Notes
[Notebook: Transfinite field theory DB 56]
[Sunday 20 June 2004 - Saturday 26 June 2004]
Sunday 20 June 2004
[page 106]
Monday 21 June 2004
. . .
The combination of equivalence and vagueness afforded by the infinite (transfinite) sets gives us a model for the equivalence of human beings. The cardinal number of a particular ordered set may vary over an infinite range without changing the ordinal number - we are ordinally human whatever the cardinal representing our power in the world.
A Christian delusion: life should be easier than it is (meliorist, and possibly true) and the reason that it is not is due to the evil that guilty humans have wrought. Our proper approach to god is mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa (my fault, my fault, my biggest fault] So I have said that a thousand times but it is worth it to see the opposite position more clearly: that we are all divine creatures living in a wilderness.
WILDERNESS = MAXIMUM (physically possible) ENTROPY (constrained by the laws of physics and survival.
Fitness is ultimately defined relative to physics, evolving systems learning to use the propensities of their environmental alphabet to fulfill their needs. An open system has hunger, for it it can take nothing in it will become a closed system (dark matter).
Wilderness need not be red in tooth and claw. For humans we can imagine a vegetarian wilderness containing both the organization and the variety
[page 107]
to feed the human world in an attractive way while minimizing our footprint on the planet (this too for our own delectation)
How much work is necessary for survival? This is a random variable, depending on circumstances, the answer lies between 0 and 1 (ie maximum sustainable or some such).
Should one accept one's romantic fate or do something about it. What about those creatures which exhaust themselves in reproductive activity through courtship and child rearing? Depends what you want. Its a matter of accepting ones degree of acceptance of one's fate. Only when things become life threatening is action dictated directly by survival. In the longer term survival strategies become more complex and subtle so that lifetime is to some extent a measure of complexity: so we expect (in general) that old things are more complex than young ones. This complexity reaches an optimum, but old age then sets in and leads one back to childlike simplicity.
Ideal acts: moral, ethical, effective, precautionary, no regrets etc. Do not let present pleasures compromise future pleasures.
Back to the wilderness question: should one do anything other than the biological imperatives, avoid death, grow, reproduce. Maybe not; that could be taking work too far. On the other hand there is capital investment which provides an indirect route to the imperatives. So we can judge every capital investment from nuclear energy to garbage disposal by its net contribution to (long term) fitness. This is not easy, because all predictions through time have an exponential structure which can suddenly reveal dark horses (like the exponential spread of AIDS in Africa).
[page 108]
The aim of the natural religion project is to export my quality of life to the whole world. This quality is a product of luck, grace and technology. I am lucky to have been born into an economy and polity where, with a reasonable amount of work, I have been able to obtain all I need in the way of food, shelter, education and security.
Grace I take to be the divinely created nature of the Universe that works to minimize violence and maximize stability through the Universe [this tendency appears in physics as the principle of least action?]
Technology is our means of capturing the powers of nature to add to our own fitness. I live in a place and a time which possesses adequate technology to deliver all the goods listed under luck above.
Can we change our luck. If we cannot, then all attempts to better our condition would be wasted, and this is clearly [not] so. We can, in other words, turn the odds of various events in our favour. All living things can do this - it is the rood of survival and education. Fitness is the condition where the odds (however set) favour life, growth and reproduction. Unfitness, on the other hand, results in no descendants.
We understand the odds and the manipulation of odds in our Universe using the mathematical theories of quantum mechanics.
ODDS = RATE = FREQUENCY This horse is 4/1, we would expect four identical runnings to yield one win, or, more precisely in an unlimited number of [identical] races, its actual number of wins would fluctuate around and slowly approach 1 in 4 races.
FREQUENCY = 1/DURATION
[page 109]
Eternity: tota simul. Not physically possible because 'tota' is too big to be expressed in one text of length ℵ0, which we take to be the cardinal number of the quanta of action occurring in the Universe from the beginning. The set of physical events is represented by ℵ0. This is motivated by the quantum nature of actual observations. All are in effect events in physical spacetime whose meaning is explained by the 'wave function'.
Chaitin's random principle says we cannot tell the difference (physically) between a random sequence of bits and a perfectly compressed message (every symbol carrying maximum entropy, minimal redundance. Chaitin
Will I make the effort to have the pleasure. Civilization says yes. Barbarism says steal somebody else's pleasure. Schadenfreude. I rejoice in my enemy's misfortune. If I had an enemy. Perhaps this is the foundation of my wellbeing. I do not have any personal enemies. And although many organisations around me declare the members of other organisations to be ipso facto enemies, I find this a bit hard to stomach. Human personal relationships are often corrupted by the requirements of suprahuman organisations. Anonymous war is the worst manifestation of this.
