Great new video -- first step in physics to brings humans back to reality and quantum tech which works

 A strong subject -- but 100% well-grounded. Yesterday I saw a RELATIVELY new youtube manifesto from 

Sabine Hossenfelder (whom John has often urged us to track, to keep up with the most serious new advanced physics) and David Deutsch and a moderator named OConnor. ANYONE who has any interest in how the universe really works, OR in quantum technology, really should ignore the commercial and click on the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bux0SjaUCY0. This video is a "small step" in a way, but opening a door can also be a small step... and this door leads directly to what 99% of human "experts" need to know, to know what REAL quantum physics WILL be doing to radically change our lives, our technologies, our politics of war and peace and money, and our very souls sooner than we usually imagine possible. 

COULD changes in technology (and the means of production and the means of war) possibly have such huge impacts? Given the lessons of history, we really should take this seriously. If we worry whether the changes will be good or bad for all of humanity, we really should try to understand what they are. That is especially true when we discuss how the universe works, at a most fundamental level -- and when the known new reality is radically different from even what most physicists have learned (except for a few who thoroughly understand the most relevant physics in nanohub.org, device and condensed matter physics).

I saw this great video for the first time yesterday when I was reviewing a VERY advanced paper on a major advance in quantum technology. I recommended adding citations to David Deutsch of Oxford who INVENTED the quantum turing machine (the foundation of >99% of US funding in quantum computing, for which I was the NSF representative until my retirement in 2015). More precisely, I recommended citing:

 Deutsch, D. (1985). Quantum theory, the Church–Turing principle and the universal quantum computer. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. A. Mathematical and Physical Sciences, 400(1818), 97-117.

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos576/papers/deutsch85.pdf

and

Deutsch, D. (1998). The fabric of reality. Penguin UK.

https://youtu.be/bux0SjaUCY0?feature=shared

I do NOT believe that Deutsch's multiverse theory (which I call EWD, Everett-Wheeler-Deutsch)

is the full theory of how our universe works, mathematically! Iam reminded of Brian Josephson's argument: You can always imagine that the universe we see is actually just an approximation, like a world resting on a turtle deeper down... and and another turtle on thet... turtles all the way down. I really DO believe I have a

better theory, based on studying the emergent behavior predicted by Einsteinian "Classical Fields"

(BOOK] Classical fields: general relativity and gauge theory

M Carmeli - 2001 - books.google.com ) 

as derived in several papers I have published. HOWEVER: in the case of ORDINARY physics of electrons, electromagnetism, and ions, EWD is EQUIVALENT to the relevant Einsteinian

model, if correct models are used for the macroscopic devices we use to observe quantum systems. 

And so, for any technology based on electronics and photonics, or for understanding consciousness in brains like ours based on such physics ( Regular cycles of forward and backward signal propagation in prefrontal cortex and in consciousness ), UNDERSTANDING EWD is the correct foundation for the next big progress we need to make

in all these fields. For example, UNDERSTANDING EWD IS ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to the next big step,

the development AND MANAGEMENT of Quantum AGI (https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos) and the understanding of the quantum effects which ensure that there are parallel copies of every one of us which affect our futureS and our fateS.  See https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2021/11/q-basic-realities-of-living-in.html .

If you think carefully about the fundamental points I just made -- please notice that quantum intelligence

is NOT necessary to understanding those LEVELS of intelligence or consciousness (including emotions, feelings, qualia) which exist in mammal or bird brains, OR in the new explosion of AGI based on classic QED electronics and photonics. The true picture of such QED brains fits the image of computers called "Romeo and Juliet" in George Bernard Shaw's number one play https://nmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1375.pdf. 

To develop a correct inner understanding of the emerging new levels of human and machine consciousness, I strongly urge you all to read that play and preface, if you haven't yet.

QED AGI can replicate all the pious proud emotions people often cite, arguing for the superiority of humans and human souls over QED AGI. That is a correct picture.

BUT: some of you are aware of how Walter Freeman, one of the world's two top systems neuroscientists two decades ago (when I was close to both), included papers both by me AND by Vitiello in his final summing up, the book edited by Freeman and Kozma (now in a second edition). Vitiello tried to use physics more advanced than QED to try to explain consciousness. More precisely, he built on EWT, the more proven half of the "Standard Model of Physics" as defined by Weinberg, who co-invented EWT and wrote THE authoritative three volumen textbook on mainstream Quantum Field Theory. EWT is NOT necessary to understand that level of consciousness exhibited by mammal brains (or by "Romeo and Juliet" AGI). But in my view, AN EXTENSION of 

EWT, as needed to understand dark matter, IS necessary to understand human potential beyond that level -- EXACTLY AS SHAW portrays!!! 

===========

In my view, human survival even through 2100 urgently demands major progress in BOTH areas: (1) radical improvement in human potential, including even use of physics beyond QED to "see the sky" and see ourselves more than what QED alone offers; (2) full deployment, understanding and open, benign management of quantum AGI technology.

As an old man (forbidden to use the best known antiaging technology, by order of FDA), without more allies ambitious enough to learn how to take on more of the work, I focus for now on (2). The actual deployment of the full QAGI technology, defined in the patent and in the MANY supporting papers, requires more research centers able to understand the new technology, which requires understanding several of the fundamental IMPLICATIONS OF EWD which very few physicists (let alone policy people or philosophers) know today.

