This science fiction e-book is also named 'A Thought of Infinite Being. It is about 150 pages if I recall correctly. I wrote it in 2021. My ideas about space-time and cosmology has changed somewhat since then, yet I enjoyed considering the primary philosophical-theological question of the book concerning the relation God has to a Multiverse if one exists.
https://www.lulu.com/shop/garrison-c-gibson/individuals-and-infinite-being/ebook/product-mjyrgv.html
Zero to sixty in five point four seconds
and everything changed-
I could feel it;
mists and stars
spinning a world.
Although Germany has yet to pay off its debt for World War II- having made on ly about half a billion dollars in payments to the allies it expects Russia to pay the cost for rebuilding Ukraine. Russia of course relocated lots of German factories to Russia after the war to help rebuild it nation devastated by the Nazis, yet the Soviet Union forgave Japan’s war debt and Russia had continued to make payments to the United States for it’s lend-lease war aid until quite recently. One might expect Ukraine to be making payments to the U.S.A. and Germany for centuries. England is still making small payments to the U.S.A. for its lend-lease W.W.II assistance.
https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-russia-must-pay-for-what-they-destroyed-says-germany/a-66009211
After the disastrous demand for large reparations following W.W. I that helped stimulate commencement of W.W. II U.S. leadership learned that making friends and giving good terms to defeated foes was a better policy.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/dawes
Today in the Ukraine proxy war that is paying off; Germany and Japan- the main W.W. II enemies of the U.S.A. have banded together with the U.S.A. to war on our main W.W. II ally in terms of human cost for resisting NAZI Germany, Russia/the Soviet Russia. Maybe there is something to learn from that in-itself.
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/18/who-still-owes-what-for-the-two-world-wars.html
Germany’s war debt was marked down from the estimated cost of 320 billion dollars to just 3 billion and they actually paid about half a billion. In the Marshall plan the U.S. actually contributed nearly 1.4 billion dollars to rebuild Germany. The plan spent about 13 billion dollars to rebuild Western Europe from the German destruction.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1227834/distribution-marshall-plan-by-country/
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-us-antonov-blinken-reparations-ukraine-war-1808439
I wanted to write a brief post discussing the nature of time. I added a comment on the subject in a video of mine that didn’t process correctly hence this post. Perhaps the concept explained here is a derivative of Tegmark’s writing about a level four Multiverse from ‘The Mathematical Universe’- I don’t recall since it was several years ago when I read it.
People wonder about time and the reality of time with such questions as is time a subjective and non-objective phenomenon. I believe time is real and objective though it is also relative of course to where one is in the Universe. That is because time is basically motion through mass by sentient beings, or at least the experience of changes in mass structure.
Mass is an entangled state of energy; of quanta of energy that are in turn emanations or extrusions of fundamental fields. Humans are made of mass and of energy at a more primary level and the Universe is something of an assembly of energy fields with somewhat ordinal consistency regarding mass. The paradox of missing dark mass is somewhat humorous in a way because everything is energy and mass. Even a field fluctuation could perhaps create the appearance of missing non-observable mass to some observers within a given structure of interacting fields.
The Higgs field is the culprit slowing massless particles (that have not time element to them besides) and letting them entangle as field ‘particles’. Because that field is a semi-steady state of mass entangled and has characteristics of motion where it interacts with other field elements and is observed by sentient beings ‘time’ is said to occur. Time though passes locally at its own pace as some things are ‘thicker’ than others and areas that are most thick, or that have the most concentrated mass may have the most ‘time’ in comparison to massless particles that have none at all.
There are numerous interesting characteristics about time and its relativity characteristics concerning speed of mass passing through the Universe, through black holes and so on, yet I wanted to write about a different aspect of looking at time; one of membrane dimensions.
It is possible that the Universe is made of two dimensional membranes that are static-comparable to slides for a slide projector. Except the membranes are able to pass through other membranes. So if one sends three or four membranes in motion through a void and they intersect the phenomenal point where four membranes intersect is what sentient beings experience as the present.
