What We Really Know and Need to Learn about Climate and AI Threats to Human Existence

What do we REALLY know today about threats to the very existence of the human species, and where do climate and AI fit?

Quick summary: there is important news about climate, well documented, worse than before, but as a true devotee of truth, I will explain why, and what we should be doing on this and other threats to human species existence. There is also news about AI you will not see elsewhere yet,

HOW CAN WE ORGANIZE AND BE SURE OF WHAT WE KNOW?

Example of a Best Practice: IEEE

Most of you know that issues involving electricity and electric power are not just something to wire up at random after a great conversation in the local bar. Many of you even know that there is a great coordinated world organization, https://www.ieee.org/, which connects, evaluates and maintains what is known all over the world on these issues. It offers a two-way system of communication, essential to prevent people at the top from turning members into useless parrots.

Because the production of electricity is one of the two biggest sources of greenhouse gasses, we should be considering the best information available to IEEE on how to fix that aspect at minimum cost, as effectively as possible.

I was delighted this very morning, as I started to type this, to see an email from the President of IEEE, announcing that I will receive their Frank Rosenblatt Award , for outstanding contributions to biologically and linguistically motivated computational paradigms, with the following citation: “For development of backpropagation and fundamental contributions to reinforcement learning and time series analysis.” That came from an extensive review I did not even know about until this morning!

Example of Another Best Practice: US NSF

Some of you know that the National Science Foundation of the US has often been the world leader in the pursuit of truth in science, engineering and education, following the great vision and charter of Vannevar Bush, a man we should never ever forget or take for granted. As with IEEE, two-way networks of communication and review, and high strategic goals, using the best computer technology available for management, have been crucial to the high level of success often achieved.

In a recent podcast, the man who created the IEEE Neural Network Society in the 1980s (at a time when the lead textbooks of computer science and AI assured us that neural networks like deep learning could never do much) asked me for my views of how NSF has achieved such great success, despite inevitable human imperfections. I have seen NSF at times as the greatest true temple of truth in human history so far. There is no way that any government in our world, including the UN, could cope effectively with the new existential threats before us without working hard to reinvent, expand and build on these unique examples.

Today’s Best Practice for the Future of Humanity Including Threats to Our Existence

I wish more of you knew about another best practice, created by another visionary whom I have had the privilege to work with, Jerry Glenn, who is to futurism what Vannevar Bush was to basic science. He created the Millennium Project, the greatest two way international network of communication in existence, developing, analyzing and integrating scenarios for the human future, cutting across all the major sectors. That includes threats to the very existence of humanity, but also includes other important issues. Jerry and I have learned what we can from many other very serious efforts to understand threats to human existence, but we agree that humanity needs much more than anything which exists yet. That is why we and others with the Millennium Project have been working hard lately to try to propose and grow a new system of networks, ultimately like IEEE and NSF, focused like a laser on the issue of the survival of the human species.

Here is where we stand now on those efforts, especially regarding the possibility of climate change so serious what it would kill all humans, and regarding emerging threats with the internet which are even larger and more urgent.

 

Message on climate and AI extinction threats I sent to the Millennium Project international coordinators this past week (lightly edited):

 

We have often discussed two great threats of extinction of the entire human species --

Threats related to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), for which Jerry rightly pushes for a new comprehensive study (with plans to connect to the UN General Assembly), and "climate extinction", for which John Kerry and Guterres appeared a few months ago before the UN Security Council to push for a new effort there. Personally, I will do what I can to support both efforts, because they SHOULD support and reinforce each other in the end, and because I know enough to feel sure they are the two biggest threats to the continuation of human life. (Misuse of biotech and of nuclear tech are next biggest, in my view, but climate and internet are big enough to discuss in one email.)

 

I strongly support Jerry's AGI effort, for many reasons. First, it is the area where misinformation is most extreme, in advising policy. New studies and networks of information are most essential there, exactly because the information now flowing to policy makers is so far from what is known. Second, it  builds on your work on the future of work, which is one of the essential areas where changes in the internet (including Internet of Things and human-computer interaction and cybersecurity and quantum technology  COMBINED with AGI, which integrates it all) seriously threaten our very existence, if we do not get it right. It can also be a great ennobler of human life, but only if we push even harder in expanding our understanding of fundamental realities.

 

BUT:

 

The climate future is ALSO a rightful, important part of futurism, where decision makers and stakeholders need better information.

 

I was very happy to learn yesterday that that essential part of futurism IS being covered in an integrated way much better than I would have thought from world policy debates (including even the recent G7 discussions):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jq23mSDh9U

 

They put a lot of money and research into organizing and mapping the key issues, and they have started to get into key points which most of the world does not know yet. It is a huge step forward. They should be congratulated for STARTING a discussion which needs to be expanded and fixed. 

It reminds me of when I worked at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), where special support was always needed for the people who START settling a whole new continent, even when they get about half of it wrong on the first cut.

 

In the video, they clearly and explicitly state the need for a new office under the UN Security Council, just as Kerry and Gutteres asked, and for it to BUILD on what they have started but GO FURTHER. 

 

Unlike Greta Thunberg (whom they show and support), they work hard to explain WHY and HOW it is really about the extinction of the human species, and WHAT WE NEED TO ADDRESS to reduce the risks. 

 

I was especially happy to see their discussion of the importance of human land use (our sources of food!!) and of fertilizers. They even mentioned nitrates and phosphates. But they were not aware of the VERY best new, hardest core scientific information:

See chapter 12 of https://www.amazon.com/New-History-Life-Discoveries-Evolution-ebook/dp/B00OZM4AN2/

That book, only $12 on kindle, gives the most definitive overview now available of what science really has learned about the history of life on earth. (Also a guide to the future and related issues.) Chapter 12 reports on really crucial new work by Professor Lee Kump (https://www.ems.psu.edu/about/who-we-are/meet-dean) demonstrating that PHOSPHATE CONCENTRATIONS IN THE OCEAN predicts and explains the biggest extinction of life on earth far better than earlier theories favored by the oil industry. Still, the youtube video cites phosphates AND nitrates, which is probably what really drives the threat to humanity, when combined with "stratified ocean", which Ward has told us about in the past. 

 

The video does repeat the old mantra that "1.5 degrees C" is the key warning flag, or thermometer, for the risk of human extinction. It's a nice goal to keep in mind, but it is not the most definite warning of extinction risks (and of things we need to change to improve our chances). For now, I see ocean stratification (best guess about 30 years off) and fertilizers in the ocean as the best warning signal we have now, but more and better focused  research is possible and essential to get it right; see "point 5" of  http://www.werbos.com/climate_extinction_risk_and_solutions.htm. (Thanks again to Youngsook and Jerry for the invitation to their TV session in 2019 which was a great start at the time.)

 

The discussion of ocean acidification is a worthwhile issue, but NOT so important to extinction as they thought, based on those parts of Ward's earlier book which now appear out of date. 

