Philip K. Dick and the Frontier of Soul
This one will be ‘way, ‘way out.
In many spiritual paths, people are told that all esoteric or paranormal experiences should be 100 percent personal and kept secret from everyone. That makes sense in many contexts, but should not be taken to extremes. I suddenly associate this with a time when I was on a quiet little tourist boat on the peaceful lake in the center of Guilin in China, passing by a very small island with just a few trees and rocks and low pi nk light to warn ships – and a speaker, through which filtered an instrumental version of the old song “The sound of silence.. silence like a cancer grows..” And before that, I was reminded by a couple of scenes on the theme of “when the truth must out” in The Dark Knight Rises, a movie I saw with Luda and Chris at noon yesterday (this is 3AM Sunday).
Whether the human species survives or (not), I resolved about a year or two ago (or three, when I saw the US Senate at work) that I personally at this stage of life should give the spiritual side of life its due. Whatever the story of other people – my own “soul” has at least much chance of survival as anything on this planet, and something which is half my being should get at least half the energy, especially since it has more useful life expectancy than the other half right now. Also, it is half my own special comparative advantage. (From age eight or ten to 21, I thought mathematics was my comparative advantage, and maybe some genetic correlates of that, but I learned otherwise… though like Jung and Pythagoras I see the associations between mathematics, music and mysticism.)
But how to DO that? Given our ignorance, given the huge mix of rational and irrational barriers, how can we really do justice to spiritual development?
There are so many reasons for inhibitions in even talking about it, rationally based on the fact that we are all so uncertain about the meaning of our experiences, which we encode differently in our psyches. But if we firmly develop the discipline of how to live with uncertainty, and how to map out the diversity of coding systems, we can be rational about some of these things (not omniscient but rational!), and not totally flip out or succumb to destructive forms of imbalance. We can maintain a kind of impedance matches, to avoid the twin dangers of deadening ourselves or overwhelming ourselves… let alone falling into nutty wrong convictions.
In my case, I do have one “secret weapon” on the coding side. The Rosicrucians call it “assumption.” My paper in August 2012 Neural Networks has a section on dreams where we “are” another person. That section is a Trojan Horse. It is totally justified by very serious science, a bit like the original “Lucid Dreams” work at Stanford (but more mathematically grounded than that.) Yet in the same way, it urges the reader to open up in a way which mobilizes certain spiritual or paranormal powers. Some folks have been unhinged by lucid dreams, but I hope my version is relatively safe as such things go. I hope that the experience, by a person grounded in sanity (the main theme of the ugust 2012 paper), of what it feels like to be a DIFFERENT PERSON, will generally lead to more ethical and socially constructive behavior and thought.
For myself, I have had such experiences for many years, since the 1970’s, maybe a bit less just a couple of years ago. But there have been literally thousands of them,
And lots and lots of veridical support. In the bulk of the cases, where they see “green,” I also see green … but I remember a white woman who saw herself as black when she started to feel sexual feelings she felt she shouldn’t. And how they see life and society and other people is incredibly different, so much so that it’s hard to adapt to, especially when you see that person the next day and need to behave almost as if nothing happened. (“Almost”: one can be a bit more sensitive to them, of course, in the usual case where people are not too touchy about their motives. And tuning into most people around you is not advisable, when stronger spiritual connections between you and them are not appropriate – a special consideration for me, since I tend to amplify the projections of anyone I connect to strongly. Flows of qi or backpropagation, as in a neural network or vine.)
But all of this is baby stuff. Preface.
I also have experience which I have not fully digested involving time, and the survival of the soul, which I have never expressed yet to anyone. Lots of it.
This morning I feel especially called to record two “assumption dreams” I had after
reading the first 20 or 30 pages of “The Exegis of Philip K. Dick” before going to
bed. Let me emphasize that I do not just take dreams at face value, that I have far more trust in a state I think of as “cosmic consciousness” when I am not dreaming at all (which usually happens AFTER all dreams but before I leave bed), etc.
But I must give one more piece of background. I have at times had assumption dreams and others exploring the realm of the dead. And yes, I have had a bit of contact with Dr. Joel Whitton, author of Life Between Life and the recent sequel
not yet published (I think), who has worked hard to reconcile what he has seen in neuroscience and hypnosis and parapsychology experiments with theory from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Rosicrucianism (by giving more definition to those viewpoints). I think back to meetings with my father, with an old friend Jeff Keppel, and with the crew of the Challenger (translated in time to two weeks before the actual crash). I am not a Swedenborgian, but the book What Dreams May Come by Mathieson struck my fancy; even though the movie does not do full justice to the book, I did send a video of it to my mother when she was going through a rough patch.
So… perhaps it was predictable, but after reading Dick’s material for an hour before going to sleep, and thinking loosely about that stuff… which I had some direct insight into… It is not surprising that I had two dreams which I remember right now which reflect that. My crude summary:
1. Second visit to a kind of tour service (organized a bit like a cruise line) to a kind of peaceful Jurassic park, on the first leg finding a peaceful place to sleep amongst the human-sized brown dinosaurs (among other things), and on the second leg visiting the new headquarters (reminding me of a new building on an old road in Urumqi, where I was last week) of the tour service to discuss the next phase of the tour.
2. Starting from a kind of normal social gathering at a kind of campus or party kind of area … moving on to inspect a kind of tough hiking trail for future use, going up in the final trek to an alternate trail much more rugged than the usual one, by a very vigorous mountain stream with great energy… one place with no handholds requiring great care but flat and no cliff type hazards.. and another next to a huge cliff, but with some plastic clear barriers to prevent any real danger, closer to the end.
What are these? In a more conscious state as I woke... I had not CHOSEN or MEANT to tune into Dick, but I >80% interpret these as assumption traces of what he himself is going through right now, considering choices for his next incarnation. They are encoded versions (>90%) of the issue of choosing incarnations.
AFTER that… I attribute somewhat higher probability to the general gist of Whitten or core Tibetan (“mindfulness”) Buddhism. (Rosicrucianism is more consciously a “big tent” which discusses several possibilities.) After that and a
few other things. Also, my thinking is more precise than anything in this posting.
Again, I did not do anything whatsoever to create this kind of assumption effect,
nor did I even think of it as I read those pages. There were too many other things going on in those pages. As I sat in the big brown chair in our living room, I mentioned to Luda that some parts of those pages reminded me of the quote from Meng Tze in Yung Fulan which seemed fuzzy and weird to others but perfectly clear to me and resonant with very definite experience. (I actually had a bit of contact with Dick himself in old days. His book on Palmer Eldritch really hit home, when I was a graduate student at Harvard.. before the Civil Service dampened out so much.)
Gossamer threads connecting us all… some aspects of time. In those days, I projected a lot about tachyons myself, after Schwinger expressed some interest and I asked myself some questions… though I later learned other options.
I am tempted to say more about time (which has been very striking to me in recent experience not in dreams at all) and about the soul interface (following on thoughts started when I was in Istanbul a couple of years ago).. but it is now 4AM, an hour after I started typing this. I promised Luda I would return after this
“bout of the muse,” which I do not plan to mention on Facebook… only in the most obscure place…
Best of luck,
Paul
=================
Added at 6AM:
In any discussion of Philip K. Dick, I should mention that -- unlike
Bill Clinton or Barack Obama -- I emphatically never touched marijuana
or any other illicit substance at all, even though the cultural pressures
I experienced were stronger that way to at least try marijuana once.
I remember in the early 1970's learning that all the dozens of former students from Lawrenceville I could track had tried marijuana at least once -- except me and a
Chinese friend, Chen.
Many reasons why. Not least of them -- the realm of human experience is complex enough without adding gross additional random disturbance. Also... knowing how difficult it is to evolve something as well crafted as a human brain (for all its limits)...
to me, taking psychedelic substances would be like booting up a high precision computer, and then hitting it with a sledge hammer. No way.
Other that that, I was a lot like Palmer Eldritch, as part of my life, in the 1970's.
There was also a Dick novel where there was a minor character, whose
name for psychic purposes was the Chinese word for "word" (I then often
used Verbus, the proper pronunciation of my own last name) projecting as a simple kitchen pot... warning him not to put too much faith in a less honest projector who was
a bigger part of that particular story.
Another reason is that what we have by nature is powerful enough... and I did resonate
a bit with a little book by Annie Besant which I had read which discussed such things.
Yes, I read Andrew Weil's Natural Mind (when a suitemate showed it to me)
and, in more detail, the Castaneda series of books. Still no real temmptation,
given my awareness of the other aspects. I remember a very intelligent anthropologist I met circa 1980, who had studied in the Amazon, and also read Weil... and,
intelligent or not, ended up dead as a result of believing Weil too much.
I have had moderate use of alcohol and caffeine, on-again off-again,but
lately more off-again. They start to hurt my body long before they do much to
my brain. I join my Chinese compatriots at baijiu at dinner, but I always say
"saluda" instead of "kampei," even though some do not like that, because it is better to really taste the flavor of a small amount than wash too much down the throat.
Two big decafs every day at work... and a cup of caffeinated coffee in the morning
only at some special times (like with my wife on a weekend, or at a conference where
there is little choice).
...
======================
3PM the same day:
I have scanned through the whole of the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.
Quite a trip.
From pages 20 to 45, I was happy to see some progress from commonplace delusions
to signs of real insight. When he got to The Other, he began to seem as if he
was intuiting something about "Assumption" (though he did miss some basic aspects).
But... after the last lucid bit, about page 179... it never really seemed to
converge with reality.
The bit about "hypertime" reminded me of my first Nuovo Cimento paper, circa 1974...
though as I learned better math, I saw less and less need for such scaffolding.
Only very recently have I begun to think again about that kind of possibility, but
not in florid sort of way Dick does.
In general, it reminds me of how some dreams can be a MIX of fantasy and
real inputs..
Best of luck...
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Friday, July 27, 2012
Status of Threat of Great Depression II
About a month ago, definitive op-eds in the Financial Times and
elsewhere were warning us that
the possibility a new Thirties style Great Depression starting within
about one year is far too serious
and realistic to ignore.
It is still so.
Before the details and possible response, some background....
--------------------------------
Budget sequestration doesn't get many headlines this month, but it is
very much in process.
As I understand it, January is when it all hits the fan for actual
government net spending. I have seen estimates that
unemployment will quickly go over 9%. And, yes, I wonder what the
specific impacts will be;
it's hard to know, and the House has even passed a bill demanding more
details. All of us wonder what
the impact will be on us. In addition, I pray that it doesn't kill the
unique new DARPA
plan for hypersonics research, which has the chance of saving the US
future capabilities in space just in time before it is too late.
(It's not a billion dollar item, but at a time of cutbacks, it is
common for bureaucracies to circle the wagons and save
old stuff first.)
Likewise, the Financial Times said this morning that many are expecting
the shoe to finally fall off for Greece
before too long, and -- despite what was achieved this past month --
for the dominoes to keep falling.
A lot was achieved this past month or two, but not enough. It reminds me of the story about
the guy who finally got usable tires for his car, but
never got around to the engine.
I don't know how it cuts in China, but I don't expect deus ex machina
from them. They have their own problems.
One humorous aside: in China, I ran across quite a few Moslem people
this time. Honest to God, some were truly excited
about the prospect of the US electing a President who would be a
devout member of the Mormon brotherhood, and
finally put alcohol and caffeine in their proper places, and show a
little more respect for polygamy. The Saudis who own so much of Fox
News
would undoubtedly agree. More seriously, I can imagine a scenario in
which Romney takes office in January, and unemployment immediately
ticks up a point or two,
and half the lights go out due to unprotected EMP, and then things
become really messy. It could really happen.
=====================================================
Of course,everything above and below is just personal rumination, not
representing anyone, and not
proposing A Position.
I have tried to back off a little, and map out what COULD be done, in
principle, in a broad way, to prevent a new global depression.
It seems to me that there are two essential global constraints we need
to think about.
1. First, there are constraints due to the need for each major
decision center (US, EU, China) to maximize its goal independently.
I strongly conjecture that we are caught in a kind of "prisoner's
dilemma," which I have talked about before. This leads to the first
major domain
for possible action to make things better: could we somehow come up
with workable agreements of US, EU and China to get out of the
prisoner's dilemma situation
somehow, and move to more of a Pareto optimum? Note that I haven't
given details, but in general, in principle, this is a very
fundamental tool
for saving ourselves, if we can use it effectively. Let me call this
"lever one."
