial but fuzzy image, like the light in relatively dark but slightly lit
room, if we focus hard on try to predict what we see and feel and “see in the
dark,” and become receptive to clues from any kind of inner sensation anywhere,
there is hope that our natural (nonverbal) neural networks will learn to use
and thus respond to those other inputs. Focusing on inputs like moving bits of
fog can help one to learn to “look sideways” and see them more easily, partly
just by mundane pattern recognition but partly by more. Procedures for testing
which rigidly separate mundane and psi inputs and outputs can be useful for
testing, but terrible for training. However, all of this can be seem as just a
set of thoughts requiring testing in future research.
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