Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 4 March 2007 - Saturday 10 March 2007]
[page 108]
Sunday 4 March 2007
Reference frame = observer. Physics is devoted to reconciling what different observers see by transforming between reference frames. Theology seeks a model of god in the same way by reconciling different people's feelings about the world with one another so that we can all work together for survival, peace and well-being.
Minkowski space is 'spread out' by 4-dimensional invariant intervals ds2 which are causally related by the light cone structure. We may look at the interval between observers as the building block of the Universe. [the distance between points where events occur].
Monday 5 March 2007
The speed of light = maximum speed. Every process
[page 109]
has a maximum speed which contributes to the causal structure of the world it experiences and can influence. Human beings, by assuming prosthetic speeds in all sorts of dimensions (not least movement from point to point) have vastly increased our input (knowledge, resources) and output (ideas, products) causal cones.
Everything has a maximum speed. The maximum maximum (corresponding to the minimum algorithm for moving from point to point in the three space subspace of fourspace) is the speed of light.
General relativity says that every source is what it is and that is that. The output of a given source, however, has many different receivers that give different meanings to the signals they receive from a given source. The absorption of a photon by a hydrogen atom in intergalactic space is has a different meaning to the absorption of a photon in a vertebrate eye.
Writing has the power to communicate truth and to delude, sometimes catastrophically, as in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Communist China and now Imperial America.
Tuesday 6 March 2007
Evolution depends upon the exponential power of ordered juxtaposition/concatenation.
[page 110]
Wednesday 7 March 2007
We observe points (ie events) by being in communication with them [ie being part of them]. We extract patterns (eg waves) by modelling the relationships of points to one another by measuring against some frame of reference, ie a set of sensor positions in a diffraction experiment.
A continuum, by definition, contains no information, like an unmodulated carrier.
Thursday 8 March 2007
We may see the history of mathematics as he interplay of geometry and arithmetic. From this pint of view, what does Cohen's proof hat the continuum hypothesis is independent of set theory tell us? That .continuum/ is not an arithmetic concepts although the epsilon-delta people have done a good job of establishing a link between real numbers and the geometric continuum. Such continua, however, are continuous by high cardinality rather than continuous in the Aristotelian sense, by overlap.
There is not much to be said about (or with) continua. Data is carried by discrete symbols and communication theory shows s how to reduce overlap to as close to zero as we want.
Here we set out, in the manner of a physicist, to quantify 'actus purus' and use this
[page 111]
quantization to exhibit the identity of the Universe of experience and what is traditionally called god.
I seriously need this fellowship, either to break into the mainstream or have it explained to me in detail where I am wrong and explore ways in which the model might be transformed to become a more reliable model of the world we inhabit.
Behind each message is a network of other messages eg the neural processing necessary to write this sentence. This is in a way holographic, the whole world is present (albeit abstractly) at every point (?) in the world. POINT = EVENT = ACT (OF COMMUNICATION). This is a feature of a network of peers - any feature of any element is available to al, but will be downloaded (shared) at different rates by different clients.
An heuristic principle - if the world started as a simple undifferentiated 'singularity' it can't be all that hard to understand. The singularity is staring us in the face at every point = in every event (including staring in the face). All human experience from birth to death is available to each individual (multiplication) but none of us is likely to explore it all. Many human states are relatively improbable, like winning a lottery or being tortured to death.
Evidence
[page 112]
Friday 9 March 2007
Coming up with a good sentence (embodied insight) is a random event (like a quantum event) with a certain frequency which is determined by the embodied experience of the speaker, both evolutionary and personal, ie the speaker's 'preparation'.
Symmetry with respect to complexity 'parallel transports' us from the initial singularity through to an open boundary that points toward god = infinity = the unknown.
PURE ACT = NO CONSTRAINT
The only constraint on the permutation group of distinct objects is the cardinal of the group generator, ie its alphabet. The whole group is effectively infinite (ie uncontrollable) relative to its alphabet.
Saturday 10 March 2007
General covariance is not computable. All that is required for an event is the perfect execution of the sub-events leading to the event in question. So every move of a tightrope walker is devoted to keeping the average centre of gravity directly over the average position of the rope so that on average, the walker does not fall.
[page 114]
The cause of uncertainty is incomputability. Local uncertainty is called by local incomputability (my inability to optimize my path through the events that involve me.
General covariance: we can all be exactly ourselves. But what if myself is a murderer?
Bucur Theological Studies 68 (2007) pp 92-112
'On the basis of this narrative, Judaism recognizes the true God -- "the God who works wonders" (Psalm 77.14). who delivered from bondage, led through the Red Sea, gave the Law, showed himself to the prophets, and continued to love and chastise his people. The same can be affirmed of Islam, with the qualification that the history of salvation is extended to encompass Jesus and culminate with the final revelation to Mohammed.' Bucur
Wishful thinking, except that we can make this god for ourselves, maximizing love and minimizing chastisement. Sacks Uncle Tungsten 'the history of chemical discovery was inseparable from the quest for light.' page 47 Sacks
From the selfish gene's point of view the key to growth is to get its phenotypes to reproduce. If theology is a gene, religion is its phenotype.
