What IF the end times really might be coming?

I have put a lot of serious intellectual effort into two important questions: What is the probability that all of the human species will go extinct "soon" (within a few millennia anyway), and what can we do to reduce that probability? There is also an active discussion group on that subject, involving  very prominent thinkers, through the Lifeboat Foundation, and a new center at Oxford, on this subjevct.

"Believe it or not, nuclear bombs can still kill people. Death is not fashionable, but somehow fashion doesn't seem to stop those kinds of realities." On my short list of things that could "pull the final trigger" are misuse of nuclear technology, climate change (H2S, not warming as such), artificial intelligence, and "clone armies" resulting form misuse of deep brain stimulation. When I get deep into the realities of all four, and more, I find myself asking more and more: "WHAT IF we really can't juggle fast enough to stop all four of these threats and more?" Indeed, for many years now, I have had to remind myself of problems which seemed impossible which I was eventually able to solve, of the rational reasons for never giving up, and so on.

But what if we don't make it, in the end? What then? What matters?

If we as humans are just the obvious physical bodies and DNA we see every day (at least if we get our DNA tested), then the utility function in that scenario is a flat zero. Nothing really matters at that point.

But... if the concept of "soul" has any meaning at all .. we rightly ask.. how does that affect our rational choices?

Of course, there is a lot of empty bullshit being said about the soul, driven by people believing whatever makes them feel good, or gratifies their ego, or seems to offer them a vehicle for controlling other people (or at least avoid being ejected from a group). Myself, I start from a lifetime of trying to questoin and probe and extend what we really know; I have a new paper in press, in Russian and English, which will be open access... but for now I post it as www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf.
(It is forthcoming in the same Russian IFNA journal which appears in some of the citations.)

In essence... we on earth are all part of the same "noosphere. Our souls are all basically just parts of that entity. So if we loose the earth, it's not just bodies we lose, but souls too, for the most part.
(The Russian mystic Gurdjieff wrote a lot of strange things, to try to  shake people up, but he seemed to have some common sense awareness of limits which apply to souls, and not just bodies. )
So is it still just zero? If we don't find a way to stop the maniacs in process of trying to kill us all,
is that simply the total end of the game so far as we are concerned?

Maybe, maybe not.

I recently posted something about  "is your soul like a piece of paper"? My present, crude impression  is that the "harvest of souls" which would result in the event of extinction is pretty similar to what I was hinting at there. It's basically a matter of valuing different pieces of information, as one would do when moving to a new office... which is done at times anyway under normal turnover in an existing office.

Since Jesus also talks about "harvest of souls," and many people seem to be pushing us there.. I decided to watch "Jupiet Rising" the other day, because the trailer used the word "harvest" and
had a few other curious associations. I didn't go in search of a New Religion, but in search of a bit of mental stimulation.

Well, kit was provocative enough for me... but it also exposed pretty clearly how people's thinking on earth about such subjects tends to be screwed up. Yes, the earth -- including the entire noosphere -- is really tiny and immature even compared to just our own galaxy in our own time track, and yes it matters. But no, it is really pretty silly to imagine earth could be farm for carbon molecules or for vampire-like manna. That age old confusion between conserved physical energy and Freud-like "psychic energy" (either mundane or esoteric) screws people up again, in a serious way. Screwed up ideas can kill people, and kill their neighbors too. It would be more accurate to think in terms of INFORMATION value, or to think in terms of life... life as in family and kinship relations. On earth, we do not see people raising their children for purposes of food, and there is no reason to imagine that the galaxy is less evolved than species on the earth. It does not make apriori dynamical systems sense, and it does not make empirical sense either (for folks who have any data).

And so, if humans do engineer end times... yes, some spiritual existence may continue for some... but not for those who achieve nothingness (why???) and those who hide in caves both of body and of mind, but for those who continue to connect with humanity and the rest of the noosphere even through difficult times, trying to save physically but also to connect at other levels as well.

It is very sad that Koch's new committee now looks like a serious threat to a good harvest here, just as much as the Moslem Brotherhood (a particular growth, as Moslem as Cheney is Christian). In both cases, the problem is that they are pushing towards total totalitarian control, suppressing the natural real freedom for real humans which is a key prerequisite for spiritual growth (and salveagable information.). (Hint: as I digitize, I simply toss and do not digitize duplicate copies.) To get an illusion of control, Koch has built a coalition of those willing to exclude feedback..
and has apparently sold out to the :clone army" groups in his coalition, who slaver at the mouth about the big new money which could come from the new electronic versions of cocaine and heroin,
well suited to turning humans into controllable puppets on a string... they haven't exactly sold their souls to the devil, in hopes of getting their father's favor... but... it has the same effect.
There may still be hope, but it is not concrete and clear to me. And yes, they are more in charge now than Obama is.... but let me not get off course.

where is mind and where is the future

(First posted at Lifeboat Foundation.)

We have had a lot of offhand discussion about building minds and understanding the future here. But all of that rests on a foundation of assumptions about what the mind and the future actually are. This past month..., well, it is possible to surprise even an old guy with some startling new wrinkles -- if we don't get lost in the foggy world of empty DC-style pedigrees and hermeneutics. 

Long ago, folks like Aristotle told us that "mind" or consciousness as we know it is basically just a matter of "form," of patterns of organization defined over "substance" or hardware. Some of you associate that with Dan Dennett, who has pushed the idea that mind equals brain equals patterns of atoms in the brain. Dennett's choice of words was unfortunate at times, but the basic idea that mind is a matter of patterns defined over a physical substrate still makes sense. When real life experience tells us that our minds don't follow the mundane version of "what you see is what you get," some folks would choose to go nuts, while others would recognize that "substance" is not limited to atoms and that we can still try to understand natural law even when it gets weird.

OK, that's past. We take it for granted.

What I have begun to appreciate for the past few months is that this is not the true picture. And yes, this has something to do with my re-examining of quantum mechanics. Consciousness, in a quantum mechanical universe, does not really fit the Aristotelian picture. Perhaps Plato will have the last laugh here.

Many of you know about the "multiverse," a concept due to Everett and Wheeler, ably carried on by David Deutsch of Oxford (a bit less ably by Bohm and Hiley). In their version of quantum field theory, the cosmos is made up of an infinite continuum of the kinds of object we call "universes", all existing in parallel. In this view... when we ask what the future will be... we should remember that ALL possibilities will actually occur, in reality, with varying probability strength.

Everett tried to prove that this picture LEADS TO the usual Copenhagen picture of measurement, of "the collapse of the wave function," but he did not quite succeed in proving this -- because it isn't true! The work of David Deutsch is the real foundation of quantum computing as it is now known to science. Quantum computing is also necessary to building the most powerful type of mind, whether "natural" or 'artificial," possible in this cosmos.

