see the naked "swamp" Puerto Rico example

Trump has rightly talked a lot about "the swamp", but can he ever figure out where it is and how it works, and how to save us from the extinction it is on course to bring us?

My previous post on electric power problems, which could become as big on mainland US within the year as they now are on Puerto Rico (watch the example closely folks). That's more urgent than this post.

But even so, it was amazing to see on CNN just a few minutes ago the woman who now runs DHS explaining why the request for a special waiver allowing foreign help was ignored in the case of Puerto Rico, when it was approvcd quickly for Texas and Florida.

Since she did the work, I tend to think that the White House rationalization was just post hoc PR, which we have seen a lot of this past year. (Not invented  by Trump, of course, but also not something a sane observer would not be aware of.)

WHY did the two previous requests get immediate attention, but not this one?

This one just came from Congress. the others cam,e form industry (from large stakeholders).

Some folks imagine that the President runs the executive branch, and Congress provides just budget and oversight. Authoritative academics can find lots of authoritative books saying that this is how it works. But we live in a new world now, folks. Those who have seen at ground level know better. In ever more agencies, instructions come from visiting "stakeholders," empowered by selected members of Congress. No, it's not those civil service folks who do this (except when they are too scared to let anyone know, but the new whistle blower systems point back to the folks who represent the stakeholders.) Roughly speaking, actual power is proportional to the size of large campaign donations, and there are numbers out there for those who watch closely, like certain intelligence agencies.

The Moslem Brotherhood itself is actually bigger there than Russia, but their friends steer us elsewhere, and poor Trump believes a lot of what certain folks tell him.

All for now.

Puerto Rico's problems: are you next, and what could be done to save you?

On a technical level, it is well-established that the whole US power grid is in real danger this year of being shut down as badly as Puerto Rico, a real disaster we need to understand better and face up to. (No electricity for months to come, suddenly no food.) For example, James Woolsey (former CIA head under Clinton) says that Kim may be poised this year to do an EMP attack which would shut down half the generators in the US, and I have given details and citations for a cyber threat even worse at www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf. 
Why hgve our leaders done nothing to correct problems which could actually be corrected quite easily? 

As people start to realize this is real, even for the political leaders living in DC, one leader has asked a group of us:

I wouldn’t know the first thing about this, but is it possible to put parts of the grid, not just wires but smaller if not larger transformers underground?  And if that were done, would it help much?

Thanks very much, ...

At some level, the real problem may be a gap in communication between the engineering people and the mysterious politically shielded process of stakeholder influence in the Senate. Nobody in the latter seems to know the first thing about the EMP threat to burn out and shut down half the big transformers, or the cyber threat to burn out and shut down half the generators, on the continental US. There are only a few parts of the US (like Texas) where the water threat to the grid is anywhere near as serious, but a better understanding of the CONSEQUENCES of losing electricity for a long time might help a little, maybe, in getting policy-makers closer to reality on nature and importance of the EMP and cyber threats. 

For the EMP threat... putting wires underground is expensive. In October 2001, I organized a joint NSF-EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) workshop on urgent opportunities to harden the grid, at EPRI headquarters in Palo Alto. For transmission, underground wires cost about ten times the ordinary wires, which were already hard enough to get build because of issues of regulatory barriers and costs running into the billions BEFORE any multiplying by ten.

But there are much simpler and easier technical fixes. Under the Congressionally chartered EMP Commission, an engineer named Kappenman worked with others to develop (and I think patent and incorporate) much cheaper, easier and more reliable fixes. The estimate was on the order of $100 million to harden the ENTIRE US grid from all kinds of EMP (other than lightning, which was already being addressed in other ways). When I hear Woolsey on TV talking about how Kim could shut down the US with one single H bomb, and about how Kim does know this and is preparing to do so, I find myself really wondering about the sanity of people who could have engineered the fix ten years ago, and did not. Part of me says -- I am not a professional politician; I do well enough in passing information on to people who are, for someone who is more a scientist, engineer, economist and Quaker than politician; but even so, the total failure to get even such a simple fixable problem fixed makes me ever more enervated in the face of equally fatal problems in other areas, likely to kill us all if we don't learn better how to walk a straight line.

With EMP, the required fix to the grid is not only cheap and easy but known to the House. More precisely, Congressman Trent Franks (with strong support from folks we knew like Roscoe Bartlett) introduced a bill, the Shield Act, which passed 3-1 in the House (obviously bipartisan), which would have hardened the grid against EMP, years ago. 

Franks is a conservative Congressman from Texas, so of course there was nothing socialist or weird about his solution. The bill would simply have empowered and mandated FERC (the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates interstate gas and electric transmission systems) to ADD EMP resilience to the many other existing reliability standards enforced by FERC. Just one more health and safety kind of standard, less expensive than others long on the books. At a (one time) cost of $100 million, it would end up as about a $1 one-time charge to the average rate-payer (if as a rough guess we have 100 million of them in the US), with maybe a continuing cost of 10 cents per year thereafter for maintenance. Just part of the cost of having a reliable source of electricity.