2. In the US, dollar bills and coins only get into circulation by the
action of Federal Reserve Banks LOANING them to other banks, who in
turn loan
them to others. This puts a pretty firm constraint on TOTAL debt in
the US. (Of course, folks like Milton Friedman undoubtedly have texts
giving much more
detail on exactly how this works.) Federal debt is not the only debt
which matters; consider China's problem with provincial debt, and our
problems in earlier years with consumer debt!.
Yet it is not so realistic to talk about lowering TOTAL debt, under
this system. In a way, the goal may be to MOVE debt to places like
corporations,
where it may be offset by real tangible value of productive assets.
In theory, we do not have to stay with this general system. The Roman
Empire survived reasonably well for awhile just using the new
currency for
direct spending. I do not know what China really does here. In theory,
there could be a second lever of changing the system, to make
total net debt more avoidable. I would call this the second possible
lever for action... but it has obvious problems, and I have far less
specifics I can see here right now.
I mention it for completeness, not because I have anything to propose
right now. But for the long term, I do wonder just how necessary such
debt really is?
How much could it be biasing the future of humanity?
---
And then, we get back to the usual "two practical levers" that
everyone knows about, the "fiscal" and "monetary policy" levers.
For fiscal policy... it still comes back to something I have discussed
before: the importance of estimating the total job creation value
PER DOLLAR of government debt, either spending or tax incentives. So
far as I know, a few Japanese eoconomists in the office of their
president are
the only ones who have taken this very simple common-sense approach to
minimizing debt without raising unemployment, or maximizing employment
while
living within some debt constraint. Unemployment does not HAVE to rise
above 9% for the level of debt reduction implied by the sequestration
law,
if we take such an approach, but can we? Not if sacred cows rule the Congress.
But there is another aspect of ordinary government policy which also
can help. For example, we have discussed the Shield Act, which would
not
add to the deficit to any significant degree. But by mandating
hardening of the power grid, it would mandate electric utility systems
to invest (hopefully VERY QUICKLY)
in off-the-shelf equipment to harden their systems. This would cause a
small increase in electricity rates, spreading out the cost over many
years, accompanied by
a much larger immediate private sector investment ( financed by the
"good" kind of corporate debt) creating jobs in the construction and
heavy industry sectors,
which are especially depressed even now. The Open Fuel Standard bill
would have similar benefits, on balance, though not quite so graphic.
Changing Renewable Fuel Standards to an appropriate equally strong
Low Carbon Fuel Standards law (as we have discussed before) likewise.
Much larger and more important, in my view, would be measures in
Europe mandating utility purchase at 15 cents per kwh for all solar
generation
from solar farms operating within the EU, as much as people can
generate up to about half of daytime peak demand. (Of course, the US
and China could do the same,
and we could even possibly AGREE to some form of this by treaty.)
Regarding monetary policy, second-guessing someone as smart and as
focused as Ben Bernanke is very hazardous. He says he is doing all he
can do,
but that monetary policy is not enough. That suggests that the minimum
risk to the world economy would come from maximizing what we do on the
usual
fiscal/regulatory side (REMEMBERING to maintain shock absorbers for
the eventual time when unemployment gets all the way back down to 5%),
and MAKING that enough to get us back to 5% smoothly, and making deals
between US and EU and China such that all three know they can get away
with zero real interest rates in paying off
resulting government debt.
But... maybe there is also something else which could be done on the
monetary side, at least in the long term.
One may ask:
Is the present system for channeling loans really the most efficient
in the long-term, for dealing with the uncertainties and reflexive
effects
and vicious cycles of pessimism (positive bubbles and negative
bubbles)? Just as electricity markets now work better
since the era of Enron, now that new computerized markets based on
more modern algorithms get rid of some of the
erroneous arbitrage noise, could they do the same for financial
markets somehow, and not just in the realm of millisecond twitch
trading?
Could a different structure of "plays" better factorize the gigantic
"matrix" of uncertainties and actors?
Stuff like Glass-Steagel might help a little, but maybe a more truly
optimizing alternative might be possible, if the very best new
systems methods are applied. Worth thinking about.
This final "lever" reminds me a bit of Martha's question about
batteries. To PROPERLY value and operate a battery within the power
grid really requires
an advanced form of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP), because of the
difficult uncertainties, context complexities, and need for correct
timing.
I suspect that NONE of the technical traders in the world financial
market know the relevant mathematics; a lot of what they do is based
on applying metaphors from domains like
superstring theory or Soviet aircraft design (recycled from a guy at
Bell Labs) or local, myopic chaos. Large scale financial flows are not
really easier than batteries.
elsewhere were warning us that
the possibility a new Thirties style Great Depression starting within
about one year is far too serious
and realistic to ignore.
It is still so.
Before the details and possible response, some background....
--------------------------------
Budget sequestration doesn't get many headlines this month, but it is
very much in process.
As I understand it, January is when it all hits the fan for actual
government net spending. I have seen estimates that
unemployment will quickly go over 9%. And, yes, I wonder what the
specific impacts will be;
it's hard to know, and the House has even passed a bill demanding more
details. All of us wonder what
the impact will be on us. In addition, I pray that it doesn't kill the
unique new DARPA
plan for hypersonics research, which has the chance of saving the US
future capabilities in space just in time before it is too late.
(It's not a billion dollar item, but at a time of cutbacks, it is
common for bureaucracies to circle the wagons and save
old stuff first.)
Likewise, the Financial Times said this morning that many are expecting
the shoe to finally fall off for Greece
before too long, and -- despite what was achieved this past month --
for the dominoes to keep falling.
A lot was achieved this past month or two, but not enough. It reminds me of the story about
the guy who finally got usable tires for his car, but
never got around to the engine.
I don't know how it cuts in China, but I don't expect deus ex machina
from them. They have their own problems.
One humorous aside: in China, I ran across quite a few Moslem people
this time. Honest to God, some were truly excited
about the prospect of the US electing a President who would be a
devout member of the Mormon brotherhood, and
finally put alcohol and caffeine in their proper places, and show a
little more respect for polygamy. The Saudis who own so much of Fox
News
would undoubtedly agree. More seriously, I can imagine a scenario in
which Romney takes office in January, and unemployment immediately
ticks up a point or two,
and half the lights go out due to unprotected EMP, and then things
become really messy. It could really happen.
=====================================================
Of course,everything above and below is just personal rumination, not
representing anyone, and not
proposing A Position.
I have tried to back off a little, and map out what COULD be done, in
principle, in a broad way, to prevent a new global depression.
It seems to me that there are two essential global constraints we need
to think about.
1. First, there are constraints due to the need for each major
decision center (US, EU, China) to maximize its goal independently.
I strongly conjecture that we are caught in a kind of "prisoner's
dilemma," which I have talked about before. This leads to the first
major domain
for possible action to make things better: could we somehow come up
with workable agreements of US, EU and China to get out of the
prisoner's dilemma situation
somehow, and move to more of a Pareto optimum? Note that I haven't
given details, but in general, in principle, this is a very
fundamental tool
for saving ourselves, if we can use it effectively. Let me call this
"lever one."
2. In the US, dollar bills and coins only get into circulation by the
action of Federal Reserve Banks LOANING them to other banks, who in
turn loan
them to others. This puts a pretty firm constraint on TOTAL debt in
the US. (Of course, folks like Milton Friedman undoubtedly have texts
giving much more
detail on exactly how this works.) Federal debt is not the only debt
which matters; consider China's problem with provincial debt, and our
problems in earlier years with consumer debt!.
Yet it is not so realistic to talk about lowering TOTAL debt, under
this system. In a way, the goal may be to MOVE debt to places like
corporations,
where it may be offset by real tangible value of productive assets.
In theory, we do not have to stay with this general system. The Roman
Empire survived reasonably well for awhile just using the new
currency for
direct spending. I do not know what China really does here. In theory,
there could be a second lever of changing the system, to make
total net debt more avoidable. I would call this the second possible
lever for action... but it has obvious problems, and I have far less
specifics I can see here right now.
I mention it for completeness, not because I have anything to propose
right now. But for the long term, I do wonder just how necessary such
debt really is?
How much could it be biasing the future of humanity?
---
And then, we get back to the usual "two practical levers" that
everyone knows about, the "fiscal" and "monetary policy" levers.
For fiscal policy... it still comes back to something I have discussed
before: the importance of estimating the total job creation value
PER DOLLAR of government debt, either spending or tax incentives. So
far as I know, a few Japanese eoconomists in the office of their
president are
the only ones who have taken this very simple common-sense approach to
minimizing debt without raising unemployment, or maximizing employment
while
living within some debt constraint. Unemployment does not HAVE to rise
above 9% for the level of debt reduction implied by the sequestration
law,
if we take such an approach, but can we? Not if sacred cows rule the Congress.
But there is another aspect of ordinary government policy which also
can help. For example, we have discussed the Shield Act, which would
not
add to the deficit to any significant degree. But by mandating
hardening of the power grid, it would mandate electric utility systems
to invest (hopefully VERY QUICKLY)
in off-the-shelf equipment to harden their systems. This would cause a
small increase in electricity rates, spreading out the cost over many
years, accompanied by
a much larger immediate private sector investment ( financed by the
"good" kind of corporate debt) creating jobs in the construction and
heavy industry sectors,
which are especially depressed even now. The Open Fuel Standard bill
would have similar benefits, on balance, though not quite so graphic.
Changing Renewable Fuel Standards to an appropriate equally strong
Low Carbon Fuel Standards law (as we have discussed before) likewise.
Much larger and more important, in my view, would be measures in
Europe mandating utility purchase at 15 cents per kwh for all solar
generation
from solar farms operating within the EU, as much as people can
generate up to about half of daytime peak demand. (Of course, the US
and China could do the same,
and we could even possibly AGREE to some form of this by treaty.)
Regarding monetary policy, second-guessing someone as smart and as
focused as Ben Bernanke is very hazardous. He says he is doing all he
can do,
but that monetary policy is not enough. That suggests that the minimum
risk to the world economy would come from maximizing what we do on the
usual
fiscal/regulatory side (REMEMBERING to maintain shock absorbers for
the eventual time when unemployment gets all the way back down to 5%),
and MAKING that enough to get us back to 5% smoothly, and making deals
between US and EU and China such that all three know they can get away
with zero real interest rates in paying off
resulting government debt.
But... maybe there is also something else which could be done on the
monetary side, at least in the long term.
One may ask:
Is the present system for channeling loans really the most efficient
in the long-term, for dealing with the uncertainties and reflexive
effects
and vicious cycles of pessimism (positive bubbles and negative
bubbles)? Just as electricity markets now work better
since the era of Enron, now that new computerized markets based on
more modern algorithms get rid of some of the
erroneous arbitrage noise, could they do the same for financial
markets somehow, and not just in the realm of millisecond twitch
trading?
Could a different structure of "plays" better factorize the gigantic
"matrix" of uncertainties and actors?
Stuff like Glass-Steagel might help a little, but maybe a more truly
optimizing alternative might be possible, if the very best new
systems methods are applied. Worth thinking about.
This final "lever" reminds me a bit of Martha's question about
batteries. To PROPERLY value and operate a battery within the power
grid really requires
an advanced form of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP), because of the
difficult uncertainties, context complexities, and need for correct
timing.
I suspect that NONE of the technical traders in the world financial
market know the relevant mathematics; a lot of what they do is based
on applying metaphors from domains like
superstring theory or Soviet aircraft design (recycled from a guy at
Bell Labs) or local, myopic chaos. Large scale financial flows are not
really easier than batteries.
Thursday, July 26, 2012
kung fu style mind discipline
Grasshopper – how to train your mind
Or: Mathematics comes to the Shaolin Monastery
Just as the kung fu fighter gains power by studying and emulating the crane, the kung fu thinker can gain power by studying and emulating a variety of creatures… from the fish to the dinosaur to the mouse to the monkey, and only then beyond.
