What will happen to you after you die

A scholar I know has spent years probing deeply both into the empirical work in neurscience and psychology, and to the long experience and scholarship of yoga and Vedas -- to ask what might happen to HIM. He wrote: 

Dear all,

Conclusion of reading many articles related to death and life-after-death (afterlife)

1. Since everybody dies sooner or later and we are not alone, there is nothing to worry about because of the group effect.

2. There is neither scientific proof for the survival of the self after death (afterlife or life-after-death) nor for the death of self. Therefore, we should remain agnostic on this issue until we have scientific evidence either way.

3. Therefore, the best way to live and die is first trying for symbolic immortality. If there is indeed literal immortality (self survives death) then we are in an excellent position because we tried out best in our lives in doing the good karmas towards symbolic immortality. In this way, we have both symbolic and literal immortality.

4. If we follow the above view then the anxiety of death will disappear (as happened to me) or at least be minimized because we will be benefiting either way.

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MY RESPONSE:

Congratulations, Ram, on achieving a certain degree of inner peace on the dilemma you have been working SO hard to come to terms with. As I read your post, I immediately visualize Yeshua talking about inner peace. For the sake of my own inner peace, I have mainly been relaxing this past week, and even reading calming reading like: https://www.amazon.com/Monkey-King-Journey-Classics-Hardcover-ebook/dp/B08D8JKCZP/ . It also teaches about Buddhism in a readable story way; my memory is fuzzy already, but when it listed the three books of the Tripitaka, I think one was about inner peace.

But this week, I have been reminded of how certain very simple ideas we learn in childhood can be of enduring importance, important to REMEMBER and APPLY over and over again, at higher and hiher levels, in a kind of spiral development.

One of those ideas is: the challenge of NOT MISSING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES. This is such a basic principle!Eve n the early founders of artificial intelligence, like Herb Simon of Carnegie-Mellon, appreciated the importance of "chunking" (learning higher patterns of organization). 

WHEN YOU GET VERY DEEP into so many neuro and psych papers related somehow to afterlife, it is very much like bewildering collection of leaves. Karl Pribram and Walter Freeman -- the real, greatest leaders of systems neuroscience a few decades ago (when I worked with them a lot, as did Yeshua and a few others on these lists) -- often felt sorry for those folks who were so deep into THEIR specific piece of an immense hierarchy of science that they never appreciated the OTHER parts, or the system as a whole.

I beleive that Bernie Baars once talked about  certain conferences on consciousness where people would sound like

"TRUE consciousness is MY piece... are 17.31, not YOUR 21.56....  Of course, Bernie himself tried to raise people's sight to

the system as a whole, or at least the global workspace of conscious awareness in mammalian  neocortex. 

The leaves can be bewildering, Ram,  but there IS a forest out there as well. Some of us can feel MORE at peace if we start to see

MORE of that forest, and start especially to make more use of our "eyes."

You, Ram, have worked ever  so hard to advance a cause which I too revere: bridging the deepest gap between science and the great inheritance of first person spiritual experience which often comes wrapped in religious boxes. How to heal the greatest schism splitting our collective intelligence. (That was where I started at  http://www.werbos.com/religions.htm.) Yet so often you have been spinning without traction.

My view: what humanity needs now, to have hope of healing its inner schisms before it kills itself (as it might well due to lack of true integration!), is to strengthen BOTH its eyes, the most powerful inner eye of science, and the most powercul eye of spirit -- AND to fuse the two together, to be able to REALLY see what is going on.

What is REALLY going on is not a vast warm blanket of fuzzy, information-free "bliss," which in my view is just PK operating on reward centers of the brain. That stuff is popular like drugs which stimulate pleasure centers, and warp the brain. 

When we dispel the fogs of illusion, and learn to see... well, it is a complex world, even just on this planet. You need to see for yourself..as d id I.

Afterlife: I had a great discussion a few days ago with a former lead teacher of one of the Western esoteric schools, and we got very deep, and did discuss some sources important to making sense of the kind of first person experience which bears most on afterlife, and on what

THOSE OF US ABOVE 70 ("PSI70", folks!!) are called to prepare for. For example, we discussed the Tibetan Book of the Dead

(and our photos https://photos.app.goo.gl/a7exSNMyibiMXcNP7 ), the Egyptian Book of the Dead,  Steiger's book https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MXZ7GLC/, and Oversoul 7 https://edu.glogster.com/glog/download-pdf-the-oversoul-seven-trilogy-the-education-of-oversou/3pqn2wkmk3b . 

Many say you go directly to the "Bardo," which many many fans of Tibet talk about in many ways -- a great entry hall for the newly dead.

I only got there once when I was a regular practicer of "astral travel," but it was an incredible once in a lifetime experience. (I have LOTS of those, but only one in Bardo." ). When we visit Bardo, the image we see is heavily shaped by CONFABULATION, the way our neocortex FILLS IN the kind of details our mundane brain needs to see to feel oriented. What I saw looked a lot like the bridge of the Enterprise! And there was even a group like a crew wearing space ship clothing!

There were many striking details. One was that I recognized the crew of the shuttle Challenger. This was just two weeks before they crashed. Another was that ... I learned interesting things as I was included in a group, expelled, and returned by myself  by force, and shown and taught.

