halloween day after day after

Yesterday's informal post (informal except for the H2S update, suitable for Halloween) actually understated the complexity of the day. And not everything was depressing. Actually, I began this sequence of improbable days with the feeling that it was a great positive step to engage more closely with major conflicts which need to be resolved in this world, not only at the material  but at the mental level as well. It is good to come to terms with them.

But one of those days, I woke up with a very simple little poem being rehearsed/echoed in my mind, a bit like the power of a simple prayer or mantra, so simple it was a bit embarrassing:

Lightning streaks across the sky
I know not when I know not why

Feel the lightning feel the light
Feel it echo day and night

======

A couple of days later, I am sad to say I forget;
Did it begin Lightning, or "The lightning"?
Was it "feel it" or "feel them"?

Isn't the "know not" a bit strong? Certainly I am overwhelmed at times about
the many details and fundamentals I do not know even now, but a FEW things have come through...

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

Nice to have had a couple of dreams off of the usual mix of 90% astral or assumption, 10 % or less "ordinary dream dreams." Positive at least. The other day, it was a dream being encouraged to read a book, an article and something else on INTEREST RATES..  a way to focus my mind on the serious design questions for any Integrated Market Platform (IMP) for the coming internet of things, important questions discussed in a previous blog post. (VERY important questions people are not facing up to yet, discussed with some IT people recently, but Luda rightly reminds me that it confuses things when I say too much to too many people before I have real clarity on what we need to do.
But I need to think especially about the role of China, and what I say when I go there in less than two weeks, maybe soon enough that Donald Trump will also be there. Curious how my second day trip to Qatar was a day or two before Kushner came there, by now a couple of months ago.)
That day, the second dream was a feeling of a middle way in the design, ever so essential. (Could China even sell such a thing as an open source product to the world?)

Today... well, OK, maybe it was astral. The part I remember towards the end was in a VERY modern, clean feeling large room, not unlike the house in the late movie remake of Tron (which reminded me of this family at that time) or like some recommendations in the book Seeing With the Mind's Eye by Samuels and Samuels (a very beautiful paperback book I recommend). There was a huge screen filling up almost all of a wall, which I used to see various... games... or displays. In the final scene, I saw a waterfront place on the screen, not so colorful (the actual beaches of Waikaloa are not as colorful as people associate with Hawaii, but this was not so volcanic as Waikaloa). Happy people walking on the beach, nice women, and center stage was a guy who looked very Scandanavian.
He reminded me in a way of my very first boss, a Scandanavian cardiologist, from a summer job at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, a radiant benevolent guy with a solid build, tall, high forehead, smile., This guy on the screen was MORE of all those things, not so broad in face but higher forehead, more radiant, maybe a bit less hair. He smiled, ON THE SCREEN, and waved for me to come closer. Then he put a small piece of bread forward, beckoned for me to come close, and lo and behold a small piece of real bread actually appeared, coming out of the screen. This was some unbelievable and important technology, I felt... and I grabbed hold of the bread, ate it, and saw it was real. Next part, same procedure, but this time with a fish. A fish? I was worried whether it might wiggle in my hand, but I followed through anyway, and then the fish was just a little bigger than my hand, but dried in such a way that I could have just eaten it. But then my impulse was not to just eat it, but to first show it to Luda before anhthing else. I called out to her, and made to get her...
and there was something I don't remember about a bit of light to the middle of the fish... but the emotional intensity then woke me up, as emotional intensity often does from dreams. All positive, and for a minute I tried to hold on to the image, as I did not want to let go of something which felt so important and positive. Back in my ordinary mind/brain, I immediately thought: "Hey, bread and fishes by the waterside. I remember a couple of guys like that. Neither of them Scandanavian looking, but that's no surprise..."

But back to bed, to thinking about IT and China for now, checking events of the coming days, and seeing what Luda may say. Best of luck in your own adventures...

Odds and ends the day after Halloween

First personal things, then The Watch, no new science today except death by H2S
=====================================================

My two previous posts, both on spooky Schrodinger cats, happened to be on Halloween. I forgot what day it was, until I posted the second of the two, and Luda reminded me.