Organisations that intrude into human personal relationships have no place in a peaceful system (Prove this) It is in the interests of each 'higher' system to respect all the properties of the system of which it is composed, as molecules respect atoms. Human organisations have often not followed this rule, so that some have lived and profited by the enslavement of others. This reduced the entropy of individuals and consequently of the society of which the individuals are parts.
[page 110]
We have tow measures of complexity, spatial (momentum) ad temporal (energy) Special relativity compresses these into one measure, the flow of 4-momentum. What are the dimensions of 4-momentum. Back to Misner. [action?, dimensionless, like information?]
Smil: Energy policy is moral, ie it has to take in the whole human picture, ie to be theological, where by definition theology is the broadest science we have, most devoted to the big picture.
Health is closely related to purification. We can handle large amounts of some substances, but others are quite poisonous (because they couple to important elements of our (bio) physical system, and their environmental concentrations have to be kept low.
LIFETIME = 1/VIOLENCE = 1/FREQUENCY
The fundamental role of probability theory and quantum mechanics is the normalization of events.
Spacetime is the intuitively simple (to us and to the Universe) view of events. Quantum mechanics is the full computational view of what is going on behind the scenes. This process is relatively continuous.However, relativistic constraints on appearances (measurements) constrain the communications in the quantum world and lead to the generation of particles (Weinberg Weinberg)
Geometry is the study of ordered sets
Arithmetic is the study of cardinal sets.
Geometrodynamics = the dynamics of ordered sets.
Quantum mechanics, since it is based on the 'blind to order' inner product (integral) may be in some way blind to geometrodynamics, ie relativistically invariant. Quantum mechanics exists outside spacetime in a formal 'action space'.
[page 111]
So human 'action space' encompasses, for instance, the whole of literature and everything people have ever done from the baby who died at birth to the emperors that had power of life and death over millions.
The general geodesic. What is the geodesic in Hilbert space? Eigenvalues? The way of the eigenvalues. If I am not here I will be there, or in one of my allowed states. As for an atom, so for a human, only the state space is bigger.
Do I do my best work when my life is most pleasurable or is torture necessary to achieve the good (abegnation, supererogation)? We say no. But pressure increases the error rate which is in some sense tantamount to creativity and we have seen that many artistic giants were very stressed individuals. On the other hand, a minimum of stress probably contributes to the error free development of an hypotheses developed as a last resort in a time of stress. (Planck).
Physics tells in a simple way how a particle setting out on a certain trajectory will follow life's journey. It predict the path of a comet, and more stochastically, the life history of a radioactive nucleus. From physics we can generalize to the behaviour of systems of unlimited complexity, using symmetries of energy, momentum, action and information. Landauer tells us that the transmutation of information is associated with events (action) and that the amount of information revealed by an event is - log pe where pe is the probability of the event. Landauer So very improbable events have very high entropies.
high = log(very high)
very high = exp(high)
[page 112]
Einstein: all physics takes place 'localization; - infinitesimally close nodes of a network communicating with essentially unlimited frequency, but a delay proportional to 'distance' ie the number of infinitesimal steps a message is transmitted.
Misner, Thorne and Wheeler 'Space acts on matter, telling it how to to move [space is the road system eg]. In turn, matter reacts back on space, telling it how to curve [traffic will tend to optimize the road system in the process of eliminating bottlenecks. Misner, Thorne and Wheeler, page 5
We can divide functions (mappings) into constant entropy (1-1) and variable entropy - many-one (deterministic) and one-many (random)
Sovereign violence: the interface between the 'westies' and the police, based on physical prowess without any overlay of culture. The stick end of discipline The carrot end is that you forgo violence and accumulate capital since violence dissipates capital, both physical and moral. It seems to be the way, however, that the sovereign considers every act of violence to be against its person, and to be punished accordingly: stop fighting or I will hurt each of you more than you can ever hurt each other pax Romana; pax Americana; pax Brittannica etc.
Meliorism justifies going into business with natural religion because nothing that we can do within corporate law could be as bad as the currently dominant religions which claim power of life and death on the flimsiest of pretexts, as states do.
The fundamental appeal to people: if the organization wants you to die for it, it has problems. They talk you into being a suicide bomber (or a martyr of any kind) one can deduce that their position is fundamentally false (?). Perhaps a bit of martyrdom is necessary. It is powerful public relations in a world where anything goes, but is it ethical to talk people into killing themselves for
[page 113]
your cause.
General relativity extrapolates from a set of discrete events to a continuum of events described by a differentiable manifold. There is a certain inconsistency between 'continuum' and 'event' which is pointed up by the uncountable dimensions of the Hilbert space necessary to describe continuous motion. Every point on the real line becomes a discrete dimension in the Hilbert space.