I remember very vividly an important "inner circle" meeting of Franks and other supporters of the Bill at the Senate Visitors Center, where even the top people in the House in both parties were deeply mystified about why the Senate simply did nothing with an easy matter of life or death which they could have taken care of quickly. There was a lot of speculation. My natural response was; "Holy cow! If even THESE guys are baffled about what is going on, what are my chances to figure it out... with Specter now gone from the Senate." But my year working in the Hart building did give me SOME basis for my own guessing... and I remember how Reid operated, with his own view of the Stakeholder System, which is probably similar but worse under McConnell. On the tombstone of the US, will it be written "Death by shared new procedural ideology"?

Could McCain save us somehow, as the most reality-oriented guy left now that Specter is gone? Or will Murkowski, Cantwell, Kaine and Schumer be the last remains of hope?

Anyway, the fix to save us is easy, and it may be all it would take is for the right Stakeholder (maybe BP could do it) to gently tap the shoulder of McConnell or whomever, and note that Franks is still alive and happy to reintroduce the bill. I don't know.

BUT: the cybervulnerability is just as urgent, and even bigger as a threat. (Folks in the House speculated: maybe senators just wanted to solve EMP and cybervulnerability of the grid TOGETHER. But clearly waiting for A before B and B before A is a dumb and even fatal strategy here!!)

It is EVEN MORE technical than EMP. At www.werbos,com/NATO_terrorism.pdf (published in a book in the NATO series), I give technical details of that threat and of HOW TO fix it. It certainly depresses and enervates me very deeply that we show no signs of progress in making THAT fix either. It is so obviously a matter of national survival that I find myself wondering about the patriotism of the powerful folks who have chosen to do nothing here. (Yes, I share the deep worries of the public about the "swamp," but I often wish Trump had a better understanding of what it actually is.) But my son in law, who is closer to the specific technologies, suggests it is simply a case of old fashioned cover-your-ass psychology. More specifically, in the 1970's, when the Multics operating system was being developed (in front of my eyes literally), there was a collaboration of folks who really knew what a computer is and of folks who really know what a theorem is, yielding among other things "the orange book." (If you look up Multicians on the web, you will see I am just one junior member of a larger group, if they haven't all died of old age yet.) THE ESSENTIAL FIX of open machine-verified compliance testing of operating systems for critical infrastructures (starting with power) requires that kind of crossdisciplinary cooperation, which may have simply been lost with time (just as we may have lost Boeing's hot structures capability crucial to economic access to space either for missile defense or power generation). It COULD be reconstituted, and not take all that many years, but when key people in power do not want to admit what they have lost and what it would take to fix... well, maybe that's the political problem which needs to be solved somehow or other.

But again, I am not so involved in such politics any more. I was invited to Trent Frank's meeting due to connections which are pretty much gone now. Tomorrow I do go back to revisit IEEE HQ in DC again for the first time in a long time -- but only to give a technical talk to the aerospace electronics society, focusing on exciting nuts and bolts related to IT. 

Can natural markets solve our problems of species survival?

Recently, on a listserv set up to discuss as analytically and as realistically as possible the threats to the very survival of the human species and strategies to reduce those threats, I posted the link to a new essay:

Urgent need to develop new integrated platform for IOT, to prevent the worst as it (inevitably?) does take over the world, sooner than most people expect.  This essay does get into more undiluted specifics than you will find anywhere else, on the basic big question of the future of humans (if any) in the IOT:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzYEn42Vg7DKTmhRZ24tU2U0SXc

One person on the list said we should not worry about any of the threats I mentioned, because "natural markets" will take care of all of them. He also objected to the concept of "market design" in general. Here is my reply to him:

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

First consider an analogy: some people assume that God or fate will determine the outcome anyway, so why should anyone think about it? There are people who apply that attitude to all large issues, to the issue of whether they might lose their job, and even to the issue of finding a  new job when they lose it. Personally, I regard such attitudes as a kind of neurotic defense mechanism, one of the many such common neuroses widely prevalent even in the high performing sectors of our society. I highly recommend the book by Valliant of Harvard, who tracked the life success and failures of Harvard graduates over many decades,  and established connections between people's success or failure on their own terms, with their choice of defense mechanisms. At www.werbos.com.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf, I discuss what it means to be truly sane, based on what we now know about how brains work.

In my view, the idea that "natural markets" will take care of everything is very similar to the idea that God or fate will take care of everything. 

To begin with -- what the hell IS a "natural market"? What are the words actually supposed to mean, apart from the obvious vigorous emotions they are attached to? Are they just a new synonym for God or fate, and a new phrasing of the same old Idea? Or are they more like "natural foods," defined as foods produced by plants or animals and not by Humans? 

So is a "natural market" one created by nature and not by humans? That's a rather odd ideas because all markets I ever heard of were created by humans, one way or another.

Or is a "natural market" one created by unconscious humans, with a strict rule that market design should not be tainted by anything like conscious thinking about how the system Works? Is consciousness a kind of taint which corrupts everything, and should be repressed? Or is it just altruism which should be outlawed? How could one try to make any real sense of such cultural beliefs?

