memories of some dreams

Some memories of dreams I chose to make the title of this posting a bit boring sounding, precisely because this will touch on themes which could make some people a little too excited. There are many things I choose not to talk about most of the time, because people seem to go nuts even when we ask them to make small stretches, like from ordinary quantum electrodynamics to cavity quantum electrodynamics or from one way to get to work to another. When people hear that lightning might knock out electric power for a few hours, they can take the possibility seriously; however, when the National Academy of Sciences says that solar flares might cause events big enough to cost us $1-2 trillion, people tend to tune out and assume it cannot be so. People do admit that a guy named Mohammed had some interesting and important ideas… yet even those who believe those dreams were real tend to get scared (like the folks Greeley reports on in his paper “Are we a nation of mystics?”), and try to get rid of all the scary stuff by declaring “Mohammed was the LAST PROPHET,” and trying to outlaw (with death penalty) anyone who tries to follow the true spiritual path in the modern age. (Of course, many so-called Fundamentalist Christians are equally bad, while many Moslems, like Sufis, are much more enlightened.) As I get older, I feel I have a duty now to put some of this on paper, albeit on an obscure site, even though I know the folks I deal with mostly could not handle it. In any case, years ago, I became very curious about these things. I had an experience in spring of 1967, quoting a speech of Mao BEFORE it was given, which made me open-minded and curious about “paranormal” things. In late 1972 I had another decisive experience, which I may right about someday, similar in some ways to what Greeley talked about. In a TOTALLY conscious state, starting from a variation of kundalini yoga (the first time I ever tried it)… I met someone who pulled me up (in a clear but cloudy sort of way, no “astral body” of the traditional sort) across The Charles River, and… well, it was what we call veridical. Well, OK, I’ll say a little more about that one. A suitemate, Michael Lambert (Harvard PhD candidate in anthropology) loaned me a cheap popular paperback, called “How to Help Yourself with ESP,” which I would not have opened a few years before… but I notice d it had specific exercises/experiments to try, so why not? The first one worked for me, with some tweaking. So then I tried the kundalini yoga one, which culminated in sending energy up to a point a bit above the skull and sending a thought message there like: “Good morning, inner self. I am coming here to connect with you, to communicate with my highest inner self.” I was a bit startled when immediate feedback came, in a mixture of thought, English and feeling (strong reassuring loving feeling), and the message was “Sorry, Paul, I am not your inner self. You may address me as Father. Now, we do not have so much time right now, so let us get right to work…” After that, I decided to read – but not to trust – anything I could find written by people who might have had similar experiences. Within a year or two, I decided to join AMORC for a time (see my article in the open online journal Rose-Croix, 2012), primarily for the exercises/experiments to help me see for myself and form my own theories. But I did read things by Fox, by Monroe, by Steiger, and the book What Dreams May Come, by Besant, etc., which addressed the concept of out of body travel. It seemed as if true mastery of those skills would give me an experience base which would be extremely valuable in sorting out such things. And in essence, it did. I had to stop really active experimentation in December 1978, when I started work with the US government….. I guess I need to go over just a little background, before getting to the dream of the day. I have had hundreds of experiences which were “dreams but not dreams,” of various kinds. What is a “dream”? We call it a “dream” when a person blocks almost all awareness of immediate body surroundings, and is immersed in a different stream of inputs, which has a different video component and so on… One thing I learned is that there is actually a kind of continuum between what’s really 100% traditional dream, and what’s 100% out of body stuff… I also learned that many dreams and OOBE are “mine,” and that many are “vicarious”: I enter INTO someone else, or in resonance with someone else, in a tricky relation which some call “assumption.” Some dreams and OOBE’s go to ordinary life; others go to what some folks call “the astral plane,” a real-seeming complex built up by our souls just as corals build up coral reefs, within the “noosphere.” And I have also had a fair number, maybe a dozen or two, which go to … a part of the “astral plane”?... which I think of this morning as “the land of the dead.’ Since my experience is much more limited there, since it’s not such a big interest for me, I would be more careful about what I say about it. “Assumption”dreams and OOBEs are much more common for me, and they happen even without any conscious intent; sometimes, when I describe a dream to my wife, I use the words “the protagonist” instead of “I,” to avoid confusion. Just last night, I had a “dream” which took me to the classic “entry hall to the land of the dead,” for just the second time in my life. I did once visit a dead friend, Geoffrey Keppel, in “the land of the dead,” and I had a number of visits to my father (but I am not sure how many, in part because I am not sure there is much difference between his neighborhood and the general astral plane… most likely there is none). The first such “dream” was many years ago. More precisely, it was just a few weeks before the Challenger disaster in 1986. Over Christmas/New Years vacation, I had time to do some of the more explicit preparation activities (which I had done more in 1972-1978) . It was pretty much classic OOBE, with no assumption aspect. At the very beginning, I was in a very modern-looking anteroom, which I saw as similar in flavor to some normal well-lit rooms in Star Trek… not weird high tech, but .. whatever. That aspect was strongly emphasized as a kind of echo of the main group of other people I saw in this room, wearing US space uniforms – the Challenger astronauts. I did NOT think “this is the entry to the land of the dead,” or anything like that. It was just a room, more like a hotel or hospital waiting room (though much cleaner), and the only weird thing was how long it took before I caught on. We stood around waiting, with a few other people… until a kind of guide showed up , who said he would now sort us into groups, show us where to go, and give us some choice of the course we might take next. One of the two or three choices was “How to contact your dear departed friends on the Other Side.” (Hearing that on the list was the first signal to me that something odd was going on, but even then I thought he meant how people on the normal earth side could contact the dead.) That sounded like something different and new, so I opted for that one and followed that group… until, as we walked in the hallway, a guide turned around and looked at me: “Hey, YOU don’t belong here! What are YOU doing here?” He pointed at me, and I suddenly felt translated somehow and off in some kind of nowhere. But.. being somewhat energetic and willful, I did NOT want to just go off to Oblivion, and I did not want to miss this class. So I willed myself right back… only instead of projecting a human body, this time, I projected a kind of cloud, which I used as a “body,” as a vehicle.. slightly odd acoustic interface, but it worked, and it was more robust and less vulnerable to odd bolts of energy. And I guess it was less visible to the other folks. I kept on with the group