But I never really believed in the Everett picture. It seems unnecessarily complicated, and it entails some really strange kludges, like assuming an infinite number of space dimensions but still only one time dimension. There are other ways to go.  As a proper follower of Occam's Razor, I have tried hard to get back to Einstein's prohgram, back to reality, back to understanding just how much we could predict and explain by assuming just three space dimensions and one time dimension, governed by nonlinear partial differential equations. I have sought a "theory of everything' which could be expressed in a single equation, a "Lagrangian,' and I even have a specific candidate Lagrangian in my notes.

But... well... those nonlinear PDE can do a lot more than even I used to imagine.

Even a universe governed by nonlinear PDE can do things which are very strange, in a way which changes the proper assumptions about mind and the future themselves.

I have two new papers coming out this month, one in the International Journal on Bifurcation and Chaos, and one in a Russian mathematics journal, giving different aspects of this, as well as a new experiment which really should be reporting out in a couple of weeks (delayed due to byproducts of the ongoing reorganization of the US government).

The IJBC paper discusses (among other things) three theories of physics -- Feynmann path (the most orthodox of orthodox in quantum theory today),

a new stochastic path formulation (which I call stochastic realism), and -- briefly -- the PDE possibility which is mathematically just a limiting case of stochastic path.

And yes, the latter two are abject heresy this week -- except that new experiments may say otherwise. 

I have studied what stochastic realism really predicts in detail for experiments involving two or three entangled photons... versus the usual old Copenhagen version of quantum mechanics... and this has led me to a deeper understanding 

of Feynmann path as well.

In essence, stochastic path and Feynmann path both appear to say that reality is just 3+1 dimensional, not at all like the multiverse theory. One future, and one future only. We would picture our minds as patterns over the fields in three-dimensional space.

But no, not so.

Both Feynmann path and stochastic realism are grounded in something I would call "scenarios" rather than "paths". (Feynmann used the term "path" \when he started out, thinking of a small number of point particles, but folks like Schwinger pushed towards thinking of functions of space-time.) You can think of a scenario X as a set of possible values for all of the fields of physics, over all points in space and time.  In a way, all of Feynmann physics can be summarized in the model

psi(X) = (1/Z) product {space x,time t} e**(iL(x,t,X)),

where psi is the probability amplitude of scenario X, where L is called "the Lagrangian function," and where Z is just a real number chosen to make the resulting probabilities add up to one.  In stochastic realism, I just assume:

pr(X)=(1/Z) product {x,t} e**(L(x,t,X)) -- just like ordinary Markov Random Fields,

used in AI for decades. (I think Laveen Kanal started that.) MRF are not new, but

what's new is the proof that we can explain all the known two-photon experiments this way, WITHOUT assuming any "collapse of the waver functoi\\ion" -- as in some papers I have at arxiv.org. With three photons, we can test for stochastic realism versus the old Copenhagen stuff.

What really hit me this path month... is the realization that

MIND IS ATTACHED TO SCENARIOS, NOT TO REALITY ITSELF.

What's more, even the "conservative" Einstein view, as the limiting case of stochastic realism, actually implies all the same weirdness as full stochastic realism and Feynmann! In all these systems, consciousness or mind is attached to "scenarios,' and "our" future is just a matter of other possible scenarios.

A bit like Pogo: I finally found reality, but it's not us. Mind as we know it 

is a matter of forms and organization of SCENARIOS... almost like those

science fiction novels where lots of simulations are going on in parallel.

And so... the complexity of an entire multiverse seems to be  compressed into

a single 3+1-D continuum, in all three types of model... so in a sense, David Deutsch gets the last laugh. I think of this as the "Jack in the box" universe,

mathematically "simple," but, due to the incredible power of Lagrangian variational mathematics...   an emergent effect just like a multiverse! Time tracks and all..

not for reality itself, but for shadows like us. (I suppose Zelazny might feel a bit vindicated.) EVEN for the Einstein-type universe! 

And yes, there are operational consequences of many kinds, including consequences for the design of more powerful computing systems...

but some of the consequences I am just now beginning to assimilate.

It's really amazing how rich the emergent behavior can be of one Lagrangian one could write out in half a page...

Best of luck,

  Paul

(As of now, no longer an employee of the US government.)

P.S. Could it be that NONE of these three theories -- Feynmann path, stochastic realism or PDE -- is true? Certainly. But the stochastic path and PDE theories are the simplest one could hope to devise, consistent with the two-photon and three-photon experiments. If the true 'law of everything" is different, that probably means that there are ADDITIONAL complications -- but all of THIS weirdness is pretty much unavoidable. I really wasn't planning to try to vindicate Plato this year... but.. some things need to be faced up to.

Is your soul like a piece of paper?

Is your soul like a piece of paper?

Many mystics of the old school say that your personal soul is like an individual cell in a larger body. It has its own existence and is real, but is not really meaningful except as part of that larger body. The larger body we humans are part of is recently called “the noosphere”, but was earlier called “nous” and other things; it is similar to what some people recently call “Gaia” (as in the Gaia hypothesis) or “the morphogenetic field.” There are other words. In addition to cells, the noosphere also has some matrix, as does a human body. The entire noosphere of earth is just a tiny dot in a much larger cosmos, but we make a grave mistake if we underestimate how big the noosphere is compared to each of us as individual people.

That’s a much better metaphor most times than the one I will give you today. Today I ask: How is your individual soul like a piece of paper?

For the past month, my top job here has been to sort pieces of paper. Because I am retiring from NSF, I need to dispose of all the paper in files in my office – and likewise files at home, to make more room for files from the office. Part of the problem is that Adobe Acrobat works right at NSF, where lots of people use complicated firewalls to keep the beast under control; at home, I bought it, but it never worked well enough to use hardly ever.

And so, for each piece of paper, I had to make a judgment:

1. Do I simply throw it away – which is like tossing it into the fire. (OK, I use a recycle bin, but

This is like what the Book of Esdras says happens to the souls of the unworthy. They are burned, not as torture,

But as a simple quick elimination of chaff. Imams say that humans should never burn humans, but who says that Allah cannot ever clean his house? Who says that human bodies and computer systems can get away without garbage collection systems? Actually, brain scientists know that when humans reach two years of age, there is a huge cleanup of brain cells by the developing brain.)

2. Do I digitize it and THEN throw it away? (This reminds me a lot of a thing called “the causal plane” by various schools of mystics who spend a lot of effort doing what people call “astral; travel” or “Out of body experience.” Those words are a bit misleading , but in my view the experience is quite real in its own way; I have gone to see for myself.  The metaphor is that “the causal plane” is like a garden of Greek statues, a place where initially there seems to be no life or activity but where you can “touch” a statue to animate it. I suppose there is also some analogy to what people call “the Akashic records,” where passive memories are available – but only for those who know how to activate them. So this week I get to assign many pieces of paper to the digital “Akashic records” on our computer systems.)

