Notes
[Sunday 28 September 2008 - Saturday 4 October 2008]
[Notebook: DB 64 Gravitation]
[page 108]
Sunday 28 September 2008
Groping for the wheel, a simple solution that opened up a new world of communication. What does network theory teach us? Principles a) maximum entropy = stable. b) entropy increased by communication (Zurek) Zurek Entropy maximized by a) equiprobability and b) order.
[page 109]
Jesus said 'love one another' (and implied that all will be well). We translate that as 'communicate with one another'. The difficult part is to communicate honestly, which in effect means sharing resources.
Guidance from our creators.
Faith, hope and charity are our bastions against the slings as arrows of outrageous fortune, and they may be well or ill founded. As recent economic events suggest, much depends on how we value things. An Essay on Value. An Essay on Value
Good theology, by giving us insight into the ways of the world (= god) enables us to value things and actions more realistically.
The creative force is communication. We die when our internal network breaks down.
The internet is a wonderful step forward in human communication. Of course there are people trying to censor it, crash it or use it as a vehicle for unrealistic propaganda, but this is true of any network. Our bodies have an immune system to deal with this sort of problem and the internet is similarly equipped. At one extreme we find attacks based on computer software. These must be dealt with by writing codes that detect and neutralize such attacks. This system is based on the network itself. Ideally, the network immune system would inform every user of the network as soon as an attack is detected and circulate software to deal with the attack as soon as it becomes available.
[page 110]
Another Christian conundrum.
So understand the network by analogy with our bodies.
We can fit quantum mechanics to the network, but that is for another time. Here we consider the interface between two layers.
THEOLOGY directs the human SOCIAL IMMUNE SYSTEM.
Disease and cancer are generic features of networks to be found in human bodies and human societies.
A fully developed internet means that all the information in the world is potentially available to everybody, [in other words we each become a superposition of the whole human world] although it is natural for users of the network to distinguish between public and private data.
My consciousness is a node in the universal network and continually connects to other nodes in the network. These notes are a record of some of the messages that have come into my consciousness which seem relevant to the search for an alternative to the Current Roman Catholic Church. It is by no means a diary of my whole life, just working notes - lab notes.
[page 111]
Monday 29 September 2008
Communication creates entropy 0 .. 9 + 0 .. 9 = 20, but 00 .. 99 = 100. We might see gravitation as unary (uncreative) communication.
Small data sets lead to difficulty of interpretation,. as when we see things dimly in the twilight. So theology is dying for lack of data and the vultures are arguing about a few words here and there in often unreliable manuscripts. . . . More data clarifies the picture. The book of nature provides us with infinitely more data delivered directly to our senses.
CLEANLINESS =- ERROR REDUCTION.
War is the ultimate dirty system.
Add Napisan to my list to get stain out of jacket where bird shat on shoulder.
CLEANING = ERROR REMOVAL
Error is relative. A dirty dish is an error (not-p ) relative to a clean dish and vice versa (as are dirty floors, clothes, tricks etc)
CLEANING = PEACEMAKING Many of us feel at peace when we have got our home clean. Some are obsessive, some messy, but even mess can get out of hand and force one to leave that environment. Migration, on the whole, is fraught with difficulty and so not peaceful. On the other hand a system like a person, a family, a pump or a nation is most
[page 112]
at peace when things are running smoothly. Peace is not guaranteed but can be maximized by paying attention to the detection and correction of errors.
Peace occurs when there is sufficient entropy in the controller to deal with all states of the controlled. In the human world this has less to do with actual messages than the protocols of communication: war or diplomacy. What is controlled is the integrity of messaging, not the actual meanings transmitted by the clean channel so created. The creation of such a clean channel in human affairs is characterized by fairness and justice. Fairness means equal distribution of physical network resources to all nodes (us). Justice means a fair and dispassionate system of detecting and correcting errors in the system: systematic health care in the widest sense.
A network so conceived is an abstract formal entity. We give the network meaning by connecting it to familiar concepts like 'fairness' and 'justice' above.
In a world of natural selection networks have the properties necessary to become universal. Everywhere we look we see networks of communication, nodes looking at one another, thinking and saying things.
On the divine cleanup. Crossan has the standard apocalyptic vision, expressed in modern times by Teilhard de Chardin, of an 'omega point' that somehow marks the end of the present Universe. Crossan, Teilhard de Chardin Here we assume that the Universe has no end. For practical human purposes this is quite true, although whether the Universe is finite or infinite
[page 113]
does influence how we look at it.
A theory of everything must be ubiquitous. The most ubiquitous concrete thing is the universal network of physical communication described by modern quantum theory. This network a materially or physically ubiquitous network. We see this as the physical layer of an infinity of logical networks, myself included. So we encapsulate the theory of network in an abstract mathematical interface and present it as the theory of everything and a logical extension of Trinitarian theology : then to pantheist.
As seems to happen often in the succession of religions, the old bad guy becomes the new good guy and vice versa. Monotheisms are closely related to monarchies in many ways and the general tendency of both is to keep the variety of the punters at a minimum so that they are easily swayed and rules. Here we preach diversity and resistance to concentrated power. Instead we opt for variety within the common bounds of humanity,
Reversible decoding/encoding systems preserve entropy, just as reversible (Carnot) heat engines do.
