No Time Or Place Or Space For Thee - But Eternity's For Meeee...,

euronews  |  What if you could live forever? It's a question long pondered by fictional supervillains and Silicon Valley billionaires alike.

Now researchers in Japan say they may have taken a step toward boosting human longevity with successful trials of a vaccine against the cells that contribute to the ageing process.

In laboratory trials, a drug targeting a protein contained in senescent cells - those which have naturally stopped reproducing themselves - slowed the progression of frailty in older mice, the researchers from Tokyo's Juntendo University said.

The vaccine also successfully targeted the senescent cells in fatty tissue and blood vessels, suggesting it could have a positive impact on other medical conditions linked to ageing.

"We can expect that (the vaccine) will be applied to the treatment of arterial stiffening, diabetes and other ageing-related diseases," Juntendo professor Toru Minamino told Japan's Jiji news agency.

What is cellular senescence?

Cells become senescent when they stop duplicating themselves, often in response to naturally-occurring damage to their DNA. Cellular senescence is thought to contribute to the ageing process itself, as well as ageing-related diseases like Alzheimer's and some cancers.

"Senescent cells secrete a series of factors that disrupt the function of the tissue," Dr Salvador Macip, head of the University of Leicester's Mechanisms of Cancer and Ageing Lab, told Euronews Next.

"They 'call' cells from the immune system, in theory to be cleared by them (but that eventually fails) and create a chronic low level inflammation, mixed with fibrosis," Macip said.

Macip was part of an international team of academics from universities in the UK, Spain, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia that published research on another method of tackling senescent cells in October this year.

"The biological process of ageing is very complex, therefore it is unlikely that one single strategy will completely stop it or reverse it. However, there are probably many ways to slow it down, and clearing senescent cells seems to be one of the easiest and potentially more effective," he said.

 

 

 

On Second Thought, Propagation of the Faith May Be Even More Fundamental...,

vanityfair |  When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend [photographer] Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said: Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain. —Joni Mitchell

jaysanalysis |  It seems more and more as if we are living in a bad B movie, replete with cheesy set pieces and a Casio keyboard score – and the reason for that is because we are.  We have focused on Hollywood and propaganda often at JaysAnalysis, but we have not looked at the music industry, aside from brief mentions and a few shows.  When it comes to the score for that B movie we all live in, the best analysis I’ve read in a good while is none other than recently deceased Dave McGowan’s excellent work, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream.  I also have the honor of Amazon classing my book, Esoteric Hollywood, with McGowan’s, in the “readers also purchased” section.  I get emails on  daily basis requesting book recommendations (which is much harder to choose than you’d expect), so I think for the spirit of my site, no better book could be suggested for a reading list than Weird Scenes (aside from my own book, of course).

McGowan’s thesis is simple: The 1960s counter-culture movement was not what it appeared to be.  In a purple haze of pot smoke, free love, booze and LSD tabs, the fog of the 60s is believed by most baby-boomers to be a genuine (monstrous for faux conservatives) reaction against the system.  From student protests to politically active musicians, the anti-war, anti-establishment ethos of the 60s was, so the story goes, a natural, organic reaction to a hawkish, greedy corporate demon, embodied in “the man,” opposed by all those revolutionaries who love freedom, expressing themselves in the “arts.”  After reading McGowan’s analysis (a self-confessed fan of this era), it would appear the mainstream view is only slightly correct – some artists were political and genuinely anti-establishment, but the big names, and the movements as a whole, were promoted and directed by design, for large-scale social engineering.

McGowan begins his argumentation by pointing to Jim Morrison’s father, Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who played a central role in the Gulf of Tonkin’s false flag event.  Morrison, curiously, avoided this association, stating his parents were dead, adding fuel to his mythical narrative of having no musical training and supposedly becoming a musical shaman following ghostly encounters and hallucinogenic trips.  While some of that may have been the case (such as the trips and witchcraft initiation, for example, as shown in Oliver Stone’s The Doors), the real story is likely much closer to McGowan’s analysis – Morrison was promoted and made into an icon by the system because of these high level connections.  However, being well-connected was not the only explanation – the establishment had a specific motive of derailing any legitimate anti-war activism or artwork, as well as moving the culture into a more degenerate state for social engineering.

We Know A Little About What Matter Does, But Nothing About What It Is....,

qz |  Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously.

One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism. Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Because it applies to all structures—not just the human brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience.

Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.

“Physical science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume,” says Goff. “Eddington”—the English scientist who experimentally confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century—“argued there’s a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but not what it is. We can put consciousness into this gap.”  Fist tap Dale.

Your Elites Are Like A Parasite About To Kill Its Host

oxforduniversitypress |  At the centre of the modern theory of credit rationing, as observed at the macro level, are banks—a critical institution which was missing from DSGE models. This was a particularly peculiar omission because, without banks, there presumably would be no central banks, and it is the central bank’s conduct of monetary policy that is central in those models. The fact that credit is allocated by institutions (banks), rather than through conventional markets (auctions) is an important distinction lost in the DSGE framework. Greenwald and Stiglitz (2003) model banks as firms, which take others’ capital, in combination with their own, obtaining and processing information, making decisions about which loans to make. They too are by and large equity constrained, but in addition face a large number of regulatory constraints. Shocks to their balance sheets, changes in the available set of loans and their expectations about returns, and alterations in regulations lead to large changes in loan supply and the terms at which loans are made available. Variations in regulations and circumstances of banks across states in the US are helping validate the importance of variation in the supply conditions in banking in the 2008 crisis and its aftermath.³⁸