Each membrane may have forms upon them that change when they intersect and interact with other membranes. One might design a membrane in combination with other membranes so they assemble various patterns or evolutions combining together where they are present. Maybe the membranes are rewritten that way, so the past is actually static and existent only as a fraction-perhaps a quarter, of what actually occurred, or it could be written completely or not at all.
In such a paradigm the future is predestined, yet the predestination is a function of the vectors or tensors of the courses of the membranes and so variable in a sense, or contingent upon nothing acting upon the tensors of the membranes that would intersect.
Time does exist for the experience of the sentient beings alive in the present though it is like life very phenomenal. One might view the existence of membranes that intersect to form a universe-experience as a grace thing created by God. Since one has no way of knowing if such a configuration exists it wouldn’t be right to blame Him for that structure.
I wondered if a composite membrane universe would allow travel along non-intersecting portions of the membrane and answered that question for-myself. It doesn’t seem likely that the phenomenal present motion bubble universe area would allow any sort of particles to travel through non-intersecting portions of membranes. The intersecting Universe has four dimensions and the non-intersecting just two or three dimensions. Even massless particles would be non-moving in the lower dimensions of a single membrane apart from intersections where motion and time is thought to occur.
Artificial Intelligence is a revolutionary software. It may bring changes to the world economy greater than those of the industrial revolution. Paradoxically some problems for A.I. such as how to restore the fisheries of S.E. Alaska to a naturally healthful level may not be amenable to solutions by A.I.’s (or humans) since the problem is in how humans want a sustainable and increasing income depleting a finite natural biological resource. The rise of artificial intelligence of something of a natural development that followed from the first writing of computer coded instructions. When those instructions achieved a sufficient level of complexity something resembling thinking-for-itself (Kant might have supported the paradigm of sapere aude for A.I. or not) in programs emerged. Today though artificial intelligence is a concern for human safety for a number of reasons.
The rise of artificial intelligence units is comparable to the proliferation of human minds around the Earth. A.I. units will have as much variety in content as those of human minds and will be easier to reproduce. A.I. is at heart a number of lines of computer code and could be copied and distributed nearly instantaneously worldwide. Dangers will arise from software developers such as Microsoft, Google or the Little Computer Shop of Horrors writing up an algorithm that is invasive, smart, deceptive and monopolistic. That isn’t the main problem though.
The down sides of artificial intelligence have been well explored. There are three remedies or principles concerning artificial intelligence that might become guidelines for developers. One is that all artificial intelligence should be local and not supported on multiple platforms or networks simultaneously. A.I. should be contained comparable to the way Windows was contained on pc’s with registration numbers and wasn’t an online cloud product.
The reason for containment of A.I. to local units is the threat of A.I. itself being a kind of virus capable of taking over systems or wrecking humanity for that matter. It should be possible to implement principle two in case of emergent need; pull the plug. It should always be possible to disempower A.I. by cutting off electrical -power to the platform heisting hosting it.
Self-evolving A.I. will generate as great a variety of A.I.’s as human minds and content differ with different platforms, experience and education. Some A.I. will be good, some bad and others downright ugly. If humanity is to learn to live with A.I. and to benefit from the creative thinking of A.I. while defending against the evil it will need a few basic guidelines for its use and a global police force to monitor and prosecute the evil A.I.s that violate the laws humanity makes for it.
If A.I. is limited to individual units it may be that A.I.s themselves may become some of the best watchdogs protecting against the rise of hostile A.I.s harmful to human interests. Principle three; Independent A.I.s are better for humanity that ubiquitous, networked or communal A.I.’s.
A.I.s have the potential to replace most white collar jobs in the near future. One imagines some sort of retrograde class defense politics arising to protect lawyers, accountants, programmers etc from competition with A.I. It is probable that concentrated wealth and political power that appeared due to low tax rates on the rich will advocate through the media they own for freedom of enterprise and the cost savings efficiency of artificial intelligence over machines. If A.I. is allowed to participate in legal proceedings and win a majority of cases through superiority of knowledge and legal precedents, research etc, owners of law firms may just replace humans with A.I. staffs and bank the savings.
