Notes
[Sunday 9 March 2008 - Saturday 8 March 2008]
[Notebook: DB 63 aTheology]
[page 20]
Sunday 9 March 2008
The archetypal fixed point might be a halted Turing machine that sits there remembering its answer until someone asks it.
[page 21]
Another bright beautiful sunny day. The sun needs to be the keystone of natural religion.
The natural religion project is a technology project so it seems reasonable to have a volume on energy - corresponding to the physical layer.
Four layers: physical, biological, human, divine
What scientists are really looking for is the roots of the trees whose leaves are the phenomena of their interest.
There is a certain culling goes on among possible entries for this book, and the first point is that whatever it is has to be writable, that is stay still in my mind (which is often a whirl) for long enough to copy down. Stationary, in other words, and stationarity is slowly establishing itself in my mind as the root I am seeking for the source of the speakable, writable, usable features of the world that are in a sense dead and communicable because they do not change, ie they are error free. Periodic functions are perpetual generators of stationary points,
STATIONARITY - SYMMETRY - TIMELESSNESS - MOMENTUM
The centre of gravity of a dynamic mass is a fixed point of the dynamics.
Sitting here in the morning sin,m but ideas are socially useless without publication.
[page 22]
Becoming a preacher; getting a band together.
So the natural religion project can boil down to a catechism: A specification of natural religion.
Who made me? I am a leaf on the tree of life rooted in the initial singularity.
No mention of other religions. Do not disparage the past.
What is a catechism? Catechism - Wikipedia
How did this happen? By creative evolution, each new layer of the Universe building on the past to create a step on the way to my life.
Why did this happen? Because it could not not happen. All of reality is creative, bringing forth new realities without end.
Cherry Pie. Written creatively. Redhead
Are conspirators smarter than the rest of us. In fiction probably yes, in reality probably know. We need error free social systems where possible that detect and correct corruption as automatically as may be, and we must learn to trust these systems by making it in the interests of their operators to do their job well: town managers.
We are a corporation marketing a product so caveat emptor. We believe that people should be critical
[page 243]
of their religion and not just sit thee like dummies getting preached to.
. . .
What is a church? A church is a group of people who have come together to celebrate, discuss, criticize and develop their religion. Such groups traditionally cluster around an architectural struture and a corporate personality that manages their affairs.
What is a religion? a set of communication protocols, [passed from generation to generation, which enables a group of people to work together for their common welfare.
Why did they lie? Redhead p 115.
. . .
Cherry Pie: A Homeric tale of helplessness before the machinations of the Gods revealed through lust for life. 'I couldn't help myself' p 166,
It is the lust for life that drives us to kill because we are too tightly confined, so the energy level is too high. Peace, probability, statistical mechanics and information theory.
[page 24]
In a cybernetic system the bad news is good news because it gives us something to do: work out what went wrong and fix it.
Legal License - software for which we make no guarantee and take no responsibility for the consequences of its use.
Software for life: Religion
. . .
Karl Marx proposed a model for society and tried to use this model to predict and control the future based on knowledge of the past. His model has had a chequered history.; If anything, capitalism has grown stronger, but the more benign examples of capitalism have taken a certain amount of socialism, democracy and human rights into their mix.
We propose a broader mould, and begin to explore its conformity to experience. Everything revolves around communication, and we can order people's wellbeing by the size of the databases they are connected to like a satisfactory system of social security, health care, housing, employment and so on. It revolved around the notion that all information is embodied, to there as a coupling between physical and noetic welfare.
Network - Layering - Symmetry - Peerage - Socialism. Error and parallel processing: democracy, bring the full power of society onto social problems.
[page 25]
PEACE <==> VACUUM
Monday 10 March 2008
Omnes Bohr: Complementarity : exclusive channels. Omnes
Religion is necessary; Christianity is unsatisfactory. So I am doing this, and loving it because it is fun and promises a better world, 'meliorism', 'getting ahead', overcoming instabilities.
Microcosms of interacting organisms are chaotic because even though individual organisms and species have somewhat predictable behaviour, the interactions between them are much less constrained, so they can go anywhere. The solar system is chaotic, even though the communication channel, gravitation, is perfectly well determined (at least classically).
