Has Trump sold out to the Moslem Brotherhood?

A few days, I was wondering what would happen when Trump responded to a gross personal insult form Putin. Like the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. And also when Putin made it clear that alliance in defense of the world from sharia extremism (really, Moslem Brotherhood, a very specific and very effective international organization which many of us, including MBS, know a lot about).

Well, something impossible was to be expected...

But the evidence is now accumulating about what happened.

After all, Flynn himself sold out to Erdogan years ago. Trump seems to be doing the same. Suddenly to say he is working on selling Gulen to Turkey. And now doing an action in Syria aimed at allowing Erdogan to do the mass murder of those allies who have been working hardest to protect us all from MB people (even as he hypocritically talks about death of one guy in his army). If Putin imagines this helps Russia, he is as myopic as .. well, the most mypoic people I have ever met in DC.

It is a very serious, very dangerous line he has crossed. It is a test of how much integrity the rest of us have. Some of the protections which go to his office will certainly be withdrawn.

Has CIA been misusing social media? What could anyone do?

A colleague recently pointed me to a press report on this very serious issue:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/

My reply:

My concern is that there are dozens upon dozens of unscrupulous groups all over the world taking advantage more and more of what technology allows them to do 

with censorship, harsh measures against anything which does not fit a narrow playbook, and dishonest manipulation of public opinion.

In many ways, it is a classic "race to the bottom," erosion towards a Nash equilibrium. 

I feel a bit guilty I have not done more on the technical side, to start addressing the concrete issue: how could Facebook have reduced the fake news problem by automated, transparent technical means WITHOUT hiring lots of new human censors (let alone the horrible subcontracts and links to outside political groups). I am "biased" by an experience I had myself while outside the US, which I described after a lot of humor buried in a long blog post: https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/11/from-obama-and-zuckerberg-to-oumuamua.html

But we should not be steadfast in ignoring horrible first person experiences. 

This technical approach is at least one way to start groping for a kind of moral highground here, a path to avoid becoming just one more cannibal in the war of all against all, 

a path towards a hope for something more like a Pareto optimum. But several things discouraged me as I started to get into it. 

First, one well-connected guy insisted that Facebook is now a media company, and should be managed the way they manage other media companies they buy up for political purposes. Fair IT not welcome. In truth, when there are dozens upon dozens of nasty wolf packs out there from all over, all of the front line wolves would unite to try to bite anyone who would have tech to partially defang them. Maybe the folks who pay their salaries hope for some result other than blood and gore, but the wolves are there on the front lines. 

(Again, let me emphasize that I am not even thinking of the CIA much as I say this. There are lots of other wolf packs out there besides the one(s) they run, and they themselves are victims of others.) 

Second, Google decided to shut down its competitor to Facebook at about the same time. I wonder what to make of the new New York branch as well, but that's just a question mark. 

My next task assigned by me to me is to look for Xi Jinping's latest speech. The relation between human subjective judgments and market design for a free marketplace of ideas... will be crucial all over the world. 

Quantum reality 101 --- living in a real Fock space

I have pushed hard to ask for new experiments to test my new theory of quantum electrodynamics, MQED, against the best standard mainstream version of QED most widely used today in predicting real experiments. I call that mainstream version ρQED, because it makes heavy use of "density matrices" ρ. 

However... not everyone knows what practical, mainstream quantum mechanics really says, today. 

There are hundreds of philosophies and beliefs out there about what quantum mechanics actually is; that's why I am doing this blog post on "quantum realism 101," explaining what ρQED is. When I ran the NSF research program ("QMHP") to support quantum modeling for practical use in electronics and photonics, the practical work was mostly all based on ρQED in practice (though they didn't spend a lot of time on the philosophy of what they were doing). 