So then we put the front light on, to be welcoming, and brought out a small bowl of candy and waited. We usually don't get a lot of children on Halloween, because houses are further apart in our cul-de-sac than in other local neighborhoods. This year, it was even less than before. Could it be that kids might see a little cottage which, despite the flowery garden in front, is embedded in deep dark large forest, with a full moon peeking through the tall trees, and this year the aura of spooky Schrodinger cats? Only two little girls showed up, together, dressed as black cats....

A few days ago, I mentioned three focused images which came to my mind early that other day: the Schrodinger cat puzzle, the questions about how to specify an Integrated Market Platform (IMP), and a Tibetan mask of the dead which I saw in Nepal, with a face not unlike that of Turki Faisal whom I shook hands with last week. Sadly, the mask of the dead DID visit New York on Halloween as well.

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

Yesterday, in addition to seeing solutions to the Schrodinger cat questions, I also felt a question coming to me about three faces -- Turki Faisal, Mohsen Qomi (not Comey, but an interesting resonance), and Michael Hayden. (Though logic says "Don't forget Mercer!!." And of course, Russia and China always there.) How in the world could the human species hope to survive given the "Gog and Magog" kind of conflicts which could get out of hand, given some conflicts of values which appear irreconcileable, given some ever apparent limitations of human intelligence and flexibility.

The news about Saudi Arabia "giving citizenship" to a Sophia robot, and news I received privately about the transhumanist or antihumanist values of some of its promoters did not make me more optimistic.

I saw the news about the incident in New York on CNN (and France24!). There was the usual speech "the terrorists WANT us to be afraid. We will show them.." But is that really what the terrorists want? Or do they want to provoke a war of civilizations, one which their masters (not being authentic prophets) do not realize would simply zero out the human species? Others said "He was radicalized here,  but the US is more resilient to radicalization than the EU, so don't worry." As, but it was possible only because of the foundation he built on, and a new alignment of feelings and thoughts has been created here in the US...  Very tricky, very real, very delicate...

Up until now today, I have mainly followed leadings in the IMP sector, which Luda urges me NOT to post to the general public, though it builds on previous blog posts on that topic. The financial sector does get into IP issues.

But on Halloween, new news came through on climate which contributed to making it hard to overcome despair re this particular species. Let me just copy over what I sent to the Lifeboat list:

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

This week I heard more about the proud people who know they are on theright side of climate change. It was especially sad to see an oldwoman who really wanted to hear about gold stars to put on people'scollars, to make loyalty visible, but who wanted to block anydiscussion of whether present efforts are going utterly nowhere. Likea vast army, led by its leaders over the nearest cliff, due to theirbeing just as oblivious as famous conservatives to the reality theylive in.

But... in this tiny venue where life or death is an acceptabletopic... I do have some further thoughts on the H2S problem, which Ipreviously mentioned here. (See the nice color pictures in the laterpart of www.werbos.com/Atacama.pdf.) One skeptic said: "Oh,m thatoxygen depletion data for the Pacific is based on 2013 data. What of2017?" The relevant NOAA page says: it looks still valid, but ourfunds got cut and mandate restricfed, so we don't have a real update.
Of course, billions are being spent by politically correct peopledisplaying gold stars on their collars all over the world, but theminiscule research (million dollar type stuff?) to nail down the keyissues of conditions for H2S proliferation in the ocean is not beingdone in any of the labs capable of that kind of assay, aquarium levelresearch.
It does look (in the absence of that more precise research) that weare well on course to mass death of humans, with little chance ofglobal GHG programs cooling the antarctic in time to reverse that (orthe sea level rise which Hansen once called "worst case" nowunderway).
A few months ago, I started saying: "It may be timer NOW to startimplementing Teller's geoengineering plan." So I simply did what Ishould have long ago, googling Caldeira's latest work on that subject.It is more depressing than I thought. The materials HE is pushing aresulfates, the very worst materials to start pumping into the oceanswhen they MIGHT be crucial to H2S archaea proliferation. (That makesthe aquarium level research all the more essential, and the need forresearch to consider other aerosols.) Even worse, it works worse atthe poles, where we need it.
Sadly, what;s really needed is a major international research programaimed at deeper strategic push/study on OTHER hopes forgeoengineering... with or without US...  Maybe SSP is not our bestvenue now for low cost launch R&D, among others, though we WOULD needBoeing and ITAR analysis.

