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Healthcare sharing ministries | Liberty HealthShare

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Liberty HealthShare provides individuals and families with an affordable way to share medical care expenses in a like-minded community.

In the midst of an increasingly complex and confusing healthcare system, Liberty HealthShare is committed to bringing clarity and peace.

Liberty HealthShare is not insurance. Since 1995, our parent organization has equipped hundreds of thousands of like-minded, health-conscious individuals and families to take seriously the biblical command to do good and share with others.

Our members commit to five statements covering belief in God, freedom, and ethics, and we seek to support the community through healthy living, wise decisions, and good stewardship.

Liberty HealthShare is a leader in the growing field of healthcare sharing ministries that offer a different approach to paying for medical care.

Members make an affordable monthly contribution online, which is matched to a medical need within the group. Our large, geographically diverse community commits to supporting each others medical expenses after a low annual threshold is met.

Liberty HealthShare offers three different programs to fit members with different resources and circumstances.

Liberty HealthShare operates on a fully transparent, non-profit basis, using biblical principles of stewardship to keep costs low while meeting our commitments to our community.

Unlike other healthcare sharing ministries, Liberty HealthShare provides members with a secure, intuitive online system. We make it simple to see where your monthly share amount goes and check on the status of your shared expenses if the need arises.

From providing low-cost healthcare sharing programs to offering customized support for people working to improve their health, Liberty HealthShare is committed to changing the way people manage the economics of medical care.

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Healthcare sharing ministries | Liberty HealthShare

liberty | Definition of liberty in English by Oxford …

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

nounmass noun

1The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behaviour, or political views.

compulsory retirement would interfere with individual liberty

More example sentences

Synonyms

independence, freedom, autonomy, sovereignty, self government, self rule, self determination, home rule

people who attacked phone boxes would lose their liberty

More example sentences

Synonyms

free, on the loose, loose, set loose, at large, unconfined, roaming

the Bill of Rights was intended to secure basic civil liberties

More example sentences

Synonyms

right, birthright, opportunity, facility, prerogative, entitlement, privilege, permission, sanction, leave, consent, authorization, authority, licence, clearance, blessing, dispensation, exemption, faculty

the Statue of Liberty

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2The power or scope to act as one pleases.

individuals should enjoy the liberty to pursue their own preferences

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Synonyms

freedom, independence, free rein, freeness, licence, self-determination

Example sentences

3informal count noun A presumptuous remark or action.

how did he know what she was thinking?it was a liberty!

Synonyms

act with overfamiliarity, act with familiarity, show disrespect, act with impropriety, act indecorously, be impudent, commit a breach of etiquette, act with boldness, act with impertinence, show insolence, show impudence, show presumptuousness, show presumption, show forwardness, show audacity, be unrestrained

he was at liberty for three months before he was recaptured

More example sentences

Synonyms

free, on the loose, loose, set loose, at large, unconfined, roaming

2Allowed or entitled to do something.

he's not at liberty to discuss his real work

More example sentences

Synonyms

free, permitted, allowed, authorized, able, entitled, eligible, fit

1Behave in an unduly familiar manner towards a person.

you've taken too many liberties with me

More example sentences

Synonyms

2Treat something freely, without strict faithfulness to the facts or to an original.

the scriptwriter has taken few liberties with the original narrative

More example sentences

Venture to do something without first asking permission.

I took the liberty of checking out a few convalescent homes for him

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Late Middle English: from Old French liberte, from Latin libertas, from liber free.

Liberty High School – issaquah.wednet.edu

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

March 20, 2019 Liberty E-News

Sent March 20, 2019

Hello 8th Grade Students and Families!We are very excited to have you join us at Liberty High School in the fall of 2019!! Liberty...

Sent March 19, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Last Day of School Additional InformationCollege Application Workshop Wednesday, March 20Spring...

Sent March 14, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Last Day of School Thursday, June 27PBSES SDQ Survey / Altered Bell Schedule Tomorrow, March 15Call for...

Sent March 11, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Secondary World Language Curriculum Adoption SurveyDistrict Surplus Sale March 13 PBSES SDQ Survey /...

Sent March 8, 2019

Incoming Freshman Night!On Tuesday, March 26, from 6:00-8:00pm, Liberty High School will host Incoming Freshman Night for our...

Sent March 7, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Secondary World Language Curriculum Adoption SurveyTalent Show March 8 ISD STEM/CTE Partner TEALS...

Sent March 4, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Check for Fees and FinesTalent Show March 8 PBSES SDQ Survey / Altered Bell Schedule March 15News from...

Sent February 28, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Spring Sports Information Night: March 4Liberty AP Exam Schedule: May 6-242019 Summer School...

Sent February 27, 2019

Community Presentation: Supporting Students and Families Through Grief and Loss February 28This is a friendly reminder that...

Sent February 27, 2019

As a result of the recent school closures from weather, we have moved some of the Advanced Placement exams tolater dates in May so that...

Sent February 25, 2019

In this issue of E-News:Community Presentation: Supporting Students and Families Through Grief and Loss February 28After...

Tax Preparation, File Taxes, Income Tax Filing | Liberty …

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

The information contained on this site is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional advice.

Easy Advance

An Easy Advance is a loan secured by and paid back with your tax refund and is offered by Republic Bank & Trust Company, member FDIC, to eligible taxpayers. Loan amount options are based on your expected Federal refund less authorized fees. If approved for an Easy Advance, a Finance Charge may apply depending on your loan amount. Loan is subject to underwriting and approval. Easy Advance proceeds are typically available within 24 hours of IRS acceptance of tax return or within 24 hours for those filing before the IRS start date however, if direct deposit is selected it may take additional time for your financial institution to post the funds to your account. Visit your LibertyTaxoffice to learn about the cost,timingand availabilityof all filing and product options. Valid at participating locations. Valid Jan. 2-Feb. 28, 2019.

Cash-In-Flash

With paid tax preparation. Valid at participating locations. Cannot be combined with other offers or used toward past services. One coupon per customer and per return. Other exclusions may apply. Void where prohibited by law. Valid 12/26/2018-2/26/2019.

Send-A-Friend In-Office Referral Program

Valid at participating locations. Referral payment amount, terms, conditions, and availability vary by location and are subject to change without notice. To qualify, your Friend must: (1) Be a new Liberty Tax customer; (2) Present your valid Liberty Send-A-Friend coupon in store; and (3) Prepare, file and pay for their tax return preparation in the store. Discount offer valid only for intended recipient, cannot be combined with any other offer, and may not be used toward past services. Other exclusions may apply. Void where prohibited by law.

Liberty Tax School

There may be a small fee for books, which vary per market. Availability is based on classroom capacities per office.

Liberty Tax Service has been approved by the California Tax Education Council to offer Liberty Tax School (CTEC Course #2097-QE-0001), which fulfills the 60-hour qualifying education requirement imposed by the State of California to become a tax preparer.A listing of additional requirements to register as a tax preparer may be obtained by contacting CTEC at P.O. Box 2890, Sacramento, CA 95812-2890, toll-free by phone at (877) 850-2883, or on the Internet atwww.ctec.org

Licensed by Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission (OAR) 715-045-0033(6). Students must pass the Tax Preparer examination given by Oregon Board of Tax Practitioners before preparing tax returns for others.

In Maryland and New York, additional instruction and requirements are necessary to prepare an individual for employment as a Registered Tax Return Preparer.

In Arkansas, Liberty Tax is licensed By the SBPCE State Board.

In Tennessee, students will be offered employment per satisfactory completion.

Liberty does not make any promise, warrant or covenant as to the transferability of any credits earned at Liberty Tax Service. Credits earned at Liberty Tax Service, may not transfer to another educational institution. Credits earned at another educational institution may not be accepted by Liberty Tax Service. You should obtain confirmation that Liberty Tax Service will accept any credits you have earned at another educational institution before you execute an enrollment contract or agreement. You should also contact any educational institutions that you may want to transfer credits earned at Liberty Tax Service, to determine if such institutions will accept credits earned at Liberty Tax Service prior to executing an enrollment contract or agreement. The ability to transfer credits from Liberty Tax Service to another educational institution may be very limited. Your credits may not transfer, and you may have to repeat courses previously taken at Liberty Tax Service if you enroll in another educational institution. You should never assume that credits will transfer to or from any educational institution. It is highly recommended and you are advised to make certain that you know the transfer of credit policy of Liberty Tax Service, and of any other educational institutions you may in the future want to transfer the credits earned at Liberty Tax Service, before you execute an enrollment contract or agreement.

*Enrollment in, or completion of, the Liberty Tax Course is neither an offer nor a guarantee of employment, except as may be required by the state. Additional qualifications may be required. Enrollment restrictions apply. State restrictions may apply and additional training may be required in order to become a tax preparer. Valid at participating locations only.

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Tax Preparation, File Taxes, Income Tax Filing | Liberty ...

Liberty Label | Releases | Discogs

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Cat# Artist Title (Format) Label Cat# Country Year 0C 156-83023/24 Whitesnake Live... In The Heart Of The City (2xLP, Album) Sell This Version 1A 052Z-83321 Marz (2) Hooked On That Lovin' Thing (12") Sell This Version 1 A 062Z-83317 Classix Nouveaux Because You're Young (12") Sell This Version 1A 006-60276 Scott Fitzgerald & Yvonne Keeley Scott Fitzgerald & Yvonne Keeley - If I Had Words / This Time Of Year (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-82732 Sandy Nelson Let There Be Drums / Teen Beat (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-82865 Gerry Rafferty Bring It All Home (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83008 Kenny Rogers Lady (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83015 Slim Whitman When (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83016 J.J. Burnel Girl From The Snow Country (7", Wit) Sell This Version 1A 006-83055 J. Berry* Midnight Cowboy (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83058 Classix Nouveaux Nasty Little Green Men (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 006 83105 Gene McDaniels* A Hundred Pounds Of Clay / Tower Of Strength (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83106 Ernie K.Doe* Mother-In-Law / I Cried My Last Tear (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83107 Martin Denny Martinique / Sake Rock (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83108 Shirley Bassey Goldfinger / Diamonds Are Forever (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83112 Classix Nouveaux Guilty (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83116 Fischer-Z Marliese (Single) 4 versions Sell This Version 4 versions 1A 006-83137 Whitesnake Don't Break My Heart Again (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83150 Fischer-Z Berlin (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A006-83159 Dottie West What Are We Doin' In Love (7", Single) Sell This Version 1 A 006-83 163 Sheena Easton For Your Eyes Only (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 006-83166 Kenny Rogers I Don't Need You (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83180 The Ventures Walk Don't Run / Hawaii Five-O (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83188 Robbie Patton Don't Give It Up (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83194 Kenny Rogers Blaze Of Glory (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83196 Classix Nouveaux Inside Outside (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83235 The Stranglers Let Me Introduce You To The Family (7", Single, Hea) Sell This Version 1A006-83240 Kenny Rogers Kentucky Homemade Christmas (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83255 The Stranglers Golden Brown (Single) 3 versions Sell This Version 3 versions 1A 006-83275 Classix Nouveaux Is It A Dream (7") Sell This Version 1A 006-83279 Xavier (2) Work That Sucker To Death / Love Is On The One (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83284 The Stranglers La Folie (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83293 Kenny Rogers Lucille / Ruby Don't Take Your Love To Town (7", Single) Sell This Version 1 A 006-83316 Classix Nouveaux Because You're Young (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 006- 83321 Marz (2) Hooked On That Lovin' Thing (7") Sell This Version 1A 006-83322 Kenny Rogers Love Will Turn You Around (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83333 The Stranglers Strange Little Girl (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83335 Gerry Rafferty Sleepwalking (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-83336 Cher Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) / All I Really Want To Do (7", RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-83374 Kenny Rogers, Sheena Easton Kenny Rogers, Sheena Easton - We've Got Tonight (7") Sell This Version 1A 006-83375 Julie London Cry Me A River (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-91094 Timi Yuro Hurt / Smile (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 006-92299 Bobby Goldsboro Honey / Danny (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-92795 Eddie Cochran C'Mon Everybody / Summertime Blues (7", Single, MP, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-93112 Don McLean American Pie - Part I / American Pie - Part II (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-93503 Fats Domino Blueberry Hill / My Girl Josephine (7") Sell This Version 1A 006-93731 Canned Heat On The Road Again / Going Up The Country (7") Sell This Version 1A 006-93744 Ricky Nelson (2) Hello, Mary Lou / Travelin' Man (Single) 3 versions Sell This Version 3 versions 1 A 006-97041 The Marketts Balboa Blue / Surfer's Stomp (7") Sell This Version 1A 006-98421 Vikki Carr It Must Be Him (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-99377 Sandy Nelson Drums A Go Go / Let There Be Drums (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-99380 Johnny And The Hurricanes Red River Rock / Reveille Rock (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A006-99381 Del Shannon Runaway (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A006-99383 The Rivingtons Papa Oom Mow Mow / The Bird Is The Word (7", Single, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006-99384 Ike & Tina Turner Proud Mary / Nutbush City Limits (Single) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 038-61220 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Uncle Charlie & His Dog Teddy (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 038-90308 The Ventures Hawaii Five-O (LP) Sell This Version 1A 038-95671 Country Gazette A Traitor In Our Midst! (LP, Album, RE, Gat) Sell This Version 1A 054-83017 Motrhead On Parole (Album) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 054-90639 Various Midnight Cowboy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (LP) Sell This Version 1A 054-91422 Timi Yuro The Best Of (LP, Comp) Sell This Version 1A 054-92656 Canned Heat Masters Of Rock (Comp) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 058-61356 Ricky Nelson (2) More Songs By Ricky (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 058-61357 Rick Nelson* Album Seven By Rick (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A-058-61358 Ricky Nelson (2) Songs By Ricky (LP, Album) Sell This Version 1A 058-82992 Fats Domino Just Domino (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 058-82993 Fats Domino Let The Four Winds Blow (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 058-99106 Ricky Nelson (2) Ricky (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 006 20 0384 7 Michael Martin Murphey Disenchanted (7", Single) Sell This Version 1A 006-20 0610 7 P.J. Proby Today I Klilled A Man / I Apologize (7", Single) Sell This Version 1 A 062-26519 Shirley Bassey Onvergetelijke Hits (Comp) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 062-45848 Various Rock 'N' Roll Hits (LP, Comp) Sell This Version 1A 062-60395 Gerry Rafferty City To City (Album) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 062-62440 Shirley Bassey The Magic Is You (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82635 Fischer-Z Word Salad (LP, Album, RP) Sell This Version 1A 062-82740 The Stranglers The Raven (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82741 Whitesnake Lovehunter (Album) 3 versions Sell This Version 3 versions 1A 062-82748 Eddie Cochran 20 Rock 'n' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, Mono) Sell This Version 1A 062-82749 Ricky Nelson (2) 20 Rock 'N' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, Mono, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82751 Johnny Burnette 20 Rock 'N' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82752 Del Shannon 20 Rock 'N' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82753 Johnny Rivers 20 Rock'n'roll Hits (LP, Comp, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82755 Sandy Nelson 20 Rock 'N' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82756 Jan & Dean 20 Rock 'n' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, Mono) Sell This Version 1A 062-82757 Bobby Vee 20 Rock 'n' Roll Hits (LP, Comp, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82814 Billie Jo Spears The Billie Jo Singles Album (LP, Comp, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-82904 Whitesnake Ready An' Willing (Album) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 062-83003 Kenny Rogers Grootste Hits (Comp) 3 versions Sell This Version 3 versions 1A 062-83019 Slim Whitman Songs I Love To Sing (LP, Comp) Sell This Version 1A 062-83045 Earl Klugh Late Night Guitar (LP, Album) Sell This Version 1A 062-83052 Billie Jo Spears Special Songs (LP) Sell This Version 1A 062-83084 The Stranglers The Gospel According To The Meninblack (LP, Album, Gat) Sell This Version 1A 062-83100 Fischer-Z Red Skies Over Paradise (Album) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 062-83111 The Vapors Magnets (LP, Album) Sell This Version 1A 062-83134 Whitesnake Come An' Get It (Album) 3 versions Sell This Version 3 versions 1A 062-83143 Classix Nouveaux Night People (Album) 2 versions Sell This Version 2 versions 1A 062-90960 Ennio Morricone The Good, The Bad And The Ugly - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (LP, Album, RE) Sell This Version 1A 062-93703 Don McLean American Pie (LP, Album) Sell This Version 1A 062-97530 Ike & Tina Turner Greatest Hits (LP, Comp) Sell This Version 1A063-83091 David Mansfield Heaven's Gate (LP, Album) Sell This Version

