Notes
[Notebook: TURKEY DB 55]
[Sunday 29 June 2003 - Saturday 5 July 2003]
Sunday 29 June 2003
[page 333]
Monday 30 June 2003
We may claim that no matter how much we see in any picture, text, set of data = ordered set . . .
Cantor Universe is the space that contains (and so unites) both the material (physical) and immaterial = metaphysical.
METAPHYSICAL = almost everywhere force free communication
card {forceful communication} = ℵ0 equivalent to physics.
card {metaphysics = force free communication} = aleph(>0) equivalent to metaphysics.
I am a person bound to the wheel of life but I do not want to be free because I discern a distinct link between work and freedom. We may measure productivity by the amount of freedom divided by the amount of work, expressed in suitable units, ie entropy = log(card). The balance between work and freedom can be increased in the direction of greater productivity by cooperation.
[page 334]
We would like a proof of this theorem, in terms perhaps of parallelism and computer power. So we need to develop the transfinite network more explicitly. At present the only working mode of hypercomputing is the Newtonian computer which takes advantage of the hypothesis that matter is continuous to create smaller and faster computers, to such a degree that they can cross the barrier between ℵ0 and ℵ1 which is the present boundary on machine isomorphic to the Turing machine.
We can look at this passage to infinity in more structured way, using the transfinite network to make the leaps between aleph(n) and aleph(n+1), n >=0. We construct this leap by a simple argument. Any Turing machine can be represented by an ordered set of cardinal ℵ0, ie little omega(0) (?) Thus the cardinal of the set of all possible Turing machines is ℵ1. Expand this argument.
Tuesday 1 July 2003
Lo, Popescu and Spiller. Lo, Popescu and Spiller
superposition
entanglement
reversible unitary evolution
measurement and decoherence
no cloning
Quantum computation has two problems: how to achieve high Q (low decoherence) in systems doing a quantum computation so that the process is unitary and reversible and: how to prepare and measure the systems to perform the computations. We are looking here for both action and non-action.
The matter-spirit divide is crossed by the link between entropy conceived as a physical quantity and entropy measured as a count or log(count)
One of the greatest and most valuable reconciliations we can effect in the human sphere is to bridge the gap between matter and spirit, so that that all the globe's spiritual models may be tied
[page 335]
to a matter model. We will explore this bridge in the context of quantum mechanics, using particularly the ideas emphasizes by quantum information theory. We can take a lot of the mystery our of quantum mechanics by seeing it as a model of the hardware and potential software of an information processing system. We describe this system in the Cantor Universe by a construct called the transfinite network.
Physics is a symmetry of all religions (and every other complex structure). Physics must be respected; it is the protocol of survival, of non-annihilation. For a system which exceeds the constraints of physics will break up. As we see physics, it is the properties of a viable communication network. This is largely a matter of bandwidth. Conservation of energy means conservation of bandwidth. The overall processing rate is fixed - what can be adjusted in the nature of the processes. We describe a process with an ordered set, like a recipe. This recipe specifies a sequence of actions which will lean to a desired result. Some of these actions (like 'grease tin') can be performed at many different places in the sequence. Others, like 'cook' have a fixed point, after the mixing is complete.
Matter: destructive copying
Spirit: non-destructive copying.
This fact brings down the proofs devised by Aquinas and Lonergan that there is a spiritual being other than this Universe.
entanglement is relative to a basis.
. . .
What drives this thing is the pressure of love, the generalized creator of stress-energy. That is to say, love is manifested by stress-energy. This manifestation has complexity or entropy ℵ0. The entropy of love
[page 336]
itself, of course, is much higher, as we may understand through the construction in the Cantor Universe we call the transfinite network. From the E-theorem we can see how the unitary/amorphous infinity of love (also known as god) resolves itself into a countable network with a countable number of packets of information flowing through it.