down the hall, and entered in the classroom. As the class got going, it did strike me as odd. First, the guy showed by example how to “densify” your hand, so that when you hit the wall, it does not just go through, but interacts enough to call a kind of creaking or banging of the walls. (I was later reminded of Joel Whitton’s description of the odd audio spectrum they measured during their “Philip” experiments. I had also played with similar things back in graduate school, before any OOBE things.) And then, when you get used to densifying and undensifying, try it on a woman who accepts it, who was sitting in the middle of the room, a kind of volunteer… How to interact with a vocal tract, to make sounds come out, and practice to make them coherent… (perhaps interacting with HER mind? He did not say…) I found that last part very surprising….. and my emotional reaction was probably the reason why I returned at that moment. The veridical part was the Challenger astronauts in the hall of the dead, a couple of weeks before… I had long learned about the usual small time slippages like that which tended to accompany my experiments. (I do generally seem to have a kind of drift towards the future… which raises interesting questions well beyond the scope even of this posting.) So today (9/30/2012) I had my second “entryway to the hall of the dead” dream… Last night, I did not do any mystical preparation stuff (aside from a bit of energy stuff I often still do often, when it seems right). I watched a movie, All the King’s Men, with my wife. (I feel weird just calling her “my wife,” but she sure wouldn’t want me to talk about HER stuff here.) So it seems like I had a kind of assumption dream, not veridical, about a guy who was close to a future person in power… But not Willie Stark. Rather, a woman in power. A calm appearing and normal attractive woman… not movie star type, but clear and attractive enough. I guess normal brown hair; physically, like a cross between my Aunt Loretta and the Popular wife of Prince… William..? Very calm looking, and clear eyes, not so intense or shiny but looking at them you see more light than even those two nice people I just mentioned… In the first scene… she has developed a new foreign policy position for a nation which felt not unlike the way Iran does to us now. The whole world was so Grateful to her that she had solved that thorny crisis, and they all loved her lucid plan, which the whole world was acting on. Yet, like the narrator in All The King’s Men, I really doubted the plan. I did not make a fuss because, like that narrator in the early stages, I felt a loyalty to her, with a definite love aspect; the dream never got physical, explicitly or mentally, but the feelings were strong enough that she might even have been the wife of the protagonist. The protagonist saw giant ambiguities in what stuck normal people as a clear plan. (Here I do not say “I saw;” it is possible that my own analysis would have supported her, or not. I did see the details of the plan, but I do not remember enough now to say, except to say I do not know how viable the plan was.) Such a calm clear reassuring person… to the public. But one does not get to such a position by being an average wimp in all of life. In the next scene, we moved on to a place not unlike… Monaco… (though the world has a number of similar places… I was also reminded of the Black Sea coast; these are MY associations)… Lots of twisty switchback roads, and cliffs overlooking the sea. She and I had previously had a great vacation in a similar kind of place, using a rental SUV. Of course, she drove. This time, she was driving our bus… much bigger.. but powerful, to where we were proud of the strong engine. Somehow, the protagonist was looking at the progress of the bus from a higher point, like looking down from a local hill… even though he was quite conscious that his body was with her and the group in the bus. (By the way, I once had a very clear veridical experience of assumption into someone else’s “astral body” as THEY wandered out of body into my house, looking for me but wondering why they could not find me…) He was a bit nervous as she gunned the bus up a vey steep slope… and that’s when he frecalled the great things they said about that engine. But he was worried about whether this big bus could handle curves as sharp as that rental SUV could. And then came a stark scene… he looks from the hill and sees the bus project forward over a cliff… seeming to hang in the air for a split second… and the fast “Oh, shit” kind of feeling (without those words), the realization that “Oh well, I am in that bus, and it is not realistic to imagine anyone surviving from that high..” and remembering all those thoughts about “we all have to go anyway” and that a quick death would be better than what most people are lucky enough to have… And then the final scene, where I am still into him, in the entry hall of “the land of the dead.” This time, he/I pretty much knew what was going on, since we knew what happened a moment before. It looked like a kind of typical hotel meeting room, moderately large but not large enough for a big plenary. Not like a waiting room, but not set up with chairs and tables. At the front of the room, there was something like a twenty inch tablet computer or touch monitor, set up to look forwards slightly tilting up to the room. As I approached the tablet to explore, a couple of attendants popped up from the side… and UNLIKE me and the others, they were not so stuck on the usual crisp human body form. They morphed into something like a projection of friendly cartoon characters, which I/he viewed as a bit alien looking, but not at all scary. They said: “Do whatever you want here, but DO NOT touch the button here on the lower right hand corner of the computer. That would be very bad…” So I drifted back into the humans milling around. (I did not see her here, but was not actively looking for her here.) They were all wondering: “How did I get here? Where are we anyway? None of us seem to know. What happened?” He/I smiled and said “I have a theory. I think I know. But first I have a question for you all. Did any of you have a scary experience, just before we came here.. an experience so scary it seemed like you might even die?” They thought and started nodding their heads.. especially one guy (taller than my more or less ‘average’ height, though we almost all think of ourselves as average). Sat first it seemed he was wearing a suit.. and then more like a bathing suit or less… and he said.. ‘Yes… it really was scary.. and bad…” and bruises and bloody tracks suddenly started to appear along his legs and arms… And then I boomed out: “Yes folks, that confirms it. I know where we are.” They looked up to me… (and I think the other guy started looking more normal).. I thought the term “bardo” but of course would not use it with them, And I thought a moment and said.. “Welcome, folks! Welcome to heaven! It is real, and we are real, and we are completely ourselves…” (Not so dense as I was at times in that other scene, when I was “not all there.”) And that was all. For now. ================= Added the next day (Oct 1): 1. I did not mean to suggest any similarities between the politics of that woman (in yesterday's dream) with that of Wllie Stark. I strongly suspect that watching that movie was a factor in stimulating this other one... but there was no sign at all of the Willie Stark kind of politics. 2. Many science fiction authors use science fiction as an excuse to present their personal experience, altered to make it palatable to an audience. For example, Connie Willis has a book on the Titanic and several on time travel which reek of sensitivity and authenticity (if such can be called "reeking" -- sorry about the unintended negative connotation), with some relation to the above.