When people say "natural markets ensure optimal outcomes," perhaps they are trying to give us a simplified interpretation of the serious work of Adam Smith, Walras , Samuelson, Ken Arrow and such. There DOES exist a serious and thoughtful effort in economics to understand WHAT kind of markets (what kind of market design) lead to optimal results in what sense. Some markets do, some don't. (Arrow actually was on my thesis committee at Harvard, when one of the two possible topics was a deeper understanding of what people's utility functions are, but dropped out when I chose the other topic, how we actually maximize their expected future value.)

I would guess that the markets of feudal rural England would count as "natural" and "organic" much more than the more formal organized free markets developed after decades of intense intellectual and political work by the Liberal party of England, with lots of lawyers creating and implementing new explicit rules.  (In those days, "liberal" simply meant promoting freedom.) In fact, simple banditry was a big part of the older more natural markets, and limited trade reduced not only the level of productivity but the rate of growth. 

All of the optimality theorems show a limited type of optimality, only when certain assumptions are satisfied. One of the required conditions is "perfect competition." Serious market economists all respect the great classic work of Joan robinson, who gave us a basic quantitative understanding of how much lose at any time when we face a certain DEGREE of lack of competition. 

So this leads to a kind of first grade understanding of what market design is about. Truly natural markets, like the dark ages of Europe or wars between animals in the jungle,  reduce the degree of (effective, honorable) competition, and reduce not only output but growth. (I'd say more about the growth aspects.. but later. If there is a real economist on the list interested in joint authoring a paper, please let me know.)

First grade market design works to create more competition, more effective, more fair, etc. 

But it goes beyond that.  In the early days of electric power deregulation, there were some enthusiasts who basically thought that any kind of market would work. Then came Enron.  There is now a huge literature on auction systems which work and those which don't. This is one of the big inputs from economists to the development of the new economic dispatch and unit commitment computer platforms which now control most of US electricity generation.

Another key assumption in the optimality theorems is perfect information by all players, including clairvoyant knowledge of the future. (Don't believe me? Fine. I don't claim to be God. Just Google dynamic general equilibrium models.) Imperfect information causes all kinds of problems, again not only for the current standard of living but also for growth -- and in truth for the probability of survival. 

Serious policy economists also know about the private goods assumption, usually discussed as the externalities problem.

Market design, in my view, may start from first grade market design but really should account for the other aspects as well, to get closer to real .optimality.

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

LOTS more can and should be said about this subject! For example, lack of competition in energy markets has been a huge problem for US national security, among other things. See http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2017/09/reminder-that-hard-left-threatens.html for gross market imperfection/failure in the electric power sector. See this IEEE policy statement for ways we could have improved competition in the market for car fuel, which would have been of huge benefit to the liquid fuels companies (who now face possible extinction due to lack of alternatives to gasoline and electricity) but was blocked by lobbyists with same monopolist anticompetitive ideology as what really blocks interstate transmission. I still remember the warnings I received from Boyden Gray, then general counsel to president Bush, in the west wing proper, about problems even the president had in trying to cope with.. well, after a lot of floods, I can't help thinking of a swamp, and I'm grateful that other parts of Texas are doing better.  I am very grateful to the friend who sent me privately some passages from the book of Mormon directly relevant to that. The stakes are very high here. 

debate about minimum wage laws and future of work/ITon a ;policy list

X:... the most enlightened minimum wage laws and working condition regulations are developed using sophisticated economic models, and  studies confirm that some work as intended...<

Y: Again with the miraculous economic models, etc.  besides, min wage laws are pretty much a club.  And as I mentioned about 2/3rds of of owe under new min wages lose their jobs.  It's very basic economics, no need to over analyze (for a excuse to over control?)  If the jobs were worth the new mandated prices, they would likely be paid about that already. 

My response:

Since these are both tricky and life-or-death issues, I am maybe halfway through writing an essay on the challenge here (especially as a challenge to IT, the technology which is replacing humans here and now). 

For the moment... just a few quick thoughts. The many studies of future jobs reviewed by the Millennium project say that 2/3 of ALL the jobs will be lost, not just the minimum wage ones. Some would say; "If these folks are not worth it, they SHOULD lose their jobs, to hell with the consequences, because what are those humans worth anyway?"

What's worse, the human policy types who served in those studies were paying close conservative attention to what they already know; at the frontiers of IT , we can see that NO HUMANS ARE NEEDED ON EARTH. Clearly, adherence to that line of evaluation is in itself a threat to the existence of the human species!

It is important to understand that "WORTH" here is not something magical which our corporations get from God on a burning bush in the Sinai, but more like a rule from the SEC. There is a WHOLE lot of market failure out there right now, what Trump has rightly called a "rigged system." (Why did Google insist on injecting a question mark when I typed "Trump"? I really wonder sometimes about "the soul in the machine". This is not the first time  by far.) All markets now are DESIGNED markets, like the electric power markets today maintained by computers and viable (not so rigged) only after many years of technical study and retuning. A key part of the challenge is how to design automated markets (as all markets will be before long) which accurately reflect the value of human beings, at least enough to maintain their existence and -- in my view -- their full human potential, material and intellectual and spiritual. HOW TO BUILD SUCH AN IT SYSTEM? It is a crucial challenge, which no one has fulfilled as yet.