=========

Happy Halloween!

Is There a Parallel Copy of You Out There in The Quantum Universe?

 As of today, I think I know the answer to this question better than anyone else on earth, but I don’t expect you to just take my word for it. So I will explain in detail.

Most of you have heard something about “Schrodinger’s Cat.” This was a story which Schrodinger put together, to explain why he could not believe Heisenberg’s version of quantum mechanics. In the first part of that story, a cat is put into a “mixed state,” a special kind of state in quantum mechanics, in which the cat is half dead and half alive, undecided. In the second part of that story, the cat “condenses” into a live cat or a dead cat, exactly when a human observer looks at the cat, just because the human looks at it. Who was right, Heisenberg or Schrodinger?

Here on this blog, and elsewhere, I have explained why Heisenberg was wrong about the second part of the story. But as for the first part – there is a whole lot of new experimental evidence proving that “macroscopic Schrodinger cats” do exist. More precisely, it has been proven that modern quantum electrodynamics (QED) continues to hold in the macroscopic world we live in, so that big objects CAN be puut into all kinds of mixed states, not just alive or dead, but here or there, open or shut, etc. And since human bodies are governed almost entirely by QED (and a little bit of Newtonian gravity), that means that you and I ARE OURSELVES Schrodinger cats, in principle.

This leads to a lot of follow-in questions important to us:

(    (1)  Under the normal rules of QED, how many copies of us are actually likely to be out there?

(     (2)  If we also try to explain QED as a kind of statistical approximation to a deep theory of the Einstein/Lagrange kind, in which there is only ONE universe, how could that be reconciled with (1) and what would it change?

     
     (3)  How does this connect to reports of spiritual or paranormal experience, which some of us take quite seriously?

Not until today did I feel I have a resolution of all three questions, in a consistent manner, which I am comfortable with. But since they are all tricky questions, let me take them in that order. Please forgive a bit of copy and paste.

       (1)  ****************** DOES QED PROMISE YOU A “TWIN”?

First, we can ask what the story would look like IF QED (KQED or MQED) were our only foundation for answering -- neglecting the possibility of a deeper Einstein/Lagrange model, and neglecting anything paranormal or spiritual.

My wife (who has two PhDs to my one, both in serious hard S&T) immediately doubts that there is a parallel version of her out there. Yes, lots of "quantum foam" (John Wheeler's image), but no real macroscopic separation. After all, all the known cases of macroscopic Schrodinger cats which I cited before were DESIGNED BY engineers working in Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST). Those folks constantly struggle with the tendency of nature to destroy such correlations or entanglements, through decoherence and disentanglement, very powerful forms of "entropy" they are only able to overcome for a short time by applying lots of free energy and focused, conscious design. In the absence of such deliberate application of free energy, shouldn't we expect nothing more than quantum foam?

Here, it does start to matter what TYPE of QED one believes in. In truth, MQED would ultimately allow both forward time and backward time free energy, and larger scale designs, in a way which might allow larger scale superposition, and in a way which raises the question of what splitting might be created by the deployment of free energy by minds in other times and places.

But even then, the story is not quite so simple (or so definite and clear) as that may sound. In effect, it assumes that "entropy" from nature, except when it offers free energy to us, is a force towards local disorder, decoherence and disentanglement. Many years ago, I revisited that issue of the shape of the entropy function (see a couple of papers reposted at arxiv, such as one in the cond-mat section of arxiv). Long-distance correlations DO exist in nature, at times. A nice example to think about is the simple iron magnet kind of thing, where energy is minimized (and probability of the state maximized) for the two extreme states of all little spins/magnets pointing in one direction, or in the opposite direction, something very much like a Schrodinger cat. Or even consider the presence of PLANETS in the cosmos, a kind of big correlation across space, very different from a disorderly gas. 

For humans, what matters is whether states of our entire planet might ALSO have that kind of complex energy landscape, with multiple basins of attraction, which would naturally lead to mixed states across such possibilities... but would it just be statistical entanglement and not quantum entanglement? 

