Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 18 March 2007 - Saturday 24 March 2007]
[page 126]
Sunday 18 March 2007
Monday 19 March 2007
SMH From a scientific point of view, Christian theology is an hypothesis, a narrative describing a history and a model of the forces driving the observed events. From the Christian point of view, the evidence for the hypothesis is in the Bible. For science, the Bible may contain evidence for many historical reconstructions of human theological history, but there are many other
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scenarios possible and worth investigating.
Christianity has contributed enormously to human fitness, as is evidenced by their numbers, political power and environmental impact. It did this by constraining the human mind to the ideas encoded in one relatively small source, the Bible. The power of religion is that it binds large groups of often unrelated people together in a cooperative group. The united we stand, divided we fall factor. The practical power of cooperation is such that it may not much matter why people are cooperating, whether it be religious injunction or economic advantage. In other words, we may be able to retain and expand the advantages of Christianity by rebuilding its fundamental model of reality.
Drawing on the book of Genesis, Christianity divides reality into God and the world. Further, in its institutional forms, it assumes that it is the unique carrier of a message from God about how the world got here, what has happened and what lies in the future. Over all this is the promise that how one thinks and acts in this life control's one's condition in the next, eternal bliss or eternal pain. . . .
Title: 'On the religion question'
The driving force of science is to discern the structure of the world so that we can increase our fitness.
Any fundamental position is circular, and therefore hypothetical.
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We postulate an 'other' god because it gives is a living between this god and 'the people'. But is this necessary? Here we say not and proceed on the assumption that the Universe of human experience is itself divine.
So you say being drawn and quartered is divine, just like being escorted to a feather bed by a potential mate. The short answer is yes, good and evil are part of God. You will say that this is impossible, given the well known properties of God, omnipotence, omniscience, eternity and so on. How can you even begin to say that thee is any similarity between god and the world.
I answer that it all depends on how you see God and the world. A scientist would say that theological questions, like questions in all the other sciences, are model dependent. The questions we ask depend on what we already know, or think we know.
If the Universe is divine, so that every human experience is experience of divinity, theology can be a science like all the other sciences : a creative search for models grounded on the requirement that better models are more useful and probably more beautiful as well.
Christianity is cybernetic insofar as it teaches us (or purports to tech us) how to steer toward heaven. There are two heavens, here and hereafter. Christian institutions tend to steer their beneficiaries
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toward heaven here by offering the faithful, ie the controlled, the slaves, heaven in the hereafter.
Ashby 133. 'A common and very powerful constraint is continuity'.' [the argument from continuity.] 'It is a constraint because whereas the function that changes arbitrarily can undergo any change, the continuous function can change at each step only to a neighbouring value.' Ashby [this is how we break big computations down into 'atomic' logical operations]
Continuity constrains both quantum mechanic and general relativity and given general covariance, may be the only physical constraint. [here for 'physical continuity' we substitute 'logical continuity' first proposed by Aristotle as a 'syllogism' a 'discourse in which certain things having been stated, something else follows of necessity for their being so' . Aristotle Prior Analytics] When we break the continuity constraint, we come to the full permutational variety. Continuity is a variety reducing symmetry connected to the conservation of energy and momentum.
Tuesday 20 March 2007
General relativity and quantum mechanics both run on vectors and operators and the dot product. That is the basis toolkit, a set of ordered sets. A 'measurement, on the other hand, leads to a count of the various processes that can be constructed with the toolkit.
I am a vast array of coupled chemical processes. These processes form a control system. When the system goes outside certain bounds we have disease, injury and death, all of which are from an abstract point of view, errors. Error is a relative term. General covariance tells us that all
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transformations (processes) are equal, and so none can be called an error. It is only when we start constructing more complex things out of physical components, the possibility of an error (relative to the desired process) arises. The shell may explode in the breech and kill the gunners, not their enemies. Suppressing error means keeping entropy down, and this can only be done with communication, that is constraint.
We se here how constraint is creative. Investigations of error correction in quantum computations show that the error correcting overhead decreases sharply as the precision of the gates is improves. Classical computers (I have heard) make about 1 error per 1018 bits processed. At present quantum gates are very much worse than that.
In classical physics we map spacetime points onto points in a four dimensional space x, y, z, t which serves as a grid for measurement. In relativity physics, we map events onto the orthogonal grid not directly but through a (set of) functions, the metric. The metric at each point transforms the events at that point into some standard form, the spherically, axially symmetrical etc. Looking for symmetries that let us 'see into' structures.
Every observer is defined by a 'proper' coordinate system into which the rest of the world is transformed. So my structure transforms my world into the world I [see]. This structure is no different in principle (only in complexity) to the transformations
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of general relativity. All that happens is that we observe general covariance in a much more complex space, not the wave function of an electron by my 'wave function' (constituent function, soul).
Wave functions are quite mysterious enough to be the subject of mystical and religious interpretations. Let us call the wave function of the Universe the 'world soul' a la [Plato and many others]. Wolf
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Entering a period of turbulence. What am I doing here. Is it dangerous. Will it increase my security (in a probabilistic sense)? The answer to the last is I hope yes. I want to trade useful ideas for money. Sometimes I have doubts about my capabilities as a plumber (when things do not go according to pan) let alone as a merchant of ideas and advice about religion. While it would be ice to be in business, first the product has to be tested, that is represented and criticized in the scientific literature. The fellowship would be a big step toward this but also demands a change of life. On the other hand I have done rather well to be able to sit here and think without moving too much for thirty years.