liberty | Definition & Examples | Britannica.com

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Liberty, a state of freedom, especially as opposed to political subjection, imprisonment, or slavery. Its two most generally recognized divisions are political and civil liberty.

Gambling – Britannica.com

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Gambling, the betting or staking of something of value, with consciousness of risk and hope of gain, on the outcome of a game, a contest, or an uncertain event whose result may be determined by chance or accident or have an unexpected result by reason of the bettors miscalculation.

Sacred Centers – Tools for Conscious Evolution

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Aligned along the sacred core of your body, seven energy centers known as chakras spin like sacred jewels, forming a bridge of connection between Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter, mind and body.

Herein lies the architecture of the soul.

This ancient map of the chakra system presents a viable key to wholeness and a guide for both personal and planetary awakening.

As we align the inner worlds of earth, water, fire, air, sound, light, and consciousness, we simultaneously align with these sacred elements in the outer world.

Herein find tools to open, engage, activate, and align your chakras and your innermost being with the larger mystery of life.

Explore our books, workshops, home learning courses, videos, and more.

Join our community and become a member of Sacred Centers.

In this long-awaited book by acclaimed chakra expert Anodea Judith, you will learn how to use yogas principles and practices to awaken the subtle body of energy and connect with your highest source. Using seven vital keys to unlock your inner temple, you will be guided through practices that open and activate each chakra through postures, bioenergetic exercises, breathing practices, mantras, guided meditation, and yoga philosophy. Learn how to activate your chakras through yoga. With 232 full-color photographs, step-by-step alignment instructions, chakra-based posture sequences, pranayama (breathing) techniques, mantras, yoga philosophy, and more, this book is a must-have resource for anyone who teaches or wants to learn about yoga and moving the subtle energy.

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Sacred Centers - Tools for Conscious Evolution

Paradox of hedonism – Wikipedia

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

The paradox of hedonism, also called the pleasure paradox, refers to the practical difficulties encountered in the pursuit of pleasure. Unfortunately for the hedonist, constant pleasure-seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness in the long runor even in the short run, when consciously pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing it.

The utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick was first to note in The Methods of Ethics that the paradox of hedonism is that pleasure cannot be acquired directly.[1] Variations on this theme appear in the realms of ethics, philosophy, psychology, and economics.

It is often said that we fail to attain pleasures if we deliberately seek them. This has been described variously, by many:

But I now thought that this end [one's happiness] was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness[....] Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way[....] Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.[2]

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

The more a man tries to demonstrate his sexual potency or a woman her ability to experience orgasm, the less they are able to succeed. Pleasure is, and must remain, a side-effect or by-product, and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it is made a goal in itself.[3]

What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.

What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.

What is happiness? The feeling that power increasesthat a resistance is overcome.[4]

[...] it is significantly enlightening to substitute for the individual 'happiness' (for which every living being is supposed to strive) power [...] joy is only a symptom of the feeling of attained power [...] (one does not strive for joy [...] joy accompanies; joy does not move)[5]

Nietzsche's "will to power" and "will to seem" embrace many of our views, which again resemble in some respects the views of Fr and the older writers, according to whom the sensation of pleasure originates in a feeling of power, that of pain in a feeling of feebleness.[6]

The love of praise, howe'er concealed by art,

Reigns more or less supreme in every heart;The Proud to gain it, toils on toils endure;

The modest shun it, but to make it sure![7]

Happiness is like a cat, if you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.[8][9]

Happiness is found only in little moments of inattention.[10]

Suppose Paul likes to collect stamps. According to most models of behavior, including not only utilitarianism, but most economic, psychological and social conceptions of behavior, it is believed that Paul collects stamps because he gets pleasure from it. Stamp collecting is an avenue towards acquiring pleasure. However, if you tell Paul this, he will likely disagree. He does get pleasure from collecting stamps, but this is not the process that explains why he collects stamps. It is not as if he said, "I must collect stamps so I, Paul, can obtain pleasure". Collecting stamps is not just a means toward pleasure. He simply likes collecting stamps, therefore (indirectly) acquiring pleasure.

This paradox is often reversed to illustrate that pleasure and happiness cannot be reverse-engineered. If for example you heard that collecting stamps was very pleasurable, and began a stamp collection as a means towards this happiness, it would inevitably be in vain. To achieve happiness, you must not seek happiness directly, you must strangely motivate yourself towards things unrelated to happiness, like the collection of stamps.[1]

Happiness is often imprecisely equated with pleasure. If, for whatever reason, one does equate happiness with pleasure, then the paradox of hedonism arises. When one aims solely towards pleasure itself, one's aim is frustrated. Henry Sidgwick comments on such frustration after a discussion of self-love in the above-mentioned work:

I should not, however, infer from this that the pursuit of pleasure is necessarily self-defeating and futile; but merely that the principle of Egoistic Hedonism, when applied with a due knowledge of the laws of human nature, is practically self-limiting; i.e., that a rational method of attaining the end at which it aims requires that we should to some extent put it out of sight and not directly aim at it.[11]

While not addressing the paradox directly, Aristotle commented on the futility of pursuing pleasure. Human beings are actors whose endeavors bring about consequences, and among these is pleasure. Aristotle then argues as follows:

How, then, is it that no one is continuously pleased? Is it that we grow weary? Certainly all human things are incapable of continuous activity. Therefore pleasure also is not continuous; for it accompanies activity.[12]

Sooner or later, finite beings will be unable to acquire and expend the resources necessary to maintain their sole goal of pleasure; thus, they find themselves in the company of misery. Evolutionary theory explains that humans evolved through natural selection and follow genetic imperatives that seek to maximize reproduction,[13] not happiness. As a result of these selection pressures, the extent of human happiness is limited biologically. David Pearce argues in his treatise The Hedonistic Imperative makes the point that humans might be able to use genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and neuroscience to eliminate suffering in all human life and allow for peak levels of happiness and pleasure that are currently unimaginable.

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Paradox of hedonism - Wikipedia

Christian Hedonism | Desiring God

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Joy is not optional. Its essential.

Christian Hedonism is the conviction that Gods ultimate goal in the world (his glory) and our deepest desire (to be happy) are one and the same, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. Not only is God the supreme source of satisfaction for the human soul, but God himself is glorified by our being satisfied in him. Therefore, our pursuit of joy in him is essential.

Christian Hedonism claims that the Christian life should be the pursuit of maximum joy in God joy both in quality and quantity. Fullness of joy and joy forevermore (Psalm 16:11) are found only in him.

Learning that Gods glory and our joy are not at odds is a liberating discovery. Christian Hedonism touches, and reshapes, our vision of essentially all of life and ministry from conversion to worship to the Scriptures to prayer to marriage to missions to suffering, and even the very nature of God himself.

John Piper has taught the vision of life and ministry he calls Christian Hedonism for more than forty years, and many of the same questions resurface again and again from first-time hearers.

Much is at stake with joy in God. Many have thought about Christianity for so long in terms of duty, rather than delight, that the claims of Christian Hedonism can be tough to swallow. John Piper has heard these over the years and is eager to win even the most ardent detractors.

If this page was helpful to you, please consider sharing it with someone.

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Christian Hedonism | Desiring God

Ron Paul – Official Site

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

mar 21, 2019 Neocons Want Brazil in NATO to Undermine Venezuela Daniel McAdams Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute joins News.Views.Hughes to discuss Trumps apparent 180 degree turn on NATO. While once he was outspoken in his criticism, President Trump now wants to expand the alliance by bringing Brazil into the fold. He argues that Trump has neocons whispering in his ear and that NATO is an expensive meeting club that has outlived its purpose... read on...

mar 20, 2019 Twitter Prevents Julian Assanges Mom from Posting, Restricts Viewing of Her Past Posts Christine Assange, the mother of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has usedher Twitter pagetocriticizethe United States government effort to prosecute and imprison her son for making available leaked information exposing abusive government actions, as well as her sons harsh treatment including a prohibition on his communication with the outside world over the last year at Ecuadors London embassy where he obtained sanctuary in 2012. read on...

mar 19, 2019 Ron Paul Airs Concerns about the Trump Presidency Ron Paul, the libertarian communicator who ran three times for president, has been neither a never-Trumper nor a loyalist of President Donald Trump. Instead, Paul, through the 2016 presidential campaign and Trumps presidency, has judged Trumps various comments and actions against Pauls understanding of right and wrong. read on...

mar 16, 2019 Five Minutes Five Issues: Watching Assange, Ocasio-Cortez, Expungement, Bernie Sanders, Alaska Marijuana A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted is out. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show atStitcher,iTunes,YouTube, andSoundCloud. read on...

mar 14, 2019 Lawrence Wilkerson: National Security Spending Should Be Cut, Not Increased President Donald Trump released this week his budget proposal thatincludesincreasing by five percent United States military spending. read on...

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Ron Paul - Official Site

Best Bitcoin Cash Wallets (BCH): Free Money For Every …

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Today I am going to talk about the fork again and the free money is created from thin air!!

Mind you, this is not the fork which you use to eat noodles, but the fork/split of the most legendarycryptocurrency Bitcoin,and the freemoney created from thin air Bitcoin Cash (BCH).

If you dont understand what I am talking about, then I guess you have not read our guides on the Bitcoin fork and Bitcoin Cash (BCH):

For those you have just joined now (post-fork party), in a nutshell, this is what happened:

August 1, 2017

As of block 478559, the Bitcoin (BTC) network has hard forked intoBitcoin Cash (BCH)

This hard fork has now created Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which is worth $440 per unit (at the time of this writing) and is the third most valuable cryptocurrency according toCoinMarketCap.

Abracadabra!!Bitcoin Cash is worth $440, and it was just created out of thin air!

Isnt it amazing?

At least to me, it is!!

BCH is free for every Bitcoiner who had any amount of BTCs and were also holding their private keys under their custody prior to the fork.

Now, post-fork, such Bitcoiners can simply use those BTC private keys to claim their BCH in a BCH-supported wallet.

For example, if you had 1 BTC, then after the split/fork, you will now have both 1 BTC and 1 BCH; in other words,your coin holdings have doubled as both coins now have the same private keys.

Now, lets keep everything aside to quickly jump and seewho is supporting Bitcoin Cash, as I know many of you might be looking to grab or trade your free Bitcoin Cash coins.

Here are the wallets and exchanges supporting Bitcoin Cash (BCH). However, there are not many BCH wallets, as it is only a few days old! But for early birds, these are ample amounts of options.