Given how long it takes balance sheets to be restored when confronted with a shock of the size of that of 2008, it is not surprising that the effects persisted.³⁹ But they seem to have persisted even after the restoration of bank and firm balance sheets. That suggests that this crisis (like the Great Depression) is more than a balance sheet crisis. It is part of a structural transformation, in the advanced countries, the most notable aspects of which are a shift from manufacturing to a service-sector economy and an outsourcing of unskilled production to emerging markets; for developing countries, the structural transformation involves industrialization and globalization. Not surprisingly, such structural transformations have large macroeconomic consequences and are an essential part of growth processes. DSGE models are particularly unsuited to address their implications for several reasons: (a) the assumption of rational expectations, and even more importantly, common knowledge, might be relevant in the context of understanding fluctuations and growth in an agricultural environment with well-defined weather shocks described by a stationary distribution,⁴⁰ but it cannot describe changes, like these, that happen rarely;⁴¹ (b) studying these changes requires at least a two-sector model; and (c) a key market failure is the free mobility of resources, especially labour, across sectors. Again, simple models have been constructed investigating how structural transformation can lead to a persistent high level of unemployment, and how, even then, standard Keynesian policies can restore full employment, but by contrast, increasing wage flexibility can increase unemployment (see Delli Gatti et al., 2012a,b).

Religion and Money

gurdjieffclub |  To reflect on the relationship of religion to money, there is no better starting-point than "to go beyond time." In returning to the origin of the question, we may find a grain of truth and thus turn towards the remedy for an otherwise intractable problem. Countless volumes have appeared about the Church's attitude to war and sex but very little has been written about money.

William Desmonde shows1 that in some ancient cultures money was used as a symbol to replace food in sacrificial communion rituals. Participation in the meal implied a bond of loyalty with other members of the group and signified also entering into a covenant with the deity. Each communicant received a particular portion of the sacrificial flesh corresponding to his standing in the community. When money of different denominations began to be used in place of the portions of food, the establishment of a contractual; relationship between two individuals at first retained traces of the original bond of religious loyalty among participants in the same communion, with impersonal bargaining replacing the patriarchal redistribution of foods among the brotherhood.

In any case, there is good reason to suppose that money was originally a sacred device created by religious authority to facilitate the exchange of necessities in an expanding society. It was intended to be a means of recognizing that human beings have individual property rights and at the same time that no human being or family is self- sufficient. In support of this theory, Rene Guenon states2 that coins of the ancient Celts are covered with symbols taken from Druid doctrine, implying direct intervention of the Druid priests in the monetary system.

Given the sacred origin of money, solutions to the problem of religion and money on this level can never be found. A solution is achievable only through reinstating the individual's relationship to money within the whole scale of his spiritual studies and strivings, that is, through re-educating him to regard money transactions as a measure of his individual human relationships. For, like everything existing, money is a vital part of life on the planet and is worthy of respect, of course at its proper level. True religion views everything, including money, in relation to universal laws. In showing us our dependence on each other, money acts to remind us of these laws. The only thing wrong with money is our present view of it. This is what needs to be studied and understood.

Where to begin? It stands to reason that such a program of re-education cannot begin with the masses, who, in the last analysis, are not concerned with human values except in terms of physical survival.

Nor can much be expected from the many studies of money that are being made on the psychological level, although these may serve as useful shocks to our customary unconscious attitudes towards accumulation and waste. For example, Freud noted that in the modern Western world, the language of people of different nationalities is a mirror of their typical attitude to money. Germans earn money, Italians find it, the French gain or win it, the English have it or possess it, Americans make it. Freud pointed out also a common tendency among the clergy of his time to look on money as dirty, you mustn't touch it. He detected here some similarity to their attitude to sexual relations and even hinted at a direct connection between the problems of money and sex.

Open Thread IQ Test REDUX: Is This About The Money Power?

Fist tap Dale

Decision Neuroscience (REDUX Originally Posted 11/24/08)

This will not be the first time you've heard this from me, I've variously addressed it hereabouts under the rubrics neuroeconomics or dopamine hegemony - but this morning my very good friend Arnach hit me up back channel with a morsel supportive of the theory that global human governance boils down to the science of stimulating and controlling dopaminergy in the individual brain.

From the Stanford Storybank we have This is Your Brain on Bargains.

Scientific inspiration can derive from the most mundane experience. Archimedes was said to have figured out how to compute volume in his bathtub. When Uzma Khan had her eureka moment, she was sprawled on her couch, just back from a shopping mall where she had gone to avoid working on her dissertation.

Khan—then at Yale, now an assistant professor of marketing at the Graduate School of Business—knew all about the supposed levers of consumer behavior: supply, demand, advertising, discounting. Traditionally, business theorists described consumer behavior as being based on rational decisions about value and price. But as Khan looked at the shopping bags strewn around her apartment she realized that the conventional wisdom was, well, bankrupt. She was sure that her buying decisions had much less to do with price than they did her frayed nerves. She had gone shopping to feel better. Once home, the thrill was gone. “I looked at all that stuff, all those bags, and I thought, 'I don't need this stuff. I'm going to take most of it back. What was I thinking?'”

Khan's professional focus today is answering that question—what are we thinking when we go shopping? She is one of a growing number of researchers at Stanford and elsewhere working on consumer mysteries: Why are our needs and wants so disconnected? Why do people dig themselves into debt from foolish spending? Why do our brains perceive expensive products as superior? And what are the biological bases for the pleasures that shopping or even the anticipation of shopping can unleash?

So simple, elegant, and obvious. Selective governance via the natural tendency of the brain's neuronal circuits to Do What They Do..., what could be easier, more powerful, and more durable than that? The basic fact is that humans are routinely exploited by those with the wherewithal to "engineer" values in the outside world and a little knowledge of the workings of the "inside" world. - This takes us then to the meatus of the economic beatus - which isn't quantum mechanics - but a depth psychology informed by an expansive understanding fractal unfolding and the poised realm what that knowledge is and where exactly it came from.

Neuroeconomics: Dopaminergy In The Individual Brain (REDUX Originally Posted 01/26/08)

A couple months ago, I introduced the concept of neuroeconomics in the context of collective psychology. It's time to take that a step further - a la the philosopher Daniel Dennett, channeling the late ATL Gurdjieffian prankster Jan Cox.