My love, I feel, has a clear evolutionary origin in the perception that the genotypes that look after their offspring best are thereby granted an increased representation in the next generation. The careless, on the other hand, succeed by having vast numbers of potential offspring, a few of which survive. This is 'k' versus 'r' selection. Which is which? The few offspring great care algorithm which guides our species gives us all a vested interest in increasing the fitness of our children. As we have known explicitly for millennia, this fitness has two aspects which are commonly called material and spiritual. We need both to survive and they must harmonize with one another. In times of rapid evolution, however, the harmony of matter and spirit is ipso facto decreased, A transient burst of evolution in response to high selective pressures.
This love is not pure in the old religious sense. We note that a large proportion of the dominant religions of history have put a certain emphasis on celibacy and childlessness, obedience and poverty, and so in a way, withdrawn themselves from the maelstrom of reproductive life where there is a selective advantage in self management, wealth and plenty of sex. This seems to point to a certain hypocrisy where the religious professionals drew an income from the population at large by representing themselves as better connected to the controlling invisible spiritual elements of life which were often realized as a god or gods, angels, spirits, demons and other reminders of
[page 337]
the vast menagerie of invisible beings created by the human imagination.All these personalities are elements of the spiritual dynamics of reality, and so have the same sort of existence as the particles and fields of modern physics. What we are introducing is scale invariance, so that we can understand the personality of ourselves, a planet or a galaxy in the same breath as an atom or a subatomic particles. This is like the Reformation idea that we are all priests. Religion cannot be left in the hands of a self appointed elite, but must become subject to the wishes of all stakeholders. As in other political decisions, they are best made if founded on a true assessment of the issue and potential solutions. This is the role of science, and it brings us round to the grail, scientific theology leading to reasonable religion, just as scientific biology leads to reasonable medicine.
Wednesday 2 July 2003
I may waffle more as I get older, but that is in a way of the essence of these notes, which are an attempt to capture a vision of the future of religion, by any means, no matter how rough. This seems necessary. In a lifetime I have never met anyone who thinks remotely as I do in all the details presented here. This leads me to think that I am moving into new and interesting territory which will show us more clearly the path to peace. My hope of course is eventually to put all this together in such a concise and consistent form that its beauty and power are inescapable, but, even if this task turns out to be impossible these notes will still contain the parts of a jigsaw that someone else may find a way to complete. The history of science shows that it often takes decades or centuries or even millennia of beating around the bush before someone finally sees how to capture everything in a simple picture, as done by Jesus, Newton, Einstein etc etc.
Like every organism and every work of art, natural religion will have to struggle for its epiphany,
[page 338]
and may suffer many stillbirths before it finally comes alive and takes root in the human milieu.
Christie: The Cat Among the Pigeons 24 near the end: 'Your vision's quite right. Its the girls that matter, but if you want to make a success of anything, you know, you've got to be a good tradesman as well. Ideas are like everything else. They've got to be marketed. We'll have to do some pretty slick work in the future to get Medowbank going again. . . . ' Christie
Popescu: 'The Joy of Entanglement' Lo, Popescu and Spiller
page 30: 'Quantum mechanics builds systems out of subsystems in a remarkable, holistic way. The states of the subsystems do not determine the state of the system' ie it is not a cellular automaton.
LAW = INHIBITION = CONTRARY POTENTIAL (hilly)
SYMMETRY = PATH TO OTHER STATES = EQUIPOTENTIAL (flat)
From one point of view, the straight and narrow is a constraint; from another, it is a liberation. By inhibition at the data layer, ie detecting and rejecting erroneous symbols or sets of symbols, we vastly increase the combinatorial properties of the user layer.
DATA = ordered set
USER = encoder and decoder of data. The data string 'the sports
carnival is postponed' means that me, a potential ferry driver, have
a free day to pursue this, my journey into peace and prosperity. The
ultimate foundation for human togetherness is the idea that if one
wins, all win. This implies that we are playing a positive sum game.