There are times, when I consider the hopes and dreams of Robert Mercer (who is working closely with Charles Koch in remaking the world economy, and liberating their computers from any government influence, partly documented in the excellent book Dark Money), that I am reminded of a scene in Asimov's extended Foundation trilogy, where he describes a planet with a human population which has slowly dropped to a few thousand but has a huge GNP to support those people, disintegrating bit by bit to where it all dies in just a few thousand years. So what is value then? Or would the intelligent AIs step in and forestall the disintegration in the obvious way? I expect so, but weak systems in any ocean are the first to discover how invasions can work. 

more debate in Vedanta group about astral travel

Me: Thank you for your serious thoughts here! Since this is serious stuff, I will endeavor to be as precise as I can in follow-on.

Him:

Both the Astral and our physical plane composed of the baryonic matter and 4 fundamental forces are physical in the sense that

Me: As you know, I take very seriously Einstein's (early) vision of the laws of physics, governing an entire cosmos which most likely (but who knows?) is simply a curved Minkowski space. But in that view, the (Einsteinian) physical plane is actually composed only of force fields -- not exactly the four forces discussed before the discovery of EWT (by Weinberg and Salam), but a variation we can now smell but not touch, a variation which would include the foundations of dark matter and dark energy.  

 Him: 

I) both are the derivatives of the  same primordial physical physical stuff with physical being the derivative of the astral in succession.

 Me: ==================================================================

In the Einstein view, everything in this cosmos EXCEPT the underlying forces and the ultimate Lagrangian laws is emergent. Protons and electrons themselves are seen as emergent patterns (roughly, as "solitons"). Atoms, molecules and planets are even less fundamental, and more "emergent", than protons and electrons. Living organisms are at yet another level, emergent from the (oceans) of molecules or the equivalent that they emerge from, in a process more general than Darwinian evolution but inclusive of Darwinian evolution. ALL FORMS OF ACTUAL MIND ACTUALLY KNOWN TO US, except for the cosmos itself and AI and imaginary things people dream of, emerge as subsystems of such living organisms, subsystems we may call "brains," even though that would include aspects of the noosphere of our solar system, a mind so great it usually appears as a whole cosmos in itself to those humans who get to see it more and more completely. 

What we call the "astral plane," or astral bodies, is basically just a view of part of the emergent CONTENTS of  the noosphere of our solar system. Like the electronic traces of the mundane thoughts in our mundane brains, it is more like an IDEA or MODEL of reality than like reality itself.

Even if one shifted to a nonEinstein model of the cosmos, in which the underlying forces themselves are just an emergent level of something deeper, the atoms and molecules are closer to underlying reality than the ideas we see in the noosphere are... ideas which certainly include the silver cord, the humanoid forms we chose to wear/project in most astral travel, Santa Claus, all of the archetypes described by Carl Jung (and Joseph Campbell and Neil Gaiman) and the serious, powerful "shadow" images attached in human culture to names like Jehovah and Allah and even most Church versions of Jesus. (These last are cases where I see an existence both of something real, more real than the archetypes, but ALSO a shadow image of imperfect fidelity, just as Fox in his book Astral Projection describes useful but imperfect shadows of the physical world in the astral.) 

II) Both lack any innate consciousness.

Except for the cosmos itself, I view ALL consciousness we know about as emergent. Humans do often like to talk and speculate about what they know nothing about, but 

that kind of phenomenon, reinforced by groupthink, is more about human psychology than about reality. In truth, I do believe we should be vigilant in looking for REAL clues for anything which would give substantive information about reality beyond the Einstein model (if such should exist),  but  I have looked far and wide (and will continue to do so), and have only found things which provide deeper understanding of the Einstein vision. (As I type, my wife mentions a new headline: "Trump says Strange Grown Up Since Election." But Carl Jung would have no problems understanding deep aspects of how such puns arise.) I will keep looking, but the deeper understanding seems more promising to me right now. 

When I hear some folks argue about whether God is male or female or transgender, I wish they were conscious enough to consider the obvious metaphor of fetuses wasting their energy speculating about the sex lives of their parents. Fetuses have a lot of mental work to do, but it is a waste of energy to oscillate (let alone fight!) on variables which are not yet ready to converge to any kind of point estimate or weight. (Still, it is not unreasonable for a fetus to imagine that the matrix it is living in could be imaged as female.) 

