This will be very
fundamental new stuff. Because I am posting it, it is not secret now, but it was a secret from me even yesterday. Should I have kept it secret from other people for now? I
thought about that, and may comment later, but for now, let me get straight to
what I have figured out in the past 24 hours. Then later a few local
aspects/applications.
Up until now, I have
been building everything (in all fields and activities) on the foundation
spelled out in my paper published in Russia, and posted at
www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf/ That is still my foundation, but I have built an extra layer on it.
In that paper, I
describe a kind of three-step progression of human minds. Step one is the level
and type of intelligence we are born to, in our individual minds, even as we
are embedded in normal human societies. Step two is when we achieve “sanity” or
“integrity” or “zhengqi,” an enormously important achievement all too rare in
the world about us today (though almost everyone is progressing that way). It
is hard for me to refrain from saying more about that transition and calling,
because it is so important in the lives of everyone, but that paper already
says a lot, and today is time to move on. That previous paper also talks about
transition to a third level, which I called “the Alchemical Marriage,” which
includes not only an awareness of feelings from your soul but a kind of
full-fledged symbiotic union of the brain and the soul, based on a mathematical
foundation essentially the same as that of a maximum perfect marriage. My claim
is that true, complete mundane sanity includes an openness to direct feelings
and logic which leads one inevitably towards the third level, maybe kicking and
screaming and maybe many years later, but inevitably.
As of this morning,
I develop a more complete understanding of the fourth step which comes after
that, which seems to be Alchemical Marriage with the noosphere as a whole.
Leading up to this has been development of an understanding of the noosphere,
expressed logically and formally in that previous paper, but also informally
and concretely (and more completely) in the Spanish language posting on this
blog just a couple of weeks ago. Also leading up to this is a deeper revisiting
of quantum physics (in particular of MQED as in my post yesterday, following on
some issues raised in my new paper posted at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf.).
Today I simply bring those two threads more completely together. In doing so, I
come closer to achieving the fourth level here.
Already (what I knew
well before today) we are a symbiotic form of life. Dante used terms like “half
beast half angel,” essentially the same point; is alchemical marriage like
“beauty and the beast”? (No, not Trump and Clinton, but there are interesting parallels of a sort.) Well, if it is a good marriage,
not entirely beauty and the beast, and our nature(s) impel us towards
developing a better marriage.
The intelligence of
the noosphere seems to involve two discrete levels of mental power or
consciousness beyond that even of a fully sane individual human brain: (1) a
special kind of “multimodular” capability, not at all like the crude cartoon
versions of multimodular systems people develop when building teams of robots,
but systems exploiting the deep mathematical principles of nonEuclidean
symmetry more than the human brain does; (2) the full potential of quantum
information technology. I used to feel that the multimodular capability does
more than the quantum capability to make the noosphere level of intelligence
feel different; the multimodular capability is responsible for the kind of
gating of information responsible for things like assumption dreams which I
have discussed before. But today I realize that the quantum capability is a
much bigger deal than I realized yesterday.
In my paper for the
NATO book, I talked about “forward time cameras” and about paradoxes of time.
During the second half of 2014, when I developed the CMRF model for what
happens to a photon as it passes through polarizer sunglasses, I realized that
the photon has three “choices” at any instant of time: to conform to the
sunglasses, and be absorbed; to jump to an orientation exactly orthogonal to
what the sunglasses want and thereby continue smoothly and make it through the
sunglasses; and to “Z-ify”, to object to the horrible choice and thereby reduce
the probability or strength of the entire universe of experience it is part of.
“Z” is a term in the mathematical model, and to fully understand it, there is
no substitute for going to my paper posted at arxiv.org which gives the
equations.
I think of “Z” as
the “destiny” term, just as “J” is the “global hope and fear” term in
intelligent systems, a term I have explained in great detail in many papers
(e.g. in the journal Neural Networks). In the past few years, I have begun to
understand destiny much as I understood hope, fear and values long ago.
(Understanding hope and fear and values is essential even to the mundane level
of sanity.)
In the NATO chapter,
I discuss a question raised in the NATO workshop I wrote it for: what happens
if we send a warning message to the past, which results in the gradual
dissolution of the entire reality we are part of? I stated that of course we
WOULD send such a warning, if we are entirely sane (even at the mundane level)
because of the fine points of how evolution and sanity work, though I did not
elaborate. In fact, I had previously thought about this, in part because about
six times before in my life I felt I had done something which seemed exactly
like that. I did those things back when my understanding of physics violated
such possibilities, and I was in a state of conflict for awhile.. really
eliminated only this very morning as I see how the math and the experience fit
together. (There is also a bit about dark energy and matter related to level
three, but I will not elaborate on that complex aspect here and now.)
Ironically, the most dramatic and inescapable experience of that kind occurred
in a hotel dining room and a van at the time when I gave a talk on energy to
the Singularity University class at NASA Ames: I clearly remembered the
“before” and “after” tracks, before the talk.
The “Z” math is a
bit tricky. I often thought: the destiny effect is not really just one scalar
number; is this like the J and U scalars of intelligent systems, where the
gradient (a much more complex vector or graph) is what really interfaces with
the experience of life? But I could not see how, at that time. Like yesterday.