Misner Thorne and Wheeler, page 13: ' . . . when one deals with spacetime in the context of classical physics, one accepts (1) that the notion of 'infinitesimal test particle' [measurement without force] and (2) the idealization that the totality of identifiable events forms a four dimensional continuous manifold. Only at the end of this book will a look be taken at some of the limitations placed by the quantum principle of one's way of speaking about and analyzing spacetime.
Christmas Humphreys page 17: 'To the Buddhist all weight and emphasis is on the mind and none on circumstance. 'Our mind should stand aloof from circumstances and on no account should we allow them to influence the function of our mind' ' Sutra of Wei Hang. Humphreys
This is a bit extreme and seems politically motivates in that the physically poor are advised to be happy despite their lot. Physical theology takes a middle road, looking for a well endowed 'mind' in a well endowed 'body' to yield a happy whole person.
'All things are One and have no life apart from it; the One is all things and is incomplete without the least of them' We can go along with this, which seems to contradict the previous statement of the aloof mind.
[page 114]
Humphreys page 19: 'We are what we are and are incomplete, unhappy, filled with suffering. The cause of that mystery is desire; the cause of desire is ignorance, the old illusion of self, the belief that the part can pit its separate self against the will and welfare of the whole.'
No; we have desires because we are open systems within the whole and need inputs and outputs to desire. We may desire more than we need, but that is a different issue. Ignorance means that we are not in a position to fulfill our desires optimally.
Tuesday 22 June 2004
'Work out your own salvation' said the Buddha "with diligence". No again; salvation is overwhelmingly a social good to be obtained by the network of relationships in social trading in human needs.
Buddha seems to espouse the right wing view that is it everyone for himself and the weak can go to the wall. Typical statement from a wealthy prince who survives by milking the peasants.
Wednesday 23 June 2004
Thursday 24 June 2004
Friday 25 June 2004
Humphreys (p ?) says Buddhism is a missionary religion. As are the other 'great' religions, Hindu, Christian,. Muslim etc. Otherwise they would not be great. 'It is not so much the product as the sales techniques that have made them what they are. Not least of their promulgation has been achieved by military conquest. Missionary religion is political, and any religion (including science) must be adept at the political process to gain the resources to reproduce itself. Religions are in effect viruses (software) in the human mind, and their spread is ultimately determined by the fitness they can confer on their devotees. Buddhism, it seems, was driven out of India to the north and east.
[page 115]
Saturday 26 June 2004
Fixing an old Black and Decker radial saw. I am reverting to my Dominican days, reading, writing and making furniture. Ploughing ahead on my own course without really thinking about what they thought of me until they asked me to leave. How did it happen? I do not really remember. Perhaps I asked them to leave, but I do not think so. A fair bit of time being questioned about my views and advised that I was failing to accept some of the 24 Theses. perhaps there are other accounts of this somewhere in these notes.
The Buddha's say a) all is suffering and b) don't want things and you won't suffer. Experience teaches that all is not suffering and given the right attitude most things are quite satisfactory, even the mistakes and hard times which, by being (relatively) pathological, motivate us to seek ways to avoid them with technological (ie behaviour and capital) fixes. So I am fixing the old saw to make tables to hold computers in order to make the recording and development of these religion ideas more secure, and with the help of others, faster. Why do this? The Buddhas are right on compassion, even if they are wrong about how the world works. The vast difference in wealth between princes and peasants might account. The Princes having everything laid on may have failed to see that all creatures must work to live and that suffering can be overcome by productive work (like growing food) as well as by rejecting the 'material' world and seeking to become part of the cosmic mind. Perhaps I misunderstand them. Being a prince is work, like any other. The peace that arises from the administrative and military activities of the Princes creates an environment that may be easier on the peasants that its absence. They replace death and desolation at the hands of attackers for the taxes that maintain the Princes and their military
[page 116]
in comparative luxury.
So we are compassionate and activist, but do not reject the meditative (theoretical) side of life. Here, however, we do not specifically seek an empty mind as a path to enlightenment. We see enlightenment, insight and action in general as all of a peace [sic] communication between one part of the Universe and another as part of the universal search for consistency, l;east action, minimum energy and maximum entropy, all of which come under the term 'fitness' ie fitting into the world which fulfill the needs of each subsystem of the whole. This network/computational view of evolution has led us to a formal system that looks a bit like pure mind, but when we look at something, also fully concrete, and no matter how deeply we look, we can be assured that even deeper things are going on at levels of complexity that we have yet to fathom.
In the case of genomics, for instance, now that we have learned to read genetic sequences, we are faced of working out what it means. We are slowly reading the vast genetic literature of life and finding that it is more subtle and complex than we thought. In the early days we thought he genome simply coded a set of proteins. Now we find that less than 5(?)% of our genome codes for proteins. What is the rest? perhaps layer after layer of regulatory code that decides when and how frequently different portions of the genome should be transcribed and the other systems in the cell turn on or off or modulated.