Best regards,

    Paul

P.S. I apologize for using the computer science definition of "avatar" in discussing astral life before, but the term fits SO well! Not only do some people chose a cloud as their astral form in such travel; there are also folks who MODIFY their body appearance in such projection, sometimes changing it in real time. And there are Chinese mystics who regularly use nonhuman organic forms in their projections. The original term avatar from India has a very different meaning, of course, ALSO very real in the fundamental wiring of the noosphere. One of you has mentioned Joan Roberts, who talked a lot about "channeling," which in my view is a very real and important phenomenon, even when the channeller and channellee are both quite fallible. I do recall a meeting where one person talked about an experience of visiting someone else in need of a certain kind of help, and the person who had been visited was present and learned of the other half right then and there when I was watching. RELATIVELY veridical in the details,  crosschecked. The Netflix series Sense8 tries to bring some of the core ideas of the Upanishads "to life", and includes some scenes of this kind, and illustrates other basic principles you would find familiar. (Though it caters a bit more than I would like to postmodernist political groupthink.) Channeling is always two-way TO SOME EXTENT, and it can actually form a chain.

 

I suppose that (somewhat imprecise) phrase "sub Planck" could refer to the level of fundamental forces and Lagrangian laws of cosmos itself, with EVERYTHING else at  higher emergent levels, in the picture of Einstein realism. 

===========

As I think this over, I remember that some sincere, experienced mystics have argued that our mundane earth is just a "slow lane" of the astral plane, because it too can be influenced by dreams and thoughts, and because their experience in the astral plane does show varying levels of mutability already. However, even mundane human thoughts can change our mundane world simply because of ACTIONS WE TAKE. Yes, we may have had a dream before we acted, but that does not by itself make the consequences of our actions any less real. Mystics can act not only directly, through mundane body actions, but through other efferents of the noosphere, but even that does not make the consequences less real at a mundane physical level. The narratives are very important, but we should not let us lose touch with reality here.

This reminds me of one of the simple maxims I presented in Nepal:

"The further along one goes in the path, the more and more important it becomes to resist two ever more powerful delusions:  delusions of grandeur, and delusions of helplessness. " This applies both to ourselves, and to what we hear from others. 

Trusting Experience or Data: Brains to IT to Souls

Certain principles of mathematics really are universal, and are understood better if one considers multiple examples together. One of the really fundamental issues in all intelligent systems – from brains to souls to AI – is the issue of how much trust to place in the reported experience data from someone else.

The issue of trust is even more complex in political systems, but, since those are not really intelligent systems, I will get to those examples later if at all today.

To see this issue with mathematical clarity, it is important to begin by understanding the basics of trust factor issues in three types of brain – roughly, mouse/rat, monkey and human. The mathematics and neuroscience behind this is summarized/reviewed at www.werbos.com/Mind.htm, which has links to the most recent published papers, such as the open access paper Regular Cycles of Forward and Backward Signal Propagation in Prefrontal Cortex and in Consciousness, by Paul Werbos and Yeshua (J.J.) Davis, Front. Syst. Neurosci., 28 November 2016.

The mouse brain basically learns from a compressed database of all its past experience, its OWN past experience. Mice pay a lot of attention to other mice and other creatures, and yes they do learn in real time as they update their memories, but their learning is based on their own direct experience. The great advance in the monkey brain over the mouse is “mirror neurons,” which allow the monkey to assimilate the experience of OTHER monkeys or humans (or… ?) and learn from it, when they actually see  the other creature. (Think of the old apt phrase “monkey see, monkey do,” and of imitation learning.) Humans take this one step further by communicating experience from one person to another without the receiver having to actually see the original experience on-site.

From a mathematical viewpoint, this is simply a logical progression, the development of new levels of learning system capable of exploiting more and more of the total information available in the environment. But more powerful learning systems using more of the data require some tricky advances in fundamental brain design, relevant to IT design as well. (Please be careful however in implementing things which can be scary powerful and dangerous! I suppose that rats would agree that humans can be very dangerous to them.)

The key challenge in building or understanding a vicarious learning system, whether monkey-level or human level, is WHAT TO TRUST.

A mouse can get away with a simple compressed database of memories – with records roughly made up of (linked sequences) of VERBS (what it was doing) and OBJECTS (the part of the environment it was acting upon). In all cases, the SUBJECT – the actor – is itself, and it does not need to think about its separate individual identity. (Some studies of the psychology of early childhood report a similar lack of personal learned identity.)

But for a vicarious learning system, identifying WHICH SUBJECT is having the experience (playing the role of actor) is extremely important. For a human level system, it is essential to have a kind of trust factor addressing the question of whether the experience as communicated really did happen, with what level of confidence. It is amazing that human brains do all this with such little VISIBLE difference in the basic wiring diagrams of the brain; however, those of us who have worked with complex algorithms know that a few simple innocuous looking feedback terms can yield radical changes in system properties at times, and we already know that humans only have a tiny percent difference in DNA from other primates. Evolution naturally seeks maximum benefit from minimal cost changes.

At this moment, people are preparing to restructure the economies which rule human society by building new transaction systems (and markets) based on ideas like blockchain. The key idea is to have trust factors which are “1” or “0” . You trust it or you don’t. IT people have for many years tried to develop more powerful belief factor or trust factor systems, where trust is not “0” or “1” but a continuous number. Because storage and attention are limited assets in brains, even when they use a continuous trust factor, they still make decisions whether to assimilate a personal or alien experience record AT ALL, with or without caveats; such limits limit our performance, but they are unavoidable facts of life for all finite systems like us.