CODING <=> MEMORY Brillouin page 26. Brillouin
The religious internet contains protocols to enable intercommunication between all the religions of the world. Most succinctly the protocol is encapsulated in the words of Deuteronomy echoed by Jesus 'love one another'. Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22-37-40
Crossan wishes to eliminate the divine armageddon by exegetical fiat, relying on God to do the work. He is wrong, insofar
[page 114]
as we must do the work ourselves and right insofar as we must accept the role of gods and begin to exercise our responsibility rather than fobbing it off on an imaginary god essentially of our own creations.
Staying alive for people is the same as staying alive for corporations (although the accounting in human life might be more realistic than some corporate accounting): one must remain solvent, able to pay ones debts as they fall due. The alternative is pain, bankruptcy, death.
At first disappointed and incredulous with Crossan, and then realized that there is a certain amount of truth in the book, heavily obscured by a religious idiom dating back many thousands of years. It is the aim of network theory to make explicit and operative these ancient hopes of human salvation.
The whole story is told in the first few chapters of Genesis: eat of the tree of life and you shall be as gods. Ungovernable. A monarch's worst nightmare, like the ancient fear of one's daughters becoming 'sexually active'.
The Bible is a pretty down to earth account of the life of a relatively small group of people over thousands of years. It records their struggle to retain their independence from the empires that came and went around them.
[page 115]
Judaism and Christianity are both strong on attributing guilt to people, especially those outside the pale: Gentiles, Pagans, Sinners, etc.
Redundancy: If the Pope fails we are all in trouble. Perhaps safer if we are all our own popes. How does this compare to the financial scene: there is a lot of blue sky there, based on the valuations of securities arising from a 'bubble' fantasy market, rather like the salvific dreams of Christianity.
A god (independent source of action) may be created by a network of gods. In this way gods are layered and their degree of correlation and cooperation is measured by their rate of communication, which depends on protocols and distance and size.
Tuesday 30 September 2008
Wednesday 1 October 2008
More sun.
The 'Divine Cleanup' can be formulated on network principles. Fairness and Justice are properties of peerage. Crossan page 78
Hall annual report. There are things I'd like to do more but its got to be done to maintain our good standing with the Lands Department and ultimately the wider community. So I talk myself into it.
Life = selecting and ordering string of actions for survival play., ie finite actions determined by desired ends vs infinite 'endless' activity, the eternal delight. Both elements are present in every action, ie following the rules, tactics and strategy of the game +
page 116]
the exuberance of playing. This comes down to the determined and free.
Here we apply network theory to the fundamental paradox of Christian theology: determinism vs free will. It is said to be a mystery. The network paradigm can take us deeper into this mystery.
FREEDOM and CONSTRAINT. A suitably abstract and amoral title for the first in a series of articles applying a network model to the human condition.
There is a vast technical literature surrounding networks, and it may be considered part of the network protocol, the set of fixed points in a network. Here we rely on our common intuitive knowledge, since we are all involved in networks of family, gossip, work, business and so on. We can illustrate all the technical features of a network in the human sphere. This is the first wonderful feature of networks: the theory is scale invariant, dealing with any number of nodes and edges indifferently. Formally network communication is the same whether it is realized in atoms or nations. So understanding our human networks gives us a key to understanding the Universe (and divinity) as a whole.
We undertake the divine cleanup by cleaning up human communication protocols, taking out violence and error and substituting peace, security and high bandwidth.
Thursday 2 October 2008
[page 117]
ERROR - simple - error at the symbol level
-complex - error at the meaning level - misunderstanding
ERROR - random
- coordinated (= an attack)
We can describe the general features of a network by describing the relationships between nodes and layers.
The arch must be closed to stand up. Similarly a message must be closed. If it is broken off halfway ... the system should see it as an error, an unfinished sentence.
SENTENCE = CLOSED (MEANINGFUL) MESSAGE
Since networks can be seamlessly bonded there is no reason why a message in a network should not itself be a network, as I am a message in the life of the earth.
Given the network paradigm, each chapter of the development volume maps its subject matter into the paradigm [layer by layer]
Friday 3 October 2008
Saturday 4 October 2008
. . .
Maybe back to physics and Is gravitation quantized?
The power of network theory is that it binds human society closely to the society of the rest of the Universe. This is in opposition to the fundamentalist and anti-science views of those who believe that the world was created 'just for us' and that we are especially free to do what we like rather than bound to act within certain limits or risk destabilizing the foundations of our existence.
'Union of the cosmic and ethical orders'. We judge actions by their consequences, and we can make predictive judgments by predicting the consequences of various actions like hitting someone very hard on the hear.
Needham II:453 note d 'Yet the most scientific philosophies must account for the emergence of ethics in the physical world.' Needham
Natural ethics.
Needham page 454: 'But what the Neo-Confucians did was to recognise the moral as fundamentally planted in Nature and arising out of Nature by an emergent evolution, when, as we should say, conditions are present in which the moral can appear.'
The weak spot in monarchies such as the Roman Catholic Church is abuse of power making arbitrary scientific and judicial decisions which (on the whole) ultimately lead to trouble because they are not consistent with the rest of the world.
Like NASA, one must resist the temptation to launch prematurely.
I wasn't molested in the sexual sense, but they certainly did fuck with my mind. As you read
[page 119]
this you might think 'dead right'. Since the data of theology is human experience, the value of these words is none the less because they are motivated by negative feelings about the Roman Catholic Church.
My personal gripe against the Roman Catholic Church is their success in dimming the divine light within me. This is a natural characteristic of monarchies. Requisite variety [is] a feature which cybernetics tells us is built into the Universe and we must respect it. To maintain control, a monarch has no choice but to reduce the variety of its subjects.
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