So... in quantum realism 101, in ρQED , we always assume a distinction between what the state of the cosmos actually IS at any time, the wave function ψ, and the state of our knowledge,  represented by the density matrix ρ. That's difference from the old 1920's version, when they thought that the wave function ψ represents all of our knowledge; turns out, that didn't really work. (I got to see that ever so vividly in NSF reviews of ideas for quantum computing.) 

In ρQED, we assume that the "law of everything," the dynamic equation which governs everything in the cosmos, is just dψ/dt=iHψ, the usual "Schrodinger equation", where H is the usual normal Hamiltonian operator well-known in QED. That IS unitary. We often think of the wave function ψ as a vector in Fock-Hilbert space (the Hilbert space of functions like ψ defined over Fock space, over "the multiverse.") 

But the big problem lies in how we model actual measurement processes.  

What happens when we put two or three polarizers between a source of entangled photons and the detectors behind them? Many philosophers believe that this is where God, free will, or metaphysical consciousness intervene and perform a miracle in the real world. Sometimes I call it "looking for the soul in your sunglasses" (if you have polarizing sunglasses). Many mezzo people believe that the polarizers perform a UNITARY TRANSFORMATION, that they input one definite wave function ψ and output another definite wave function, according to a well-known formula, their version of the "Born rule."

But in ρQED, we assume that the polarizer is a stochastic object, somewhat unpredictable to us human experimenters because we DON'T KNOW the state of every atom and electron in the polarizer. Thus when a definite known wave function ψ comes into the polarizer, we use the modern version of the "Born rule" to tell us what MIGHT come out, with what probability. If the incoming wave function represents just one photon reaching the polarizer, then there are only two possibilities for what might come out: (1) nothing, represented by the wave function ψ=0, the vacuum state; and (2) a photon aligned to the polarization angle which that polarizer supports. 

(I think that good ordinary sunglasses just pass through photons polarized sideways, so as to protect you from the up-and-down photons coming from the sun. Zielinger's group in Austria -- the worlds leader in this entangled photon stuff -- writes the wave function for a horizontal photon, what the sunglasses pass through, as ψ=|H>, where "H" means horizontal.)

And so, ρQED predicts that the output of the polarizer is a stochastic mix of the wave function 0 and the wave function |H>. That is NOT a unitary model of the polarizer!!!

The density matrix   ψ   for a definite known state ψ is defined simply as

(ψ)(ψ-transpose), where ψ is considered as a vector. The density matrix coming out of the polarizer is predicted to be  ρ=a*ρ0+b*ρH, where a and b are just scalars, and where ρ0 and ρH are the density matrices representing the vacuum state 0 and the horizontal state |H> respectively.

In summary, ρQED models the polarizer as a stochastic input-output process, not unitary -- as an ordinary Markov process. This kind of input-output behavior cannot be the result of a unitary Schrodinger equation by itself; it requires that we assume some kind of stochastic noise in the polarizer itself. But modern ρQED also includes lots of work on "master equations," equations for describing what happens to density matrices inside of solid objects. They are not unitary over Fock-Hilbert space; they are usually written in "Lindblad form," which makes them linear in the density matrix. 

So all of that is ρQED. My modified version, MQED, still assumes that the state of the cosmos at time t is defined by the wave function ψ. It still assumes that the cosmos is governed by the same Schrodinger equation. The underltying dynamics of the cosmos are still unitary The only difference lies in how measurement devices like polarizers are modelled. MQED requires that ALL passive macroscopic objects (objects which do not channel free energy from some source other than the light or electricity we are modeling explicitly) have a time-symmetric stochastic model. That means that complicated experiments or devices, which involve more than one macroscopic object, must be modeled as a kind of MARKOV RANDOM FIELD over time, rather than a Markov process. 

In theory, this is a bit more complicated than ρQED. However, in practice, the predictions of MQED are easier to calculate than the predictions of ρQED for many experiments, like the classic experiments with entangled photons. MQED predicts that we can use a simple lumped input-output analysis to predict those experiments, without even using wave functions at all. 

