natural theology

This site is part of the The natural religion project
dedicated to developing and promoting the art of peace.

Contact us: Click to email

Notes

[Sunday 11 May 2008 - Saturday 17 May 2008]

[Notebook: DB 63 ATHEOLOGY]

Sunday 11 May 2008

[page 190]

Monday 12 May 2008

Feynman Statistical Mechanics page 2: 'Because two states of the same energy are equally probable, the probability of a state having energy E is a function only of the energy P = P (E).' Feynman

Theological Studies : The articles in this periodical are all discussions of the human condition seen through the eyes of the Christian faith. In contrast, this article sees Christianity and all its activities as an infintesimal process in a Universe of unimaginable size.

NAZARETH and statistical mechanics. Local communication beings about peace, stability and equilibrium. A recent traveller advises me than in Nazareth Christians and Muslims live together in peace, a condition that is often absent in interfaith relations. Nazareth - Wikipedia

Communication is at the heart of statistical mechanics, and where communication is perfect we get equilibrium and a black body spectrum

PEACE = SOCIAL BLACK BODY. Black body - Wikipedia

Feynman page 2: 'The probability P (Er ) that S is in a state with energy Er is proportional to the number of ways S can have

[page 191]

that energy.'

Feynman page 12: 'If an oscillator mode is excited to the N th level, that is, if E = h bar omegai N, one says that there are N photons with energy h bar omegai . Since photons are defined as the degree of excitation of a mode, one cannot consider a permutation of photons as a new state. That is, photons are indistinguishable. This point is the basis of quantum statistics and will be dealt with in a later section.'

Photons are indistinguishable in a particular state but they nevertheless enter and leave the state as individuals with energy E = h bar omega and relatively well defined regions of emission and absorption.

Lee Attwater (Dorothy Wickenden, New Yorker 5 May 2008 page 24)

'My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. [he called for leaders to] 'speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American Society, this tumor of the soul'.' Wickenden

I dig better than evr and I think I have solved the intellectual problem set for me by the failure of the Roman Catholic Faith to meet expectations.

Theological Studies : The fundamental data of theology is personal experience. The scriptures may mould experience, but they are not experience, they are accounts of someone else's experience and they all appear to have been written with certain political goals in mind. As it sees itself (and writes accordingly), the Church has a

[page 192]

mission, the mission of psychological imperialism. It wants to shape all human minds in its image by 'preaching the Gospel'.

Christianity treats God as a Cretin. God has totally fucked up his own life because of us, getting tortured and killed to placate himself for being disobeyed by the puppets he created. The whole thing is grossly unfair, dating from an era when Kings were Gods and human rights has not yet been heard of.

Tuesday 13 May 2008

West, Lovers, page 217: '. . . there has to be in every empire a core, a lodestone of divinity. True or false, it doesn't matter'.

Lovers: West's last run through the subterranean connections of the most ancient institution in the west, the spiritual heir of the Caesars ruled by the most ridiculously self assured monarchy on the planet, the ultimate multinational, working, as it must, to maintain and expand its own place in the sun. I can have nothing to do with this. All I want to do is rebuild the foundations of all human theology and religion. Not by myself, but by providing the nucleus of a phase change from an alien and mysterious God to one which we can experience directly for ourselves at every moment of our lives because we are part of it and it is the environment that sustains us.

Much of the Church's power arises because it presents itself as the sole and rightful guardian of a mystery which is holds to be essential to the right [conduct of life].

[page 193]

[To new book: GRAVITATION]

[page 1]

Like the woman taking the eggs to market (who fantasized so much about her coming windfall that she dropped them) I sometimes wonder what would happen if the position I am developing turns out to be a goer. Divine judgment is at work when the Universe decides whether something will work or not. Those people are to be trusted who make things work. They are to be mistrusted who use spin to cover engineering difficulties.

We are all on this planet together and some of us are getting along much more easily than others. The first step to bettering our situation is to understand our situation and it is here than evidence based rather than institutional theology would help . . . . Having got it established in physics, we now develop the network model through biology, cybernetics and psychology to theology. Them from the peak of abstraction which is isomorphic to an isolated quantum system and the traditional model of god [we develop a religious viewpoint which culminates in the design of our work.]

Theology, we might suppose, studies models of God. The first discernible model of God in my theological tradition was produced by Parmenides. Parmenides - Wikipedia Parmenides introduced the notion of God as the perfect eternal foundation of everything. No two models: [we must include] Also the personal God imagined in Genesis.

A tragedy of the commons: a racecourse turned to propaganda. Tragedy of the commons - Wikipedia, Garrett Hardin

Infrastructure = network, road, rail, port, airport, gas,

[page 2]

water, electricity, data, all part of the commons together with the protocols that operate them. The sources and sinks of the human network are all in the environment.