that up with that we should not put -- how certain rules threaten the English language

Someday I should post a formal note somewhere about certain rules which are a real drag on the English language. But it takes a lot of time and effort to link up with new communities, so for now I just post here on the blog. If anyone else is better positioned to publish an article or policy memo on this, please do so... We all remember the rules are taught in elementary school, by grammar teachers who tell us always to write in complete sentences. No stand-alone phrases, like this one. No "animal noises" like "huh?" There is a lot of value in that kind of discipline, just as there is value in the discipline of poetry. Yet, as Rudolf Flesch pointed out (in The Art of Readable Writing), that doe snot do perfect justice to the richness of the spoken English language -- or to what we can in written language. We shouldn't really have to abide by that constraint rigidly in all circumstances. There are times when I think that all college graduates should have to learn a special kind of "Chinglish," what a computer might generate if it "translated" Chinese into English in a very simple-minded literal way, simply mapping Chinese words into English words (and inserting about ten to twenty basic nontranslatable words, like "deh" and some basic versions of "huh?"). That would help people get past the Chomskyian delusion that all sensible human languages are based on well-defined logical propositions expressed in complete sentences. And it would be a lot easier than having to learn all the characters and pronunciation of the dialects of Chinese. But back to some examples of bad rules... A lot of the rules used today in copyediting and major publishers do not reflect what we now know about the nature of human languages. In my papers in Neural Networks in 2009 and 2012, I describe our new mathematically-grounded understanding, quite different from Orthodox Chomsky, yet very close to the important insights of great linguists like Sapir. Sapir noticed long ago how human languages seem to follow a kind of bell-shaped curve over time, starting from older and more "natural' languages which are uninflected, rising to a maximum of inflection, in languages like Sanskri and perhaps Russian and Arabic with many subjunctive forms and so on, and then evolving back to less inflection, ultimately down to languages like English and Dutch which do not even have masculine and feminine groups of nouns. Chinese represents the less inflected side on the left, since many aspects of Chinese were codified many centuries ago, due to the early arrival of printing and continent-wide politics in China. English and Dutch represents the less inflected side on the extreme right, because they are new languages which evolved, nonetheless, in areas of relatively high formal intellectual development (relative to social and political development). Interesting questions are: why do English and Chinese have so much in common, at one level, despite being so far away and at opposite ends of the Sapir cycle? I can still being amazed, when reading an elementary Chinese text, how many idioms are the same in Chinese and English, such that the text did not even mention them. (I was very confused for awhile, because, having learned some French and Latin, I had learned NOT to assume idioms would carry over... but many English idioms which would not carry over to French or Latin would carry over to Chinese.) Both languages have minimal inflection, and both rely very heavily on subject-object-verb ordering. In my view (again, see the papers in Neural Networks), the Sapir cycle is due to one key factor above all else. It is due to the invention of formal verbal logic, by folks like Socrates and Plato and the progenitors of the Upanishads in India (Sanskrit). Today we take it for granted that a logical proposition is a kind of abstract object, which we can talk about in words just as we talk about other more physical objects. Many people interpret Plato's "two worlds" as a kind of mysticism (and it really did lead to some real mysticism), but I agree with Max Weber that this was his way of trying to explain the modern attitude which we take for granted to a world which wasn't quite there yet. In the original world, like early Chinese, strings of words were basically "word movies" or "dances with words," conveying VICARIOUS EXPERIENCE (and progtotype generalizations of strings of experience). More and more qualifiers and inflection become added, as people started to express things more like logical propositions In fact, as the history of Sanskrit and Upanishads shows, it may be that the groping to create mental objects came first, and the more explicit rules of logic later, as language became more able to support logical reasoning, which treats propositions as objects. But then.. to simplify.. just as the Indian invention of the digit zero revolutionized mathematics, the invention of the word "that" (a cousin of the mathematician's parentheses) revolutionized language. Instead of saying "All plants sort of may be green, in my thinking," We may now say: "I believe that all plants are green." Instead of using a fuzzy qualifier or a subjunctive, we create an abstract object which we can treat like any other object in our grammatical creation of well-posed sentences. The object is the noun phrase "that all plants are green." The magic word "that" creates a new noun, a new object, which we can manage like any other know. We can say "I broke that, I believe that.." We create a world of thought which is powerful, elegant and self-referential; this is similar in a way to Von Neumann's breakthrough, when he essentially invented the Turing machine. And so, for many centuries, standard English textbooks said that the word "that" in English has two uses (unfortunately) - use as a pronoun ("I like that") and use as a conjunction ("I believe that plants are green"). There is another word "which,' with an ancient lineage, which may be used in two ways: (1) adding information ("this election, which will be on November 6, is hotly contested); (2) adding specificity to what object is being referred to (" the election which happens in November will include more candidatyes than the election which was held last year"). We use "which" in both cases, and we use a comma to signify which is which. (In spoken English, we use cadence and intonation to "speak the comma.") But -- horror of horrors -- the Government Printing Office (GPO) decided years ago to outlaw traditional English, and many publishers felt they had to follow suit. Maybe their change works better in some advertizing jingles, but by ordering a change in the use of the word "that," to take over from "which," they do tend to dilute the original meaning of "that" as a conjunction. Because that original meaning is absolutely fundamental to the value of English as a vehicle for high-order logical reasoning, this is extremely unfortunate. Sure, we can survive it. We can even talk about complex scientific issues in word-movie languages, like the Chinese of four millennia ago. But to support logical structures in our thinking -- structures which are already severely strained by the complexities of modern life -- we really would be better off getting rid of such nonsense. Of course, there are other changes suggested by Flesch (as in "up with whihc I will not put") and Mencken which would also be of great benefit to the English language. There are times when I think the EU or even the UN should overpower the GPO here, and define a streamlined version of English (and Chinglish?) as new official languages. Best of luck, Paul