A competent agent is a tradesman (tradesperson, trader). In the definition of trader we include ideas of competence and ethics, right action at all levels of complexity in other words, or right at least in the prevailing terms of trade. Traders must assume that the lawmakers who
[page 117]
create the environment for their activity know what they are doing. In a corrupt society, they may be acting for themselves. In a reasonable society, every group of traders must accept some ethics (like paying accounts) to make their activity possible and sustainable., At no point would a wise trader slay the goose that lays the golden eggs. This means at the top level that it is unwise to kill god, the source of all good things, (aka nature).
trader must a) model some dream (new house, new hair colour [basic survival]) and then model a path toward the realization of that dream.
Religions of acceptance are probably good for maintaining the status quo and the Prince may think the status quo so good that the use of violence to maintain it seems justified. The most efficient way to do this is to pick off the ringleaders for change one b one before they gain a following and some level of civil war seems necessary.
On the other hand peace may be maintained by venting excess pressure when it builds up by devolving more power to the people, for there is no doubt that the maximum entropy of society occurs when everyone runs their own life ion some environment which prevents physical [and psychological] harm, ie unjust use of power.
Buddha - nature - grace. Buddhists say that you have to meditate a lot to bring out your Buddha nature and receive enlightenment (= understanding acceptance a la Islam); the Christians say you cannot do this by yourself and must even wait for God to give you the grace to accept his grace. In the meanwhile, you improve your chances by doing what we tell you. Here we say that reasonable action has the best chance of bringing about grace and the manifestation of Buddha nature, but all of it depends on properly understanding the system in which we live in order
[page 118]
to use it properly. The circle of science and technology takes us along this path - (the wheel of science and technology).
Know the right thing and do it. tradespersonship. Of course 'do it' includes do nothing, and it may be all sorts of actions that fall into the partition 'right' The knowledge comes from science and its disseminated through the community by education, and where necessary testing, licensing etc. But the whole system will fail if the theology, ie the big picture is wrong, because the partition into right an wrong will be wrong.
The difficulty with all the old religions begins with their world vies, original sin, suffering, etc etc. We have to be more realistic and make certain that whatever picture of human existence we paint is consistent with the most probable world pointed by science.
We are on our own here in the world but we have a pretty good idea how we got here and of the forces or potentials which motivate us. What we are looking for is productivity, the minimum constraint (work) for the maximum freedom. We model freedom and constraint by thinking about communication and errors, and if we can deploy this power properly, we could move to higher levels of entropy, jut as an error free computer chips enable us t make large calculations without interruption. Headroom, entropy, tolerance, truth.
No unnecessary secrets. This sort of thing is only probable in an environment of sufficient wealth for everyone to meet their needs without the need to rip off someone else.
INSIGHT == ACTION
[page 119]
Rest : meditation : sleep : recreation
Why do we need these things, instead of continuous rating. Instead it takes most people effort to work 12 hours per day, 8 for the money, 4 for the family.
One form of oppression is to have to work so hard that there is no time to recreate. Other animals sleep more that we do; some less.
The ancient religions all operate at the same peer level on the same set of assumptions, basically that there are people in the know (us) and there are people who do not know (them). The world is bigger than this little stratagem in the struggle for existence, and true theology must be of the whole and able to explain, among other things, the particular theological points of view taken by the old religions. We climb from particular religion to comparative religion to inclusive religion.
To make all these things public will require a lot of energy. Wry bother? compassion, wealth, the excitement of thinking about a peaceful and durable human planetary presence with planning horizons at all scales from picoseconds to gigayears and beyond.
Invariance with respect to complexity - momentum
invariance with respect to frequency - energy
Each religion (as a business) contributes to the overall human religious capital. Our formalism must embrace them all, variant network structures in human groups. We want one human network with no barriers arising from higher organisations like tribes or nations.
Human communicational symmetry + small world network.
[page 120]
Why do organisations constrain their members? Do molecules constrain atoms? No. They just form and occupy a product space of all of their attributes so that every possible interaction between them is accessible and no natural configurations have to be suppressed. The tensor product? Must always learn more mathematics.
Gas supply: the denser the network (more sources and connections) the more secure it is. True for every network. The more connections you have the safer you are. The Buddhas are right about suffering to some degree. No connections, no food, loneliness, homelessness all bring pain because they bring insecurity and unfitness. We have a need and so a desire to remedy them. Unfortunately (perhaps_ in the era of evolutionary adaptation things were mostly scarce, so obesity and other diseases of overfulfillment (greed, keeping up with the Joneses) were not common, but these can be dealt with in the Greek way, by knowledge and a bit of self control, rather than by entering an order and meditating all the time. Supererogation is as far from the middle way as starvation.
