Notes
[Notebook: DB 59 Draughts]
[Sunday 16 July 2006 - Saturday 22 July 2006]
[page 75]
Sunday 16 July 2006
It seems to be fact of life that people cannot live peacefully together without come sort of control, that is boundaries placed on human behaviour. The broadest of such boundaries is 'do no harm' whose corollary is 'suffer no harm'. The trick is to structure a society where these injunctions can be realized, (at least as well as possible).
Much of this work is an effort to reestablish my personal authenticity after being brought up as a defective being, a sinner, prone to evil, worthless in the eyes of God, etc etc. This doctrine is fundamentally a means of social control. Since the people tend to
[page 76]
evil, the sovereign is entitled to treat them roughly. Better still, talk them into being rough on themselves by vowing poverty, chastity and obedience, leading a life of self imposed deprivation. No one need be conscious of this strategy for it to work toward maintaining the status quo and keeping the peace. That the reasons for cooperation are spurious does not lessen the value of cooperation of if contributes to fitness.
Following Einstein, we need communication interpretations of the Einstein tensor and the stress-energy (matter) tensor.
Monday 17 July 2006
A Zee Fearful Symmetry Zee
Zee page 27: 'That the exchange of particles can produce a force was one of the most profound conceptual advances in physics.'
Does gravitation depend upon the exchange of special particles ('gravitons') or is it simply a product of the overall communication in the Universe (as Einstein's 'geometrodynamic' model seems to say that the phenomenon arises purely from the geometry of space, not from particle exchange.)
Tuesday 18 July 2006
Quantum field theory as traffic analysis. Things only happen when all the conditions are fulfilled. I can
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be pretty certain that there is one thing stopping my car from going and I just have to find it. Lonergan's 'virtually unconditioned', Aquinas 'bonum ex integro '.
The path integral method is a method for the the probability of fulfillment of a certain set of conditions, ie particle starts at x at time t and finishes at x' at time t'. The classical path of a moving particle is observable at every point and a model of it can be generated by the principle of least action. In quantum mechanics this becomes the principle of stationary phase, since when things are all in phase amplitudes add and the probability of the event approaches the classical limit if one exists.
The bonum ex integro serves as an inhibitor on process, since any consistent[abstract] process (like the Carnot cycle) can only be implemented by a physical process like the motions of pistons, valves, electrons, etc that go to make a practical implementation of the Carnot cycle. This all sounds rather banal but it has to be said since it is a pixel in the picture.
The world is in a state of panic about terrorism even though the dangers are quite negligible in the general scheme of things. War has moved from gigantic armies and millions of tons of metal with high localized destruction to a more diffuse and local entity. So the total destruction is say 10% of what it used to be, but its impact is up 1000%, so that to many the 'war on terror' seems as bad and doomladen as the world wars. In a way this is a good thing because it paves the way for a new stable symmetry, cooling or
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crystallization, a relaxation of the state of radical inequality that has characterized humanity since the invention of slavery and conquest, ie military power.
Personal integrity, ie real professionality: I do it because I believe it.
The love of continuity seems related to the love of integrity, in that discontinuity is equivalent to disintegration. From this point of view, continuity is equivalent to a 'language area' where all elements can communicate using a common protocol, but must use translations to enter into the spaces of neighboring language groups. The manifold structure (language = coordinate patch) or curved space is reflected in the interactions of language groups.
Platonic panic: fear that the philosopher kings will lose control of the democratic rabble.
Wednesday 19 July 2006
West, Lazarus: 'We think in centuries and plan for eternity. Page 54. West
We communicate by observables which are represented by operators, the simplest of which is represented by addition of unit matrices (?). Most of quantum theory seems to resolve around addition - integration.
West page 66: 'There will be no hope of reform in the Roman Catholic Church, there will be no restoration of confidence between the faithful and the hierarchy, unless and until a reigning pontiff is prepared to admit and abjure the errors of his predecessors . . . .'
[page 79]
The principal function of scientific method is that it calms the conflict in social discourse by directing our decisionmaking into paths acceptable to the Universe in which we live. In the beginning, cities were human black holes. Somewhere I have read that the average country boy moving to London only survived a few years before succumbing to disease or violence. It was a big step forward when we learned that we mustn't drink water contaminated with our own excrete. Slowly, cities began to develop the water supply and sewerage system that make them ecologically possible [ie not contradictory to human existence].