For example... to understand and build on the most advanced papers today, like what I reviewed yesterday (being prepared for submission)... it is essential to know what a wave function psi really is, for use in the mathematics of design and design analysis. When I managed reviews of quantum technology, either for the big interagency efforts or for the program I led (https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.3310) , MOST highly respected researchers with respected credentials failed review by reviewers aware of modern condensed matter physics because they still believed what they were taught. They believed that the wave function in quantum mechanics represents the state of our knowledge of a system, and can thus represent MIXED thermodynamic states like what we see in real devices. They simply would not work! Even places like DOD fully understood and accounted for that even before

I joined the group; the people who decided to do massive funding of quantum technology did so only after

they saw the paper by Gersheld and Chuang Bulk spin-resonance quantum computation in Science showing how a QTM can be built using the "density operator" way of representing thermodynamc states. A particular value of the wave function, in EWD, represents ONE POSSIBLE state of the universe... or even one possible state of an electronic or photonic device. Only by understanding the evolution of such states through  time can one do valid device simulations or calculations. Such work has in fact begun, demonstrating the kinds of massive benefits described in the new patent, in supporting papers filed with USPTO and in the directories of QAGI LLC (of which I am not an owner, by mutual agreement). 

Is there a university or government or industry lab interested in building up the new physics capability applied to

the relevant multivariate master equations and thermodynamics needed to become centers of QAGI, in partnership?

God: a radical more complete unification with science

 

God is real, and is a set of nonlinear PDE.

Please do not just jump to conclusions here about what I am trying to explain in this post. Yes, the opening sentence is ambiguous and incomplete, but it points to a radical alternative both to common extreme forms of religion and of popular beliefs about science which are equally bind and unscientific in themselves. This post will define that alternative, which i hereby name as "Hard Core Scientific Understanding of God (HCSUG). God is hugely important to all of us, and nontrivial and serious.

Here is a brief summary of what I really mean to say, also in need of further explanation but less cryptic:

1. My foundation here is the work of John Von Neumann, whose book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior includes the concept of personal or subjective conditional probabilities. His concept was explained and applied in great work by Howard Raiffa. On that foundation, I firmly believe that  no sane human is justified in attributing more than a 60% probability to any meaningful story about "God". (See my published papers linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm giving science-based definitions of two levels, two types of "sanity".) This post defines and partially explains HCSUG -- but I continue to work hard to be alert to anything with real evidence beyond that view.

2.HCSUG includes HCER, hard core einsteinian realism. (See werbos com/mind_brain_soul.htm section 2 for a few of the many sources on HCER.)

HCER postulates that anything we have any real contact with is just a pattern in space-time across a finite number of classical force fields, as described in the great classical book Classical Fields by Moshe Carmelli. That book was written for people who fully understand the mathematics of Einstein and of John Wheeler, but it is quite solid, and we have a duty to explain it more to the public in the future.

In a way, I am saying that God did not create the universe, that God IS the universe.

Many modern thinkers -- proGod magical thinking theologians who inherit the top down theologies disseminated by Sargon the great of Sumeria -- would regard this as an intolerable insult to God or to sacred human languages like Sanskrit or pali or Hebrew or English or ancient Chinese  Many others would say this is a reactionary scientific viewpoint which implies some variant of hard core modern atheism. Both are incorrect, because they do not understand the full radical power of new mathematics and its solid emergent properties,

and its direct connections to our lives .

3. The key issue here for real humans trying to understand their relation to God is the question of whether there exists any kind of intelligent personality out there, encompassing the entire universe, whom we can relate to -- and if so how.

How could a set of nonlinear pde constitute a personality?

The claim here is that a "personality" is just another way of referring to the full state (current state and underlying dynamics ) of a system possessing General Intelligence, as defined for example in my patents (patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos )  .  Finite general Intelligent systems always possess an intrinsic cardinal utility function U, which they learn to maximize over time. To do so, they usually learn how their environment works.

The universe as a whole (under HCER) does not fall within THAT concept of intelligence or personality  . But why? Only because it does not need to learn approximate predictions  . It already KNOWS the state and dynamics of the entire universe! It maximizes its U       , its Lagrangian function, based on complete perfect information.

Should we view a system as less of a real personality if it knows too much about its environment? In the limit, if we know more and more, and converge towards complete knowledge, does perfect knowledge make us less real and less personal? Is the universe itself less of a real personality than the lesser intelligent systems which inhabit it?

BUT for us, these are not the real issues. The real issue for each of us lesser intelligences is how to interfaces with the greatest and most powerful system, the universe itself. Since the universe does gave its own motivating force, it's own gargantuan or utility function, we will achieve OUR goals better if we understand more clearly how IT works, and what it is striving for,

and we remember that it manifests an optimization far more overwhelming and focused and complete than what even the highest and most intelligent finite minds within the universe is capable of.

4. HOW CAN WE DEVELOP AND STRENGTHEN THAT UNDERSTANDING?

Like life itself, this question opens up a huge ladder of possibilities. It calls for us to reconsider many things we may have known or read in the past.