My friend agreed with Steiger: we are NOT ALL BOUND FOR BARDO. "Where we go VARIES a lot, and depends on US.."

I agreed with Steiger (whose experience fits mine, and Annie Besant's.) (If any of you have any respect for Ghandhi's first person experience, you might check out what books of hers he treasured when he was her student. If anyone is interested, I can even send you a link to photos.) BUT: none of us see IT ALL... 

I cited the Oversoul book, and explained how the science-grounded model at http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm is more like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in a way, pointing to several TYPES of

"afterlife" imprint we may have on our noosphere, which we are all part of. Not just different PLACES to go to, but different TYPES of place and different parts of ourselves, which may remain connected or not, hard to be sure.

1. SOME PEOPLE probably do indeed get dissolved by that great garbage collector in the sky, as in the Book of Esdras. 
2. The deeply inspired children's cartoon, "Coco," depicts another possible path, deeply followed in Latin America. It includes a musician who does just dissolve away (1), but a lot of people who live on as memories of a sort. (Think interneurons in cortex.)  I also think of places like catacombs of Rome, pyramids, New Grange, and the giant server farms which many saw as the future of the internet https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q1D6ZT7/. WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER AS A FILE IN A GIANT FILING CABINET? You may have that option.
3. Kissinger and Schmidt offer a better future for the internet, but they too are overwhelmed by the leaves (apps). Would you prefer to live forever as one small leaf on a giant tree? Well, it it is the tree of life, that is a whole lot better than atrophying as a file cabinet. As a leaf, and a useful app connected to other apps and users, you have something still there. Nature impels us to live that way, rather than ossify. The "sap" or "qi" we may associate with life, light and love naturally motivates us; it is who we are.
4. SOME OF us may learn to integrate and connect a bit further, as do the giant pyramid cells of neocortex -- especially those which learn to instantiate universals, like mathematics and Platonic forms, conne cted to primary sources of energy and archetypes in the noosphere. That may seem overwhelming, but it IS natural... nature impels ojur entire noosphere to understand, learn, adapt and survive as best it can, and even become prepared for its future in the larger cosmos we are all also part of, similar to Carl Jung's Spirit of the Deep. 

Have a happy future, if you have one. I hope we all can find ever better ways to help... 

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Minor afterthought: the unified viewpoint has some similarity to what you see in the movie Avatar. (We even have photos of the Tuva area of China, where it was filmed, which has palpable qi itself.) Of COURSE, it is not just humans! But humans and computers are both important parts of the ecology of our solar system. 

Deep debates over basic principles illusion versus reality in Buddhism

There is no doubt that the millennia-long database of human experience in Buddhism is an important part of what we have to draw on in trying to understand the soul more deeply, and in understanding the uncertainties which ALL of us will face up to if we have even a meager degree of sanity (sanity, as I define in papers linked to at www.werbos.com/religions.htm). Over decades of probing, and visits to spiritual centers from Nepal to Japan... I was surprised even today and yesterday to learn very important aspects of the Buddhist experience I was not aware of before!

It started when my wife acted once again as a guide, leading me to watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulDzLjz0wdw

That very much contradicted impressions I had had before. It started out with reference to Journey to the West, the highest of the four great classics of literature which any Chinese scholar must qualify in. I am grateful to my friend in the Liu family, the leading family of the Han dynasty, for bringing me to bookstore in Beijing where I found a great translation, with English and Chinese and illustrations, and explanatory history. Some call that book "The monkey and the monk". We got to visit many of the places depicted in that story across China, and the great building in Xian which they brought the scrolls back to. That book conveyed a very well developed version of Mahayana Buddhism, still a key force in China. 

But this new movie depicted a totally different view of that story! And it begins with reference to a British scholar Cunningham, who seems to claim that the author of Journey to the West (as powerful as it has been in China) was actually just a simplifier and popularizer.

The movie builds up to a Great Debate in Tibet, which sounded radically different from the focused clear great debate in Samye which I had read about, with huge implications for what Buddhists believe, at many levels. After the movie, my wife did a web search this morning, in bed by cellphone, which sorted out the true story. There were many great debates in Tibet, but three which stand out:

(1) An early debate (mid 500s?), what I remembered, discussed in great detail in Tricycle magazine https://tricycle.org/ years ago.

Tricycle reported a great debate in the US a few years ago, between the "Mindfulness" school of Buddhism (led by Tibetans) and the "No Mind" or "Mindlessness" school (led by Zen, descendants of Chan, descendants of Bodhidharma of Shao Lin, whose place we have visited and probed). I am VERY clear than mindfulness AS OPPOSED to mindlessness is the path of sanity, the path of choosing life, the path which follows nature, life, light, love, "because that is who we are." A later issue of Tricycle described the great debate in Samye on the same issue, where Bodhidharma basically went in exile and loss to China with a few followers, to try to establish his contrary path, in a place which has become famous for economic success and efforts to sell itself as "true Chinese" (since Tibetans would not have him). 

(2) The great debate depicted in the movie, which I found very disorienting but which calls out for thought and discussion.