There are also important CONNECTIONS between climate extinction and the bigger AGI issues:

  http://www.werbos.com/How_climate_extinction_and_internet_connect.htm

 

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

Regarding AGI, the recent Putin-Biden discussions after G7 were VERY encouraging for those of us who view cybersecurity (and quantum technology and AGI, which are closely linked to it) as one of the most urgent key pieces we all need to get right, and need to learn how to cooperate on. But I see no way we could get it right, and avoid real extinction of the human species, unless we also connect it to deeper and broader collaboration with China. In the case of climate, the "extinction" threat should be clear enough to anyone honest enough to look at the new solid information from science, but with AGI/IOT/new-internet the threats are actually larger and more imminent; the problem is that they are obvious and glaring only to those who know how they work, with real technical roots.

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

 

Should You Believe It? Important Follow-ons on Climate and AGI

There have already been some important follow-ons, starting to build new bridges to very important players.

For example, Hector Casanueva, editor of the  Chilean Council of Foresight and Strategy magazine, is publishing the message I sent. He provides a focal point for important work on climate and AI all over South America, which is proving out real world technologies meeting much higher standards than some of the stakeholders funded in the existing climate efforts around the world.

There are also climate skeptics who wonder whether chapter 12 of Ward and Kirschvink really is the best up to date story. In fact, I am deeply impressed by the quality of work I have seen led by Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institute in DC, just a few miles from my home where I am typing this. HIS more recent seminal work points to volcanoes as a cause of mass extinctions in the past. However, even though Hazen is a truly great leader in his field, and I have often wished to meet him (and Kump and Ward) some day, there is no single human on earth who knows all aspects of all the sciences in play. Hazen’s recent videos and books include strong praise for Kirschvink, and do not argue against the great recent book by Ward and Kirschvink. I do not agree with everything in that book, but I HAVE sent messages urging organization of a new, fair workshop with leadership from Ward, Kump and Hazen to discuss some of the extinction threat issues (and required future research) in more detail. I even cc’ed people I know in NSF and DOD, and folks working with Warner’s Senate Intelligence Committee, urging world class honest scientific organization of the workshop, following what we learned from the very best success stories we had at NSF.

 

But… when a skeptic friend asked me about this, I did a quick web search on more recent work by Kump:

Using scholar.google.com, advanced search (triple hamburger),

I see:

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2360

https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/39268/Combined%205-14.pdf?sequence=1

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2018GB006061

No reason here to change the definitive story in that book!

 

 

On the AGI side, I certainly paid a lot of attention to Warner’s support of new funding to “strengthen US leadership in three key new strategic priorities: AI, cybersecurity and quantum technology.” If we interpret “AI” to mean “AGI” (the most powerful general AI), it hit me that two of these are areas I led at NSF before my retirement in 2015!

More precisely, the “new AI” came from work I did and funded (https://mindmatters.ai/podcast/ep139/ ). I created and led another new area  https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310 which got deeper into the quantum theory used in advanced electronics and photonics than any other program on earth, pointing to new opportunities in Qunatum Information Science and Technology (QuIST) far beyond the Quantum Turing Machines which dominate almost all research funded now by the US government.

See the many links at the bottom of http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm. Also see the new unification I posted on youtube this year (see the slide below). For a more intuitive picture of what this means, see this recent interview discussion in Canada.

 

Will the folks supporting Warner’s new directions actually fund work beyond the narrow limits of current US efforts in QuIST?

I felt strong support for a statement by Preskill this morning, stressing the need for new directions to be guided by people who really know the math. That’s absolutely right. But in THIS area, there  are crucial new directions in the math which have not yet reached “the usual suspects” in the US. Many in China and even in electric power know many crucial aspects of this and cybersecurity which have yet to flow to US policy. I hope Jerry’s UN efforts will provide a venue for the same dissemination of this technology to nations now lagging so far behind they don't even know how far… like the US.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One More Experience of Higher Consciousness With Age

This morning -- I worry whether my blog posts on higher consciousness may have been misleading, and in need of correction. As I look at what I said from a distance... the errors they might encourage are actually quite subtle, from the viewpoint of logic, but in real life, they seem important. They do affect my PSI plans/strategy, and all of us should have SOME type of PSI plan or strategy, informal as it may be and in need of continued updating.

I have described the time "from age 70 to 90 or death" as an "age of uncertainty". Is it smooth sailing until a sudden easy transition, or.. unpredictable jerky changes in life, like an old car losing parts in a way hard to predict? 

A positive view: is it Death on the Installment Plan (DOIP) or Duality on the Installment Plan? I have written here about various types of "cosmic consciousness" (CC) experience which I MAINLY had in bed when fully conscious in the early morning. 

I mentioned something my little sister told me she read, a long time ago: "Am I Li Po who just woke from a dream of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who just started a new dream as Li Po?" Am I one level of life in CC, and a lower level more and more late in the day? Does DOIP mean I am becoming a bigger "butterfly" at CC times, but a lower human later in the day, a kind of division of states, moving slowly from alchymical marriage (me as union of "beast and angel") to alchymical... not divorce, as the beast will simply die even if I take reasonable care of it?

AT ALL TIMES of day, I still remember the important "Scylla and Charybdis" challenge which all sane humans should always be aware of and try to manage, at "all times" like never swaying so far to left or right that we fall over. THIS challenge is -- not to overestimate or underestimate what one could accomplish, with what one has now. Not too much overestimating one's powers or strengths, but not falling into false helplessness as an excuse for not living up to one's natural .. whatever... dharma?

At normal times of day, memory of CC and times of greater capability should support thiskind of balance. You remember you can do much better, but also remember not to overglorify the limited perceptions one has at the time. I do not do Irish Cream any evenings any more, but this kind of "staying balanced by memory" was especially notable on such days when I did.

But at CC times... as that evolved and grew until this morning... slowly humility required me to remember the principle of "partial gating" I have described here before. I can gate to a level of consciousness which is much higher than my normal best, AND YET IS ITSELF finite. A kind of "spirit of the deep" connection, extremely important. The challenge is to strengthen and manifest that connection, even as becoming more clear that the individual person side of that (the "me" more or less, noetic as it is) is NOT identical to what it is channeling.

This morning, a small mundane but real experience forces me to focus a little differently, and adds just a little to the requirement for humility not as a social gesture but as part of truth and sanity. 

The small thing -- a friend called this small thing "a pain in the butt."

Earlier this year, the "old car" had more and more problems seeing, then tooth problems, and then a terrible A1C blood test result just on the day before a covid vaccination shot I thought would start a more normal life. The eyes are back to normal, thanks to posterior capsulectomy (a complex story, and thanks to especially good doctors). Teeth close enough (likewise). HOWEVER: just a few weeks, when my wife Luda suggested how I might help her clean walls of a room in our house (as she prepared a bigger restoration).. I bent over, and suddenly felt a pain in right hip. I decided to rest a bit (not the worst pain in my life!).. but it seemed to be a discrete change, a bad one, not yet over despite all kinds of normal approaches to cope with it.