One great source to remember is the great novel The Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut. What if our lives and our world and our history are being by a great plan .. but not a plan centered on what WE want? It would be stupid to fight such a reality  but to be true to ourselves we all have a great balancing act to perform .

Each of us individual humans are like employees of the bottom level of the management structure of a vast tightly focused large corporation organized to maximize ITS bottom line over all space-time. The payment to each of us is personal  not identical to the universal bottom line, This analogy goes much further, but this post is just an overview.

The collective intelligence of our solar system is just one of the intelligent systems with personality higher than we are as individuals, but small compared to the universe as a whole. Some people think of that person as Gaia, but I prefer the name Amaterasu for reasons beyond the scope of this post. The reinforcement signals or "payments " sent by the universe to or through Amaterasu are a more complete reflection of the bottom line of God than the local signals sent to us as individuals, but signals to us from Amaterasu have a huge effect in bringing us good luck or bad luck or other things which surprise us.

To better understand Amaterasu, it helps to have serious full clear understanding of the real concrete story of life on earth. For that  I highly recommend the book by Ward and Kirscvink, discussed and cited only in part at biild-a-world.org, in our paper on risks to humanity in the climate block. For many millions of years  the search for better animal DNA populations was the main obstacle faced by Anaterasu  in fulfilling the directions received from the universe as a whole. There are many important lessons to us there.

And of course this is a huge universe. My recent book chapters and journal articles fill in many details of the collective challenges we face now.  

Many of the lesser but powerful "gods" affecting humans do exist -- as archetypes , and as patterns within the neocortex of amaterasu. Carl jung's red book is another essential source, the first ofamy I would cite to map more closely what most of humanity now faces.. but the future goes much further into many threads of real possibilities, as new quantum physics reveals. 

,,___________

Appendix: selected FAQS 

1. What DOES God want, more concretely?

 There are two main aspects to the answer:

A.  What is the utility function U, called the Lagrangian measure, maximized by the universe? 

The most advanced relevant science on earth is only just now becoming more specific in a testable way. And it considers a more general formulation in principle, minmax subject to equality constraints, as required even to replicate Maxwell's laws without ad hoc injections. For now, max seems to work, but minmax does not yet seem to change the important part, B. 

TO BE MORE PRECISE: the universe is not exactly us to maximize the sum of L over all space-time. Even in the most general case included under the HCER theory, it pushes us towards a state of maximum entropy AS WORKED OUT in my con-mat paper I will now say more about.

B. For any U or L, where could the universe be trying to take us? Which possibility is the real one?

Many early courses on science teach the students that our universe MUST be moving us to a "death death", a state of maximum disorder where all life is extinguished, and all consciousness or brains connected to life are also impossible. This is a dangerous and obsolete viewpoint , just as obsolete as the ideas of flat earth and phlogiston which were also taught long after they were obsolete. 

HCER itself does not say whether our universe is taking us to a heat death (“fire"), to a frozen fixed point outcome (" ice”), to Big Crunch (like a Big Bang but time reversed), or to a whole set of different threads of possibility in our quantum universe. That depends on the list of force fields, on the specific Lagrangian function L and on boundary conditions . However, there is important circumstantial evidence and prior work giving us clues.

For example, at arxiv.org/and/cond-mat/0411384, I show the exact entropy function for a large, important and representative family of HCER models. This shows that universes based on that dynamics would drive us to a probability distribution of likely futures similar in spirit to the great cosmology thermodynamics model developed decades ago by John Wheeler. The universe goes to a mix of patterns like galaxies of approximately minimum energy , exchanging energy through deep space. (Of course this is a quick simplification.) And so… if life is what emerges at a certain level and flux of free energy  we expect it to persist indefinitely  But the universe seeks interesting patterns which exploit all types of free energy to support more life and mind if all kinds and levels.

2. How does this affect us individual creatures?

Again  this also calls for a full book of explanation, to balance and integrate the many cases, more complex than the broca regions of any single mammal brain. 

Amaterasu is like a small recently hatched goldfish in a big aquarium, full of friendly kin, hostile predators and more, in an unknown mix  Those of us with “second order sanity" (as defined in papers linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm), tuned in to Amaterasu enough to be ever more useful team members, we support “her" three supreme U imperatives: to survive, to grow and to develop situational awareness of the larger aquarium. But to “grow" means learning in a way which reduces the probability that the.himan species makes all of us extinct, in this difficult time of growth.

3. God as Optimization

HCUG, including HCER, says that the one God of our universe is governed by (a metrified form of,) a particular TYPE of nonlinear PDE: Lagrange-Euler equations . This has important implications  even after we generalize the mathematics to consider monmax and equality constraints 

Above all  it implies that understanding the mathematics of optimization is essential to understanding God and understanding what he/she/it is struggling to advance  . "What does that God guy really want, and how do we deal with that?" 