3. Do I put them in the most privileged position – where I digitize them AND put them into an active file, either at home or to be moved to home within the week now?

Of course, as I do this, and face a heavy deadline, I put some pieces of paper into drawers at home where I haven’t done that sorting in time. Also – because I have limited time and throughput, I try to handle pieces of paper in GROUPS as much as I can; I scan or toss entire documents, made of pieces of paper stapled together, or even bound. Books are a different category; because I don’t plan to scan any but a few of those, I will wait and either relocate, donate or toss.

Most religions of the world say that all personal souls are kept active and relocated – some to better places than others. But of course, human vanity easily explains why the power-seekers who put heavy spins on large organized religions say what people want to hear. And the normal human level of neurotic, not-yet-disciplined thinking explains why the egos of many religious leaders encourage them to assume what they want to assume. The opposite extreme, of saying we have no souls at all, is a natural reaction to such neuroses – but in my view is based on insufficient data and a lack of personal effort to go out and really see and feel what is there. Neither Faith nor Doubt are sufficient in themselves to take one to real truth; it requires effort to increase real understanding, and patience as we admit there are bigger things than us out there.

But in fact – there are garbage collectors out there, and those who get bound together in books like the Faith of the Mass Murderer may well be the first to get into the recycle bin.

OK – an interesting metaphor.

But I was thinking more about a different metaphor two weeks ago, more about my own personal situation. I am grateful in many ways for the job I am now leaving, and for the way that NSF was at its peak.

When I was in graduate school, my father worried that I was going to become a “perpetual student.” (I have digitized a lot of what he wrote this month, including things I never saw before, like a precise accounting of how much money I cost him through the years.) He was well to worry – since my job at NSF was in many ways like a perpetual graduate school, in which I learned exactly what you would from 8 to 10 PhD. My review panels were like seminars – only with 8 of the very best professors trying to teach just one lucky student, who got to ask all his important questions, but who had to follow up with the homework of reading compact well-organized 15 page essays by more than half the people doing advanced research in a whole variety of fields – especially fields connected with understanding intelligent systems (brains and computers and internets and so on), with understanding what humans really know about how the universe works (where electronics and photonics account for more than 90% of the real empirical data, data much more interesting than most people know), and with issues of energy and space technology and their eocnomic implicatoins (which connect to almost all the world economy).

For a week it seemed – now I will finally have my graduation ceremony. My father would be proud.  I will really leave school, and I will go out into the world a lot like one of his heroes, John Galt of the book Atlas Shrugged. (But maybe with less of the political posturing and lewd gestures Ayn would want him to make.)  I actually found a guy in the Detroit area, with former GM connections (hey, tis tracks the book really well), and found a way we could bring a new enine to the world that really could be a huge benefit to real people. And if the funding worked out, maybe we would move on to the more advanced technology I had up my sleeve, just like the book.

But... a problem here. The engine guy was very positive at first.. but became scared as it became real. He remembered the many people who really did mistreat him in the pastm in a way he was justified to remember forever, from crooked narcissistic VCs to legally corrupt higher-ups in some government agencies (fortunately not NSF at that time), and even university types who could not really see and feel his vision and its importance. So now...

Now... maybe, maybe not... but I have to remember the bleak possibility that this whole “earth office” may be relocated.  It’s not something I want to think about, but I feel as if I have been pulled kicking and screaming to face up to how real that possibility is, every year that goes by. Not just me personally, but the whole thing. I know about the earthy realities of nuclear proliferation and terrorism. (I ran the joint NSF-DNDO research program on that subject, probing the limits fo what we know on that subject, and had lots of prior experience at DOE. My files also have lots of open source stuff from CIA, NSA, DIA and others – mostly in the causal plane now.) I know about the earthy realities of climate change, a lot more than Al Gore ever did, which are very different but a lot scarier than what Gore talks about. And more.

And so, where am I? Is it just another stage, graduating from elementary school to middle school?

What emerges? Certainly a lot of new math, ala physics or emergent nonlinear systems dynamics. And... it occurs to me... that old stuff of grading papers, which I had to do for the professor back in graduate school a bit. I hated it, but so did he, and it did seem appropriate to assign some of that to a graduate student. In fact, isn’t that a major part of what I was trained to do at NSF for over 25 years? More sorting, more grading. Oh, dear. I hope not. I still really hope the “earth office” won’t be relocated. Not that kalpa stuff! I am not really planning for that. But today, I will keep sorting, keep reliving past history in so many sectors of life on earth, and – when it is done – I will certainly try to see Jupiter Rising, despite the bad reviews. (Hell, they did not like Bruce Almighty or even Avatar at first...

And those were worth seeing.) I hope the harvest of souls is not coming “soon”

(whatever “soon” means – the Biblical metaphorical week?) ... but it would be interesting to see their take on it. After all, their last big one, The Matrix, was interesting. Poor young Gaia...

========

As a footnote: I have also digitized a few technical papers on the role of metaphor in the human brain, a subject for which I have a more complete mathematical explanation than those modelers do. So much to digitize! And eventually a decision as to which to keep in digital form just in my home, and how much to secure cloud. And things to digitize on security too...   

Another footnote: I have two papers in press, one of which explains more about the noosphere and mental discipline

for mathematically competent people. After I wrote the first draft, I received long-distance calls from the orthodox church accusing me of heresy, and saying that the Noetic Institute is a front for The Devil and should be shut down -- but that there might be some hope for me.  Long story. I was discouraged... but I also got an email out of the blue for Kazan, asking for almost exactly the new paper, so now it's in press from there both in English and in Russian. Not exactly Nature magazine in either case, but I haven't had time to play the usual games required of academics. That paper goes for a new level of unification of science and spirit -- but a new part of the relevant science is also in press, actually following two or three channels. Who knows? There might be a little hope for us here, maybe -- just as maybe the engine might still happen. We will see, and try. I also sometimes think of the year I spent working in the Hart building of Congress, where we had a kind of quiet initiation in which an experenced guy said: "Above all remember-- you must play, you can't win." Not a grand synthesis, that, but the words do come to mind at times.

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

Added later, Sunday morning:

All the words above the double line were written in the middle of the night. As I lay in bed, fully conscious, the words started gelling more and more, and I knew what I was supposed to do. I quietly murmured the word "muse" to Luda, put on a bathrobe and slippers, and went down to the study to type them in and post.  (I also sent a very brief email to
one of the folks mentioned, to be sure it's OK.) When I got back, Luda asked what the muse was this time.
Just a blog post????  I mentioned the title, and she asked: "What are you saying about people's souls? How some are 
clean, some are even shiny and glossy, while others are tattered and falling apart?"