The story of that groping.. not yet over... would not interest most people (except those facing the same). Bottom line: THIS early morning... lying in bed... sheer physical pain sure affected "the beast" and affected even how well I could link to the spirit of the deep or CC. To REDUCE attention to physical pain, it is more realistic now to get put of bed, and get into a more sustainable sitting position, a position controlled by the awareness habits I have been trying to learn more and more lately. No total CC now. Now the best I can do... I can do right now, in a sitting position on a firm chair in front of the laptop where I am typing this. 

Even before I gently moved out of bed (at 540AM, when I would usually be starting an hour of deep CC activity)... I did remember bits of a video Luda showed me ... months ago... of a Japanese Buddhist who alternates between zazen type of meditation, aiming at CC with no inputs from the mundane body, and a moving kind of meditation, still aiming as high into CC as possible WHILE ALSO maintaining a balance and coupling to mundane activity. 

Where does this lead? PART of CC has been activity DIRECTLY on PSI levels ... levels which connect us after all to other people and to the rest of the universe, and even to some PK connections to it. (A little gentle qi to try to ease the muscle sensitivity and pain? That has value, but does not make me an immortal. If I had THAT level of skill, I would not be down here in the kitchen chair right now! I think. Unless it was called of me, here and now, to write THIS?) 

Another part of CC has been planning and linking... usually a list of things I can or should do after I get up... and some links to help. And ways of looking to stay as positive as I can, which I deeply want to do. Our neighbor says it is "faith, family, friends FFF" which keeps him motivated enough at a deep level to stay positive (and to WANT to stay positive, for all their sake).

I tend to really the old Rosicrucian mantra "life light love (LLL)," and of course draw energy form that realization. In either case, I recall the saying "To integrate or disintegrate, those are the choices." To flow positive as best one can, while one can.

But now... no great plans for this day, except a very small Quaker Meeting in the evening where FFF and LLL are easy even for a late night fuzzy eyed mortal to see.

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

Six days later: That day was unusually bad for me health-wise. On Tuesday, I talked to my new GP, and

then read: https://www.spine-health.com/conditions/herniated-disc/lumbar-herniated-disc

Maybe I had one or even two more days when pain in bed kept me from my usual "Cosmic Consciousness" (CC) hour in the early morning. I am so glad that came back and seems likely to stay! Glad because there is so much of that unique work which needs to be done, which requires a two way partnership between my old but full old brain and Higher Intelligence. Lately, when I try to discuss it with Luda, I find it more comfortable to use the simple phrase "Higher Intelligence". This morning I said: when and if we connect better, we can connect like two eyes to better see what is there. 

Our neighbor Ed includes "prayer" a lot in his regular spiritual practice. Is "prayer" when we speak to Higher Intelligence (or Intelligences??), or is it when we listen? I expect it should be a balance of both.

"Why should God listen at all?"

Well, I remember meditating deeply in a sacred onsen (hot bath) in the center of Shinto, thinking about how my foot is to me as I am to our noosphere. Yes, I do push it around a lot, and should, but I should also be aware and sensitive and learn from it to, and consider its needs. This week, I think more about my hip and my lower spine, but TWO-WAY awareness is essential. That is the path of nature and it is what my new four-fold vision of reality predicts. (That vision does include our local noosphere of course, and more.) 

The deepest and most complete attunement (or "assumption" or "avatarhood") state.. helps each side of the connection be more fully aware of the other, and connected, yet also aware that it is CONNECTION, not an identity. Like two "persons" within a larger symbiotic mind. 

But this week, it seems I must do more deep connections with parts of my body, in order to maximize CC hopes for the future of my (admittedly short) mortal life. (Twenty years is short by those standards, but it is not as if I know the number.)

Image of nature in our solar system as a giant whale

1. Why we Need Images of Nature 

Recently I updated my web site to reflect my new understanding of how four levels of reality work and connect with each other: 

(1) the Einsteinian level which I now understand as most fundamental; 

(2) the David Deutsch level, the best mainstream quantum field theory, the version which has passed many experimental tests in the realm of Quantum Information Science and Technology; 

(3) Von Neumann's approach to explaining consciousness, mind and life as we know them in mundane life as the result of emergent statistical patterns embedded in Boltzmann and Bellman equations; and 

(4) the spiritual level, from PSI to cosmos. Minds, Brains, Souls in a unified new mathematical viewpoint explaining what seem like contradictions between objective reality and first person experience.

 I have never claimed to have a COMPLETE understanding of level 4. That would be worse than a biologist claiming to know every species possible on earth and elsewhere! But if we look hard at all the evidence before us, we DO seem to know SOME things. And so, I believe that 

--  we ARE part of a "solar system noosphere," a connected organism reaching at least from deep mud under the oceans of the earth all the way to the sun, and maybe some more in our area  

--  AND that this organism has a "brain," a nervous system, making heavy use of ordinary matter (electrons, protons, neutrons, and photons, whatever these are) AND of "dark matter" (which we can now see in photographs at a scale of many light-years, which includes both "particles" and "force fields").  

--  And that most or all of us are in a state of symbiosis with that "solar bra in." 

--  And finally, that Carl Jung's Red Book  includes an excellent first person account of HIS conscious awareness of his connections with that brain, and more. 

All is in the updated webpage (except for two slides which have yet to upload). BUT: what do we know of OTHER minds beyond us mundane earth animals and the solar brain? That is an area of huge ignorance. And what do we know about the DETAILS of our solar system brain, what is its spirit of telos, and how it connects to our level of life? There is so much we do NOT yet know, which may become easier to understand, bit by bit, if we clear our vision by at least looking at reality here. By using both science and first person observation, integrated together. 

 Jung tells us a lot about how to achieve integration. He shows how greater consciousness of ourselves, of our connections with our own preverbal mind as well as the noosphere, depends a lot on how well we use not just words but images, analogies, feelings, and even music. There is not just one true image we can use, but many, which can blend together like photographs of a 3D object taken from different angles. 

 2. The whale: one good specific image or analogy to represent our local solar system organism 

 My favorite images of our local solar system noosphere brain are a tree (a special type of tree) and an image of the sun which some Shinto associate with Amaterasu. (It helps that I see both of them most of the time on most days through our back doors and windows. No, I don't confuse any tree with the whole noosphere, but most of them ARE alive, and can be used as gateways of the mind.) I have also mentioned the Jewish star and the kabbala of Luria. 

But yesterday I was reminded of the value of ANOTHER image or analogy, our local noosphere organism as something like a great whale. My thinking started in a Quaker Meeting by Zoom, where someone talked about climate: "We should not underestimate the power and intelligence on Nature on our planet, which may help us survive problems which we humans seem unable to solve ourselves." Then two people spoke of the Netflix video "My Octopus teacher." 

We humans are the peak intelligence of a whole mountain range full of species with intelligence on earth, but there are two other whole mountain ranges of animal brains on earth: (1) brains of octopi and beyond, like giant squids; and (2) hive minds of ants and bees (and beyond?). The giant squids reminded me of earth history, and of the giant sperm whale, whose brain is an interesting example of how complex brains can evolve and work. 