Scientific method is built on the same mathematical foundation as the art of gambling, probability theory.
Science cures social delusions, like we can all live happily ever after without going to the trouble of devising practical methods, like sewerage, of achieving these aims. In other words it steers the constitutions f human groups toward survival.
You might object that we are confusing engineering and politics here. We answer that objection that we are here concerned with developing a mathematical model of human groups which will apply equally well in the design of sewerage systems and social systems. We can say in brood terms that the sewer system is based on the idea of conserved flow. What this means is that as much dirty water comes out the end as clean water goes in at the beginning. We could create a closed system by cleaning this water ad putting it back through, or we can dispose of it in our environment and allow the world's
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ecosystem services [to do the work].
One of the most damaging illusions enjoyed by our Marxist friends is that religion is worthless. When it came to the crunch, Marxist regimes acted like state religions and acted with breathtaking callousness to those who did not fit in. They succeeded in killing many more people that the Inquisition ever dreamed of. And since the cold war history has shown that applied religion can be more like speed than opium in the hands of the George Bushes and radical Imams of the world.
They thought that religion and the state would wither away but they implemented both with unprecedented resources and thoroughness.
The biggest delusion is that we are different and special.
Every organism requires resources to survive. The essence of peacemaking is to replace rape and plunder methods of resource acquisition with fair trade. Our aim is to provide a mathematical model that gives definition to fair trade and see if it fits the physical world.
West page 127: 'In the Roman Catholic Church, he whole system -- the hierarchy, the education, the clergy, the Curial administration, the Electoral college -- is designed to perpetuate the status quo and eliminate along the way any and every aberrant element.'
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Peace, memory, retribution and image scoring: 'The Vikings burned Dublin centuries ago. The Irish have never forgotten it. West, Lazarus, page 264.
Thursday 20 July 2006
West, Lazarus: 'Before you stage a revolution, think what you have to put in its place -- otherwise you are left with a vacuum and seven devils rush in to take possession.' page 268
My current effort is to understand quantum field theory and fit it into my model of god. Although this fit would be very pleasing, it is not altogether necessary because it seems that the model fits the observed Universe quite welt at higher peer levels, in the region of human intercourse, and we can use complexity invariance to move up and down form there. Nevertheless it would be an excellent icing on the cake if I could find a model of my god's body which fits and explains the observations and model of current physical theory and in particular makes sense of the relationship between gravitation and particle physics.
Our model of the creative power of the Universe is the exponential function e = (1 + 1/n)n, which shows is that things can only stay the same if their generations are identical. So the limits to non-creation are set by the limits to identity. . . . So we have a boundary between creative and non-creative, and we can further divide creative into growth (en) and decline (e-n).
Simultaneous growth and decline gives us the complex exponential eix, which is periodic.
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IDEALISM = SPIN = efforts by the competing elements of a system to grow. DNA (eg) is an idealized version of a species.
The art of the possible, that is the space of chains of events that can lead (path integral) from a to be. Feynman: sniff out the proper course.
The first step on our way ahead is to ditch the idea that we are something special. Most know the Christian story: god created the world just so that we could see how great he is. Then we fell, we redeemed by a blood sacrifice and now the good ones among us will be rewarded with the eternal vision of God. But who is good? Evolutionary theory gives a very broad practical definition: what survives is good (fit). Idealists might argue that by saying that nature is red in tooth and claw and they want none of that. Often their peaceful enclave is maintained by armies and police forces that are redder in tooth and claw than any animal. Animals, on the whole, only fight and hunt when necessary, and are not nearly as given to genocide as 'civilized' nations have been seen to be with their extermination camps and incendiary and high explosive destruction of cities full of people.
The ratio of civilian to military deaths is a measure of the control (or lack of it) exercised by civilians over the military.
West page 281 'If its your war, no. You will lose it. If it is God's,
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you win it, though not perhaps in the way you hope.
GOD -== WORLD Spin is part of god, and all the other tricks of survival.
A theological blueprint for Roman Catholic reform. Theological Studies. One can interpret almost every phrase in the catholic dogmatic lexicon in the light of the identification got == world and have to change only 'one bit' of the original statement to make it consistent with the new.
The welfare state, based on economic rationalism (ie maximizing the entropy of the economy) can provide food, shelter, health care and so on, but may need the help of religion to give meaning.