1. Ledger Nano S (Hardware Wallet)

If you have a Ledger Nano S, then now you need not do anything to get ahold of your BCH after the fork. LedgerNano S/Blue, Nano, and HW.1 owners just need to update a few things here and there to access their BCH. Here is the official CoinSutra post on how to claim your free BCH from the Ledger Nano S. And here is the official blog post from Ledger further articulating the dos and donts.

Buy The Ledger Nano S Now

2. Trezor(Hardware Wallet)

Trezor has officially announced support for BCash (BCH). On August 1, they published this official step by step guide on how its users can claim BCH.

UPDATE: After some time, Trezor has taken down BCH support as is evident from their note on their blog which says:BCH wallet has been taken down from TREZOR Wallet, until further notice.

But stay tuned

Buy Trezor Now

3. Coinomi(Mobile Wallet)

This is a popular lightweight multi-coin HD wallet for Bitcoin and other altcoins. It allows you to control your private keys and supports a maximum number of cryptocurrencies right now in the market. They have officially released a blog post supporting BCH and how to access it. Here is the step by step blog post.

It is only available for Android as of now, but iOS support is also coming soon.

Download Coinomi

4. Electron Cash(Desktop & Mobile Wallet)

Electron Cash is the fork of the original Bitcoin wallet, Electrum. It allows you to back up your wallet via a mnemonic seed phrase, like a true HD wallet. It is a light wallet as it doesnt require you to download the full node of Bitcoin Cash. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. It also has a version which supports Android mobiles, too.

Recommendation on how to redeem Bitcoin Cash: https://t.co/2eO4p6En7C

Electrum (@ElectrumWallet) July 31, 2017

Download Electron Cash Now

5. Jaxx (Mobile & Desktop Wallet)

Jaxx is another popular multi-currency HD wallet which allows you to control your private keys. They have announced prior to the fork that Jaxx users would not need to do anything to access their BCH coins. The Jaxx team has decided to work on the full integration of BCH on Jaxx apps, and when the integration is complete, its users will be able to access BCH coins with a simple software update.

However, they have clearly stated this:

SinceJaxx users are always in control of their private keys, corresponding Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will be safe in your Jaxx wallet. However, please know that you will not be able to access/send/receive your Bitcoin Cash (BCH)untiltheintegration takes place.

Here is the official Jaxx announcement with their dos and dontslist on BCH.

Download Jaxx Now

6. BTC.com (Web & Mobile Wallet)

BTC.com is a popular web and mobile Bitcoin wallet. If you would like to access a web wallet that wont compromise your private keys, then this is it. And according to this post, you will be able to access BCH.

Moreover, they have stated that:

If the fork is successful, you will automatically have the equivalent amount of BCH as the amount of Bitcoin stored in your BTC.com wallet.

See and explore their step by step guide on recovering BCH using their BCH recovery tool.

So far this tool works only in the web version, but it should soon be available for Android and iOS versions, too.

Download BTC.com Wallet Now | Sign up forBTC.com Wallet

7.BU Bitcoin Cash Client (Desktop Wallet)

Bitcoin Unlimiteds Bitcoin Cash 1.1.0.0 edition has been released, and it supports BCH.This release is being offered by the Bitcoin Unlimited Developers unofficially until the BU community has the opportunity to vote on whether Bitcoin Cash should be officially supported. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. (Source:Bitcoin Unlimited)

Download BU Bitcoin Cash Now

8. Bitcoin Classic UAHF Client(Desktop Wallet)

Bitcoin Classic has also launched a desktop wallet called Bitcoin Classic 1.3.2, which is a BCH-compatible release. This will allow you to follow the Bitcoin Cash chain when its fully installed. It is alsoavailable for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems.(Source:Bitcoin Classic)

Download Bitcoin Classic Now

9. CashAddress (Paper Wallet)

Bitcoin Cashs paper wallet script is now available. For those users who are comfortable with paper, wallets can go here and make one for themselves. But in my opinion hardware wallets are superior to paper wallets.

If you need a reference guide to make a paper wallet then refer to this one. Note: though this guide is for making Bitcoin paper wallet the process is similar for making BCH paper wallet also.

Check out CashAddress

10. KeepKey (Hardware Wallet)

KeepKeys support for Bitcoin Cash is now available. See here their official guide of it.

For those of you who dont know KeepKey is a cryptocurrency hardware wallet but is quite bulky to carry. However, I am not against KeepKey as they are doing a decent job and supporting now more than 5 cryptocurrencies including BCH.

But I prefer to use Ledger Nano S and Trezor more for convenience and faster cryptocurrency integration.

Buy Keepkey now

Basically, there are all sorts of methods for claiming your BCH. In short, you will either need to export your BTC private keys on a BCH-supported wallet or you just need to do some sort of software update here and there depending upon the type of wallet you are using.

Word of Caution: Depending upon the kind of wallet you are using, you may require playing with your private keys. Hence, we advise you to do it cautiously by following the official announcements from your associated wallets.

Also, consider not to do large transactions using these BCH wallets as these are still the early days of Bitcoin Cash, so you should expect some hurdles and bugs in the BCH software.

Thats all from my side in this article. I will be updating this list of BCH wallets as more keep popping up, so keep an eye here!

And until that time, happy Bitcoin forking!

Do let me know in the comments section about which wallets you are using to access your BCH funds.

Like this post? Dont forget to share it with your network!

For further reading:

Best Bitcoin Cash Wallets (BCH): Free Money For Every ...

8 Signs You’re a Slave Instead of an Employee

Posted on March 21, 2019 by Danzig

Literal slavery is a horrible practice that still persists into the modern age. But, I want to talk about another form of human exploitationemployment slavery, which can also ruin a persons life. Generally, I consider this a self-inflicted slavery because its ultimately a persons choice to work under such conditionsbut I also understand that brainwashing can occur, creating the illusion that theres no way out.

Slavery (in general) exists because of the inclination among people to obtain the benefits of human resources, while providing little (or nothing) in return. Human work is the most intelligent, efficient way to create a system of wealth and power. For the morally bankrupt, such benefits are sought for free.

Employment, in the best case scenario, is a business deal of mutual benefit. But in other instances, the company is expending such minimal resources that they are taking advantage of you. In the worst case scenario, through a combination of slave-driving principles and psychological techniques to break you down, such a job can morph into something very similar to actual slavery.

If you dont know any better, its easy to fall into slavery conditions. Here are signs that your sense of freedom in life is totally gone:

Because of the way employers conveniently ignore yearly inflation, todays minimal wage is not enough to maintain any semblance of a normal lifestyle. Minimal wage makes some sense in small businesses just starting out. But, In America, $8.25 an hour, or less, from a large, billion-dollar corporation is inexcusable. In this case, your annual wages cost a second of the companys hourly profits. In other words, your hard work is a very bad deal for you, and a killer opportunity for the suits upstairs.

Youre lucky you even have a job! is a psychological taunt that bad employers use to try and keep their wage-slaves from believing they can do any better. Such statements are made to maintain a sense of control. Understand, voluntary slavery is not a rare phenomenon. It happens when a person is brainwashed into the belief that they have nowhere else they can go.

If your manager uses psychological put-downs like this to denigrate your professional abilitiesunderstand that its being done for a reason.

The idea of getting a raise and a promotion may be dangled in-front of you, but youve seen no evidence to suggest that it really happens. In fact, only a very small percentage of your co-workers ever obtain this goal, and they tend to be the cronies of upper-management. If this is the case, then what exactly is your reason for working at this company?

Inconvenient hours are inevitable in jobs, but some companies will abuse the system. This ranges from illegally denying overtime pay, to scheduling month-long bouts of cloping (working until closing hours late at night, then opening hours the next morning) that leaves the employee physically and emotionally drained.

An employee in this system may feel the intense pressure by the bosses to conform to abusive hours, under the threat of being denied promotions or even getting fired for seeking better treatment.

Americas two-week annual vacation time is one of the weakest in the Western world, and American workers tend to not even use it. This is because many employers will hint that vacationers are likely to end up on the shit-list of not getting promoted. They may even hint that unruly vacation-seekers will be the first to get laid-off or fired at the earliest opportunity.

A system of slavery does not allow free-time for individuals to maintain their own lives outside of their work. This could cause dissent and break the system of total control. An unspoken methodology among abusive managers is to destroy the lifestyles of employees so, instead of tending to family or hobbies, they work at full capacity.

Feeling motivated based on high-standards and being scared to go below those standards is one thing, but being genuinely scared of the people youre working for is another.

Slave-masters maintain systems of fear, to break down their subjects and perhapsin timebuild them back up. For the best example of thisplease see Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones.

Psychological and verbal abuse is usually what occurs. An abusive employer understands exactly what strings to pull to generate feelings of shame or guilt, and theyll use the professional context to destroy a subjects sense of self-worth, perhaps by implying worthlessness at the vocation theyve devoted their life to.

In other instances, the abuse is very overt and could include yelling, tantrums and even physical assaults. But the outcome is the same: the employee living in a constant state of paranoia, fear, and subservience.

Read carefully the ten warning-signs youre in a cult by the Cult Education Institute. Some of these that could be very applicable to a workplace include: absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability, no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry, the leader (boss) is always right, and former followers (employees) are vilified as evil for leaving.

If the job feels less about, you know, getting the job doneand is more about the influence, charisma and infallibility of the bossthen get the heck out of there. This means the person in charge is getting a side-benefit to running or managing the workplace: power and dominance.

The number one sign youre a slave and not an employee is that youre working an unpaid internship, and its not for college credit. You may be promised great benefits and valuable connections, at what amounts to harsh workplace conditions, long hours, and zero pay.

A huge mistake I see young professionals make, and it really irks me, is naivety about peoples intentions. I went to film school for my bachelors, and many students I knew lusted after top internships at film studios or with big names in the entertainment industry. Such internships are often offered regardless of college credit.

When a person is blindsided by their desire to make it and get in with big names, they are likely to make bad decisionsand unscrupulous employers will prey on this desire.

Internships are great IF its part of a students actual curriculum. It means hands-on work and real experience versus useless classrooms. But, the questionable non-credit internships I warn about also exist to lure young people into systems of slavery. Its gotten so bad these types of arrangements are quickly becoming illegal in California.

The reality of such internships is that the slave-drivers only desire one thing: unpaid work. There is NO promise that you will move up or land any type of a paid job. When your internship finishes, they will discard you and find the next victim.

The biggest reason to avoid internships is the mentality behind the deal. Imagine a law firm or a film studio that is a multi-billion dollar operation. How hard would it be to throw their new recruit at LEAST minimum wage? The fact such a company would, despite their huge profits, still desire unpaid labor is indicative of a slave-driving mentality that funnels wealth to the top at the expense of the people on the bottom making it possible.

As a professional, it would be best for you to avoid doing any type of business with any individual or company that possesses a philosophy like this.

Employment-slavery situations are common. Very common. But ultimately, the biggest factor in determining how bad it is, is a single question: are you happy?

If you are happy at $8.25 an hour with no benefits, because you like the people you work with, you like the nature of the work, and you feel its moving you somewhere you want to bethen its not slavery. Youre making an investment thatll either pay off, or it wontbut at least you enjoy what youre doing.

However, if you are miserable in your current conditions, its quite possible that the uneasy feeling in your gut is your intuition telling you that someone is taking advantage of you.

Employment is supposed to be a business contract, and an exchange of services. Never a system of control. Sometimes, just the willingness to walk away is your strongest defense against a terrible job situation.

For more about avoiding systems of employment-slavery, please see my short books: Freedom: How to Make Money From Your Dreams and Ambitions, and How to Quit Your Job: Escape Soul Crushing Work, Create the Life You Want, and Live Happy.

(For more books, also check out the Developed Life bookstore, http://www.developedlife.com/bookstore).

More here:

8 Signs You're a Slave Instead of an Employee

The Occult and Satanism in America – The American TFP

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

Few Americans took notice that in the last U.S. census of 2010, witchcraft had become the fourth largest religion in the United States. As shocking as that may be, Satanism has become just as popular. So says Zachary King, one of the most renowned former Satanists who converted to the Catholic Church, in an interview he gave to Crusade Magazine.

Does the Devil Exist?

When we speak of the occult and Satanism, many readers may have the impression that we are talking about the fabled bogeyman. The bogeyman is in everyones nightmares, but it doesnt really exist. According to a Gallup poll in 2003, only 70% of Catholics believe in the existence of the devil, which is only 2% higher than the average American.

Most Catholics do believe that the devil exists, but is largely absent from their lives. Or perhaps, for our peace of mind, we would like to think he is only distantly involved. Some would rather not talk about it. After all, one of the maxims of the American way of life is Live and let live. Let the devil be and hopefully, with a wing but no prayer, he will leave us be.

In a four-hour interview with former Satanist Zachary King, a lot was revealed about the activities and growing popularity of Satanism in America. The interview also showed that children are at a high risk of getting involved in the occult and how much the world is becoming more accepting of the devil. Far from sleeping, the devil has been awake and quite active.

Zachary King, a former Satanist high wizard, converted to Catholicism in 2008.

A Former Satanist Converts

Zachary King converted to the Catholic Church in 2008. His conversion story, which involves the miraculous medal, is a fantastic story in itself, but it is not the focus of this article. He was a former Satanist who reached the degree of high wizard in the World Church of Satan. A high wizard is hand selected by the top leaders. If a satanic high priest is more or less equivalent to a Catholic priest, a high wizard is more or less equivalent to a mystic saint. In this position, he traveled extensively to perform satanic rituals for politicians, CEOs, TV producers and artists. His more than twenty-six years of deep involvement in Satanism has given him insight into this secretive world.