Do you remember those old movies where a student of gung fu at the Shaolin monastery learns to appreciate and imitate the fighting styles of a bird, a preying mantis, a tiger, a monkey and so on? Now, with our new understanding of the brain really works, we can start to do the same kind of thing in training our mind. And since the power of the mind is the most important qi of all (at least on earth), this is serious stuff. But in this case, it’s pretty clear that the animals form a progression… from the least intelligent to the most intelligent, all of them offering important lessons.
At the lowest level is the “vector intelligence,” a level so low we do not see it in real animals. It is actually much higher than what we use in control systems in the world today, but I will not say much more about it now. (Some day I will scan and post an old 1980 paper, from the time when I thought that ordinary mammals only had vector intelligence. We can learn from that level, but now I would want to move higher. Even the simple “perfect vector intelligence” experiences pain and pleasure, and hope and fear. Even the simple vector intelligence may be confused by traumatic and euphoric experiences which he cannot yet explain, and may have all kinds of dreams.)
Next up is “spatial intelligence.” Still not any animal I know of, but maybe the fish might be so low.
The fish does not have grand plans for life, and he does not show much creativity. He does not develop new technologies or build cities. His schools are not really schools. But he does live and survive in a very complex world, full of myriad threats and opportunities. He is assessing these threats and opportunities at every moment of his life.
Can you imagine a fish as a master class player of chess? Actually, it is true in a way. A simple system of spatial intelligence was built by David Fogel in 2005. (It is described in an article in Proceedings of the IEEE, which is the highest ranked journal of the world’s largest engineering society.) Just by learning and paying attention to its simple world, the world of the chessboard, it learned how to beat master class human chess players. Even a fish brain has more neurons and a more sophisticated brain than this simple spatial intelligence which Fogel put together. So how could it beat humans?
This was not like Deep Blue, an ultrafast computer programmed with rules about chess, which beat even the best human chess players. This was only master class. But Fogel’s system was not told any special tricks about chess from human teachers. It had to learn to play all on its own, without so many clues as a human gets form reading chess books. So how could the “baby fish” computer learn better than most of the humans serious about chess?
Its only real advantage was that it PAID ATTENTION. The chessboard was its whole world, and its whole life. The human researcher did work to give this creature good learning experiences, struggling to defeat mirrors of its own self and its own capabilities. Of course it had to work through many experiences of defeat and victory, struggling the whole time. Unlike the simple vector intelligence, it would always pay attention to the symmetries and patterns and connections in its world, just as the fish pays attention to the symmetries and patterns and connections in its own very complex world.
Could a fish then play a master class game of chess, as good as what Fogel’s system could, if properly trained and motivated? Would it require some kind of brain-computer interface to make it pay attention, like what we see in the movie The Matrix? Maybe… maybe not.
Whenever I think of computers playing chess, I think of a strange night at MIT at around 1971. In that year, I went to Harvard graduate school, and had a friend from France. On a lark, for fun, he proposed that we go to visit the MIT Artificial Intelligence center one night. It was then just one part of a floor in a modern building at Kendall Square, where I later worked myself on another floor.
As we entered that mostly dark place, it was an eerie experience indeed. Strange Gothic music imitating Bach suffused the whole place; small white lights gently turned on and off, hundreds of them, near the tops of beautiful baby blue DEC computers which lined most of the walls of this big open area. These computers were mostly implementing a program which was trying to imitate Bach; it was not like real Bach, but the differences only contributed to the sense of unearthly weirdness permeating the whole area.
Off to the right was a special enclave, more brightly lit, where a robot arm was playing with blocks with a baby or very young child. Of course, some computer was implementing a new AI program, “blocks” developed by Richard Winston; it was not a human-like program, but it was entertaining enough for the baby, playing in effect both with the blocks and with the computer. As we stared at this spectacle, the mother rushed up to us, somewhat apologetic and embarrassed, and explained that it was such a nice toy for her child…
And then, off to the left was the chess-player. A magnificently intelligent and serious human face, with a high brow and a countenance a bit like a general of a Roman or Celtic army, was pondering ever so seriously at the well-lit chessboard in front of him, with a computer on the other side. This was not Big Blue; only an older generation hard coded master class computer chessplayer. But as we looked at this master class human, and at the chessboard itself, it was overwhelming to see how the computer slowly and implacably crushed him, despite his best efforts and his obvious intelligence, certainly playing better chess than I or my friend could play (short of some kind of terrible and painful psychic cheating). It reminded me a lot of the Swedish movie, the Seventh Seal, where a human plays chess with the devil.
So whenever I think of a “merely master class” chess machine, I imagine that ponderous scene from the seventh seal, and I also remember the fish. Do not underestimate the fish, and do not underestimate the power of paying attention to the hall of mirrors right in front of you. A fish is not a jellyfish, as any biologist could tell you.
When I look at the wiring diagram of the brain of a fish, I do have some idea of how these circuits work, to give the fish the power to cope with complexity in space. There is a three-layer cortex in the fish, which seems like three of the layers of the cerebral cortex of the human. Three layers are already enough for the fish to learn to predict the complex spatial world it lives in. They allow some circuit properties we call multiplexing and nonlinear state estimation (creating an image of complex reality in its brain). We are very close to building this in computers today.
But beyond the fish lies an impressive animal indeed -- the next level of intelligence, up beyond the spatial intelligence. The level of the dinosaur. The dinosaur is what I use to symbolize this level of intelligence in my slides on the mathematics of intelligence.
In formal terms – the dinosaur level has a brain which can handle multiple time intervals effectively as it decides what it expects and what it will do.
Roughly – look at a big dinosaur and think: “This guy sure knows how to be DECISIVE.
He knows how to make decisions, to set goals and to stick with them over time.”
I look at the dinosaur this week, and I also think of Dick Cheney (recent VP of the US under George Bush) and of Zhou in China (the security guy who worked with Bo Xilai, purged this year). Those people rose very high by being very decisive. Just as the fish and chess player focus so well on space, on a pattern in front of them here and now in space, these more powerful creatures focus on patterns of their own will. When I think of these powerful creatures, I also think of our former President Jimmy Carter, who was so enlightend and intelligent in some ways, but lost power as people concluded that he was simply not decisive enough. Reagan was simpler, but more decisive. And to be honest, I think of my self in some ways. I believe in organisms governed by values and criteria at the highest levels, but I have often been almost a kind of hypocrite… living much of my own life obsessively pursuing a variety of well-defined goals. But deciding to attain a well-defined important goal, and working back how to reach it and visualizing a workable path, is a very important power of the human mind as well. The dinosaur inside us had great powers, if we can keep it under control and not let it serve goals which do not lead to dark outcomes in the end, in the larger picture.
In 1998 and the early years of this century, I published many equations and design details for how to build a dinosaur level of brain in computers. But these were not politically acceptable to the computer scientists, who had more fun playing with simple designs which would not work from their cute old friends. For tough engineers, building a system at the fish level is already a great challenge; so I have mainly talked about that level, and even simple vector intelligence, in recent years. When creatures are not yet ready to stand on two legs, I do not want to just torture them by asking for feats they cannot yet achieve. Yet for us as humans, we can still cultivate and master our inner dinosaur. (Much of the politics of human survival involves trying to master or control the powerful dinosaurs of our world – but we should
not underestimate those dinosaurs as we do so.). But – is a human turtle just a dinosaur with less of an inflated ego? Many emperors of China have identified with the turtle. (Or the snake?)
When I look at the brain of the reptile or the bird, I see another three-layer cortex which helps run the decision making, working with a system called the basal ganglia which executes decisions and learns to perform or lead the variouus kinds of actions or “verbs” which that cortex may ask for.
On my roadmap for mathematical neural networks, the highest step of all, above the dinosaur, is a creature which is even grander and more powerful, the creature with the power to totally defeat and destroy all the dinosaurs of earth, whose fate was sealed but not determined by a great comet in the end – a sign of celestial support to resonate with and accelerate the inevitable defeat of the dinosaur by this more powerful creature.
The more powerful creature, the higher level of intelligence, is the mouse, a high creature worthy of great veneration. (In my mind, I can even imagine Jesus looking at the mouse and the dinosaur and repeating his famous words “the first shall be the last and the last shall be the worst…”).
The basic power of the mouse is the power of creativity.
For many years, I wondered exactly how the mouse achieves the kind of power of creativity which it has. It is easy to build a computer system which, like the dinosaur, easily gets trapped in a rut, a boring cycle of life which is not so great as what a creative creature might learn to discover. How can a mouse possibly be so creative? The mathematics of this problem are very interesting and very challenging. Sometimes I called this “brain-like stochastic search.”
I did not really have the basics figured out until 2009, when I wrote a paper for the journal Neural Networks, stimulated by friends like Dan Levine, Robert Kozma and Frank Lewis. At that time, I thought back to many things, including a paper I read long ago in a classic anthology on neuroscience, called “the Rockefeller series.”
In that book, they explained how the brain of the mouse seems to come from a MERGER of the two older three-level cortex structures. I thought about how this connects to what we now know about the basal ganglia and about spatial complexity… and the explanation flashed immediately to mind:
By COMBINING its power of spatial complexity with the power to make decisions, it is wired up so that it can perform spatial mapping of the space of POSSIBILITIES.
As soon as I understood this, I could make sense of many of my own experiences in finding answers to difficult questions, and in quickly getting a feeling and assessment for complex areas of thought either as an introduction or as a way to get some useful understanding when my time is limited.
In many difficult areas, there is a key stage in the beginning when I do a kind of thrashing around in thinking, considering many different points of view. The possible ways of thinking seem to curve around and connect in a very strange kind of space, repeating and revisiting or contradicting, forming areas where people cannot escape unless they explore a certain other direction. What happens in that very important time of thrashing? It seems… this is how one engages the natural ability to map out the space of possibilities of ways of thinking. And that thrashing is absolutely essential to the highest levels of creativity we humans are capable of. Of course, there must also be a motivation – like the big question or goal we are thinking about… but we need to do this cognitive mapping.
Many people become famous dinosaurs, but actually hold back progress, because they do not ever do this kind of thrashing around in thinking. Maybe they thrash just once or twice, and settle down to some comforting ideology, and never thrash enough to have a good map of the territory.
But for real creativity of real humans, there is another factor -- the social factor.
Some very lucky people have free and flexible friends they can trust, who are just as advanced as they are in probing the limits of the questions they are working on. They can have deep “brainstorming sessions,” where they thrash freely through the space of possibilities, without ideological or conventional limitations, without reinventing simple issues, and each do the cognitive mapping of this space. Because of the way we humans are – with the social aspect of our motivational systems and our natural tendency to feel that things are “real” when other people also feel they are real – this is extremely important in mobilizing the full power of the human mind. In my own life, I have only really experienced this twice – once in 1979, when I worked with a guy named Joe Firestone at Census Use Research (a research organization which no longer exists) and now with my wife Ludmila.
But with these kinds of brainstorming sessions, there are two dangers which we also must remember. First, they always have some degree of limitation. It is especially dangerous to creativity when they become brainstorming sessions of like-minded people, who exclude other points of view which a true creative thinker of high integrity would not ignore; it can reinforce irrational “groupthink,” a major threat to creativity. Second, they are never quite as free or as fast as what a powerful thinker can do on his/her own, at times of peak clarity and focus. For myself, my ability to answer really difficult questions which others have mostly give up on has depended a lot on being able to drive myself despite lack of social reinforcement to keep thrashing through questions which others mainly hide from. Of course, exploring the space of possibilities means exploring the space of possible strategies to answer the question; strategic thinking, both in words and in images, is a central part of this thrashing.
After I wrote this, and expressed my thanks to my wife again for the unique importance of our relationship, I suddenly realized: of course the mouse too is a very social animal, much more than any reptile. Mice do not have the deep empathy and mirror neurons that a monkey has, but they do have strong families, and some kind of communication abilities. I wonder: how much do “smiles” and petting influence the ability of some mice to boldly explore their environment, and find new paths to cheese or even to dinosaur eggs? I do not know. I have even seen a baby mouse “smile” at a cat, who then carried it away to a safe place in the forest behind our house.
