Notes

[Notebook NAKEDICAME, DB 53]

[Sunday 1 October 2000 - Saturday 7 October 2000]

[page 22]

Sunday 1 October 2000

Monday 2 October 2000

[omission]

We have an 'inner' life and an 'outer' life and a 'hidden' life. The inner comprises all conscious events that I alone am privy to. My outer life comprises all

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my interactions with my environment including my interactions with you.

The hidden life connects the inner to the outer. It is the immensely complex set of processes, guided but not determined by the 'laws' of physics, which are the subject of biology. We think here of the hidden life as the language that links consciousness to the world.

Conscious though we may be, we know that our biology has been shaped by natural selection. The fundamental problem for a conscious agent, we shall say, is to maximize the state of wellbeing, that is to maximize the proportion of our lifetime that each of us feels to be 'in heaven'.

[omission]

The consistency of religion requires consistency of environment, which means the unity of human understanding expressed through theology.

A fortunate life. By that I mean that I have followed a trajectory through good fortune and bad to the view of the world that I am trying to capture in this project.

Step 1 I was born into the RCC, an organization with very definite and powerful views about life. As five year olds, the nuns terrified us into prayer by telling us that the Communist Chinese would invade and torture us with bamboo slivers under the fingernails and other unspeakable horrors if the Blessed Virgin was not motivated by our prayer to stop them. We were taught also that the 'Brown Scapular' would protect us from evil, which I interpreted to mean that

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it was safe to do anything on the monkey bars. Above all, a Catholic Education convinced me that my sensual body would lead me to Hell unless I did something drastic, which led to

Step 2 I entered the Roman Catholic Dominican Order, an 'institute of consecrated life' founded in 12?. In its time the order was an innovative mixture of monkish contemplation and Christian activism designed to produce a force powerful enough to combat the heresies of the age. In other words, the Domini Canes (dogs of god) were trained for relatively non-violent holy war. They were close to the hot wars, nevertheless. Famous Inquisitors such as . . . were Dominicans. In the Order I first began to feel the might of ancient literature and studied it avidly. In particular, we were introduced to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas wrote one of the single most influential works in the Catholic Church, The Summa Theologiae. I also discovered the modern writer, Bernard Lonergan, who has done much to bring Thomas alive to modern readers. Leading to

Step 3 I fall out with the Church by questioning the nature of god. The Catholic Church believes in an eternal omnipotent being that existed before it created the Universe and will continue to exist after the Universe is gone. Aquinas proved the existence of such a god by showing that the Universe is defective, so that the fact of its existence shows that there must be some other, non-defective, behind the scenes. Lonergan introduces as a modern model of this defect 'empirical residue' data without meaning. (Lonergan 1992) Because we would expect anything existing in its own right to be fully meaningful, he says, the fact that parts of the visible Universe are not meaningful implies that there must be a fully meaningful being (traditionally called God) behind the scenes, as the Catholic Church would wish. The Catholic Church believes it has a monopoly on reliable communication with God, which monopoly would be broken if the divinity was directly visible to all of us. I wrote a paper called 'How Universal is the Universe' and was soon asked to leave the order.

Then I see it. Lonergan's conclusion depended upon his model of the world. His model merely assumed that there was meaningless data in the Universe, but it could easily be wrong.

TRAGEDY - impact of dream and reality
COMEDY - impact of dream and dream

HYPOCRISY - CORRUPT ENVIRONMENT

The age of fantasy is over. Long live fantasy. But not in our physical relationships with the Universe.

With every bit of business goes a set of 'paperwork' maybe in someone's head, or in a computer.

NAKEDICAME
We are aware of the proverb that money cannot buy love, but it can secure many of the

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natural outputs of love such as food, shelter, human contact and blissful oblivion that many people are in need of.

Tuesday 3 October 2000

Wednesday 4 October 2000

Thursday 5 October 2000

[omission]

[page 29]

Greenpeace: Testing for evolutionarily stable strategies.