A Blurry Line

The occult and Satanism are nothing new. Many times the distinction between the two is blurred even by authorities who have studied both, since, by their very nature, both deal with the devil, though occultists may not always perceive it as such. This is evident in the book written by Mr. Luis Solimeo and Mr. Gustavo Solimeo, Angels and Demons. Mr. King himself first dabbled in the occult before being recruited into Satanism.

Defining the Occult

The occult is as old as the first temptation in the Garden of Eden when the serpent tempted Eve to become like God by merely eating a fruit. Mr. James R. Lewis, the second most prolific writer on the occult, has a long list of occult movements which includes Wicca, Druids, Voodoo, Brujeria/Santeria, the garden variety of New Age religions, astrologers, psychic readers, spirit mediums, among other less known sects. The terms witchcraft and the occult are synonymous. Occultism can be defined as the movement of people who believe in harnessing the power of spirits or nature through the use of herbs, crystals, amulets, incantations, symbols and spells for either good or bad effect.

The practice of the occult has always been popular and public throughout history. We see the practice in different forms like the priests of the Pharaoh whom Moses fought, Simon the Magus whom Saint Peter confronted, or the druids Saint Patrick challenged. Occultism was universally prevalent in pre-Christian times.

Ever since Saint Michael the Archangel expelled the fallen angels from heaven, they seek to destroy Gods creation by turning man away from God to the point of worshiping Satan himself, the ultimate enemy of God.

Defining Satanism

Satanism can be considered as ancient as the revolt of Lucifer and his angels against God. The former light bearer, as the name Lucifer signifies, deceived a third of the heavenly host and led a revolt against God. There are many variations of Satanism according to Alfred E. Waite, the most published authority on the occult and Satanism. In his book, Devil Worship in France, he defines Satanism as the movement of people who imitate the fallen angels and declare allegiance to Lucifer as a form of defiance to God.

Whereas the occult is an indirect, albeit sometimes unsuspecting, worship of the devil, Satanism is its unabashed counterpart. As Mr. King noted, the occult dabbles with the power of the devil many times not knowing it. Satanists, on the other hand, he continues, embrace it fully and openly.

The presence of Satanism has not been as obvious as that of the occult throughout history. All the gods of the gentiles are devils (Ps. 96:5), say the Scriptures. However, Satanism, per se, is the open worship of the devil, and, as such, if it did exist as a movement, was completely secretive in the past.

The Shift in the Soul of Western and Christian Man

The practice of the occult began to diminish markedly as Christianity spread, especially in the lands where it took root. Superstitions were replaced by the true Faith. Pagan rituals were replaced by prayers and the sacraments. The paranormal activities worked by invoking spirits were replaced by miracles wrought by novenas, prayers and devotion to Mary, the angels and the saints. Miracles abounded during the Middle Ages, a period when saints, imbibed by a true Christian spirit, walked the land.

Something changed in the lands where Christianity once flourished. Today, the influence of the Christian faith is much diminished in society. The appeal of witchcraft and, consequently, devil worship returned.

Bishop Fulton Sheen made the saying popular that the greatest trick the devil played on mankind was to make us believe he doesnt exist. The trick seems to have changed. The devil is now playing a new and improved trick on mankind.

The Resurgence of the Occult and Satanism

According to the above-mentioned 2010 census, there are more people involved in the occult in America than there are Muslims or Jehovahs Witness. Compare this to polls in 1980 when the people who affiliated themselves with the occult were so statistically small, no specific data was assigned to them. They were grouped with Muslims, Buddhists, Unitarians, and others, which altogether was only 2% of Americans.

The tally of the number of Satanists is harder to come by. According to Zachary King, his conservative estimate is about 4 million in the United States and about 10 million worldwide.

One reason why its impossible to have hard figures on the number of Satanists in America is because of the secrecy. The Church of Satan, founded by Anton La Vey, was the first of its kind to officially establish itself as a non-profit religious organization with the U.S. government on September 20, 1971 in California.

The Church of Satan ironically professes to be atheistic. In their belief system, the only god is oneself. The only sacraments are to pleasure oneself in any way imaginable. The only commandment is to do whatever makes you happy. Curiously, however, in their private rituals, they constantly invoke Satans name.

A symptom of the dechristianization of society can be seen in the multiple controversies and lawsuits against the erection of monuments to the Ten Commandments which occur in cities all across America.

The Black Mass

Perhaps another mark of their increased popularity is the controversy they have generated in the news lately. The Satanists especially have been demanding public acceptance by trying to distribute books about the devil to school kids, putting up a public monument of Satan in Oklahoma City or setting up a holiday satanic display next to a nativity scene in the Florida state capitol.

The greatest controversy in 2014 was regarding the satanic black mass. On May 12, 2014, Harvard University scheduled a reenactment of a black mass. It was canceled by the school due to overwhelming protests. It would have been the first black mass offered to the public in the world.

In September of 2014, a satanic black mass was performed in Oklahoma Citys Civic Center where the admission was opened to the general public. In that sense, it was the first public satanic black mass celebrated in history. It was a public act in a public venue offered to the general public. It was the first time in history that Satan could be worshipped in broad daylight before the whole world. Previously, all satanic activities were done as privately as possible, in basements or in rooms with covered windows, and in the middle of the night.

Shockingly, Zachary King notes that a black mass is much more common than people think. Many high priests will perform it every night starting at midnight, the witching hour, and conclude at 3:00 a.m., the inverse time of Our Lord Jesus Christs death on the cross.

What is a satanic black mass? Mr. Alfred E. Waite, author of Devil Worship in France (1886), described it as a ritual based on the Catholic Mass. It is not based on Jewish or Muslim services, nor Buddhist or Hindu rituals, not even Protestant services.

The following is a list of rituals done in a satanic black mass compiled from the writings of Mr. Waite and confirmed by Mr. King.

Just as the Holy Mass is celebrated on top of an altar containing a relic of a martyr, Satanists perform theirs on top of an undressed woman of ill repute. Just as we humble ourselves repeatedly invoking Gods mercy, they offer their acts of constant revolt in imitation of the devil. Just as Jesus is offered as a sacrifice, they offer human or animal sacrifices. Just as we lift our hearts and minds to God asking His presence, Satanists repeatedly implore and demand the presence of demons. Just as we fill our naves with sacred music and chants, they fill theirs with weird music, a gong sounding every time the name of Satan is invoked. Just as we direct our prayers to God, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the angels and saints, they direct theirs to Satan, the demons in hell and the damned souls in hell, especially those who committed particularly heinous sins on earth, like Cain and Judas. In addition, Mr. King added that he even witnessed some Satanists pray the rosary completely in reverse, starting from the last word, Amen, and ending with Hail.

Litmus Test: the Sacrilege with Consecrated Hosts

Here is the worst part and what seems to be the main point of their ritual. Just as we receive Holy Communion, believing the consecrated host to be the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ and are encouraged to offer acts of faith, adoration, love, thanksgiving, reparation and petition, the Satanists, too, receive communion. Real Satanists insist on using a real consecrated host. They then spit Our Lord on the ground, trample all over Him, all the while screaming blasphemies and profanities at Him.

In his book, Alfred E. Waite writes that in order to form a partnership with the lost angels one must please Satan. Since Christ is the enemy of Satan, the sorcerer must outrage Christ, especially in His sacraments. Because of this they insist on using a consecrated host and they obtain this by stealing It.

A priest in France wrote last year about a former Satanist who claimed he could tell a consecrated host from an unconsecrated one. This convert claimed that if you put a consecrated host on a table along with ten unconsecrated ones, he could pick out the consecrated one without hesitation. When the priest asked how that was possible since there is no physical difference, the former Satanist said he could do this because of the intense hatred he felt towards that one species.

Although not all pro-abortionists are Satanists, the connection between abortion and Satanism is not surprising. During satanic rituals, aborted babies are offered as human sacrifices to the devil.

Satanism and Abortion

Another shocking aspect of a black mass is the use of abortion. A common image used to portray abortion is that of the false god Moloch whose statues mouth is shaped like a burning furnace where babies are thrown in as a sacrifice.

Done completely under the protection of the law, satanic high priests today will assist in an abortion and offer the killing of the baby to the devil. Lawyers are consulted to make sure everything is done according to the law. In addition, many high priests dedicate all the abortions in the world to the devil every night during the witching hour.

Explaining the Shift in the Soul of Western and Christian Man

How did this shift happen? How can society today accept or be indifferent to such heinous acts?

In his masterful book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, Prof. Plinio Corra de Oliveira analyzes the modern-day crisis and explains the changes in the soul of Western and Christian man.

Prof. Corra de Oliveira explains how society was transformed in five stages. The historical reference point of his analysis is the High Medieval Ages when the Gospel of Christ pervaded all of culture and society. During this time, the practice of the occult existed, but it was extremely unpopular and it was never public.

Plinio Corra de Oliveira, author of Revolution and Counter-Revolution, prognosticated that the Fifth Revolution would be the Satanic Revolution. This revolutionary process attempts to reverse the fruit of Our Lords death on the Cross, namely Christian civilization.

The first changes started with humanism and Protestantism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We see during that time the resurgence of the Greek and Roman deities. As Prof. Corra de Oliveira says, The thirst for earthly pleasures became a burning desire. Diversions became more and more frequent and sumptuous, increasingly engrossing men Hearts began to shy away from the love of sacrifice, from true devotion to the Cross, and from the aspiration to sanctity and eternal life. He called this the First Revolution.

The Second Revolution is the French Revolution. In this period we see the proclamation of the goddess of reason. Mr. Waite noted the growth of popularity of the occult and devil worship during this period.

The Third Revolution is the Communist Revolution. Though communism never promoted witchcraft and devil worship, it tried to abolish religion and establish materialism. In all the nations where the errors of communism spread, as predicted by Our Lady at Fatima, the role of God diminished and the role of atheistic materialism increased.

The Fourth Revolution, as defined by Prof. Corra de Oliveira, is the Cultural Revolution. During this phase we begin to see the rise of New Age religions and the occult.All the previous four stages progressed towards one finality: the end of Western and Christian civilization.

What shifted in the soul of Western and Christian man is the influence of Jesus Christ and His cross in the hearts of modern men. The whole revolutionary process attempts to reverse the fruit of Our Lords death on the cross which inspired and is the foundation for Christian civilization. We now live in a civilization where more and more Christian values are being eroded and persecuted, and anti-Christian values are being promoted.

Before the author of Revolution and Counter-Revolution died in 1995, he prognosticated that the Fifth Revolution would be the Satanic Revolution.

Hope in Face of the Advancing Satanic Revolution

Within the context of the struggle with the devil, sometimes we are tempted to think that God is an equal opportunity employer. God set an enmity between the woman and the serpent in the book of Genesis. There is a competition between the two factions. Sometimes we have the impression that God abides by the rule of fair play. There are rules in this competition and both sides are given equal opportunity to make their play. Or, so, some may think.

TFP Members in TFP Ceremonial Habits carry a statue of Our Lady of Fatima during the 2009 Public Square Rosary Rally in New York City.

This is not the case. There is no parity between the devil and Our Lady. She was given a super abundance of graces, supernatural gifts and spiritual qualities. She is superior in every spiritual sense to the devil. She has proven this to us again and again.

This is one of the reasons why The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property always makes the effort to spread devotion to her Immaculate Heart through our America Needs Fatima campaign. It is also one of the main reasons why we promote the Public Square Rosary Rallies every year. Even as the occult and Satanism grow in popularity and Christianity is increasingly being persecuted, we are confident in the fulfillment of her prophecy at Fatima that her Immaculate Heart will triumph.

Where is the hope in face of the resurgence of the occult and the coming Fifth Revolution, the Satanic Revolution? Even though the media and Hollywood do not give it much notice, the signs of Our Ladys actions are out there.

A big sign is the 12,269 Public Square Rosary Rallies held in 2014. Crowds from 10 to 500 gathered in public squares all across the country praying the rosary for the conversion of America. This movement has grown from 2,000 rallies to over 12,000 within less than ten years. This is a big sign that Our Lady is active.

Another sign is the increasingly warm reception given to America Needs Fatima Custodians who take replicas of the most famous statue of Our Lady of Fatima to homes around the country. About 2,000 talks were scheduled in 2014. America Needs Fatima members host the statue in their homes, inviting family, friends, neighbors, parishioners and, sometimes, complete strangers for a presentation about the prophecies of Our Lady of Fatima and how to pray a rosary. Here, too, we see the Blessed Virgin Mary very active.

Other signs of hope are the conversions. Zachary King converted in 2008 by an extraordinary grace from Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. He and his wife now spend their time giving talks about the dangers of the occult and Satanism. His main devotions now are to the Blessed Sacrament and Our Lady.

Another prominent convert is Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926) who became a model of piety. At his conversion from Satanism, he dedicated the rest of his life to expiating for his sins. At one point, he was tormented by doubts that the devil still owned his soul and that nothing he could do would save him from that.

Our Lady of the Apocalypse chains the old serpent who is the devil and Satan. I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel. Gen. 3:15

At the height of this temptation, he heard in his ear a promise that said, One who propagates my rosary shall be saved. From then on, his mission became clear: to spread devotion to the Holy Rosary. He restored a painting of The Virgin of the Rosary which became the focus of this devotion in the region of Pompei. The church that houses this painting was raised to a minor basilica.

My Hope With This Article

I pray that this article acts as a warning siren to America. It is not meant to be sensational. It is meant to warn America that the storm is here. The Satanic Revolution, the fifth and final stage of the process of the Revolution, is here and attracting a following. We need to be aware of its dangers. We need to be spiritually prepared for it as best we can.

Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

I pray that America does not forget the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in this onslaught. As Mary said at Fatima, to convert the world, God wants to establish devotion to my Immaculate Heart.

Continued here:

The Occult and Satanism in America - The American TFP

What Is Blockchain? The Complete WIRED Guide | WIRED

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

Depending on who you ask, blockchains are either the most important technological innovation since the internet or a solution looking for a problem.

The original blockchain is the decentralized ledger behind the digital currency bitcoin. The ledger consists of linked batches of transactions known as blocks (hence the term blockchain), and an identical copy is stored on each of the roughly 200,000 computers that make up the bitcoin network. Each change to the ledger is cryptographically signed to prove that the person transferring virtual coins is the actual owner of those coins. But no one can spend their coins twice, because once a transaction is recorded in the ledger, every node in the network will know about it.

DigiCash was founded by David Chaum to create a digital-currency system that enabled users to make untraceable, anonymous transactions. It was perhaps too early for its time. It went bankrupt in 1998, just as ecommerce was finally taking off.

E-gold was a digital currency backed by real gold. The company was plagued by legal troubles, and its founder Douglas Jackson eventually pled guilty to operating an illegal money-transfer service and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Cryptographers Wei Dai (B-money) and Nick Szabo (Bit-gold) each proposed separate but similar decentralized currency systems with a limited supply of digital money issued to people who devoted computing resources.

Now a cryptocurrency, Ripple started out as a system for exchanging digital IOUs between trusted parties.

RPOW was a prototype of a system for issuing tokens that could be traded with others in exchange for computing intensive work. It was inspired in part by Bit-gold and created by bitcoin's second user, Hal Finney.

The idea is to both keep track of how each unit of the virtual currency is spent and prevent unauthorized changes to the ledger. The upshot: No bitcoin user has to trust anyone else, because no one can cheat the system.

Other digital currencies have imitated this basic idea, often trying to solve perceived problems with bitcoin by building new cryptocurrencies on new blockchains. But advocates have seized on the idea of a decentralized, cryptographically secure database for uses beyond currency. Its biggest boosters believe blockchains can not only replace central banks but usher in a new era of online services outside the control of internet giants like Facebook and Google. These new-age apps would be impossible to censor, advocates say, and would be more answerable to users.

Several companies are already taking advantage of the Ethereum platform, initially built for a virtual currency. The startup Storj offers a file-storage service, banking on the idea that distributing files across a decentralized network is safer than putting all your files in one cabinet.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that bitcoin was originally best known for enabling illicit drug sales over the internet, blockchains are finding acceptance in some of the world's largest companies. Amazon, Google, and Facebook are all exploring the technology. And perhaps most surprisingly, some big financial services companies, including JP Morgan and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, are experimenting with blockchains and blockchain-like technologies to improve the efficiency of trading stocks and other assets. Traders buy and sell stocks rapidly, but the behind-the-scenes process of transferring ownership of those assets can take days. Some technologists believe blockchains could help with that.

There are also potential applications for blockchains in the seemingly boring world of corporate compliance. After all, storing records in an immutable ledger is a pretty good way to assure auditors that those records haven't been tampered with. This might be good for more than just catching embezzlers or tax cheats. Walmart, for example, is experimenting with using using the blockchain to track its supply chain, which could help it trace the source of food contaminates.

It's too early to say which experiments will work out or whether the results of successful experiments will resemble the bitcoin blockchain. But the idea of creating tamper-proof databases has captured the attention of everyone from anarchist techies to staid bankers.

The original bitcoin software was released to the public in January 2009. It was open source software, meaning anyone could examine the code and reuse it. And many have. At first, blockchain enthusiasts sought to simply improve on bitcoin. Litecoin, another virtual currency based on the bitcoin software, seeks to offer faster transactions.

One of the first projects to repurpose the bitcoin code to use it for more than currency was Namecoin, a system for registering ".bit" domain names. The traditional domain-name management systemthe one that helps your computer find our website when you type wired.comdepends on a central database, essentially an address book for the internet. Internet-freedom activists have long worried that this traditional approach makes censorship too easy, because governments can seize a domain name by forcing the company responsible for registering it to change the central database. The US government has done this several times to shut sites accused of violating gambling or intellectual-property laws.

Namecoin tries to solve this problem by storing .bit domain registrations in a blockchain, which theoretically makes it impossible for anyone without the encryption key to change the registration information. To seize a .bit domain name, a government would have to find the person responsible for the site and force them to hand over the key.

Ethereum and other blockchain-based projects have raised funds through a controversial practice called an "initial coin offering," or ICO: The creators of new digital currencies sell a certain amount of the currency, usually before theyve finished the software and technology that underpins it. The idea is that investors can get in early while giving developers the funds to finish the tech. The catch is that these offerings have traditionally operated outside the regulatory framework meant to protect investors, although thats starting to change as more governments examine the practice.

Bitcoins software wasnt designed to handle other types of applications. In 2013, a startup called Ethereum published a paper outlining an idea that promised to make it easier for coders to create their own blockchain-based software without having to start from scratch, without relying on the original bitcoin software. In 2015 the company released its platform for building smart contracts, software applications that can enforce an agreement without human intervention. For example, you could create a smart contract to bet on tomorrows weather. You and your gambling partner would upload the contract to the Ethereum network and then send a little digital currency, which the software would essentially hold in escrow. The next day, the software would check the weather and then send the winner their earnings. At least two major "prediction markets" have been built on the platform, enabling people to bet on more interesting outcomes, such as which political party will win an election.

So long as the software is written correctly, there's no need to trust anyone in these transactions. But that turns out to be a big catch. In 2016 a hacker made off with about $50 million worth of Ethereum's custom currency intended for a democratized investment scheme where investors would pool their money and vote on how to invest it. A coding error allowed a still unknown person to make off with the virtual cash. Lesson: It's hard to remove humans from transactions, with or without a blockchain.

Even as cryptography geeks plotted to use blockchains to topple, or at least bypass, big banks, the financial sector began its own experiments with blockchains. In 2015, some of the largest financial institutions in the world, including JP Morgan, the Bank of England, and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), announced that they would collaborate on open source blockchain software under the name Hyperledger. Several pieces of software have been released under the Hyperledger umbrella, including Sawtooth, created by Intel for building custom blockchains.

The industry is already experimenting with using blockchains to make security trades more efficient. Nasdaq OMX, the company behind the Nasdaq stock exchange, began allowing private companies to use blockchains to manage shares in 2015, starting with a company called Chain. Similarly, the Australian Securities Exchange announced a deal to use blockchain technology from a Goldman Sachs-backed startup called Digital Asset Holdings to power the post-trade processes of Australias equity market.

Despite the blockchain hypeand many experimentstheres still no "killer app" for the technology beyond currency speculation. And while auditors and health inspectors might like the idea of immutable records, as a society we don't always want records to be permanent.

Blockchain proponents admit that it could take a while for the technology to catch on. After all, the internet's foundational technologies were created in the 1960s, but it took decades for the internet to become ubiquitous.

That said, the idea could eventually show up in lots of places. For example, your digital identity could be tied to a token on a blockchain. You could then use that token to log in to apps, open bank accounts, apply for jobs, or prove that your emails or social-media messages are really from you. That could be especially useful for refugees, who have lost their native proofs of identity or never had any to begin with.

Future social networks might be built on connected smart contracts that show your posts only to certain people or enable people who create popular content to be paid in cryptocurrencies. Perhaps the most radical idea is using blockchains to handle voting. The team behind the open source project Soverign built a platform that organizations, companies, and even governments can already use to gather votes on a blockchain.

Advocates believe blockchains can help automate many tasks now handled by lawyers or other professionals. For example, your will might be stored in a blockchain. Or perhaps your will could be a smart contract that will automatically dole out your money to your heirs. Or maybe blockchains will replace notaries.

It's also entirely possible that blockchains will evolve into something completely different. Many corporate experiments involve "private" blockchains that run on servers within a single company and selected partners. In contrast, anyone can run bitcoin or Ethereum software on their computer and view all of the transactions recorded on the networks respective blockchains. But big companies prefer to keep their data in the hands of a few employees, partners, and perhaps regulators.

Bitcoin proved that its possible to build an online service that operates outside the control of any one company or organization. The task for blockchain advocates now is proving that thats actually a good thing.

This guide was last updated on May 23, 2018.

Enjoyed this deep -dive? Check out more WIRED Guides.

Amazon Managed Blockchain

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum*.

Blockchain makes it possible to build applications where multiple parties can execute transactions without the need for a trusted, central authority. Today, building a scalable blockchain network with existing technologies is complex to set up and hard to manage. To create a blockchain network, each network member needs to manually provision hardware, install software, create and manage certificates for access control, and configure networking components. Once the blockchain network is running, you need to continuously monitor the infrastructure and adapt to changes, such as an increase in transaction requests, or new members joining or leaving the network.

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates, lets you easily invite new members to join the network, and tracks operational metrics such as usage of compute, memory, and storage resources. In addition, Managed Blockchain can replicate an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully managed ledger database. This allows you to easily analyze the network activity outside the network and gain insights into trends.

For applications that need an immutable and verifiable ledger database, visit Amazon QLDB here.

*Hyperledger Fabric available today. Ethereum coming soon.

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Amazon Managed Blockchain

The Ultimate Guide To Understanding What A Blockchain Is …

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

By this time, you must have heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency.

You must have also heard about blockchain- the technology underlying these cryptocurrencies.

Though this term has been used for decades, its now becoming very popular with the recent crypto boom.

Many big corporations and venture capitalists are betting billions of dollars on the blockchain.

This may look like something that only tech-savvy bankers and IT professionals can understand, but I would like to break protocol and give you a simpler explanation of blockchain than any other explanation Ive ever heard before

Note: This article is part of our Blockchain series. Do scroll to the bottom for more articles in this series.

Lets try to understand this with a simple example:

Consider a special Google spreadsheet which is shared by every computer in the world and is connected tothe internet. Every time a transaction happens, it gets recorded onto a row of this spreadsheet.

Anyone with a mobile device or computer can connect via the internet and can access the spreadsheet. Anyone can view and add a transaction to this spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet doesnt allow anyone to edit the information which is already there.

This is basically a blockchain.

Isnt it simple?

The same way that this spreadsheet has rows, a blockchain has blocks.

A block is a collection of data. And each piece of data is added to the blockchain by connecting one block after another in a chronological way, much in the same way a row of a spreadsheet follows another row.

And this series of connected blocks one after another makes it a chain of blocks(i.e. a blockchain).

So heres the summary: A blockchain is a global online database which anyone anywhere with an internet connection can use. Because it exists on the internet, it is decentralized, meaning the blockchain ledger is shared among all computers around the world, not in one central location.

And this is why Bitcoin is unique.

Blockchains very first and most famous application is Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer digital currencyfor the modern, digital age.

Bitcoin is created and held on Bitcoins blockchain.

Unlike traditional money, you can send Bitcoin money to anyone and anywhere without seeking permission from banks or governments.

Bitcoins blockchain doesnt care whether you are a human or a machine. Thousands of Bitcoin nodes on the blockchain are equally able to verify the legitimacy of payments. Thats why there is no need for any third party intermediaries like banks.

Bitcoins recent price rally and its mass adoption speakvolumes about the inherent worth of a blockchain concept.

So now that we know what a blockchain is, lets try to decode how a blockchain works. I will be using the example of Bitcoin, as most people are familiar with it.

These blocks have unique features like:

Each block has a date and time attached to it.

Each block has multiple copies placed in several locations.

Anyone can view whats on the block.

When a transaction happens on the Bitcoin blockchain, it goes into a pool of unconfirmed transactions called the Mempool. These transactions are then grouped into a block. After this, miners solve a computationally difficult math problem to add this block to Bitcoins blockchain.

In this way, as more blocks keep on getting added to the blockchain, it becomes more computationally difficult to reverse the transaction or to double spend a transaction.

And simultaneously, Bitcoins blockchain is used by millions of users who are running this distributed ledger on their personal computers. Its like having millions of copies of Bitcoins ledger starting from the Genesis block, whichSatoshi Nakamoto mined.

Each of these copies contains the history of blocks since the beginning of the Bitcoin network. This makes it difficult for anyone to corrupt or take down the system.

Moreover, each transaction is secured by strong cryptographic math.

Anyone who wants to alter the ledger needs to overpower and hack the 51% network to reverse the cryptographic math. This means that a hacker has to hack 51% of the total number of computer nodes which are running this ledger at various locations and at the same time.

Even if one tries to do this, it would require a practically infeasible amount of capital and energy. This is what makes the blockchain unhackable and tamper-proof.

Bitcoin is only one example of a blockchain application.

But blockchain solutions can be implemented across many industries to solve various issues.

Blockchain, as explained above, is an immutable and transparent database of records. This immutability and transparency ensure that there is no need for anythird person to look after the database.

Consider the example of a farmer from Africa. He bought a piece of land, but in a flood, he lost his copy of the deed and agreement of the land. Now he has no way of claiming he owns his land. And he had a digital copy of the ownership agreement on a governmental database, but that too was destroyed during the flood.Now, this farmer is at a loss!!He would have avoided these problems had hefiled his land deed copy on a blockchain, which would have had multiple copies distributed around the world.

This is only one scenario in which a blockchain application would be useful. Apart from this, the technology of blockchain will matter by protecting our identity, verifying ownership, avoidingdouble spending of money, and even running autonomous vehicles!