My day job: coupling human structures to the earth.

High layers may abuse lower layers. Is this layers or powers? The rule of law rules as long as it can enforce the rules. We wish to minimize the enforcement task by maximizing our mutual contributions to our mutual flourishing. Does the network model tell us anything new about good and evil?

EVIL = UNNATURAL CONSTRAINT. What does that mean? People in chains, in locked rooms, in torturous positions and conditions.

How does one fixed point become two?

Wednesday 14 May 2008
Thursday 15 May 2008

How does one fixed point become two? By reflecting itself in something, like the Father and the Son. The point and its reflection maintain their independence by communication in their product space. Very formal, but we are talking form, fixed points.

Friday 16 May 2008

. . .

[page 3]

Emch page 235: 'Note that it is one thing to select some particular solutions among all the solutions which are a priori possible, but it is quite another thing to ignore part of a theory in order to decree that the solutions which one chooses are stable when in fact the original full theory prevents this to be the case. Bohr was aware of this, but he seems to have believed from the beginning of his investigations that this departure from classical theory was necessary; he did not seem to worry whether any explanation could ultimately be possible within the accepted principles of the classical theory; quite to the contrary, he appears to have felt that such an explanation should not even be sought after.' Emch

We have a mathematical explanation in the form of the eigenvalue equation which picks a certain set of orthogonal functions as a basis for estimating the probabilities of various events. The eigenfunctions of an operator are those whose direction is not changed by the operator, although a certain change of length (and therefore of probability) is effected by the operator on each of its eigenfunctions. So while the total probability remains fixed at one, the relative probabilities of different outcomes may be changed by an operator. From a quantum mechanical point of view, normalization is the only constraint placed on the mathematical formalism of complex function space. Normalization requires quantization and orthogonality otherwise we cannot count things properly because they cannot be distinguished from one another.

Distinction is a matter for communication theory that tells us that error correction requires quantization which requires maximizing the distance between symbols to minimize the chance

[page 4]

of confusion. As a rule of thumb, any observing system can resolve the observed system down to its space-time pixel size (fourxel).

Now we propose the bootstrapping of error correction made possible by the exponential power of order, which enables us to measure the fidelity of long strings of bits by a short checksum by which we can reduce the probability of error in a string n bits long to essentially zero with a checksum of length log n (check this). Error detection and correction - Wikipedia

. . . if personal experience is the data of theology (Lonergan's self assertion), then it all goes in, including my residual anger that things like the Church, the Burmese government and other authoritarian absolutists are still bringing human life by suppressing our creative responses to changing times.: nothing other than torture, ie forcing their human mind out of shape by forcing it to conform to institutional dogma.

Communication protocol: absorption and emission lines coincide. Emch page 235 Emch

The uncertainty of the observation depends upon the periodicity of the observer (pixellation).

Hamiltonian is a constant of the motion. [algorithm]

Angular momentum is what is quantized and all the energy levels of the atom follow from, this.

[page 5]

First step: Sommerfeld's rule: 'The quantum-theoretically stable orbits of a Hamiltonian system H (pi , qi ) are characterized by the conditions orbital integral dqi pi = h ni , i = 1, n, where h is Planck's constant and the ni are positive integers; the integral is taken over the orbit considered and extends over one period.

So one period = n h where n may correspond to action in an atom of the lifetime of a galaxy, a vast but countable quanta of action.

Emch page 253 quoting Born 1955: 'The first non -trivial and physically important application of quantum mechanics was made . . . by Pauli. From this moment there was no longer any doubt about the correctness of the theory.'

A matrix valued function is an expansion of the idea of a scalar or vector valued function, and so on up to a notion which is a 'human valued' function .

ANGER - ENERGY - INCONSISTENCY
DESIRE
PASSION (a la Thomas Aquinas.

Passion motivates; the whole Catholic thing is to suppress it and replace it with contemplative serenity.

ACTION = CYCLE ie something complete , ie a halting Turing machine.

Halt = become stationary and be observed as opposed to a non-halting machine which cannot be observed.

[page 6]

Emch quoting Born (1956) "I shall never forget the thrill is experienced when I succeeded in condensing Heisenberg's ideas on quantum conditions in the mysterious equation pq - qp = h / 2 pi i.'

Emch page 277: Einstein to Born Jan 1920: 'I do not believe that the solution to the quanta can be found by giving up the continuum . . . . I believe, now, as before, that one has to look for redundancy in determination by using differential equations so that the solutions themselves no longer have the character of a continuum. But how?

