Notes
[Sunday 26 April 2009 - Saturday 2 May 2009]
[Notebook: DB 66 Turing Field]
Sunday 26 April 2009
Monday 27 April 2009
Tuesday 28 April 2009
Wednesday 29 April 2009
[page 134]
Thursday 30 April 2009
Theological Studies: A thesis:
On the relationship between theology and quantum field theory.
LEARNED vs SKILLED : A History.
On the whole learning is abstract, skill concrete. For a long time in Western history, learning has tended to be separated from skill. Crombie Learning was a prerogative of the powerful, that is those able to employ slaves, who possesed the concrete skills necessary to keep their master in the manner to which he was accustomed. This separation is by no means absolute, but it seems to have been a general rule that those with power avoided getting themselves or their beautiful clothes dirty.
The rise of science and technology, on the other hand arises from us beginning to
[page 135]
think about what we do. By thinking about our activities we make them more productive, that is contributing more to our fitness. The single most conclusive argument is the human population explosion which has resulted from our skill at turning the world to our own benefit by agriculture, mining, forestry and so on, at the same time radically altering the landscape by replacing natural systems with our own constructions. This is my day job; at night I think about it (among other things) and record some of my thoughts here.
A thought is something of which we become conscious and which can be to some extent be captured in some record. A thought is potentially communicable data, some structure with communicable (quantized) features. These snippets arise from the continuum of thought which includes all possible thoughts. The continuum arises from the permutation of the discretum.
A common observation in human affairs is that if something is done, somebody did it. It seems natural to extend this idea by giving personalities to the non-human gents in the world, either in their own right, or as puppets or slaves of some other personality. The monotheist tradition sees the personalities of all agents in the Universe as manifestations of the one omnipotent God, in Hebrew and Christian tradition, Yahweh. This contrasts with other cultures where the gods may be many or none. As the current power structure of the human planet stands, the Yahwistic tradition has become to most powerful, ultimately due to its association with superior military technology and the means (once the Navy, now the Air Force) to project power around the Universe.
[page 136]
While the Hebrews were inventing monotheism, the Greeks were inventing science, the careful observation and recording of events, coupled with algorithms to predict future events from past events. Predictability is the foundation of skill. There could be no golf if clubs, balls and contrived landscapes had completely unpredictable behaviour.
The Hebrew and Greek traditions met and prduced Christianity. This creative process is recorded in the Patrologia of Minge, and all the other texts we have about the formative period of Christianity during which it settled most of the questions of interest to it in the relations between God, his Son become human and the world. Jacques-Paul Minge, Patrologia Latina; J. P Minge, Patrologia GraecaThe result is a vast, and in its day convincing, picture of our divine and worldly environment.
Christianity entered a second stage of development in the in the Middle Ages, whose high point [in retrospect] was the Summa Theologiae of Thomas of Aquinas, made official by Canon Law Thomas Aquinas, Holy See, canon 252:3 In this period also the Popes became active in both laying down the law and using military means to spread the law and force obedience to it. As the screws tightened, an increase in heresy began which has continued to this day, when the large numbers of people in erstwhile Christian regions now find such an approach to knowledge and power obsolete. Historically, the beginnings of this are recorded as the Reformation and the Renaissance. The Reformation saw the flowering of Christian sects to the left and the right of the traditional Church, now called Roman Catholic to differentiate itself from the splinter groups. It remains by far the most powerful Christian denomination.
[page 137]
The Reformation drove the Roman Catholic Church to defend its doctrine more explicitly, beginning a trend which led to the declaration of Papal Infallibility at the first Vatican Council and the victory of reactionary forces in the Church over the brief flowering of creativity surrounding the Second Vatican Council.
