Notes
[Notebook Turkey, db 55]
[Sunday 23 December 2001 - Saturday 29 December 2001]
[page 16]
Sunday 23 December 2001
We take it as fundamental that the survival of a particular organism depends upon the organism being able to control itself, ie work for its living. There are regimes (I believe) where control is completely overwhelmed and then random action becomes optimal, hoping by chance to find a solution to the problem of the moment (which might be [for a moth] a pursuing bat).
We might divide problems into known (eg how to peel an orange) and unknown (how to get through the latest in tamper-proof packaging). Known problems may be dealt with in a routine way by expert agents who have seen it all before (eg linesmen? linespersons?). The system can handle known problems at a certain rate, and can maintain its integrity until the known problem processing system is swamped by demand. Survival then demands that more resources be devoted to this system (ie more energy, more subprocesses per second, etc)
The solution of unknown (new) problems requires a search process. This site is essentially the log of a search. The unknown problem is: what does religion mean in the light of modern scientific knowledge of ourselves and our world.
[page 17]
The biggest problem is to get over the shame associated with preredeemed nature. By confessing myself (in these notebooks) I seek absolution for past errors. But the need for guilt is moot. I did things as I saw them, and can overcome feelings of shame by reasoning along these lines, and by the scientific method of abstracting as far as possible from personal involvement in the problem to pick out its essential structure.
The solution of unknown problems is a time consuming process, but time is of the essence in survival matters. An organism must therefore act on partial solutions. We may do this by averting our gaze from some of the phenomena that may need to be taken into account.
Present is a meeting of future and past (Feynman) both of which are abstract ingredients to the concrete present. Feynman p vii. ['In working on the problem (of the infinite self energy of the electron] a "least-action" principle using half advanced and half retarded potentials was discovered.)
A measure of the 'perversion index' of a society may be gathered from its patters of media censorship. Eg our film censors expose us to any amount of violence, but severely ration sexuality and sensuality (except perhaps for advertising).
Monday 24 December 2001
Tuesday 25 December 2001
Wednesday 26 December 2001
Thursday 27 December 2001
Friday 28 December 2001
The core beliefs of the ancient religions are communicated to us through fictional personalities, that is independent agents who can be communicated with by word and thought. The activities of these personalities are very much like the activities of real people, but have been subjected to various amounts of literary purification to differentiate the roles of the actors in the divine comedies and tragedies. This sharpening and integration of the agents in the cosmic model has its parallel in the development of the modern physical pantheon, beginning with the familiar photon and electron and extending to the lesser known neutrinos and quarks. This set of particle is the latest output of a process of identifying and naming the agents in the world. This is principally a project of the western scientific
[page 18]
community which grew out of the medieval renaissance in theology which we associate with the importation of the works of Aristotle which had been preserved in the Arabic speaking world. Someone collected the Aristotelian MSS Albert and Thomas used for ideas to produce a systematic model of the Christian world which marked a transition between the ancient interpretation of the world as interacting personalities and the modern notion that the world is ruled by law.
It is natural that the penetration of scientific methods is deepest in the simplest aspects of the Universe (Galileo, Newton)
Lonergan's 'transcendental method' describes the cycle which generates knowledge. Lonergan. Each traverse of the cycle (which is marked by the discontinuity known as insight) adds a further modicum to our knowledge. We model this (in some unspecified way) by the 'Cantor transition' a process whose working depends on the 'cardinal-ordinal bootstrap' [cob] that Cantor used to prove his theorem. cob is realized as 'diagonal method'.
But though god contains cyclic processes, god itself is not cyclic, since god operates at maximum complexity, and the most complex coding is indistinguishable from noise. Chaitin. White noise contains all frequencies from 0 (the life of god, happening only once) to some UV cutoff, happening (say) ℵ0 times in the life of god. Cyclic phenomena can be understood (compressed) by removing the redundancy from them while exploiting their repetitive nature to expand succinct explanations (Like Lonergan's exposition of the knowledge cycle).
We approach the unity of god's life through cyclic processes which are amenable to scientific study. We model this approach by the transfinite numbers, which,
[page 19]
since they never end, tell us that we cannot come to a full scientific understanding of god, ie the whole of which each of us is a subprocess, an element in the life of god repeated one hundred billion times already on this small planet alone.
The self similar nature of the transfinite series also allows us to see that god's revelation of itself through time is a cumulative process with cyclic subprocesses (just like shovelling gravel into a heap) whose present point is a unique outcome of all that has gone before. In the divine whole, every event is named by its relation to those that come before and after it.
Force(n) is the restraining (confining) effect of aleph(n) on aleph(>n). So we feel the physical forces that emanate from the physical layers (low alephs, perhaps just ℵ0. We are subject also to forces arising from our biological layers(s). Through Newton we have inherited effective means to deal with physical forces and Darwin has opened our eyes to the sources of biological forces. We may call this cardinal (complexity) constraint and together with logical (consistency) constraint these constraints provide the outer shell of the world = god. Since consistency allows (demands?) transfinite growth these constraints are consistent with the nature of god. Force arises from the need of higher integrations to direct the potentials from which they are composed. In cybernetic terms, force is an error signal.