Periodicity - wave function

Schrödinger : Our classical mechanics is perhaps the complete analogy of geometric optics and as such is wrong and not in agreement with reality; it fails whenever the radii of curvature and the dimensions of the paths are no longer large compared with a certain wavelength. . . . There an undulatory mechanics has to be established and the most obvious approach to it is the elaboration of the Hamiltonian analogy into a wave theory. (Hamilton 1933). William Rowan Hamilton - Wikipedia

THEOREM (PROOF) = CONTINUUM (LINK)

Computing a theorem : computing an address,

Delusion = unbased fiction.

Reifying fiction: We're an empire now, we make our own truth. Anyone who looks for the foundations of our castles in the air will be killed by falling castles.

[page 7]

Flatten the management, do away with the middle management, the Church.

Nothing lives unless it is a dynamic unity., What does that mean? That it is a network built on atomic interactions that sustains itself as an organized structure against the forces of error.

There comes time when things are sufficiently convincing to justify getting some help, which means explanation and motivation, which is what a lot of this writing is about : how to obtain the resources to bring these ideas alive, top rebase theology.

Flourishing.

The arselicking language of worship: a false concept. Ruling the world is a job like any other to be done by everyone in his place and while it deserves respect, worship (with its connotation of blind subservience) is going too far. Reminiscent of ancient potentates.

Saturday 17 May 2008

The Church that stole God

The warlords who rule Burma are giving absolute power a bad name, but evil as they are, their role in the global game is minor. Here we are concerned with a big one, the Roman Catholic Church . . . China etc.

A peaceful layer does not break down because it has sufficient error correcting capacity ('emergency services') to deal with

[page 8]

everything that comes up. A fragile layer, on the other hand, is likely to fail through human error and plunge its stakeholders into anarchy.

Cellular automata explore the constraints placed on them by their parts (their alphabet). s they become more complex, the constraint moves from the nature of the parts to their quantity, as more complex organisms compete to make themselves larger still.

Kevin Rudd will help us take care of China, but the Roman Catholic Church needs work.

Warlordism. But keeping people in slavery by force is an expensive business, requiring heavy expenditures on soldiers, arms and spies, preferably one in every household to nip trouble in the bud.

The noblest of motives turn imperial adventurers into thugs.

Always mild panic in the mornings. The world is at its most overwhelming in the dark hours before dawn. But a cup of coffee, a bit of sun, and things begin to look better, being the best just before sleep.

Why do I want to go to war with the church? Revenge, profit, to take its assets and use them for myself? To make a living while making my environment more secure? Because it is there? Because I disagree with it? Because it is something to do, refurbishing the old to make it like new. Restumping, Renovating. The first step always is temporary support, demolish the old, build the new. The Church is in no need of support, so we can go straight ahead with the demolition, breaking

[page 9]

the old walls that are in the way of the new vision.

For the purposes of this task I cast myself as a scientist trying to overcome institutional inertia that blocks the entry of new ideas. I do this in my own interest because I have an hypotheses that has been rejected for a long time for institutional reasons but which in fact holds the key to a further step in human peace.

Action made necessary for me by my mental state, ie something that perceive needs doing for my own 'fitness', adjusting myself and (to a tiny extent) my world the better to flourish. This is because I am getting old and see a hard life ahead without a bit of money and public theology. It all comes down to a sun shining on me (and the plants that feed me)( and inspiring me to act.

MESSAGE = {MESSAGE}

A message has all the properties of a set, elements and order, ie cardinal and ordinal numbers. The ordinal number of a message is a string isomorphic to the message. All we are doing here is saying the same thing in different words, ie using a different reference system to measure the same reality.

The Roman Catholic Church has devoted a lot of energy not only to making God its exclusive property, but promoting God as the ultimate in potentates, totally unlike anything within human experience. Natural theology does away with all this fluff and takes god as it is, everywhere, us, normal totally everyday, combining the extremes of bliss and pain with normal everyday life and love. Eastern religions the same, demanding a lifetime of study to see the ultimate.

[page 10]

But everything is divine. Everything is ultimate and authentic and the judgment of god is the death of things that do not work. And we, the mechanics, have to find where the chain is broken and repair it. Concrete, shit, metaphysics, sex, all divine.

The principal use of the Church to me is as a starting point, a frame of reference a quo which provides me with a fixed point in my search for ad quem, which is effectively unknown. Gödel and Turing between them have shown why I cannot expect to be able to predict what is going to happen next in my life. The uncertainty principle exists because there is not enough information in an alphabet of Turing machines to determine the order in which they can be assembled. So I am a node receiving an enormous amount of input every second and being driven to action (when I see it necessary) by that input. For if I see a missile coming, I must duck or die.