Not at all like The Xuan Yuan I knew so much about!!! Or saw all over Xian!!!

This great debate began with two clear focused positions, like what many of us debate even now!!

One debater takes a position which fits exactly with my core new worldview expressed at http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm. He says something like "Our perceptions of the world are not real, are an illusion, but the world itself IS real." (Actually, BOTH of the families of theories of physics I present in my web page, EWD and HCER, postulate that the world itself is real.) But that debater is labelled as the spokesman for Hinayana Buddhism, which the hero of the movie, Xuan Yuan, is asked to  disintegrate. Xuan Yuan argues that our perceptions, our selves AND our world, are BOTH illusions. The hero is less like me and more like Deepak Chopra.

ME A HINAYANA? Wow is that a wild zinger of an idea! I DO remember a video course from Princeton (which my wife also led me to) where they brought in a Vipassana (Hinayana) meditator whose approaches to meditation seemed very close in spirit to many things I had experimented with, and continue to respect, but there are many other historic differences between Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism.

In any case, if we are still debating reality versus total illusion even now, it is still on the table, a dichotomy of thought reaching 

all the way to the noosphere. Am I the last true realist left on earth (now that Einstein etc are dead) who has not ignored or neglected or grossly twisted the hard core evidence we have seen from physics through mathematics?

Is the cosmic mind working (with help from my wife, though she had no such intention) to enlighten me to the fact that Deepak was right in spirit, at some level, however many crucial questions he leaves open on the table? Or is this an instance of Kipling's great poem "If" (which my wife and I both paid very deep attention to for many decades) where he talks about keeping one's head when all about us are losing theirs? 

It reminds me of an old Japanese sci fi, The Island of the mushroom eaters, which my wife says was a remake of a very old repeated story in human literature. And hell, there are Marxists who talk about the power of the folks who keep feeding opiates to the masses. (But is Xi now one of those folks, if HE supports the version of Xuan Yuan in this movie? And Putin's house Rasputin as well?) 

Again, I have to admit I do not REALLY know who is ultimately right in the great debate. The realist worldview has plenty more to give us and enlighten us about, and my next tasks do build on where it leads me, in quantum technology. What could we DO about a fuzzy all-possibilities belief that reality as such is an illusion? Yet there was ... well, we have discussed several ways one MIGHT try to do something more meaningful with the nonrealist position, other than classic psychotic mushroom eating. We mentioned the world-is-a-school school, the astral realism school, and the People Are Real World is Not school. I guess we should keep out eyes open, with peripheral vision as best we can,

but now...

Having done this duty, I will go to the next one, an incredibly focused looking-ahead task in quantum areas. I do agree with the neuroscientist Levitin that we need to BALANCE shifts of focus, and now I must shift.

My wife noted a third great debate later in Samye on whether enlightenment must be gradual or sudden, or a middle way. But not today for me.

Who are those creatures who claim to tell us they know exactly what all Buddhists believe? 

Internet requirements for human survival and issues beyond our solar system

 I have often urged us all never to forget the four biggest threats in the coming century to the very survival of the human species: (1) "AGI/IOT", actually the entire complex of instabilities emerging from the emerging new internet; (2) climate extinction; (3 and 4) misuse of biotech and nuclear tech. It would be unhealthy and biased to pay less attention to serious HOPE, the positive side, but to ignore the worst threats to our existence would be crazy.

The "AGI/IOT" threats are by far the worst, most central and most immediate. People talk about "threats to democracy," threats of war and autonomous weapons, threats of civil war 

(e.g.this morning, see https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state), about the consequences of unemployment >70%, possibilities for near-term economic collapse due to short circuits in the world economy, cyberwarfare, etc. These are all very large and very immediate problems, but they are all just symptoms of something even deeper and more stubborn. 

At http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm, I tried to explain 

the biggest, obvious linked problems, and the radical redesign of internet which would be necessary to avoid the terrible entropy threatening to engulf the world. 

BUT WILL IT HAPPEN? The modes of instability have become clearer to me this year, in part because I see how they are playing out before our eyes, but also because I have had a chance to understand the math better. Therefore, I will just copy over a summary I sent to a fellow expert yesterday, and a link to a directory which describes some of the (partial) fixes I understood by 2019:

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If you could really DO that... a GENERAL platform to INTELLIGENTLY bring together the highest human and machine intelligence (WHICH REQUIRES NEW MACHINE INTELLIGENCE) , to be able to learn to collaborate in a general way without killing/undermining each other... THAT would fulfill the highest images Bill wrote down in that email. If that was not stated, or not clear to him, we have a communications problem.

But I see the design of such a platform (CUM ITS CORE PRIVILEGED APPS) as a huge research challenge, requiring a new network already of US communication (e.g. in a game which you and I and Bill play?), and drawing some of what I know of the AI and human requirements which no one else on earth knows yet.

My overview http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm
AND SUPPORTING FILES NOT YET OPEN solve some of the design problem, but this year I see further demands (modes of instability demanding firewalls)  I did not see before. In essence, firewalls like the Sarbanes Oxley rules needed to prevent collapse of electric power grid systems are necessary, BUT ARE SUSTAINABLE LONG-TERM only if they are implemented in privileged app programs compiled on hard cybersecure open systems, NOT overly dependent on human word inputs (with IOT direct sensing to robustify networks of truth).
Only a new caste system for apps can liberate humans from THEIR need for speciation and caste systems, a need intruding into political systems all over the world even now. Computers to liberate humans...