My response: "Wow. You are reminding me of that video play, Cats, where almost everyone ends up in the recycle bin by default. The only one who gets digitized is that tattered old woman. Actually, for the past month, I have simply tossed a whole lot of new and glossy paper. I have put in a lot of effort to digitize some old and tattered pieces of paper, where I had to use the flatbed reader a sheet at a time.  Some are more valuable than others."

I  also thought immediately of the Buddhist monastery on Chicken Dragon Mountain in Korea, where I saw an old monk who made a very striking impression. The monk seemed to be a Zen monk, almost completely successful in her long goal of achieving total nothingness. Her soul was old and dry, and about to drift away the powder of disintegrating paper into space. Her face had a very strange rictus kind of smile on it... the smile of pride of success in achieving a goal pursued for so long, mixed in with a horror that something was wrong about what was happening... that strange rictus of an unhappy frightened smile reminded me of the "Crystalman smile" mentioned by Lindsay in his important book Voyage to Arcturus... but I now realize he had something different in mind. 

The Zen school does declare nothingness as its supreme objective, but the high TIbetan Buddhists would be more in tune with the idea that the whole world is a school, something we also hear form Rosicrucians like Joel Whitten (sp?),
author of Life Between Life.  The TIbetan Mahayana Buddhists even have an image of people being judged, after death, by folks a lot more like teaching assistants than like the Almighty Galactic Father Whom Christians often hope to see. 

But... back to more files to be sorted....

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

Well... a few less important thoughts, for those amused by arcane things.

I never learned the full history of the play Cats. (It would be interesting enough to be worth digitizing if I did!)
I have the impression that it had something to do with T.S. Eliot, who had something to do with Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff folks used to say that they had three serious schools, and a lot of hokey imittaors. The three serious ones were basically ranked: (1) Ouspensky/France; (2) Bennett/UK; (3) New York. They also had three books, starting from the long one in poor English, followed by Meetings with Remarkable Men (closer to the empirical source), followed by a third series which was very secret. I do have a copy of the third series lying around in my house, and I was a bit surprised when I saw it. It was more like dirty linen people wanted to keep secret... or was it? It was mainly about how the people who try highest and get to highest ranks can easily just totally screw up anyway. My vague fuzzy memory was that New York had some pretty interesting folks after all, and maybe Eliot was of that tradition.

Years ago, in the house of the fanous art collector Stuart Carey Welch... I remember a young woman of the NY Gordjieff tradition dmeonstrating some of what she could do, in a low lit huge room with the Tibetan MASK OF THE DEAD AND MANY SUCH THINGS ALL AROUND.  (Caps courtesy of my touchpad.) Her enertgy was so impressive I was instantly overwhelmed by wanting to marry her... though of course I did not say so. All kinds of energies broke out amongst the four of us there... lights going on and off.. poltergeist.. the whole bit. I never returned, but always wondered a bit. But I have lots of other things to wonder about, and later my own trip to Tibet (at least to a place which the local Tibetans call Tibet).

Am temptyed to say more about what I have digitized, but must run..

Coming to terms with a radical possible new view of life

Months ago, a guy named Kafatos urged me to write a paper on “the time machine of consciousness.” I felt a duty to respond, because I had put a lot of energy before then in understanding the physics of time, the mathematics of neural networks and brain models that really work, and in coming to terms with the full depth of our first person experience of life. The paper I wrote was deeply shocking to the orthodox – but at the same time when they screamed, a request arrived out of the blue from Russia, and I sent a revised version, now in press, in English and in Russian. To the orthodox it may be shocking, but in my view it is a calm unification of thought, which is something this troubled world badly needs at this time. Lots on the meaning of life, of sanity, zhengqi and so on.

However.. life itself is not by nature static. There are new developments in the basic physics here, which suddenly are not quite so calming as they seemed at first.

What are these new developments? They are not really the strangest mathematical fantasies that many think of these days when they think of basic physics, fantasies which give a feeling of Fu Manchu narcissistic glory to  some of the authors because no one else can understand them, not even they themselves. No, this is the “humble’ world of empirically-based fundamental physics. This is the world I sang to my granddaughter about a couple of months ago: “one little, two little, three little photons…”

A few months ago, I worked out a new simple mathematical model of what really happens to one little photon as it passes through a very common kind of object – a polaroid polarizer. (Like some sunglasses.) To test the model, you need to do an experiment with three entangled photons, but that’s already being done. (I am waiting for permission to find out what happened… but in any case people need to do a lot more of that kind of experiment anyway, to develop some new technology.)  If you empathize a little with that little photon…. It has four choices at any moment: (1) to change its alignment to match the polarizer, and then get absorbed into heat and nothingness; (2) to realign itself exactly perpendicular to that alignment, which can be a wrenching and “expensive” change; (3) to stay as it is for one more instant, despite heavy pressure not to; (4) to “scream” that it doesn’t want to be in the situation in the first place, and retroactively make it less likely to happen at all. That fourth choice or term in the equation is the key to understanding what we now call quantum mechanical phenomena – what Kimble of CalTech has called “putting weirdness to work.” Reality is weird, and we have to accept that.

But how weird? I thought that the new three photon experiments would prove that the weirdness of the universe is far less than we had thought. Ultimately, we may be able to get back to the nice, clean, beautiful image of Einstein, where it’s all real, no magical “condensation of the wave function,” even just three dimensions of space and one of time (With a little wiggle room like what EDinstein talked about sometimes).

But.. between the first version of my paper and the second, I did have to add a new paragraph/section about a caveat. As I thought about that little photon… it reminded me a lot about what I was going through, as new polarizing forces affect life in the US government. (Those realities are more shocking to me than anything I say here today, but I am not posting on THEM!) But I don’t have that type of inner “scream” option… or do I? I start to wonder. The new section … is it the tip of an iceberg? But this morning I ask: am I avoiding reality not to face up to it}?

Our lives often seem to follow scripts or stories. I am amazed at times how powerful stories can be in shaping our lives, and our entire world. I real many science fiction stories, in part to stimulate my imagination and in part to avoid becoming too captive to any ONE story (as people do who do not read so many). Long ago, for example, I read the book of Genesis and the Ambder Chronicles of Zelazny – which were truly beautiful poetically, but which I never took even HALFWAY seriously. (By contrast, I have taken Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged and the Book of Revelations halfway seriously; each is an antidote to some degree of the excesses of the other, but I have taken some work by Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card more seriously.)

But now… I do begin to wonder.

The new physics is similar to Feynman’s in a way – where reality is in 3+1 dimensions, but everything that happens is based on an interplay between what I call “scenarios” and he calls “paths.”

