Notes
[Sunday 27 July 2008 - Saturday 2 August 2008]
[Notebook: DB 64 Gravitation]
[page 77]
Sunday 27 July 2008
Particle = operator = process = event, eg me, quark
Georgi Physics Today April 1988 page 29 Georgi
[page 78]
Observable event = appearance of a stationary, memorable, measurable state which is modelled by the halting of a Turing Machine, ie the dynamics are finished, the work is finished and results are obtained, the screw is screwed, etc.
Why I smoke dope. There is a war on and I am prepared to accept a risk of personal injury to increase the chances of a win for my side. War = power struggle = conflict over the use of resources.
Smoking is a public health problem, but so is war.
York page 48: 'The people who irritated [Eisenhower] were the hard sell technologists who tried to exploit Sputnik and the missile-gap psychosis it engendered. We were to be wary of accepting their claims, believing their analyses or buying their wares. It seemed that the pursuit of explosive and complicated technology as an end in itself might become an accepted part of America's way of life.' York
The theologians are nowhere to be seen in the Cold War except as a political fringe of fundamentalists promoting he annihilation of communities based on 'dialectical materialism' as opposed to their 'mysterious spiritualism' The high tables of the war were occupied by statespersons, politicians, military, scientists and engineers.
Perspective: Consequences of the rule of the celibate (and consequently childless). They have no experience of the central miracle of reproduction. This seems to explain their desire to control sexuality, mistaking it for the be all and
[page 79]
end all of the thirty year saga of bringing a child into the world from the meeting of mates until; the end of education and the beginning of a personal surplus. By ignoring the miracle of life they are led to create false miracles of life where the dead don't die and our children are not our children but servants of God.
Preparing for the mission. If Jesus was a real man and spoke as well as the record shows he must have been both gifted and well educated in the philosophy and theology of his time.
Monday 28 July 2008
'But Wittgenstein's work is truly amazing - and I really believe that the mighty morass of Philosophy is at last crystallizing about a rigid theory of Logic - the only portion of Philosophy about which there is any possibility of man knowing anything - Metaphysics etc are hampered by total lack of data. (Really Logic is all philosophy. All else that is loosely so termed is either Metaphysics - which is hopeless, there being no data - or Natural Science eg Psychology).' Pinsent in Monk, page 83. Monk
Formal undecidability does not imply real [un]decidability, so reality adds dynamics to formalism, so that it does decide between formally equivalent possibilities, like the sides of a coin.
All data (events, messages) are data for metaphysics and physics. This is consistent with the network paradigm where events in the physical layer are given more and more meaning by the 'metaphysical' structure of the layers of software driving the physical layer and being realized by it.
[page 80]
To be a hermit is in effect to embrace a personal formalism cutting oneself off from the dynamics of the world. One tries to become a stationary point, sub specie aeternitatis. Monk page 89.
In the network theory the need for 'types' is taken care of by the layering (in space and time) of the network, and by the requirement for requisite variety of equivalent cardinality, so that a one to one mapping is possible between symbols (the pointers) and reality (physical events).
Monk page 92: Wittgenstein seems to think of Philosophy as pure formalism, equivalent to logic 'Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis.'.
Metaphysics: complex logical software that guides the dynamics of machines and systems of machines.
Wittgenstein in Monk page 95: 'All the propositions of logic are generalizations of tautologies and al the generalizations of tautologies are propositions of logic. There are no other logical propositions. (I regard this as definitive)'.
Turing machine = string of tautologies.
page 96 Truth-table.
Wittgenstein: 'I wish to God that I was more intelligent and everything would finally come clear to me - or else that I needn't live much longer.
It was easy being a greenie because quite enough science
[page 81]
was already done to demonstrate the necessity of greenism, but religious activism is not so easy because there is no reliable theology. Theology has been in the control of politicians like the Pope for so long now that it has no reality of its own, and negligible correspondence with the real word. So a prerequisite for activism has been the reconstruction of theology. This is done enough to justify activism about doing more.
Monk page 102: Wittgenstein: 'Logical so-called propositions show the logical properties of language and therefore of the Universe, but they say nothing,'
Monk page 137: Schopenhauer: 'Undoubtedly it is the knowledge of death and herewith the considerations of the suffering and misery of life that give the strongest impulse to philosophical reflection and mystical explanations of the world.' The World as Will and Representation Schopenhauer
Will - dynamics - potential
Representation - form - message
Monk page 185: 'To be religious is to recognize one's own unworthiness and to take responsibility for correcting it.'
We may be wrong and need correction but this does not indicate unworthiness but normal feedback.
Monk page 187: Wittgenstein: 'In fact, I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before; it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact. . . .'
Self contradiction, or contradiction between self and reality (fact). The Roman Catholic Church induces such pain in its adherents by transmitting a false picture of the world.
[page 82]
Monk page 247 There is an infinite space between tautology and contradiction, p and not-p, 0 and 1, and this distance is the 'unit' of digitization.
Monk page 278: Wittgenstein: 'What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.'
What is good / divine is what works?
