God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!

Discussion of hybrid images

Detailed commentary on slide from my recent presentation

Slide 29 - Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe?

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required. The original covers a larger portion of the torso and the effect is much more pronounced.

===== Extended commentary on how the way humans process images can cause interpersonal conflict ==

You can see smaller partial versions of it here. The MIT Hybrid Image page is here with a three faces that are both smiling or/and frowning, depending on your distance. This illustrates the problem with the terms "or" and "and" when considering phenomena that cover a broad range of scales simultaneously. It can cause amazing conflict by two viewing groups who can't understand why the other group, looking at the "same thing" on a different scale or from a different distance, can possibly be so stupid as to see the "wrong" thing.

Another "angry illusion" on www.hemmy.net shows an angry and a calm face that change to the other expresion as you move further away.

It may be that a number of international conflicts are due to this exact phenomenon, or its analog, where those close to the front lines perceive very clearly one thing, and those at a comfortable distance away perceive something entirely different, leading to total internal chaos because of the mistaken stereotype that a perception "must be one or the other". It could explain some "you had to be there" excuses.
The sad truth is, like thinking there must be a "best", this is another comforting and simplifying error on the part of humans. Some things are both "chickens and eggs", and almost everything takes on that property as soon as you close the feedback loop of causality so A causes B which in turn causes A, and let it stabilize into a strange resonance state that we simply never see when feedback is not involved.

Regardless, this is one way that the situation at "the front lines" of an organization might be astoundingly different than the way it is so clearly and unambiguously viewed at the top. Repeatedly, the question asked by CEO's or top officials is "Why bother going down there? I can see from here!" The answer is that even you would see why if you went. That's why Toyota has a policy of "Genchi Genbutsu" -

You have to go down there and take the time necessary to settle down and actually see things from that viewpoint before you rush to judgment or speak or come up with "a plan" that won't have such a high risk of being nonsense or worse.

All our images, including mental ones that use the same hardware in our brains, have the problem of "filling in" gaps for us (to be "helpful", like Microsoft Word's paperclip) whether we asked them to or not. There is no way for us to know by looking at our mental picture that our head has papered over details it couldn't make sense of and replaced them with something that made more sense to it. (almost the definition of a magnetic "stereotype" that grabs hold if we get anywhere near it.)

Life is "fractally complex" and sometimes the fine-grained details change the entire equation. There are shapes, like the famous snowflake curve, that can be filled with paint but not painted. Our intuition misguides us. The "genchi genbutsu" rule of thumb is probably the safest bet.

Along with the other rule of thumb - "the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail." If it occurs to you that maybe you should go and look for yourself, don't put it off.

(from Rules of Thumb.)

Put in other terms, it's possible that there is way more energy in the high-frequency "details" than the low-frequency "overview", and that the details do NOT "go away" and can NOT be "put off till later."

That is pretty much the case with the Escher "Waterfall" picture. The tiny details that were wrong, that our eyes "helpfully" insist on discarding entirely for us from each local area of the picture, actually are coherently and systematically wrong and do not "cancel out." They are not "negligible" precisely for that reason.

In mathematical physics terms, we are used to the high-self-energy, low-interaction-energy world, where the inner product is
dominated by |a| and |b|. We tend to forget about <,> and can get away with it when thinking about rocks and simple machines. But when we get to social interactions, or plasma physics, or galactic centers and black holes, the interaction term <.> dominates, and the self-energy terms are negligible. 1 + 1 becomes dominated by the nature of "+" and doesn't care much about "1" any more. We have about zero intuition regarding that world, although we can compute the equations for it and simulate it.

Our problem is that we are trying to use cold-earth mathematics to design policies for high-energy social interactions. We try to leave out all the feedback, and all the cross-product interaction terms, and then are baffled that our results don't match the data. Hmmm.

The lessons we should learn from "system dynamics" or books like "Feedback control of dynamic systems" is that not only is the feedback usually not negligible, it actually dominates every other factor. If you want a good "first approximation", leave out all the other stuff and put back in the feedback structure and see what that gives you!