Bottom line: I would tend to expect that large-scale correlations in nonliving nature, or in complex ecologies, would experience heavy decoherence, even though probabilities would still exist for many different states. Parallel people would exist in different wave functions in the density function of the cosmos, but they would simply be mixed states – classical statistical probabilities, in effect. There would be classical types of uncertainty about our past and future, but not Schrodinger cat types of mixed states, EXCEPT to whatever extent conscious folks like us deliberately exploit quantum technology to create such entanglements. MQED predicts it is easier to do that than the best mainstream QED (KQED) does.

Even so, we ourselves really are just “shadows,” patterns within classical statistical possibilities, as I described in www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf. We already knew that “life is a game of probabilities” in the classical world; this just extends that a bit. There may well exist a parallel earth in which “Terminator 2” already happened, where intelligent robots and computers exploit MQED to try to dominate the entire timestream, exactly as described in the movie, or in the deep science fiction series by Dan Simmons, the Hyperion series.

        (2)  **************** BUT WHAT IF THERE ARE ONLY 3+1 DIMENSIONS?

Most mainstream physicists do not place much hope in the idea of explaining QED (any form) as a statistical approximation to something deeper, something without stochastic terms, defined over just 3+1 dimensions of spacetime, as Einstein sought until his dying day. I was one of very few people fully conversant in QED truly hoping for such a deeper explanation; others, better known, are Anthony Leggett and Gerard ‘tHooft. In 3+1 dimensions, how could there be multiple copies of any of us, at the same point in space-time? This question explains why Leggett was a leader of the skeptics who doubted the possibility of macroscopic Schrodinger cats… until experiments proved them to be real.

I do not believe it is scientific to just BELIEVE in Einstein’s picture, but more and more I have seen answers to questions which seemed unanswerable, and see more and more hope/possibility that Einstein will be proven right in the end on this key point. (Not on everything of course! No human is infallible.)

So how do we explain the cats?

The answer is basically simple. We live our lives at the level of QED, not at the level of physics below one femtometer. Yes, MQED can be derived as a good statistical description of something deeper, but we ourselves live “at the cybernetic level,” not at the level of things smaller than one femtometer. In a way, we are just classical statistical possibilities, vying for probability. We exist, such as we are, because QED predicts/determines our existence, and that means that we really are just Schrodinger cats, despite what exists at a deeper level.

Because the mixed states are mainly a matter of classical probabilities, there is no real conflict with underlying Einsteinian physics; what quantum entanglements exist are a key issue which any credible Einsteinian explanation must handle in any case to be credible. (See the link above. By the way, I have a family of new Lagrangians which are more promising,  but need to wait for the time when physics is more ready, when MQED is an established starting point.

            (3)  WHAT OF SPIRITUAL ASPECTS?

If there is more than one actual future in existence in front of us, what does this say about precognition and such?

Many people have experience of life limited enough that they are justified in not even reading the literature of parapsychology. They are justified in believing like Hebb (introduction to his seminal classic book The Organization of Behavior) that parapsychologists have proven their claims more than other psychologists have proven theirs, but that “physical impossibility” (as known to psychologists) rules out any real hope of it being true. If you are one of those, please do not waste your time by reading further.

On my own case, it was a precognitive kind of experience which forced me to be open-minded, at first, and then convinced as experience mounted.

From that viewpoint, weird entanglements and cross-time cross-“world” effects can be created (and managed to some degree) either by quantum technology (as in simple quantum computers which exploit entanglement) OR by the entities we call “souls” or “noosphere” which have evolved in the vast ocean of dark matter and energy in the cosmos, long enough to have developed a biological equivalent of that technology.

One of the folks on the Vedanta discussion group asked me today who could make another copy of me (Meow!), and what would happen then to the original.

My reply:

As a practical matter consider the example of a backwards time telegraph discussed in a recent NATO workshop, recounted at
www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf. Seeing a terrorist act unfold
before my eyes, I could send a signal back in time (if the device is
provided) to prevent the terrible loss of life... and THEREBY create another copy of me, a version who at this later time did NOT experience the terrorist act! As a matter of ethics, I WOULD send the signal back... but others might hesitate over that decision, and we all might wonder what REALLY happens. The device
would be a straightforward extension of the experiment proposed at
http://vixra.org/abs/1707.0343.

In that case, the new version of me would have the record of the
message from the future, but I would expect the brain not to remember
having sent it. However, I would tend to expect the soul would
remember, and for the soul information to reach the brain, if the
person is reasonably attuned to the soul side.

could a simple experiment lay to rest the old idea of metaphysical observers?