I have a new paper in draft which gives a nice example of this, with supporting data, but for now I must hold it in confidence, for many reasons (not least of them the terrible political sensitivities and activist groups emerging in the world lately). 

Comments on Zen Buddhism

Like all great religions on this backwards little planet we live on, Zen Buddhism is a mixed bag. Some of its practices and stories certainly would deserve a place of honor (albeit with caveats in some cases) in any really rational, effective system for human spiritual development for the whole earth. Perhaps the prayer Sean mentioned would fit there, or perhaps not; I don't know. 

But there are also things to watch out for, and even some false things propagated for the benefit of folks in power, as with all great world religions. 

For example, some bits of history. At least in China, they tell me that Zen Buddhism is a missionary development of Chan Buddhism (which fits everything I have seen), which was promulgated in the first place from the Shao Lin Monestary. In fact, I do remember American Zen guys talking about Bodhidharma who ... whatever. Shao Lin has pushed very hard for political support in China, arguing that this is the one branch of Buddhism which truly originated in China -- a national treasure. But others in China note how the leader has used it as a great cash cow, with lots of questionable ways to hype the money making. Great theatrics, but..? From an article in the great magazine Tricycle, I learned how the real origins were in a debate, from which the losing side emigrated in disgrace to China. (I have names and dates deep in my notes.) 

So far as I know, there are three really serious dominant strands of Buddhism to be found in China today -- Tibetan, Chan and "Vatican" (near Xian). The Tibetan has been a great embarrassment to the current government, which is why there seems to be more and more support for the "new Vatican of Buddhism" supported by the government (and various other vicissitudes I will spare you for now). I am grateful to have had a chance to experience all three. 

A couple of years ago, Tricycle reported a great structured debate between the leading teachers of the two main strands of Buddhism active in the US today -- Tibetan and Zen. The story was written by a Zen guy, who was delighted that "his guy" won the luck of the draw, to have the last word. By the rules, each debater got to summarize his position in one or two words in the end. The Tibetan summarized it as "mindfulness". The Zen summarized "no mind." The reporter conveyed a very self-satisfied clever chortle, but in my view this really clarified which one is sane and which is ultimately misguided nihilism. 

I also can't help thinking back to a quiet little tea ceremony in Nara, Japan, overlooking the ;place where Buddhism came to Japan. Our hostess said, "yes, here is where they came to us saying we should learn to be peaceful and give up our old Shinto ways. The monks with blue hats came, saying this, and the monks with yellow hats said the same thing. Then on that hill, we saw them killing each other in the most dishonorable bloody fight we ever saw." 

But Buddhist groups in Japan have since had some degree of peaceful combination, and there are esoteric groups in the high mountains which are not Zen but are well grounded.

I remember when a cousin of mine working for Paul Allen mentioned he was a Zen Buddhist, and asked me what Quakers do. "Well, there is no doctrine, really. The core foundation for traditional (FGC) Quakers is practice. The practice is a quiet group meditation every week, and and imperative that we all try to listen and listen to our own individual conscience." He had a wistful look and said "that's exactly what we say we are doing, but somehow not fighting over doctrine is hard..." 

Whatever.

Perhaps I should have mentioned instead what some of the specific treasures are from Zen, but not today. This is too long as is. Symptom of a day when I worry a lot about ways to get into trouble in other areas (like what the Chinese military acts on in quantum technology). 

Best of luck,

     Paul 

What happens if experiments do NOT allow even quantum realism?

First, I accept Hal’s suggestion, seconded by Chris, that I should use the word “ultraweirdism” to refer to any theory of how the cosmos works outside the families of theories I have called “Einsteinian realism” and “Fockian realism.” Ordinary quantum dynamics, as in mainstream Fock space, is already weird enough; something weirder than that should better be called “ultraweird” than “weird.” Since I personally attribute about 1/3 probability to each of the three main possibilities, I should pay more attention to ultraweirdism than I have lately, just to keep a balance. Also, as Stan has hinted, a careful analysis of ultraweird possibilities may be relevant even to an Einsteinian or Fockian cosmos.