I can even imagine someone saying: “How can you have so much reverence for the mouse? What’s next? Will you be telling us that Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney deserve more serious reverence than the Bible?” Actually, when my son was small, I remember a time when came home and asked: “Daddy and mommy, the kids at school said they believe in Adam and Eve, and asked whether we believe in Adam and Eve too?” My immediate response: “Well, I believe more in Lilo and Stitch than in Adam and Eve. And if they say Santa Claus is on the north Pole… I think he would be all wet by now, and I really think it is more true that Big Bird lives on the South Pole.” (Side note: NSF runs the biggest base on the South Pole, and also funded the development of Sesame Street.) In actuality, I do believe it would be a great mistake to underestimate the depth and validity of many of things which Walt Disney tried to portray. And certainly, many adults would be more creative if they could remember some basic aspects of reality which are clear to children.
But then, even higher than the great mouse is the great monkey…
=================
All of the above was written in Shenyang, China, where I saw thousands of people
in the morning, 4:30AM to 6:30 AM, doing morning exercises in Bei Lin Park, next to the conference hotel where I was staying --- some of them wu shu of various kinds,
including tai qi.
The monkey is revered in China, but really this leads to more advanced stages
discussed in my paper "Neural Networks and the Experience and Cultivation of Mind,"
in the journal Neural Networks, August 2012. With a brief extension under submission elsewhere...
Of course, one cannot mention the Great Mouse without paying some respects to Walt Disney. I meant to say more of the serious respect we should have for Disney... but
time ran out in Shenyang for this kind of thing, and I am not ready right now to fill in that gap.
Regarding the neuroanatomy ... I resolved to go back and reread the sources on comparative neurology and comparative neuroscience of the vertebrates, to nail down all of this. Last night, I reread the first part of the Neurosciences Rockefeller book, second study series... mainly the first half of Nauta's piece... and it seems
I should properly review a whole lot of other stuff, some which I read and some not,
to nail down some of this.
In Nauta's version, he refers to "external striatum" for what I saw described
as "another 2 or 3 layer cortex", perhaps in Bitterman. So instead of merger
of two cortices, in the mouse, I should have said merger of 3-level cortex with
external striatum, to follow Nauta's way of describing things.
Do we have fish, say, with all the spatial stuff but not the external striatum?
Nauta leaves that open; when he wrote, apparently people did not know as much
about the fish as we do now. Certainly the external striatum appeared at SOME
point in the evolution of the vertebrate brain... even if the modern fish should have an external striatum, it would have to have an aquatic ancestor who did not.
Best of luck....
Paul
Or: Mathematics comes to the Shaolin Monastery
Just as the kung fu fighter gains power by studying and emulating the crane, the kung fu thinker can gain power by studying and emulating a variety of creatures… from the fish to the dinosaur to the mouse to the monkey, and only then beyond.
Do you remember those old movies where a student of gung fu at the Shaolin monastery learns to appreciate and imitate the fighting styles of a bird, a preying mantis, a tiger, a monkey and so on? Now, with our new understanding of the brain really works, we can start to do the same kind of thing in training our mind. And since the power of the mind is the most important qi of all (at least on earth), this is serious stuff. But in this case, it’s pretty clear that the animals form a progression… from the least intelligent to the most intelligent, all of them offering important lessons.
At the lowest level is the “vector intelligence,” a level so low we do not see it in real animals. It is actually much higher than what we use in control systems in the world today, but I will not say much more about it now. (Some day I will scan and post an old 1980 paper, from the time when I thought that ordinary mammals only had vector intelligence. We can learn from that level, but now I would want to move higher. Even the simple “perfect vector intelligence” experiences pain and pleasure, and hope and fear. Even the simple vector intelligence may be confused by traumatic and euphoric experiences which he cannot yet explain, and may have all kinds of dreams.)
Next up is “spatial intelligence.” Still not any animal I know of, but maybe the fish might be so low.
The fish does not have grand plans for life, and he does not show much creativity. He does not develop new technologies or build cities. His schools are not really schools. But he does live and survive in a very complex world, full of myriad threats and opportunities. He is assessing these threats and opportunities at every moment of his life.
Can you imagine a fish as a master class player of chess? Actually, it is true in a way. A simple system of spatial intelligence was built by David Fogel in 2005. (It is described in an article in Proceedings of the IEEE, which is the highest ranked journal of the world’s largest engineering society.) Just by learning and paying attention to its simple world, the world of the chessboard, it learned how to beat master class human chess players. Even a fish brain has more neurons and a more sophisticated brain than this simple spatial intelligence which Fogel put together. So how could it beat humans?
This was not like Deep Blue, an ultrafast computer programmed with rules about chess, which beat even the best human chess players. This was only master class. But Fogel’s system was not told any special tricks about chess from human teachers. It had to learn to play all on its own, without so many clues as a human gets form reading chess books. So how could the “baby fish” computer learn better than most of the humans serious about chess?
Its only real advantage was that it PAID ATTENTION. The chessboard was its whole world, and its whole life. The human researcher did work to give this creature good learning experiences, struggling to defeat mirrors of its own self and its own capabilities. Of course it had to work through many experiences of defeat and victory, struggling the whole time. Unlike the simple vector intelligence, it would always pay attention to the symmetries and patterns and connections in its world, just as the fish pays attention to the symmetries and patterns and connections in its own very complex world.
Could a fish then play a master class game of chess, as good as what Fogel’s system could, if properly trained and motivated? Would it require some kind of brain-computer interface to make it pay attention, like what we see in the movie The Matrix? Maybe… maybe not.
Whenever I think of computers playing chess, I think of a strange night at MIT at around 1971. In that year, I went to Harvard graduate school, and had a friend from France. On a lark, for fun, he proposed that we go to visit the MIT Artificial Intelligence center one night. It was then just one part of a floor in a modern building at Kendall Square, where I later worked myself on another floor.
As we entered that mostly dark place, it was an eerie experience indeed. Strange Gothic music imitating Bach suffused the whole place; small white lights gently turned on and off, hundreds of them, near the tops of beautiful baby blue DEC computers which lined most of the walls of this big open area. These computers were mostly implementing a program which was trying to imitate Bach; it was not like real Bach, but the differences only contributed to the sense of unearthly weirdness permeating the whole area.
Off to the right was a special enclave, more brightly lit, where a robot arm was playing with blocks with a baby or very young child. Of course, some computer was implementing a new AI program, “blocks” developed by Richard Winston; it was not a human-like program, but it was entertaining enough for the baby, playing in effect both with the blocks and with the computer. As we stared at this spectacle, the mother rushed up to us, somewhat apologetic and embarrassed, and explained that it was such a nice toy for her child…
And then, off to the left was the chess-player. A magnificently intelligent and serious human face, with a high brow and a countenance a bit like a general of a Roman or Celtic army, was pondering ever so seriously at the well-lit chessboard in front of him, with a computer on the other side. This was not Big Blue; only an older generation hard coded master class computer chessplayer. But as we looked at this master class human, and at the chessboard itself, it was overwhelming to see how the computer slowly and implacably crushed him, despite his best efforts and his obvious intelligence, certainly playing better chess than I or my friend could play (short of some kind of terrible and painful psychic cheating). It reminded me a lot of the Swedish movie, the Seventh Seal, where a human plays chess with the devil.
So whenever I think of a “merely master class” chess machine, I imagine that ponderous scene from the seventh seal, and I also remember the fish. Do not underestimate the fish, and do not underestimate the power of paying attention to the hall of mirrors right in front of you. A fish is not a jellyfish, as any biologist could tell you.
When I look at the wiring diagram of the brain of a fish, I do have some idea of how these circuits work, to give the fish the power to cope with complexity in space. There is a three-layer cortex in the fish, which seems like three of the layers of the cerebral cortex of the human. Three layers are already enough for the fish to learn to predict the complex spatial world it lives in. They allow some circuit properties we call multiplexing and nonlinear state estimation (creating an image of complex reality in its brain). We are very close to building this in computers today.
But beyond the fish lies an impressive animal indeed -- the next level of intelligence, up beyond the spatial intelligence. The level of the dinosaur. The dinosaur is what I use to symbolize this level of intelligence in my slides on the mathematics of intelligence.
In formal terms – the dinosaur level has a brain which can handle multiple time intervals effectively as it decides what it expects and what it will do.
Roughly – look at a big dinosaur and think: “This guy sure knows how to be DECISIVE.
He knows how to make decisions, to set goals and to stick with them over time.”
I look at the dinosaur this week, and I also think of Dick Cheney (recent VP of the US under George Bush) and of Zhou in China (the security guy who worked with Bo Xilai, purged this year). Those people rose very high by being very decisive. Just as the fish and chess player focus so well on space, on a pattern in front of them here and now in space, these more powerful creatures focus on patterns of their own will. When I think of these powerful creatures, I also think of our former President Jimmy Carter, who was so enlightend and intelligent in some ways, but lost power as people concluded that he was simply not decisive enough. Reagan was simpler, but more decisive. And to be honest, I think of my self in some ways. I believe in organisms governed by values and criteria at the highest levels, but I have often been almost a kind of hypocrite… living much of my own life obsessively pursuing a variety of well-defined goals. But deciding to attain a well-defined important goal, and working back how to reach it and visualizing a workable path, is a very important power of the human mind as well. The dinosaur inside us had great powers, if we can keep it under control and not let it serve goals which do not lead to dark outcomes in the end, in the larger picture.
In 1998 and the early years of this century, I published many equations and design details for how to build a dinosaur level of brain in computers. But these were not politically acceptable to the computer scientists, who had more fun playing with simple designs which would not work from their cute old friends. For tough engineers, building a system at the fish level is already a great challenge; so I have mainly talked about that level, and even simple vector intelligence, in recent years. When creatures are not yet ready to stand on two legs, I do not want to just torture them by asking for feats they cannot yet achieve. Yet for us as humans, we can still cultivate and master our inner dinosaur. (Much of the politics of human survival involves trying to master or control the powerful dinosaurs of our world – but we should
not underestimate those dinosaurs as we do so.). But – is a human turtle just a dinosaur with less of an inflated ego? Many emperors of China have identified with the turtle. (Or the snake?)
When I look at the brain of the reptile or the bird, I see another three-layer cortex which helps run the decision making, working with a system called the basal ganglia which executes decisions and learns to perform or lead the variouus kinds of actions or “verbs” which that cortex may ask for.
On my roadmap for mathematical neural networks, the highest step of all, above the dinosaur, is a creature which is even grander and more powerful, the creature with the power to totally defeat and destroy all the dinosaurs of earth, whose fate was sealed but not determined by a great comet in the end – a sign of celestial support to resonate with and accelerate the inevitable defeat of the dinosaur by this more powerful creature.
The more powerful creature, the higher level of intelligence, is the mouse, a high creature worthy of great veneration. (In my mind, I can even imagine Jesus looking at the mouse and the dinosaur and repeating his famous words “the first shall be the last and the last shall be the worst…”).
The basic power of the mouse is the power of creativity.
For many years, I wondered exactly how the mouse achieves the kind of power of creativity which it has. It is easy to build a computer system which, like the dinosaur, easily gets trapped in a rut, a boring cycle of life which is not so great as what a creative creature might learn to discover. How can a mouse possibly be so creative? The mathematics of this problem are very interesting and very challenging. Sometimes I called this “brain-like stochastic search.”
I did not really have the basics figured out until 2009, when I wrote a paper for the journal Neural Networks, stimulated by friends like Dan Levine, Robert Kozma and Frank Lewis. At that time, I thought back to many things, including a paper I read long ago in a classic anthology on neuroscience, called “the Rockefeller series.”
In that book, they explained how the brain of the mouse seems to come from a MERGER of the two older three-level cortex structures. I thought about how this connects to what we now know about the basal ganglia and about spatial complexity… and the explanation flashed immediately to mind:
By COMBINING its power of spatial complexity with the power to make decisions, it is wired up so that it can perform spatial mapping of the space of POSSIBILITIES.
As soon as I understood this, I could make sense of many of my own experiences in finding answers to difficult questions, and in quickly getting a feeling and assessment for complex areas of thought either as an introduction or as a way to get some useful understanding when my time is limited.
In many difficult areas, there is a key stage in the beginning when I do a kind of thrashing around in thinking, considering many different points of view. The possible ways of thinking seem to curve around and connect in a very strange kind of space, repeating and revisiting or contradicting, forming areas where people cannot escape unless they explore a certain other direction. What happens in that very important time of thrashing? It seems… this is how one engages the natural ability to map out the space of possibilities of ways of thinking. And that thrashing is absolutely essential to the highest levels of creativity we humans are capable of. Of course, there must also be a motivation – like the big question or goal we are thinking about… but we need to do this cognitive mapping.