Trust factors, or their equivalent and their cousins, will be a crucial challenge in developing new types of internet of things (IOT) capable of respecting and serving humanity, and getting us off of the quick fix of turning the whole earth over to one big integrated AI system. A major problem is that no one on earth has a good enough mathematical handle on how to do them right. Luda, who did the official reviews for the Russian AI society, reported lots and lots of work years ago on belief factor systems, none of which worked. They remind me of the neural networks before I discovered backpropagation, none of which really worked, but could similar new mathematical insight fix the situation? Maybe, but it would have to be grounded in deep understanding, just as my work on backpropagation was based on understanding not only of the credit assignment problem but of Freud’s psychodynamics.

One key insight: trust factors cannot be just scalars, as in many IT designs today. For example, in a database to support decision-making, some here would say there should be at least a Republican trust factor and a Democratic trust factor in the system, factors which would not be equal to each other. Trust is a vector, not a scalar. But it is NOT SO SIMPLE, NOT EVEN CLOSE!

Of course, running NSF panels (a crucial part of my own personal database of experience, very rich and very valuable), one can learn how different people can be trusted in different areas, at different levels.

Recent discussions with Vedanta Society people reminded me (and helped make me more conscious) of another important aspect of trust factors in human life:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2017/09/what-should-we-believe-about-reports-of.html

How could we automate THAT? Actually, maybe that’s a very dangerous question. How could we UNDERSTAND that?

Well, maybe just one comment. In my view, the “gating” phenomena connected people’s minds within the noosphere are really just an extension of the same kind of symmetry principle we see in mirror neurons, which in turn is an extension of gating/symmetry principles present even in the visual system of the fish. (I cite Olshausen’s paper in Arbib’s first brain handbook as a nice cartoon-like explanation of how this works, though I try to be more general and formal in my own papers discussing that topic.)

And of course, my level of interest/acceptance of reports from other people is influenced by measures of plausibility, which in gturn are very much influence by my own past database of first person experience.

That’s already my main message here for now. It was about five minutes in bed this morning. I have joked to Luda: “Is my superior higher intelligence of the early morning due to a kind of cosmic consciousness, or is it just due to being close to you?” Some of both, I suppose.

She immediately asked “so indeed what should **I** make of that March 1967 newspaper experience you keep talking about? Can’t you tell me more of the details?” Well, that was another whole 5 minutes. (Can you imagine the suffering of a one-year old child with little prior experience of life, exposed to such periods of ten minutes? That’s serious, and tricky, but not for today, not even about today.)

Some immediate thoughts –

1.   My present >> 99% belief in paranormal/spiritual phenomena is mainly based on experience AFTER March 1967. The full first person experience was naturally far more compelling than hearing about it would be, but I was such a hard case that all it did was raise me to “50-50”, open mind. Open mind plus intense general curiosity led to many, many later experiences, of varying testability.

2.   I certainly can recall more about the period and the experience – not all, but enough that I feel like a guy on the psychiatrist’s couch who suddenly understands past experience better when reliving it. And of course, I am well aware of the need to resist filling in details (confabulation) as most people often do.

Did I really read the New York Times from cover to cover every morning back in those days? Yes, I am quite certain about that, I remember that from more than just that day, but there is a caveat: I read the whole news section, which was more than 30 pages, including the big editorial page. I did not read EVERY story, but all those which interested me. Other sections I paid much less attention to, except for the magazine section on Sundays and occasional headlines which would catch my eye (more often in business section, never in sports).

I would wake up more slowly then than I do now (when I am retired and utterly unconstrained!). My bed was aligned parallel to the window, parallel to the wall which contained the door.

It was a rectangular room, longer in the direction from door to bed and window than along the door wall. I would drag myself slowly from bed to door, open it, pick up the newspaper, close it, drag myself back to bed, and study the newspaper with a really fierce intensity.

I was INTO the goal of “saving the world” just as intensely then as now, maybe more intense, even though I had not yet understood that it really is a matter of avoiding species extinction. I was in fact a kind of moderate Republican, recently very active in Young Republicans (less so as my work loads grew heavier), intensely scanning the newspaper for understanding of people’s thinking and of opportunities either for me or for society to do better. I had fully understood and implemented the idea of (mundane) “sanity”, as described in www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf (published much later in Russia).. and so in studying the newspaper I was “ALL THERE,” verbal mind, mathematical mind, and full nonverbal self all fully engaged and working together, probing the world. I described this to people later as “reading it half asleep, remembering every word”, but in fact I was combing the clarity of intense consciousness and focus with the residues of dream association which I did not focus on but which were part of the me doing the focusing.

And yes, that was every day, BEFORE I assigned any possibility to the kind of experience I had on that startling day in March 1967.

For many years, I have noticed how the gaps between the “ego” (one of Freud’s concepts of ego, the symbolic reasoning explicit self, actually a phenomenon of human culture built UPON evolution of the more fundamental wiring for communicated experience) and the conscious nonverbal life have many consequences. It is possible for people to recall memories of experience which do not really fit what the “ego” would have assigned to them at the time. And we can even hold on to memories we do not entirely trust which do not fit our theories of the time.