That really came home to me a few weeks ago when my old friend Yeshua, who is starting up one of the experiments, stressed: “you should let the chips fall where they may.” Logically, if the relevant new experiments do NOT support time-symmetric statistics as I defined it in my IJTP paper (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf), that would imply that Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism are both false. For a few days it seemed as if it MIGHT come out that way, raising the question of what the alternatives might be.
(For a slightly more technical version of this, see https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2018/12/is-idea-of-objective-reality-still.html.)

One major difficulty with ultraweirdism (which does not disprove it!) is that there are so many, many possibilities. Most of those in the literature come from biased sources down through the ages, limited in many ways, usually not internally consistent or truly coherent. (Some are collections of words which do not really answer crucial questions about how it works and what it really means for us.) If I were forced to accept ultraweirdism, there are only two possibilities which I personally (in my ignorance) would look more into now: (1) the Great Mind or Idealism idea, the idea that the greater cosmos is … something like a dream generating system..; and (2) the Subset idea, the idea that everything we experience (in “Process 2”) is just a subset, a kind of emergent subset, of the larger true cosmos. Ultraweirdism 1 is certainly similar in spirit to what Deepak Chopra, many Buddhists and many Cabbalists (and others) have been saying. Certainly I remember the time when Roger Penrose, at a younger age, standing next to Karl Pribram, echoed the idea that “the universe feels more like a Great Mind than a Great Machine … so what is the mathematics of mind?” Since I think I know something about the mathematics of mind, and have also had lots of first person experience with incredibly weird things, I have wondered about the great Mind possibility for some time, mostly not pushing too hard or getting very far… but a week or two ago after the email from Yeshua, I tried to push just a little further.

When I visited Nepal last year, there were at least two really seriously weird experiences in Kathmandu, one of which shook me up, enough that I was very grateful to Bhakti Muni for helping calm me down more than I was able to on my own (though I did try very hard, with SOME degree of success). The next stop was to the shrine of the sleeping/dreaming Vishnu, said to be dreaming up the entire universe or cosmos. That image also comes to mind when I think of Great Mind ideas, though of course I do not attach all the mythology to it. But even when I hold onto Einsteinian realism, I do respect the reality of Jungian archetypes as objects in the local “great mind” of the noosphere of our little solar system. So I was grateful to accept a little help from Vishnu as well as Muni that day.

The most .. traditional… forms of the Great Mind cosmos idea… would say that our experiences of “Samadhi” (as defined by high Japanese esoteric Buddhism) are not JUST connections to the local noosphere (and its connections), but also, if elevated enough, to the Great Mind of the cosmos itself, dreaming up everything which exists, with power to make and unmake our local physical realities more than any mere dark matter could. Ultraweird enough?

I can imagine some folks saying, “Wait a minute. Would verification of the Born rule, asymmetric as it is, imply stuff as weird as this?” That reminds me of a poem which my girl friend in high school once showed me: if one little pebble in your back yard suddenly just shot up into the air, with no magnets or anything else to explain it, would you just say “Oh THAT little pebble happened to feel like jumping up that morning?” I forget how the poet explained it… but the point is, when something clear and simple substantially violated everything you thought you knew about how things work (“Process 2” as Henry or Grundlagen would say), … logically it is like Pandora’s box. Ignoring it is like ignoring climate change, but worse.

Great Mind people might say: “You are not discovering the laws of physics with your experiments. You are just making them up as you go. It’s really just a contest of which dream is stronger. Even if realism works in your experiments, all it proves is that you are a stronger dreamer. You shouldn’t consider it as proof that realism is true.” So now, as new more definite data appears supporting realism, I remember that.