Many people become famous dinosaurs, but actually hold back progress, because they do not ever do this kind of thrashing around in thinking. Maybe they thrash just once or twice, and settle down to some comforting ideology, and never thrash enough to have a good map of the territory.
But for real creativity of real humans, there is another factor -- the social factor.
Some very lucky people have free and flexible friends they can trust, who are just as advanced as they are in probing the limits of the questions they are working on. They can have deep “brainstorming sessions,” where they thrash freely through the space of possibilities, without ideological or conventional limitations, without reinventing simple issues, and each do the cognitive mapping of this space. Because of the way we humans are – with the social aspect of our motivational systems and our natural tendency to feel that things are “real” when other people also feel they are real – this is extremely important in mobilizing the full power of the human mind. In my own life, I have only really experienced this twice – once in 1979, when I worked with a guy named Joe Firestone at Census Use Research (a research organization which no longer exists) and now with my wife Ludmila.
But with these kinds of brainstorming sessions, there are two dangers which we also must remember. First, they always have some degree of limitation. It is especially dangerous to creativity when they become brainstorming sessions of like-minded people, who exclude other points of view which a true creative thinker of high integrity would not ignore; it can reinforce irrational “groupthink,” a major threat to creativity. Second, they are never quite as free or as fast as what a powerful thinker can do on his/her own, at times of peak clarity and focus. For myself, my ability to answer really difficult questions which others have mostly give up on has depended a lot on being able to drive myself despite lack of social reinforcement to keep thrashing through questions which others mainly hide from. Of course, exploring the space of possibilities means exploring the space of possible strategies to answer the question; strategic thinking, both in words and in images, is a central part of this thrashing.
After I wrote this, and expressed my thanks to my wife again for the unique importance of our relationship, I suddenly realized: of course the mouse too is a very social animal, much more than any reptile. Mice do not have the deep empathy and mirror neurons that a monkey has, but they do have strong families, and some kind of communication abilities. I wonder: how much do “smiles” and petting influence the ability of some mice to boldly explore their environment, and find new paths to cheese or even to dinosaur eggs? I do not know. I have even seen a baby mouse “smile” at a cat, who then carried it away to a safe place in the forest behind our house.
I can even imagine someone saying: “How can you have so much reverence for the mouse? What’s next? Will you be telling us that Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney deserve more serious reverence than the Bible?” Actually, when my son was small, I remember a time when came home and asked: “Daddy and mommy, the kids at school said they believe in Adam and Eve, and asked whether we believe in Adam and Eve too?” My immediate response: “Well, I believe more in Lilo and Stitch than in Adam and Eve. And if they say Santa Claus is on the north Pole… I think he would be all wet by now, and I really think it is more true that Big Bird lives on the South Pole.” (Side note: NSF runs the biggest base on the South Pole, and also funded the development of Sesame Street.) In actuality, I do believe it would be a great mistake to underestimate the depth and validity of many of things which Walt Disney tried to portray. And certainly, many adults would be more creative if they could remember some basic aspects of reality which are clear to children.
But then, even higher than the great mouse is the great monkey…
=================
All of the above was written in Shenyang, China, where I saw thousands of people
in the morning, 4:30AM to 6:30 AM, doing morning exercises in Bei Lin Park, next to the conference hotel where I was staying --- some of them wu shu of various kinds,
including tai qi.
The monkey is revered in China, but really this leads to more advanced stages
discussed in my paper "Neural Networks and the Experience and Cultivation of Mind,"
in the journal Neural Networks, August 2012. With a brief extension under submission elsewhere...
Of course, one cannot mention the Great Mouse without paying some respects to Walt Disney. I meant to say more of the serious respect we should have for Disney... but
time ran out in Shenyang for this kind of thing, and I am not ready right now to fill in that gap.
Regarding the neuroanatomy ... I resolved to go back and reread the sources on comparative neurology and comparative neuroscience of the vertebrates, to nail down all of this. Last night, I reread the first part of the Neurosciences Rockefeller book, second study series... mainly the first half of Nauta's piece... and it seems
I should properly review a whole lot of other stuff, some which I read and some not,
to nail down some of this.
In Nauta's version, he refers to "external striatum" for what I saw described
as "another 2 or 3 layer cortex", perhaps in Bitterman. So instead of merger
of two cortices, in the mouse, I should have said merger of 3-level cortex with
external striatum, to follow Nauta's way of describing things.
Do we have fish, say, with all the spatial stuff but not the external striatum?
Nauta leaves that open; when he wrote, apparently people did not know as much
about the fish as we do now. Certainly the external striatum appeared at SOME
point in the evolution of the vertebrate brain... even if the modern fish should have an external striatum, it would have to have an aquatic ancestor who did not.
Best of luck....
Paul
Saturday, June 23, 2012
energy actions to seriously reduce chances of economic depression
World leaders and folks running for office are rightly focusing their
energies now on the challenge of trying
to avoid falling into a 1930's-style global economic depression. And
they rightly understand that a few
PR releases on green jobs here and there are not really part of that
economic discussion.
BUT -- energy is a major part of the world economy, and I see a bit
more clearly this morning how new
international action on energy could help.
Some actions related to transportation energy could help a lot, but we
have discussed that before (and of course
we should keep discussing it). This morning,
I have thoughts about the "other half" of that equation, the electricity side.
Could new actions on electricity really be important to the world
economic situation, in a serious way and
on a serious scale? Or, as some highly elevated economists have said,
is it "too small to deserve a place as
part of these large-scale discussions?"
IEA/OECD reported world electricity generation in 2008 to be 20,000
terawatt hours. If electricity
costs about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) to generate today, that's
$2 trillion per year, certainly larger
than the US government annual deficit. Furthermore, that annual flow
of $2 trillion per year is based on a lot
of previous capital investment, whose benefits are spread over 10 to
50 years or so . (50 year planning horizons
are still reasonably normal in the electric power sector.) To sustain
and enhance that $2 trillion/year flow,
it is quite reasonable to talk about new investments on that scale,
whose economic stimulus and job creation
benefits could be more than enough, in principle, to shake us out of
our deep local minimum in the world
economy.
How do we bring that closer to reality?
First -- please forgive some review of the all-important context. It
is a great thing that G4 or G20 folks are talking about new financial
arrangements
to reduce the chances of runs on banks, wild instabilities in
currencies or dangerous rises in the interest rates we have to pay
as EU, US and China try to work their way out of the debt positions.
But "debt" and "jobs" are equally important here.
To get out of the hole, with minimum debt risk, all three areas need
to "run the numbers" the way some Japanese economists
have done lately. For each source of government debt, X, whether on
the tax side or the spending side, we need to ask
how large the near-term job creation benefit is (while having ways to
prevent excess demand if and when we finally get to full employment).
To avoid depression, we need action on the financial and bank side,
but ALSO action on the "jobs" side, where the real
threat of global depression is rather urgent.
And so, in the EU, where the threat is now most acute, the big picture
question is: how to get more jobs in Greece, Italy and Spain,
WITHOUT throwing more money down the rat hole of the Greek government
and assorted local parasites? How
the BALANCE OUT the necessary cutbacks on one side of the ledger, with
something else to make up for the
job loss which results from those cuts?
At the level of concrete reality, down in the "weeds" where most of us
really live, I have several times suggested an obvious possibility:
shouldn't the upper level EU people (government and investors and
banks in some combinations) go for a really big investment
right now in massive construction of solar farms (billions of dollars
per year worth, to be scaled up as rapidly as possible)
in the sunny areas where solar power can be generated most cheaply? If
done right, this is cheaper than offshore wind
(20 cents per kwh) and it also buys freedom from Russian gas and from
pressure to build new nuclear plants which most Europeans
have agreed are not so acceptable.
But I have worried: are the EU people really intellectually capable of
being able to do something like that?
If they even tried... instead of deploying 13 cents per kwh solar
farms technology, will they do what I have heard
of from Spain, sending tons of money to politically connected people
who end up charging 50 cents per kwh?
In the real world, is there a possible mechanisms for making the badly
needed investment which will not
be killed by the kind of graft and "legal corruption" we see so often
in all the powerful governments of the world?
Thinking about that this morning... I see the germ of a possible way out.
Years ago, I remember when Southern California Edison (SCE) and
Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) offered
absolute firm purchase contracts to Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and
some other companies to
buy up to something like a gigawatt of electricity at a committed
purchase price, as much as those
folks could deliver. There were other problems which got in the way,
which folks in the real world do need to think about,
but the basic idea here makes a lot of sense.
Could the EU somehow get behind a much more massive commitment to buy
all the solar electricity folks can generate,
up to a VERY large level, at 15 cents per kwh, to stay at 15 cents for
a long time to come? (Details of sunset provisions and
competition are important, but could be worked out.)
Financial people tell me the investment capital tied to a definite
market is MUCH easier to get on a large scale
than traditional VC stuff. And there is plenty of loose cash out there
right now.
The previous two paragraphs would require some thoughtful action by EU
people, and maybe some intellectual guidance here
and there, but it SHOULD be possible for the EU to make those kinds of
market guarantees, and to make sure the cash
is really there from the investment community to respond rationally
to the investment opportunity.
And for once those folks who could actually come in UNDER 15 cents
would have the level of encouragement which is socially rational.
This would help a WHOLE LOT in getting us to under-10-cents renewable solutions.
Of course, 15 cents for wind and water-based power would also be fair,
if it doesn't muck up the details
of how to make the solar be feasible. But no broader than that for
now, for many reasons (mostly obscure).
(OK: a few details. For ordinary biofuels, electricity generation is a
dead-end; there is some CO2 associated but,
more important, liquid fuels for transportation are a better use, if
the market barriers there are removed.
Municipal waste is a different matter, but the complexity cost right
now of getting it right and preventing abuse exceeds the
benefits of extending things to include it now in this particular new thrust.)
=====
But: after the next elections... will the powers of the Republican
party help or hurt with such a fix?
For that matter, what about the role of Russians in Europe? Will
billionaire friends of Medvedev
in the gas industry try to buy out key EU politicians (as they have at
times in the past, causing huge embarrassment),
or will Putin prove he really means it about being a force for
progress concerned about the fate of the
people of Greece?
energies now on the challenge of trying
to avoid falling into a 1930's-style global economic depression. And
they rightly understand that a few
PR releases on green jobs here and there are not really part of that
economic discussion.
BUT -- energy is a major part of the world economy, and I see a bit
more clearly this morning how new
international action on energy could help.
Some actions related to transportation energy could help a lot, but we
have discussed that before (and of course
we should keep discussing it). This morning,
I have thoughts about the "other half" of that equation, the electricity side.
Could new actions on electricity really be important to the world
economic situation, in a serious way and
on a serious scale? Or, as some highly elevated economists have said,
is it "too small to deserve a place as
part of these large-scale discussions?"
IEA/OECD reported world electricity generation in 2008 to be 20,000
terawatt hours. If electricity
costs about 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) to generate today, that's
$2 trillion per year, certainly larger
than the US government annual deficit. Furthermore, that annual flow
of $2 trillion per year is based on a lot
of previous capital investment, whose benefits are spread over 10 to
50 years or so . (50 year planning horizons
are still reasonably normal in the electric power sector.) To sustain
and enhance that $2 trillion/year flow,
it is quite reasonable to talk about new investments on that scale,
whose economic stimulus and job creation
benefits could be more than enough, in principle, to shake us out of
our deep local minimum in the world
economy.
How do we bring that closer to reality?
First -- please forgive some review of the all-important context. It
is a great thing that G4 or G20 folks are talking about new financial
arrangements
to reduce the chances of runs on banks, wild instabilities in
currencies or dangerous rises in the interest rates we have to pay
as EU, US and China try to work their way out of the debt positions.
But "debt" and "jobs" are equally important here.
To get out of the hole, with minimum debt risk, all three areas need
to "run the numbers" the way some Japanese economists
have done lately. For each source of government debt, X, whether on
the tax side or the spending side, we need to ask
how large the near-term job creation benefit is (while having ways to
prevent excess demand if and when we finally get to full employment).