But here is the zinger: we think of ourselves as realities, as part of the final scenario. Isn’t that the way it is, in an Einsteinian kind of universe? But what of that poor little possible photon? Can entire MIND states and life states also inhabit scenarios, where they FEEL as if they were the one reality (in a universe where there IS only one reality in the end across space-time)? Indeed they can. The math is pretty clear, once you start to really understand what it means. EVEN in Einstein’s mathematical vision of one objective reality… the emergent outcome for folks like us.. is that the phenomenon of mind in such a universe, with the full symmetries we know of now… is that we are very much like the people in Zelazny’s Chronicles, shadows in shadow scenarios. I am not yet at the point of seeing any reality in those parts of his stories which get to primal chaos and such (as in Genesis!)… but.. the idea that WE are parts of scenarios… takes some adjusting to.

So many meanings to the word “shadows,” not all the same…

But are we all shadows in the way Zelazny talks about?

Who knows? Right now I know it’s time to get back to bed, and then adapt to whatever this morning brings. I am not about to jump whole hog into another story, but it wil be tickling my mind as I do what I must, and I remember other stories.

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

PS Speaking of Atlas Shrugged.. I received a great call yesterday from an old friend in Michigan, where we talked about a new engine... and about the time he report to John Von Ndeumann's daughter. He mentioned her book, "Martian's Daughter," which I ordered yesterday on Amazon to be sent to my older daughter, based on some things he said....

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

Jan. 28, Wed, 5AM:

I have not fully absorbed this new possible viewpoint (possible? the math seems to say more)..
but it evokes many associations and memories.

First... it reminded me of the time at Lawrenceville, when I took advanced mathematics courses
at Princeton, when I seemed to understand math pretty well, but wasn't sure what to make of some "simple" nonlinear partial equations, the kind of things Einstein had studied. I wondered: "Do people really understand these things?" I didn't know the half of it until this past month! Embedded
in what seem to be such innocuous things... is a lot more than I had any appreciation for before...

It reminds me of my quest for reality in physics... how it began in the summer when I worked at the RAND Corporation just a few blocks from the beach, entertained at times by Ellsberg's circus bouncing up and down loudly in the corridors for anyone with eyes to see. I was thinking ahead to my personal future, which didn't seem to align with RAND quite as much as I had hoped.. RAND wasn't what I had hoped... I wanted to help with important larger things, but I also knew I had to be realistic about my own personal comparative advantage, in mathematics, even though I no longer thought of mathematics as a goal or religion in itself. I remembered Von Neumann's thought that three major areas where new math could make a big difference is in more unified understanding of three things -- mind, life and how the universe works. So I borrowed a book from the RAND library on quantum mechanics, to see what I could see, and maybe help prepare for me to pursue that path, in my forthcoming PhD program at Harvard. As I read that book, it seemed to \assume some very confused thinking, in need of some straightening out... and aty Harvard, more and more, restoring Einstein's vision of reality seemed to be correct, worthy and interesting... if extremely challenging.

So in a sense... this year... I finally FOUND that reality, that authentic, credible 3+1-dimensional reality that Einstein talked about. 'Yes there is an objective reality, but no, we are not part of it." OOPS!

All of a sudden, I find myself in Plato's cave... and we, from monkey brains to noospheres, are all just the shadows projected into the cave! (Again, please be careful with this word "shadow." Like "consciousness" and some other tricky words, it has multiple meanings, each worthy of analysis, but not to be confused with each other! )

It starts.. like Alice in wonderland.. chasing not after a rabbit, but after a photon... where does it go when it seems to do peculiar things and vanishing acts at times? And realizing: "Hey, I am not less than a photon. What it does, it could do too." Indeed I could. A typical earthy neurotic
could easily swell up with delusions of godhood, if he saw he or she could do a few of the odd things I have done on occasion. But then as I look at the whole picture, I see what it really means... yes, the manipulation of shadows is easier than the manipulation of reality would have been... because they are shadows.

It also reminds me of a quiet thought which has come at times to the back of my mind, more often this year than before... people have so MANY holy trinities.  (A high up in India was not amused when he mentioned the trinity of Vishnu, Brahma and Siva, and I told a story about the other holy trinity of mommy, daddy and baby.) I was thinking.. for me it is more like noosphere (which some call 'Gaia"), galaxy and... cosmos or universe. I knew that the optimization equations which seem like our best model of the universe logically imply "more intelligence than intelligent systems" in a way... only in a way.... but now I realize that gthis is more operational than I thought, that it is not intelloigence as we know it, but it does have the power to generate complex structures in a way even more powerful than what we see in things like noospheres. (Yes, earth has just one, but there is the galaxy out there, folks. Virtually all your spiritual experience, from high to low, is just one window into one little noosphere. For the most part, your "gods" or saints are just archetypes within one little noosphere.) And suddenly.. the greater world makes us the same kind of creatures the old Hellenes thought we were, buffeted not between literal gods or archetypes... but clusters of scenarios. Not our stories, but objective scenarios...

Whatever.

Time to go back to a relatively normal day, packing up... tying up loose ends... addressing a few scenarios..

Well, one more thought. Part of my concrete duty today relates to the work of an important famous guy named David Deutsch, from Oxford. A wonderfully creative guy.. but I didn't really believe we have evidence in physics of anything as complex as what he describes in his book The Fabric of Reality. Now... it seems there may be more complexity, similar in spirit, but more like a Jack in the box, all compressed into a tiny space, objectively.  Hmm. When do we start turning on the music?

various thoughts -- packing up, principles of economics threatening us all, old letters, ODE

Streams of thought as I pack up...

Friday the 13^th of next month is my last day at NSF. By then, I lose both my office (a major place for holding lots of books and files, with unique important information) and my access to a workable copy of Adobe Acrobat to clean and compress scanned files.

For many days past, and many to come, my top focus is the never-ending task of scanning, digitizing, mostly tossing out also refiling boxes and boxes of paper, due to retirement – losing both office and access to a working version of Adobe Acrobat.

But as I do this, huge volumes of thought still pass through my mind. So many things which did not end as hoped (whether “won” or “lost”), so many areas where the scanned record is maybe 10% of the real record and half of what I hope it will be when I am done \-- and utterly misleading. And lots of lessons learned.

Among these past threads are ideas I had which could have been the whole life’s career of a  normal successful academic, which in turn is much better then the majority who essentially had no new ideas at all.  By majority’s rules, I am penalized in many ways for being different, as if it would help the others to reduce my effective output! But when the many feel they are uncertain about survival itself in a very tough competition (and well meaning nutty ideologues strive to make that worse), it is not so surprising that they keep trying to change the rules to get int the way that way.