During the 2016 elections, I remember when a hard core math/physics friend said to me: “I used to just laugh at those theories that life is just a dream. But now when I look at the TV news… it seems more and more real as a possibility… hard to avoid… this can’t really be real. And is the dreamer crazy now?”

This leads into one of the difficulties with the Great Mind idea. Back in the early 70’s, I remember reading one of the canonical kabbalah texts while standing up in a local bookstore. Their theory was that there is just One Great Mind, but that it fragmented long ago into the little pieces or sparks like us. Our mission, it said, is to bring the sparks together again, and unify our mind. So, looking at this idea objectively, it seems to say that a lonely mind floating around in sensory deprivation (no external stimuli) just fragmented into pieces, as one would expect, and that the most we can achieve is to put it back to that original state of emptiness and loneliness. A beautiful metaphor, useful in its way, but clearly not a solid enough foundation for those who really build on their beliefs. (I’d say that Zen has similar problems.)

More compelling to me was a book called What Dreams May Come, by Matheson, which was later made into a movie with Robin Williams. I have the impression that it reflected a Swedenborgian school of thought, which did regard our mundane world as a subset of a larger astral plane, such that the dreamlike nature is more visible in other parts of this larger cosmos. A key message was that dreaming good dreams leads to good outcomes (outcomes we like), and dreaming bad dreams can produce something like a living hell. (It is interesting that Donald Trump really is a sincere believer in positive thinking, but it seems he has not yet mastered the art of how to avoid a living hell.) Many years ago, I gave a friend a copy of Seeing With the Mind’s (Eye? I?), by Samuels, a beautiful color paperback which I found for only $10, which gets very deep into the first person issues of visualization and positive visualization: not just Belief in dreams but praxis. And of course, LaBerge’s book Lucid Dreaming is solid science and relevant.

But: how is it possible to engage with the realities of human life as it is today and still engage in thinking which is both realistic and positive? In truth, this is the number one struggle I face in my own life lately. Everything else does seem to be part of that.

Years ago, when I tried to put Matheson’s ideas on a more precise, mathematical footing, it pointed toward certain equations by Kohonen. But there was a very disturbing… arbitrary quality to it, which was not entirely convincing.

More recently, in the great movie Inception, I saw clues both about how we as people might test ultraweirdism versus (weird) realism and about a few of the real practical challenges before us on this planet right now.

But as Stan has hinted, testing is hard, since a careful review of Lagrangian mathematics does allow for a whole lot of weirdism. I suppose that it is more important that we figure out how to adapt to the phenomena themselves, wherever they may come from. 

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

Addendum: one important practical point about positive visualization. Years ago, I had a lot of contact with Barbara Marx Hubbard, who accomplished a number of very solid and real things, and also taught people a lot about positive visualization. Some would summarize: "Be VERY CLEAR about what you want, but don't worry about HOW." That works fine for some managers, who have the right kind of people working for them, but SOMEWHERE the "HOW" must also be addressed. In the present state of the earth, competence in visualizing HOW in a coherent viable way is ALSO a crucial ingredient.  Lack of it may well result in extinction of the species. 

Is the idea of objective reality still tenable as Everett and Deutsch have claimed?

Many people were very excited when Heisenberg invited a well-known guru to speak about the nature of reality in his place. Ayn Rand and VI Lenin  both assailed the risks of what could happen if people totally gave up on the idea of objective reality, but most physicists shrugged their shoulders and followed Heisenberg, even as some fundamentalist gurus went wild with joy. Later, three great physicists -- Everett, Wheeler and David Deutsch (who won the Dirac award for inventing the new paradigm of universal quantum Turing machine) -- argued that we can restore the concept of objective reality in physics, so long as we accept that we live in a cosmos of quantum reality, a Fock space instead of Einstein's type of Minkowski space. 

BUT IS QUANTUM REALITY, PHYSICS WITHOUT OBSERVERS, CONSISTENT WITH EXPERIMENT?