To avoid depression, we need action on the financial and bank side,
but ALSO action on the "jobs" side, where the real
threat of global depression is rather urgent.
And so, in the EU, where the threat is now most acute, the big picture
question is: how to get more jobs in Greece, Italy and Spain,
WITHOUT throwing more money down the rat hole of the Greek government
and assorted local parasites? How
the BALANCE OUT the necessary cutbacks on one side of the ledger, with
something else to make up for the
job loss which results from those cuts?
At the level of concrete reality, down in the "weeds" where most of us
really live, I have several times suggested an obvious possibility:
shouldn't the upper level EU people (government and investors and
banks in some combinations) go for a really big investment
right now in massive construction of solar farms (billions of dollars
per year worth, to be scaled up as rapidly as possible)
in the sunny areas where solar power can be generated most cheaply? If
done right, this is cheaper than offshore wind
(20 cents per kwh) and it also buys freedom from Russian gas and from
pressure to build new nuclear plants which most Europeans
have agreed are not so acceptable.
But I have worried: are the EU people really intellectually capable of
being able to do something like that?
If they even tried... instead of deploying 13 cents per kwh solar
farms technology, will they do what I have heard
of from Spain, sending tons of money to politically connected people
who end up charging 50 cents per kwh?
In the real world, is there a possible mechanisms for making the badly
needed investment which will not
be killed by the kind of graft and "legal corruption" we see so often
in all the powerful governments of the world?
Thinking about that this morning... I see the germ of a possible way out.
Years ago, I remember when Southern California Edison (SCE) and
Pacific Gas and Electric (PGE) offered
absolute firm purchase contracts to Stirling Energy Systems (SES) and
some other companies to
buy up to something like a gigawatt of electricity at a committed
purchase price, as much as those
folks could deliver. There were other problems which got in the way,
which folks in the real world do need to think about,
but the basic idea here makes a lot of sense.
Could the EU somehow get behind a much more massive commitment to buy
all the solar electricity folks can generate,
up to a VERY large level, at 15 cents per kwh, to stay at 15 cents for
a long time to come? (Details of sunset provisions and
competition are important, but could be worked out.)
Financial people tell me the investment capital tied to a definite
market is MUCH easier to get on a large scale
than traditional VC stuff. And there is plenty of loose cash out there
right now.
The previous two paragraphs would require some thoughtful action by EU
people, and maybe some intellectual guidance here
and there, but it SHOULD be possible for the EU to make those kinds of
market guarantees, and to make sure the cash
is really there from the investment community to respond rationally
to the investment opportunity.
And for once those folks who could actually come in UNDER 15 cents
would have the level of encouragement which is socially rational.
This would help a WHOLE LOT in getting us to under-10-cents renewable solutions.
Of course, 15 cents for wind and water-based power would also be fair,
if it doesn't muck up the details
of how to make the solar be feasible. But no broader than that for
now, for many reasons (mostly obscure).
(OK: a few details. For ordinary biofuels, electricity generation is a
dead-end; there is some CO2 associated but,
more important, liquid fuels for transportation are a better use, if
the market barriers there are removed.
Municipal waste is a different matter, but the complexity cost right
now of getting it right and preventing abuse exceeds the
benefits of extending things to include it now in this particular new thrust.)
=====
But: after the next elections... will the powers of the Republican
party help or hurt with such a fix?
For that matter, what about the role of Russians in Europe? Will
billionaire friends of Medvedev
in the gas industry try to buy out key EU politicians (as they have at
times in the past, causing huge embarrassment),
or will Putin prove he really means it about being a force for
progress concerned about the fate of the
people of Greece?
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
how weird attitudes affect risks of war and depression
It looks to me as if the two big risks of large immediate damage to humanity
within the coming year are --
1 -- risk of big new war in the Middle East (most likely involving Iran, though
Kashmir is still a question)
2 - risk of a 1930's style depression, with all that that would lead to.
(Just a few days ago I heard some worried people talking about
"bildenbergers.")
(Caveat: it may be that other longer-term risks are larger and just as
urgent for action.)
In all of these areas, it is interesting how subliminal messages and
psychology affect
the behavior and rationality of the various actors.
As one small example -- Syria. We in the US generally assume one view,
assumed and propagated by the media:
that Syria is a classic morality play of the advance of democracy,
that we are witnessing the battle between tyranny
(even hereditary monarchy of the worst nouveau kind) and democracy.
People seem to find it hard to even imagine
any other view.
But from Russia, it seems clear they would view it as a rerun of the
Balkans, where they see the US as intervening to supporting
Al Qaida type Sunni extremists aiming to suppress and ultimately kill
Christians, due to the blinding and deluding effects
of relying on mass media such as Fox where the Saudis have a large
share of ownership, and the Saudis have other allies.
Within the Middle East, there are those who have essential contempt
both for the US and for the Russians,
who believe that we are in the penultimate stage of God's plan for a
Third Caliphate, to enlighten the entire world,
where the penultimate stage is to purify Islam by eliminating its
powerful heretics, and where the Americans and the Russians
are basically just semi-sentient pawns in the great struggle between
Sunni and Shia.
Not that we have heard the last of Gog and Magog and of asteroids
coming to earth...
Strange world....
==================
Regarding depression...
Europe is certainly not out of the woods, even after "the euro won the
election in Greece."
The blind spots and the attitude problems all over the world are a
part of the ongoing risk.
For example -- it seems clear that corruption and sloth associated
with the government of Greece
needs to be cut back and "reformed," AND ALSO that new sources of
demand and employment are
needed to make up for the loss of old ones, in order to prevent a
downward spiral. (As well as massive bank
runs being avoided.)
Yet just this week, I heard a very prominent guy say: "Hey, a few
years ago, GERMANY was the economic sick
man of Europe, mainly because of its inability to assimilate East
Germany. The problem got solved BY REFORM.
So we should all support Merkel, who is steadfastly applying to the EU
what worked in Germany."
Interesting blind spot here. With Germany, it was a COMBINATION of
reform (breaking some bad corporate culture
developed in old East Germany) AND heavy investment to create jobs and
support education in East Germany,
relying on a traditional German culture which was not 100% alienated,
which worked. The balance was necessary
then, as it is necessary now.
I also heard someone say: "Create new jobs in Greece , Italy and
Spain? That's absurd. None of those people
are willing or able to work anyway, no matter who the new managers
would be. No one can get any useful work
from those people, even in construction tasks (like assembling solar
dishes from parts made elsewhere, and constructing solar farms)
under supervision. They don't have the education or the genes."
Yet that very evening, I heard people complaining about the US
workforce, and how it has fallen behind
many of these others in education. Can Americans work, even if offered
jobs? Could they ever?
Have Greeks or Italians ever been able to build anything?
Strange world indeed....
========
Underlying all this... I think about the paper I just got published in Neural Networks,
"Neural networks and the experience and cultivation of mind," providing something of a scientific analysis of how it is possible for people to be so crazy, and what it takes to achieve a bit more sanity.
within the coming year are --
1 -- risk of big new war in the Middle East (most likely involving Iran, though
Kashmir is still a question)
2 - risk of a 1930's style depression, with all that that would lead to.
(Just a few days ago I heard some worried people talking about
"bildenbergers.")
(Caveat: it may be that other longer-term risks are larger and just as
urgent for action.)
In all of these areas, it is interesting how subliminal messages and
psychology affect
the behavior and rationality of the various actors.
As one small example -- Syria. We in the US generally assume one view,
assumed and propagated by the media:
that Syria is a classic morality play of the advance of democracy,
that we are witnessing the battle between tyranny
(even hereditary monarchy of the worst nouveau kind) and democracy.
People seem to find it hard to even imagine
any other view.
But from Russia, it seems clear they would view it as a rerun of the
Balkans, where they see the US as intervening to supporting
Al Qaida type Sunni extremists aiming to suppress and ultimately kill
Christians, due to the blinding and deluding effects
of relying on mass media such as Fox where the Saudis have a large
share of ownership, and the Saudis have other allies.
Within the Middle East, there are those who have essential contempt
both for the US and for the Russians,
who believe that we are in the penultimate stage of God's plan for a
Third Caliphate, to enlighten the entire world,
where the penultimate stage is to purify Islam by eliminating its
powerful heretics, and where the Americans and the Russians
are basically just semi-sentient pawns in the great struggle between
Sunni and Shia.
Not that we have heard the last of Gog and Magog and of asteroids
coming to earth...
Strange world....
==================
Regarding depression...
Europe is certainly not out of the woods, even after "the euro won the
election in Greece."
The blind spots and the attitude problems all over the world are a
part of the ongoing risk.
For example -- it seems clear that corruption and sloth associated
with the government of Greece
needs to be cut back and "reformed," AND ALSO that new sources of
demand and employment are
needed to make up for the loss of old ones, in order to prevent a
downward spiral. (As well as massive bank
runs being avoided.)
Yet just this week, I heard a very prominent guy say: "Hey, a few
years ago, GERMANY was the economic sick
man of Europe, mainly because of its inability to assimilate East
Germany. The problem got solved BY REFORM.
So we should all support Merkel, who is steadfastly applying to the EU
what worked in Germany."
Interesting blind spot here. With Germany, it was a COMBINATION of
reform (breaking some bad corporate culture
developed in old East Germany) AND heavy investment to create jobs and
support education in East Germany,
relying on a traditional German culture which was not 100% alienated,
which worked. The balance was necessary
then, as it is necessary now.
I also heard someone say: "Create new jobs in Greece , Italy and
Spain? That's absurd. None of those people
are willing or able to work anyway, no matter who the new managers
would be. No one can get any useful work
from those people, even in construction tasks (like assembling solar
dishes from parts made elsewhere, and constructing solar farms)
under supervision. They don't have the education or the genes."
Yet that very evening, I heard people complaining about the US
workforce, and how it has fallen behind
many of these others in education. Can Americans work, even if offered
jobs? Could they ever?
Have Greeks or Italians ever been able to build anything?
Strange world indeed....
========
Underlying all this... I think about the paper I just got published in Neural Networks,
"Neural networks and the experience and cultivation of mind," providing something of a scientific analysis of how it is possible for people to be so crazy, and what it takes to achieve a bit more sanity.
Friday, May 11, 2012
Could a pact for growth actually avert world depression?
Could a pact for growth actually avert world depression? How?
It was a great relief for me this past week or two to see that Europe is finally displaying some higher-level consciousness of its real urgent needs. The new President of France, Hollande, and the Financial Times (FT) have both talked about the need for a new "pact for growth" to prevent and even reverse the rise of unemployment in Europe, which otherwise seriously threatens a 1930's style depression spreading to the entire world.
The key question: do they have any hope of actually pulling it off? With a very complex systems issue like this, ordinary reactive thinking just won't work. NO ONE can write about all the key issues here while being explicit about ALL the important details, but
I can begin to see more of the glimmerings of how they COULD cut the Gordian knot, if they chose to do so. But there is a whole lot of tunnel vision among the official great experts working on this, and I don;t know what their chances of finding these glimmering for themselves.
There are two especially interesting core principles which could provide a way out:
(1) As FT notes, the EU could start to try to think about the problem of growth in Europe AS IF they already had a United States of Europe, and could use all the best techniques we have used here (which are in need of improvement but have been working out a whole lot better than Greece, Spain, Italy, France, UK and eurozone as a whole...). We have a lot of very substantive prior thought that could be transferred.
I am not proposing starting by actually creating a United States of Europe (though my PhD thesis advisor, Karl Deutsch, would have been delighted about that); rather I am proposing that we/they analyze what could be done, and then try to work out the smoothest way to get the same effect.
(2) Given that EU, the US and the provinces of China all have similar levels of debt problem, we are all limited in how fast we can return to growth, because we need to protect ourselves from the world financial community (us!). It's a classic prisoner's dilemma situation. To get to a Pareto optimum (growth as fast as we could get if we were all one nation, without the bad politics that would mean in practice)... we need something like a "G4 pact," a kind of economic nonaggression treaty, built on a foundation of very close intense and deep discussions of at least US, EU, China and Brazil. Brazil is not in the same debt position, and makes the discusison more complex -- and that's precisely why they need to be there, just as new web pages needed to be tested against different kinds of browsers before going public.