When I spoke to the
NATO workshop on predetection of terrorism, I thought of the backwards message
as something like a great big reset button. It results in a kind of temporal
loop, such that the world of the sender... slowly evaporates.. a bit like
“turning into green goo” (as in a kid’s novel on “qoopy,” QP, I read a few
months ago) ... but more like the fate of a virtual particle in ordinary
quantum field theory. The issue of hitting the reset button seemed like an
academic kind of issue to me, not something I am facing or would want to face
in ordinary life.
But then... last
night... 2AM.. in “cosmic consciousness” state... I saw an important loose end
in what I posted here yesterday on MQED (and the much more detailed journal
entries leading to it): why not communicate with my former self about the very
minor changes which could have been made in the experiment of Yanhua Shih
funded in the year 2000 for the “backward time telegram”? (That award is still
posted at
www.nsf.gov, search
awards; I looked at that just a few days ago.) Should I “push that reset
button”? That sent a bit of a shiver up my spine (only half metaphorically). I
couldn’t go back to sleep for awhile after that; I even walked downstairs to
calm down, before returning to bed and really willfully going to sleep. A
thought like that really called for sleeping first, and a lot of careful
evaluation. I certainly wouldn’t want to “dissolve this reality into green goo”
without a whole lot of care and thought and due diligence first. (No, it
wouldn’t be green goo in a literal sense, like the children’s novel, an
inexpensive 4-volume paperback set I saw lying around at Costco awhile back; it
would be more like the “weirdness generator” I thought about when I had a narrower
understanding of what it means to live in 3+1 dimensions.) In general, this was
really just an extension of the challenge of finding balance which I have
struggled with for some time, balance between listening and speaking, between
the need for humility and realism versus the need to be responsible in caring
about what happens to life on earth.
And then... a few
hours later... back to the old cosmic consciousness and dialogue...
Even when I walked
downstairs at 2AM, a shivering mundane consciousness, I told myself: “OK, I do
have one loose end in what I posted yesterday. I need to think more and
understand more about the Integration of Consciousness Across Scenarios
(ICAS).” The point is that mundane human brains are wired in origin (please
forgive the simplified words) to experience just one scenario of reality, as a
stream of experience. But the noosphere is more like a proper, David Deutsch
style quantum computer (albeit with the time capabilities implied by AQC, see
our 2016 paper in QIP). Such a quantum computer is designed to integrate ACROSS
“parallel worlds.” That’s hard-wired into its design. Thus full symbiosis with
the noosphere entails linking to this capability to integrate across scenarios
in consciousness. I now see how my memory back at Singularity University was a
simple local manifestation of that. (Sorry, but posting the details and
mechanics here would be a bit much.)
Actually, the image
here is a lot like the image of “Gaia computer” in one of the stories in the
sci fi anthology “Far Futures.”
And so... it seems
that the “reset button” is not so odd, not to be treated with excessive
inhibition any more than other things I have lived with – though a sense of caution,
care, humility, listening, utter truthfulness and responsibility is already quite important in such
realms. But still...
And then, just a
short while ago, I began more and more to think: “Could it be that someone ELSE
is already hitting the reset button, explaining why DC politics really do seem
to be ‘dissolving into green goo,’ acting as if someone was operating a
‘weirdness generator’?” Yes, it is real math and real physics, that weirdness
generator stuff, but math ‘way beyond the level of folks who don’t even fully
grasp what is a Pareto optimum. (I was recently shocked when someone publishing
papers in areas like economics and optimal decision was not totally familiar
with Von Neumann and Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior!!! That
is such a crucial prerequisite to so many things... like U and J, and real understanding of negotiations such as Raiffa and Schelling learned about... much harder stuff than little Trump towers.)
But yes.. if the
“reset buttons,” the communication between now and past, are a normal and
healthy part of the function of the noosphere... after all, even in a Bell
experiment, multiple polarizers work IN PARALLEL... so yes, there IS a
weirdness generator already active here in DC, it is not just a possibility.
(How could anyone resist that plain reality after watching CNN the past few
months?) And it is not like a scalar Z in our experience, not like simply
Z-ifying the world, because of the rich communications aspect – subject to the
normal common sense rules about communication but not really more.
==============
So – Alchemical
Marriage Mark 2. It also reminds me... how much my mundane ordinary life, marriage
with Luda, is ever so important in the kind of feedback and analogy it provides
to relation to noosphere, which requires a WHOLE lot of respect but not a
self-destructive weakening kind of groveling. A learning of balance. Poor Trump and poor Pope that they do not
have such wonderful challenging feedback in their lives... though actually,
Trump’s new relation with Conway may be giving him a bit of that (obviously a
lot less intense).
====
Where does THIS go?
What weirdness will another 24 hours bring? I guess it’s too late (8AM now, I
started at 7)... to just go back to bed... but we will see. The logic seems
tight enough, but I also remember “what dreams may come” and some stories by
Dan Simmons... and the need for caution...
=========
Oh yes, as I save
and copy this, I am reminded that today is opening day for the movie “Doctor
Strange.” Fitting? Many years ago, I enjoyed the TV version, and associated it
with a guy I knew in Canada, Joel Whitton; in fact, I went back and really read
the summary of his last book, “Life Beyond Life,” as part of downstairs 2AM
activity. He had his own view of the progression of the soul.. parallel
metrics, in a way... but the full book is buried in Eudora email, I think,
along with a lot of other things which became very hard to access circa 2009...