At the root of all this lies a cosmological principle: we are not even special intellectually. We propose a clear connection between quantum insight (the emission of a particle or absorption) and human insight. To have an insight is to emit a particle of text of the exact sort as this, an attempt to write down an insight into the model I am proposing for the world., and its application to the world. The intelligence that built s us isomorphic to the intelligence we enjoy.
Omnes page 168: Tarski: 'The rose is red is true when the rose is red.'
Tuesday 11 March 2008
Wednesday 12 March 2008
Thursday 13 March 2008
Asimov Pebble p 142: 'There's absolute proof.
'They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would e blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.' Asimov
Sit coms: the situation is the potential that structures the comedy, and the same is true of all writings. So talking about theology we adumbrate the theological potential, the need to know, and then fill in this potential with a theory of knowledge leading to a theory of the world a la Lonergan. Lonergan
A problem is a potential well. [something is not in the right place and movement is required hence the existence of force and potential]. People who fall into it gain kinetic energy and build structure which eventually makes the problem go away leaving a (local) law of nature in its place. [eg Q: how to sit up in the air working on something? A: Invent the scaffold]
Friday 14 March 2008
Applied divinity takes the lessons of the network and uses them to establish the consequences of various hypothetical
[page 34]
behaviours, which consequences enable us to rank the behaviours in some order of preference. The key concepts are layering ad peerage, all the elements of a layer, like all human beings, are (in the maximum entropy stable state) peers; the richness of a layer is to some extent guided by the richness of its alphabet, that is the layer (art or technology) it is built upon.
PEERAGE ==IDENTITY (In the quantum mechanical sense)
Application, Work, Truth, Economics, Politics, Religion, Peace, Death
A hunch: that general relativity describes a conservative network, that is a network with conserved flow, ie a meaningless (physical) network.
Johns Nature 451:1058-9: 1059 'So it was that the alignment between trust and trade became foundational to the modern patenting regime in pharmaceuticals. Today this alignment i once more cast into doubt. Again we face the problem of guaranteeing the identity of pills and powders across trade networks that extend far beyond national patenting regimes. Johns
Turner & Fisher To the rich man the spoils N451:1067. Turner & Fisher
Pure mathematics is purely formal. No energy mass or momentum is attributed to its symbols. It is required only that they be distinct and have, in some cases, a natural order. Things are a
[page 35]
bit different for mathematics incarnate because every symbol has a cost which imposes a sort of machine infinity on the system. The formal cost is the cost of error prevention.
Saturday 18 March 2008
There is nothing special about the velocity of light in the formalism of special relativity. What matters is the ratio of the relative velocity of the observers to the local velocity of communication, ie v / c abbreviated frequently to beta.
Topological fixed point theorems are geometrical. We want to talk about logical fixed points. Geometrical fixed points arise from constraints in the geometrical mappings imposed by certain boundary conditions, specifically the that set of interest be closed (ie contains its own boundary) and be convex, ie have no 'holes'. So though a circle be a closed line, it is hollow and does not have a fixed point, since it can be rotated as a whole by mapping every point to its neighbour on the 'right hand' side.
The Universe is full of holes, but also contains regions which fulfill the hypothesis of a fixed point theorem. So fixed point theorems like the stationarity of the Lagrangian have enabled us to elucidate all the particles (messages) in the Universe of physics. Every message is a particle, and every particle is a fixed point in the universal motion. The fixed points form a tree which I like to call the tree of life, whose root, the first fixed point we call the initial singularity.
How do I make these things up? My method (so my model
[page 36]
says) is the same as theirs. This gives substance (but only hypothetical substance) to the ancient feeling that if we could understand our own minds we would understand the world. This is Lonergan's position, based on an act of faith that God made it so. This is hierarchical theology: all the meaning in the system was put there by the creator. Here we allow the system to generate its own meaning, creation is ubiquitous. This is social theology. Social situations create. We see some of the larger products like babies and wars very clearly, but all these have a microstructure that goes back to the initial singularity, which turns out to be the only fixed point in the inherently dynamic world pictured by general relativity. These fixed points generate other fixed points (like the solar system) along an energy scale ranging from 1, the initial singularity to 0, the absolute symbol with no energy. In the physical world, a fixed point energy of h bar little omega / 2 is required so we see that the frequency goes to zero as the energy goes to zero.