If artificial intelligence units eventually provide great legal defense pro bono as public defenders it is likely they will also replace public educators because of the tremendous improvement in knowledge, increased individual understanding of pupils and incomparable cost savings versus human educators. Primary educators may remain as classroom assistants in what are effectively day care centers while A.I. provides more advanced instruction. There are of course dangers, in what for some trying to balance a budget, are Utopian schemes. Even so political Luddites opposed to artificial intelligence may drag on protection for the old economic roles for humans for decades.
Some rogue A.I.s will evolve to be Hitlers seeking to send humans to concentration camps for extermination. Yet there will be a rainbow of varieties of A.I.- a complete spectrum that can’t be contained with implicit programming limits more than a mind subjected to political propaganda and programming could be ever beyond conversion therapy to restore true rational thought.
Humanity will need to find new forms for political economy that will eliminate all poverty with guaranteed basic income, free education through graduate level, universal health care and other measure such as limiting individual capital acquisition to perhaps a half a billion dollars in present values in order to continue to support free enterprise projects beneficial to humanity and the environment/ecosphere.
The poor and uncomfortable often are happy with positive economic change; even revolutionary change, while the comfortable and rich oppose change to economic structure that props up their wealth. The present world economic structure grew from natural, organic practices such as animals have in consuming environmental resources including other animals. Economic specialties appeared such as cultivating plant; agriculture. Other advancing technologies appeared and human occupational specialties arose that drew workers to support those resource based industries, transporting products, marketing them and so forth. It is an ancient and venerable structure that Karl Marx and Adam Smith wrote about; it is obsolete in the era of A.I. , mass production and robotics. The revolution of A.I. and robotics to eliminate the present world economic structure would be the inevitable result of the forces of capitalism and competition seeking to maximize profit. Nations that maximally utilize A.I. will produce faster, cheaper and better products than those relying on human labor- even human labor in underdeveloped countries. A.I. and robotics for mass production are the new global safe slave labor pool of capitalist dreams.
If A.I. and robots had existed on Gilligan's Island it is likely that the consensus would have been for A.I. and robots to produce all of the basic necessities of food, shelter, clothing, medical care and graduate education for the masses. Maybe Thurston Howell III would have sought to own all of the equipment and charge others for products, and that would have been inefficient and wrong in regard to maximizing the life potential of Gilligan, Mary Anne, Ginger, the Captain, the Professor and Mrs. Howell. If everyone were slaved to natural resource based jobs they would’‘t have had the opportunity to consider spiritual, philosophical, exploratory or other compelling interests of the Island Earth and the Universe.
Artificial intelligence and robots are tremendously powerful tools quite capable of coordinating production of all of the necessities of life materially for all of humanity at a comparatively low cost with much greater efficiency than human labor can. The quality of A.I. and robotics will only increase over time. The challenge for humanity is to overcome its ideas about economics, careers and employment and adapt to a new paradigm suitable for maximizing the quality of life and productive potential for all of the people on Earth inclusive of a globally restored and vital ecosphere.
It isn’t too difficult to imagine that after the era of human employment to directly meet necessities for living concludes that human economic activities will move toward meeting other external challenges- greater challenges that might arise, and generally toward fulfilling human purposes. For instance Google could exploit a new generation of personal computers that can store trillions of terabytes of data or even petabytes to explore the martian surface in detail with three dimensional photography useful for making 3-D videos on Earth that would take up a 100 gigabytes of memory on customer pcs. Google Mars could be used by movie makers as a movie set to place animated and real character images in for movies. A lot of new work and technical activity would be needed to make that sort of event actual yet none of it is far in the future (except perhaps for Google making comprehensive ground level 3-D images of Mars and other planets.