Friday 6 October 2000

Saturday 7 October 2000

Theology implies complex = high entropy dynamics.

Theology is the dynamics of the whole.

Expanding Lonergan's misunderstanding of dynamics to non-analytic functions [functions with incompressible representations]

One is trying to gain a wider and wider spectrum. Look back to Reformation/Renaissance. At the same time as the idea of dynamical explanation of the world was being produced by future oriented Renaissance Men, the Reformation men were harking back to ancient ideas and ancient texts. These positions reflect two attitudes to life, one the good old days leading to a decadent present and the other the glorious future to come where the evils of the present will be overcome.

[page 31]

I feel that I am a victim of party discipline rather than literary incompetence and wish to formally complain about the administration of THEO 628 as I have experienced it.

Life: Data - pleasure/pain

PHYSICS TODAY: What is the difference between physics and theology?

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES - Wherein the great L published. Another failure at the ACU, but will protest this one. Prepare a brief. The excitement is not just to win, but to keep pushing a point of view that gains depth and consistency as it comes across each difficulty.

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The time has come to cut away the scaffolding, that is the historical path to my position ( = my life so far) and let the abstract structure shine. But it needs a little bit of history. The story. We start with Aristotle.

Physics and Theology (for Theological Studies and Physical Review)

It has been a bit like making a road, first finding an optimum line, the clearing away the past, building bridges, earthworks and finally surfacing and embellishment. See the human signage growing on the mountain road.

Here it is intended to embrace both these senses.

When the Greeks first began speaking scientifically about the world they came across the difficulty of reconciling motion and stillness in the world.

Some fragments of Parmenides set the scene: (Parmenides)

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goddess.

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

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Copyright:

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Feynman, Richard P, and Robert B Leighton, Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 3) : Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley 1970 Foreword: 'This set of lectures tries to elucidate from the beginning those features of quantum mechanics which are the most basic and the most general. . . . In each instance the ideas are introduced together with a detailed discussion of some specific examples - to try to make the physical ideas as real as possible.' Matthew Sands  Amazon   back

Huxley, Aldous, The Perennial Philosophy, HarperCollins 1990 Introduction: Philosophia Perennis -- the phrase was coined by Leibniz: but the thing -- the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychlogy that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being -- the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive (sic) people in every region of the world, and in its fully developed form it has a place in every one of the higher religions.'  Amazon   back

Joyce, James, Finnegans Wake, Faber and Faber 1982 Webster: 'Experimental novel by James Joyce. Extracts of the work appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, and it was published in its entirety as Finnegans Wake in 1939. The book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod (near Dublin), his wife, and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Mrs. Anna Livia Plurabelle, and Kevin, Jerry, and Isabel are every family of mankind. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. Languages merge: Anna Livia has "vlossyhair"--wlosy being Polish for "hair"; "a bad of wind" blows--bad being Persian for "wind." Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear. On another level, the protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey standing as representatives of the history of Ireland and, by extension, of all human history. As he had in his earlier work Ulysses, Joyce drew upon an encyclopedic range of literary works. His strange polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words is intended to convey not only the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also the interweaving of Irish language and mythology with the languages and mythologies of many other cultures. '  Amazon   back

Joyce, James, and (Edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior and with a new preface by Richard Ellmann, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, The Bodley Head 1986 Preface: ',,, For the purposes of interpretation, the most significant of the many small changes in [this] text has to do with the question Stephen puts to his mother at the climax of the brothel scene, itself the climax of the novel. Stephen is appalled by his mother's ghost, but like Ulysses he seeks information from her. His mother says, 'You sang that song to me. Love's bitter mystery.' Stephen responds 'eagerly.' as the stage direction sasy, 'Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.' She fails to provide it. This passage has been much interpreted. . . . Professor Gabler has been able to settle this matter by recovering a passage left out of the scene in the National Library. . . . the omission of several lines - the longest omissionin the book. These lines read in the manuscript "Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. . . . '' page xii back

Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'  Amazon   back

Santayana, George S., and Irwin Edman , The Philosophy of Santayana: Selections from all the Works, Charles Scribner's Sons 1953 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description This is NEW,GREATLY ENLARGED EDITION copyright 1953 A collection originally published in 1936. Please note that although George Santayana is Author of the works this edition was EDited by IRWIN EDMAN and is a compilation   Amazon   back

Weyl, Hermann, Space Time Matter (translated by Henry L Brose), Dover 1985 Amazon customer review: ' The birth of gauge theory by its author: This book bewitched several generations of physicists and students. Hermann Weyl was one of the very great mathematicians of this century. He was also a great physicist and an artist with ideas and words. In this book you will find, at a deep level, the philosophy, mathematics and physics of space-time. It appeared soon after Einstein's famous paper on General Relativity, and is, in fact, a magnificent exposition of it, or, rather, of a tentative generalization of it. The mathematical part is of the highest class, striving to put geometry to the forefront. Actually, the book introduced a far-reaching generalization of the theory of connections, with respect to the Levi-Civita theory. It was not a generalization for itself, but motivated by the dream (Einstein's) of including gravitation and electromagnetism in the same (geometrical) theory. The result was gauge theory, which, slightly modified and applied to quantum mechanics resulted in the theory which dominates present particle physics. Weyl's unified theory was proved wrong by Einstein, and his criticism alone, accepted by Weyl and included in the book, would justify the reading. Though wrong, Weyl's theory is so beautiful that Paul Dirac stated that nature could not afford neglecting such perfection, and that the theory was probably only misplaced. Prophetic words! The philosophic parts are, alas, too much for our present cultural level, but you can ignore them. The mathematical and physical parts are perfectly accessible and, of course, of the highest class. The pity is that the number of misprints is immense, particularly in the formulas, so that the reading is made much more difficult than it should. Also, the English edition is not the latest one. If you read German, choose the original, also available here.' Henrique Fleming  Amazon   back

Papers

Chaitin, Gregory J, "Randomness and Mathematical Proof", Scientific American, 232, 5, May 1975, page 47-52. 'Although randomness can be precisely defined and can even be measured, a given number cannot be proved random. This enigma establishes a limit in what is possible in mathematics'. back

Gödel, Kurt, "On formally undecidable problems of Principia Mathematica and related systems I", Monatshefte fur Mathematik und Physic, 38, , 1931, page 173-198. Reprinted in Gödel, Kurt, Kurt Gödel: Collected Works Volume 1 Publications 1929-1936, Oxford UP 1986 pp 144-195.   Amazon. back

Hopcroft, John E, "Turing Machines", Scientific American, 250, 5, May 1984, page 70-80. 'At its logical base every digital computer embodies one of these pencil-and-paper devices inented by the British mathematician A M Turing. The machines mark the limits of computability.'. back

Landauer, Rolf, "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5, 3, 1961, page 183. back

Shannon, Claude E, "Communication in the Presence of Noise", Proceedings of the IEEE, 86, 2, February 1998, page 447-457. Reprint of Shannon, Claude E. "Communication in the Presence of Noise." Proceedings of the IEEE, 37 (January 1949) : 10-21. 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two function spaces, and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of "ideal" systems which transmit this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second of certain information sources is calculated.' . back

Links

John Burnet Parmenides of Elea: The Poem 'The Poem Parmenides was the first philosopher to expound his system in metrical language. His predecessors, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Herakleitos, wrote in prose, and the only Greeks who ever wrote philosophy in verse at all were just these two, Parmenides and Empedokles; for Xenophanes was not a philosopher any more than Epicharmos. Empedokles copied Parmenides; and he, no doubt, was influenced by the Orphics. But the thing was an innovation, and one that did not maintain itself. The fragments of Parmenides are preserved for the most part by Simplicius, who fortunately inserted them in his commentary, because in his time the original work was already rare. I follow the arrangement of Diels.' back