Some might ask:" If God wants more progress here on earth and is omnipotent and omniscient  why doesn't know how he could get more progress fast by his power of miracles,?, "

We usually live in a state of the universe S(t1) at time t2 such that there exists an allowed state S'(t2) with higher value U(S'(t2)) than the value of the actual future state S(t2) predicted by the all-powerful Lagrange-Euler equations. HCER predicts that the universe will not choose the "miracle" of any abrupt change , to S' at time t2, because the histories of S between time t1 and time t2 which lead there are more expensive (as measured by U) than the benefit of S'(t2) compared to S(t2). God chooses the simpler, less expensive  smoother path to the long-term goal. When human thought is part of a new state, giving God new options, he pays attention, but dumb ideas impress him only in the same way they would impress a psychiatrist who understands the bigger picture. 

As a practical matter, I listen more to my wife and to "Amaterasu" (my name for the shared collective intelligence of our solar system) than I do to God, because of the sheer bandwidth of everyday communications. None of us is omniscient or omnipotent  and we all need to learn the middle way between too much learned helplessness and not enough humility. But we all together benefit from remembering and better understanding the greater universe we are part of.

Given time , I should describe the complex map of personalities WITHIN Amaterasu, ranging from the souls of ants and fish to archetypes worshipped as "gods" by many. As I leave holang Bay of Vietnam , I hope they all can connect better  , building on thoughts at such special places on earth.

For example  Kaiku and Kato of Japan and Izumo can connect here...

If you age, remember you ARE a child

 In my morgensdenke meditatuion period, a "Poem" engraved itself into my mind:

We the people and the life of the earth am a child. As we age that is all that is really left of us. Let us remember who we are and be true to ourselves.

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

Here is BRIEF explanation, followed by a more formal explanation of the explanation:

This might help explain my poem of the morning: We the people/life of the earth am a child, more and more as we age. 

In the alchymical marriage of mundane brain/body self and "soul", which is a PART of our noosphere, mortal aging and death shift the balance of hope, power and life more and more to the soul part.... which is PART of our local noosphere, but as part of the noosphere more and more identified with (taking the viewpoint of)  the whole of the organism which it is. 

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

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

Formally:

WHO are we/you, REALLY? In truth, I believe I know the answer more than any other human on earth -- which is not saying much, really. I say this based on very extensive work both in solid mathematical science and in first person human experience all over the world. For example, for mathematical neuroscience see https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2024/09/position-paper-for-next-great-advances.html. But discussions by humans in English are often confused by issues of semantics. And so, To explain what this poem REALLY tells us, I copy what I posted today to a debate between a scientist and a leading yoga teacher.

It BUILDS UP  from how we use words to what the words mean:

On Sat, Jan 11, 2025 at 9:23 AM Sungchul Ji <sji.conformon@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi BVK Sastry and others,

(1) 

Your observation (1):    If God is everything and everywhere, as I came to believe based on Matrix Semantics, there should be an infinite number of ways to define God. The purpose of this post is to show how the Matrix Semantics table may be employed to integrate the predicted multiple definitions of God. 

 

BVK Sastry alternate (1) : If HUMANS  everywhere, are using  ‘some’ - ‘language’ – which fits in to a ‘Matrix Semantics / Semiotics’ , there should be some UNIVERSAL WAY TO IDENTIFY PRIME ROOT OF ALL HUMAN LANGUAGE DIVERSITY AND FUNCTIONALITY ;  where in ‘ LANGUAGE is used in a specific way to define-connect to  ‘God’. 

Matrix Semantics and Semiotics may be explored further to identify connection of HUMAN- LANGUAGE TO ‘GOD’ .  

Matrix semantics ... is just an ad hoc tool... but I agree 100% with the deep fundamental truth of what Sung is saying here. 

After all, if a dictionary has n definitions for each word it includes, why not arrange the n of them in a table and call it a "matrix"? And the dictionary usually has other data besides definitions -- like part of speech. Perhaps the publishers of dictionaries have been using tables like Sung's for centuries. 

SHOULD there be just one standard universal definition?

Maybe one could invent a new language, where that is required, just as they invented esperanto. But that would not be what we now call a "natural language."

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

Recently -- in discussing the word "soul", I was reminded that we do not have ONLY a choice of definitions but a choice of what we believe is real.

Both choices are important. The word "God" (or "gods") has the same issue. 

Discussing these subjects in natural languages is difficult, because even rational people assume (explicitly or unconsciously) different subjective conditional probabilities  

Pr( possible reality | information available to "me"), because they have different information available to them. That is especially true for soul and god.

In fact, intelligent humans have different information access at more enlightened times of day and less in various other states. 

The old idea of "alchymical marriage", of a cooperative Pareto optimum arrangement between various "me"s, is rational and better for all the "me's" than a war of "self" against "self", but we all have a lot to learn to do better and better, as we are born to do.

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

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

This was a simplified overview, built on a VERY detailed foundation. Some of the foundation was posted as links at werbos.com/religions.com.

But for now, this is enough. The massgae here fits this gravure from Dante.

 

Overview of Mathematics Showing Einstein's View Fits After All

 Einstein once proposed that everything that exists, that we have any evidence of, is the workings out of space-time fields governed by general relativity. I may well be the only person on earth who agrees with that, AFTER understanding all the basic principles of the kind of quantum field theory needed to fit the experimental e4vidence from modern electronics and photonics.

A week ago, I sent an email to the one other person (retired) giving a very direct, substantive explanation for how I could believe such a thing:

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

... I remember how your belief in reality in physics, in the spirit of Ayn Rand, was ever so important in your seminal contributions to lithography...