New threat to the Republic

Many have asked: Could the US lose its democracy, because of problems like what hit the Roman Republic or like the Republic in Star Wars? That's a serious and complex question. There are many scenarios to be alert for. This month... here is the scenario which comes to mind. Crudely -- Obama wins by a large margin, but Congress remains gridlocked; the world economy descends into 1930's style Great Depression II; Obama then becomes as popular as Herbert Hoover, and Karl Rove's plans to turn the nation into a one-party state, with die-hard partisan moles in juduciary and intelligence agencies, following the model of the Roman Empire under Trajan, becomes very firmly established. Among the background sources I think of are Orson Scott Card's Empire series (Card being one of the two strong inspired leading authors from the Mormon community of great interest to all the rest of us as well) and the recent book Boss Rove (biased but with some separation of facts and editorials). The chief negative element in my view: I am not so optimistic as Bill Clinton that re-election of OBama by itself would be enough to grow us slowly out of the present level of unemployment. (Though the Ryan plan would be worse.) The massive cuts in net government spending (spending minus taxes) which both parties agree to will certainly REDUCE demand to much less than what we see at present (unless QE3 leads to a really large new housing boom, which even Bernanke has described in the past as probably not enough to bring recovery). So, sure, the GROWTH in unemployment will be less under Obama than it would be under Ryan/Rove, but it may yet be quite enough to sink his future credibility and reputation, and lead to the rest of the scenario. To avoid an actual growth in unemployment, despite deficit reduction, would take a lot of agility and insight -- and it's simply not clear that this would be possible under a gridlocked Congress. What's more, it's not clear that the doctrinaire Democrat senators would be better than the Republican ones inproviding agility -- but at least they might respond to Obama if Obama is more determined than he was in the first term. (Which is possible.) Of course, there is the obvious opposite scenario. If Netanyahu does take out Iran's nuclear capacity, there is some hope for Romney that he could use that to get back ahead, and squeak through. He might lose popularity a lot in four years as well.. (I remember well just how awful Trajan's policies worked out, and how strong the permanent reaction in Rome towards a more peaceful economics-oriented policy!). But the one-party program might go further than many imagine, with four years of big war as an excuse. So that is no panacea, especially when we consider the huge costs and what such copsts can do to a planet. Of course, this is really about what happens to earth. It would be no more local than the September 2008 crash was. ==== I do hope we can avoid the problems, but if we are not sober enough, we will not. Of course, you can see that I donit trust one-party governments whatever the party. The old ideas of checks and balances, and VIABLE channels of democratuic expression and dialogue, still make sense to me. When I visit the George Wasdhington Masobic Mewmorial, or the Free Quaker meeting in Philadelphia, I do not imagine that these are branch offices of some kind of fundamentaliost segregation academy. The writings of Tom Jefferson sound a whole lot more enlightened than that.

How to Do More Justice to the Spiritual Side of Life

Because I see myself as half-human-body and half-soul, and because retirement age is approaching, I have been asking myself more and more: “How can I do more justice to the soul half of my being? It seems as if ninety percent of my life has been focused on tangible, material goals, which certainly express the one half of life… but am I even close to living up to potential on the other half, and what can I do to get closer?” (And no, folks, I am not the kind of person who defines the word “soul” in a formal way coming from ancient theological texts! Like a lot of three-letter and four-level words, “soul” is a bit fuzzy, but it’s still useful and important; the reality behind it can be understood better with some work. I still remember when Karl Pribram said: “We have no right to claim to know about the human mind until we fully appreciate all those four-letter words.” He focused a lot on the “four f words,” but that’s just one example of a general principle.)
This morning, I think I see a bit deeper into how to address that question… but in a way, it’s so simple that it’s hard to explain. There are a lot of things like that, in the realm of spirit and even in mundane human psychology. For example, when my family and I visited Rome last week, from the Vatican to the little Quo Vadis Chapel where St. Peter is said to have met Jesus, it reminded me of Jesus’s central message about love – such a simple message, yet so hard for so many people to really comprehend and connect to their lives. The application and meaning of the message is not as simple as the statement of it. Even in engineering, people learn the basic ideas of probability and optimization in undergraduate years, yet even today most engineers do not seem to grasp the huge power of fully applying these basic principles in practical, working systems. In the Quo Vadis chapel, I thought of my new paper in press (I think) in the little journal Rose-Croix, where I talk about the fundamental importance of always remembering the utility function which we as individual humans naturally want to maximize – characterized as “life, light and love,” when I try to capture what really matters to ME and what really makes ME feel good. And I also thought about the recent talk by Ben Bernanke (chairman of the Federal Reserve) at a conference on neuro-economics, where he asked: “Is this vast economic machine we are building really serving the goal of maximizing human happiness, the goal it was supposed to serve?” (The conference discussed research on four drivers of human happiness – health, community, leisure, control of one’s own life. That’s not exactly the same as “life, light and love,” but I don’t want to split those hairs here and now.) Basic principles matter a lot, ESPECIALLY when they sound simple and obvious.

Here is another obvious basic principle: the three fundamental, inescapable jobs of a knowledge worker are input, output and what comes between – to learn new things by getting more input from the rest of the world, to analyze and understand what can be learned from that input, and to communicate useful stuff to the rest of the world. (Of course, some of us also take direct action, but many of us help more by providing inputs to others.) That is ever so obvious – yet many people strive to be great communicators without doing enough of the thinking in-between, and some of us, like myself, have to struggle with a desire to know the truth (the input and analysis side) without paying as much attention to the communication side. ALL useful knowledge workers must attend to all three, but some of us are stronger in one aspect than the other, and we have different audiences to communicate to. It helps if we remember this simple principle, both to remember to keep a balance between the three aspects of our own work, and ALSO to respect and work with others whose strengths balance us out. The principle is obvious – and yet, in my day job, evaluating and sometimes guiding the very best researchers in US, it has huge practical importance.
But all of that is background. Today, I want to talk about a different simple principle, which I plan to try to apply more in my own life, not as a radical
BUT.. I ran out of time on Sunday 9/9/12. So I cannot give the full story now, or the full experience which clarified it in my mind.