And its no exaggeration that blockchain technology will soon be an integral part of our lives.

The blockchain is the mother of the over$100 billion cryptocurrency market.

But the success or failure of Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency will not decide the blockchains future.

Some notable shifts in the blockchain ecosystem are as follows:

Apart from all these, blockchain solutions are being discussed in industries like automobiles, identity management, intellectual property rights, real estate, healthcare, supply chain management, and governance (to name a few).

When all is said and done, only time will tell how disruptive this invention of computer science will be.

To stay up to date, subscribe to CoinSutra and keep learning about the blockchain revolution!

Now I want to hear from you: What do you think about blockchain technology? What more industries do you think it can impact? What practical applications do you see it being used for? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below!

And if you found this post informative, do share it with your friends on Twitter and Facebook!

For further reading:

Originally posted here:

The Ultimate Guide To Understanding What A Blockchain Is ...

The virtual afterlife will transform humanity | Aeon Essays

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

In the late 1700s, machinists started making music boxes: intricate little mechanisms that could play harmonies and melodies by themselves. Some incorporated bells, drums, organs, even violins, all coordinated by a rotating cylinder. The more ambitious examples were Lilliputian orchestras, such as the Panharmonicon, invented in Vienna in 1805, or the mass-produced Orchestrion that came along in Dresden in 1851.

But the technology had limitations. To make a convincing violin sound, one had to create a little simulacrum of a violin quite an engineering feat. How to replicate a trombone? Or an oboe? The same way, of course. The artisans assumed that an entire instrument had to be copied in order to capture its distinctive tone. The metal, the wood, the reed, the shape, the exact resonance, all of it had to be mimicked. How else were you going to create an orchestral sound? The task was discouragingly difficult.

Then, in 1877, the American inventor Thomas Edison introduced the first phonograph, and the history of recorded music changed. It turns out that, in order to preserve and recreate the sound of an instrument, you dont need to know everything about it, its materials or its physical structure. You dont need a miniature orchestra in a cabinet. All you need is to focus on the one essential part of it. Record the sound waves, turn them into data, and give them immortality.

Imagine a future in which your mind never dies. When your body begins to fail, a machine scans your brain in enough detail to capture its unique wiring. A computer system uses that data to simulate your brain. It wont need to replicate every last detail. Like the phonograph, it will strip away the irrelevant physical structures, leaving only the essence of the patterns. And then there is a second you, with your memories, your emotions, your way of thinking and making decisions, translated onto computer hardware as easily as we copy a text file these days.

That second version of you could live in a simulated world and hardly know the difference. You could walk around a simulated city street, feel a cool breeze, eat at a caf, talk to other simulated people, play games, watch movies, enjoy yourself. Pain and disease would be programmed out of existence. If youre still interested in the world outside your simulated playground, you could Skype yourself into board meetings or family Christmas dinners.

This vision of a virtual-reality afterlife, sometimes called uploading, entered the popular imagination via the short story The Tunnel Under the World (1955) by the American science-fiction writer Frederik Pohl, though it also got a big boost from the movie Tron (1982). Then The Matrix (1999) introduced the mainstream public to the idea of a simulated reality, albeit one into which real brains were jacked. More recently, these ideas have caught on outside fiction. The Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov made the news by proposing to transfer his mind into a robot, thereby achieving immortality. Only a few months ago, the British physicist Stephen Hawking speculated that a computer-simulated afterlife might become technologically feasible.

It is tempting to ignore these ideas as just another science-fiction trope, a nerd fantasy. But something about it wont leave me alone. I am a neuroscientist. I study the brain. For nearly 30 years, Ive studied how sensory information gets taken in and processed, how movements are controlled and, lately, how networks of neurons might compute the spooky property of awareness. I find myself asking, given what we know about the brain, whether we really could upload someones mind to a computer. And my best guess is: yes, almost certainly. That raises a host of further questions, not least: what will this technology do to us psychologically and culturally? Here, the answer seems just as emphatic, if necessarily murky in the details.

It will utterly transform humanity, probably in ways that are more disturbing than helpful. It will change us far more than the internet did, though perhaps in a similar direction. Even if the chances of all this coming to pass were slim, the implications are so dramatic that it would be wise to think them through seriously. But Im not sure the chances are slim. In fact, the more I think about this possible future, the more it seems inevitable.

If did you want to capture the music of the mind, where should you start? A lot of biological machinery goes into a human brain. A hundred billion neurons are connected in complicated patterns, each neurone constantly taking in and sending signals. The signals are the result of ions leaking in and out of cell membranes, their flow regulated by tiny protein pores and pumps. Each connection between neurons, each synapse, is itself a bewildering mechanism of proteins that are constantly in flux.

It is a daunting task just to make a plausible simulation of a single neurone, though this has already been done to an approximation. Simulating a whole network of interacting neurons, each one with truly realistic electrical and chemical properties, is beyond current technology. Then there are the complicating factors. Blood vessels react in subtle ways, allowing oxygen to be distributed more to this or that part of the brain as needed. There are also the glia, tiny cells that vastly outnumber neurons. Glia help neurons function in ways that are largely not understood: take them away and none of the synapses or signals work properly. Nobody, as far as I know, has tried a computer simulation of neurons, glia, and blood flow. But perhaps they wouldnt have to. Remember Edisons breakthrough with the phonograph: to faithfully replicate a sound, it turns out you dont also have to replicate the instrument that originally produced it.

So what is the right level of detail to copy if you want to capture a persons mind? Of all the biological complexity, what patterns in the brain must be reproduced to capture the information, the computation, and the consciousness? One of the most common suggestions is that the pattern of connectivity among neurons contains the essence of the machine. If you could measure how each neurone connects to its neighbours, youd have all the data you need to re-create that mind. An entire field of study has grown up around neural network models, computer simulations of drastically simplified neurons and synapses. These models leave out the details of glia, blood flow, membranes, proteins, ions and so on. They only consider how each neurone is connected to the others. They are wiring diagrams.

Simple computer models of neurons, hooked together by simple synapses, are capable of enormous complexity. Such network models have been around for decades, and they differ in interesting ways from standard computer programs. For one thing, they are able to learn, as neurons subtly adjust their connections to each other. They can solve problems that are difficult for traditional programs, and are particularly good at taking noisy input and compensating for the noise. Give a neural net a fuzzy, spotty photograph, and it might still be able to categorise the object depicted, filling in the gaps and blips in the image something called pattern completion.

Despite these remarkably human-like capacities, neural network models are not yet the answer to simulating a brain. Nobody knows how to build one at an appropriate scale. Some notable attempts are being made, such as the Blue Brain project and its successor, the EU-funded Human Brain Project, both run by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. But even if computers were powerful enough to simulate 100 billion neurons and computer technology is pretty close to that capability the real problem is that nobody knows how to wire up such a large artificial network.

In some ways, the scientific problem of understanding the human brain is similar to the problem of human genetics. If you want to understand the human genome properly, an engineer might start with the basic building blocks of DNA and construct an animal, one base pair at a time, until she has created something human-like. But given the massive complexity of the human genome more than 3 billion base pairs that approach would be prohibitively difficult at the present time. Another approach would be to read the genome that we already have in real people. It is a lot easier to copy something complicated than to re-engineer it from scratch. The human genome project of the 1990s accomplished that, and even though nobody really understands it very well, at least we have a lot of copies of it on file to study.

The same strategy might be useful on the human brain. Instead of trying to wire up an artificial brain from first principles, or training a neural network over some absurdly long period until it becomes human-like, why not copy the wiring already present in a real brain? In 2005, two scientists, Olaf Sporns, professor of brain sciences at Indiana University, and Patric Hagmann, neuroscientist at the University of Lausanne, independently coined the term connectome to refer to a map or wiring diagram of every neuronal connection in a brain. By analogy to the human genome, which contains all the information necessary to grow a human being, the human connectome in theory contains all the information necessary to wire up a functioning human brain. If the basic premise of neural network modelling is correct, then the essence of a human mind is contained in its pattern of connectivity. Your connectome, simulated in a computer, would recreate your conscious mind.

It seems a no-brainer (excuse the pun) that we will be able to scan, map, and store the data on every neuronal connection within a persons head

Could we ever map a complete human connectome? Well, scientists have done it for a roundworm. Theyve done it for small parts of a mouse brain. A very rough, large-scale map of connectivity in the human brain is already available, though nothing like a true map of every idiosyncratic neurone and synapse in a particular persons head. The National Institutes of Health in the US is currently funding the Human Connectome Project, an effort to map a human brain in as much detail as possible. I admit to a certain optimism toward the project. The technology for brain scanning improves all the time. Right now, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is at the forefront. High-resolution scans of volunteers are revealing the connectivity of the human brain in more detail than anyone ever thought possible. Other, even better technologies will be invented. It seems a no-brainer (excuse the pun) that we will be able to scan, map, and store the data on every neuronal connection within a persons head. It is only a matter of time, and a timescale of five to 10 decades seems about right.

Of course, nobody knows if the connectome really does contain all the essential information about the mind. Some of it might be encoded in other ways. Hormones can diffuse through the brain. Signals can combine and interact through other means besides synaptic connections. Maybe certain other aspects of the brain need to be scanned and copied to make a high-quality simulation. Just as the music recording industry took a century of tinkering to achieve the impressive standards of the present day, the mind-recording industry will presumably require a long process of refinement.

That wont be soon enough for some of us. One of the basic facts about people is that they dont like to die. They dont like their loved ones or their pets to die. Some of them already pay enormous sums to freeze themselves, or even (somewhat gruesomely) to have their corpses decapitated and their heads frozen on the off-chance that a future technology will successfully revive them. These kinds of people will certainly pay for a spot in a virtual afterlife. And as the technology advances and the public starts to see the possibilities, the incentives will increase.

One might say (at risk of being crass) that the afterlife is a natural outgrowth of the entertainment industry. Think of the fun to be had as a simulated you in a simulated environment. You could go on a safari through Middle Earth. You could live in Hogwarts, where wands and incantations actually do produce magical results. You could live in a photogenic, outdoor, rolling country, a simulation of the African plains, with or without the tsetse flies as you wish. You could live on a simulation of Mars. You could move easily from one entertainment to the next. You could keep in touch with your living friends through all the usual social media.

I have heard people say that the technology will never catch on. People wont be tempted because a duplicate of you, no matter how realistic, is still not you. But I doubt that such existential concerns will have much of an impact once the technology arrives. You already wake up every day as a marvellous copy of a previous you, and nobody has paralysing metaphysical concerns about that. If you die and are replaced by a really good computer simulation, itll just seem to you like you entered a scanner and came out somewhere else. From the point of view of continuity, youll be missing some memories. If you had your annual brain-backup, say, eight months earlier, youll wake up missing those eight months. But you will still feel like you, and your friends and family can fill you in on what you missed. Some groups might opt out the Amish of information technology but the mainstream will presumably flock to the new thing.

And then what? Well, such a technology would change the definition of what it means to be an individual and what it means to be alive. For starters, it seems inevitable that we will tend to treat human life and death much more casually. People will be more willing to put themselves and others in danger. Perhaps they will view the sanctity of life in the same contemptuous way that the modern e-reader crowd views old fogeys who talk about the sanctity of a cloth-bound, hardcover book. Then again, how will we view the sanctity of digital life? Will simulated people, living in an artificial world, have the same human rights as the rest of us? Would it be a crime to pull the plug on a simulated person? Is it ethical to experiment on simulated consciousness? Can a scientist take a try at reproducing Jim, make a bad copy, casually delete the hapless first iteration, and then try again until he gets a satisfactory version? This is just the tip of a nasty philosophical iceberg we seem to be sailing towards.

In many religions, a happy afterlife is a reward. In an artificial one, due to inevitable constraints on information processing, spots are likely to be competitive. Who decides who gets in? Do the rich get served first? Is it merit-based? Can the promise of resurrection be dangled as a bribe to control and coerce people? Will it be withheld as a punishment? Will a special torture version of the afterlife be constructed for severe punishment? Imagine how controlling a religion would become if it could preach about an actual, objectively provable heaven and hell.

Then there are the issues that will arise if people deliberately run multiple copies of themselves at the same time, one in the real world and others in simulations. The nature of individuality, and individual responsibility, becomes rather fuzzy when you can literally meet yourself coming the other way. What, for instance, is the social expectation for married couples in a simulated afterlife? Do you stay together? Do some versions of you stay together and other versions separate?

If a brain has been replaced by a few billion lines of code, we might understand how to edit any destructive emotions right out of it

Then again, divorce might seem a little melodramatic if irreconcilable differences become a thing of the past. If your brain has been replaced by a few billion lines of code, perhaps eventually we will understand how to edit any destructive emotions right out of it. Or perhaps we should imagine an emotional system that is standard-issue, tuned and mainstreamed, such that the rest of your simulated mind can be grafted onto it. You lose the battle-scarred, broken emotional wiring you had as a biological agent and get a box-fresh set instead. This is not entirely far-fetched; indeed, it might make sense on economic rather than therapeutic grounds. The brain is roughly divisible into a cortex and a brainstem. Attaching a standard-issue brainstem to a persons individualised, simulated cortex might turn out to be the most cost-effective way to get them up and running.

So much for the self. What about the world? Will the simulated environment necessarily mimic physical reality? That seems the obvious way to start out, after all. Create a city. Create a blue sky, a pavement, the smell of food. Sooner or later, though, people will realise that a simulation can offer experiences that would be impossible in the real world. The electronic age changed music, not merely mimicking physical instruments but offering new potentials in sound. In the same way, a digital world could go to some unexpected places.