 The sperm whale has the largest brain on earth. But how INTELLIGENT is that whale? Scientists debate that, and study that, but do not truly know how to integrate what they know. (Most scientists do not even know how mammal brains work; the upgraded link on my web page above points to very recent explanation of that. Pilot whales are not the same as sperm whales, but are studied more because it is easier. ) 

YES, the whale has a big brain, but it also has a huge body. How much of that huge brain is really just coordinating small pieces of a huge body, lots of neurons, but at what LEVEL of mind? And so, what of our noosphere? It has a huge nervous system, but how much is restricted to local boring tasks? Hazen's book the Story of Earth suggests that Amaterasu is like a brilliant woman who just spent a billion years (1.8 to 0.8 billion years ago) cleaning out the stinkiest, most poisonous giant toilet within lightyears. How do we strike up a relation with HER, and what kind of mood is she in? (Ward and Kirschvink give a similar picture, all backed by very hard science.) But then I think of the sperm whale. It too spends ever so many years just eating and metabolizing. 

But there are also those whale songs, which many say can reach thousands of miles, a very complex social system requiring and displaying intelligence. Lack of hands is a serious limiter, but solar noospheres do not have that problem. It took a long time to de-sulfur earth's oceans (in 1.8-0.8 billion years ago, "the boring billion"), but that does prove that nothing else was happening. 

 It amuses me to remember I published a paper in an obscure place, the Rosicrucian Digest, in 1977 or so, before I even knew about dark matter. Based on recent discussions with Schwinger and his TA Chaikin, I considered how particles like tachyons with negative mass-energy would not only fit their models, but would predict a kind of cosmos-wide ocean of energy and matter, where big organisms would evolve, analogous to whales. I even received a letter from Tryon  saying that this paper inspired his own next thoughts about how things work in our universe. But now that I think of it, sperm whales are carnivores, which is how they evolved brains bigger than what other whales have. (Humans and wolves have a similar relation to cows and deer). We really have no idea what mix of species exist on that scale of length in our cosmos. And how does the Spirit of the Deep change the picture?

For folks over 70: realities of our coming afterlife

 Two windows into what happens after ordinary mundane death:

(1) real ghost stories; but

(2) VERY important aspects we miss if we think that is our whole story

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

1. GHOST STORIES

A retired top executive from the computer industry, who previously played a major role in the management of our local Quaker Meeting, recently called me by Zoom to talk about many subjects. He mentioned two things relevant to this topic:

(1) "I have been visited by a whole lot of ghosts, right here in my study. My wife says she cannot see them, but we all know I am still of clear mind. What do you think?"

(2) "That huge picture on the wall behind you, what is its story?"

Back at the time of William James, before the rise of  modern quantitative parapsychology (due to Rhine of Duke?), there were many very honest, intense and sincere groups working hard to understand PSI in a more scientific way than older traditions. I recommended my friend to read or learn about the classic book, Phantasms of the Living.

"First thing that you need to know is that what you see might be a projection from a LIVING person, not a ghost or spirit body or anything like that." Many traditions talk about "astral projection" rather than "astral travel."  What you see is NOT any kind of real body, but a projection of someone's mind. That someone might be alive or might be dead.

But yes, the story is tricky because so MANY older people suffer from Cognitive Decline, and the fraction who say they see ghosts increase at the same time. Science knows amazingly little about how elder cognitive decline actually works; when we age past 70, we are well advised to learn what science CAN tell us, limited as it is. Hameroff's conference in 2018 -- maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n941JWmT_xQ -- included a great session describing research trying to understand the links between cognitive decline and anesthesia; from that, I concluded we should avoid a need for anesthesia in any way we reasonably can. I HAVE seen people who showed cognitive decline after an operation which could have been avoided. One of my neighbors who experienced that learned that there are low level infections usually in hospitals  which few doctors know about which CAN be treated, but usually are not. And then Bredesen has great books on other aspects we should know about. On the positive side, I have seen reference to blueberry juice and mental stimulation in very serious technical literature, to stimulate production and use of new stem cells which can reverse the direction.

And so: GIVEN that "seeing ghosts" by older people can be explained away so easily, why should we believe such things?

First, it is NOT ONLY older people, but let me not elaborate. So MANY other people in our Quaker meeting have discussed such experiences, one of whom successfully created a new school and still teaches teachers skillfully in big Zoom classes!

Second... I told my friend: "I have seen the other side of this." 

Buried deep in http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm is the link:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/09/classifying-my-first-person-spiritual.html

where I mention my OWN experiments with "astral travel," mainly back in the 1970s,

echoed only in (veridical) dreams after that.

I certainly remember floating into rooms where one or even a few people, generally older, could actually see me. I communicated with them by smiles and other such body language, even as people around them seemed utterly puzzled or even disgusted. The people who could see seemed to have a kind of whitish glow about them, and yes, they saw enough of me that we COULD interact.

"What were you trying to tell them?" My friend asked. Nothing special. I do not even know what drew me to that particular place at that time... Or at other times, it would be just a side effect of my going somewhere else or answering a question on MY mind. 

That picture behind me was a huge picture of my father, Walter J. Werbos, who actually taught a course once (pro bono) at Wharton on marketing and public relations, and may be embarrassed now about one of his students who appropriated his way of signing the "J" with a great flourish. 

My father gave up Catholicism when he was young, probably due to abuses and distortions he ran across, or maybe due to lack of sheer justification in the DETAILS of what the church teaches now. Before 1967, when experience FORCED me to accept what I now call PSI (the other side of our minds and lives), I assumed he was probably a solid German technological atheist as I was. But later, when I confessed to him how my views had changed, he just smiled and said: "We wondered how long it would take for you to grow up." No, it wasn't just my half wild Irish Druid Catholic mother... it was the solid Germanic and industry side even more!!!

But my father was quite insistent he did NOT want a traditional Catholic funeral (as HIS mother had had), with a body and a viewing and all that. "When you die, you are gone. The body should be given to science. Don't waste money, and don't waste what's left."

When my brother and sister and I met at his house in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, when the time came to implement his wishes and discuss his estate, I insisted on sleeping in his bed that night. "WHAT?" they asked. A friend of my sister even offered for me to stay in her house, and I was actually VERY attracted to her at times, but most people would ask: "Aren't you afraid of seeing a ghost?" My reply: "If my father is ready to talk to me, I really would not wish to miss the hope of learning what he might tell me, of this life or beyond." (I have known many Asians who would fully appreciate this and have said much more to me.) 

Sadly, I did not see or hear from any ghost. But I DID have an "assumption dream," which is explained in that blog post above. (I hope I cited Eisenbud https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=mpsa.006.0065a ). Just as living people may "see a ghost", can a ghost see them? I first saw through my father's eyes at his Catholic memorial service (arranged by my family), where he was a little frustrated at seeing "through" the eyes of exactly that big picture which hangs behind me in my study now, which they used to represent him at the service. He did not ask or will or desire to be there, but the many people at the service looked at this picture and thought of him, and that "puled him in." (Did the ghost come to visit YOU, or did YOU call the ghost? PLEASE CONSIDER WHOM YOU CALL!!)

