Notes
[Sunday 7 September 2008 - Saturday 13 September 2008]
[Notebook: DB 64 Gravitation]
Sunday 7 September 2008
[page 95]
Monday 5 September 2008
Lost the thread again. Whatever their stance on evolution, religions themselves are subject to evolution. Religions evolve. The successful
[page 95]
ones spread. The others die. This prompts the question: why are the successful religions so weird? I know Christianity, and the Christian story is to me absurdly unrealistic. And I see hints that many of the other old religious traditions suffer form the same defect.
On religion. I have just read The Constant Gardener about a good drug prematurely promoted and the deaths that ensue. Le Carre The big loss is the loss of life. If it can be lost, it can be measured, and on the scale of 0 to 1, death is a 1.
Why is a species more successful? Because, in the given environment, its actions are more profitable to it. My aim in developing these religious ideas is primarily my own profit, and secondarily he profit of all those who yield some of their profit to me.
Here is the evolutionary rub. Whatever your morality the successful are successful, even if one may disagree with the method of their success. So the Constant Gardener. So Christianity succeeds as a story of creation, sin, redemption, paradise.
The real problem with Catholicism is the hypocrisy where one is inclined to believe one thing while going another. Hypocrisy arises because there is a contradiction between theory and reality. A true theory can tell it like it is and not require any suspensions of disbelief.
TRUTH SIMPLIFIES
FALSEHOOD COMPLEXIFIES. A is not B
[page 96]
Luxury: toast with butter and honey in front of the fire.
We seek authentic beauty and human happiness with a sustainable consumption of resources.
SUSTAINABLE = CLOSED (BALANCED as in books)
(PUBLIC PROFIT vs PRIVATE PROFIT) vs (PUBLIC = PRIVATE) [Adam Smith Smith]
Time division multiplexing: One way to measure the importance of an activity is the time spent doing it. This is obviously a crude measure since it does not differentiate between being in love and being in a chain gang.
I only take peoples money for things that I know I can do. There can be a temptation to claim greater than actual competence. One must suppress knowledge of the failures for most profitable results. Honesty is not necessarily as well rewarded as hype.
On the relative power of abstract and concrete representations of reality.
We know that reality may be considered as an immensely complex kinematic process formally represented as a communication network.
On the search for the holy grail. Many of us are looking for grails, holy or otherwise, and many already have one.
[page 97]
A recurrent theme in the Bible is the bad doing well and the good doing badly.
TRUTH = PEER
DECEPTION = NOT-PEER
The promoters of religion are looking for a successful formula, one that will profit them in some way or another. We all promote our own religion as an aid to common survival.
The ideal is commonwealth.
You're not on the scene if you do not have the resources to stay on the scene. A process only lives while it lives.
PEACE & BLANDNESS rule, because the majority like stability and only a minority want change for the sake of change. There seems to be an optimum mix of stability an innovation, ie an optimum rate of change, a local velocity of light.
Network protocols: chatting people ut; raping them; having an orderly conversation.
' ' '
Greed: more of the same; Creativity: something new.
The mystics are only doing it for the visions.
Enlightened self interest = cooperation.
[page 98]
Why does the 'mafia' have to kill people when other businesses run profitably without killing?
If you are not with us you are against us and we kill anybody who is against us.
Religion: Spiritual software for life.
There is no such thing as perpetual motion: quantum mechanics vs the heat death of the Universe.
As denizens of the network we may be more inclined to see entropy as a communication resource rather than thermodynamic waste.
Tuesday 6 September 2008
Wednesday 7 September 2008
Thursday 8 September 2008
Friday 9 September 2008
Natural religion = (?) Wu wei (Needham II:68) Needham