===
I don't have this nailed even at the intellectual level, but some themes seem to emerge...
BOTH for the new G4 pact, AND for the EU, there is a kind of "Greece problem."
Common sense suggests -- the pact should be to cut each other some slack, ESPECIALLY
on interest rates for sovereign debt, BUT ALL TO AN EQUAL EXTENT. The idea is to tune up world demand, not to subsidize governments which do not live beyond their means.
Of course, it is interesting to compare states of the US versus provinces of China in this regard... but let me stay with the big picture for now.
To balance this out, things like the Greek problem (and potential imbalances within the G4, where Brazil acts to some extent as a surrogate or leader for more nations)..
would be dealt with by raising demand, to prevent waste, IN THE AFFECTED region BUT NOT BY THE GOVERNMENT of that region. I think a little of things like the Appalachian
Commission and the Epscor program in the US. These things may be public or private or a mix of both, but they must be transnational kinds of activity which channel demand to areas where there is a certain kind of imbalance, a kind of waste of human or economic resources. Of course, people have talked about development funds for many decades at least, but it seems that maybe a new context could let us re-examine such issues with fresh eyes.
Of course, the idea that such transnational programs might build giant solar farms
in Southern Europe using the new 7 cents per kwh solar thermal technology I happen to know about (thanks to excellent sources of information on technology and on what to believe) still makes sense... if a transnational fund could be set up which is capable
of occasional flashes of competence that way. (The US and China themselves have not reached that stage of competence yet itself... but it's important that we keep trying; a lot is at stake.)
That can apply, in fact, at national, regional, and provincial levels...
and the challenge is how to do it more by reliable types of formulas rather than corrupt stakeholder stuff (the bane of many development funds). Even with NSF's Epscor program, I have often thought about how the present information channels are useful, but actual funding decisions by automatic immediate 50% matching without side criteria
could result in much greater efficiency overall, whatever the apparent levels of overall funding.
But there is still more to be said about risk management and representation systems (or "plays") to better factor risk in this kind of complex world. The discussion above
needs to be integrated somehow with more of that.
============
=========
As for what we have learned WITHIN the US....
1. In a Nash equilibrium, maybe the Tea Party solution would be best, even though it would help us join Europe in approaching a rerun of the 1930's. With a G4 pact, we can avoid that rerun, if we have the will to do so. and are rational enough to make full use of the breathing space and slack that buys us. (But as we waste the slack we get from fracking, and use it just to dig ourselves into a deeper hole, there is reason to worry.)
One of the European commentators recently said: "Hey, we agreed with Hollande that we will do as much as we can for growth, within the limits of the austerity agreemnet which even he says he will uphold. Hey, OK, he will get all the empty sound bites he needs, but let's be real. How can you get growth in the face of austerity?"
But in fact, we got very deep into that here a year or two ago. Obama may have only a 50% grade or so on that kind of sophisticated juggling act... but 50% is ever so much more than anyone else. (I suppose China is also running at about 50% efficiency, not because they understand this juggling act, but because of the inertia of a highly efficient starting point.) ONE PART of Japan's economic recovery plan in 2009 was
much more efficient... but there were other parts, and there has been an earthquake...
One key point... which the old school idiots need to really understand... it is simply not true that X dollars in government deficit in one sector yields the same stimulus as X dollars in another sector. Simply by shifting commitments from one sector to another, one can substantially increase stimulus without increasing government dollar commitment. Merkel's own cash for clunkers program is a great example of this, yielding
about three times the stimulus per dollar as normal government spending, which in turn does about twice what the more dubious tax breaks would provide, which the "job creators" (i.e. PAC fat cats) have been pushing for. Japan's "three pillars of eco..."
are like Merkel's cash for clunkers that way. An EU-wide program based on those three pillars (e.g. the stimulative parts of the 18-page bill posted at www.werbos.com/oil.htm) could go a very long way that way, as would relative incentives
for utility solar farms. And of course to talk about growth without supporting education would be a gross nonsequitur.
But... in a world of legal corruption... I often think about Syn Rand, where the DC (and Brussels) lobbyists who represent certain big companies may be very effectively digging their own graves, as well as ours.
Would Romney be any better than Obama in resisting those negative forces threatening to pull us apart, or would he a gleeful uninhibited gateway to expanded corporate welfare for the PACmen? Will he streamline the financial system, or will he just give the federal reserve as a kind of election spoils to a drunken arsonist from his base? His choice of VP will tell us a lot. If he picks any of the Washington insiders which the press has been talking about, he could be a threat to our very existence, at this delicate time. (Of course the woman they fired from HP would not be any better.) But
there is hope...
=====================
======================
As I post this, two more thoughts come to mind:
1. For US or EU:
Why not "incentive pay for the top 1%?"
Obama has rightly argued that it would be better to sacrifice new optional tax breaks introduced by Bush, rather than sacrifice public education, which Thomas Jefferson rightly promoted as a sacred bedrock of our nation. The tax breaks for the rich do not help aggregate demand so much as most other ways of using the money. But if we DO
ever get out of high unemployment and deep debt, then we will be able to afford it again.
So instead of fighting over this stuff every year, to adapt to changing conditions..why not make it into a FORMULA? After all, we have CPI formulas in the law.
Why not have a formula which adjusts the tax rates for the rich, as function of the basic economic strength of the nation (rates of employment, growth and debt)?
We could use one more automatic stabilizer...
2. As part of this, of course, using housing as a kind of yoyo regulator ..
may not be the best stabilizer...
===========
================
Byeond that,
It was a great relief for me this past week or two to see that Europe is finally displaying some higher-level consciousness of its real urgent needs. The new President of France, Hollande, and the Financial Times (FT) have both talked about the need for a new "pact for growth" to prevent and even reverse the rise of unemployment in Europe, which otherwise seriously threatens a 1930's style depression spreading to the entire world.
The key question: do they have any hope of actually pulling it off? With a very complex systems issue like this, ordinary reactive thinking just won't work. NO ONE can write about all the key issues here while being explicit about ALL the important details, but
I can begin to see more of the glimmerings of how they COULD cut the Gordian knot, if they chose to do so. But there is a whole lot of tunnel vision among the official great experts working on this, and I don;t know what their chances of finding these glimmering for themselves.
There are two especially interesting core principles which could provide a way out:
(1) As FT notes, the EU could start to try to think about the problem of growth in Europe AS IF they already had a United States of Europe, and could use all the best techniques we have used here (which are in need of improvement but have been working out a whole lot better than Greece, Spain, Italy, France, UK and eurozone as a whole...). We have a lot of very substantive prior thought that could be transferred.
I am not proposing starting by actually creating a United States of Europe (though my PhD thesis advisor, Karl Deutsch, would have been delighted about that); rather I am proposing that we/they analyze what could be done, and then try to work out the smoothest way to get the same effect.
(2) Given that EU, the US and the provinces of China all have similar levels of debt problem, we are all limited in how fast we can return to growth, because we need to protect ourselves from the world financial community (us!). It's a classic prisoner's dilemma situation. To get to a Pareto optimum (growth as fast as we could get if we were all one nation, without the bad politics that would mean in practice)... we need something like a "G4 pact," a kind of economic nonaggression treaty, built on a foundation of very close intense and deep discussions of at least US, EU, China and Brazil. Brazil is not in the same debt position, and makes the discusison more complex -- and that's precisely why they need to be there, just as new web pages needed to be tested against different kinds of browsers before going public.
===
I don't have this nailed even at the intellectual level, but some themes seem to emerge...
BOTH for the new G4 pact, AND for the EU, there is a kind of "Greece problem."
Common sense suggests -- the pact should be to cut each other some slack, ESPECIALLY
on interest rates for sovereign debt, BUT ALL TO AN EQUAL EXTENT. The idea is to tune up world demand, not to subsidize governments which do not live beyond their means.
Of course, it is interesting to compare states of the US versus provinces of China in this regard... but let me stay with the big picture for now.
To balance this out, things like the Greek problem (and potential imbalances within the G4, where Brazil acts to some extent as a surrogate or leader for more nations)..
would be dealt with by raising demand, to prevent waste, IN THE AFFECTED region BUT NOT BY THE GOVERNMENT of that region. I think a little of things like the Appalachian
Commission and the Epscor program in the US. These things may be public or private or a mix of both, but they must be transnational kinds of activity which channel demand to areas where there is a certain kind of imbalance, a kind of waste of human or economic resources. Of course, people have talked about development funds for many decades at least, but it seems that maybe a new context could let us re-examine such issues with fresh eyes.
Of course, the idea that such transnational programs might build giant solar farms
in Southern Europe using the new 7 cents per kwh solar thermal technology I happen to know about (thanks to excellent sources of information on technology and on what to believe) still makes sense... if a transnational fund could be set up which is capable
of occasional flashes of competence that way. (The US and China themselves have not reached that stage of competence yet itself... but it's important that we keep trying; a lot is at stake.)
That can apply, in fact, at national, regional, and provincial levels...
and the challenge is how to do it more by reliable types of formulas rather than corrupt stakeholder stuff (the bane of many development funds). Even with NSF's Epscor program, I have often thought about how the present information channels are useful, but actual funding decisions by automatic immediate 50% matching without side criteria
could result in much greater efficiency overall, whatever the apparent levels of overall funding.
But there is still more to be said about risk management and representation systems (or "plays") to better factor risk in this kind of complex world. The discussion above
needs to be integrated somehow with more of that.
============
=========
As for what we have learned WITHIN the US....
1. In a Nash equilibrium, maybe the Tea Party solution would be best, even though it would help us join Europe in approaching a rerun of the 1930's. With a G4 pact, we can avoid that rerun, if we have the will to do so. and are rational enough to make full use of the breathing space and slack that buys us. (But as we waste the slack we get from fracking, and use it just to dig ourselves into a deeper hole, there is reason to worry.)
One of the European commentators recently said: "Hey, we agreed with Hollande that we will do as much as we can for growth, within the limits of the austerity agreemnet which even he says he will uphold. Hey, OK, he will get all the empty sound bites he needs, but let's be real. How can you get growth in the face of austerity?"
But in fact, we got very deep into that here a year or two ago. Obama may have only a 50% grade or so on that kind of sophisticated juggling act... but 50% is ever so much more than anyone else. (I suppose China is also running at about 50% efficiency, not because they understand this juggling act, but because of the inertia of a highly efficient starting point.) ONE PART of Japan's economic recovery plan in 2009 was
much more efficient... but there were other parts, and there has been an earthquake...
One key point... which the old school idiots need to really understand... it is simply not true that X dollars in government deficit in one sector yields the same stimulus as X dollars in another sector. Simply by shifting commitments from one sector to another, one can substantially increase stimulus without increasing government dollar commitment. Merkel's own cash for clunkers program is a great example of this, yielding
about three times the stimulus per dollar as normal government spending, which in turn does about twice what the more dubious tax breaks would provide, which the "job creators" (i.e. PAC fat cats) have been pushing for. Japan's "three pillars of eco..."
are like Merkel's cash for clunkers that way. An EU-wide program based on those three pillars (e.g. the stimulative parts of the 18-page bill posted at www.werbos.com/oil.htm) could go a very long way that way, as would relative incentives
for utility solar farms. And of course to talk about growth without supporting education would be a gross nonsequitur.
But... in a world of legal corruption... I often think about Syn Rand, where the DC (and Brussels) lobbyists who represent certain big companies may be very effectively digging their own graves, as well as ours.
Would Romney be any better than Obama in resisting those negative forces threatening to pull us apart, or would he a gleeful uninhibited gateway to expanded corporate welfare for the PACmen? Will he streamline the financial system, or will he just give the federal reserve as a kind of election spoils to a drunken arsonist from his base? His choice of VP will tell us a lot. If he picks any of the Washington insiders which the press has been talking about, he could be a threat to our very existence, at this delicate time. (Of course the woman they fired from HP would not be any better.) But
there is hope...
=====================
======================
As I post this, two more thoughts come to mind:
1. For US or EU:
Why not "incentive pay for the top 1%?"
Obama has rightly argued that it would be better to sacrifice new optional tax breaks introduced by Bush, rather than sacrifice public education, which Thomas Jefferson rightly promoted as a sacred bedrock of our nation. The tax breaks for the rich do not help aggregate demand so much as most other ways of using the money. But if we DO
ever get out of high unemployment and deep debt, then we will be able to afford it again.