Need cooling. What cools me most is extrapolating myself across the Universe, seeing that my life has a lot n common with all the other entities that come and go in the Universe.
Thursday 22 March 2007
From a cybernetic point of view, the initial singularity might be defined to have one state and an entropy of 0. How did this entropy increase to the current value, which [we think] is very large. One does not hear much about this question since the second law of thermodynamics seems to say that at lease entropy cannot decrease, so the big bang cannot go [backwards].
Further, quantum mechanics seems to suggest that entropy is constant as a result of normalization. This is not so. As long as the probabilities of the states involved in a particular event add up to 1, quantum mechanics is happy. But the entropy varies as log n where n is the number of states whose probabilities add up to 1. The quantum method for increase in the number of states is the tensor product and entanglement. Entanglement acts to somewhat reduce the variety of states in the product space.
If we multiply two spaces with two basis states each, we get a space with four basis states. We represent a two state system with vectors |a> and |not-a> or |1> and |0>. Such a two dimensional space is called a qubit, the simplest quantum building block with the potential to build the Universe. Let us say that the entropy of such a two state system is 1. Some would say the entropy is much higher because we must take into account the infinite number of superpositions |q> = a|1> + b|0> (sqrt (a2 + b2) = 1) (normalization)
Since a and b are continuous complex numbers, they may take on an uncountable infinity (ℵ1) of possible states and so entropy (assuming equiprobability) log(ℵ1) = ℵ0, a countable infinity. We will return to this question. The important fact is that we can assign entropy aleph(n-1) to a system of aleph(n) states which occur with probability 1/aleph(n). H = log W
Logarithmic scaling is the inverse of exponential scaling.
From an observational point of view the entropy of a qubit is maximized at 1 when a = b, so seeing |0> or |1> is equiprobable, like heads and tails.
A basis for the product of two qubits is |00>, |01>, |10>, |11>.
We can use this basis to write entangled (Bell?) states
eg:
Hobson 'a tensor [is] a linear map from some number of vectors to the real numbers.' Bit like the collapse of the wave function, where a vector of great complexity is reduced to a probability.
A tensor is an 'algorithm' which might be realized in a piece of software that describes the exact procedure for reducing a set of vectors to a scalar. Scalars are
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the messages in the mathematical network.
All this mechanism is linear and continuous, a strong constraint that keeps entropy down. The next freest is linear and discrete, then on-linear and discrete )since all is discrete and in God there is no 'empirical residue' Lonergan page 50 sqq.).
The only antidote to the fear that this might all be rubbish is the correspondence between these ideas and reality. By testing thee correspondences one becomes confident that one is describing the world as it is. Such truth, of course, may be a source of fear, the fear of inevitable death, the fear that our social, political, economic and environmental systems may become nastier, more brutish and shorter as they are in some places.
Friday 23 March 2007
We can use continuous Lagrangians and the calculus of variations to constrain the dynamics of continuous systems because continuity severely limits the variety of systems. What about more complex systems where we hold the total amount of human communication invariant while varying approaches to achieving this level of communication ie minimizing the action (environmental impact) of the fulfillment of some desire.
In order to study control, we must first establish an uncontrolled system, a wilderness as a space in which to define controls and observe their effects. This is the transfinite network. Then we apply constraints, starting with cardinal constraints, 1, 2, 3, . . .
The main thing we want to derive from a model of god is clear information on the consequences of different ways of interacting with one another, from murder through oppression and support to love. More generally, how to act for the bet. [and how to design the system so that what is good for the whole is good for the part] Faith --> hope --> charity. Model --> effective action --> community.
How do we differentiate wilderness from community? Being on my own, vs being part of a group. The advantage of the latter accounts for the evolution of complexity - to survive an entity must be able to reduce the variety of its environment to something near zero.
PS to oeaw (?) I have remembered my one publication, half a chapter in Mary Elliott's compilation, Ground for Concern, A nuclear free world, with Michael Bell. Elliott In my part I set out to apply the principle of requisite variety to the control of human affairs, basically the more complex control the less complex. I can now go further and say (1) that we can assign vectors to every particle in the Universe, and some would say to the Universe itself, the 'wavefunction' of the Universe. A vector and a function are the same thing, a mapping between two sets of elements with the same cardinal (the sets, that is). (2) So now we say that the complexity of the entanglement
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of two particles is greater than that of either particle alone, and so the entanglement is able to 'control' the particles to a restricted set of states. We can use this argument to learn something about the cardinality of quantum states. We begin with |q> - a(0> +b |1> ie a state expressed in terms of the base states |0> and |1>. Now we combine two of these objects to get a new states |q2> which has the basis |00>, |01>, |10>, |11>. We can divide the set of states n this basis into two classes, independent and entangled.
'And yet there should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation' Conan Doyle facsimiles (Strand Magazine) p 882. Doyle
Possibilities (eigenvalues + eigenvectors) probabilities = connection.
Evidence: follow your heart. And (Thomas) the heart follows the mind.