Whatever. Among the loose, misleading idea threads…

Back in 1964, when loosely supervised at UPenn, I put lots of effort into several things, one of them being an effort to solve some polynomial type ODE; in a general from, like Riccati, but also negative powers After transformation after transformation, it seemed to form a pattern. On some ways, like turning a Rubix cube. One simply could not “get out of the box” with certain classes of transformation. It seemed to me that I was getting a glimpse of a formal structure, like a transformation group but with modifiers making it more like an algebra than a simple group. Later, when I decided that I simply did not have time to nail this down myself, I submitted a “problem” to American Math Monthly to try to pass it in. They (like a reasonable percentage of the many people I wrote letters to when young) responded bonestly, but couldn’t make anything of what I sent. Now I know much less of the specifics I knew then (50 years ago!), but even so this feeble paragraph I am writing now conveys more of what I found than what I wrote when I knew more! And now I would know much better how to explore this territory, in part because I have learned the specific skills of creative science (and requirements of human audiences) much more than then. In part because my work on extended P representations (Both published and unpublished) gives some clues. But I also have even more of an issue in prioritizing time than then. So I write this, and plan to move back to the urgent packing.

If I could afford to, I would also write a lot on trust, and what my experience shows about that. Not enough time.

Another thread is with Milton Friedman, where there were several iterations. In cases where I got somewhere, it usually took multiple iterations anyway. It is enough to succeed in the end. But often I only continued enough to satisfy me, and did not continue with most threads. As is appropriate – focus demands that one continue a priority line, and a careerist would say I should have done more of that, not less. My values are different, but I still have to prioritize. That’s drinking from a firehose 101 – work hard to cope with more but always avoid instant drowning, hopefully via things Valliant would call… more positive defense mechanisms. And structuring.

With Friedman… I eventually explained clearly enough how imperfect competition is NOT just a matter of a finite x% loss in output and productivity. It is a loss in the rate of growth. Did I miss my chance to become the Joan Robinson of growth economics, as I had the insight and the math and enough communication ability if I chose THAT as my focus? I suppose. It is really all so obvious (to someone with a “sane” way of thinking), yet the misconceptions are all SO pervasive! Today I think of it with the aerospace industry serving government; then I thought more of the transition from dark ages to era of economic growth (e.g as Hanseatic League benefits from competition). Ojutput at t+1 is reduced RELATIVE to the base one sets at time t, due to Joan Robinson effects, and part of that reduction involves less growth in the base which would have put one in a different position and allowed one to go still further in the next time period. Accumulation of capital and of skills and of human base all suffer… and I see that happening now to a lethal degree in many area of the US economy and society now!

Dishonorable or unconstrained competition can also be problematic. Max Weber’s insights are analogous to LeCun’s convolutional networks – a clear and useful example of a more general principle. Is there hope that cultural change, tied to real spiritual energy in the noosphere, could save us from the doom it now seems to be leading us to? Maybe. Worth trying, to some degree, for many reasons on many levels.

By the way, compressing and digitizing important stuff at home is also a way to keep more of the various fields of science and society I have been involved in. So of course, lots of 

France’s 9/11: listening to the voices of the people

The voices of the people were a real zinger last night.

One voice: “This is a day which will live in infamy. It will live in infamy not only because they declared war, but because the Presidents crawled over to the radio, and announced they their plan to stay in bed, roll over, and then go play golf somewhere with rich buddies.”

Another “voice,” an image from a 1950’s B grade sitcom: A funny guy with an accent in the desert says,”Yes, boss, we really declared war. We took over the crusaders’ last main base in Nigeria, their only remaining source of oil other than the US itself, which may soon go out of business. We took over Tripoli. And now we pulled a Pearl Harbor on the very center of their civilization, and published a mein kampf about how we plan to take back that continent which is rightfully ours. But, no, they still won’t even get out of bed. What can we do? Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders and go ahead and clean it all up.”

In a variation, a reply to this image: The boss takes off his hood, smiles, and reveals a face something like Palpatine of Star Wars or Cheney or one of the Koch brothers and says: “Don’t worry. It is all set.. My time is coming soon.”

What to make of this?

First I should say that I view it as a real sacred duty for some of to listen hard to the voices of the people, even when we do not like all of what we hear. In the 1990’s, there was a time when many said “The voice of the people is the voice of God.” Not exactly, but please don’t just throw away that thought..

When religious or antireligious activists try to pin down where I stand on the great cultural wars of our times, I usually reply (except in China) that I am a Quaker, or Quaker Universalist. These answers have many advantages, one of them being that they are true, even though they are far from being the whole truth.

Many religions formally believe in a million sacred things, which members pick and choose from as they will. Traditional Quakers, as in Friends General Conference (and the writings of Rufus Jones which I never read but which sound like the real culture), essentially believe in one common principle: the value of working the listen as well as one can, in weekly meeting, to “listen to the voice of God” – while also connecting as deeply as possible with other people, and seeking the light. That’s it. All else is what different people choose to build on that simple but challenging foundation.

I take that seriously, and do try to learn how to listen. I have also worked pretty hard to master the intersection of a lot of tough intellectual subjects, and, to be honest, did spectacularly well in some school stuff starting back around when I was 8 years old. But I suspect that sustained progress in those areas has depended a lot on my ability to “cheat” by being able to hear what a professor was really thinking, by being able to really listen to the views of people speaking in NSF panels, and even, with effort, to probe into the thoughts behind some of what I read. By nature, I started out like a bull in the China shop, with levels of testosterone and “yang” ‘way beyond the norm (very helpful from ages 8 to 14 or 15), but I was lucky to have a mother who said “Ferdinand, learn to smell the flowers,” and my intellect itself really understood the need to cultivate empirical data. It understood that effective small groups need to adopt a culture where everyone tries to listen to everyone, where there is a real dialogue.. and where everyone accepts the responsibility to listen, to reflect very seriously, and to communicate with a kind of deep honesty. (Sometimes NSF encourages that, but some myopic careerists  give priority to other agendas.)

And so.. There are levels and levels of learning how to listen, and it is natural for us to strive for the highest that we are capable of. Quaker universalists are a strand of Quakers who believe in reading and listening far and wide, tolearn as much as possible from the totality of our shared human experience. (I received a weird phone call from Macedonia the other day, from a guy high in Greek Orthodox, who had a nice metaphor about trying to be like a honeybee, buzzing from flower to flower. Nice metaphor, though the human version of buzzing is not exactly the same as listening. Real bees do listen to each other, however.)

As I read widely…. Many years ago, I read a lot of the writings of a Quaker named H. Spencer Lewis, who decided to work hard to develop a more systematic approach to teaching people how to listen. I can’t say more right now, because it’s time for me to stop typing and listen to my wife. Among the many interesting things he talked about (some of which I agree with more than others, and some of which I find more useful and stimulating than other parts).. was a specific idea of “cosmic consciousness”..