On giving up arbitrary power.
Friday 21 July 2006
We inhabit two spaces: the physical space in which we move and act with our bodies; and the psychological space in which we move and act with mind and communication. This dichotomy of space is reflected in the notions body and soul, and more recently and technically in the distinction between the four dimensional spacetime in which we and other macroscopic objects move, and Hilbert space, which we use to describe the motions of very small objects. The modern union of these two space is quantum field theory, an uneasy union that suggests that there us something going on that we have missed. We cannot
[page 84]
avoid the union, because it is enormously productive of insights and technologies. What we seen is a new reconciliation of these spaces based on a communication paradigm.
There is a mathematical theory of communication, which we briefly describe. The theory explains the discrete nature of our communications in terms of error avoidance and correction. Examples are language and speciation.
The oil companies are reconceiving themselves as energy companies; so the churches can reconceive themselves as scientific : theological blueprint.
The only rule is survival = fitness.
SPACE - ENTROPY - POSSIBILITY
THING - INFORMATION - ACTUALITY
are two ways to say the same thing.
Begin an explanation of the configuration space of language illustrated by the configuration space of lego like adherent bricks = atoms.
The procrustean quality of Catholicism is repellent to many individuals, including myself. Yet it has a certain value, which we would do well to preserve if we can. Its failures are most obvious in the interface with the real world - it sticks to a model for which, in principle, no evidence is available because its god is invisible in most senses of the word.
Writing is equivalent to building, ordering structural elements
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to achieve a preconceived plan. In the case of building, I am trying to make an environment in which I can function with maximum productivity which serves to increase my fitness. With writing I am working on the same thing but in a different space.
Theological blue print - the Church learns a lot from 'heretics'
Although a computer is a dynamic device, we operate it in a quasi-static mode, ie in a formal (kinetic) rather than physical (dynamic) mode. The dynamics must be there, of course, and enormous effort is devoted to speeding them us and miniaturizing them.
Plato's idea modernized: field is a function of spacetime.
Saturday 22 July 2006
Our minds are extremely plastic at birth and we very quickly find our way around our local language(s) and culture(s), if these things exist. Now we know that our minds are processed by neural networks, and we have learnt a little about how to design them so that they learn from their environments.
From my critical pint of view, all the world's religions, at least in their upper echelons, live in fantasy worlds. Can I reply be expected to believe the Christian story given what I know about the size and evolution of the Universe, of the solar system and myself and all the other forms of life that share the world.? No.
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The ancient religions all deny our cosmic roots and belittle the human world to what amounts to the fantasies of the old men who have predominant control of corporate religion. To continue to promote these products in the light of current knowledge places them in the same moral bin as those tobacco companies that promote their product.
Here I would like to take advantage of the generally low moral tone of the religion industry to promote a religious view of my own. I call it natural religion. I would like to have called it fundaligionism, but the Fabulous Furry freak Brothers beat me to it.
As we have said, traditional religions live in fantasy worlds. What we might today call science fiction. Such fictions are valuable, in that they lay the foundations for peaceful social protocols, socially productive cooperation, life, growth and survival. No one can gainsay the huge progress made by the Christian West. It is all based on the trust and sharing that make our markets fair and accountable. The same can be said for all the other religions in their heyday. From a biological point of view, we take religion to be the set of protocols acquired by the newborn to enable them, in the long run, to contribute to the survival of the group.
Resources are limited, so that expanding societies will eventually clash. Here we see the downside of religion, which is exactly the same as the downside of personal integrity. I am prepared to suffer a few hardships to keep myself alive, and even sacrifice parts of my body to
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save the rest. This is reasonable behaviour and it seems as we look back through history that fighting people singly or in groups has long been a feature of human history. It seems that we are smart enough to increase our numbers, but not smart enough to deal with the consequences. This feature of our existence reached its most recent peak in the twentieth century where wars and misguided political religions directly claimed more than 100 million lives and blighted the lives of many more. At the same time, improved living conditions around the world ignited an unprecedented increase in the human population of the world. This was accompanied by population loss, or extinction, for most other species except for the ones we have domesticated along with ourselves.
The course ahead is very clear: we have to overcome all our religious squabbles and work together to find a viable way to live with the planet and ourselves. The first step toward this is a globally acceptable theology, that is a common view of our roots and our place in this world. This scientific method is providing, but many resist it and stick to the old story. Why?