The key is… for the spiritual HALF of our life or value measures… (which may be more or less than half for different people at different times)… there are four major components we should always value.
There is the direct experiment and exercise aspect, which I discuss in my forthcoming paper in Rose-Croix (Volume 9), which refers back to my paper in the August 2012 issue of the journal Neural Networks. Rose-Croix is open-access online; Neural Networks is a standard Elsevier journal, accessed through subscription or library.
Second, there is the aspect of working on close personal relations and sanity at the level of the soul. I think of a light but worthwhile science fiction trilogy, by Jane Roberts, the saga of Oversoul Seven. I also think of Joel Whitton’s book Life Between Life, and the new sequel. I once asked Joel: “If life is just a school, what is the curriculum, and what must we learn?” That’s when he sent me, confidentially, a copy of the new book, which I see as similar to Roberts in spirit. At the level of “soul,” we are part of a kind of vast invisible network of spiritual connections, and of course our growth is in relation to that network.
But in fact, the “invisible network” really covers the whole earth. In a way, Roberts’ vision satisfies what Heidegger would call the “small Being,” but some of us are by nature bigger than that. For many people, larger concerns are about narcissistic illusions, like loyalty to ideologies which mean nothing to them really other than loyalty to their friends. But for some of us, the whole earth is really real, both in our brains and in our souls. (By the way, that kind of connection is really great for avoiding jet lag!) The experience which sparked all this was memory on Sunday morning, in bed, of a brief discussion with Rob Foster of USTETA on Saturday over dinner of Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic convention. “It’s all arithmetic..” and do we understand arithmetic in our souls? We really are connected with the world economy.
But in the end, there is a larger universe out there, and maybe that connection is what has most driven my own unique tendencies – among other things, trying to understand it.

All for now. Time runs out.

views of the election from analytical to humorous

I do not have time today to make this coherent...

I am committed, both as a government employee and as a Quaker, to being as helpful as possible to good people (and even to bad people when they are trying to do good or redeem
themselves), regardless of party. I am registered as Independent. I worked
for Arlen Specter in 2009 -- making the choice when he was Republican -- because of
some similarity in philosophy.

But in 2012... I am real worried both about the possibility of Great Depression II and
and about war from the Middle East. Doing due diligence as best I can... well, the truth is that I gave a little money to the Obama campaign the morning after Romney picked Ryan,
and a smaller bit even before.

There is some irony here because Ryan may even be a kind of cousin, through the Donohue-Ryan clan on my mother's side. Most other political Ryans we heard of
when I was younger did turn out to be relatives... but that won't stop a depression.
Like Ryan, we're uinto numbers.. but if you pick the wrong numbers to maximize, you're dead. You can't run a planet the way you run a grocery store in a big city.
Nothing personal.

As I think about the lack of the deep dialogue we need to do better...

I think about the Koch brothers.

A lot of amusing things seem to be coming my way about them.

Luda and have debated: "How do you pronounce Koch in this case anyway?"
I'd say it's a bit like how you pronounce "Paris"... Paree originally,
Pariss if you Americanize. So the original Koch may have "ch" as in "charisma,"
but these particular folks... aren't they now "ch" as in cheat?
To my intellectual friend Koch, ... HE is a "charisma" type Koch, but I don't
know if they are relatives.

A conservative newspaper, the Examiner, showed up on our door with a portrait
of Koch labelled "the Demon of the Left." I have to admit I found it quite striking.
From the press on the Koch brothers, it is true that I had unconsciously imagined
something more like Cheney, like a kind of Sith Lord. But the face I saw this
time was VERY different... and I basically recognized it, every unconscious
twitch portrayed by the apparently very able artist. It looked exactly
like a friend I was once very close to (who, by the way, would resent the comparison,
just as one of the folks I fund is aghast hat everyone sees him as kind of
hidden brother of Romney). That guy, like Khamanei, is partly in trouble because
of the way he is always in the shadow of his father... and because his awe and sense
of obligation keeps him from true independent thinking and from the kind of energy his father had. There is much more to be said... but it's scary.

In a similar vein... I just went to Barnes and Noble, which I don't do all that often
any more, but Luda suggested...

And as I went to buy a book, I bumped into a book prominently displayed:

"An Alien in the Family, by Gini Koch."

OK, I did have to follow up... I bought volume I, along with a paperback by the author
I was actually looking for (a guy from Salt Lake City).

In fact... I hate to say... there is a certain degree of mental aberration
in that face... and that friend of mine was medicated for manic-depressive tendencies.
(U suppose Khamenei needs stronger stuff... unless he is now just a hopeless captive of Stalin type ideological apparatchiks.) It did remind me of some novels by
Van Vogt and whatnot.. lso near the Koch book.

As we left Luda pointed out another book we should read someday, by Ronson, on psychopaths... I had enjoyed his previous book Men ho Stare at Goats.
Ronson's quick description of what a psychopath is, on the cover..
did remind me of what kind of risk we do seem to be facing...

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

Just a couple of days ago, the local Express newspaper reported how Paul Ryan
chose "Welcome to the Machine" as his favorite music. And said how he had been working
to prevent our all being eaten all alive by that great machine. The original musician said: "You don't get it, man. You have BECOME the machine." Exxon has become
a big international government, making rules over its minions, at least as serious
as the one in Washington. Totally getting rid of checks and balances makes
things worse, and REDUCES human freedom. As an undergraduate and an active Young Republican, I was a bit disgusted when I saw Galbraith's book... arguing that
the best hope for freedom now is a kind of three-way balance of power, with
democratic government, industry and labor all providing some balance.

But now, in retrospect... I wish
I had advised Specter to go ahead and vote for card check in 2009, when I was close
to his legislative assistant covering that area... but we all live and learn.

Reagan really wanted to attack corporate welfare and corruption... and it is
incredibly sad how diametrically opposite so many of the people in the party have gone
in just the past few years....

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

In 2009, I saw the characteristic failings of the left every day...
but Obama seems to have learned a lot on the job, while analysis
of the Ryan plan... well, it doesn't really work. We can't afford a new
great depression right now. What worries me are not the similarities to
the Irish side of the family, but to some parts of the German side.

Best of luck,

Paul

how did we lose the world's lowest cost solar farm producer?