But it seems I must cut it off right now. Sorry. Best of luck. How does this connect to the new movie Ju[iter Rising? How could I know, since I haven’t seen it yet? Best of luck indeed.

Meaning of the destiny term Z of quantum physics in human life

Years ago, Albert Einstein made a typical human kind of error in trying to understand quantum mechanics. Einstein famously said “common sense is nothing but a collection of prejudices acquired before the age of (16).” But he himself fell victim to the same kind of thing. When his own mathematics showed us the symmetry of the universe in time and in space, and in forwards time versus backwards time… he did not assimilate the implications in his gut. He proposed an experiment, the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment (later refined into the “Bell’s Theorem” experiments), which would disagree with quantum mechanics, ONLY on the assumption that physical effects can only march forwards in time, never backwards. His common sense was proven wrong… but his mathematics still works, as I have shown (see www.werbos.com/quantum.htm).

But last year I made the same kind of mistake myself.  I too failed to fully appreciate how rich the phenomena can be which emerge in a universe with just three dimensions of space and one of time.  I even felt there seemed to be a big contradiction between my direct experience of life and what would be possible under that kind of theory of physics.

Now I know better. There is a certain term, Z, which appears BOTH in the Feynman path version of quantum mechanics and in my new stochastic path version. The math of these versions is similar on the surface, but they lead to different predictions (and different options for technology). Still, both have this term Z.  In “common sense” (a different kind of common sense, which I should perhaps call “inner subjective understanding), Z is a destiny term. Understanding Z, in your gut, is like understanding destiny and what it really means.

The new story about Z reminds me a lot of the story of another simple-looking mathematical function, J, which I learned about as an undergraduate at Harvard, in the 1960’s.  Feynman’s Z is known to lots of people now, just as J was well known in the world of optimization and optimal control back then. Engineers would say “Oh, J is just a minor technical term we use in solving inventory control problems. It’s basically just ‘cost to go.” But in trying to understand how intelligence works in the brain, I was the first to realize that J, or approximate J, is actually the mathematical basis of what we call hopes and fears, and “secondary reinforcement.” Hopes and fears are absolutely central to the human  mind. It’s a lot more than inventory control. (For more of that story, see the Handbook of Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, edited by Lewis and Liu, from IEEE/Wiley. Or just look at www.werbos.com/mind.htm.) Understanding hopes and fears and how they work is really essential to understanding any kind of mind or brain. Now – it turns out that Z is just as important, and more than I appreciated before this past month.

Is it possible to “change the past” in a really significant way? I basically assumed it could not be possible, in a 3+1-D universe. Like Einstein… I misunderstood my own math. I thought that the science fiction novel Chronoliths gave a good picture of what that math tells us. I thought that that my 3+1-D math fit what Connie Willis called “the Oxford standard model of time travel” in her two-volume novel Blackout/AllClear. But now I know better, simply because I worked out an example. Of course, I am only just BEGINNING to know better, and I don’t claim to have the new deal totally mastered! Lots more to learn better!

In a way… I owe thanks to Bernard Widrow, Marlan Scully and Chris Altman for jogging me in ways that helped me understand better. (If you google on either of the first two names, you will see I have reasons to be very grateful for the gentle guidance I received from them.)

Widrow and Scully both gently suggested a general approach to coming down to earth from the worlds of mathematical abstraction which were the main foundations of my intellectual life. Scully’s encouragement got me to work out the concrete examples of a new formulation of physics which I have written this past year (as well as publish more details of a new type of P formalism beyond the scope of this simple blog post).  Following that track, I forced myself to do the mundane job of  working out the continuous time equations for what happens to a photon going through a polaroid type polarizer – a rather mundane thing, but someone had to do it, and I was unable to get anyone else to do it (though I tried).  The equations which I came up with are explained in some detail in a paper posted at vixra.org, and in a more complete paper forthcoming in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, March 2015.

As I worked out those equations… I could not help empathizing a bit with that poor little photon going through a polarizer. After all, Washington D.C. is also a very polarizing environment. That’s not a joke. It’s very serious.

To make it work, I had to be very clear that the photon essentially had three possible actions it could take, aside from doing nothing, at every instant of its life in that polarizer. It could spin itself around to perfectly match the spin that the polarizer wanted of it. Or it could go 90 degrees against the prevailing direction, and get totally eaten up. Or it could “scream” that “I don’t want to be in this situation”, and change the destiny term Z such that this whole scenario would be much less likely to arise in the first place. In a sense, it could change the past (with some probability) to prevent the situation altogether.

I did not take this serious at the time, but it seemed like a wonderful joke. New forces have appeared in the executive branch of the US government this past year, which are very much like that polarizer. What to do, when facing a choice between totally aligning with the spin of the new order, or being eaten altogether?  Certainly the option of screaming inside myself  was part of the game. (But actually one must be very careful about doing that, “even just” within one’s own mind.)

But now, as I reflect on other situations… I realize… why should human minds, in their fullest capability, be less capable than photons?  Even if we give up “multiverse” theories of physics, which assume that parallel time tracks really do exist… the mathematics of multiple scenarios competing for probability (either in my stochastic path physics or in the more classical Feynman path physics) can have a similar effect, to minds embedded in such a universe. The weird thing is that this is true even if the stochastic path effects result from “deterministic” models like the mathematics of Einstein! If you ever feel a bit nervous looking at Einstein-type nonlinear field equations, and you worry that you might be missing something… please remember that even Einstein himself did not fully understand all the implications of equations which he himself formulated!

And now… as I have other things to do this New Year’s day, let me just repost an email I sent a day or two ago to Yeshua Ben David:

Good morning, Yeshua!

Today, in the time when I still have energy to think out of the box, my priority is to rewrite that cosmology paper on consciousness and the physics of time, to try to improve the impact somewhat. But before I do... it is interesting to think a bit more about the larger picture. 

I am very grateful for a tolerant ear, of someone who will be willing to put up with someone who does not see reality in the same way as many others.

Centuries ago, if a person rejected every part of life that he could not yet understand in a fully mathematical way, he would not be listened to much. he would be lucky to survive at all. Yet, as our mathematical knowledge has grown... a good thing... there has been a bad side effect of people rejecting and forcibly ignoring all else. I often think about George Valliant's discussion of the various types of defense mec hanisms which pervade our culture. I see such bad tendencies in myself too... but, being aware of them, I at least try to keep them under control while so many others fall gleefully into things which may destroy them... and the rest of us as well.

But... beyond what I understand mathematically... well, there is also a zone of things I can understand but not discuss.   