Does the current state of real experiments in quantum foundations
already make it totally obsolete and wrong to talk about "metaphysical
observers" the way that Copenhagen people do?

My wife rightly keeps reminding me that I sometimes jump ahead too
much, without really cleaning up the elementary points which people
need to understand and justify more completely first.

And so.. I have good practical reasons, I think, for discounting
metaphysical observers, but maybe it would be useful to do actual
experiments to really nail down the point in an easier way to
understand. Since ... is not SO far away from Professor Yamamoto
(emeritus Stanford), it is possible that he might have ideas for THAT
kind of experiment, as I will explain.

Let us begin by asking WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS in a very simple kind of
experiment: we have a source of photons emitting light at a certain
rate, at a certain (linear) polarization. That light is sent to a
polarizer, after which there is a detector, and a human looks at the
readout from the detector. For simplicity, assume the photon has an
initial polarization of angle tau, while the polarizer is tilted to
want angle theta to pass through.

It is well-known that the intensity of light at the detectors will be
cos**2(tau - theta), so we know how the experiment comes out. But
there are fiv e theories of what is happening here, which need to be
tested against each other (in DIFFERENT experiments).

According to the old metaphysical Heisenberg version (even if updated
a bit), the wave function of the photon BEFORE the polarizer is just a
nice pure wave,
for polarization tau, with a wave function denoted as |tau>.. The
polarizer then
performs a "unitary operation," rotating the wave function. What comes
out is the wave function a|theta>+b|0>, where |0> means "vacuum state
(no photon there), where a is some complex number like cos(tau-theta)
and where |a|**2+|b|**2=1.

In the Heisenberg theory, what comes out of the detector is ALSO a
mixed state, with a|detection>+b|no-detection>, if it is a perfect
detector. The wave function "collapses" into a human seeing a
detection or a human seeing no detection, only when a human actually
looks at what comes out of the detector.

So that's theory number 1. Let me jump to theory number 3, KQED, my
understanding of the best mainstream version of QED actually used
today. According to KQED, what comes out of the polarizer is ALREADY
collapsed.
What comes out is a density operator, representing a simple classical
probability of |a|**2 that the wave function coming out is just
|theta> and a probability of |b|**2 that nothing comes out at all. In
fact, all the well-known "predictions of quantum mechanics" for the
classic Bell's Theorem experiments used this assumption in doing the
calculations. (I have papers at arxiv which review those calculations
in detail.)

I have put a lot of effort into lobbying for two experiments which
would decide which is true, theory 3 or theory 4 (which I haven't
mentioned yet in THIS post),
but what about deciding which is true, theory 1 or theory 3? (No, it's
not just a matter of interpretation.) What about a possible theory 2,
where the polarizer is unitary but the detector is not?

In fact, there are physical consequences to the idea that |theta> and |0> may be
superposed, like entangled in a way, together. So by testing those
consequences, could we lay theory 1 to rest in a way clear to
everyone, once and for all?

Since theory 1 strikes me as silly, for many reasons, I haven't put
much effort into this myself, and I don't plan to. But since theory 1
is such an article of religious faith for so many people, maybe it
would be good for SOMEONE to aim for such an experiment. It is even
conceivable to me that a very clear experiment has already been done,
and not published because it would be seen by some as a "negative
result."

Above all, I think I remember seeing some paper by Yamamoto, a highly
respected researcher, talking about exploiting states of the form
a|theta>+b|0> in quantum computing. Could it be that HIS lab has
examined this? Perhaps it is a simple matter of persuading people in
his group that results they already have SHOULD be brought forward, as
the decisive test of alternative basic theories which they are, and
published. (Not that the thoughts of graduate students doing such work
are really simple!) Or perhaps it is something close enough at hand in
his lab that he could do it. Or perhaps someone else on the list
connected to a place which does such work could do it.

Who knows?

Again, it is not at the core of my own emphasis, which does not give
credence to theory 1 anyway.