So instead of fighting over this stuff every year, to adapt to changing conditions..why not make it into a FORMULA? After all, we have CPI formulas in the law.
Why not have a formula which adjusts the tax rates for the rich, as function of the basic economic strength of the nation (rates of employment, growth and debt)?
We could use one more automatic stabilizer...
2. As part of this, of course, using housing as a kind of yoyo regulator ..
may not be the best stabilizer...
===========
================
Byeond that,
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Could the Navy help warn us of possible human extinction?
Sent to a list which include some folks high up in making policy for the military:
=======================================
Since some of you have good contacts with the Navy --
A long-term friend of mine, deeply concerned about global climate change,
has suggested that the Navy might have a role to play in reducing our woeful ignorance
about ocean phenomena which might threaten our lives more seriously than warming or ocean acidification do.
I would be interested in your thoughts about how one should follow up.
By way of introduction -- Rod was formerly one of the most important partners in Arthur Anderson,
in the good part of the company, training people in how to use systems thinking and systems methods
in managing Fortune 500 companies, and also providing these companies with in-depth unbiased information about climate change.
Rod's current idea, at the top of the trail below, builds on previous discussion. In essence,
the email trail makes sense if you read from bottom to top. (From item 1, to 2, to 3, to 4).
Best regards,
Paul
4 ==================================================
From: Rod
To: 'Paul Werbos'
Paul,
When I was focusing on the NAO THC issue based largely on work out of the
Potsdam Institute George Klir referred to me a former systems science PhD
student of his who is an expert on thermohaline. At that time he worked at
the Naval Warfare Research Center and no doubt they have an interest in
hiding (or finding) submarines within thermohaline layers.
Maybe it is time to turn "swords into plowshares".
Any ideas?
Rod
3 ======================================
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul
Hi, Rod!
On Apr 30, 2012, at 6:23 PM, Rod wrote:
Paul,
Here is the link to the Nature abstract:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n5/full/ngeo1452.html
I do not enjoy a subscription at the moment but perhaps your
organization does. There are some informative charts in the abstract.
When I go to the web site, I see all three pages, which seems to have
everything.
To be sure, I clicked on "pdf," and then downloaded the article. But It was
still just the same three pages.
What troubles me about this finding is the vastness of the
(diminishing) Arctic Sea ice. I remember reading (maybe Arctic Dreams
by Barry Lopez) years ago that there are many microorganisms living
under the sea ice that are not normally living in the open sea (archaea?).
It's amazing how little science really understands even now about some of
the basics of life on earth.
When I started this job, circa 1990, I remember a guy from Wood's Hole who
reported a success story with neural networks:
"Thanks to neural networks, we were able to detect two new types of microbe
in the ocean this year. By the way, these two types account for about 90% of
the biomass of the ocean." Quite a zinger.
He explained a bit more (about how hard it had been to do this kind of
study), but still I wondered.
In 2009, when working on climate stuff, I read up a bit more on archaea.
People had recently believed they were relatively rare, mainly in deep open
trenches and such. "Extremophiles." But it seems they may be about half of
the biomass of the ordinary ocean, in modern up-to-date work (though of
course there is a lot of textbook lag, not as bad as what we have in my
field, but still noticeable.) And maybe they are 90% of the biomass below the sea bed, where the
amount of biomass is far greater than people used to think. These are
general impressions from the current literature, but are of course not a
mature equilibrium of analysis. (Others would know more .. but many know less
who depend on older information.)
Archaea as a group are amazingly adaptable. And what they do to us depends a
lot on what we do to them. They certainly were implicated in all the
extinctions (except perhaps the one based on a comet) in Ward's history of
the earth. They are the main source of H2S and of methane.
For mass extinction purposes, both via methane or via H2S (direct or via
ozone depletion), there are two key drivers: (1) how much do the archaea
produce; and
(2) how much escapes to the atmosphere. Low levels of oxygen and nutrients
in the water seem to be the main drivers of (1), and those in turn are
heavily influenced by ocean currents and nutrient runoff from the land.
It does worry me that we don't seem to have a basic handle on the basics of
where we might be going in the fluxes of this system.
As Ward says, the study of thermohaline currents seems to be relatively
static, from what I have seen, without the kind of generalization and data
which would give us early warning of possible disasters.
The political advocacy types seem to view Ward as "just another footnote to
support our concern about ocean acidification," which may be worse in its
way than the fundamentalist climate deniers who at least know that they are
shutting their eyes and putting their heads in the sand.
Best of luck... to us all... we need it...
Paul
It is important to remember that as recently as the 16th century (and
maybe
later) sea ice completely surrounded Iceland, and "Eskimos" were
spotted in kayaks in Scotland. So the total sea ice cover diminished
greatly from its 16th century peak, and is diminishing greatly again now.
In any event I can only hope the methane studies continue to be funded
as this may be very high on the list of planetary challenges.
Rod
2 ==================================================================
From: Paul
Subject: Re: NASA finds new potential source of CH4
Thanks, Rod!
I literally felt a chill up my spine as I read your email, and clicked
on the link.
My immediate thought as I read what you said: "If it's from open ocean
and not from permafrost or clathrates... that leaves just one
possibility..."
And on a very quick glance the story says what seems obvious: what
else could it be but living things in the ocean?
Of course, I certainly don't know at this point... but the words which
popped into my mind immediately were:
methanogen archaea.
If we are already seeing a big expansion of archaea ... that's the key
final stage leading to the death-by-H2S and
death-by-renewed-ozone-depletion scenarios.
But certainly it is 'way premature to say we know what is going on.
For example, I didn't see a time-series in this story.
But if the kind of mechanisms that Kemp and Ward talk about are
actually getting started in the Arctic Ocean..
I guess I shouldn't have just limited the discussion to the North
Atlantic and North Pacific as I did in my posting to Jerry.
(Also, I hope that the obvious issue with the Black Sea is not large
enough to be relevant to the ozone issue.) Yet Ward's book suggests
that the North Atlantic by itself was already enough to explain the
massive extinctions at the end of the eocene.
Who knows? I guess we really ought to keep our eyes open here....
Best regards,
Paul
1 =================================
On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Rod wrote:
Data collection over open water of the Arctic Ocean shows elevated
levels of
CH4 that NASA believes may be from the ocean water and not from
melting permafrost or methane clathrate deposits on the sea floor.
This source of
CH4 could potentially be large and bears further study.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20120422.html
=======================================
Since some of you have good contacts with the Navy --
A long-term friend of mine, deeply concerned about global climate change,
has suggested that the Navy might have a role to play in reducing our woeful ignorance
about ocean phenomena which might threaten our lives more seriously than warming or ocean acidification do.
I would be interested in your thoughts about how one should follow up.
By way of introduction -- Rod was formerly one of the most important partners in Arthur Anderson,
in the good part of the company, training people in how to use systems thinking and systems methods
in managing Fortune 500 companies, and also providing these companies with in-depth unbiased information about climate change.
Rod's current idea, at the top of the trail below, builds on previous discussion. In essence,
the email trail makes sense if you read from bottom to top. (From item 1, to 2, to 3, to 4).
Best regards,
Paul
4 ==================================================
From: Rod
To: 'Paul Werbos'
Paul,
When I was focusing on the NAO THC issue based largely on work out of the
Potsdam Institute George Klir referred to me a former systems science PhD
student of his who is an expert on thermohaline. At that time he worked at
the Naval Warfare Research Center and no doubt they have an interest in
hiding (or finding) submarines within thermohaline layers.
Maybe it is time to turn "swords into plowshares".
Any ideas?
Rod
3 ======================================
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul
Hi, Rod!
On Apr 30, 2012, at 6:23 PM, Rod wrote:
Paul,
Here is the link to the Nature abstract:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n5/full/ngeo1452.html
I do not enjoy a subscription at the moment but perhaps your
organization does. There are some informative charts in the abstract.
When I go to the web site, I see all three pages, which seems to have
everything.
To be sure, I clicked on "pdf," and then downloaded the article. But It was
still just the same three pages.
What troubles me about this finding is the vastness of the
(diminishing) Arctic Sea ice. I remember reading (maybe Arctic Dreams
by Barry Lopez) years ago that there are many microorganisms living
under the sea ice that are not normally living in the open sea (archaea?).
It's amazing how little science really understands even now about some of
the basics of life on earth.
When I started this job, circa 1990, I remember a guy from Wood's Hole who
reported a success story with neural networks:
"Thanks to neural networks, we were able to detect two new types of microbe
in the ocean this year. By the way, these two types account for about 90% of
the biomass of the ocean." Quite a zinger.
He explained a bit more (about how hard it had been to do this kind of
study), but still I wondered.
In 2009, when working on climate stuff, I read up a bit more on archaea.
People had recently believed they were relatively rare, mainly in deep open
trenches and such. "Extremophiles." But it seems they may be about half of
the biomass of the ordinary ocean, in modern up-to-date work (though of
course there is a lot of textbook lag, not as bad as what we have in my
field, but still noticeable.) And maybe they are 90% of the biomass below the sea bed, where the
amount of biomass is far greater than people used to think. These are
general impressions from the current literature, but are of course not a
mature equilibrium of analysis. (Others would know more .. but many know less
who depend on older information.)
Archaea as a group are amazingly adaptable. And what they do to us depends a
lot on what we do to them. They certainly were implicated in all the
extinctions (except perhaps the one based on a comet) in Ward's history of
the earth. They are the main source of H2S and of methane.
For mass extinction purposes, both via methane or via H2S (direct or via
ozone depletion), there are two key drivers: (1) how much do the archaea
produce; and
(2) how much escapes to the atmosphere. Low levels of oxygen and nutrients
in the water seem to be the main drivers of (1), and those in turn are
heavily influenced by ocean currents and nutrient runoff from the land.
It does worry me that we don't seem to have a basic handle on the basics of
where we might be going in the fluxes of this system.
As Ward says, the study of thermohaline currents seems to be relatively
static, from what I have seen, without the kind of generalization and data
which would give us early warning of possible disasters.
The political advocacy types seem to view Ward as "just another footnote to
support our concern about ocean acidification," which may be worse in its
way than the fundamentalist climate deniers who at least know that they are
shutting their eyes and putting their heads in the sand.
Best of luck... to us all... we need it...
Paul
It is important to remember that as recently as the 16th century (and
maybe
later) sea ice completely surrounded Iceland, and "Eskimos" were
spotted in kayaks in Scotland. So the total sea ice cover diminished
greatly from its 16th century peak, and is diminishing greatly again now.
In any event I can only hope the methane studies continue to be funded
as this may be very high on the list of planetary challenges.
Rod
2 ==================================================================
From: Paul
Subject: Re: NASA finds new potential source of CH4
Thanks, Rod!
I literally felt a chill up my spine as I read your email, and clicked
on the link.
My immediate thought as I read what you said: "If it's from open ocean
and not from permafrost or clathrates... that leaves just one
possibility..."
And on a very quick glance the story says what seems obvious: what
else could it be but living things in the ocean?
Of course, I certainly don't know at this point... but the words which
popped into my mind immediately were:
methanogen archaea.
If we are already seeing a big expansion of archaea ... that's the key
final stage leading to the death-by-H2S and
death-by-renewed-ozone-depletion scenarios.
But certainly it is 'way premature to say we know what is going on.
For example, I didn't see a time-series in this story.
But if the kind of mechanisms that Kemp and Ward talk about are
actually getting started in the Arctic Ocean..
I guess I shouldn't have just limited the discussion to the North
Atlantic and North Pacific as I did in my posting to Jerry.
(Also, I hope that the obvious issue with the Black Sea is not large
enough to be relevant to the ozone issue.) Yet Ward's book suggests
that the North Atlantic by itself was already enough to explain the
massive extinctions at the end of the eocene.
Who knows? I guess we really ought to keep our eyes open here....
Best regards,
Paul
1 =================================
On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 10:37 PM, Rod wrote:
Data collection over open water of the Arctic Ocean shows elevated
levels of
CH4 that NASA believes may be from the ocean water and not from
melting permafrost or methane clathrate deposits on the sea floor.
This source of
CH4 could potentially be large and bears further study.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20120422.html
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