What we have to fear is that our positive sum game is embedded in a
larger zero sum game. If this is so we might (catastrophically) lose
all our gains. The theory of peace is based around a proof that in
certain circumstances, thee is no upper bound to the positive sum
game. This is illustrated by the unbounded growth of the Universe in
both size and complexity. Evil, in this context, is the
implementation of negative sum games (like war) which despite their
negativity, do
[page 339]
serve the ends of a subset of the community (arms manufacturers, power brokers, imperialists etc)
I spend much of my time being very happy. My main frustration is catching my state in a communicable form, and transmitting it to others who are finding [life to be difficult].
Once again come around to the idea that a book will be good for this because it entrains the marketing power of a publisher. Just have to put something together that will suck the publishers in.
We model the superposition by a network, each node of which represents a state of the superposition, and the energy of that state being the probability that it will manifest upon observation. A network is a superposition of nodes (ie all existing simultaneously) [but not necessarily active at any moment]
Thursday 3 July 2003
Friday 4 July 2003
PREFACE
Science helps us balance good feeling with hard evidence. It maybe that the spectrum of human feeling and its mapping to the environment of the human mind reflects to some degree conditions operative in the [Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness] . Cummins page 52. The modern explosion of technological (and therefore environmental) change has required us to remap our feelings (so that, for instance, we fear motor vehicles as much as large carnivores) but this remapping (if it is to confer fitness) must be based on evidence. It is no sense to continue marching lines of soldiers into machine gun fire. So though I am somewhat in raptures over my theological constructs, it is going to be some time before they become evidence based to anyone but me. In order to achieve this, this book . . . is a mixture of persona experience and feeling, modelling and public scientific information. Its main purpose is to whet your interest and get you thinking about the nature and power of a global natural ( = evidence based) religion.
Saturday 5 July 2003
By their error we shall know them. Here lies much of the interest of biography and gossip. Both these genres become malicious when unjust judgments are made of people n the basis of inadequate evidence, too little or misunderstood. I went out plumbing without my dark glasses. I think that eye protection is essential for oxy welding. Arc welding without protection quickly leads to radiation damage to the eyes and skin. So I had to come back and think like this one the way. The story is simple. Yesterday I had been on the same sort of job and anticipated all my needs for this next one. Last evening I put my dark glasses in the top pocket of my overalls. When I took [them off] my gasses fell out on the bedroom floor. This morning I picked them up with another pair also on the floor, and brought them down to the kitchen. The chain broke after breakfast when I forgot to take them out with me. A simple, rather banal error of a very human type: forgot my glasses / pen / car keys / bag / etc etc. We are all prone to it and so see it as a feature of our network that involves the detection of an error (nearer the point of use) and a retry. Come home and get my glasses, meanwhile documenting a bit of the model and giving my employers more time to sleep in.
At the other end of the scale of complexity the larger and less frequent errors in human life, which are the breaking of a significant relationship by death, loss of friendship or the death of love. These complex situations, especially at the boundaries between nations, religions and other subsets of human society have the same features as day to day errors when one allows for scale. The 'infinite' (divine) scale sees everything 'sub specie aeternitatis' and so is in a position to view human affairs in the same vision as animal or atomic affairs. This sounds reductionist,. But it seems that there is a corresponding structure in the world which is invariant with respect to complexity. This is the network. As soon as we introduce communication theory, however, we see that things can be arranged so that increases in complexity (entanglement)
[page 340]
lead to the increase in fidelity of coding that is needed to maintain that complexity and more. This, we propose, is the bootstrap by which the Universe creates itself.
Our fundamental equation is that f(complexity, violence) = constant, lets say 1 (or we can use logarithms and say f(log(complexity, violence)) = 0. So as love grows and we interact with one another in more detail (sensitivity, complexity) the less need there is for (and so probability of) violence.
This does not tell us much until we develop means of measuring complexity and violence and see whether this relationship holds in the real world, comparing for instance violent suburbs with peaceful ones. Presumably there is already a lot of data on this, to be cobbled together into a paper.
The community of atoms (H, He, . . . ) is vastly greater than the community of humans yet they are both capable of the same number (ℵ0) of utterances. For an atom discrete spectral lines; for a human, discrete sentences.