The institutional weight of Christianity has effectively killed theology as a science, since its whole empirical basis is the Bible, tiny source of data compared to the world in which it is embedded. Like all survivors, the Church acts to ensure its own survival. The raison d'etre of the Church is to serve as a communication link between God and the World. If God and the World are in fact one, the Church becomes unnecessary. Millions of people have already taken this step, guiding their lives by their own experience rather than by the 'Word of God'.
The difference between God and the World is established by proofs for the existence of God, a very famous five of which Aquinas records in the Summa. Aquinas 13 All of these proofs amount to establishing that the world is not self-sufficient and so, since it does exist, must exist courtesy of some other being which we call God.
Each of these proofs compares a model of god with a model of the world and shows that one is not the other; they are, in other words, model dependent. Here we would like to argue that God and the World are one and we do it by producing a singe model which fits both god and the world.
[page 138]
MOMENTUM = RATE OF CHANGE OF MEMORY in (eg) bits /sec
or
MOMENTUM = amount of memory (a cardinal)
and
ENERGY = rate of change of memory = actions per second. d memory / dt
or
MASS = MEMORY ? no MASS = ENERGY = acts per second, quanta of action per second.
I am in the same quandary as the pre Galileans, trying to map physical dynamics onto a communication network. Crombie II: 3
What seems clear is that we ultimately measure counts of quanta. Physics is the most abstract science in the sense that it is ultimately trying to model a pattern of counts (or events) in spacetime. This is equivalent to network traffic analysis, which is not concerned with the meaning of messages in a network, only their volume.
COUNTING EVENTS in 4xels. A cell in the Universe is something like an inertial frame, inside of which nothing happens. The action is between the frames.
The way you care for things is lock them up if the environment is bad for them, let them free if it is good for the. One quantum of action maps action onto a certain spacetime volume measured by the spacetime interval ds2. So the quantum of action pixellates spacetime, and the size of the pixels is measured by the 4-momentum 'flowing' through their neighbourhood. A region of zero 4-momentum is completely undefined, ie infinite (without boundary or
[page 139]
definition.
I want to kill the mice in my kitchen but they (or their agents) have hidden the traps.
Murderous power, but what else can I do? Trap them and put them outside. At least they have a chance. So I need gentle mousetraps, not violent ones. Of course I could tidy up a bit better and starve them out, cruel, but leave the door open so that they can forage outside and perhaps be eaten. Live trap.
Learned vs skilled: One cannot help but thing that Plato's connection with politicians influenced his outlook on the world maybe as something to be tamed in the interests of wealth.
Friday 1 May 2009
Perhaps the reason why the Church began to exercise more vigilant control of doctrine from the Middle Ages was the explosion in speculation aroused by the reception of Greek and Arabic learning into the West. This speculation gradually became institutionalized as science, but, under the influence of the Church, theology lies outside the pale of science to this day, a consequence of the strict enforcement of the difference between God and the World by the Church.
The condemnation of opinions: Denzinger, Crombie p II:90
Superposition is an artefact of analysis. First we analyze a complex motion into a set of simple motions (from a certain point of view) and them superpose them to recover the initial motion. Crombie p II:90
[page 140]
A transducer preserves the form while changing the physical objects used to represent it, converting mechanical pressure, for instance, into voltage.
Although the vectors as 'geometric objects' stay the same as we rotate coordinate systems, nevertheless some coordinate systems give a more concise expression of a vector or operation than others. So we get a diagonal matrix when we use its eigenfunctions as a coordinate basis, and from this we can read off the probability of coupling between the corresponding eigenstates. A matrix operating on one of its eigenvectors at most changes its length, not its direction. As a consequence, the matrix changes the probabilities of events rather than the nature of the events as represented by a change in direction as well as the magnitude of a vector. Crombie page 103
Crombie page 107: Albert of Saxony thought that velocity acquired was proportional to the distance rather than the duration of [a particle's] falling.
Saturday 2 May 2009
The ultimate force in the Universe is increasing cardinality since the probability of being in space is proportional to its cardinal number (or cardinal number relative to other complexity spaces).
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