[113]
A quantitative model, as used in physics, is on with sufficient detail to model the system under consideration in sufficient detail to account for the flows of energy, momentum and information through the system. While energy and momentum have a simple relativistic connection, information, ie entropy, may increase exponentially with the growth in energy, by lowering the temperature, that is expanding. Order, by making notation 'position sensitive', makes possible to transfinite increase in cardinality made available by permuting the elements of a set to form different strings. As a result, a transfinite model is necessary to model successive formal slices through dynamic fourspace.
DYNAMICS ' {form = functions which solve the following differential equation, itself a form resulting from a set of constraints on possible forms}
The ancients had not fully assimilates the kinematic idea (embodied in calculus) of assuming a string of points at rest (time slices etc) which can be integrated to describe the phenomenon.
Integration assumes cardinal arithmetic, and we usually work on the discrete (sum) or continuous(integral) measure spaces to arrive at meaningful answers.
The precision of any ordered digital physical system will eventually be greater than any measurable analogue.
[page 115]
But physics says all measuring is counting with respect to time, on other words we measure rates of occurrence of various events. Every event is a mutual measurement a match.
Time itself is a count, so we measure count per count, a ratio which we attempt to explain mathematically. Quantum mechanics has done his beautifully for physics, using a system of continuous functions on a continuous space considered to be a deterministic (computable) system which predicts not events, but the probabilities of various categories of events, like the emission of a photon with a certain wavelength and polarization, to be determined by counting. What a given ratio 'means' is explained by the circumstances of the count, that is the physical situation in which the count was obtained, which may be sheep running through a farm gate or particle interacting with a certain detector.
The basic hope in quantum computing is that we can force the error rate as close to zero as we want by the use of finite (commercially acceptable) resources. Knill
Like a photomultiplier, sensitive senses use a microscopic event to trigger an exponentially growing avalanche which eventually gets big enough for an experimenter to see. Amplification and attenuation.
Enzymes amplify certain reaction channels at the expense of others.
[page 116]
Religion is a service (like sewerage) which must be done properly if it is to work. No despot can force water to run uphill, its nature is against it, just as human nature is a poor fit to some of the dictates of the ancient religions and the governments that espouse them.
The mathematical (digital) precision of the Universe: Maxwell: 'Though in the course of ages catastrophes has occurred and may yet occur in the heavens, though ancient systems may be dissolved and new systems evolved out of their ruins, the [atoms] out of which these systems are built - the foundation stones of the material Universe - remain unbroken and unworn. They continue to this day as they were created - perfect in number and measure and weight. Quoted Sacks p 267. Sacks
The onset of my 'vocation' shut down my life to a large degree as I gradually fell into poverty, chastity and obedience. Was this the intention of those who devised the monastic routine - to try to make oneself into an angel, having no carnal knowledge.
The observable Universe of atomic events is countable, the countable alphabet of the Universe as a source. The meaning space of these events is uncountable.
There is meaning on both ends of a message, the meaning encoded by the sender and the meaning decoded by the receiver. These should be the same at the physical level but they can be very different at other levels.
[page 117]
Christianity if inherently fundamentalist (of low cardinality( because its whole foundation is a tiny body of data (the Bible) as opposed to the whole infinite reality of the world.
Rename natural religion project to natural culture project on the grounds that religion is too narrow an contentious. So we say culture is the technology of peace, and theology is the science cognate to culture. Culture we define as the whole download to each newborn.
We may conceive money as a flow akin to the flow of probability in quantum mechanic. The flow is normalized to one, that is, formally speaking, it is an incompressible fluid. This means that no [matter how] much the flow ramifies, if we take a section right across all the ramifications, we find that the total flow is the same in every such cut. We can imagine this system as a closed network of pipes containing an incompressible fluid in a state of motion. We may abstract this pipework into a computer network, where by computer we mean Turing machine and by network we mean that these machines can communicate and so act to change one another's state of motion [and establish some sort of continuity with one another]
While quantum mechanics describes the flow of an incompressible fluid, proper time orders the local succession of cuts through our for dimensional dynamic network. This is a tautology. Since time is one dimension of the manifold, it is inherently dynamic. And we see that while a subset of the world's dynamics proceed in a quasi deterministic manner, unpredictability is rife, as the standard understanding of quantum mechanics suggest. The flow of
[page 118]
incompressible probability is not in itself sufficient to determine what is actually happening at a given point (event) in the network. [physics measures the rate of flow of symbols in different channels, but not the meaning that they carry]
A network is a four dimensional (in real space) mesh of events locally time ordered. A forest of light cones.