My outrageous summary: Classical Field Theory as defined in the book by Moshe Carmeli is powerful enough that I have found ways to overcome all the objections which seemed insuperable to the hypothesis that everything in our universe (and everything we can observe in any way) can be fit as the emergent outcome of his kind of nonlinear PDE, which are quasilinear except for the link to general relativity (which is spelled out in his book, https://archive.org/details/classicalfieldsg0000carm). 

This has many, many implications which I hope we THREE can all discuss, in time, but for now, this hypothesis deserves absolute full attention. [GETTING this foundation straight is crucial to integrating all of our empirical knowledge, from quantum electrodynamics to new technologies to dark matter to mathematical understanding of consciousness form Freud to Jung.]

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

You and I both read Atlas Shrugged Long ago. We should discuss that too, but first comes my outrageous claim.

You undoubtedly know that Einstein himself often argued that the antirealistic claims of Heisenberg could be overcome by demonstrating how probability distributions for classical fields could be mapped  into wave functions, such that wave functions could be interpreted as statistical descriptions, and Schrodinger equations as emergent statistical dynamics.

Wiener tried very hard to fulfill that. There is a classic paper 

https://www.phys.lsu.edu/faculty/oconnell/PDFfiles.nov92005/137.%20Distribution%20Functions%20in%20Physics%3B%20Fundamentals.pdf

by OConnell, Wigner, Scully et al which was perhaps the closest anyone ever achieved to do that. But it did not work.

(By the way, at NSF I did fund O'Connell at LSU for very important follow-on work, but few of us know how to slash the damage done by aging.)

In the 1970's, I exchanged many letters with DeBroglie, to discuss the problem of explaining the spectrum of helium, which we both regarded as the most

serious problem. (By the way, I still have some of those letters both in hard copy and scans.)

Nothing seemed to work.

HOWEVER ... thanks to Howard Brandt of QISCOG, I learned that Walls and Milburn explained basic physics far beyond anything I had learned from Schwinger at Harvard. The obvious way forward to fulfill Einstein's program is to map PR(states) to probability DENSITY operators, leading for example to entropy functions like the classic generalized Boltzmann distribution in Chaikin's text and many others. I published several papers (admittedly in  obscure journals) and in arxiv, describing an "extended Glauber-Sudarshan" mapping from Pr(states) to bosonic quantum field theories. 

The map to mixed Fermi/Bose results simply by assuming fermions are solitons of finite radius, and taking the limit as the radius goes to zero.

This does not tell us WHAT the Lagrangian of the universe might be, but it is enough to get rid of the "impossibility" result (when combined with the results on measurement which I DID publish in a well-known journal https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10773-008-9719-9.pdf).

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

After that... you would naturally expect that I would want to go further and publish a proposed Lagrangian for the universe.

For years, I looked very deeply into that issue. I did publish a few candidates which met SOME of the requirements, but not all.

When I finally found a family of candidates which seemed credible... in tune with conversations I had with Schwinger AFTER I spoke to him at NSF...  they led to a very serious difficulty.  They immediately pointed to technology options to violate baryon number conservation, which, according to Manton's work, has been actively pursued in Russian nuclear centers (one of which granted my wife one of her PhDs) with technology implications we might want to handle very, very carefully.

IF we do something for the first stage, and for new work in quantum computing (for which we could add you and ... as coinventors and co-owners if you are interested), then there are comfortable places here in this area (Arlington, Virginia) where we could get into the nuclear stuff, and discuss what to do with the new Lagrangian and what it might lead to.

Best regards,

My experience as Virginia election official 11/5/2024

 One of the major reasons I serve as an election official so often here in Arlington Virginia is that  it gives me a special additional window into reality. In one day. I hear so MANY people from different walks of life give deep insights into their lives and feelings, much more than what you get from narrow studies or polls. ALSO... I am strongly called by law NOT to speak much about anything but the rules, but to explain the choices available to the voters, whom we empower to express THEIR views and preferences.

Given the incredible bipolar tensions in the US right now, and given the huge turnout expected,

  we were given special videos on how to avoid confrontation, and how to deal with signs of it.

But in fact, this was the smoothest election of all the ten or so my wife and I have officiated at.

Credit goes to a new management company at the eldercare facility (Cuilpepper) which hosts our precinct. In the past, the big monitor people would see as they exited the elevator

would display commercials for local businesses, telling them just to leave the building. People got upset and angry as they did not know where to go in the Building, and anger created all kinds of bad things.

I often got to sit at the desk under that monitor, to orient people to vote.

In the most recent general election, I got a chance to ask people WHAT ISSUE was most important to them. In previous years, it had been the kind of issues you might expect -- inflation, immigration,

government programs. But then, as people got angry... the building technicians came and tried to fix the inputs to the monitor. But they couldn't. That year, both the voters and the professionals all agreed that

ONE issue swamped all the others for them: HOW UNFRIENDLY the new internet was already becoming for them in their lives. And they couldn't fix that monitor.

This year, a new company got the local internet working. The country set up that desk as an information desk, and helped train me how to explain new voting rules and options that baffled people in the previous election.

