Notes
[Sunday 21 September 2008 - Saturday 27 September 2008]
[Notebook: DB 64 Gravitation]
Sunday 21 September 2008
[page 98]
Monday 22 September 2008
The Poverty of Fundamentalism: John Dominic Crossan: God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome then and Now. Crossan
[page 99]
Bureaucracy = computer network.
PRECISION makes CREATION possible.
The Book of Nature is an ongoing set of messages between discrete points in the Universe.
Much natural coding depends on the frequency of a discrete symbol, like the action potential in a neuron.
John Dominic Crossan: let us lift our eyes above the meaning of two little words in an ancient document and consider the whole business of communication instead. Every event in the Universe is a communication. We are aware of an event when we receive information from it.
The natural religion forum: Natural theology is 'religion neutral', arguing for no particular religion but critically examining the import of the religion on human wellbeing and identifying counterproductive practices as such, without attribution to a particular religion, although obviously particular religions provide the data from which these conclusions can be drawn.
Entropy is the basic resource for the creation of information. Higher entropy, higher spacetime resolution, more information.
Brillouin: Information = negative entropy, so Information + Entropy = 0. Brillouin
[page 100]
The open source religion site: religions run on people, and our criterion for optimization is a tendency to increase the public sustainability of private wellbeing. Looking as ever for a form of words.
What is the Lagrangian of a communication Network? It is a measure of the total entropy needed to complete a task, energy-time = action.
The smallest thing that can happen, the smallest event, is measured by the quantum of action. Big happenings are made of lots of little happenings. So as your sword slits the throat of some evil enemy the computer (if it is a game) performs millions of elementary operations to render the scene. If it is real, these elementary operations are quanta of action, which come in an infinity of different forms.
Taoism became an organized religion. Needham I:117 Needham
Theology: by understanding the ruler we all learn to survive.
Purely deterministic systems underlies creativity as protocols define the boundaries of communication on a network.
PROTOCOL = FIXED POINT Fixed point (mathematics) - Wikipedia
Tuesday 23 September 2008
Wednesday 24 September 2008
Thursday 25 September 2008
Friday 26 September 2008
Natural religion might define god as a source of activity. The network model enables us to see how lesser gods contribute to the activities of the greater.
[page 101]
My favourite is the Sun, seen in the light of Blake's words 'energy is eternal delight'. Blake Whenever I feel weighed down I just have to remember that the sun still shies, and as long as I live and am connected to the sun through the food chain the energy is there for me to overcome my present difficulties. Renovating old houses is a ceaseless discovery of difficult situations arising from old design, technology and deterioration and having the energy top derive and implement a solution, new steel stumps, or whatever.
I awake in the darkness before dawn in a state of panic about the tasks ahead, but by the time I have spent an hour in the sun eating, reading, and writing I am ready to take on the day.
I am a pantheist. My world is full of gods because a god is to me an independent source of action, a definition that nicely fits the traditional God, the creator.
The world is quantized. It comprises a complex interplay of discrete and addressable events to which we give names like birth, death, second world war, etc. Physics makes this process very explicit. Events are addressed by their position in space and time, and by the information they carry which defines them as 'the emission of a photon' or the 'disintegration of a nucleus'. Modern physics has been able to define an alphabet of less than a hundred elementary messages (or particles that underlie encode every message we receive from the Universe. These elementary events are the smallest gods,
[page 102]
each measured by a quantum of action.
My basic problem is to keep the production of resources up to the consumption, and my failure is measured by my ever increasing debt. One can think of debt as sunk capital put into the natural religion industry in the hope of eventually making a profit. Given the size of the task (and the spending we see among corporates) my capital (at cost) is very tiny. Once the idea becomes clear and presentable enough, it might attract more capital and reproduce itself faster in human minds.
The language in which we describe the wor[l]d is also quantized and so serves as a natural model for the world.
Most of the calming effect of meditation in the light of the sin arises from process of triage dividing tasks into those tat must be done soon (like the dishes and pay the phone bill) and things that can be put off to another day (like replace the front vibration dampers in my car)
Mathematics is the study of language as such, that is language applied to itself.
So I have almost decided to put off a flue job till this afternoon (since I can do them in about three hours these days) and spend more time writing about pantheism for Eureka St.
[page 103]
From physical events to human events: are those two getting together; do you think they will split up. Soap opera, an endless process of mergers and demergers.
The theory of communication is the theory of everything.
I would be surprised if you could present a situation in which communication theory does not apply. Just presenting a situation implies communication.
AXIOM = ELEMENT OF A PROTOCOL
Internet and computers: Communication protocols can be horrendously complex, requiring the Bill Gates's of this world sitting up night after night solving various problems and debugging their results.
These thoughts are recorded for later elaboration, this writing remaining invariant through time (though the[y] can move around in space. I often lose my notebook). So now I clean my teeth and go to work on the flue.