Several people have sent me notes about their problems and apparent failures, and have attempted to attribute a psychological basis to them. This is one of the great cutoff points. It is an immediate slap in the intellectual face: to a Revolutionist there is no such thing as "psychological." It is a flawed piece of data. It is as outmoded to a Revolutionist alive today as is the idea of a "capital-g" god. What is called "psychological" is serving, and has served, a purpose with some people. But you must see that any apparent psychological pressures arising from influences apparently "out there" -- your boss, your mother, your mate -- have to enter in through the five senses. Always stop and remind yourself of that even if you can't do anything else. If one or all of your senses were knocked out, you would not be suffering this "psychological pressure." You have to face up to that. Whatever is going on in you is chemical. There are really no such things as drunks; it is people with an alcohol deficiency. Absolutely religious people have a chemical deficiency. The same with people who have phobias, as they are called. It is a chemical imbalance outside the normal bell curve of the populace at their time and place. Jan Cox

From that earlier article I stated that "For decades it has been known that these neurons and the dopamine they release play a critical role in brain mechanisms of reinforcement. Many of the drugs currently abused in our society mimic the actions of dopamine in the brain. This led many researchers to believe that dopamine neurons directly encoded the rewarding value of events in the outside world."

Today's post is one of those hidden in plain sight elaborations on that theme, this time addressing the rewarding value of events in the INSIDE WORLD, the world comprised of the neurons making up your brain. Think about it. That's all I ever ask you to do, and in the process, you will inevitably be led to draw your own validating conclusions. Here's Dennett;

brain cells — I now think — must compete vigorously in a marketplace. For what?

What could a neuron "want"? The energy and raw materials it needs to thrive–just like its unicellular eukaryote ancestors and more distant cousins, the bacteria and archaea. Neurons are robots; they are certainly not conscious in any rich sense–remember, they are eukaryotic cells, akin to yeast cells or fungi. If individual neurons are conscious then so is athlete’s foot. But neurons are, like these mindless but intentional cousins, highly competent agents in a life-or-death struggle, not in the environment between your toes, but in the demanding environment of the brain, where the victories go to those cells that can network more effectively, contribute to more influential trends at the virtual machine levels where large-scale human purposes and urges are discernible.

I now think, then, that the opponent-process dynamics of emotions, and the roles they play in controlling our minds, is underpinned by an "economy" of neurochemistry that harnesses the competitive talents of individual neurons. (Note that the idea is that neurons are still good team players within the larger economy, unlike the more radically selfish cancer cells. Recalling Francois Jacob’s dictum that the dream of every cell is to become two cells, neurons vie to stay active and to be influential, but do not dream of multiplying.)

Intelligent control of an animal’s behavior is still a computational process, but the neurons are "selfish neurons," as Sebastian Seung has said, striving to maximize their intake of the different currencies of reward we have found in the brain. And what do neurons "buy" with their dopamine, their serotonin or oxytocin, etc.? Greater influence in the networks in which they participate.

So simple, elegant, and obvious. Selective governance via the natural tendency of the brain's neuronal circuits to Do What They Do..., what could be easier, more powerful, and more durable than that. The lengths to which some folks will go to furnish elaborate post hoc rationalizations of What It Do - and how that basic fact is exploited by those with the wherewithal to "engineer" values in the outside world - just crack me up.

Neuroeconomics - Dopamine Hegemony (REDUX Originally Posted 12/02/07)

Physiological utility theory and the neuroeconomics of choice;

For decades it has been known that these neurons and the dopamine they release play a critical role in brain mechanisms of reinforcement. Many of the drugs currently abused in our society mimic the actions of dopamine in the brain. This led many researchers to believe that dopamine neurons directly encoded the rewarding value of events in the outside world.

That last one is a gem. Even though the discipline is barely aborning, it's already become value-laden and placed in the service of a political agenda.

Neuroeconomics has been described as:

• "an emerging transdisciplinary field that uses neuroscientific measurement techniques to identify the neural substrates associated with economic decisions” (Zak, 2004, p. 1737)
• “Economics, psychology and neuroscience are converging today in to a single unified discipline with the ultimate aim of providing a single, general theory of human behavior. (…) The goal of this discipline is thus to understand the processes that connect sensation and action by revealing the neurobiological mechanisms by which decisions are made". (Glimcher & Rustichini, 2004, p. 447)
• “the program for understanding the neural basis of the behavioral response to scarcity” (Ross, 2005, p. 330)

Money's effect on the brain is faster than language processing or face recognition. Money is ancient tricknology and not the human cultural artifact we commonly take it for granted as being..., when you study money, you're studying biology - not culture.

Subtitled: I Don't Know - But Here's One Helluva Gish Gallop!!!

babylonsbanksters | “Modern fiat money and reserve banking is indeed a manifestation of the transmutative ‘nothingness’ of the Philosophers’ Stone, for from the creation of credit out of nothing, gold is produced.” By nationalizing that money and credit-creating institution “and wresting it from private, secretive hands, and using it to fund the alchemical physics it was beginning to develop as the ultimate energy source, as the ultimate power to transport mankind, and as the ultimate power for destruction on a doomsday scale, the Nazis indicated that they had understood the nature of the (Philosophers’) Stone. They had seen, and fully understood, the connection between alchemical physics, and alchemical finance. And they were willing to put it to supremely evil uses.

“But that connection between alchemical physics and alchemical finance is, perhaps, a relationship that requires its own exposition….

The Philosophers’ Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter. The reader may have inferred from these quoted remarks that there was much more of the story — both from the standpoint of physics and finance, and from that of history — to tell, and that it would require yet another study or book to do so. If the reader made such inferences, he is correct on both counts: there is much more of the story of the relationship between physics and finance to tell.