And then later, he travelled to the medical school place where they sent his body (prior to some kind of cremation later, though we never saw the ashes). And yes, THEY focused on the person they imagined they saw, and he had to put up with that for awhile. A short while, however, and ... 

2. NO WE DO NOT JUST GO TO HEAVEN OR HELL OR THE ASTRAL PLANE OR EVEN SHEER NOTHINGNESS

To us as normal humans, it seems easiest to imagine that nothing much really changes after mundane death, even if we end up in a strange place. "My self is permanent and unchanged." (MY self changes a lot even from early morning to late night after red wine, even now that I HAVE given up the Irish Cream.) 

But science, logic and first person experience ALL warn us  not to give way to that kind of human-centric bias in trying to understand a cosmos which is much, much bigger than us. It really is. Excess, undisciplined ego distortions are a huge problem for all levels of humanity. 

In the 1970's, I remember reading a brief, private piece by H. Spencer Lewis, which basically said:

"If you are trying to understand the soul and greater life, you should at a minimum study and understand two great books -- the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead." Tibet we visited and understood quite easily, but the Egyptian viewpoint seemed ever so strange to me until just a few years ago. "What are these ka and ma, TWO souls for each person?"

BUT: for now I must be brief. The links I gave now explain that our "souls" are all part of larger local soul/mind, our local noosphere, fully consistent with hard core Einsteinian realism. As PART of a larger system, we are like neurons in a brain. We are very diverse. The very life and future of our souls all depend on our CONNECTIONS (as is true for neurons in a brain). We all have varying MIXES of local and global connections. When folks like Gary Zukav 

sound like the Disney cartoon Coco --that IS PART of our fate and our potential and our true nature. But so too are

LONG DISTANCE and GLOBAL connections. Kill the long distance giant pyramid cells, and the brain itself will die. We need both, and harmony, and each of us... has multiple manifestations..

What do Einstein and Hamilton tell us about Jung's Spirit of the Deep (aka God)

THE QUESTION OF THE DAY 

 More and more over the past few weeks, I find myself drawn to a concept of "third order sanity," in which we become more aware and connected to what Carl Jung called "the spirit of the deep" (in his Red Book).  Jung discusses how we can use visual images, among other tools, to deeply assimilate and use any new point of view, so when I tried to achieve more third order sanity myself, I started by  visualizing triangles. That worked, and it still works,  but lately I simply think of our cosmos and the Spirit of the Deep as something which looks like the vast neural-like network web of dark matter which we see in photos taken by gravitational lensing. See the lower right of this slide.

This slide gives an overview of the youtube talk and discussion I led nine days ago  giving my new four-fold understanding of the reality we live in, starting from 

(1) Einstein's view of how the cosmos works, rising to 

(2) the Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of quantum theory (which is our best approximation now to the statistics of how the cosmos works), rising to 

(3) those streams of mathematics from VonNeumann which can explain life and mind as we know them as emergent phenomena, rising still further to 

(4) larger scale emergent phenomena like a few kinds of higher intelligence alive in our cosmos, explaining how and why we have "souls" and authentic PSI or spiritual experience. 

I define "first order sanity" as the same kind of integration which Freud and Confucius taught.  I define "second order sanity" as the integration of brain and soul, as in Jung's extension of Freud. (That fits the old Western concept of "alchymical marriage".) But third order sanity would involve fuller integration beyond our personal soul to the full spirit of the deep, whatever that is. 

But what is it? What does that vast neural-like network in our cosmos really represent? Is it really a mind at all? I have some fuzzy new thoughts about that this morning, and hope that some real dialogue is possible to help clarify it all. 

HOW MUCH IS OUR COSMOS LIKE A GIANT MIND, IF WE BELIEVE THE EINSTEIN VIEW? 

In the youtube talk, I first explain why I now agree with Einstein that EVERYTHING we ever see and know comes from what we experience in a hard core 4D space-time continuum. The talk gives a specific definition of Hard Core Einsteinian Realism, HCER, the "theory of everything" that I now believe in. 

Does that imply that we live in a cold, mindless universe? DON'T JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS.

People often look at these equations and think they must be cold and mindless, because they don't understand what the math is really telling them. This is where Lagrange and Hamilton, and maybe even Lorenz (not Lorentz, Lorenz) can help us understand better. FINITE minds, like what we have in our heads and like what our entire noosphere possesses are born with an inborn sense of purpose (telos or U), with a striving to learn to make choices which better serve that purpose, and to better understand the uncertainties they always face BECAUSE they are finite minds, and do not understand everything. But what about the cosmos AS A WHOLE, the whole big 4D thing? 

In LAGRANGE'S original concept of how it works, the universe ALSO has something like a sense of purpose or U. In physics, they use the letter L for Lagrangian, but THE MATH IS THE SAME. More precisely -- in the neural network mathematics (RLADP)  which describes how the brain works ) we learn how the brain as a whole system (complete with qualia and consciousness and all that) is based on an equation called the Bellman equation, which tells us how to maximize U UNDER UNCERTAINTY.

 The original equations of Lagrange and Euler, for the physical universe, are THE SAME EQUATIONS for the special case where there is no uncertainty. In other words, when HCER tells us that everything in the cosmos is governed by Lagrange Euler equations (slightly tweaked for curved space), it is telling us that THE COSMOS IS ACTING LIKE A GIGANTIC BRAIN WITHOUT UNCERTAINTY. It predicts that the cosmos will BEHAVE like a gigantic perfect superintelligence, and that everything we ever experience at the finite level from this willful behavior of the cosmos as a whole. It actually fits quite well with the image of Creator in Yeshua's writings and in Luria's cabbalah. 

Whether we call it "God" or not does not matter so much. What matters is that it is the driving current behind everything which happens in our universe, and that it acts with something like PERFECT intelligence. BUT DOES IT? That is the REAL question I ask today. 

The math is important, and the consequences are real. Lagrange tacitly assumed that L, the "value function of the universe", is NONNEGATIVE. THAT is what clearly would create behavior like a great mind, pushing as hard as it can in... its direction, which we are well advised to try to discern. 

But the equally great mathematical physicist HAMILTON argued with Lagrange. Roughly, he said: "You claim that the universe is maximizing L, a positive function over all space time. You say it is governed by the Lagrange-Euler equations, which describes what happens in a universe maximizing its L. HOWEVER, those same Lagrange-Euler equations are ALSO needed to describe a MINMAX universe, where some decisions are made to maximize L while others minimize it." In fact, my "Bible" (The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by Von Neumann and Morgenstern) explains a lot about how minmax systems arise and how they work. They are what you get in a zerosum game, an all-out war, between two players. 