To give just one disorientating example, it might include any number of dimensions in space and time. The real world looks to us to have three spatial dimensions and one temporal one, but, as mathematicians and physicists know, more are possible. Its already possible to programme a video game in which players move through a maze of four spatial dimensions. It turns out that, with a little practice, you can gain a fair degree of intuition for the four-dimensional regime (I published a study on this in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2008). To a simulated mind in a simulated world, the confines of physical reality would become irrelevant. If you dont have a body any longer, why pretend?

All of the changes described above, as exotic as they are and disturbing as some of them might seem, are in a sense minor. They are about individual minds and individual experiences. If uploading were only a matter of exotic entertainment, literalising peoples psychedelic fantasies, then it would be of limited significance. If simulated minds can be run in a simulated world, then the most transformative change, the deepest shift in human experience, would be the loss of individuality itself the integration of knowledge into a single intelligence, smarter and more capable than anything that could exist in the natural world.

You wake up in a simulated welcome hall in some type of simulated body with standard-issue simulated clothes. What do you do? Maybe you take a walk and look around. Maybe you try the food. Maybe you play some tennis. Maybe go watch a movie. But sooner or later, most people will want to reach for a cell phone. Send a tweet from paradise. Text a friend. Get on Facebook. Connect through social media. But here is the quirk of uploaded minds: the rules of social media are transformed.

Real life, our life, will shrink in importance until it becomes a kind of larval phase

In the real world, two people can share experiences and thoughts. But lacking a USB port in our heads, we cant directly merge our minds. In a simulated world, that barrier falls. A simple app, and two people will be able to join thoughts directly with each other. Why not? Its a logical extension. We humans are hyper-social. We love to network. We already live in a half-virtual world of minds linked to minds. In an artificial afterlife, given a few centuries and few tweaks to the technology, what is to stop people from merging into berpeople who are combinations of wisdom, experience, and memory beyond anything possible in biology? Two minds, three minds, 10, pretty soon everyone is linked mind-to-mind. The concept of separate identity is lost. The need for simulated bodies walking in a simulated world is lost. The need for simulated food and simulated landscapes and simulated voices disappears. Instead, a single platform of thought, knowledge, and constant realisation emerges. What starts out as an artificial way to preserve minds after death gradually takes on an emphasis of its own. Real life, our life, shrinks in importance until it becomes a kind of larval phase. Whatever quirky experiences you might have had during your biological existence, they would be valuable only if they can be added to the longer-lived and much more sophisticated machine.

I am not talking about utopia. To me, this prospect is three parts intriguing and seven parts horrifying. I am genuinely glad I wont be around. This will be a new phase of human existence that is just as messy and difficult as any other phase has been, one as alien to us now as the internet age would have been to a Roman citizen 2,000 years ago; as alien as Roman society would have been to a Natufian hunter-gatherer 10,000 years before that. Such is progress. We always manage to live more-or-less comfortably in a world that would have frightened and offended the previous generations.

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The virtual afterlife will transform humanity | Aeon Essays

Your mind will not be uploaded Soft Machines

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

The recent movie Transcendence will not be troubling the sci-fi canon of classics, if the reviews are anything to go by. But its central plot device uploading a human consciousness to a computer remains both a central aspiration of transhumanists, and a source of queasy fascination to the rest of us. The idea is that someones mind is simply a computer programme, that in the future could be run on a much more powerful computer than a brain, just as one might run an old arcade game on a modern PC in emulation mode. Mind uploading has a clear appeal for people who wish to escape the constraints of our flesh and blood existence, notably the constraint of our inevitable mortality.

In this post I want to consider two questions about mind uploading, from my perspective as a scientist. Im going to use as an operational definition of uploading a mind the requirement that we can carry out a computer simulation of the activity of the brain in question that is indistinguishable in its outputs from the brain itself. For this, we would need to be able to determine the state of an individuals brain to sufficient accuracy that it would be possible to run a simulation that accurately predicted the future behaviour of that individual and would convince an external observer that it faithfully captured the individuals identity. Im entirely aware that this operational definition already glosses over some deep conceptual questions, but its a good concrete starting point. My first question is whether it will be possible to upload the mind of anyone reading this now. My answer to this is no, with a high degree of probability, given what we know now about how the brain works, what we can do now technologically, and what technological advances are likely in our lifetimes. My second question is whether it will ever be possible to upload a mind, or whether there is some point of principle that will always make this impossible. Im obviously much less certain about this, but I remain sceptical.

This will be a long post, going into some technical detail. To summarise my argument, I start by asking whether or when it will be possible to map out the wiring diagram of an individuals brain the map of all the connections between its 100 billion or so neurons. Well probably be able to achieve this mapping in the coming decades, but only for a dead and sectioned brain; the challenges for mapping out a living brain at sub-micron scales look very hard. Then well ask some fundamental questions about what it means to simulate a brain. Simulating brains at the levels of neurons and synapses requires the input of phenomenological equations, whose parameters vary across the components of the brain and change with time, and are inaccessible to in-vivo experiment. Unlike artificial computers, there is no clean digital abstraction layer in the brain; given the biological history of nervous systems as evolved, rather than designed, systems, theres no reason to expect one. The fundamental unit of biological information processing is the molecule, rather than any higher level structure like a neuron or a synapse; molecular level information processing evolved very early in the history of life. Living organisms sense their environment, they react to what they are sensing by changing the way they behave, and if they are able to, by changing the environment too. This kind of information processing, unsurprisingly, remains central to all organisms, humans included, and this means that a true simulation of the brain would need to be carried out at the molecular scale, rather than the cellular scale. The scale of the necessary simulation is out of reach of any currently foreseeable advance in computing power. Finally I will conclude with some much more speculative thoughts about the central role of randomness in biological information processing. Ill ask where this randomness comes from, finding an ultimate origin in quantum mechanical fluctuations, and speculate about what in-principle implications that might have on the simulation of consciousness.

Why would people think mind uploading will be possible in our lifetimes, given the scientific implausibility of this suggestion? I ascribe this to a combination of over-literal interpretation of some prevalent metaphors about the brain, over-optimistic projections of the speed of technological advance, a lack of clear thinking about the difference between evolved and designed systems, and above all wishful thinking arising from peoples obvious aversion to death and oblivion.

On science and metaphors

I need to make a couple of preliminary comments to begin with. First, while Im sure theres a great deal more biology to learn about how the brain works, I dont see yet that theres any cause to suppose we need fundamentally new physics to understand it. Of course, new discoveries may change everything, but it seems to me that the physics weve got is quite complicated enough, and this discussion will be couched entirely in currently known, fundamentally physicalist, principles.

The second point is that, to get anywhere in this discussion, were going to need to immunise ourselves against the way in which almost all popular discussion of neuroscience is carried out in metaphorical language. Metaphors used clearly and well are powerful aids to understanding, but when we take them too literally they can be badly misleading. Its an interesting historical reflection that when computers were new and unfamiliar, the metaphorical traffic led from biological brains to electronic computers. Since computers were popularly described as electronic brains, its not surprising that biological metaphors like memory were quickly naturalised in the way computers were described. But now the metaphors go the other way, and we think about the brain as if it were a computer (I think the brain is a computer, by the way, but its a computer thats so different to man-made ones, so plastic and mutable, so much immersed in and responsive to its environment, that comparisons with the computers we know about are bound to be misleading). So if what we are discussing is how easy or possible it will be to emulate the brain with a man-made computer, the fact that we are so accustomed to metaphorical descriptions of brains in terms of man-made computers will naturally bias us to positive answers. Its too easy to move from saying a neuron is analogous to a simple combination of logic gates in a computer, say, to thinking that it can be replaced by one. A further problem is that many of these metaphors are now so stale and worn out that they have lost all force, and the substance of the original comparison has been forgotten. We often hear, for example, the assertion that some characteristic or other is hard-wired in the brain, but if one stops to think what an animals brain looks and feels like theres nothing much hard about it. Its a soft machine.

Mapping the brains wiring diagram

One metaphor that is important is the idea that the brain has a wiring diagram. The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others by thin fibres the axons and dendrites along which electrical signals pass. Theres about 100,000 miles of axon in a brain, connecting at between a hundred to a thousand trillion synaptic connections. Its this pattern of connectivity between the neurons through the axons and dendrites that constitutes the wiring diagram of the brain. Ill argue below that knowing this wiring diagram is not yet a sufficient condition for simulating the operation of a brain it must surely, however, be a necessary one.

So far, scientists have successfully mapped out the wiring diagram of one organisms nervous system the microscopic worm C. elegans, which has a total of 300 neurons. This achievement was itself a technical tour-de-force, which illustrates what would need to be done to determine the immeasurably more complex wiring diagram of the human brain. The issue is that these fibres are thin (hundreds of nanometers, for the thinnest of them), very densely packed, and the fibres from a single neuron can pervade a very large volume (this review in Science The Big and the Small: Challenges of Imaging the Brains Circuits ($) is an excellent up-to-date overview of whats possible now and what the challenges are). Currently electron microscopy is required to resolve the finest connections, and this can only be done on thin sections. Although new high resolution imaging techniques may well be developed, its difficult to see how this requirement to image section by section will go away. Magnetic resonance imaging, on the other hand, can image an intact brain, but at much lower resolution more like millimetres than nanometers. The resolution of MRI derives from the strength of the magnetic field gradient you can sustain. You can have a large gradient over a small volume but if youre constrained to keep the brain intact that provides quite a hard limit.

Proponents of mind uploading who recognise these difficulties at this point resort to the idea of nanobots crawling through the brain, reading it from the inside. Ive discussed at length why I think it will be very much more difficult than people think to create such nanobots, for example in my article Rupturing the Nanotech Rapture, and in Nanobots, nanomedicine, Kurzweil, Freitas and Merkle I discuss why I dont think the counter-arguments of their proponents are convincing.

Mapping out all the neural connections of a human brain, then, will be difficult. It probably will be done, on a timescale perhaps of decades. The big but, though, is that this mapping will be destructive, and the brain it is done on will be definitively dead before the process starts. And massive job though it will be to map out this micro-scale connectome, theres something very important it doesnt tell you the difference between a live brain and a dead lump of meat that is what the initial electrical state of the brain is, where the ion gradients are, what the molecules are doing. But more on molecules later

Modelling, simulation, emulation: why mind uploading might make sense if you believed in intelligent design

If you did have a map of all the neural connections of a human brain, dead or alive, is that enough to simulate it? You could combine the map with known equations for the propagation of electrical signals along axons (the Hodgkin-Huxley equations), models of neurons and models for the behaviour of synapses. This is the level of simulation, for example, carried out in the Blue Brain project (see this review (PDF) for a semi-technical overview). This is a very interesting thing to do from the point of neuroscience, but it is not a simulation of a human brain, and certainly not of any individuals brain. Its a model, which aggregates phenomenological descriptions of the collective behaviours and interactions of components like the many varieties of voltage gated ion channels and the synaptic vesicles. The equations youd use to model an individual synapse, for example, would have different parameters for different synapses, and these parameters change with time (and in response to the information being processed). Without an understanding of whats going on in the neuron at the molecular level, these are parameters you would need to measure experimentally for each synapse.

An analogy might make this clearer. Let me ask this question: is it possible to simulate the CPU in your mobile phone? At first sight this seems a stupid question of course one can predict with a very high degree of certainty what the outputs of the CPU would be for any given set of inputs. After all, the engineers at ARM will have done just such simulations before any of the designs had even been manufactured, using well-understood and reliable design software. But a sceptical physicist might point out that every CPU is different at the atomic level, due to the inherent finite tolerances of manufacturing, and in any case the scale of the system is much too large to be able to simulate at the quantum mechanical level that would be needed to capture the electronic characteristics of the device.

In this case, of course, the engineers are right, for all practical purposes. This is because the phenomenology that predicts the behaviour of individual circuit elements is well-understood in terms of the physics, and the way these elements behave is simple, reliable and robust robust in the sense that quite a lot of variation in the atomic configuration produces the same outcomes. We can think of the system as having three distinct levels of description. There is the detailed level of what the electrons and ions are doing, which would account for the basic electrical properties of the component semiconductors and insulators, and the junctions and interfaces between them. Then there is the behaviour of the circuit elements that are built from these materials the current-voltage characteristics of the field effect transistors, and the way these components are built up into circuits. And finally, there is a description at a digital level, in which logical operations are implemented. Once one has designed circuit elements with clear thresholds and strongly non-linear behaviour, one can rely on there being a clean separation between the digital and physical levels. Its this clean separation between the physical and the digital that makes the job of emulating the behaviour of one type of CPU on another one relatively uncomplicated.

But this separation between the physical and the digital in an integrated circuit isnt an accident or something pre-ordained it happens because weve designed it to be that way. For those of us who dont accept the idea of intelligent design in biology, thats not true for brains. There is no clean digital abstraction layer in a brain why should there be, unless someone designed it that way? In a brain, for example, the digital is continually remodelling the physical we see changes in connectivity and changes in synaptic strength as a consequence of the information being processed, changes, that as we see, are the manifestation of substantial physical changes, at the molecular level, in the neurons and synapses.

The unit of biological information processing is the molecule

Is there any general principle that underlies biological information processing, in the brain and elsewhere, that would help us understand what ionic conduction, synaptic response, learning and so on have in common? I believe there is underlying all these phenomena are processes of macromolecular shape change in response to a changing local environment. Ion channel proteins change shape in response to the electric field across the membrane, opening or closing pores; at the synapse shape-changing proteins respond to electrical changes to trigger the bursting open of synaptic vesicles to release the neurotransmitters, which themselves bind to protein receptors to transmit their signal, and complicated sequences of protein shape changes underlie the signalling networks that strengthen and weaken synaptic responses to make memory, remodelling the connections between neurons.