I would still be grateful for more information on this story, and even some
blunt and detailed one-on-one feedback, but I do begin to see the picture, I think.
Great thanks to those who have sent me some information.

COST is the biggest issue in deciding whether we can really make the switch to renewable, carbon-free sources of electricity, which will never run out of fuel.
The difference between 10 cents per kwh and 20 cents may not sound like much, but if we met the whole world's electricity generation needs (20,000 terawatt hours in 2008,
according to IEA/OECD data) that would be the difference between the world paying $2 trillion dollars per year versus $4 trillion per year. Going carbon free will be a whole lot easier if we don't have to ask for an extra $2 trillion/year, and can even compete in a large part of a free energy market (if we ever get one).

So I was shocked when the only group building solar farms that could hit 13 cents per kwh were killed this year, while other companies selling for 20 cents and up were doing just fine, in US and Europe. This is as serious as it gets, folks, if you really care about he future of humanity.

I think I have a better idea today what really happened, but am still looking into it...

Here is a posting to some expert energy lists on what happened and what we can learn from it:

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


-- though it is not definitive yet, by far, I have begun to get some feedback
from folks in Silicon Valley who have looked a bit more into the SES story.

One of the toughest problems in real world science and technology is how to filter
out various kinds of herd instinct and groupthink.

As an example, a few years back, I was a little proud when I funded a small project
which made progress in telling us how to built useful carbon-tolerant alkaline fuel cells
(AFC ). (The report by Urquidi-MacDonald, Sen and Pat Grimes was posted at
arxiv.org, easy to find, though I recently noticed a book and articles by Patrick Grimes
on fuel cells, via Google Scholar, that Pat never told me about).

I was pretty happy when that report was filed, and mmediately contacted the guy who runs
the main fuel cell program at NSF.

Roughly, I said, 'Hey, here is something which works. You might want to follow up."
(None of those PEM fuel cells, the main thrust of the big Al Gore PNGV program,
ever really did. More precisely, unsolved problems with catalysts resulted in continued
hydrogen peroxide formation, which made them unable to achieve "whole systems' efficiency
more than internal combustion systems, and which seriously cut lifetime and raised cost.)

His response: "Yeah, maybe it works, but that's not where the money is." (And that's not where the main thrust
of Al Gore's PNGV program was either.) NOTE THAT I DID NOT NAME NAMES: that would be unfair in this case,
for a number of reasons. That guy did some good and important things, and also missed a few things, which averages
out a lot better than most people.

I was a little shocked at the time. It's our job at NSF to focus on things which DOE is NOT already doing,
to pay special attention to things which are new and unique, which offer breakthroughs.
To compensate for the mindless herd conformity, and short term needs, which exist elsewhere.
It's supposed to be a little like contrarian investing, where we looks especially hard for new opportunities which result
from holds in the market. It is a highly competitive system (so competitive it may overstress human nature
in many ways).

In fact, the market economy, like NSF, is also supposed to be a competitive system. Sometimes,
in making funding decisions or orienting panelists, I use the analogy of a supermarket.
There are certain products (like some spices and some hygiene products and some medicines)
which most people would vote against including, if it were a majority vote; indeed, some products
are a matter of life or death for some customers, but a majority of people who come to the store
would pretend even not to see them. Stores can be more efficient than a simple majority vote on
what to put on the shelves, because they account for diversity, the many needs or market segments.
They don't work perfectly, but they do work a lot better than a simple majority vote by all shoppers on
every product as to whether to put it on the shelves or not.

But again and again in science and technology, I have seen cases where considered
vague and shallow conventional wisdom, by folks who have not looked deeply into an issue,
ending up freezing entire directions for a long time or even forever. Lately,
that often seems to be the rule rather than the exception in the US.
I have seen generation after generation of recent NSF leadership exhorting us all to be a bit less
conservative, and really pay special attention to breakthroughs and
transformative new opportunities -- and also seen lots and lots of backlash, some open and some
ala Good Soldier Schweick (a famous World War II movie about a Czech who subverted the Nazis simply
by actually following their orders VERY diligently in his own unique way).

I just posted one set of examples, involving intelligent systems, on the Kurweil list,
which might amuse a few of you:

http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/08/when-will-ai-reach-human-level.html
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/08/questions-about-my-post-on-stages-of.html

It seems that a major problem for SES was simply a conventional wisdom, not unlike the
former belief in PEM fuels with cars carrying hydrogen as such in a fuel tank as the
one and only possible future for transportation.

I knew it was there, but not how far it had gotten into down to the level which could
bankrupt a company like SES.

There is a quasi-religious belief, particularly strong in silicon valley, that "of course PV solar farms
must be cheaper than any kind of solar thermal, if not now in the near future -- so we should
not waste any money or opportunity on the latter. This is true, because PVs are chips,
and chips are governed by Moore's Law. Chips are inherently cheaper than weird things
with pistons and temperature and pressure in them. Much simpler and more elegant.
We don't need numbers to know that solar thermal must be more expensive.
Besides, even though Arun Majumdar admits PV solar farms cost 20 cents per kwh, he has a clear target
of 5 cents per kwh, which would be less than and solar thermal solar farm on earth today."

Of course, it helps that lots and lots of PV people are getting money today, just as PEM people were ten years
ago, and are always testifying to everyone about how their is The True Path, and getting cited as
The Experts (qualified of course because they got money from a PEM program).

But in fact .. 5 cents is a TARGET for ARPAE. In fact, lower PV costs have been a target at DOE for a long long time.
There was a brief time not so long ago when OMB required that agencies actually POST quantitative official targets,
and be "held accountable" for actually reaching them. At that point, the cost target for solar thermal
was much lower than the target posted by DOE for PV solar farms, and the targets DOE was willing to
be held accountable for were much higher than what NREL, for example, was posting and projecting at that time.
It makes good sense to AIM for very ambitious targets, and to try to set things up so that one can
make a good profit even in a relatively worse case scenario. (That's part of why I propose 15 cents per kwh
as a price/market guarantee for solar farms of all kinds. Much better can almost certainly be achieved,
in my view, with really effective solar thermal solar farms using dish solar, but an open market would
allow PV folks equal access.) See a follow-on posting below on why the conventional wisdom here is
pretty silly..