It was consistent a few weeks ago. The evidence up until then was that it is. But we don't yet know; the experiments are not yet definitive... and we really don't know.

So here is what I sent a few days ago to a kind of discussion group concerned about such issues and their larger implications about a week ago....

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


It is curious how hard it is to discuss issues other than personal ego or group identities, in all kinds of human discussions. For example, I tend to regard debates about extensions of monism as continuations of ancient debates, similar to Protestants versis Catholics or liberals versus conservatives -- inherently fuzzy stuff since it is about group definitions and the fuzzy semantics (semiotics?) they entail. Can we break out of that?

So, first, I wonder where people on this list stand on an issue I have posed as "realism (Einsteinian or Fockian) vfrsus weirdism"?? 

Am I the only person on this list who feels that the probability is more than 50% that Einsteinian or Fockian realism are the ultimate truth of how things work underneath in our entire cosmos?

Sometimes, when Deepak Chopra complains about "physicalism," maybe what he really means to complain about is Einsteinian or Fockian realism. I do not like his description of what people like me believe, and we do have a right to speak for ourselves. It is better described as "mathematicalism" than "physicalism." 

Physics proper demands that we seek a VERY specific, well-defined theory, but for this list we need to define FAMILIES or  CATEGORIES or sets of theory. For example, there are many possible theories consistent with special relativity; in a way, special relativity is not a theory, but a FAMILY of theories. 

So let me define "Einsteinian realism" here as the theory that EVERYTHING which really exists in our cosmos and our lives is some kind of pattern or form of a finite number of underlying force fields, defined over a finite dimensional mathematical manifold, governed by deterministic local differential equations, like the usual Lagrange-Euler or Hamiltonian equations or metric equations extending Einstein's work on general relativity. (Really, though, I like to think about "extended Einsteinian realism" where it may be local stochastic differential equations). 

Am I the only person on this list who believes there is a serious possibility that Einsteinian realism may be the true "law of everything," and that life and consciousness may all be just emergent phenomena which result from the operation of the underlying differential equations?

And, by the way, is Einstein realism itself a form of monism?

In truth, I used to believe Einsteinian realism with more than 50% personal subjective probability. As did De Broglie and even Bohm, at least before ... whatever.

Psychic phenomena are not really a problem for Einsteinian realism, as I have discussed often enough.

But -- macroscopic Schrodinger cats are another matter. The deeper I get into that... I now tell myself, 1/3 probability for Einsteinian realism, 1/3 for Fockian realism. 

And 1/3 for "something very different," a very heterogeneous collection of possibilities which I call "weirdism." Crudely, Einsteinian realism is the conservative/reactionary position, Fockian realism 

the real proper mainstream, and "weirdism" a collection of the left, the idealism, off-beat mathematical concepts, and any of the crazy things which could actually mean something if properly re-examined.

Fockian realism is just as hard core mathematical as Einsteinian realism, except that it postulates an infinite dimensional cosmos containing "parallel universes" as in macroscopic Schrodinger cats (and even Schrodinger planets). The Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of quantum field theory is just one example of a theory in this category/family/set of theories. Everett's PhD thesis, the real birth of these ideas (long before some Bohmians reinvented a Rube Goldberg convoluted version of the same idea), was crystal clear in its commitment to hard core realism. 

Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism BOTH agree that "measurement processes" are not magical. The operation of measurement devices is just one more collection of emergent phenomena.

But is realism (Einsteinian or Fockian) true in the end? 

Conventional wisdom says that the Bell experiments conclusively disprove, empirically, the possibility that Einsteinian realism might be true. I was very disappointed yesterday to see a Scientific American article asserting that "all the loopholes have been closed." They haven't been. Back in 1988, in the same book edited by Menas Kafatos where Zielinger first announced the idea of GHZ states and GHZ experiments, I had a chapter "Bell's Theorem: the forgotten loophole." The article I saw yesterday still forgot it. 