It also requires a new level of machine intelligence, outlined in new paper for an Elsevier journal, for which they promise the page proofs any day now.

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https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cKKbdlmk2JVsD2sVfBKvcwcMEEwITvBz?usp=sharing

Just the tip of an iceberg...

The Elsevier paper gives a concrete path to a technology it calls QuATh, including application to being able to image what we see beyond our solar system with far more accuracy than any classical technologies, like what Milner's Breakthrough Initiatives are capable of. It is odd that Milner wants us to advertize our existence without knowing whom we might be advertizing TO. 

social contracts, game theory, sociobiology and extinction threats here and now e.g.Russia

 Whenever we try to think really deeply, out of the box, to make sense of big challenges right in front of us... it can point to a need for new paradigms. THIS WEEK, the crisis in US-Russian relations has woken me up that way, pointing to very basic issues in fundamental science, BUILDING on but EXTENDING the frameworks given in http://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm and in my draft paper on approximation of entropy operators. It comes down to the theory of dynamical games....

Sudden shifts in Russian policy this week have strongly reduced the probability of World War III over Ukraine this year. But even as Western policy leaders all breathed VERY loud sighs of relief, going back to other issues on their plate, a strong warning came to me: "DON'T think this is over, or that 

you folks are home free. Nowhere near that." As I see this playing out, it is a warning that the

"AGI/IOT existential threat" is EVEN more urgent, difficult and compelling than I was already saying months ago. That, yes, plus the nuclear and bio threats entangled with US-Russian relations. 

In the past, I have generally just agreed with Yeshua that these existential threats (with the partial exception of climate changes) can be seen as examples of existential level CONFLICTS, demanding peace as a solution, peace as in some kind of new social contract or Pareto optimal bargain. (Xi Jinping even seems to understand these words, more than other major world leaders, whatever the actions of other Chinese may or may not be.) We have always thought back to the Twelve Tablets of Rome, the ten Commandments, Locke and the US Constitution. (I have even visited Washington's meditation study, and been locked by accident  into a large room containing his private papers.) I view this as an example of Schelling's analysis of nonzero sum games, in Strategy of Conflict.

HOWEVER: WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT THE GAME OF HUMAN LIFE INCLUDING THE POSSIBLE OUTCOME OF EXTINCTION?

Naive judgmental people often say: "Of course this species will not go extinct. Species (like this) never go extinct. The biosphere has a very powerful natural stability, resulting from the mechanisms Darwin told us about." 

It is SO SAD how many "mainstream" academic cultures never learn what other cultures down the hall from them, in the same universities, know much better. To discuss the evolution of life, people really should know the foundational (if incomplete) work by E.O. Wilson, in Sociobiology, the classic work by George Gaylord Simpson before that, and the seminal book by Robert May Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems. (For a more complete up to date factual account see Ward and Kirschvink.) 

Back in the 1970's, May used solid mathematical modeling to completely disprove the old fantasies about stability in ecosystems. Species go extinct all the time, both at the bottom and the top of the food chain. What we see as stability is usually just HEAVILY FILTERED by millions of years of selection, BUT MASSIVE CHANGES in the web of ecological relations typically DO lead to massive new extinctions. 

The key point is that HUMANS (and all species affected by us) are at the BEGINNING of even more massive changes in the ecology of the earth, most notably through the AGI/IOT complex but also through many others. 

Here is a fundamental key question: in what kinds of  nonlinear dynamical games is the long-term outcome more or less guaranteed? What degrees of freedom do we really have? 

My common sense, informed by deep knowledge of the entropy functions predicted by the most solid modern physics, tells me that I am asking about the existence of widely separated BASINS OF ATTRACTION in the space of the human cultures which could lead to a sustainable social contract or to entropy and extinction. That in turn depends on the variety and scale of noise and connection in that cultural system. That does not sound much like separability. Nor does it LOOK that way, as I think of examples like the entropic processes guiding Putin and ALL other large human societies and organizations on earth today. (I pray that IEEE will be an exception, and there are reasons why it MIGHT be enough for us tALL o survive, but I will learn more this coming week or two.) Furthermore, the examples cited by May all feel like the kind of nonlinear dynamical process we are involved in; I do not see signs of collective intelligence giving collective free will there, or in any of the history reviewed by Ward and Kirschvink. 

IMPLICATION: ONLY A CHANGE OF GAME gives us much hope. And that comes back to issues

buried (too deeply) in http://www.werbos.com/How_to%20Build_Past_Emerging_Internet_Chaos.htm.

INTERNET design **IS** a kind of game design. Approached that way, with the right kind of immune system included, it may be possible to create enough of the right kind of separability of "QAGI workspace of consciousness" to give us a chance to survive. The odds may be against our species surviving in the face of so many things which we have to get right, but in such a large cosmos SOME species probably get through, so it is only natural that we should try our best... as part of our noosphere, we naturally do respond to the most basic feedback we receive from it, feedback which gently guides us all to help as much as we can.. 