From a fitness point of view an act is 'good' if it adds to one's fitness, bad if it detracts, and indifferent if input to doer = output from doer.
Do we need nature? We do! And we need an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics to understand and use nature.
The power of companionship. If A and B are 2 dimensional entities the dimensions being non-commutative, each can only be observed and controlled with a precision limited by sharing the task of self control. The entity {A, B} is able to keep its parameters within closer limits so improving its fitness and making its life more peaceful and less violent, ie less likely to contain
[page 342]
a fatal fluctuation.
The Catholic Church is the world's archetypal autocracy, and we will use it as such to anchor one pole of the argument of this book. Although I consciously rejected the doctrines about thirty years ago, it is ingrained still deeply in my makeup. Like most human beings that have ever lived, I was indoctrinated into my religious and social milieu with no conscious awareness that anything could be different. The Church, empowered by God himself with the gift of absolute truth stood before me then as an unassailable monolith. Now for me big cracks have appeared and the time has come to put an end to this aging and decrepit institution and to appropriate its wealth and turn it toward the transformation of heaven from a dream state cunningly marketed by an organization totally without shame or ethical control, into something real on earth.
The Catholic Church says this cannot be done because human beings, and the world we inhabit are fatally flawed. This fatal flaw, they say, entered the world at the Fall, and will stay there until the end of the world, when God recreates everything in the world as he wanted it in the first place, until the humans that he had made turned against him and had to be punished. A strange story, if God is as omnipotent and infallible as they say.
The basic aim of the Church is to close our minds, to convince us that everything the Church says is true, cut and dried, revealed to it once and forever in the scant records of the life and antecedents of Jesus Christ. I have been bashing my head on this rock for more than fifty years, perhaps uselessly, but I think not. The sexual deviation rampant in the Church is but an echo of its intellectual deviation. The Church stands foursquare in the path of evolution, trying to bring the world to a halt to please the egos of a bevy of old men who like to dress up./ Like any dam across a powerful and erratic river, the Church is a potential disaster, We have seen this disaster in the past, and it is with us now - religious war.
[page 343]
The greatest error is the denial of error.
RELIGION
Politics and religion are passionate subjects and easily lead to
violence, particularly where alcohol is involved, as is customary in
Christian countries. This is part of our heritage from the grape sown
lands encircling the Mediterranean Sea. Violence, on the whole,
solves nothing, although it may temporarily eliminate unpalatable
points of view. To establish productive discussion and avoid violence
we must keep things cool. Among the coolest things on earth are
science and mathematics. Our discussion of religion, then, will be
framed in scientific and mathematical terms.
We approach the centre of the subject through the notion of order.
Jane Eyre 374: 'I saw even that to be this frankly addressed on a subject he had deemed unapproachable - to hear it freely handled - was beginning to be felt by him as a new pleasure = an unhoped for relief. Bronte
. . .
We begin our exposition with the proposition that life is a mixture of ecstasy and work. Our first task is to express this natural language proposition in mathematical language. We get there through the ancient distinction between time and eternity., The ancient theologians devoted a lot of thought to the idea that god lives in eternity, people live in time.
Source: energy is generated by inconsistency, ecstasy by consistency, so that perceived inconsistency generates the energy to bring out its own removal. My pain has led me to a plan to rebuild a new religion on the
[page 344]
site of the old, recovering and recycling as much of the old as possible.
Our world is a whole comprising many parts each of which is itself a whole comprising many parts. The universal process we experience is the dialogue between all these elements, each seeking its own comfort and survival by managing the other elements, upon which it depends for these goods. Action is driven by pain, error or need; if one is lacking in resources it acts to procure them; if it is beset by danger, it acts for its greater safety, if it can.
We see this jostling for position, the continual interaction between entity and environment, going on at every level from fundamental particle to nations to the Universe, and we subsume it all under the rubric of networking and communication. To make a new religion, I must see my own position in relation to the whole, and use this vision to improve my position . . . vis a vis the whole, ie by feedback.