The thesis of this book is both simple to state, and difficult to understand, and that is that, since ancient times and with more or less uninterrupted constancy, there has existed an international money power which seeks by a variety of means — including fraud, deception, assassination, and war — to usurp the money- and credit-creating power of the various states it has sought to dominate, and to obfuscate and occult the profound connection between that money-creating power and the deep “alchemical physics” that such power implies.

Accordingly, I do not argue that case comprehensively in this book, since to do so would require an extended series of books, each devoted to a particular historical period, and each burying the reader in a blizzard of footnotes to the extent that the main thesis would itself become obscured. Rather, I assume this model as a given, as an interpretive paradigm by which to view certain events and data. In so doing, that case is indeed argued, but in synoptic form rather than comprehensively. In doing so, I hope to keep before the reader’s attention that deep and profound connection between physics and finance and to show why it is that the private and international money power must always seek to suppress not only certain types of state financial policy, but also certain types of physics, for both indeed spring from a common conceptual root.

Most of my books, as readers familiar with them already know, inhabit a strange region where alternative physics interfaces with history to reveal the latter’s hidden motivations, secrets, and players. This book is no different, save for the fact that I have obviously added a new conceptual player: finance and economics. And along the way, we shall encounter other major conceptual scenery that readers of my books have encountered before: alchemy, astrology, astronomy, torsion, Egypt, Babylon, Nazis, ancient texts and tomes and modern mathematical gurus speaking the arcane language of statistical and topological lore.

In fact, in one of those odd synchronicities that seem to increase in modern life, as this book was being researched and written, decades — if not centuries or even millennia — of corruption and intellectual flaccidity in the financial, banking, and corporate sectors of the world came to an ugly head with the collapse of the housing and derivatives bubble, and the appearance of some of those responsible for the meltdown before the United States House of Representatives, hands extended, asking for a bailout of their malfeasance and irresponsibility at the expense of the American taxpayer, and demanding no oversight to boot, as if they were being forced to pay some hidden blackmailer, and were afraid that oversight might disclose this fact.

But why call it “irresponsibility” and not simply “criminality”? In the answer to that question there lies a tale, and it is a tale I did not originally intend to go into when I conceived the plan for this series of books many years ago, much less the plan for this one. Recent financial events, however, have contrived to place the story I intended to tell after completing The Nazi International and The Philosophers’ Stone into a rather different context. As will become apparent to the reader in the main text, I do believe there is criminality and conspiracy involved in the story of the complex relationship of physics and finance throughout history. And paradoxically, the farther back one pursues this relationship, the closer together physics, finance, and all those other themes enunciated above as the conceptual scenery, draw together, and the more apparent the odor of a long-standing conspiracy becomes.

But in and of itself the contemporary financial meltdown is both a story of conspiracy as well as a case of galloping stupidity and colossal intellectual, political, and economic irresponsibility proportional to the aforesaid stupidity. It is nonetheless a story with its own deep connections to the story of the main text, and it is as good an entry into the subject as any.

So, as a way of entering into the discussion of the themes that preoccupy the main text, one may examine two salient modern examples that arose to challenge the reigning financial and physical assumptions of that money power.

Those examples are Communist China and Nazi Germany.

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

ecosophia |  Let’s start with the concept of the division of labor. One of the great distinctions between a modern industrial society and other modes of human social organization is that in the former, very few activities are taken from beginning to end by the same person. A woman in a hunter-gatherer community, as she is getting ready for the autumn tuber-digging season, chooses a piece of wood, cuts it, shapes it into a digging stick, carefully hardens the business end in hot coals, and then puts it to work getting tubers out of the ground. Once she carries the tubers back to camp, what’s more, she’s far more likely than not to take part in cleaning them, roasting them, and sharing them out to the members of the band.

A woman in a modern industrial society who wants to have potatoes for dinner, by contrast, may do no more of the total labor involved in that process than sticking a package in the microwave. Even if she has potatoes growing in a container garden out back, say, and serves up potatoes she grew, harvested, and cooked herself, odds are she didn’t make the gardening tools, the cookware, or the stove she uses. That’s division of labor: the social process by which most members of an industrial society specialize in one or another narrow economic niche, and use the money they earn from their work in that niche to buy the products of other economic niches.

Let’s say it up front: there are huge advantages to the division of labor.  It’s more efficient in almost every sense, whether you’re measuring efficiency in terms of output per person per hour, skill level per dollar invested in education, or what have you. What’s more, when it’s combined with a social structure that isn’t too rigidly deterministic, it’s at least possible for people to find their way to occupational specialties for which they’re actually suited, and in which they will be more productive than otherwise. Yet it bears recalling that every good thing has its downsides, especially when it’s pushed to extremes, and the division of labor is no exception.

Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.

Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car.  People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.

Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles—because he’ll simply fire you and hire someone who will tell him what he wants to hear. Nor do you have the option of sitting him down and getting him to face what’s behind his own unexamined desires and expectations, so that he might notice that his fixation on having a flying car is an emotionally charged hangover from age eight, when he daydreamed about having one to help him cope with the miserable, bully-ridden public school system in which he was trapped for so many wretched years. So you devote your working hours to finding the most rational, scientific, and utilitarian means to accomplish a pointless, useless, and self-defeating end. That’s crackpot realism.

You can make a great party game out of identifying crackpot realism—try it sometime—but I’ll leave that to my more enterprising readers. What I want to talk about right now is one of the most glaring examples of crackpot realism in contemporary industrial society. Yes, we’re going to talk about space travel again.

Trans-Turing Machines

bigsmartdata |  From the Poised Realm, the embodiment of Trans-Turing Systems, as a real invention, doth flow. Of course you are familiar with the Turing Machine: the theoretical paper tape compute engine to which all modern processors are obliged to worship every Sunday…you are, of course, familiar with the Turing Machine.