Is Putin Determined to Start World War III?

For several days now, MANY people in the West have been wondering how best to react to a major speech by Putin which seemed to say: "I have told you exactly what my detailed demands are from you. You must concede IMMEDIATELY, visibly, and at massive scale, or else something is coming which you will regret deeply, and not be able to ignore. Ukraine is my target now." 

 This statement, plus some discussions we had yesterday, stimulated my "early morning self" to think a bit more deeply. In the discussions yesterday, I heard two theories about the Ukraine situation: =======================================================================

One theory: he will try an anschluss, just two provinces. "After all, if it worked for Hitler.." [Comment those words in quotes were not what anyone said. Just an inner reaction which came to me then. Call it "the voice of Loki," which is useful but which needs to be kept leashed.] 

 Another: he will show he can hack into the Turkish drones which Ukraine plans to use to restore national control. One argument in favor: after all, even WE could. (If USGOV knows the more basic things even I know.) One argument against: if Russia could, why didn't they save Armenia? ======================================================= 

 But in truth, I did hear a lot of Putin's speech (on France24 and DW and maybe FT especially), and had a sense of what was behind it. In truth... it is ever more clear this morning... that I can even empathize with what lies behind that speech and that expression of frustration and desperation. Some even say that empathy is a crucial starting point in addressing these kinds of problems (once one is prepared enough to really empathize and not fake it.) 

 As usual, my early morning meditation got into complexities 'way beyond what I could write down even in days of typing on a laptop. Two bits of some relevance: ACRONYMS (important to how my higher self encodes memories to my mundane daily self): in this case EHUB (Endless Halls of Unthinking Bureaucracy), what drives Putin nuts, and GGC (Give God Choices, an aspect of how I think about synchronicity in guiding behavior). 

 A major part of Putin's message felt like: "You guys said you wanted to join with us in a new global alliance right after the end of the Cold War, circa Yeltsin time. You raised all these promises. But then we tried and tried, and nothing worked, it got worse and worse and worse. I am sick and tired of that. I won't take it any more. If I have to kick the walls, well, what choice did you give me?" 

In fact... EHUB. I too have had lots of experience trying to figure out how to get constructive results, intelligence and sanity out of the US government, which I have interacted with in many many ways at many different levels. In addition to the EHUB experience, I have seen more and more in the past few decades of a syndrome I think of as " bait and switch." That and EHUB are not conscious policies of anyone, but a kind of reflex response syndrome which has evolved through time, in part because of the effects of greater concentration of power. "Power corrupts..". 

 The promises made to Putin were probably MOST astronomical under Donald Trump. Whatever his self image and beliefs about himself, Trump certainly was the most extreme practitioner of bait and switch I have ever seen in the White House in my life. What hit ME directly was when Trump promised to strengthen the US economy, including the energy economy, and live up to the US Constitution (interstate Commerce) by getting rid of irrational regulations and barriers to competition which hold us back. That was exciting. Then he hired ... alligators from Maro Lago?... who created NEW regulations, forcing more use of coal in regions which do not want to use it, so severe that Illinois almost seceded from the US national grid system. Bait and switch. One policy announced to the public, and the diametric opposite in actual operation. 

 So did Putin also encounter the EHUB -- not only mindless bureaucracy but hired trolls and alligators, thinking only of THEIR receipts from government funding, or ideological faction? And is he basically at his wits end now, seeing little hope that the people on top will be able to get rid of the alligators and tame the system to make it live up to what the people on the top SAY they want?

 There ARE some parallels between the dynamics at work now in the world and the dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s. People did write serious books about frustration-aggression. Frustration can lead to a kind of gotterdammerung feeling, where the status quo is so intolerable they are willing to risk war. But are any of us intelligent, broad and focused enough to find a third way, not just the empty BS we see in a lot of internet policy discussions today, but a more operational kind of dialogue? Again, I think of John Von Neumann's BALANCED way of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, step by step.

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An important friend responded: I think that to interpret these geopolitical movements and threats, such as that of Putin's Russia, or the Middle East conflict, or the China-United States dispute, it is useful the analysis of the French professor Dominique Moisi, in his book “Geopolitics of emotions " https://www.amazon.com/Geopolitics-Emotion-Cultures-Humiliation-Reshaping-ebook/dp/B0027MJU32/ "It is not possible to understand the world in which we live without examining the emotions that contribute to shaping it. The world first moves around basic emotions: fear, humiliation and hope."

 So please forgive -- I have good reason to believe I now know more about how brains work as intelligent minds than anyone else on earth. That may sound crazy, but there is a paper by Werbos and Davis (open access, easy to find on scholar.google.com) which reviews our theory of how brains work, and shows how real-time deep recording data from the best lab in the US strongly favors our theory over the behaviorist style of model more common now in computational neuroscience. In a way, our strong mathematical model describes the mammal brain as a "machine to produce and act on hopes and fears," positive and negative values of J and lambda. And so, two of the three points in this sentence are 100% consistent with and directly reflect how the brain really does work, to the best of our knowledge. 