And so, once we decide that we DO live in a universe governed by Lagrange-Euler equations (and maybe some equality constraints like the Lorenz gauge), we have an obvious choice: 

(1) Is it ONE God-like player out there, ala Lagrange? or 

(2) Is our universe the battlefield of TWO players in total opposition, a bit like God versus Devil, or Zoroastrianism? 

In my chapter in Karl Pribram's book Origins, I describe some simple simulation experiments showing how the TURBULENCE generated by two forces acting in different directions may be crucial to nonstatic phenomena like life. COULD THAT BE IT? How can we know, and what would that say about trying to follow the spirit of the deep? 

THE ANSWER, THE NEW UNIFICATION, WHICH COMES AS I TYPE THIS: 

My impression is that thermodynamics may be what really clarifies this situation. (Hey, that is part of PART 3 of my 4 part story of reality!) 

Ironically, it is the Hamiltonian energy density H (as it appears in Lagrange-Euler systems!) which may "save us from the devil." It IS possible to define mathematical systems where H can be negative or can be positive at different times, in different places. But if H is unbounded IN THE NEGATIVE DIRECTION, we usually get instabilities which make the system explosive and undefined in ways we do not see in our experience of the cosmos. 

When it is bounded from below, we get an entropy function... well, actually I worked out PRECISELY what the entropy function is for this class of Lagrange-Euler system back in 2004! In the youtube video, I discussed what happens if we try to use Deutsch's vision to predict how life works as an emergent phenomenon. But as I type this I realize... now that I believe in HCER.. it is EXACTLY THE ENTROPY FUNCTION GIVEN IN THAT PAPER which contains and governs all life in our cosmos!!!

It is the positivity of THAT ENTROPY function which gives us the positivity of our spirit of the deep! Hey, is THAT one the real God Equation? I actually do know something about that equation and how it works... and how it DIRECTLY can work through the new quantum technology I discussed two days ago! (Yes, there are levels higher than tQuA level three... BUT NO, that certainly does not mean we can build a God computer. Like Elon Musk, I have at times wondered whether anyone else ever did.) 

At times, I am reminded of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan... but even so we small creatures ARE connected parts of a larger system. That's who we are. And it may help if the larger system is less distorted and self defeating than smaller social systems we see sometimes...

tQuA: Explanation and Capabilities of a Radically New Type of Quantum Computing

 Recently I developed a new approach to Quantum Annealing, which I call true Quantum Annealing (tQuA).

Tomorrow, we will have a Zoom discussion with IT people on the details. 

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

THE BIG PICTURE (GENERAL CONTEXT):

Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST) is one of the four core areas calling for further R&D, to address the

risks and possibilities of massive changes coming in the internet in general:

http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm

This would fall under the new internet effort which www.millennium-project.org has been pushing, if it ever becomes a real S&T effort. 

The United States government is putting massive investment into ONE TYPE of quantum computing, the Quantum Turing Machine (QTM), originated by the great British physicist David Deutsch. He appears as a major figure in history, in my previous talk to this group about the biggest big picture (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfHBO_uuRyE. But there are FIVE types or levels of quantum computing open for development:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2020/04/role-of-quantum-technology-in-massive.html

The QTM gives us capabilities similar to an ordinary Turing machine, like a sequential computer, but with thousands or trillions of parallel computing streams to do the job. True Quantum Annealing (tQuA) harnesses the same power, to solve ANY optimization problem, which may even include optimization of a physical plant like a chip or a radio telescope or an airplane, or drug discovery. For example, "quantum bromium" (tQuA applied to detecting backdoors in chips) may be able to find backdoors a thousand or a trillion times as fast as ordinary "sandbox" bromium security systems. 

Crudely speaking, the QTM is a kind of parallel computing. Instead of just building a thousand "cores" on a chip, to do a thousand jobs in parallel, Deutsch showed us how to do thousands or trillions of computing jobs in parallel, on ONE chip, by creating thousands or trillions of copies of the chip in quantum superposition with each other. If a QTM has ten "qubits" or forty "qubits", that means that it can harness 2^10 (about 1000) or 2^40 (about a trillion) copies of the same chip in parallel. A true quantum annealing system (tQuA) could achieve the same power, for solving optimization problems of all kinds. 

Unfortunately, Canada's famous DWave QuA system does not really do that. However, the underlying physics says that we CAN do that, and here is how.

[The link on Sustainable Intelligent Internet (SII) at the top of this post goes to a list of links.  At the bottom of the list is section on Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST), a term used in the past by the interagency Quantum information Science Coordinating Group (QISCOG), on which I was once the NSF representative before my retirement. The US funding efforts were broader in scope until Howard Brandt (the real thought leader for QISCOG) died suddenly two weeks before his planned announcement of a new direction.]

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

WHAT IS true Quantum Annealing (tQuA), versus DWave (DQuA)?"

MY CONCEPT of true Quantum Annealing (tQuA) turns out to be very different from the RELATED but weaker concept in the present literature on Quantum Annealing. 

More precisely: a Basic Quantum Annealing (BQuA) box would include: (1) an array of N "flux qubits", N binary processing elements, call them u(j) as j =1  to N; (2) a simple standard "Ising type" hamiltonian, H, such that the wave function psi( the vector u) evolves according to a term linear in u and a term of the form Hjk*uj*uk, where the USER gets to specify the coupling constants Hjk; (3) a way to initialize the u at a start time t0; (4) read out and coupling to the external world.

BUT THIS concept of BQuA includes BOTH the version of quantum annealing which is now common in the literature

(e.g. the vast literature available for the company D Wave,

 A numerical implementation of" quantum annealing"

B Apolloni, D De Falco, N Cesa-Bianchi - 1988 - cds.cern.ch), AND a useful special case of what I call true Quantum Annealing, what I assumed in my review.

I was shocked to learn that THEIR variant of BQuA is not a true quantum computer at all, but that it is very straightforward how to modify that kind of design to produce a BQuA box which IS a true quantum computer, and permits a wide range of important capabilities. For example, one can hook it up so as to probe for backdoors in chips one buys from risky sources, like the hardware backdoors which recently led to the biggest, most harmful compromise of US government data systems like the OPM personnel database. 

I was indeed stunned to learn that the DWave community and its followers have not yet figured out the simple things needed to make it work as I expected it to work. 

In essence, the DQuA (what they do) starts from a user-chosen vector u, and orbits AROUND the space of possible values for the vector u, hoping to use quantum tunneling to get from regions of low energy H to regions where some states have lower energy. (Yes, they have lots of details.) They use "annealing" by assuming a COUPLING constant multiplying the term for interactions across bits, and dialing the coupling up or down. It sounds like an electron IN ONE state, tunneling at times to get to a better state.

But true quantum computers, like Deutsch's universal quantum Turing machine, isn't like that. A true quantum computer is based on QUANTUM SUPERPOSITION, like the original Schrodinger cat. Deutsch, a major developer of the multiverse idea, described it as a kind of parallel computer, harnessing the power of parallel universes to perform different computations IN PARALLEL , and pick out what you choose in the end.How many parallel universes? Well, with 20 qubits (Q=20), it is slightly more than  2"20 universes in parallel, a million. BOTTOM LINE: there are lots of working Deutsch style quantum computers working out there now, some with many more than 20 qubits. This is not science fiction.This is today's working technology. (You may ask what good it is, but that's another subject.)