I have proposed three sets of quantum optics experiments by now to TEST that loophole -- and more precisely to test whether objects like polarizers obey time-symmetric statistics or the old Born rule. 

Einsteinian realism and Fockian realism BOTH imply that polarizers should obey time-symmetric statistics. If the new experiments come out one way, they tell us that Bell experiments are not evidence against Einsteinian realism. But if they come out the other way, they disprove NOT ONLY Einsteinian realism but Fockian realism as well!!! (That's the core point in my IJTP paper in 2008 or 2009.) 

A sane, honest follower of the scientific method (first person or third person) must be prepared to learn from these experiments, and push them very hard to be sure of what they say and not rest until all aspects are clear. As my friend Yeshua says, to "let the chips fall as they may." 

A few months ago, we got back the first citeable results on one of the three streams of experiment, which I posted at researchgate and submitted for publication. We are still waiting to hear back. Given the realities of politics in science, who knows? But the scientific method would clearly demand full publication of the status of this important issue. The results so far do tend to favor realism.

But in the meantime, I have heard from two other groups with empirical results. Initially, I had to face the question: WHAT IF we really are compelled to give into weirdism? HOW could we even learn to live with something so fuzzy, so ill-defined? ( But conversely: even realism implies a lot of weird stuff we still need to learn to adapt to!!!) Many aspects of our planet today do resonate with weirdism. That IS a major part of our first person empirical reality, which keeps growing weirder and weirder every week for me. Even when I say the probability of weirdism being true is 1/3, that already implies I should try harder to make real sense of weirdism -- and  not by using it as an excuse to get hallucinogenic like a lot of folks who embrace weirdism basically because they want an excuse to go nuts. 

But the latest data strongly supports realism. Unfortunately, there is the nasty aspect of political realism, the many strait jackets in our world forbidding full open communication of everything, yea unto abuse of IT to put strait jackets even on the kinds of conversations which were once open and free in the US. Maybe I will be able to say more in a few weeks, or maybe not.

What IF weirdism should be true?

I don't spend a lot of time studying the nice placebo things which many "teachers" proliferate, to try to calm people down. Sure, we all need to "calm, relax" at times but that is a recipe for suicide if taken too far as a complete philosophy. (Hypocrisy and subsapience is what saves the lives of many people who Believe crazy things.) Where is the content, beyond realism?

I do often think about two old movies -- "Inception" and "What Dreams may come." Possibly important EVEN IF realism is the ultimate truth, but certainly important if not. What do they REALLY point to?

Not to a bunch of empty words, but what?

Kelly's departure and how psychic stuff makes me less suspicious in a way

Zingers keep coming every week these days. 

First, Putin gratuitously screws the people of Ukraine, in a way he simply would not do if he really cared about the people (or even the Russian economy) or if he shared Trump's vision of partnership to protect Christendom from the Global Third Caliphate forces (e.g. Moslem Brotherhood, which Prince Mohammed knows about better than the others do). Then he decides to try for a new Cuban Missile kind of crisis, even more  bizarre. And then finally Russian media announce that Trump is indeed their obedient court jester/janitor whom they are confident will either do nothing or will echo whatever party line they choose for him. God was that an umpleasant scene!
It raised the question: is Trump REALLY the terrified obedient janitor/jester they are claiming he is, or is he ultrasensitive to such an extreme (and stupid!) personal insult? (WHY insult him that way?)

Silence for a short time. Canceling of a meeting at G20, leaving the question open. Announcement of US warship OPTION  to go to Black Sea, again leaving the question open. 

When the next news was Kelly resigning, I couldn't help wondering: is THIS the answer? Did Kelly, a military man, really want to send those ships, quietly but visibly and in strength, and was this the last straw for him?
(I still would like to see US-Russian partnership, and keep the war hawks under control, but there are times when good fences make good neighbors.) I was starting to wonder...