The Turing Machine

The work of Alan Turing is the rock from which the quest for a congruent theoretical computer science was launched. Totally awesome quantum computing heavy Scott Aaronson has written that when it comes to AI, we can divide everything that’s been said about it into two categories: the 70% that was covered in Turing’s 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and the remaining 30% that has followed in the decades since then. 

Turing Machine = Foundation of Computer Science 




So whoa — a Trans-Turing System? What?? I must know more!

That was the third thing that drove me to Tucson. I had to ask Kauffman what he meant — what he Tsaw, what he imagined. I found a description in the patent that Kauffman, et al, filed in 2014:

 58

"Further disclosed herein is a Trans-Turing machine that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in another node and at least one classical degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one classical degree of freedom in another node, wherein the nodes are configured such that the quantum degrees of freedom decohere to classicity and thereby alter the classical degrees of freedom, which then alter the decoherence rate of remaining quantum degrees of freedom; at least one input signal generator configured to produce an input signal that recoheres classical degrees of freedom to quantum degrees of freedom; and a detector configured to receive quantum or classical output signals from the nodes."

Sweet. I got it. Quantum computing nodes working in tandem with classical compute (Turing Machine) systems and what emerges is a Trans-Turing Machine, not constrained nor otherwise entailed by a bothersome set of NP-complete limits. Polynomial hierarchy collapse ensues, at long last P = NP, and we are full throttle to ride warp drive engines to the stars! Maybe? Maybe. Maybe not.

I had to ask Kauffman.

After I spotted him at the outdoor mixer on Thursday night, after I got over my fanboy flutters, after I introduced myself, chatted with him for a bit about his new book and how much I liked it, after I explained my own thoughts from my field in computer science, and how his book from a decade and a half earlier had so deeply influenced me, I did finally ask. 

“So how do we build the Trans-Turnig Machine?”

A wry smile crossed his face. His eyes lit. For a moment he stopped being the intellectual giant I had come to revere, and revealed the mischievous, inquisitive, childlike spirit that must have driven him his entire life.

“I have no idea,” he said replied with a grin.

I was all satisfied. I knew he did not mean that he could not conceive of one, nor he did mean that he could not describe one, nor not define the attributes it might require, nor not imagine how it might function. What he meant was we still don’t know enough about quantum computing to imbue an instrument of our own creation with something akin to consciousness — whatever that means.

Today we all harvest the ample fruits from the first baby steps into the Network Age. We are still painting a digital patina over the planet. More stuff soon will think. We are clearly well into the age of pervasive computing, but computing is not yet ubiquitous, though soon it will be. Soon — within a decade — everything will be engineered to connect with everything, and almost all those systems are and will be awesome Turing Machines, programmable systems all, that will link us all together in a transcendent fine-grained meshed digital fabric of increasing value. Yet on the fringes, there is quantum computing, playfully peeking through from behind the classical physics curtain. And therein lies the unpredictable. It could be that Here There Be Monsters. Or not. That’s the beauty and the bizarre of where we are. Both terror and elation are on the rise, though neither are as appropriate nor as compelling as is the raw, robust curiosity that drives us ever forward.

Is the ineffable thing to come a D-Wave progeny? Maybe. Will Scott Aaronson explain and extend the exploding adjacent possible? Probably. Did Kauffman and Hameroff lead us to the brink? Absolutely. And from the wily Trans-Turing Machine, will Machine Consciousness one day emerge … whatever that means? 

I have no idea.

Poised Realm Patent

google | CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

• [0001]
  This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Nos. 61/367,781, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/367,779, filed Jul. 26, 2010; 61/416,723, filed Nov. 23, 2010; 61/420,720, filed Dec. 7, 2010; and 61/431,420, filed Jan. 10, 2011, all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
BACKGROUND
• [0002]
  1. Field of the Invention
• [0003]
  The present invention relates to systems and uses of systems operating between fully quantum coherent and fully classical states. Non-limiting applications include drug discovery, computers, and artificial intelligence.
• [0004]
  2. Background Description
• [0005]
  Many physical systems having quantum degrees of freedom quickly decohere to classicity for all practical purposes. Thus, many designed systems consider only classical behaviors. One example is in the field of drug discovery where traditional approaches to drug design considers the lock-and-key fitting of a molecule into an enzyme or receptor. Other designed systems are carefully setup to maintain full quantum coherence, for example, the qubits in a quantum computer. However, recent discoveries have indicated several systems in nature that have relatively slow decoherence. Birds are able to see magnetic field lines due to a quantum coherent chemical reaction in their retina. Light harvesting molecules are able to maintain quantum coherent electron transport for times much longer than the expected coherence time at room temperatures. The existence of such cases demonstrates that quantum coherence can exist at room temperature and at the presence of water bath and evolution can ‘design’ quantum coherent structures to play certain biological roles. Thus, there is a need for new systems that utilize the unique properties that exist between full quantum coherence and classicity
  SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
  • [0006]
    Disclosed herein are various methods of classifying the state of a system, such as a molecule interacting with its environment, in terms of its degree of order, its degree of coherence, and/or its rate of coherence decay. Some embodiments include classifying only a single one of these variables whereas other embodiments include classifying two or all three of the variables. These methods include classifying the system in the course of creating systems that exist and/or operate at a specific point or region of a classification space described the variables discussed above and all practical outcomes of such creation.
  • [0007]
    Disclosed herein is a quantum reservoir computer that includes a plurality of nodes, each node comprising at least one quantum degree of freedom that is coupled to at least one quantum degree of freedom in each other node; at least one input signal generator configured to produce at least one time-varying input signal that couples to the quantum degree of freedom; and a detector configured to receive a plurality of time-varying output signals that couple to the quantum degree of freedom.
  • [0008]
    Also disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; comparing the energy level spacing distribution to at least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.