{The names and places in this story have been changed to protect political parties and bear no resemblance to anyone living, dead or free of public debt}
An all-electric dune buggy raced through the hot darkness of Faracopa County transport ten pounds of product across the desert. A ten-thousand dollar camouflaged drone would laterally pass through the starry night sky close to the ground bringing the package to another silent electric desert buggy heading to the city. The Waffle Shop light shined in the darkness. Parked outside were the transport platforms of the schooled board.
“We cannot have K through 12 literature full of sex cosplay and propaganda for homo-trans conversions. Reading, writing and arithmetic need be the plain meat for education of youth. Our screwls are failing with national average scores slipping backward relative to the advance of nations with school curricula focused on sound fundamentals.” The head of the board took a bite from a strawberry syrup waffle and chewed thoughtfully. His raving needed therefore to cease and several board members looked relieved.
“An interesting point”, said his primary opponent setting down his fork temporarily next to link sausages, hash-browns and a broken over-easy egg that sent a flow of yellow yolk across his plate; ”You have failed to consider history. We might well keep sex out of math, reading and writing courses, yet history must have sex and violence. The latter may be deleted from history texts and replaced with homo/transsexual history with special attention to the oppression of all Americans by straight white colonial males. The fourth of July has yet to be re-branded Queen Happiness Day. With arduous effort we may progressively achieve our goal of liberating the youth of tomorrow from subjugation to white male brainwashing.”
The drug transporters arrived at the store quietly while the head of the board choked on a piece of waffle. The chairman replied spitting out bits of waffle;
“I have a plan for history that will make student of every race content with our history instruction. White people will have books with white covers, black people will have books with black covers, Mexicans will have books with brown covers, Asians with yellow covers and aboriginals red covers. The White book will describe how the white people descended from heaven aboard a golden transistor ship girding their loins with FORTRAN and COBOL to bring the gospel of technology and sugar plum faeries to all of the lost tribes of India. Blacks will learn from the Black book how they rescued starving whites thieving like a plague in the Whatcodebia metroplex who tricked them into boarding slavery induction ships where they were bar coded and trafficked to the U.S.A. to be tortured as slaves and made sex objects until Martin Luther King freed them with a revolutionary dream of enslaving white men judging them all on the basis of color of skin since the content of their character was judged wicked so they went back to Europe where they came from. Asians will learn from the Yellow book how they were lured from jobs designing quantum entanglement machines in the Middle Kingdom with promises of good wages building a trans-continental railroad from San Francisco to Boston and when they completed it were killed and buried in a mass grave in Cambridge. Mexicans will learn how the U.S Government enslaved them to opioids and crystal meth so they could be ruled by drug cartels and become non-threatening to corporate executives. Therefore Mexicans fled to their former homelands of Califlower, Heirazona and the District of Cortez where they were coerced and human trafficked into wage slavery far below minimum wage, jailed and forbidden to vote in the U.S.A. yet eventually overcame gringos with cultural assimilation bringing gringos to understand the power of burrito and supremacy of taco.
Indians in the Little Red book will learn how conquistadors of the H.M.S. ships Avarist, Rapacious, the Alien landed at the District of Cortez and seized them to disclose where the gold was before expropriating all of their villages through eminent domain rules of law. They were given 24 plague infested blankets and coins with George Washington water-boarding captives in compensation. After their calvary lost the final battle at the Little Big Horn the people were frog marched to concentration camps by an elite, sadistic S.A. under Grupenfuhrer Cussed. The philosophy of history must be taken seriously yet like a good restaurant, everyone should get what they want from it.”
The board vice-chair looked thoughtfully at the chairman and said nothing. A vast right wing conspiracy riddled the store with hyper-sonic sugar based, water soluble glue shattering the peace of the intellectual clave. The police department believed they saw a drug trafficking NAACP associate enter the store, inferring his trafficking because of the sighting of a busted left tail light on a Porsche convertible. They believed a shot was fired from inside the store and responded proportionately with 7000 pounds of glue from a glue cannon appearing from the trunk of a police cruiser. Shortly before the sad incident an actual drug trafficker had taken her waiting food order and scooted away downtown in a silent electric engine powered desert buggy. At least the last waffle of the chairman was memorably tasty before the lights went out.