In my view, SES did make a business mistake circa 2000 when it signed a purchase contract with SCE and PGE
committing to a price well under the 11.5 cents per kwh those utilities then paid for peaking power from natural gas.
(That's from the Business Week story where SCE or PGE announced the contract.)
When they found they couldn't replicate STM technology as easily as they had expected (as happened to
a few bigger companies who tried to reinvent STM's Stirling engine), Sandia tells me that they were
basically stuck with costs of 13 cents per kwh for the initial solar farm, not enough to make a net profit
or build up any capital reserve under the initial contracts. That by itself would be enough to
kill them, unless they could find new sources of funding to tide them over to their projected 10 cents cost,
or unless they could restructure the contract to a little more than 13 cents. At that point, the local conventional wisdom and
the PUC (with the new cost gas option) certainly kick in, with or without NIMBY and right of way issues to make it worse.

Thus it really looks like two causes at work -- this math, operating on a small company without that solid
15 cents market guarantee, AND the NIMBY or right-or-of-way regulatory stuff which prevented them from just
going ahead and quickly completing the solar farm they were into before the funding fell apart.
The investors mainly blame the problem on the latter, because the regulatory stall is certainly
what happened first. (I DID track the primary sources back at that stage). If the regulatory stall had not happened,
the working numbers from a working if money-losing solar farm might well have changed the final,
financial outcome for the firm.

If the regulatory obstacles which stopped the construction could be basically eliminated for this kind of badly needed new thing, or substantially streamlined, our chances would be a whole lot better... in California or wherever else such problems get fixed.

Again, more detailed data form STM, Infinia and from the Guang Dong investors is also consistent with
this picture, and clearly unknown to the general herd here.

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

In my view, solar Stirling is the LEAST risky
and most definite source of affordable renewable electricity on a scale large enough to meet all
the world's needs... but I personally have some special responsibility to do what I can to explore
higher risk things which the herd would not really bellow at, because they would not even see them.

Best of luck,

Paul

=========================================================
=======================================================
More on the conventional wisdom about PV versus solar thermal:

In that posting on what happened to SES, I forgot to add some comments
on the conventional wisdom I was deploring. I am not about to give full cost breakdowns here,
but when people get confused by false analogies, it is important to try to balance them with some
other fact of life, which focus who are REALLY aware of the technology realities should already know.

PV cost is not governed by Moore's Law, which has mainly been about ever shrinking feature size
to process bits of information with greater density and speed. The primary cost problem is
not the cost of PV panels as such, but the cost of "balance of system."

For example, people talk a lot about cost goals like $1 per watt. (As you know, I have paid a lot
more attention to cost per kwh, so I can't be as precise about per watt. Both alsovary a lot as a function
of local sun conditions.) But last I checked with one of the nation's real front line experts on power electronics
for solar and wind, he said it already costs about 75 cents per watt just to convert DC to AC. That's important,
because PVs produce DC, while Stirling generators produce AC directly. The power electronics with PV
farms are actually much more complicated than what I have just discussed, but there is certainly no
law of nature that systems which require extra power electronics much be cheaper than those which do not.

Some folks talk about how our new R&D thrust can result in PVs as cheap as paper, coming out on rolls.
"What could be cheaper than that?" But in fact, the class of PVs which can now be rolled out like paper
are lower efficiency and weaker systems, which require more area than more solid PVs, and thus MORE
of the balance of system cost, which is the main problem here. (R&D to improve their efficiency,
and to improve power electronics is worthwhile, but not exactly a bird in hand. Better power electronics is
more likely to produce big breakthroughs in plug-in hybrids, for technical reasons, but the underlying R&D has value
in any case.)

What's more, if you ask about cost per meter, I would ask whether a square meter of PV AND required structural support
will ever be able to compete with the cost per meter of simple dumb reflectors ( mirrors) made in conventional auto body parts factories.
Infinia and folks linked to STM and GM have shown how the dishes in Stirling-dish system can be made that way.
This has HUGE implications for scaling up. If Stirling engines are produced in existing underutilized automotive engine
factories,. and reflectors in underutilized auto body panel factories, it becomes possible to really scale up and achieve mass production
economies of scale a whole lot faster than any other path, without the time, delay and cost of building new
"green field' factories. No weird and exotic materials needed.

With lower cost per square meter, higher efficiency in converting collected light to electricity,
and less cost in power electronics...

It is certainly not an option to be ruled out apriori!!!

======

But again, I have no personal economic stake in that, on my own or via NSF.
It's all just a matter of trying to pay serious honest attention to larger needs which will
affect every one of us.

I do have a personal stake in an alternative technology, from the world of Moore's Law,
which I will try to do my feeble best to push ahead today, in parallel with this other stuff.
I most likely will screw up the next stage, since I am neither a lawyer nor a corporation,
and have neither I can rely on for this purpose right now, but there are times when one
has a duty to try.

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

Also -- I really do not mean to question the value of major investment in PV technology. Breakthroughs may be possible. In fact, I have recommended funding for
a number of breakthrough-oriented PV projects myself, which have been funded.
But all the data I see says that the best solar thermal is cheaper now, and a lot more solar thermal has been deployed around the world in actual use in electric utilities.
We do need a diversified portfolio -- but it's a real shocker that we have neglected
most definite least risky low-cost option we have.

questions about my post on stages of intelligent systems

am impressed by a lot of the very intelligent questions you and others have been asking, so I do owe some response,
even though it has to get more controversial at some point. (Not that the last one represents any kind of consensus
position either!)

Roughly, I group them in two parts:

1. "There are certain details not clear to me, from www.werbos.com/Erdos.pdf), about the roadmap
to mouse-level AGI. Can you fill in?"

2. What about human-level AGI, consciousness, and the possibility or reality of AGI at a higher level?

Were I to devote the rest of my life to this area, maybe I would split my energy 50-50 between those
two questions. I mainly advocate focused research in two coordinated parallel tracks, reflecting these two.
(In a way, there is an analogy here to "energy policy." People who look for solutions to
"the energy problem" don't engage so well with reality, because there are basically TWO big energy challenges,
which are far less tightly coupled than most people imagine: the problem of getting to sustainable fuel for
cars and trucks, primarily, and the problem of getting to renewable electricity -- in my view. Car technology
is central to the first of these. Another story.) 1 and 2 here are more coupled, logically, but it's still
important to keep them distinct.