A true QuA box should be able to manage Q real qubits,not just "flux qubits" which may or may not be real qubits, in parallel. Thus a classical simulated annealing or stochastic search  box should be able to find good values of a vector u, to minimize some function H, but a true QuA box should be able to search through a million times as many possibilities if Q is 20. 

How could such a thing be possible?

To begin with, the hardware to implement u should be the kind of hardware which is used to hold qubits in Deutsch style quantum computing. I can think of four good candidates. DWave uses something SIMILAR to one of the four, the SQUID, first used in Maryland for quantum computing and widely used in China under Pan Jianwei. But DWave's is only similar; they set it up in a way which leads to far more noise than necessary, but that is not the main problem.

The main problem is that they don't seem to understand what ANNEALING is, what any real condensed matter physicist would know. (I have cited Chaikin and Lubensky many times.) 

One major ADVANTAGE of tQuA over quantum Turing machines is that decoherence is not a problem, in principle; losing information through noise is not a problem, when we don't want to perpetuate initial condition information anyway. 

BUT: in true annealing, COUPLING TO THE ENVIRONMENT TO SHED HEAT is the essence of how the system state u goes to minimum energy. It is not about adjusting coupling coefficients, but about shedding energy to the environment. If one can do that, thermodynamics is what does the selection.

But this discussion leaves out one more crucial aspect of any optimization system. How does one define what is to be optimized, what the user WANTS the system to accomplish?

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

THREE LEVELS of tQuA (LEVELS OF USER NEEDS TO MEET): 

There are three possibilities. 

Level 1: Endogenous scoring:

The easiest to implement is ENDOGENOUS SCORING, where the user's goal is simply encoded into the coupling coefficients Hij, and that's it. A quadratic optimization system. A fancy quadratic program? 

Of course, that can be done ITERATIVELY, where an optimum is calculated, evaluated against more complete nonlinear standards, and the optimization problem revised, until the user is happy. DWave certainly has worked hard to develop that kind of interface

Level 2. Internal Coupled Scoring:

Second choice is INTERNAL COUPLED SCORING, where

a process inside the big computer system scores each possible u, and the overall score is fed back to the QuA box, perhaps to a set of power utility input bits. In truth, new papers are needed spelling out how the thermodynamics of this works. 

Level 3: QuATh):

Third is Quantum Annealing of Things (QuAth), which is essentially the same except that the scoring system need not be a computer program but may be an external object, like a chip to be assessed. A macroscopic Schrodinger cat. 

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

Hardware Choices Which Should be Pursued In Parallel:

I NOW see the importance of the three stage approach to developing and building real QuA technology. But even stage 1 requires considering WHICH ACTUAL hardware platforms to use. I would claim that a rational program would not choose just one, but should juggle what can be learned from FOUR parallel coordinated efforts learning from each other. These would be:

true QuA based on quantum optics platforms (also used in some QTM work)

Squid platform, which DWave uses, but more like what TM uses

Massive quantum dot arrays, like Samsung TVs with billions of optical processing elements in a square meter or less

High frequency electronic systems, like what is used in GHZ electronics for cell phones 

(see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.134.2754&rep=rep1&type=pdf, which has further applications in QuIST)

Developing better component models is VERY crucial to better design capability.  Yeshua (Howard Carmichael's group in New Zealand) is closer to some of the experiments needed to get better component models than I am, but the link to Werbos and Fleury at ResearchGate also has crucial information. 

How could you and I be macroscopic Schrodinger cats if the cosmos MIGHT only be 4D underneath? It seems our states are like the photon states in that paper. But for now, the Deutsch physics are good enough, in most respects. The thermodynamics of the interface are a tricky issue, to be resolved by empirical work in the end. 

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

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

What are OTHERS already doing about quantum computing for optimization?

Exactly after I typed this yesterday, I received an email from Berkeley inviting me to THEIR two hour Zoom  on QuIST for optimization! This was supported by the Simons Foundation, which many view as the US best hope for real math in any computer topics. One was in a familiar office in Maryland. Here is the invitation and my reactions to what I saw:

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

1:00 am – 12:00 pm: Quantum Algorithms for Optimization, Ronald de Wolf (QuSoft, CWI and University of Amsterdam) |  Abstract

12:00 pm – 12:30 pm: Panel Discussion on Quantum Algorithms for Optimization, Andrew Childs (UMD), Eddie Farhi (MIT/Google), Ashley Montanaro (U. Bristol), Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley; moderator)

This colloquium series will feature talks by some of the foremost experts in quantum computation in the form of "an invitation to research in area X". With the explosion of interest in quantum computation, there is a dizzying flurry of results, as well as a diverse group of researchers who are drawn to this field. This colloquium series aims to target three audiences: 

1. Experts in quantum computation: It is increasingly difficult for even experts to keep up with the results in adjacent areas. These colloquia will aim to identify the key results and techniques in the area, as well as the most important directions for further research. 
2. Interested researchers in (classical) theoretical computer science: There are deep connections between ideas in quantum computation and classical complexity, algorithms, etc. These colloquia will make these connections more accessible to the broader TCS community. 
3. Interested mathematical and physical science (MPS) researchers: These colloquia will enable MPS researchers to cut through the clutter to make connections to CS style results in quantum computation. 

Public Zoom webinar link: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/95040632440

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

These folks were certainly selected to be the world's best in their area. (And it was truly international.)

HOWEVER, it was mainly world's best on how to use a QTM to solve optimization problems. They spent a fair amount of time on backpropagation, the new gold standard, but do not understand the basic math of backpropagation, and seriously missed what can be done even with a QTM. Their bottom line: they are far away from even linear or quadratic speedups in optimization by using quantum methods, with one narrow exception which the lead speaker was far from. 

There is an Arora-Kale SDP optimization which was designed in COLLABORATION with real physicists using tricks which the usual QTM computer scientists do not understand, outside their paradigm. I suspect it is a special case of QuA.

The lead speaker says only three real net benefits from quantum computing look real now -- cryptography, quantum simulation and optimization. The Maryland guy said no not optimization yet, and the lead speaker apologized and agreed.

And so: tQuA is just as solid, and beyond the US mainstream, as I suggested earlier today. Actually, there are also ways to use it to improve cryptography, beyond any QTM system I have seen, but maybe we should save THAT discussion for later, if there is a later. The key barrier has been the need to really understand the underlying physics, IN computation.

Why do they even screw up how to get gradients? My guess: the unwritten rule they must cite their friends, and the friends don't know the math. I am tempted to say more, but... no real need.

A specific way of meditating on Jewish star brought happiness

It worked!!