Best of luck,

   Paul

P.S. For those who might ask... theory 3 basically would represent the polarizer as a solid state object which "condenses the wave function" in the usual way they teach in quantum mechanics 1. In my papers at arxiv (published at SPIE and elsewhere), I showed how that idea can be translated into a "master equation" like what is standard in real quantum optics these days, having the same effect. But I also showed a DIFFERENT master equation, with DIFFERENT effect, a different model of what the polarizer does. That simple difference in models was, last year, the only clear difference between KQED and my proposed variation, MQED. Just a matter of characterizing what polarizers ACTUALLY do. But if they do what I think they do, the implications are very far-reaching, because it proves that the models we use for ALL solid state components in quantum optics need to be revised, in a way which opens the door to all kinds of new technology. This past year, I added a near-trivial new model for black body radiation sources, and proposed another simple experiment to test that one, with wilder and crazier and easier properties. That's theory 4. Theory 5 would be **IF** a deeper Einstein/Lagrange type of unified model could be found, for which MQED would only be an approximation.

questions of the day: cats, IMP and Tibetan mask of the dead

For me, today is a day of questions. Actually, I have spent MANY of my days "banging my head against the wall" on tough questions I had not answer for, which no one else had answers for either. I decided this was a major part of my own personal mission or calling early on, when I observed how many brilliant people would slide away or cheat on some basic questions. This was reinforced a lot when I found I really could answer some questions others gave up on (like how to train a simple neural network, which Minsky thought was impossible, but that was just one small example). Today's society tends to reward people who do the opposite, who give up asking questions and spend their lives as salesmen, which convinced me all the more that SOMEONE needs to fill the vacuum.

As a general matter, the job of a knowledge worker is to input, to process, and to output -- ALL THREE. That middle stage deserves more respect..

But whatever.

So this morning... in my early morning meditative state... yes, I know I know lots of stuff no one else does, but three images come to mind demanding that I think hard and try to sort things out better:

(1) the Schrodinger cat;

(2) the Integrated Market Platform (IMP) proposal;

and (3) the new Tibetan Mask of the Dead which I saw when wandering around Kathmandu
(weirder than the incident I mentioned before in front of the Pashupatinath Temple).

The literature on macroscopic Schrodinger cats is pretty overwhelming.  In fact, maybe I should post here what I sent the Vedanta list a few days back:

************************************************************************
***************************************************************************
Meow!

Vinod and Stan made the reasonable request that I send again the link
to a review of the massive empirical literature on macroscopic
Schrodinger cats. I am responding on a new thread, mainly because I
don't want to have to repeat this process again. To find what I sent
before, I used "search" in the "sent" email directory of gmail, and
used "print all" to save to pdf, and used the superior search
capabilities in adobe reader to locate what I sent you before! (Life
was so much easier when I could use Eudora 7 as my email package!) I
will tell you exactly how I found the stuff, so that you won't be so
dependent on me in future.

The best review book I found before, and sent you, was:

https://www.amazon.com/Macroscopic-Quantum-Coherence-Computing/dp/0306465655

I believe that the massive news about macroscopic Schordinger cats
emerged from a seminal paper in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6791/full/406043a0.html

I have to admit I do not see the name "Nakamura" there. I learned
about the paper in Nature at a very large conference on quantum
information technology, supported by multiple agencies of the US
government, where this new result was THE big new thing, the hit of
the conference. That's where I heard people give credit to Nakamura,
but I don 't see his name in my searches so far!!

Since the issue of quantum measurement is at the center of "KQED
versus MQED versus earlier stuff," I feel I have a duty to mention
another paper more suitable for experts by a very thoughtful guy
respected in quantum computing, who gives a very different  informed
view of things we have debated:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0105127.pdf

This morning I repeated the kind of search which led me to find that
first book (which I have not read, as I rely more on piles of journal
articles and such). I went to scholar.google.com, and simply searched
on "macroscopic Schrodinger cat." Then I clicked on "cited by.." under
the most highly cited paper, to get a list of more recent papers which
cite that one. This is a really important trick, to find the most
current literature and what it says about a classic paper like
Friedman's paper in Nature. This pointed to a slightly older book, but
probably a lot more definitive in this area:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1590332245/

(You don't have to buy the book to get a picture of what's going on
from that web page!)