Hopes are basically the positive sign of J or lambda, and fears the negative side. The mathematics (the ultimate goals of any RLADP optimization machine) demand that both be present, and both be learned, reflecting the actual circumstances of the organism. SOME folks do live in a world where objective reality justifies more fear, and some more hope. 

 But what of HUMILIATION??? (Certainly a theme we cannot overlook in considering Putin, or in considering experiences I had in graduate school which make it easier for me to empathize with Putin.) This is one of those phenomena extensive and fuzzy enough that I cannot be truly brief and accurate both. Crudely... how others think about us and respond to us is PART OF our image of reality, and like all other dimensions of that image a venue for hopes and fears to develop. FEAR of being misunderstood, disrespected and humiliated is undoubtedly part of the very complicated set of thoughts in Putin's mind right now. Maybe a little HOPE of actually being understood and respected, not just pandered to as one would pander to a certain kind of dog, might be a thread that could help the world escape from the serious risk of WWW3 coming... 

My friend went on to say:  HE SAID IN 2019; "Ten years ago I published the book entitled The Geopolitics of Emotion: How the Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are reshaping the world, which was based on a double conviction. First: it is not possible to fully understand the world in which we live without trying to understand and integrate their emotions. And second: emotions are like cholesterol, there are good and bad. The question is to find the correct balance between the two. Fear versus hope, hope versus humiliation ; the humiliation that leads to mere irrationality, and sometimes even violence. " 

 I would NOT say that feeling hope is good and feeling fear is bad. Hope and fear are there in the machinery of the brain (and the soul as well, I would add) for a good reason. At best it is like the duality of what we optimize and what the constraints are which we need to honor as we perform that optimization. (I could write a book on just that duality, which cuts across so many dimensions of life and thought!!). Fear and hope can both be more rational or less rational. FREUD... a great and fundamental source, which fits well with our new mathematics... talked about traumatic memories in the "id" (an example-based prediction system, in great part, prediction by association rather than by global model or dynamics). They are often traumatic, or negative, biasing expectations relative to what a true causal understanding would predict. But whatever we may say about scientologists, they are quite right that irrational hope, "euphoric memories," can be biasing and destructive just as much as traumatic memories can. 

If you are interested, I could even forward to you a message I sent to Yeshua's list on the neuroscience of the cells which actually implement these things, which some of us now know how to copy in AGI. Irrationality can of course lead to bad behaviors in a huge number of ways. That is such a huge subject, maybe too huge for an email which is already long enough. 

 One final thought: OUR EFFORTS TO LEARN AND GROW PAST the most common pitfalls which limit us, and lead to dangerous crazy behavior (like what Putin is very close to now, and like what already hit Trump in 2020 and last January) is a central part of the HUMAN POTENTIAL focus, the final chapter of Part VI of the IEEE book. I am still looking for better venues and institutional structures to do more justice to it. Best of luck, Paul

New experiment proved that living multicell organism can be turned into a Schrodinger cat

 Many reactionary philosophers have prayed that WE multicellular organisms could not possibly be "macroscopic Schrodinger cats". "You can put a block of wood or a communication network into a quantum mixed state, but not a LIVING CREATURE, not REAL LIFE." 

Now they have been proven wrong. But the creature they used in the experiment, a tardigrade, is ALSO very provocative, and I received this news at a time when the Presidential election in Chile seemed close to being in a mixed state too! Here is what I wrote to friends at the time, on the meaning of the experiment and on events in Chile:

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302337-tardigrade-is-first-multicellular-organism-to-be-quantum-entangled/

One of you recently posted:  "Tardigrade first organism to demonstrate quantum entanglement."

My initial reaction: "TARDIGRADES. I remember them well. But does anyone else know WHY I remember them and why I consider them important in the history of life?" (Suddenly I bcc the one other person, besides my wife, who really knows about them even as much as I do.) 

In fact, that post was an incredible exercise in synchronicity, connecting SEVERAL important threads in my early morning meditation today.

The first thread was political. When I first saw the post yesterday, I recalled a great visit to a research outpost in the Atacama desert. A graduate student showed me a box surrounded by endless dry sand desert, and explained that this desert was a great place to look for extreme extremophiles. The most extreme extremophiles we know about (other than places kilometers deep) are tardigrades ("little water bears")  and archaea. Tardigrades are the multicellular ones, so big that they are.. insect size, easy to find on the web.

This morning, that reminded me of the very important ELECTIONS in Chile. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-59331694  )  Chile has had several great decades (and was not exactly zero before that), managing to take serious intellectual leadership in  many areas essential to our future. What has enabled them to move up so far, compared to any other nation in South America? In fact, the elections starting now in Chile remind me a lot of the important election we just had in Virginia, which I understand MUCH BETTER than any of the big media seem to, simply because I get to observe directly here (and ALSO have access to lots of media).

Chile like Virginia? Will the "Republican" candidate there (Bast) defeat the "Democrat" (Boric)?

Actually, in the past decades (after Pinochet was ousted) Chile has had a beautiful balance and dialogue between a rational left and a rational right. Just as many remember great rational Democrats in Virginia (still there, and I even gave them some money), many of us also remember Bachelet's time in Chile, a support for great enlightenment (including great serious deep research in Atacama). So why did Virginians suddenly elect a Republican governor his year, and why is Bast doing so well in the polls despite the friendly things he said about Pinochet and lack of interest in global climate change etc.? Why did the REMNANTS of the center parties (which lost the initial rounds) go to Bast?