Two weeks ago, I made a shift in my full mind, to better organize my feelings, plans and choices. And suddenly, life also became a lot happier, so far. (I hope it stays that way.) One of our neighbors even commented how much happier I became. WHY? What worked? As in most of life, there were several factors at work, and the wheel will turn again, but for now: ONE very serious and useful factor was how I started thinking about a new view of the old Jewish star. I am  not Jewish... but it works because it connects to things which connect to all of us.

And so, here is what I posted 12 days ago ago on Yeshua's discussion list about this new way of reading meaning into that old Jewish star and using it. Just as this symbol can help add badly needed organization in my feelings, I have added headings here to organize this post:

What I posted:

1. No, I am not Jewish. What I am:

First, because there are lots of dangerous phobias out there about Jewish culture, let me start by saying I do not claim or qualify to be a spokesman for that culture, but even there I suppose I should insert a caveat. Yeshua and others have told me that there are TWO tribes, traditionally (Judea and Israel?), but they believe that there were twelve tribes originally. I was happy when my wife showed me a newish book, 1173BC, which shows how archeologists are beginning to remember more about the larger movement of sea peoples at that ancient time; the original Hellenes and the invasions of the Eastern Mediterranean in general were part of that. So who knows? When 23andme uses DNA analysis to show my own family emanated from Doggerland in the North Sea, and even claims I am 88% British/Irish (a great shock to me at first), maybe I do belong to one of the lost tribes?

More seriously, I see a lot of value, diversity, problems and great achievements both in traditional Israeli culture and n Shinto culture, and I have tried very hard to reach out and see what can be learned from both. The traditional Jewish star, and the Tree of Life from the cabbalah of Luria, fit that. I see all these as pieces of one part of a more complete fourfold worldview, depicted in https://youtu.be/jfHBO_uuRyE.

2. How Our Minds Need and Can Use Such Symbols:

Why should ultramodern people (like me?) pay any attention to such ancient symbols? That comes back to my new saying: "To integrate or to disintegrate, those are the real choices ahead of us." INTEGRATION means finding harmonious and efficient ways to unify our thoughts, feelings, values and even levels of existence, and THAT IMPLIES managing a HUGE degree of cross-cutting complexity. In a giant modern server farm, when there is a gigantic mass and variety of data, we do need some "address labels" and "memory cues" to organize it, to keep track of the diversity.

WORDS are important EXAMPLES of PART of what we depend on. These lists use words like "consciousness," "emotion," "self" and even "reality" which have many DIFFERENT meanings. The path of sanity does NOT tell us to give up using such words, but it does tell us to be ever conscious and vigilant about how they have MULTIPLE MEANINGS, some legitimate and some debilitating, but never just ONE meaning ordained by God (who does not speak English or Sanskrit or Hebrew or Mandarin as a first language in any case). 

THE SAME APPLIES to the most powerful graphic images. They to can have more than one useful meaning. Instead of wasting time fighting over which is "the right meaning," many of us do better by remembering several DISTINCT useful meanings. 

3: How I  Learned/See/Use the Upwards Triangle Part

And so, early in my usual daily "Cosmic Consciousness" meditation in bed, I thought first about a Love Triangle. (Those poor pseudo-mystics who never connect their words and ideas to powerful emotions need to get past THAT stage, to ever have hope of  attaining even first order sanity.) Love triangle -- talk about a simple symbol pointing to a powerful complexity, with many dimensions and energy!!

But in truth, to manage my own emotions, I have gravitated a lot to a very specific triangle, pointing up, with my wife and me on the bottom, and our local noosphere on top. And no, I do not limit myself to Western or Jewish symbols. At the top, I think of the sun which is so visible from where I am sitting now, most of the day, and I think of Amaterasu, a humanizing symbol for the local noosphere. (By the way, for photos and deeper analysis of Shinto stuff, see links at werbos.com/religions.htm). 

As love triangles go... me, my wife and Amaterasu... 

if you imagine that such triangles entail a bit of complexity, multiply by 1000. But the noosphere is not specifically male or female (so far as any of us creatures know, or should focus on). To avoid confusing myself, I need to be ever mindful of how SHE has her relation upstairs too, and it really is a love triangle, not a war, the very foundation of what keeps me motivated and alive.

(My incessant efforts to avoid human extinction, for example, have been mainly energized by my feelings of connection to our noosphere.)

4. But then came that downwards triangle... SUCH a power!!!

But THIS morning... an echo. That traditional "Jewish star" also contains a downwards pointing triangle, and I am reminded to give it equal time and equal emphasis, more and more as I can appreciate it too. For me at the bottom (you when you use it), the upper right side may be our local noosphere again, and the left... well, call the right Jung's spirit of the times (another window into our noosphere) and call the left his spirit of the deep. 

WHAT IS THAT spirit of the deep?

My integrated theory says that our noosphere (of which our "souls" are parts) is one of an entire huge species of noospheres, filling the entire cosmos. But the cosmos itself has aspects of mind which connect to us as well. In a fuzzy sort of way, that mind of the cosmos (like the creator in the trees of life of Luria and of Yeshua) acts in part as the soul of the entire network of noospheres. Or the network of noospheres might be seen as the "flesh" of the comsos considered as a single entity, which has both flesh and matrix.

So in any case, that's what's on the left side of that downward pointing triangle, and we are called to remember and strengthen ALL these connections.

[Added later: Since this post, attention to and awareness of the "spirit of the deep" has become a central part of my morning meditation. It is much  more complete and more fully connected than the old inner morning conversations which I once described as "God is my psychiatrist."]

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

Some footnote/caveat things:

My wife (who is so much more than what those four letters carry alone) recently pointed me to more of the true history of the "Jewish star." I used to think that that was the seal of Solomon, familiar from 1001 Arabian Nights and many, many other sources. no. That was a typical drift in cultures. It was actually a five pointed star, like what you would see on old Soviet tanks. I wonder whether they discuss that in Israel? And of course Hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis is another upwards facing triangle, quite different in connections, but also important and linked in many ways. 

The problem of phobias and how they weaken dialogue, cause disintegration and lower the level of consciousness is very well known in serious neuropsychology (and even known in pop cultures like scientology). That is a huge and important topic, but this email is already too long; I will save that for another day, except to note it IS included in one of the links at werbos.com: 

   Minds, Brains, Souls

P.S. In two hours I walk to the hospital for the first of my two eye repair operations. Hopefully you will see fewer typos from me after that.

[And now, the other eye comes in two days. Posterior capsulotomy worked SO WELL for me! It was another important lesson to experience life before and after, adapting to both. Probably I should post

what I learned from eye exercises in that period, but that would be a different post and track, and these too need to be organized. That which is not organized and connected gets lost, anything from essays to our very souls. THIS morning, I came back to Gurdieff's old saying "To know, to do, to be," in conversations with my wife, immediately AFTER cosmic consciousness... but perhaps even more cosmic in its way. And then the new obligatory morning qi stretching exercise and shower, another required change past age 70 just to prevent premature collapse. Why choose between qi and cosmic consciousness when we need to integrate both, in sequence, in our lives?]