  • 0009]
    Further disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; determining the energy level spacing distribution of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; conducting an in vitro or in vivo assay for biological activity on each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; correlating the energy level spacing distribution with activity determined from the in vitro or in vivo assay; determining the energy level spacing distributions of a quantum degree of freedom in a new set of candidate molecules; comparing the energy level spacing distributions of the new set of candidate molecules with energy level spacing distributions that correlate with biological activity; and select as drug candidates from the new set of candidate molecules those molecules whose energy level spacing distributions exhibit a pre-determined level of similarity to the energy level spacing distributions that correlate with biological activity.
  • [0010]
    Further disclosed herein is a method of drug discovery that includes selecting a biological target; screening a library of candidate molecules to identify a first subset of candidate molecules that bind to the biological target; measuring decoherence decay of a quantum degree of freedom in each of the candidate molecules in the first subset; comparing the decoherence decay to at least one pre-determined reference function; and selecting a second subset of molecules from the first subset as drug candidates based on the comparison.

Concepts in Kron's Later Papers....,

stackexchange |  Gabriel Kron was an important research electrical engineer known for applying differential geometry and algebraic topology to the study of electrical system. Towards the end of his career he published a number of unusual, even by his standards, papers on concepts with names like polyhedral networks, self organizing automata, wave automata, multidimensional space filters and crystal computer, which I think are more or less synonymous. I have obtained a few of these papers and did not understand them at all. If they were not written be Kron, I would be suspicious of them.

I have not been able to find any significant secondary literature on these ideas. The few citations I have tracked down only mention them tangentially, but I have also found no refutations of these papers and no suggestions that Kron had gone off the rails. The papers were published in respectable journals.

I am looking for an understandable exposition or refutation of these ideas, or pointers to such. Also pointers to follow on research by others, possibly using different terminology.

I am not looking for explanations of Kron's other ideas like diakoptics and tensor analysis of networks.

Some of the relevant papers are:

• G. Kron, Multi-dimensional space filters. Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 9, 40 - 43 (1958).
• G. Kron, Basic concepts of multi-dimensional space filters. AIEE Transactions, 78, 554 - 561 (1959).
• G. Kron, Self-organizing, dynamo-type automata. Matrix and Tensor Quarterly, 11, 42 - 52 (1960).
• G. Kron, Power-system type self-organizing automata. RAAG Memoirs, III, 392 - 417 (1962).
• G. Kron, Multi-dimensional curve-fitting with self-organizing automata. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 5, 46 - 49 (1962).

I have mainly looked at the last one and material at the end of

• Diakoptics; the piecewise solution of large-scale systems. MacDonald, London, 1963. 166 pp.

Gabriel Kron: Negative Resistance

cheniere |  At the time of his death, Gabriel Kron was arguably the greatest electrical scientist ever produced by the United States.

It appears that the availability of this Heaviside energy component surrounding any portion of the circuit may be the long sought secret to Gabriel Kron's “open path” that enabled him to produce a true negative resistor in the 1930s, as the chief scientist for General Electric on the U.S. Navy contract for the Network Analyzer at Stanford University.  Kron was never permitted to release how he made his negative resistor, but did state that, when placed in the Network Analyzer, the generator could be disconnected because the negative resistor would power the circuit.  Since a negative resistor converges surrounding energy and diverges it into the circuit, it appears that Kron's negative resistor gathered energy from the Heaviside component of energy flow as an “open path” flow of energy — connecting together the local vicinities of any two separated circuit components — that had been discarded by previous electrodynamicists following Lorentz.  Hence Kron referred to it as the “open path.”  Particularly see Gabriel Kron, “The frustrating search for a geometrical model of electrodynamic networks,” circa 1962.  We quote:

“...the missing concept of "open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between any set of two nodes.  (Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their open-paths to a single datum point, the 'ground').  That discovery of open-paths established a second rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar' currents...” 
“A network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open paths was the answer to the author's years-long search.”

A true negative resistor appears to have been developed by the renowned Gabriel Kron, who was never permitted to reveal its construction or specifically reveal its development.  For an oblique statement of his negative resistor success, see Gabriel Kron, “Numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations by means of equivalent circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a, p. 173.  Quoting:

“When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative resistances exist on practical network analyzers).” 

Apparently Kron was required to insert the words “none or” in that statement.  See also Gabriel Kron, “Electric circuit models of the Schrödinger equation,” Phys. Rev. 67(1-2), Jan. 1 and 15, 1945, p. 39.  We quote:

“Although negative resistances are available for use with a network analyzer,…”. 

Here the introductory clause states in rather certain terms that negative resistors were available for use on the network analyzer, and Kron slipped this one through the censors.  It may be of interest that Kron was a mentor of Sweet, who was his protégé.  Sweet worked for the same company, but not on the Network Analyzer project.  However, he almost certainly  knew the secret of Kron's “open path” discovery and his negative resistor.

---

Pooh-poohing the Kron negative resistor is just sheer naïveté.  Kron was one of the greatest electrical scientists of all time, and applied full general relativity to rotating machines, electrical circuits and generators, etc. 

Simply go check his papers in the literature.  Even today, there are few electrodynamicists really able to fully comprehend his advanced work.  And his direct quotations from his own published technical papers in the literature leave no doubt he had made a negative resistor.  Further, other scientists have commented on Kron's discovery of the “open path” connecting any two points in a circuit, and usable to provide energy transfer at will.

The mechanism by which he did this is what Kron was never allowed to reveal.