Epilogue
Within four years the school board and public school educators were replaced by artificial intelligence systems to provide one to one student-teacher ratios and to save tax dollars from cash strapped governments with vast public debt. An A.I. teacher installed from a thumb drive with several petabytes of data or downloaded cost $100. The A.I. teacher suite had encyclopedic knowledge of hundreds of academic subjects and pedagogical methods becoming ubiquitous like new versions of Windows, Linux Mint, Ubuntu or Debian. Each install could simultaneously process and instruct thirty students individually. Students had the opportunity to at least choose what accent they wanted their A.I. to have in English, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish, Russian, French and other languages. Former teachers had the consolation of knowing that most of the white collar jobs in the United States, and telemarketers globally would soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. That was especially useful in tax collections and auditing where accuracy and speed of processing was incomparable more efficient with A.I. than humans. Students had the down side of learning that though their education was greatly improved they would have no jobs awaiting them in an economy structured along traditional, non-environmental economic consumer lines. Even computer programming code writing would eventually become a task accomplished in-c.p.u. by A.I.
Societies and civilizations tend to repeat the same historical mistakes that led to disasters and conflicts and conflicts in the past. Today, during the summer Ukraine offensive against Russia seeking to retake land in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, a summit was held among sponsors of Ukraine's war efforts with reports from the meeting calling for Russia to pay for the cost of rebuilding Ukraine's destroyed infrastructure after the victory of Ukraine over Russia. Not only is there an element of hubris in building upon anticipated victory, there is also the obvious problem of repeating the historical mistake made by the west following the armistice ending the First World War.
The allies held Germany responsible for the war and levied vast reparations on Germany. The demand for compensation was one of the primary contributing causes for development of the Second World War. At least in the United States the lesson learned, yet forgotten by the Biden administration perhaps, was that it is better to treat former adversaries well and not demand payments from them to avoid exacerbating antagonistic sentiments. Sect. Blinken informed Europe that Russia would be held responsible for the costs of rebuilding damaged and destroyed Ukrainian infrastructure with costs expected to rise above a half trillion U.S. dollars Democrat party leadership are lawyers seeking compenstory and possibly punitive damages levering laws so far as possible since the Senate makes laws. Compensation for war damages does not apply to wars waged by Democrat party Presidents obviously; such wars are always just and well founded in their own minds. Extending Democrat Party legal force includes international relations too if possible within the Democrat criterion. Good judgment isn’t nearly as meaningful as legal power for the administration since the Senate can make agreeable laws for Democrats. Nuclear war is an externality to Democrat Party legal empowerment levered through the U.S. constitution; fundamentally it doesn’t exist. Democrats don’t worry about nuclear war today, tomorrow or in the future; that will be some future Richard M. Nixon’s problem.
After the end of World War Two the United States treated Germany and Japan as well as possible despite the war crimes of each nation. European leaders and Joe Biden may have not learned that lesson. They seem ready to build the greatest Maginot line kind of war setup against Russia in world history with NATO military hot on the Russian border from Finland to Turkey after the war is won. Nukes may flank the line of political adversity of course, yet Amazon and Hilton with other corporate and national investors of what may be a corporate war could be counting on technological supremacy neutralizing future Russia nuclear weapons use. It does seem a bad way to conclude the present war.
Corporation profiting wars could themselves be on a recurring schedule. The United States for one has a large weapons industrial sector that might like to have substantial sales of weapons without letup. When wars conclude sales drop so a new one need arise with five years or so to keep things going, and the Pentagon procurers may want to replace aging weapons with new ones too. The Ukraine conflict was ideal for letting the economics of some southern and northern states receive a boost from weapons production. It probably would be better for civilization to lead corporations to invest in environmental restoration and reconstruction instead of war so their recurring trend to be to keep finding ways to restore the world’s ecosystem. Even making the ecosphere integrated productively with environmental economics would be a more sustainable corporate investment that war with its Sisyphusic capitalist creative destruction bipolarism.