Tuesday 29 July 2008
Monk page 305: Wittgenstein: 'If you and I are to lead religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion . . . but that our manner of life is different.
EVIDENCE based RELIGION vs TERROR based religion.
Monk page 337: Wittgenstein: 'I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to
[page 83]
enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions which are clear cut and transparent.'
Today the root of all language games is digital computation, the whole process of which is built on a network of binary operations and symbols.
Wednesday 30 July 2008
Monk page 404: 'Through [Wittgenstein's 1939 lectures] it is made even clearer that his target was not merely, as he had put it in the Blue Book, the damage done when philosophers 'see the method of science before their eyes are are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does'; it was more generally the wretched effect that worship of science and he scientific method had on our whole culture. Aesthetics and religious belief are two examples - for Wittgenstein, of course, crucially important examples - of areas of thought and life in which the scientific method is not appropriate, and in which efforts to make it so lead to distortion, superficiality and confusion.'
Must disagree. Intelligently applies, tracking the evidence must bring us closer to God because all evidence is revelation.
How intelligent is the Universe? it made me!
Monk page 406: Wittgenstein dislikes the 'reductionism' of science, the effort to discern the alphabets of symmetries that underlie the human layer.
The human layer is continually moving in time to give 'time layers'
[page 84]
of the human layer, a kinema comprising all the human revelation in the history of the world.
At the human level of complexity the possibilities are so vast that symmetries are harder to discern. Nevertheless, given that all observation is communication, we should expect to see the laws of communication reflected in every event, even though every message is different.
Monk page 438: '. . . the elucidation provided by Wittgenstein's own work. They provide not a causal mechanical theory but: . . . something which people are inclined to accept and which makes it easier for them to go certain ways: it makes certain ways of behaving and thinking natural for them. They have given up one way of thinking and adopted another.
Metanoia
The search for alphabets is in a sense reductionist, but once we have an alphabet (or basis) we can represent transformations of whole vectors in the space measured by the basis.
Can we feel that a person who writes 'It is as though I have before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me better than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless.' has really got a proper understanding of life driven by the boundless energy of the sun.
[page 85]
Thursday 31 July 2008
Monk page 520: Wittgenstein: 'Sometimes my ideas come so quickly that I feel my pen is being guided.'
It is being guided by your mind, which is much bigger and better connected do the divinity than one can conceive at any moment, one's conscious though roaming . . . through a vast forest of information, forming well warn tracks n some places and often visiting other places never before seen.
Monk page 521: 'He was, however, cautious in attributing too much importance to these moods of inspirations.'
Such inspirations nevertheless come from within us and are the result of largely unconscious processing of input from out environment which has reached a point that it seeks and gets presentation in consciousness, that is at the unifying level of self and self management where each of us explores and debates strategies and tactics for action.
Monk page 523: Wittgenstein: 'I often believe that I am on the straight road to insanity, it is difficult for me to imagine that my brain should stand the strain very long.
Insofar as hardware and software are decoupled it is difficult to understand how any particular kind of thinking can 'strain the brain' any more than any sort of reading can 'strain the eye' except perhaps when one feels very tired.
Monk page 533: '. . . in seeking to change nothing but the way we
[page 85]
look at things, Wittgenstein was attempting to change everything.
As we do when we se the Universe as God, not some broken creation of a rather small minded and vindictive God.
Monk page 537: Wittgenstein: 'My interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.
page 556: Wittgenstein: 'An expression has meaning only in the stream of life.
page 570: '[Wittgenstein] stresses that a framework itself cannot be justified or proven correct; it provides the limits within which both justification and proof take place.
page 572: Wittgenstein: 'Perhaps one could 'convince someone that God exists' by means of a certain upbringing, by shaping his life in such and such a way.'
page 579: 'Im Anfang was die Tat . . . might, with some justification, be regarded as the motto of On Uncertainty - and, indeed,m of the whole of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.'
The frequency distribution of the alphabet is not determined by the alphabet but by the user. This is true for a naturally equiprobable alphabet. But it may be that the cost of physically representing some symbols may be greater than the cost of others, and there is an incentive to get rid of the expensive codes and go for equiprobability, as in a maximum entropy binary code.
[page 87]
Porter Flesh . . . page xiv: 'the Catholic cult of the sacred heart was contemporaneous with William Harvey's De Motu Cordis. Porter
Porter page 6: Nietzsche 'God is dead". The new god lives.
page 32: 'When Plato's complex speculations were selectively Christianized . . . what was absorbed was a simplified dualism which pitted fallible flesh against a god-like soul.'
page 36: Augustine invented the notion that 'Without Original Sin man as a unity - body and soul - would have been immortal; only after the Fall did flesh and spirit descend to civil war.'
My story in a nutshell is that the world creates itself and does not need an outside creator. This idea goes back to Locke. Porter. So you say, but how does it create itself? The answer, it sees lies in the difference between Roman numerals and Arabic numerals.
Coded = ordered vs cardinal.
The Angel Creation story: lets go and get incarnate.
Every person (source) has a probability of one, ie it has a certain durability, while it is still alive.