Gabriel Kron: Tensor Analysis of Rotating Electrical Machinery

wikipedia |  Gabriel Kron (1901 – 1968) was a Hungarian American electrical engineer who promoted the use of methods of linear algebra, multilinear algebra, and differential geometry in the field. His method of system decomposition and solution called Diakoptics is still influential today. Though he published widely, his methods were slow to be assimilated. At Union College a symposium was organized by Schaffer Library on "Gabriel Kron, the Man and His Work", held October 14, 1969. H.H. Happ edited the contributed papers, which were published by Union College Press as Gabriel Kron and Systems Theory

quantumchemistryhistory  |  Gabriel Kron, a very fascinating man. What I could do with the history of Gabriel Kron. He was thrown out of the University of Michigan. I'll tell you a little bit about him that's not in my book; I did something else. He was thrown out of the University of Michigan because he was always fighting with the instructors, at something like sixteen. He decided to work his way around the world, and came to Hollywood. He was very brilliant. He had so many problems because his professors were a couple of light years behind him. He got back to Hollywood, signed a contract for $10,000 or so to work on his new experimental movie camera, and the company that gave him the contract paid him the money up front and went bankrupt. So he had a year or two with no work to do. He came to New York City. In the public library he started to read books on mathematics and became the inventor of something called tensor analysis. It became quite important but then he worked for GE. He was unusual and was not easy to work with because he was ahead of his time. You have to mention him in the history of electrical engineering because he was a character....

Book listing (no ad) taken from alibris.com 8/2003.

Yet another reference to G. Kron, 8/2003, - from here
.....
Andrei Petrov described Kuznetsov's work on the method of tensor analysis for the handling of physical systems of extreme complexity, based on earlier work by the American engineer Gabriel Kron, whom Kuznetsov held in high esteem. Petrov also recounted the origin of the discovery of the significance of what Kuznetsov called the "Principle of Conservation of Power," for the understanding of living systems as well as physical economies, whose evolution proceeds in the opposite direction as that implied by the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. ...

Also: Gabriel Kron. Tensors for Circuits. Dover Publication, Inc., second Edition, 1959.

Some other links:
http://www-ec.njit.edu/civil/fabric/automated/CH9.pdf

Secret Societies, Ancient Ciphers, Machine Translation

wired |  The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.

The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.

 The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles.

The master starts plucking hairs from the candidate’s eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are “symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning,” the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the master’s amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.

For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of this ritual—remained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.

It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic “sight-restoring” ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least that’s what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.

In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany.

Thirteen years later, in January 2011, Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics. Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty books to new technologies and didn’t even have an Internet connection at home. But this lecture was different. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation—the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another. With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of prematurely white hair, and wiry surfer’s build, he didn’t look like a typical quant. Knight spoke in a near whisper yet with intensity and passion. His projects were endearingly quirky too. He built an algorithm that would translate Dante’s Inferno based on the user’s choice of meter and rhyme scheme. Soon he hoped to cook up software that could understand the meaning of poems and even generate verses of its own.

Knight was part of an extremely small group of machine-translation researchers who treated foreign languages like ciphers—as if Russian, for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols representing English words. In code-breaking, he explained, the central job is to figure out the set of rules for turning the cipher’s text into plain words: which letters should be swapped, when to turn a phrase on its head, when to ignore a word altogether. Establishing that type of rule set, or “key,” is the main goal of machine translators too. Except that the key for translating Russian into English is far more complex. Words have multiple meanings, depending on context. Grammar varies widely from language to language. And there are billions of possible word combinations.

the fire of the sun (my 5000th post!)

Scribd | There were others who have claimed to have met Fulcanelli. First of all there is Jacques Bergier (1912-1978). Bergier, together with Louis Pauwels, is in fact the creator of the whole Fulcanelli legend of modern times. The legend began with the publication of "Le Matin des Magiciens" ('Morning of the Magicians', in English published as "The Dawn of Magic"), written by Bergier and Pauwles andpublished in 1960. In this book, of which it is said that it single-handedly started the New Age Movement, Fulcanelli is described as an Alchemical Adept who warns of the evils of atomic energy. As a matter of fact, Bergier identified the alchemist as Fulcanelli (in all probability) in a work entitled "Faire del'Or", Bergier claims that in the summer of 1937 he was visited in a Parisian laboratory at the offices of the Gas Board in Paris by a mysterious stranger. From 1934 to 1940 Jacques Bergier worked with André Helbronner, a brilliant physicist - on researching nuclear physics. Helbronner -with the help of several industrialists- had created a nuclear research laboratory. The visitor immediately had identified himself as an alchemist.

The following account is taken from The Morning of the Magicians , published in London in 1971:“M. André Helbronner, whose assistant I believe you are, is carrying out research on nuclear energy. M.Helbronner has been good enough to keep me informed as to the results of some of his experiments,notably the appearance of radio-activity corresponding to plutonium when a bismuth rod is volatilized byan electric discharge in deuterium at high pressure. You are on the brink of success, as indeed are several other of our scientists today. May I be allowed to warn you to be careful? The research in which you and your colleagues are engaged is fraught with terrible dangers, not only for yourselves, but for the whole human race. The liberation of atomic energy is easier than you think, and the radio-activity artificially produced can poison the atmosphere of our planet in the space of a few years. Moreover, atomic explosives can be produced from a few grammes of metal powerful enough to destroy whole cities. I am telling you this as a fact: the alchemists have known it for a very long time.”Bergier was warned by the unknown alchemist against the dangers of nuclear energy, eight years before the first atomic tests that were carried out at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Until the hour of his deathin 1978 Bergier remained convinced that the enigmatical visitor was no other than Fulcanelli (Robert Amadou claimed that Bergier identified Fulcanelli in 1983 as Schwaller de Lubicz - see "L'Enquete deRobert Amadou" p10 -) . Following the experiments of Bergier and Helbronner, it is claimed that the American "Office of Strategic Services" (O.S.S., forerunner of the C..I.A.), established in 1942 under Roosevelt, tried to find and locate Fulcanelli at the end of the War. The Americans, as well as other allied intelligence agencies, wanted to gather as many expert scientists as possible to prevent them from passing to the enemy, the Sovjet Union. This claim is allegedly confirmed by Canseliet. For these agencies Fulcanelli seems to have been a real person at the end of the War in 1945. But he remained untraceable….