And so, this morning, as I relive what my routine was then, I suddenly realize it was NOT so different in its way from my “cosmic consciousness” post-dream routine today!!

In fact, I now believe that CONNECTION is the most important and essential spiritual practice of all. Yes, I now do new things in the morning, like sometimes asking questions about difficult mathematical issues – but then I was really fully immersed in active connection to my childhood version of “the watch.”

(But the New York Times was so much better for that than CNN! It brings home how much has been lost in some ways…)

Luda asks: “Could it be that I just came to understand Mao Tse Tung much better than those guys studying him full time at Harvard, to the point where I could predict the exact changes in thought and words he would use to express those changes, and the exact day of the change?” In truth, my abilities at remote empathy and in reconstructing the thoughts of other people probably were important to my academic success before Harvard. Harvard was not all success for me – but mainly because of my “trespasses,” my clumsiness in stomping on other people’s intellectual turf, not any difficulty in finding it.

So it seems it was like the later day, AFTER I had opened up, when I visited Karl Deutsch in his inner sanctum, heard him briefly express his contempt for all ideas paranormal, and SAW him connect his soul to folks in Europe to ask how they would view a new proposal I suggested for strengthening the European Union. Now I can look back and see MYSELF that way!

It is odd indeed that I totally disbelieved paranormal phenomena then, AND was deeply focused on trying to understand neural networks of brains, but used that morning period for something totally different! Yes, I experimented with my own brain as brutally as Newton did with his eye for the neural network part, but at later times of the day.

All for now. Best of luck…

What should we believe about reports of spiritual experience?

X wrote: "When applying the first-person approach, the GS-level is impassable. It means that, in an attempt to construct a theory of consciousness, we cannot rely on other persons' claims about their paranormal experiences."

My reply: 

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There are other goals we are called to pursue in life above and beyond developing a formal theory of consciousness as such. Real life always requires that we make 

judgments of a sort about our experiences and the experiences of others. Those of us who sincerely believe that "paranormal" or "spiritual" aspects do exist or might exist, and are important if true, cannot avoid making such judgments. (I will get around to the issue of whether I believe what Fox says about his out of body experiences, but FOUNDATIONS COME FIRST). 

I liked the introduction to one of Piaget's books, where he makes a rough but important distinction between three LEVELS of study of human development: (1) the invariant biological foundations, the laws of what he calls "assimilation and accommodation" (what we now often simply call learning); (2) the study of practical stages of development, his emphasis; and (3) the direct practical and applied level. ALL THREE are important, and we need to maintain connections between the three levels of study, but each is important also as a focus area in its own right. I have gone very, very deep into (1), which is where universal principles like consciousness are understood in general terms (but not as Godel or as pilot waves or bad puns in general). Yet as we live life, we can USE our knowledge of level (1), but must address practical issues at levels (2) and (3). 

At level (3) (and even some aspects of (2)), life is complicated. Only those living in solipsistic fantasy worlds imagine otherwise -- and such disconnected alienated people do not fully believe such stuff in ALL parts of their mind.

Making the necessary judgments is not at all trivial. Jesus said "judge not lest yet be judged." Von Neumann and Raiffa would say "Consider multiple possibilities, attach probabilities to them. Always keep updating those probabilities as new evidence comes in, and actively buy information to bring yourself closer to reality." Deeper study of the mind shows that our judgments are not so simple as scalar probabilities, but the same kind of approach is called for. (As I post this, I have been watching a Netflix series "Touch," which does a nice job of illustrating this theme of making judgments but being careful about them. If Netflix were at all enlightened, they would cancel the plan to delete the series soon.)

I have often felt a kind of visceral revulsion towards "hermeneutics," a practice developed over the centuries most notably in the Catholic Church, but translated a bit and popularized first by German philosophers and then in a later wave by all manner of alienated left brained postmodernist philosophers. But in all fairness, it began as a very well-motivated sober effort to make JUDGMENTS about what to believe and what not to believe, in figuring out what was the original text of some document. What revolts me is the idea that words and historic documents by themselves provide a firm basis for understanding ourselves, our minds, our universe, and our telos. 

It GROSSLY violates the basic requirements for the lowest levels of what I sometimes call "sanity" or "zhengqi" (www.werbos,com/Mind_in_Time.pdf). It fails to respect the fundamental importance of fully manifesting our natural tendency to learn from first person experience, the real bedrock of sanity, integrity ... and effectiveness in our pursuit of telos. Did St. Paul say he who has the law but not the spirit has nothing?

But this morning, from my usual morning meditations, I realize that there is a different kind of hermeneutics of great importance to practical spiritual practice, a hermeneutics of making  sense of one's own direct experience, which naturally carries over to how one learns from ("interprets") authentically recorded experiences of others. In fact, this is HUGELY IMPORTANT to real yoga-like spiritual practice, from what I see. Anyone who just BELIEVES what they see in astral dreams, for example, must either be incredibly inexperienced, or naive, or asking for incredible trouble as the walls around his or her deluded mind inevitably crumble. (One worthwhile source related to hermeneutics of nonverbal experience is the introductory part of https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Time-Machine-Perception-Predictions/dp/157174102X/, well grounded in the best information available from US government funding of paranormal operations.) 