Are important vertical or horizontal loops clearly broken? Are unexpected loops clearly present, given observed behavior? Start there. If you get a "hit" don't bother with any other details until you get that fixed, because they'll all become irrelevant as soon as you reconnect, or disconnect the flow power loops. These are the kinds of "facts" that are way more important than legacy "data" that so confidently (and incorrectly) extrapolate to tell you your quest is "impossible" and "nothing can be done about that."

This whole subject touches a point that Frank Drake and Carl Sagan used to make repeatedly in class, back in my astrophysics days at Cornell University in the late 1960's. (Sagan was briefly, my advisor before he left for JPL to work on launching Voyager) I was a grad student at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, acronym "CRSR", but we all called it "Charlie's Radio Service and Repair. " The group did many things, including running the world's largest radio-telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - made famous in the movie Contact (Jodie Foster) and also some James Bond movie where they fought in huge antenna.

Speaking of which, I see the Arecibo radio telescope will close if they can't raise $4 million this year. It's a sad loss - I was yelled at once by the designer of the antenna (who was my roommate) because I wasn't"symmetric about my z-axis". That was the night, after two months of struggling, he finally solved the 4-page equation for his PhD thesis, which he couldn't resist phrasing in the thesis as "It is obvious that ... "

But the passing of Arecibo, a very large but single dish, is part of the larger trend that synthesized virtual arrays made of of may smaller component telescopes are far cheaper to make and maintain and extend. As with "supercomputers", they stopped making "one" huge computer finally and now are grappling with the problem of how to get 800,000 smaller computers to "work together".

Amazing how that question keeps coming up.

Anyway - in what I term "Drake's Other law", Frank taught us that

Every time humans move to looking at a different level of the electromagnetic spectrum, we don't see just different sides of the same old things -- we see ENTIRELY NEW PREVIOUSLY UNSUSPECTED things going on.

So, back in visual days, no one knew the center of the galaxy was off in the direction of Sagittarius, but blocked by dust. We had to look in the radio frequency spectrum to discover that we were, like the Andromeda galaxy, in the midst of a huge "dish" of stars, about 2/3 of the way out from the center in one of the spiral arms.

My point is that, the same thing seems to be true of our observations of this "LIFE" thing we are part of. Every time we rotate the microscope lenses and change to a larger view, the whole nature of LIFE changes, as dramatically as Marilyn Monroe's image changed into Albert Einstein when you changed the viewing scale.

I warned about this in another post as well, discussing the properties of "mid-field" components of a radiation pattern of an antenna. The field is "obvious" and we can measure it reliably with technical equipment, and it clearly falls of as the inverse of the radius.

I said then

The cleanest and least ambiguous example, physically, is the middle-range field of a radiating dipole antenna. As discussed in a prior post, very near the antenna the power falls off as the inverse of distance. At long distances, the stable pattern can be measured to be falling off as the inverse cube of distance. And, in between, in the really annoying and complicated mid-range field, the pattern is unstable and appears, if measured, to fall off as the inverse square of distance. Worse, in the mid-range, some fields build up that behave as if they are about to be radiated into space, but then sort of change their mind and get basically sucked back into the antenna.

Very near the antenna, less than 1/10 of a wavelength away, life is good and the equations are easy. Very far from the antenna, over 100 wavelengths away, life is good and the equations are different, but easy.

In between, things get extraordinarily messy. Power seems to get created out of thin air, then go away again, if you "neglect" all the terms that are "negligible" at each end, but not in the middle.

There's a lesson there. In the creation of LIFE ON EARTH, we're in the "middle" part. You can't assume any term is "negligible" -- you have to check it out and be sure it is. And even then, you could be wrong tomorrow about what it turns out was true today.

You end up learning what it means to say "The future isn't what it used to be."
If the past changes in the future, and the future has changed from the past, you really can't be sure any extrapolation of the "present" is reliable, whether you can "prove it" or not.