Then there is the account of Frater Albertus, the German alchemist Albert Richard Riedel, who had information which descended from independent sources on an alleged alchemical transmutation performed by Fulcanelli in 1937! The transmutation supposedly had been performed in Bourges in the presence of Ferdinand de Lesseps II and the famous physicist Pierre Curie (Together with his wife, Marie, they were awarded half of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903 on account of their study into the spontaneous radiation discovered by Becquerel, who was awarded the other half of the Prize.) This information descends from Jay Weidner and Vincent Bridges, from the article "The Fulcanelli Mystery". There's something wrong about this story since Ferdinand de Lesseps II died in1894 and Pierre Curie in 1906. Weidner and Bridges furthermore state that Frater Albertus "does not supply us with the source of his information." When Canseliet was asked to confirm Albertus' claim heclaimed to know knothing of the incident. Canseliet stated that he only knew that both De Lesseps and Curie belonged to Fulcanelli's large circle of friends (Canseliet in an interview with Frater Albertus in1976). Finally, I want to refer to page 3 - without any further comment - where it is stated that Jean-Julien Champagne was a friend of Ferdinand Jules De Lesseps, one of the sons of the famous Ferdinand Marie De Lesseps, builder of the Suez-Canal. Ferdinand Jules was an alchemist.

"According to the thread skilfully left by Eugene Canseliet who was the unique disciple of FULCANELLI, we devoted ourselves here to a true investigation which led us to inquire into the alchemical but also into the scientific spheres of the years 1880-1920. It appeared slowly but clearly that the one who was dissimulated behind the pseudonym of FULCANELLI, was also a prestigious member of the Institute. Indeed, a great number of his reports and communications were retained by the Academy of Science. It is thus by no means surprising that he was in contact, according to the own testimony of Eugene Canseliet, with the scientists of his time, such as the elderly Chevreul, Marcellin Berthelot or even Pierre Curie, but also with the popular politicians of his time, whom he was meeting at his friend's Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man at the origin of the famous Suez Canal!" Patrick Rivière - "Fulcanelli Sa véritable identité enfin révélée" - Both claims indicate that Fulcanelli was still on the scene in the late 1930's, which would suggest that Jules Boucher was right ….. And so the Fulcanelli phenomenon continues, "his"works venerated by an audience which seem to read his writings from a reverential perspective. And don't we all just love a mystery?

Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture

Peter Lu | The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons (girih tiles) decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.

the prophet (PBUH) ridin too?

Mohammed meets the prophets Ismail, Is-hak and Lot in paradise. From the Apocalypse of Muhammad, written in 1436 in Herat, Afghanistan (now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris).

Scribd | This paper will highlight some of primary evidence for entheogenic plant use in Islamic cults that partake of a vastly older legacy of ritual plant use. The accumulated research on entheogens and religions demands that certain traditions be reevaluated in light a continuing and coherent symbolism that enshrines holy plants as high mysteries in diverse faiths. Following thesoma/ haoma complex through Asia and Chinese Shamanism and into Persian and Islamic cults the use of entheogens meets with traditions in the ancient Middle East that shared doctrines of magic plants and cup rituals of visionary wine. The Greek, Semitic and Hermetic traditions merge with the shamanic techniques that persist in the esoteric symbolism of the Shia Muslims and Sufi as demonstrated in their holy books, art and poetry. The alchemical tradition thus emerges has having a definite entheogenic context that was cherished and protected by initiates from the profane. This speculative hypothesis rests on the collective evidence of religious traditions surrounding Islam that possessed similar rituals and reverence for plants that becomes a hidden aspect of mystical Islam.

Muhammad the Prophet Shaman

The prophet Muhammad spoke to the angelic messenger of God and underwent visionary initiatory voyages to the heavenly and infernal regions (1). He mounted the mysterious shamanic beast,al -buraaq, which means “lightning” in Arabic and which begins to draw associations with mushrooms, as they have ancient folklore links with lightning and thunder perhaps due to their sudden appearances after rains. Wasson notes thatBanat ’u’rrad , “Daughters of Thunder” are used as an expression for fungus, but an unnamed species, in the dictionary of classical Arabic in his discussion of “Lightingbolt and Mushrooms” (Wasson 1986). Though described in Islamic literature as being white and something like a donkey or a mule, the fabulous creature is curiously depicted in some examples of Islamic art as being red and white in a design consistent with Amanita muscaria mushroom, the entheogen suspected to be a major candidate for the soama/haoma and the symbolic colors of alchemy.

In the above images, Muhammad is seen riding the red and white creature, again the colors of the Amanita mushroom, in his shamanic night journeyisra' and ascension to heaven mi'raj reminiscent of the ascent of Arda Viraf who takes a narcotic and takes a visionary flight through heaven and hell (Seguy 1977). This representation of Buraq may indicate that regional cults viewed the Islamic revelation through their own shamanic traditions or that Islam retained the ritual heritages of the ancient world. These traditions would be enshrouded in the mysteries of Shia gnosis, alchemy and Sufism that spread into Europe. The other image depicts Imam Ali on a similar creature with the red and white colors and in a scene entitled “Gabriel Shows Ali’s Valor to the Prophet” from the 15th century Persian epic of Ali, the Khavaran Nameh, which shows his steed in these colors particularly in scenes of battle where it is grey in other scenes though more research is needed to fully develop these curious depictions of the changing mounts (Birjandi 2004). Another uncle of the Prophet Muhammad is Amir Hamza, whose folktales date back to the time of the Prophet and whose exploits unite Chinese, Indian Persian, Greek and Arabian cultures, also rides a similarly described winged-demon steed Ashqar Devzad (Lakhnavi and Bilgrami 2007). This series of tales involves treasures under trees and occult lore of the Prophet Khizir and Imam Ali (even before he was born) in aiding in battles and traveling to the land of thejinns for temporal and spiritual jihad for the True Faith anticipating the coming of the Prophet Muhammad.