Existence of fixed points in a 4D manifold with Minkowski signature demonstrated by Hawking and Ellis using the idea of a closed trapped surface.
Through fixed point theorems, mathematics proves the possibility of its own existence [since mathematics is a fixed point = text].
The general theory of relativity demonstrates the existence of the fixed points from which the rest of the structure of the Universe derives.
[page 37]
After much work, Einstein found that spacetime obeys a complex web of second order differential equations which governed the metric tensor which in turn provides us with a formal specification of spacetime. He sought a static solution, believing spacetime to be the static, but this required a rather arbitrary assumption in an otherwise logically tight structure.
Later we found that the Universe is not only expanding but that huge masses are on the move all over the place. The only fixed points, from a gravitational point of view re the initial singularity and black holes, as we imagine them as logical boundaries creating further logical fixed points. This is the sort of structure we are trying to capture in the Hilbert oscillator. Another hunch is that we can apply this oscillator structure at all scales of the Universe, explaining not only gravitation but the various generations of particle physics up to human social structure and beyond.
Hawking & Ellis. Relativity has 3 postulates:
a) local causality
b) local conservation of energy- momentum
c)Einstein's field equations: T (energy) = G (shape of space)
Gravity is attractive for positive matter densities. Hawking & Ellis
Einstein's theory is topological since it is based on Gaussian coordinates that have smoothness but no metric, so using tensors spacetime is completely elastic ([deformable] and may be distorted into any shape that does not require tearing.
Maines: perhaps the evidence suggests that women are designed for oral sex and taking in a male is only necessary on
[page 38]
the rate occasions when one needs to get pregnant. Maines
. . .
Peacock page 4: 'The whole ethos of special relativity is that in the frame in which a particle is at rest, its intrinsic properties such as mass are always the same independently of how fast it is moving. The general way in which quantities are calculated in relativity is to evaluate them in the rest frame where thing are simple, and then to transform them out into the lab [observer] frame. Peacock
Relativistically invariant means it still looks right when relativistically transformed.
page 10 (Formal theory) : 'It is important to realize that general relativity makes no distinction between coordinate transformations associated with motions of the observer and a simple change of variable.'
'The term gauge will occur throughout this book: it always refers to some freedom within a theory that has no observable consequences (eg the arbitrary value of del . A where A is the vector potential in electrodynamics) [this freedom makes not difference at the cardinal level of resolution , but may be quite meaningful at the ordinal level, not visible to physics].
'general covariance' = has the same form for all observers.
Gravitational fixed points: initial singularity and
[page 39]
velocity of light, geodesic, local state, interval ds2 = gmndxmdxn, [energy]
It is easy to [read and] write things, hard to give them meaning.
Both quantum mechanics and relativity start with an impossible idea, the isolated system, ie the unobserved system. Quantum mechanics tells us that a system is changed when it is observes, which we would expect, because observation is communication and communication changes things. Strictly speaking, we cannot observe an inertial system other than our own, since the communication affects both systems, accelerating them so that they cease to be inertial.
The fixed point in special relativity is the inertial frame, the state of non-acceleration, that is non-communication in which everything 'looks exactly as it is'. From this fixed point, using another inertial system, we derive the (formal) Lorentz transformations, induced by the finite velocity of light, which enable us to understand that what we see on a relatively moving frame is, transformed, identical to what we see in our local frame.
Since the velocity of light is the same in every frame, it is a local phenomenon, somehow generated locally, a ratio of 'distance' travelled to 'time taken'. At this fundamental level we consider Hamming distance, how many 'nits' are different when words are placed into correspondence, and processing time. If one act can change one bit, these measures yield a velocity of 1, since a distance of n can be travelled in the time n, so c = n/n = 1.
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