Deighton Hook page 193: 'Frank had resolute faith in his superiors providing they has attended the right schools or done well in the army. For him any such suspicions [that they were deceiving him] were genuinely comical.' Deighton

It is the same with many people and the Popes. But every now and then our superiors betray us and then we must face the shock and take responsibility for our own lives. Distributed processing offers the best possibility for redundancy and security.

A campaign.

 

-->

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty


Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.


Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Deighton, Len, Spy Hook, Knopf 1988 Amazon Review: From Library Journal This is the first installment in a new espionage series, "Hook, Line, and Sinker," a sequel to Deighton's masterful "Game, Set, Match" trilogy. Bernard Samson, still trying to straighten out his life after his wife's defection to the KGB, finds top level Secret Service complicity in the disappearance of a half million dollars in departmental funds. Is this a simple case of embezzlement or of mismanagement, or is it the work of a KGB mole? Has Samson stumbled upon a top-secret operation, one in which his wife is a double agent? At novel's end Samson is on the run in Berlin, and the reader is eager for the next book. Deighton is the only worthy rival to John LeCarre.' Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
Amazon
  back
Emch, Gerard G, Mathematical and Conceptual Foundations of 20th-Century Physics, North Holland/Elsevier Science Publishers 1984 Preface: 'Aside from the primary aim of this book, which is to resent a unified mathematical account of the conceptual foundations of 20th-century Physics . . . it is hoped that . . . various parts of the book will be excerpted, and incorporated in separate courses pertaining to the Pure Mathematics curriculum, to provide illustrative examples, further motivations and testimony to the unity of the Mathematical Sciences.' 
Amazon
  back
Feynman, Richard P, Statistical Mechanics: A Set of Lectures, Westview Press 1998 Jacket: 'Physics, rather than mathematics, is the focus in this classic graduate lecture note volume on statistical mechanics and the physics of condensed matter. Containing many original contributions to the field, the book provides a concise introduction to basic concepts and a clear presentation of difficult topics, while challenging the student to reflect on as yet unanswered questions,' 
Amazon
  back
Papers
Wickenden, Dorothy, "Comment: Going Positive", New Yorker, 84, , 5 May 2008, page 23-24. back
Links
Black body - Wikipedia Black body - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In physics, a black body is an object that absorbs all light that falls on it. No electromagnetic radiation passes through it and none is reflected. Because no light is reflected or transmitted, the object appears black when it is cold.' back
Error detection and correction - Wikipedia Error detection and correction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In mathematics, computer science, telecommunication, and information theory, error detection and correction has great practical importance in maintaining data (information) integrity across noisy channels and less-than-reliable storage media.' back
Garrett Hardin The Tragedy of the Commons 'The population problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension in morality.' back
Nazareth - Wikipedia Nazareth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Nazareth . . . is the capital and largest city in the North District of Israel. It also serves as an Arab capital for Israel's Arab citizens who make up the vast majority of the population there.[2] In the New Testament, the city is described as the childhood home of Jesus, and as such is a center of Christian pilgrimage, with many shrines commemorating biblical associations.' back
Parmenides - Wikipedia Parmenides - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Parmenides of Elea (early 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, his only known work is a poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. In it, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In the Way of Truth, he explained how reality is one; change is impossible; and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In the Way of Opinion, he explained the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful. These thoughts strongly influenced Plato, and through him, the whole of western philosophy.' back
Tragedy of the commons - Wikipedia Tragedy of the commons - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Tragedy of the Commons is a type of social trap, often economic, that involves a conflict over finite resources between individual interests and the common good. It states that free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately structurally dooms the resource through over-exploitation. The term derives originally from a comparison noticed by William Forster Lloyd with medieval village land holding in his 1833 book on population.[1] It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons."[2] However, the theory itself is as old as Thucydides[3] and Aristotle.' back
William Rowan Hamilton - Wikipedia William Rowan Hamilton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Sir William Rowan Hamilton (August 4, 1805 – September 2, 1865) was an Irish mathematician, physicist, and astronomer who made important contributions to the development of optics, dynamics, and algebra. His discovery of quaternions is perhaps his best known investigation. Hamilton's work was also significant in the later development of quantum mechanics. Hamilton is said to have showed immense talent at a very early age, prompting astronomer Bishop Dr. John Brinkley to remark in 1823 of Hamilton at the age of eighteen: “This young man, I do not say will be, but is, the first mathematician of his age.” ' back

www.naturaltheology.net is maintained by The Theology Company Proprietary Limited ACN 097 887 075 ABN 74 097 887 075 Copyright 2000-2020 © Jeffrey Nicholls