Well, I blame it on good old-fashioned overreach, the extremism one gets when people feel too obligated to appeal to the base. Even the national Democrats in the US are suffering seriously in some ways from the same problem.

(Why is Kamala Harris being buried by the wrong kind of staff? What is that recruitment system doing to her?) 

A few days ago, I had been thinking of how to build ties to Boric, who has benefitted a lot from honest idealistic graduate students more into cybernetics than into Maduro or BLM stuff. BUT THE TARDIGRADE NEWS, at exactly the right time, crystallized my sight on why revered folks like Bachelet now see it differently. We could HOPE that Boric will do better on networking and recruitment and deal making than Biden and Harris, but how realistic is that, given the evidence we NOW have? I hope I am wrong, and I certainly have my eyes open, but it looks for NOW like Kast,

How Catholic IS Kast? What KIND of Catholic? Could he appreciate Teilhard de Chardin (or even our upgraded  version of that) or Pope Francis? Better than Maduro or Trump in any case. I certainly remember when BACHELET had a followers of Teilhard de Chardin in two of her key official  futurist networks (and so sad I am that I was violently ill when I had a follow-up meeting with one of the two). Would Bast be open to listening to her (who supports him now) about making plans for that, both for the sake of his administration but also for a nice election headline?

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But can you believe, that is only ONE PART of what cane to me in five minutes of my usual morning meditation?

Another part was a quick memory of the Climate Extinction cause and network which has been my main activity, after all, for several months now, thanks to IEEE and to some of the folks I bcc. 

I will resist the temptation to  the great draft preface by Ward, Wadhams and Werbos for the IEEE book proposal we have been working on. (I hope it will be releasable in a week or so, after we nail down more of the brain stuff, another topic in my morning meditation. I get long homework assignments these days.) THE NUMBER ONE THREAT to human survival from climate change is due to the growing likelihood that ANOTHER extremophile, the archaea producing H2S, will proliferate suddenly at the deep source of the Humboldt current which now brings oxygen (and lots of fish) to the coast off of Chile. Only this year did we actually combine the relevant numbers and models, and see how close and real it is. Poison enough to kill all humans on dearth, manifesting FIRST as a great stink in that same place where they were looking for tardigrades! It reminded me a little of the "silly" science fiction movie, Pacific Rim, where another form of life changes the oceans in a way which could kill OUR form of life. These extremophiles are actually doing that here and now! But IEEE, not Vancouver, is our best hope of preventing their success in annihilating us. (But I don't blame it on the souls of the tardigrades. And folks in Vancouver COULD help..)

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The other thread... came this morning, AFTER my brain research post, when I looked up the story posted here yesterday on tardigrades.

When I READ the whole article... no it is not a quantum mind kind of post!

Rather, it is... "The world's first demonstrated quantum entanglement of an entire  multicellular organism."

The first REAL macroscopic Schrodinger cat was not actually a cat, but a "water bear," but it still is hugely important.

More precisely, it is a hugely important landmark contribution to the large emerging literature on "macroscopic Schrodinger cats." It is the first solid empirical proof (that I know of) of a macroscopic multicellular organism being put into a quantum mixed state. Because WE are macroscopic multicellular organisms, it becomes ever more clear that folks who say "I could not be in a mixed state, that violate all our mainstream philosophies" need to learn that those philosophies are FALSE, proven empirically wrong. 

Just FYI, I attach a paper (accepted subject to minor revision, and revised accordingly) which goes on go describe how technology based on macroscopic Schrodinger cats has huge potential applications in technology, such as cybersecurity

issues immediately relevant to global currency issues here and now. (I just hope they start implementing BEFORE certain currencies like bitcoin crash.) 

Best of luck,

  Paul

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Later, my friend in Chile described their work with Boric, and I am VERY glad he corrected the vague impressions I had before that. Ffrench-Davis knows more about currency and inflation and deficit issues than the Great Authorities we read at Harvard years ago. AGI/IOT it radically changing those systems, but if such technology could be COMBINED with what Ffrench-Davis, maybe the world economy might have a prayer of surviving.

Best webcast I have seen for years on serious climate action

Earlier today, I saw a HORRID webcast, where COP26 people congratulated themselves on how successful they were. The measure of success? They got lots of kids to take the issue seriously, and then do stuff like wash dishes better. It's great that they wash dishes better, but ... that is not the kind of outcome we need, if the goal is to keep our species from extinction sooner than we expect!! 

 I hope that the IEEE book project will point us to a better way... but in the meantime, I was very delighted to see a far more encouraging webcast at noon today. Here is what I sent immediately to the transportation sector of the IEEE project: ============================================== 

Our Energy Policy (OEP) Webcast on Electrifying Transportation  

  Why this is important  

 More than 80% of net greenhouse gas (GHG) emitted from US comes directly from making electricity or from transportation. Those two are about equal.Most serious climate advocates see the replacement of fossil fuels by electricity as the best way by far to achieve climate survival, in transportation. Our draft IEEE book plan insists on taking a more efficient, market-based approach, with room in it for clean fuels under correct market incentives. However, there is no question that electric transportation is opportunity number one in this sector. 