Someone asked why I now make a "fail" judgment on a 'pass/fail" grading system for the writings of Fox on Astral Projection. But no, I don't make THAT kind of excessively narrow judgment. (Not of Fox, not of Donald Trump, not of Narendra Modi. Not even of my wife or my younger son, who loom much larger on my personal horizon.) For Fox's book, I consider two very different DIMENSIONS as I evaluate: (1) did he give an accurate account of what his experience WAS?; and (2) do I agree with his interpretations, his brain's reaction to what he saw, like the idea of visiting a physical place while out of body and seeing a silver cord? 

In the 1970's, I really was impressed by Fox's book (and Steiger's In My Soul I am Free) because of how authentic he seemed by test (1).  He came across as an honest witness, much more so than most writers on such subjects. He reminded me of certain news reporters for the New York Times, who were incredibly careful to give you the exact facts, so that you could easily form a different opinion or conclusions from those facts without having to blindly accept his own conclusions. (Come to think of it, I remember in the 1970's being impressed by how much more authentic the Times was that way than the Washington Post. Life demanded such judgments of me, however tentative and conditional.) But no, I DO NOT BELIEVE that the place he visited was ordinary physical reality (which I do believe exists, and is more physically real than the astral plane). It was ever so easy to PROJECT and CREATE something like a "silver cord" when hundreds of Western spiritualists were attached to that image, and it is possible to create a kind of astral reality for it, but it is far more imaginary than Santa Claus and other important thought forms which float around in the noosphere. If you look for it, you can create it and even be bound by it, by why bother and why limit yourself in that way? (But yes, if you see others binding themselves in that way, it is good to notice. I usually don't hang around such places.) 

In toto, my judgment on Fox's book was that it was very worthwhile for me to have read it, that it remains of great value to this day, BUT THAT I DON'T just endorse all his conclusions, any more than I simply rubber stamp my own astral dreams, like the one I had last night which stimulated these later lines of thought both at higher and at mundane levels. In a similar spirit, I deeply value Annie Besant's book on Thought Forms, which Ghandi also valued (I have the photo of his bookshelves in Mumbai!), but somehow never felt moved even to read any of Blavatsky's books or the Urantia book, despite recommendations form others that I do so. They didn't feel as real to me.  

There are those on this list who still believe in the silver cord, for understandable reasons, based on what they really did see on the astral plane. There are many reasons why I don't. Soon after I read Fox, I did a  bit of experimenting myself. Fox warns "don't leave home without it (without keeping that connection)." But I carefully did, no problem. 

Also, in Steiger's account, I was impressed by the picture of how different rules SEEM to apply, and SEEM to be basic, in different parts of the astral plane (or noosphere in general). Fox rules really work in zones where people agree to them,  but Catholic rules apply in other places, Moslem in others, and so on... though all zones have boundaries and are subject to more invariant rules, just as the Us Constitution provides a more invariant set of rules in the complex system of laws and regulations in the US. (Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work. The US is not as ancient or as ecologically grounded as the noosphere, nor is its Constitution as well protected.) 

I think Steiger quoted the Bible "My Father's house has many mansions." In later years, still in the 1970's, experience showed me that the bipedal humanoid body we normally project for ourselves as our avatar (AVATAR AS IN COMPUTER JARGON) in the astral plane is also something of an illusion, an attachment; more precisely, when I innocently violated the rules of one "mansion" by being present where I was not supposed to be, it was unpleasant to have one's avatar banished/disintegrated, but I could still function and monitor the place from a cloud avatar, and l later met others who frequently did the same. The humanoid avatar is important, even though it is just a short term construct of the mind, but the silver cord is more dispensable. The ordinary physical body itself is also a kind of emergent form,  but it is far more real, more fundamental, than any of these astral forms. 

Of course, when I read the Book of Revelations or read about Mohammed's white horse, I do apply some empathy, and naturally assume the same kind of nonverbal hermeneutics ( should I call it antihermeneutics?) I use on my own experience. And I do not usually overcommit to "THE interpretation" even in my own experience, even when it is not a dream of any kind at all; constant reality testing and checking is essential, no matter how far along one is. 

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P.S.For what it's worth, that astral dream last  night PRESENTED ITSELF to my brain as a visit to Hungary, including a very impressive castle, and some mention of a king maybe using Latin in an important conference. But when I woke to a higher state, and did "antihermeneutics", I remembered immediately that I had BEEN to Hungary, that it had no castles quite like that, and that this was almost certainly (can't be totally sure) a brain reconstruction to echo the powerful FEELINGS of the people I was visiting, who have the same feelings about India (or its northern neighbors?) that I do about the zone of Rhine and Danube.  The scenery was more compatible with Jodhpur or Nepal than any of the many places I have visited in Europe, and the person I spoke to most reminds me much more of people I met in Nepal than anyone I have ever met in person in Europe. But no, I do not make strong judgments about this particular one. It is far less veridical (at least so far) than many, many other first person experiences.