This emphasises that the fundamental unit of biological information processing is not the neuron or the synapse, its the molecule. Dennis Bray, in an important 1995 paper Protein molecules as computational elements in living cells, pointed out that a protein molecule can act as a logic gate through the process of allostery its catalytic activity is modified by the presence or absence of bound chemicals. In this chemical version of logic, the inputs are the presence or absence of certain small molecules, and the outputs are the molecules that the protein produces, in the presence of the right input chemicals, by catalysis. As these output chemicals can themselves be the inputs to other protein logic gates, complex computational networks linking the inputs and outputs of many different logic gates can be built up. The ultimate inputs of these circuits will be environmental cues the presence or absence of chemicals or other environmental triggers detected by molecular sensors at the surface of the cells. The ultimate outputs can be short-term to activate a molecular motor so that a cell swims towards a food source or away from a toxin. Or they can be long term, in activating and deactivating different genes so that the cell builds different structures for itself, or even changes the entire direction of its development.

This is how a single celled organism like an amoeba can exhibit behaviour that is in effect purposeful, that is adaptive to the clues it detects from the environment around it. All living cells process information this way. In the collective alliance of cells that makes up a multi-cellular organism like a human, all our cells have the ability to process information. The particular cells that specialise in doing information processing and long-ranged communication the neurons start out with the general capability for computation that all cells have, but through evolution have developed this capability to a higher degree and added to it some new tricks. The most important of these new tricks is an ability to control the flow of ions across a membrane in a way that modifies the membrane potential, allowing information to be carried over long distances by the passage of shock waves of membrane potential, and communications to be made between neurons in response to these rapid changes in membrane potential through the release of chemicals at synapses. But, as always happens in evolved systems, these are new tricks built on the old hardware and old design principles molecules whose shape changes in response to changes in their environment, this shape change producing functional effects (such as the opening of an ion channel in response to a change in membrane potential).

The molecular basis of biological information processing emphasises the limitations of the wiring metaphor. Determining the location and connectivity of individual neurons, or the connectome as its begun to be called in neuroscience is necessary, but far from sufficient condition for specifying the informational state of the brain; to do that completely requires us to know where the relevant molecules are, how many of them are present, and what state theyre in.

The brain, randomness, and quantum mechanics

The molecular basis of biological computation means that it isnt deterministic, its stochastic, its random. This randomness isnt an accidental add-on, its intrinsic to the way molecular information processing works. Any molecule in a warm, wet watery environment like the cell is constantly bombarded by its neighbouring water molecules, and this bombardment leads to the constant jiggling we call Brownian motion. But its exactly the same bombardment that drives the molecule to change shape when its environment changes. So if we simulate, at the molecular level, the key parts of the information processing system of the brain, like the ion channels or the synaptic vesicles, or the broader cell signalling mechanisms by which the neurons remodel themselves in response to the information they carry, we need to explicitly include that randomness.

I want to speculate here about what the implications are of this inherently random character of biological information processing. A great deal has been written about randomness, determinism and the possibility of free will, and Im largely going to avoid these tricky issues. I will make one important point, though. It seems to me that all the agonising about whether the idea of free will is compatible with a brain that operates through deterministic physics is completely misplaced, because the brain just doesnt operate through deterministic physics.

In a computer simulation, wed build in the randomness by calls to a pseudo-random number generator, as we compute the noise term in the Langevin equation that would describe, for example, the internal motions of an receptor protein docking with a neurotransmitter molecule. In the real world, the question we have to answer is whether this randomness is simply a reflection of our lack of knowledge? Does it simply arise from a decision we make not to keep track of every detail of each molecular motion in a very complex systems? Or is it real randomness, that is intrinsic to the fundamental physics, and in particular from the quantum mechanical character of reality? I think it is real randomness, whose origins can be traced back to quantum fluctuations.

To be clear, Im not claiming here that the brain is a quantum computer, in the sense that it exploits quantum coherence in the way suggested by Roger Penrose. It seems to me difficult to understand how sufficient coherence could be maintained in the warm and wet environment of the cell. Instead, I want to focus on the origin of the forces between atoms and molecules. Attractions between uncharged molecules arise from the van der Waals force, which is most fundamentally understood as a fluctuation force, a force that arises from the way randomly fluctuating fields are are modified by atoms and molecules. The fluctuating fields in question are the zero-point and thermal fluctuations of the electromagnetic field of the vacuum. Because the van der Waals force arises from quantum fluctuations, the force itself is fluctuating, and (see my earlier post Where the randomness comes from) these random fluctuations, of quantum origin, are sufficient to account for the randomness of the warm, wet nanoscale world.

The complexity theorist Scott Aaronson has recently written an interesting, but highly speculative essay that touches on these issues The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine (PDF). Aaronson argues that there is a type of unpredictability about the universe today that arises from the quantum unknowability of the initial conditions of the universe. He evokes the quantum no-cloning principle to argue that quantum state functions that have evolved unitarily, without decoherence, from the beginning of the universe he calls these freebits have a different character of uncertainty to the normal types of randomness we deal with using probability distributions. The question then is whether the fundamental unpredictability of freebits could be connected to some fundamental unpredictability of the decisions made by a human mind. Aaronson suggests it could, if there were a way in which the randomness inherent in the molecular processes underlying the operation of the brain such as the opening and closing of ion channels could be traced back to quantum uncertainty. My own suggestion is that the origin of van der Waals forces, as a fluctuation force, in the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum electromagnetic field, offers the connection that Aaronson is looking for.

If Aaronson is correct that his freebit picture shows how the fundamental unknowability of the quantum initial conditions of the universe translate into a fundamental unpredictability of certain physical processes now, and I am correct in my suggestion that the origins of the van der Waals force in the quantum fluctuations of fields provide a route through which such unpredictability translates into the outcomes of physical processes in the brain, then this provides an argument for mind uploading being impossible in principle. This is a conclusion I suggest only very tentatively.

Your mind will not be uploaded: dealing with it

But theres nothing tentative about my conclusion that if you are alive now, your mind will not be uploaded. What comforts does this leave for those fearing oblivion and the void, but reluctant to engage with the traditional consolations of religion and philosophy? Transhumanists have two cards left to play.

Cryonics offers the promise of putting your brain in a deep freeze to wait for technology to catch up with the challenges of uploading. Its clear that a piece of biological tissue that has formed a glass at -192 C will, if kept at that temperature, remain in that state indefinitely without significant molecular rearrangements. The question is how much information is lost in the interval between clinical death and achieving that uniform low temperature, as a consequence both of the inevitable return to equilibrium once living systems fail, and of the physical effects of rapid cooling. Physiological structures may survive, but as weve seen, its at the molecular level that the fundamentals of biological information processing take place, and current procedures will undoubtedly be highly perturbing at this level. All this leaves aside, of course, the sociological questions about why a future society, even if it has succeeded in overcoming the massive technical obstacles to characterising the brain at the molecular level, would wish to expend resources in reanimating the consciousnesses of the particular individuals who now choose this method of corporeal preservation.

The second possibility that appeals to transhumanists is that we are on the verge of a revolution in radical life extension. Its unquestionably true, of course, that improvements in public health, typical lifestyles and medical techniques have led to year-on-year increases in life expectancy, but this is driven mostly by reducing premature death. The increasingly prevalent diseases of old age particularly neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimers seem as intractable as ever; we dont even have a firm understanding of their causes, let alone working therapies. While substantial fractions of our older people are suffering from cruel and incurable dementias, the idea of radical life extension seems to me to be a hollow joke.

Why should I worry about what transhumanists, or any else, believes in? As I began to discuss at the end of my last post, Transhumanism has never been modern, I dont think the consequences of transhumanist thinking are entirely benign, and Ill expand on that in a later post. But there is a very specific concern about science policy that I would like to conclude with. Radical ideas like mind uploading are not part of the scientific mainstream, but there is a danger that they can still end up distorting scientific priorities. Popular science books, TED talks and the like flirt around such ideas and give them currency, if not credibility, adding fuel to the Economy of Promises that influences and distorts the way resources are allocated between different scientific fields. Scientists doing computational neuroscience dont themselves have to claim that their work will lead to mind uploading to benefit from an environment in which such claims are entertained by people like Ray Kurzweil, with a wide readership and some technical credibility. I think computational neuroscience will lead to some fascinating new science, but you could certainly question the proportionality of the resource it will receive compared to, say, more experimental work to understand the causes of neurodegenerative diseases.

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Your mind will not be uploaded Soft Machines

Download free chess engines – Komodo 10, Houdini

Posted on March 20, 2019 by Danzig

Chess engine is the unique software which is built into the program shell (e.g. "Fritz", "Arena", "Shredder") thus multiplying the force of the game shell. For example, "Kasparov Chess" is very good and clever shell. The maximum rating which can be set in it is 2600. And the rating of the chess engines reaches 3000-3200. That is why the chess engines are so popular. Where do the chess engines originate from and who makes them? This question is not trivial, vice versa it is quite actual, so it is worth talking about.

The first record of the chess engine was made about 20 years ago. That was just the time when the UCI standard was developed - the universal chess interface, allowing the chess engine to be connected to the graphic interface of the program shell. The engine made to this standard can be easily connected to any chess program. The standard was worked out by Stephan Meyer-Kahlen, German programmer, who was born in 1968 in Dusseldorf. He is also the founder of one of the most famous chess programs - Shredder, which is the 12-times world champion among chess machines. The UCI standard was presented to the world by Rudolf Huber. The standard has great advantages. For example, if the engine does not save the database of the games played (although it is better if this task is performed by the engine), then one can easily manage this database by UCI. As the UCI protocol is absolutely free, it gives it the advantage over the other protocols. It can be used for private purposes and as the open-source as well. This protocol was used by only a few programs until Chessbase Company (producing Fritz) began to support this protocol in 2002. Nowadays, this protocol is used by about 100 chess programs.

The majority of the chess engines are made very thoroughly and published in the net absolutely free of charge. In Russia there are the developers making engines, as well. E.g. SmarThink developed by Sergey Markov, GreKo developed by Vladimir Medvedev, Strelka developed by Yuri Osipov. These engines, as well as many others, can be downloaded from our website. As the number of the chess engines is growing, we chose the best ones, as there is simply no possibility to present all of them here.

Komodo 11 Version Windows 64

Komodo 10 2016 - Developer Mark Lefler. Version for Android, Linux, OSX, Windows ALL.

Houdini - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). 5.01 UCI Chess Engines [Full]

Komodo 8 - Champions 2015 - Developer Mark Lefler. Version for Android, Linux, OSX, Windows 7, 8 (32/64).

Houdini 4 PRO - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). Version 4 PRO.

Houdini 2.0 - Developer Robert Blow (Belgium). Version 2.0. To date, the best engine. And you can Download Houdini 2.0 for a direct link.

Deep Rybka 4 - developer Vas Rajlich. Version 4 (w32)

Stockfish - Developers Tord Romstad, Marco Kostalba Kiiski and Joon. Version 2.11

Critter - Developer Richard Vida. Version 1.1.37

Naum - Developer Alexander Naumov (Canada). Version 4.2

Spark - Version 1.0

WildCat - Developer Igor Korshunov (Belarus). Version 8.0

SmarThink - Developer Sergei Markov (Russia). Version 0.17a

SOS - Designer Rudolf Huber (Germany). Version 11.99

Zchess - Designer Franck Zibi (France). Version 2.22

Gromit - Developers Frank Schneider and Kai Skibbe (Germany). Version 3.0

Ufim - Developer Niaz Hasanov (Russia). Version 8.2

Mustang - Developer Alex Korneichuk (Belarus). Version 4.97

GreKo - Developer Vladimir Medvedev (Russia). Version 8.2 + sour

Kaissa2 - Developer Vladimir Elin (Belarus). Version 1.8a

Adamant - Developer George Varentsov (Russia). Version 1.7

Booot - Developer of Alexei Morozov (Ukraine). Version 5.1.0 + sources

Eeyore - Developer Meidel Anton (Russia). Version 1.52 (32 & 64bit)

Zeus - Developer Vadim Bykov (Russia). Version 1.29

Arics - Developer Vladimir Fadeev (Belarus). Version 0.95a

Anechka - Developer Sergey Nefedov (Russia). Version 0.08

Patriot - Developer Vladimir Elin (Belarus). Version 2006

AlChess - Developer Alex Lobanov (Russia). Version 1.5b

OBender - Designer Evgeny Kornilov (Russia). Version 3.2.4x

Counter - Developer Vadim Chizhov (Russia). Version 1.2

Strelka - Designer Yuri Osipov (Russia). Version 2.0B + sources

Belka - Developers Yuri Osipov, Igor Korshunov (Russia - Belarus). Version 1.8.20

Ifrit - Developer Brenkman Andrew (Russia). Version 4.4 + source

Bison - Developer Ivan Bonkin (Russia). Version 9.11 + sour

Uralochka - Developer Ivan Maklyakov (Russia). Version 1.1b

Marginal - Designer Alexander Turikov (Russia). Version 0.1

Chess - Designer Evgeny Kornilov (Russia). Version 3

Woodpecker - Designer Evgeny Kornilov (Russia). Version 2

Gull - Developer Vadim Demishev (Russia). Version 1.2

Continued here:

Download free chess engines - Komodo 10, Houdini

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