One of the building people, Ray Reyes, came by the desk, checked several times, and explained things in Spanish to voters  who could understand that better than my English. A new manager, PaulTimpane, had prepared the building with

in-building signs which prevented confusion, and led to great calm and pleasant discussions everywhere.

I saw just one VERY depressed looking face: the pollwatcher from the Democratic party. I can only guess what might have depressed her yesterday.  But I did tell several people

about how happy and relieved I was that on this very special and important day it went so smooth, compared with the previous one I just mentioned. One voter gave credit to Youngkin. But I gave credit to the building people...

to their face, and to our county team. 

There were many very political people from both parties present, of course. 

I heard one saying; "Actually... based on this experience... we really wish we had persuaded Kamala to push more user friendly internet as one of the top issues, maybe the top issue." 

ANYONE could ask me anything at the information desk I ran for many hours. (I had expected to spend more time on more volatile and stresssful, challenges posts, which I DID get some experience with, butlater in the day  the Chief said:

"People UNDERSTAND your explanations, and they have reduced spoiled ballots, which other people really appreciate a lot. So..."

Only one voter probed me personally enough to learn I know something about these computer issues (other than how badly the scanner/computer behaves if they spoil their ballot). He turned out to be a guy who

built a bank, which depends more and more on the internet, and wonders about its future. He sounded like a major influencer (and job creator) in the economic hub of Virginia. 

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

Older as I am getting... (lots of voters talked about aging!! Or about the pains of having too move too often...)... I feel a duty here and now to reveal a few minor personal things.

The front of the two page ballot was about President, Senate, House and School Board. the back was about country spending and county board. I could tell them the RULES exactly for the back side,

which caused most spoiled ballots (we think , but need to check).   YES, people have a kind of moral duty. The people in the county who are directly affected have a special role... in checking how those choices affect THEIR lives, and affect whether THEIR money is not 

spent on corrupt schemes as are common when key decisions are made in the dark. BUT I confessed -- we all have different duties and capabilities. **I** spent so much time on thinking about the front side of the ballot that I did not feel qualified

even to vote, myself on the back side. The county provided two sheets with additional information on the bond measures and on the county council, but I could tell no more -- EXCEPT that they could use their cell phones to check the web BEFORE they entered the voting area proper. (I heard different stories about who can do what to use the internet, quietly, when in the voting area.) 

Before yesterday, I solicited YOUR thoughts about my own personal vote. I thank you all for your feedback, which was very diverse and helpful, even though I feel heavy variances even today.

Initially, I planned NOT to vote at all, and NOT even to think hard on partisan lines in my morning meditation, in personal conversations or even in emotional reactions as I watch France24.

I have personal responsibilities now, as I did when I worked at NSF, which should not be entangled in an inappropriate way with other decisions. 

ONE of you convinced me that I should stay silent, generally, BUT SHOULD vote for Trump privately and in my mind, BECAUSE (1) I saw more certainly about the existential problems coming from Harris, for whom I 

have had very special information more direct than what many of you are stuck with; (2) there is HOPE of a miracle of sorts; (3) Vance and Musk MIGHT reduce the worst problems, and open the door to the incredible technology

advances we need to survive. (Oh, oops: I also noted that RFK junior over FDA might overturn a rigid rule which happens to threat my own life, as well as Biden's and Trump's!)

Yesterday morning, however... I finally did vote. For President, I voted Libertarian, to make it clear I see major problems with Harris and Trump both, and appreciate the RISKS which go with simply saying "YES" to either of them.  

I did not vote Green, which sounds natural, because they have chosen to back the current Iranian position in the Middle East, which is also quite existential.

But now... meeting in 20 minutes. 

"Who is the Real Paul Werbos": reply to a Critic of Nobel Prize to Hinton

Many leaders of the neural network field were shocked that a Nobel Prize this year went to Jeff Hinton, who is best known in the field as coauthor of a chapter on backpropagation in the classic PDP books of Rumelhart and McClelland.  They asked: (1) how could that happen, after IEEE and others long ago gave you prizes recognizing you were the true author? and (2) Who is the real Paul Werbos anyway?

                     Outline of my one hour plenary at WCCI2022, recording posted by IEEE CIS

For question (1), I said that Jeff Hinton was basically a well-meaning innocent bystander here, and one of many pawns in a much larger struggle for the future of the internet. In truth, I once tried to reach out to him to collaborate on new work on "dark energy," where the best present work on earth is even less meaningful than the Boltzmann machine was. But for question (2), I replied:

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 In my usual morning meditation today, I felt somewhat guilty to hear that you might use the chapter in Talking Nets to get a picture of "who is the real Paul Werbos?" In many ways, that would be like using one data point, one input/output record, to model an incredibly complicated nonlinear dynamical system. None of the half hour conversations I have had would be more than a few data points, either. My latest CV gives a broader picture, as did the piece on me for LiveScience arranged by NSF years ago (or see the brief piece posted by the National Space Society)... but to get a correct picture of who I really am... even a partial murky picture... It has been a very complicated nonlinear process. My life has been as complicated as the nonconvex systems discussed in my latest patent granted on October 15 (https://patents.justia.com/inventor/paul-j-werbos).