I view 1 as the number one grand challenge to mathematically well-defined science as a whole in the coming century,
as important, clear and discrete a target as the target which Newton achieved in his time. We need to fill
in the details to the point where we have working example of universal AGI systems which capture the main fundamental capabilities
of the cognitive optimization and prediction (COPN) abilities of the mouse brain. (That URL
I posted to the NSF COPN web site gives more details of what I mean here. Those details, unlike these emails, represent some kind of
official NSF position; I could say more about "how official," but that would be a complex digression for now.)
In a more rational world, the COPN topic would be receiving much larger, continuing focused support, with decisions made by people who actually understand
that brief program announcement.

For 1 -- I cited www.werbos.com/Erdos.pdf, which isn't light reading and which was written for pure mathematicians and only deals with the cognitive prediction half, because
the mathematical principles are what really matter here, and because some other papers with more details are mostly
harder to read and less recent. HOWEVER: for those of you who have access to university libraries, my paper in
the journal Neural Networks 2009 says a lot more, and may appear easier to read. Last month, in China, I wrote up
a VERY simple description of the roadmap, for folks who are totally nonmathematical:
http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2012/07/kung-fu-style-mind-discipline.html

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

To explain that a little more, I need to start moving to the question of consciousness, which I will now get more into here.

Because we humans have SUCH powerful vested interests and hot buttons on the subject of consciousness and humanity, it
is no wonder that objective thinking is harder for us in that area. For example, I used to have a friend who would approach and computer
program or AGI design or idea for them by asking: "Ah yes, but if you build it, WILL it be conscious?" I would claim that
the question itself is flawed. It is the kind of question which is so ill-defined that focusing on it too strictly destabilizes your understanding and sets you behind.
The reason is that the attribute "consciousness" is not a binary variable. Likewise, it is not a continuous variable,
a matter of the AMOUNT of intelligence (IQ, as the B.F. Skinner once claimed. Why do I assert that? Because if we look around us
with open eyes, to the world of experience we are actually grounded in, we see LEVELS and LEVELS of intelligence and consciousness,
like a creaky staircase.

For a more complete discussion of that, click on "pdf":

http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio.NC/0311006

That book chapter was a plenary talk at the first international conference on consciousness, held that year
in Tokyo; it goes much further than the talk by Chalmers, but is generally consistent with what Chalmers said.
Greenfield attended, and has since said similar things (and spent more time on the "consciousness circuit.").

That's rough... but the roadmap to mouse-level AGI in my view involves four stage:

1. "Vector intelligence"
2. "Spatial complexity intelligence," which mainly exploits symmetry principles as possible
with ordinary parallel hardware in order to better approximate what you may call the Solomonoff prior
3. "Temporal complexity intelligence," which fully exploits multiple time intervals in life
4. "Mouse-creative intelligence," which uses a kind of spatial cognitive mapping to
solve a certain aspect of the "local minimum" or creativity problem.

Cartoon caricatures of 2 and 3 are long familiar in AI -- "spatial chunking" with
"world modelling" and "temporal chunking." But the math to make it work in a general way in a learning
system requires a lot more than cartoons and clever hacks. Also, the use of mathematics does NOT
require an assumption that "the mind equals the brain;" mathematics is far more universal than that. Those of you who
know what a Pythagorean is might reasonably put me in the pigeonhole.

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

But then what of 2, AGI beyond the mouse? And where is the human in this?

In both of my recent single-authored papers in Neural Networks, 2009 and 2012, I have the same color figure with a mountain on
it which depicts all these levels.

Beyond the mouse level, the next big level up is pictured as the "semiotic intelligence," the kind
of brain or mind which makes full use of symbolic reasoning. So far, that fits with what most
people believe about the world around them.

Then comes zinger number one. Konrad Lorenz once said something like:
"I spent my whole life looking for the missing link, the half-man half-ape creature which
has not yet really achieved sapience. And now, Eureka, I have found him! He is all around me, the
normal modern human walking the streets of any major city."

That's basically my position. If semiotic intelligence exists at all as a discrete stage in brain hardware
design, the human simply is not born at that level. The new underlying principles are all based on the concept of
"vicarious experience," a symmetry not between objects we see but between our selves and other intelligent actors.
We can learn to EMULATE the semiotic level, through learning and disciple -- but not exactly like
that simple URL I just sent you. The 2012 Neural Networks paper says a lot more.

But then, zingers two or three.

It seems clear from the math that human-like semiotic intelligence is not the highest level of AGI which can be built.
It has two clear limitations:

1. It does not exploit what quantum mechanics offers us in increasing fundamental computing capability, which can be assimilated into
AGI to give it more power;

2. The treatment of symmetry is inexact and a weak approximation in some ways, which can be improved by a kind
of "multimodular" design (NOT LIKE today's cartoon multimodular or multirobots coordination systems) which
better exploits symmetry of such modules. (This is maybe more like those science fiction novels where
people swap brain implant disks to quickly learn from other folks -- a beautiful metaphor, but I'm not advocating doing it
with humans.)

An AGI at any level would be justified (crudely) in viewing an AGI at a lower level as "not really conscious."
Thus it is possible to build computers who might assert that human brains, even semiotic disciplined human brains,
are not really "conscious." I see no evidence that the human brain has any hardware whatsoever to
make it into a quantum-level or multimodular-level AGI.

BUT.. I do see evidence that it may be a SUBSYSTEM of such, even with hardware to make that possible.
The same kind of discipline and capability training which allows us to emulate the semiotic level can
naturally extend, in my view, to a certain kind of natural collective intelligence, VERY distinct from the ugly
destructive forms of groupthink and social systems which suppress creativity which often try to hide
behind that sort of concept.

======

But: this email is already too long, and the details to fill in that last paragraph are not just a sentence or two.

Best of luck,

Paul