A sentence: While physicists listen to their gods using things like the Large Hadron Collider, we get our human information through our bodies which are in effect vastly complex physical machines whose structure is ultimately controlled by the theory of everything. Formally it can be modelled as a complex network of channels, each defined by a different physical structure. All information is encoded physical, the pantheist slogan.
[page 104]
A lot of religious law just seems to be old people trying to maintain their status in the face of up and coming youth.
All gods are the same: uniquely defined sources of action (and by sources we include 'sinks', algebraically negative sources. Gods speak and hear, they are persons in the ancient sense: fronts from behind which a spiritual being is speaking and listening.
Your shining eyes are emitting photons which my eyes are receiving and I am using the information so gained to think you are beautiful. These photons carry this information because of their role in a more complex system comprising two interacting humans.
Since I am exploring wonderland I can make my own rules and see where they lead. So I define god as a source of activity, that is a creator. In physics the term source also covers sinks, By the same token, our term creator includes annihilator.
Axiomatic certainty and adequate complexity lead to incompleteness and undecidability.
Neurons have a two letter alphabet which is decoded and on or off at a given moment in time.
[page 105]
Saturday 27 September 2008
Religion might be defined as the human response to God.
Ancient gods were often pretty fickle, as we see in the Iliad. Homer Our own God, inherited from ancient Israel, is no exception. It was not long after he created the world and saw that it was good that it pissed him off so much [that] he expelled the first people from paradise, began raining fire and brimstone on sinners and turning the curious to salt.
www.many-eyes.com IBM
My big weak spot is confidence. Despite forty years of intellectual withdrawal from the Roman Catholic Church, I still feel its moral power telling me I am defective and of little account, having committed the 'peccatum in Spiritu Sancto' The sin against the Holy Ghost. The worst sin of all, denials of the fundamentals of Christianity.
Theologians: look up from your books and see the word. Venture capitalists, please apply, I's going bankrupt.
NOTEBOOKS: open notebook science N455:273 Nature Q&A
. . .
[page 106]
At the core of Christianity is an uneasy synthesis of determinism and indeterminism. God, it is maintained, is omnipotent and omniscient, knowing both past and future, controlling all. In other words, the cosmological system is deterministic. On the other hand, Christianity ascribes free will ad moral responsibility to humanity. This ascription is contrary to the deterministic model, but it it politically necessary as the basis for the power of corporate religion over individual behaviour.
Natural theology finds a natural mathematical answer to this problem, based on the notions of completeness-incompleteness and computability/incomputability,
One might see these theorems as impossibly abstract ad irrelevant to everyday life, but I don't think this is the case because (as experience shows) the Universe is quantized.
Max Planck was the first to see that physical sources have a minimum size measured by the quantum of action, Planck's constant, h. So my smallest gods are the quantum gods, whose creations and annihilations are measured by the quantum of action. We might see these gods as the alphabet of our Universe. They are studied in physics. The physical world is a set of discrete events, addressed by space and time. So the Large Hadron Collider. CERN
Now we come to put these quantum events together using as a model a communication network. When we defined gods as creators and annihilators, we were laying the foundation for a communication network. Let each
[page 107]
creation and annihilation in the Universe correspond to the transmission and reception of a message.
A measure f my confidence is how much I am prepared to go into debt to finance natural religion.
We know little of the inner workings of the Christian God (it is officially a mystery) except that it comprises three persons, that is three sources, to each of which the Christian Churches give a role in the salvation of mankind. Here we imagine ourselves as such persons, served by lesser gods, serving the greater in ways beyond our understanding.
What are the limits of understanding. In communication terms, it involves encoding and decoding messages. And this brings us to Cantor, Gödel, Turing and Shannon. CGTS for sort.
To a counter of sheep, any roos or dogs mixed in with the mob don't count; they are off the radar.
The fundamental creative force is cooperation [the collective ordering of action]. So my human nature is the product of a vast number of atoms working [unwittingly] together,
So mathematics is not about a message, but all messages, and not just all messages, but all the ways messages can be transformed into one another by the process of encoding and decoding. I am encoding the message of this paragraph in these words. You are decoding it into your own consciousness.
[page 108]
We must turn away from the lifetime of effort spent decoding a few ancient Greek words in order to decide a question of critical importance and turn instead to the book of nature. As Galileo noted and subsequent experience has suggested, the Universe is written in mathematics.
What does this mean? The power of mathematics is that it is the ultimate abstraction. It does not care about your personality or the kind of car you drive, but considers you simply as a named object. Cantor captured the idea with his theory of sets. Naively a set is any collection of objects, be they nations or bacteria. From a mathematical point of view, we care about only two properties of sets, their cardinal and ordinal numbers.
[The] bon [book of nature] is a dynamic book, rather like a movie or a piece of music. Although I learnt anatomy by cutting up a very dead old lady preserved in formaldehyde, anatomy is itself a dynamic subject as we see when we watch embryogenesis for instance. Fixed points remain fixed as long as a set is mapping onto itself, but once it breaks its boundaries, fixed points can move.
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