Notes
[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]
[Sunday 25 August 2002 - Saturday 31 August 2002]
[page 101]
Sunday 25 August 2002
At last sitting contentedly by the fire in the morning. . . . Now we feel that we have a firm foundation in the transfinite permutation (= symmetric) groups.
Now H has died a node in the human network has gone off line and the nodes around the hole are adjusting to the new reality, but the network remains unbroken and manifests itself at his funeral and in the minds of all those who have not heard or could not come. The severest test of a religion is the ability to deal naturally with death. We can use the network idea to model the creation and annihilation process at any level.
[page 102]
H, networker extraordinaire at every level. BROADBAND.
Narrow band is filtered broadband - filtered by superposition, eg wavefunction of piezo crystal.
With the network paradigm in mind we can (as we have always hoped) rewrite the Summa to produce its current equivalent, ie its projection through modern intellectual structures.
We say that there are 100k words in the common language, but this is to ignore the actual instances of them in communication, where each word has a unique address in the space of possible sentences. So we map 100 k words into ℵ0 instances.
An organization is an ordered structure written in people.
COARSE GRAINING/ impressionism / data compression. The requirement that the painted surface be a continuum restricts the information content that can be fitted into a given space. This is because (?) the visual system also is pixellated, and then employs intelligent neural circuitry to extract meaningful relationships from the array of pixels.
Society is pixellated as individuals, and social meaning comes from our place in the (transfinite dimensional) social picture.
As well as correlations, there are non-correlations (often called degrees of freedom) that allow us to coarse grain the complex structure of the world.
SYMMETRY - COARSE GRAINING - STATISTICS
Money gives us the coarse grain model of society as action does the society of fundamentals. The fundamentals of the stock market revolve around the actual profits and perception of the future profits of a corporation. Capital
[page 013]
seeks the highest return. Its rate of motion in the money world is related to the rate of motion of the physical assets it represents, perhaps 10 years design and construction and fifty years of use and maintenance. Should we couple the deign lifetimes of technology with human lifetimes - NO - why constrain for no gain?
Nature Commentary:
As the world teeters toward fundamentalism it is time to revisit the relationship between science and theology. There was a time in my history when these two words meant almost the same thing and the Bible was considered the paramount source of truth, although there have often been difficulties in interpretation. The Biblical literature, and its continuation, the Patristic literature are the literary foundation of the class of religions we call Christianity. Other religions have other books as well as living organizations that define and propagate their identity from moment to moment.
Each breakthrough brings with it a hope of publication which usually leads to a document that sinks without a ripple.
An intellectual journal such as Nature which tries to steer a true course between the competing demands of commercial survival and scientific integrity seems the perfect forum to ask the question: can we construct a scientific, that is physical, theology. Here's why I think we can and so bring theology and science together again.
Religion is particularly concerned with the points at which human desire comes into contact with reality. The person who wished to build a house upon a sand dune for the view of the sea must weight this advantage against the cost of potential destabilization and dissipation of the dune by wind and waves.
The fundamental moral question is to demarcate use from abuse in every dimension of existence. Dimensions within
[page 104]
dimensions, spaces within spaces.
Portrait of an Abstract man springs to mind as we cope again with death (in those days the loss of eternal life). Avoidance of death has both good and bad aspects. Each node is a transient which creates a pattern ('ripples') that propagates through the network and endures in superposition as long as the physical network and its successors remain in existence.
Writing and rewriting history is one of the spoils of victory. The Nazis caused extensive growth in the German bureaucracy as they meticulously documents every step of their path toward a new social order. Such components of this archive as have survived and been opened reveal in close detail how a society can liquidate itself by the institution of terrorism and civil war. The forces of violence because almost completely decoupled from the forces of creation, so that in effect Nazi Germany burnt itself up, in a holocaust that included the Holocaust.
The power of a node (or an edge) is measured by cardinal number (entropy)
COARSE GRAINING = DIGITIZATION
God is supposed to be most reliable. The most reliable and survival oriented structure we can imagine is all of the human population working together intelligently to maximize the fulfillment of human desire within the limits of use/abuse set by the most sensitive (scientifically complex) morality. The scientific consensus.
Monday 26 August 2002
Each position in a bureaucracy is a communication link. We have the people at the counters linking to the real world on one side and to the bureaucratic hierarchy on the other. All unified organizations need a symbol of unity, but how that
[page 105]
point holds its power follows a spectrum from dictatorship (absolute monarchy) to a functioning democracy that allows for all activities of its constituents and includes mechanisms to deal with errors in a maximally harm reductive way.
As a plumber works the lead, the lawyer works the law. What does religion do? Interfaces us with reality in the broadest sense, not just the technology of peace but the technology of technology.
Slogan: we are first of all citizens of the world (like all creatures) and only secondarily citizens of a particular environment . . .
Tuesday 27 August 2002
STRIFE arises from a point of view to narrow to give space to all points of view. Religious intransigence, where one religion sees itself as the only true religion, is such a cause of strife.
So a first question is: how big a stage are we playing on anyhow?
INSECURITY makes us VIOLENT.
The lusciousness of the physical may serve as a window on the greater lusciousness of the spiritual, or it might be conceived, as in the Roman Catholic Church, as a barrier to the spirit.
Celibate clergy are denied the emotional maturity that can only come from actual sexual experience in its normal social context.
We understand religion by fitting it into a wider context, evolution and survival.
Wednesday 28 August 2002
Thursday 29 August 2002
How does one more from powerless to powerful? (Is it safe
[page 105]
to be powerful? Power (as Cantor said) comes down to numbers, in battle, in the ballot box, in general (4, 6, 8 etc cylinders . . . ). Of course order adds fiercely to numbers. The cardinal-ordinal bootstrap.
The recent history of the human race is a history of the public perception of, and reduction of, risk. I have been a greenie in my time, and the stock in trade of greenies, as of many other things, is to try to associate grave danger with whatever practice one is trying to stamp out. I well remember the days when hundreds of us kids would be packed into a church so that the Passionist father could terrify us into goodness with exciting and graphic descriptions of the intensity and duration of the pains of hell. All this was, of course, pure bullshit, but I was not aware of that. Recently the government of this country [Australia] pulled a similar stunt, terrifying us with tales of hordes of boat people violating our sacred waters to the north.
Behind spin lies statistics, and it is hard to know which seems worse. Our ambivalence is captured in the celebrated phrase, 'lies, damn lies and statistics.
The Roman Catholic Church is 100% spin, but this is not altogether a bad thing. To survive we have to work together.
Corris: "The Kimberly Killing: the dramatic side of life. Corris.
Spin can be dangerous because the world is not arbitrary.
Friday 30 August 2002
Saturday 31 August 2002