==========

But the, since I have "let it all hang out" in this blog (except for some ultradangerous stuff, like technical nuclear stuff)... let me mention the "assumption dream" I had last night. (Searching on "assumption dream" in this blog gives some background.) On the one hand, I still believe in hard core realism more than the vast majority of people who know about quantum mechanics; my previous post should be clear on that. But I also see no basic conflict between realism and the reality of psychic phenomena, which I found inescapable long ago in my personal life. 

Long ago, I mentioned in this blog that something odd started happening to me. I regularly experienced "assumption dreams" where I experienced life from the viewpoint of Donald Trump. I would wake up and remember what he was thinking and feeling, sometimes picking up things I really could not get from any news stories before the dream. When we traveled out of the US for the past three months, it was a different atmosphere; on facebook, I gave pictures AND EXPLANATIONS in text "information" with the pictures, describing the spiritual gateways which put me in a different place, and frankly raised the overall level of happiness for three months.  But here we are again.

Almost all dreams are a mix of core thoughts accompanied by "fill in" from one's own brain. (Same with the book of revelations.) After years and years of this, I know how it works  both subjectively and in mathematical models of the cortico-thalamic loops supported by empirical data. (Look up Werbos and Davis at scholar.google.com.)
In this dream... the dominant scene at the end focused on my younger daughter Maia, who has a certain kind of radiance (as does Maia). But there was this forceful unpleasant guy who first tried to stop her from saving us ..
and when that failed, drew her into a kind of horrible room where he pulled a switch on her, and locked her into another role... she could hardly even talk after that... people could hardly hear her.. but she could talk just a little bit to a younger guy in the Trump family. (My dreaming mind was puzzled why Maia wanted to talk to a guy who very visibly was a member of the Trump family...)  

Well, that's very consistent with what I see this morning in the New York Times story. (The CNN story I saw yesterday was much vaguer, and left more wondering about other possible explanations. CNN often falls into easy ungrounded explanations which don't fit a more complete story. Also, I only watched a few minutes of CNN yesterday anyway,) 

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

All for now.

Best of luck to us all... and especially to those living around the Black Sea.

By the way, I was glad to hear that the rate of H2S formation in the Black Sea has probably actually reduced lately. But I do not know about accumulation effects, one way or another. And I have read that eddies right by Sevastopol make out gassing hard to predict even now. I do hope we won't need Moses kinds of stuff to prevengt even worse,  but that is certainly way above my pay grade as a mere watcher, 

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Since I have not posted much about the technical details of astral versus assumption dreams for awhile, I should add a note. I certainly do not believe that either type of dream or experience is the highest state of consciousness we can normally experience. I am happy to hear that MIT Media Lab has developed ways to follow up on LaBerge's work on "lucid dreams," for example, where one can wake to a fuller consciousness of the fact that one is IN a dream. (I have such a vivid memory of a night when I was twelve, experiencing that...). But I find it is a good habit to wake gently from an astral or assumption dream, not just running for coffee, but hanging on to the threads while in full wakeful consciousness. In fact, I try to make it a habit to stay in bed for awhile, and really think about many things, and make connections as well. I once thought of this as my "cosmic consciousness" period, but later, in discussions with vedantists and yogins and such, I learned that those words have been taken by stuff I view as silly (like the phlogiston theory of mind); it would be more accurate to use the word "samadhi" in the particular version used by esoteric Japanese Buddhists up in some mountains. It's really basically just about a kind of focus and clarity, and ability to shift focus. 

For those of us who have had real experience with that state, it can feel a bit depressing sometimes in the evening after a few margaritas (not every day!!!) to be asked a question, and suddenly to realize how easy it would be to answer earlier in the day  but how hard at the time. (Still, good things do come out at such times when they also involve contact with other people.) It is natural to ask: is it possible to continue in that state for more than just a few minutes in the early morning or whenever? Some people focus their entire lives on trying to prolong that state. But... others just play by ear.