Sometimes I feel so frustrated with the DOZENS of levels of compartmentalization which seem necessary in today's world here -- some due to differences in disciplines, some cultures, some matters of safety.

Yet... many years ago, I was an active member of the Rosicrucian order, and read through a lot of their old stuff, which includes stuff going back millennia. I remember one viewpoint... that the lowest level stuff is open, and ALSO the highest stuff, because it gives positive benefit for those who can truly understand it and not so much harm to those who don't. "The middle stuff is the problem," they said.

Our mathematical understanding of intelligent systems in general -- brains and minds and what we could build -- is one of the most important threads for the destiny of the human species. Yet, in the larger space, I do not really know where we are going with that thread.

Back in 1991 (I think, after IJCNN Seattle), I listened to advice from Boeing, and saw Terminator II. I am glad I did, even though I did not enjoy the movie. I have a post on that on my obscure personal blog. Since then, I have been fully aware of a need to walk a tightrope... to try to develop the kind of mathematical understanding which would be crucial to full human potential and spiritual existence, while avoiding the dangers of losing the human species. Thus I put major effort into promoting the COPN topic at NSF, focused on developing that understanding. (see www.nsf.gov.)

When the attack of 7/14/14 hit me, in this place... well... I have not yet fully absorbed all the many-level implications of that huge shock. I certainly do think of it as a multi-level situation, where it would be misleading to think only of one level.

On a deep level... the attack did occur just hours after my return to NSF from WCCI, and a major implication will be to terminate not only intelligent systems technology but also central elements of hope to understand the brain better.  (Of course, many will still wave the flag of these things, as well as the flags of openness and transparency and accountability and the future of humans in space and so on... but accomplishing things in reality requires a wee bit more than PR.) I have wondered very intensely: should I take this as a signal that I was walking a bit too close to one side of the tightrope, risking negative misuse of knowledge? Several lines of evidence supported that. Though I have also wondered: why then, would reality tolerate the intense efforts, just as dangerous, to develop "Star Wars clone army" brain helmets?

In the meantime... I understand time a little better this week than I did two weeks ago. Perhaps I ought to put in a paragraph or two in the revised paper to give some hint of that better understanding.

At www.werbos.com/quantum.htm, I give the link to the directory where the slides and audio of my Australia talk are located. But I also have some level of draft of my work on CMRFp, the new continuous time model of polaroid type polarizers, which is also posted at vixra and in press at IJBC. In the past two weeks, I have had a chance to digest more fully the meaning of the new math.

In the past, I have wondered at times: is it possible to change the past or not? Of course, we have not seen anything at all like that in the physics lab. Following the constraints explained by Thomas Kuhn, for third person science, we basically cannot even discuss that subject  in normal scientific venues.

Yet on a first person level... I have a list of about eight personal experiences which seem to say that maybe we can. That is one of the main reasons why I report the feeling (in my time/consciousness paper) that there is only a 10% chance that the cosmos is only 3+1-D.  

Yet now, for the past two weeks... I now realize that the emergent phenomena possible is a large, complex 3+1-D space are much richer than I had assumed... even though I was aware of more richness than most people already. I am reminded of the time when I was very young, when I saw the theorem that the even numbers are a subset of all integers... AND VICE-VERSA... by the curious was that holomorphism can work with infinite systems. 

In "reality", in a 3+1-D universe, only one scenario becomes real... yet the set of scenarios... well, all the scenarios are "partially real" in the sense that they interact, as per the "destiny term" Z. For intelligence embedded within that kind of universe, it can OPERATIONALLY be like a type of many-worlds situation.

I was more right than I realized at first, in empathizing with that little photon with the power to just dial down the entire scenario. Z is "just a scalar" -- but so is J in dynamic programming. Scalar functions can contain a lot of information, though I suppose I still have a lot to learn about that. Just as DHP goes 'way beyond HDP and TD and Q, perhaps a gradient form of Z could be of use in better understanding destiny effects and interfacing with intelligence. 

But I digress.

I stopped to get a decaf coffee... and received an email from IEEE about some kind of message from Elon Musk. Back to Terminators...

When I saw Terminator II,. it was a high-impact experience for me, because so many of the details exactly matched what I was actually starting up at that time. Even the evil nanorobot looked like an exact morph between me and the guy from Cyberdyne I was funding to develop a new robot arm . I tried to calm myself down... and recalled that the movie must have been filmed before all these new things had happened... and then, the final scary thing for me was to see the final emphasis, that the information was being sent back through time in order to help people prepare. (later, when I met Luda, she reminded me at times of Sara... but that was later.) I knew enough about the physics of time to take that a bit more seriously than most people would.

 At some level, my sense for several years was that it was a near thing, in actuality, and that we actually narrowly avoided something which "actually happened" at some level, like a living scenario.

This past year... I began to downplay that idea... since I have learned some crucial tricks which I didn't know back then, important to really fully doing the scariest stuff. (Yet even what I knew then could be very scary even now in the wrong places and the wrong hands).  

=======

And then, last Saturday, the final event for us in a long family Christmas sequence (unless we will get a visit from others in College Park).

My eldest son drove me and Chris to a 3D IMAX showing of the Hobbit, the final episode. Mostly just relaxing fun, typical stuff... though I could draw a crude analogy to the dwarf place under the mountain and the place where I am sitting now, and my hope to get out before the various armies start killing each other. But ...before that... multiple 3D IMAX trailers for things to come.

One -- a major new remake of the Terminator II kind of story. This time, the evil robot is Asian. This reminds me... the events of 7/14/14 will thoroughly expunge the relevant technology in the US, but China is moving ahead faster than ever, now WITHOUT whatever steering influence I might have had, and Xi Jinping is clearly having some difficulties in coping with the tightropes he needs to walk.  It is more than a balancing act really, as there is also a need for synergy between things being balanced; a fuzzy middle is not the highest form of harmony. They have not been able to think out of the box more effectively in learning lessons form Hong Kong (which SHOULD be less painful for them than 7./14/14 was for me... but it takes special discipline to be truly constructive in the face of such pains.)

OK, that was a zinger.

But...

well... there are levels and levels in the noosphere, even of this narcissistic silly little blue marble. And thoughts from other levels, however compartmentalized, do tend to have reflections at times, to leak out. I THINK I saw a trailer... about a new movie from The Matrix guy... about discussions beyond this marble of "the harvest." Interesting. I wonder.

But now...   back to the task of the morning.

Best regards,

      Paul

P.S. The afternoon will be more technical things... from computers to packing up to nanofabrication. This email is my new "NSF alter ego," though maybe my access to it at NSF will be compromised if I install Thunderbird as my client for it at home; NSF permissions will not let me use Thunderbird here. So many levels of compartmentalization! 

Click here to Reply, Reply to all, or Forward