'Professional' religion only exists because people can make a living our of it. And the entrenched group of professionals are onto a pretty good thing. Our Marxist brethren thought religion was the opium of the people. Then, in various parts of the world, they installed one party dictatorships which sought to guide the minds of their people using the same techniques as they had learnt from their (predominantly) Christian mentors.
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Religion is a necessary art of human society; as we model it here it is the soul of society. So global religion is the soul of global society.
To write an essay, we set up a basis and then try to describe vectors and sets of vectors n this basis. What we are trying to capture are interactions between things which are independent of any basis. But a basis itself is a thing, and so we can take the interaction of a basis and the thing it is used to describe as a paradigm for the interactions between things in general. Every thing may be considered to have a local [basis] from which it measured its interactions with all the other thing around it.
God helped Newton by giving him an absolute basis in which to work. Einstein found getting away from bases the hardest thing (ref?). My local basis is myself, and I see everything in relationship to myself. Society is born when people learn to transform themselves so that they can see what things look like from another's point of view, and gradually come to the view hat we must all treat one another in a 'covariant' manner [not 'respecting persons'] if we are to form a consistent (and therefore peaceful) system.
One problem with the old religions is that they have a very narrow vision of the nature of the world. As we would expect from people writing 3000 years ago when the chances of surviving childhood were pretty slim. The breadth of vision of a community is a simple function of the number of points of view in that society.
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I am my own generalized inertial frame. I observe all the basic features of humanity that every other human observes ('the same laws of nature') and all communications come to me at the speed ('c') that all people receive communications, ie in our transfinite peer group, we are all equally capable of decoding messages).
Formalize this. I represent myself in the transfinite network. A formal description of myself that is identical for all other people and includes my relationship to all the elements of my environment.
The world must salve the same sort of models as we do as it finds its way around its constraints.
The thermodynamic entropy scenario points to 'heat death'. The quantum scenario points to 'recursive life'
The cosmological constant problem suggests that we have bogged down in detail and need to back off for a bigger picture.
The scientific method is empirical, and so cooperative because we are all working on the same Universe, and so our results are comparable and communicable.
When we make the Universe divine, the laws of nature take on a new meaning.
Local in a species = individual. Local in spacetime = inertial.
Princes make the peasants work for them, ie they take some
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of their output, ostensibly for maintaining peace and security.
. . .
Empirical = by communicating with the world, the primary source.
Act is relative: I observe only acts of which I am the terminus. The rest I do not see. If I se two things interact, it is because they are also interacting with me.
Can we say that Hitler's misuse of the German Army was an element in his downfall.
Can we say that much of the world's education is dumbed down by traditional Religion. We have the Australian Catholic University which claims to be a university. First in the list of traditional features of a university is freedom of expression, and freedom in the thought behind the expression. Not in the ACU. According, at least to the last Pope, Catholic Universities owe institutional fidelity to the Church. John Paul II Consequently their theology departments are a joke, tied as they are to Catholic orthodoxy.
The Church belittles us. Instead of see us as little gods with a thirteen billion year heritage of untold generations of creativity, we are the (now) flawed products of a bitchy little god who effectively put out a contract on his own Son to make himself feel better.
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These are good times for the religion industry. Religion came on the global radar about the same time as OPEC's birth. It began to emerge that the divide between oil haves (enough) and have nots (enough) mirrored the divide between Islam and Christianity. After centuries of the passivity of weakness, many Islam oriented communities found themselves sitting on huge wealth (due to the efforts of their colonial ex-masters)
This religion differs from most traditional ones in that it is not a cult of one or a few personalities like Jesus of Nazareth or Buddha, but a cult of every personality in the Universe, ourselves included. To be a personality is to exist independently and communicate with one's environment, like an atom, a sheep or a human. The fundamental prerequisites for personality are very simple (?) and apply equally to every personality in the Universe.
define personality = a source of communication with a soul.
You've heart of heavy water. Now for the first time we release fat water. Water you can live on.
The Universe acquires static structure by time division multiplexing, and we might suppose that the first split is from 1-space x0 to two space, x0, x1 and then to four-space xmu o =<x =< 4. Then what? a series of generations of leptons and bosons leading to stable atoms, stable molecules and us and everything else that we describe as life. The boundary lies between viruses and bacteria (archaea?) Virus is software which needs a living machine to execute it.