Lately, I do not watch any television except France24, but a few years ago I watched the TV series for Indiana Jones. My initial reaction; "This is SO unrealistic. How can one person, working at a middle level of a complicated bureaucracy, have so much intense, important and fundamental interaction with so many of the leaders of  the world at that time." But then I realized; my OWN life was very much like that, even more impossible. I immediately thought of my long conversations with Oppenheimer, with ed Teller, with Julian Schwinger, with Marvin Minsky (from whom I took an independent study in the 1960s, when I wrote a paper on the levels of intelligence in vertebrates), with Steve Grossberg, with Warren McCullough (in the dorm room of Dan Levine and the Commons of Adams House, Harvard), and with B.F. Skinner. 

On my latest cruise to the Bermuda Triangle (arranged by my wife, an incredible person in her own right), the captain came to our table and

described how many nations he had visited, aspiring to be a real life Indiana Jones. I just smiled and sadly wondered what I could tell him about what it would  be like to be the real thing.

And no, I am not exaggerating; here is a small sample of the many, many places: https://photos.app.goo.gl/K5YopR37f5Ezda3f7 ;

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8L5mq8kgn4xTYbfU9 ; https://photos.app.goo.gl/8v3W8ZizJpKFGmN99 ; https://photos.app.goo.gl/97YFNADavCFc34i57. 

Just before my 21st birthday, in 1968, I was on an airplane from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to the Pentagon, where I met with the number three (Einthoven) and number 6 (Thayer)

people in DOD running the Vietnam war. I was there to give them a classified briefing on what I learned in my new data analysis of what was really happening there. (I had programmed a simplified approximate version of backpropagation, slightly beyond what I had published as an undergraduate in the journal Cybernetica (Namur); I have scanned many, many of the old papers into my digital files, including letters to me from De Broglie. The letter from Betrand Russell in 1964 had a big effect on my life, but I probably lost it.)

But in my second university job, in the summer of 1969, there were two major very competent efforts to kill me, as part of incidents recorded in the Ann Arbor newspapers.

The first was by a Black Panther, who was later captured when he spoke too much in bars about how "murder on Main Street" did not work out as they planned.

The second was incredibly lurid , in front of University Towers, where the attacking motorcycle gang did kill one person with their molotov cocktails, but I was protected by a ring of 

tough local police with machine guns checking IDs for anyone trying to enter. Years later, at a political science convention, I had a chance to safely confront the guy who ordered the hit:

"WHY? I was not doing anything to attack you. I am visibly just working for peace in my own way." I will never forget his brief response: "You knew too much."

By the way, my high school, Lawrenceville, says they included a condensed version of that story in the class of 1964 folder somehow in Harvard archives. 

In fact, in 1969, I had already decided I had watched too many James Bond movies. "No, I will not get rid of the good parts. Tropical places like RAND Santa Monica and high tech and beautiful Russian women...  I only want MORE of that. But no more proximity to guns or lies or excess newspaper appearances." And so it was.

Quiet, compartmentalized, maximum benevolent impact ... but no more risks to my life. Or not many.

In truth, the scariest risk to my life was later, in Kathmandu, in a conference on Science and Spirit. Machine guns again, this time pointed at me by a pro-Chinese red army faction keeping a few us from crossing their red lines before the Temple of Shiva. I wondered. Have I graduated from James Bond to Dr. Strange? THAT week was unbelievable. 

I HAVE discussed bits and pieces of my life with science fiction writers, like Nathan, who filed my latest patent. (The summary looks innocuous but the contents go beyond what most science fiction writers imagine.) One was Philip K. Dick, whose final collection includes a letter or two from/to me, as Dick encountered things in the desert rather mild compared to what

 I connected to in Nepal and In India. 

BUT: as improbable and important  as the past seemed to be, it is as nothing compared to what is happening and coming now. For me, this email

is basically just a way to calm down and relax, compared to what we may see and connect to (as quietly as I can manage) as Virginia election officials tomorrow,

with long-standing connections to Pennsylvania, whose Senator I worked for in 2009 (the year of climate legislation).

Next I review election laws, check news, and pack.

By the way, here is a link to my 1972 thesis proposal, https://vixra.org/abs/1902.0046, which I printed 50 copies of and distributed as widely as I could.

Advanced search in scholar.google.com shows about 500 published papers, across many fields, but there are many more not published in other important areas,

which I hope might get archived someday in a relatively open, accessible organized way.  Since my retirement from NSF in 2015, I have tried to focus on the short list of challenges, attached... and on staying alive in general, living as normal a life as I can manage.  

ADDENDUM:
And in my list of memorable conversations... I should have added Edward Heath and Richard Nixon. Heath I met in a Bow Group meeting in the House of Commons in 1967 or 1968.

Nixon I met... something like summer of 1966... in a bar in Boston, when he was feeling very down and out. It was just me and maybe one or two other Harvard Young Republicans.

After what he did in 1972, breaking some promises, I became an Independent and still am. But after I started working for NSF, I had many other more normal meetings with familiar names. 

In a way, the most striking was a meeting arranged by Congressman Trent Franks (R-Texas) in the Senate Visitor Center, where he talked about the experience of getting the job of tracking ALL the worst existential threats to the US, using ALL (classified) sources of information.   And then the struggle of trying to get rational action on the worst of them.

if only HE had taken over oversight of NSF instead of Lamar Smith!!! But then again, in that case I would probably still be there, and missed out on learning the things I learned since

my retirement in 2015, which freed me to push a lot harder past the usual boundaries limiting what people know about fundamental issues.  