 The webcast today (12/8/2021) https://www.ourenergypolicy.org/energy-leaders-webinar-series/electrifying-transport-the-state-of-electric-vehicles-a-webinar/ conveyed essential new information on the very best serious action now being taken in the US on electrifying transportation (as it bears on climate risk). It was concrete enough both to point to important opportunities unmet even beyond that, but also to give important pointers to how to connect to and assist the existing great efforts. It is the most encouraging and uplifting piece I have seen on ACTION to prevent climate extinction from the US in years.

 I was surprised to see such a good webcast, but not SO surprised, since OEP is in many ways an offshoot of the EnergyConsensus dialogue led by the office of Roscoe bartlett (R-Md), which, until he was gerrymandered out of office, was the most effective, serious and honest deep dialogue on US energy security  across US government and other serious players. At first, EOP was not really living up to that high mandate, but today may be a major turning point.

  Selected Points  

 OEP usually posts these webcasts a few days later. For now… here are my scattered recollections, from scrawled notes, of most important things said. 

 EVERYONE agreed that incentives to purchasers of EV (also PHEV and HEV?) are the most crucial target in electrification.  

 I was so delighted that Colleen Jansen of Charge Point stressed that her firm is building networks of collaboration and information, to connect all the players which need to be connected to make this work, certainly to include auto makers, battery makers, and local governments. She ALSO spoke strongly on their advocacy of a Clean Fuel Standard (see werbos.com/oil.htm, for links to topics like the Brownback bill). She was setting very high standards of integrity and market-based balance, to a truly unusual degree.  

 Steven Boyd of the DOE Program on Batteries and Electrification and Michael Maten of GM had really great chemistry in discussion. No one who sincerely wants to accelerate electrification should neglect what lessons THEY have learned! Michael Maten in particular felt like “the new replacement” for a GM engineer/manager (Al Sobey) who was one of my very best partners in these areas until his recent death by old age. Maten’s rank is not as high as Al’s was, but it is really great that there is SOME coverage of that crucial base, including the link to government action. 

Boyd does NOT have so much mandate as his area (and Biden's climate commitments) call for, but you could see on his face that there is an upswing going on.  I was surprised that Boyd cites a $100/kwh target for car batteries, and others project $65 a bit later. But then he said Bloomberg cites more like $131, and it is a complex area, very variable across different car markets even in the US. 

Maten recommended https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/national-blueprint-lithium-batteries and https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/federal-consortium-advanced-batteries-fcab as crucial sources we all should build on. HOWEVER: Maten stressed that it is all “batteries, batteries, batteries” in their efforts.“That is THE issue in achieving their goal of being competitive without subsidies.” When I was at NSF and IEEE USA energy policy committee, we had access to much more detailed breakdowns on WHERE THE extra costs were which made a Toyoto Prius PHEV more expensive, for example, than a comparable ICE car. Batteries were part of it, but as I recall power electronics were even bigger. And yes, motor quality and control were crucial as well. (I remember how switched reluctance motors with modern RLADP control outperform electric motors requiring rare earths.) I suspect there are major unmet opportunities here still, from work we started (AND CHECKED) from NSF, used in Asia but not yet in US or EU. Some not even in Asia yet.

Dan Levy of Credit Suisse was a great moderator, and asked balanced but probing questions, showing awareness of how electrification is moving so much faster in other nations now. Part of the issue is supply chains, and Biden HAS given encouragement to strengthening our supply chains. DOE **IS** supporting more robust supply chains, though do they know what firms in China were doing decades ago in recycling lithium batteries? (All in my files.) Or how the foundation of rare earth production in China turns out to be TECHNOLOGY, not resources, as we learned in discussing it in Changsha and Wuhan decades ago with people who applied control algorithms I developed to the separation issues and other control in that sector? (The Chinese wanted to share with us, in a joint China/NSF research effort, but our protectors protected us from having that technology.  Memos in my files.)

Sarah Fitts, a partner of Schiff-Hardin, inaugurated the session, and had very exciting things to say as well. It felt as if she deserves a lot of the credit for this renaissance of OEP, and that her firm will be providing great guidance to electrification in coming years.

I do wonder whether Boyd has seen the workshop report from Sadoway of MIT, the last major NSF cut in batteries relevant to cars. In my files. Along with LOTS of technical details. I saw heavy filtering in some of the other channels, which may have limited what he had access to. 

  The discussion of hydrogen was quite amusing -- showing insight and depth and a sense of humor. The GM guy clearly and politely said "FORGET it for reducing GHG in transportation." (Is anyone proposing to use it to generate electricity for the US grid???) (Not his exact words, but close enough. The webcast video is coming soon. I will cite it in my chapter on alternatives to electricity in transportation.) 

All participants argued strongly about the importance of the grid interface. At times Colleen seemed to have a picture in her mind of a “recharge at work” station which exactly matched a design which Kumar Venayagamoorthy fleshed out for a grant I awarded him back when I was at NSF!! For Section II of the book, where there are MANY relevant technology opportunities beyond the transportation group as such.