But to get a real picture, there is no substitute for the primary
literature, the vast collection of papers (more recent especially)
which are also available for free more than half the time on the web.
(Notice that even without "advanced search", Google Scholar lets you
specify a range of dates.) A nice example is:

http://www.mdpi.com/2304-6732/3/4/57/htm

By the way, this example is based on Circuit QED, which is a recent
extension of Cavity QED (CQED), which I mention only briefly in the
review section of http://vixra.org/abs/1707.0343. Once macroscopic
Schrodinger cats moved from theory to experiment to known physics, the
next stage was engineering. Most of the engineering of macroscopic
Schrodinger cats has been within the field of quantum information
science and technology (QuiST), and that is why the examples are
mainly in electronics and photonics lately. But there is an example
out there in the chemistry of large molecules (think DNA), and lots of
work in China which it is a little harder to obtain on the web,
perhaps because of their new national security push on QuIST or
perhaps because they promised to act more like US on matters of IP.

For those of you interested in the more humanistic question "what is
it like to integrate one's consciousness or soul ACROSS patches?" I am
in the middle of an awful but easy to read novel which basically does
address that issue:

https://www.amazon.com/All-Our-Wrong-Todays-Novel/dp/1101985135/

(It is interesting that I never saw a novel before which addressed
that question in the present tense, and it appears just now. The Dune
series addressed the question in future tense, for a mundane brain

********************************************************************************************
******************************************************************************************

OK, that's pretty straightforward at the level of what we really know from the experimentally solid part of quantum field theory, quantum electrodynamics (QED). But what if we believe (as I still generally do) in the idea that QED can be derived as a statistical approximation (good until we see things smaller than 3 femtometers) to the emergent behavior of a more Einstein-style field theory? How could an Einstein type field theory give rise to macroscopic Schrodinger cats? I have posted my initial thoughts on that here on this blog...  but I am wondering how certain I should be, and what clear possibilities I should be considering?

I have also mentioned the need for IMP here, and am very disappointed that the echoes so far have been inadequate... things that wouldn't work. Yet in all fairness, having the world run by an automated market platform sounds cold and scary, even though it is the best I (or anyone else) have come up with so far. Is it just a matter of filling in gaps in the story and the dissemination and getting used to it (as I got used to Schrodinger cats, more or less)? Or is something deeper required?

Yesterday, when I was stuck for a few minutes in a parking lot, I googled "Heisenberg Gopi Krishna", and found some interesting stuff, as expected. I am not moved to probe that part of the past more now, but maybe that was part of what brought the mask of the dead to mind now. This was the second time a meeting with a mask of the dead intersected a significant time in my life... the previous being 1973 or so... but then again aren't all the times significant? But this one had a different face, reminding me a bit of Turki Faisal and the assumption dream last night. 

Must run... and think... 

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One more:
On Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 8:08 AM, Andris Heks <a.heks@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear Bruno, If you perceive the absolute as personal, I cannot understand why you continue with an impersonal 'machine' model assumption. Surely, a 'living organism' would be a more appropriate model.

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It is important that we not put too much trust in specific words when we try to grapple with such tricky things beyond the level of mundane ordinary life.

What does "personal" mean anyway? I have argued that an Einstein/Lagrange optimization model of the cosmos may well be "personal" or "superpersonal," with one reasonable usage of those words, even though it would ALSO fit common ideas of what a "mechanical" or "materialistic" model would be!! What matters is NOT the position we take in a debate for or against such a word, which gives at best a fuzzy picture of the reality which it tries to describe, but the more precise understanding we develop.

Yet in truth, I find myself called this morning to think twice even about the tentative more precise understanding I have developed, in part by considering questions people have raised here.

For example -- what difference does it make whether the true Lagrangian is MAXIMIZED, or if it can only be described as a MINMAX operation (which sounds a bit Zoroastrian!), or that it might be MAX or MINMAX subject to equality constraints (a crucial feature of simple Maxwell's Laws, a crucial axiom, often mischaracterized in discussions of the underlying assumptions of a field theory). Does life exist "between the fire and the ice," between hard fixed points and stochastic "heat death", requiring a minmax kind of situation, making the cosmos less "personal" than one might imagine? And are we REALLY just possible scenarios of a PDE model? What is the real meaning of those Schrodinger cats? How would I look at all this if I did NOT include personal experience, which must always be taken with caution (as there are many many ways that strange things can happen)? 

All for now.

Of courses, none of this raises questions about noosphere and galaxy, which are still there in any case.