Making sense of spiritual experience

 Many times I have discussed a FEW aspects of the experience in spring of 1967 which forcibly drove me away from the extreme, logical, well-justified atheism

I believed in from age 8 (1955 or 1956), and the extreme experience in 1972 which drove me "all the way" to recognition of PSI, and the many steps in between.

I described them briefly in journal papers linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm.

(At werbos.com, I also explain how I resolved the many paradoxes which arise when one believes BOTH in real "psychic" or "spiritual" experience, but also in hard core physical realism as proposed by Einstein and Moshe Carmeli.) 

BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE full sense of how to understand these things, without giving up the hard core Einsteinian realism which makes sense to me more and more.

Above all -- if we are like the cells of a vast solar system brain (like in the final slide of what I gave at the UN meeting a few weeks ago), how do WE live OUR lives and make sense

of our own ever more complex experience of life and soul? It seems we are all called to keep learning. The better we are as students in the school of life, the MORE and the FASTER will new subjects be presented to us.

And so, the recent scary chaos of our planet has led me to revisit certain details of my own experience, relating them to general principles.

In winter 1972, I have mentioned how a suitemate loaned me his copy of https://pdfcoffee.com/helping-yourself-with-esp-pdf-free.html which I read very intently.

I read it intently because it focused on EXERCISES, experiments I could do myself, and alter, and evaluate myself with scientific thinking. The final exercise was actually

a variant of kundalini yoga like what I later read about in a book by Gopi Krishna. By then... I knew how to raise a kind of energy (which I now think of as "qi") up to

chakras in the skull. That was interesting. BUT THEN: in a final stage, he asked us to refocus attention to a point about a foot above the skull, and then mentally speak to the inner higher self to 

... greet him/her and ask for feedback. (I am bcc'ing a person who talks a lot about "the Master within.").

In my case, I was really startled. I heard a loud booming voice, initially speaking in English. "Greetings. Glad you made it. But first -- I am NOT your inner self. Forget that part.

You may address me as 'Father.' Now I have important urgent things to show you..." And then it was like the kind of thing Greeley and MacCready described, in their great research report and book funded by NSF. Being pulled up out of my body, and initially taken across town to Harvard... and then more. By then I certainly knew about backpropagation, which I had discussed with many people; I view this as having been a support for that new direction in human understanding. When I ask, CRUDELY, "what does God want?", this reminds me of that.

I have often felt that Jesus Christ himself was one of the people visited by this same entity -- with the special discipline of really listening.

This reminds me of course that MANY humans, especially leaders, will tell you that THEY have heard from the voice of God, or will be very quiet while believing it strongly.

(Greeley's report does a great job of giving us real statistics on this kind of thing!) FOR MYSELF -- I often say that inspired works of art tend to be swirling mix of "three colors" -- real inspiration, confabulation, and marketing, demanding we work VERY hard on "discernment". (That has SOMETIMES been used as a defining element of Quaker universalism, but

politics and labels keep waxing and waning in all parts of humanity.) WHO was the entity we were listening to? Lack of discernment is in many ways the strongest threat of wars that could eliminate humanity in this century, if we do not raise our awareness further.

I tend to think this "Father" is more or less like the "spirit of the deep" described in Jung's Red Book. And like the pachatatta whose temple my wife and I saw years ago when living for a few days in Lake Titticacca in Peru. (An island of earth-mother, sky father, deserving of our fullest respect, even though Jesus was right when he said we will have more prerequisites to understand

in years after him.) 

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I am tempted to say more about another experience I have shared only with my wife. It is now... so important... I hope she will forgive me for describing just a small PART of it.

On the one hand, I do recall images and thoughts of her (improbable thus veridical) from well before 1988. But in 1988 (I think), I visited the town house of Andy Barto in Cambridge, UK.

(I forget the exact dates, but there are records of it.) As part of this, I visited Cambridge, UK, and meditated very hard on how I needed help of making sense of very difficult issues in fundamental physics. "Order from chaos... HOW? Is there any soui out there who could help me on THAT?"

That night, sleeping in Andy's House, I felt I was lifted to into a kind of "astral plane chat room." I was interviewed by a calm and wise but normal human old guy who asked me questions,

and then concluded with "OK. It is a reasonable and honorable request. It is worth trying."

SO WHO WAS HE?

Not "father." Not THAT level of higher intelligence. Just a fellow part of the same noosphere. THis morning I think: "Oh yes, that 'Communion of Saints.'"

And many confusing messages we get today come from well-intentioned people confused even there.

Is "Father" gone? No. Years ago, in a Quaker discussion, someone mentioned the book' God is my copilot."

I said, "No, he is my psychiatrist." Perhaps that kind of dialogue is the HIGHEST samadhi any of us humans ever attains.

We are all just pieces of our local solar system noosphere fully embedded in it.

But some of us are more like the eyes and ears, fully embedded in the body, but ALSO with a special ability and duty to get inputs from beyond it.

That's important when we have MANY dimensions of discernment to grapple with.

And -- most important to me