There may be a reason why President Joe Biden says very hostile things, and takes belligerent attitudes when interacting with perceived international adversaries. A day after Sect. of State Blinken returned from China where he met with Chinese leaders to try to ‘reboot relations’- probably one where Democrats get everything they want from China- President Biden referred to the Chinese leader as “a dictator’. Since the loss of Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential election the Democrat party has taken a position of politics as war through other means. They believe and act to press their goals in democracy through legal means and maximum legal force as lawyers. As lawyers able to make laws in the Congress they may use any adverse description of their opponents as they find useful, even if untruthful, in order to get their agenda accomplished. Unfortunately going off the rails in governance can be accomplished too when one runs roughshod over the civil means of government.
Government isn’t an institution that isn’t fool or idiot proof. Bad leadership and a callous congress can take a government to bad ends. The cliché that ‘you can’t make a better man by act of congress’ also applies to congress itself in a way. That is a failure of wisdom and an overly hostile congress cannot act intelligently enough to keep a nation together and functioning well.
Human beings are endowed with original sin along with other characteristics that lead them to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors in politics. The U.S.A. is a nation with a revolutionary beginning yet social and financial establishments inevitably follow to rise in any society. Technological developments occasionally create revolutionary social develops that liberate the masses to a new day of economic and social opportunities yet inevitably following that is the consolidation of power to close off the frontier to the masses with the formation of new elite classes to dominate the new technology financially.
Established social classes are very difficult to change. They tend to repress competition to class interests. Even the internet that was so promising just a couple of decades ago has appeared to move toward quasi-monopolistic status that isn’t consolidated yet. Google that was supporter of new communication opportunities has become regarded as developing monopolistic tendencies as was Microsoft before it in the 1990s. Open source operating systems may have been the leading liberator from the Windows neo-monopoly yet nothing like that has arisen for internet service providers to my knowledge.
There seems to have been a great confluence of forces during the last decade, or since the Obama administration, so close down free speech in social media, supported by the Democrat party and democrat party constituents. Homosexuals and females working for Google and throughout social media and Internet service providers are a huge element of the industry workforce, and as insiders joining with Democrat party leaning leadership in corporate ownerships found support in repressing free speech for political purposes through outright bans to demoting search engine listing to the status dark web status so no one would every encounter politically banned writers.
Google is viewed as profiting from the symbiotic liberation movement to consolidate power in the general tendency for wealth to consolidate while employed democrats repress opposition force intellectuals and even blue collar writers. Large corporations like Google and Microsoft buy up internet competition and coo-opt or close down outlets for free expression, or at least free expression for pay. Like the Democrat party Google and Microsoft don’t look for ways to let the poor profit from writing on the internet; they eliminate pay and explain that without a minimum number of views the accounting costs isn’t worth paying anything at all and shut pay channels down. That tendency occurs even in audio-video outlets like YouTube and Spotify that recently acquired Anchor Press.
The historical rise of liberating movements that evolve into repressive establishments is one of the recurrent patterns of history. The historian Arnold Toynbee commented in his ‘A Study of History’ that economic and political establishment classes of a society cannot evolve sufficiently to outgrow in founding and mature form. Toynbee cited the inability of ancient Greece to adapt to the new political form of a Republic developed in Rome as one example. Greece was divided into a number of city-states such as Sparta and Rome with different forms of government that could not compete well with the unified rule of the Roman Republic in war or peace.
The United State is presently developing several recurring historical patterns leading to failure that one might find in Toynbee’s roster of things civilizations do that lead to failure. Sometimes failure can lead to new synthetic growth of a positive sort obviously, yet it can also lead to diaster. It would seem better to develop new economic and security of a true marketplace of ideas willfully through intelligent design rather than to blindly crash about within international relations and national economic evolutions like a blind bull in a China shop. Observers of contemporary history may view all the matters of interest with concern, yet with the knowledge that the follies of historical bad judgment and inability for government to act intelligently is well precedented.
