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Notes

[Sunday 15 November 2009 - Saturday 21 November 2009]

[Notebook: DB 68 Salalah]

[page 78]

Sunday 15 November 2009

v and V. v speaks for every personality, and the shape of the letter suggests beginning at a point and expanding. A further coincidence if that V is used in physics to represent potential, and it is the potential or container that shapes the dynamic structure within the container, just like the guitar body confines the string to certain eigenfunctions, [amplifies some and suppresses others].

Reality of a digital phenomenon, although we may treat it abstractly as a continuum.

Grgin page 243: '. . . the law of inertia, according to which a system has, at every instant t a memory of its state of motion at the infinitesimally close instant in its past t - dt. According to Aristotle, it had no memory.' Grgin

Aristotle thought the arrow was pushed along by the medium (air). But where is Newton's memory stored? In the momentum, a frequency determined by p circumflex = h bar k in the momentum representation and p circumflex = h bar / i partial d/dx in the coordinate representation. (Park page 35 Park

Park page 3: 'Anyone preparing a revolution must expect to be asked whether the step is really necessary, and he will, if he is wise, begin his manifesto by showing that it is so'.

page 2: Jefferson: 'Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient courses; and accordingly all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.'

[page 79]

Park page 5: 'Ether' = logical confinement [(?)].

Maxwell's equations describe a 'self explanatory' motion, given the total absence of friction or dissipation.

Given enough energy, one may make anything out of anything, and in fact we can make things out of 'pure' energy.'

Monday 16 November 2009

A new idea is a new bifurcation in the world, p and not-p being defined where there once was nothing. Since a bifurcation is an action, and the rate of such action (per time) is energy. We wish to take the generation of the Word from the Father as the human intellectual archetype of such an event and use it to model the creation of the bifurcation of potential and kinetic energy in the world. The idea expressed in this paragraph beings me from a point where I had no idea about the origin of energy, only the question where does energy come from. The act of creation, we might now say (which is every act) creates structure and motion simultaneously, ie potential and kinetic energy simultaneously. Structure or potential is considered to endure through time, as also does motion (Newton's Galileo's first law).

We measure distance by correlation, whether positive or negative. ie (correlation)2.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

Fortun & Bernstein Muddling Through Fortun & Bernstein

[page 80]

The Church is a flawed communication channel with reality, able to carry only those messages which are approved by the hierarchy. To be contrasted with the internet through which anything goes. Each of us is a channel of bounded bandwidth, set on a particular course by the circumstances of our birth and education, but capable of changing and in many cases ready to change to increase our bandwidth. The natural religion project is an attempt to increase the bandwidth of our coupling to God by bypassing the tiny orifice we call the Bible and replacing it with the whole horizon of human experience.

FACT = MESSAGE. What does it mean? Requires decoding.

EXPERIMENTING = LIVING, ie asking questions and seeking answers.

F&B page 6 Dewey quoting Mill: 'To draw inferences has been said to be the great business of life. Everyone has daily, hourly and momentary need of ascertaining facts which he has not directly observed. . . . It is the only occupation in which the mind never ceases to be engaged.'

F&B page 30: 'Deciding when to have faith and when to skeptically attack results and theories is an expert, subtle art or craft.'

On creation; the genesis of an event a message. The purpose of the work recorded

[page 81]

here is to record an account of the mechanism of creation and so close the circle by creation talking about creation.

To create, we say, is to bring something to be that did not exist before. It is the inverse of annihilation. More commonly, we might match creation to birth and annihilation to death. Creation and annihilation are central concepts in quantum field theory and, we guess, by extension, central concepts in our understanding of the Universe.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth . . .

or

In the beginning God began to create itself. Our intention is to show by formal mathematical argument that this sentence contains or implies no contradiction, and so can be said mathematically to exist, and physicaly to be possible. The fact that there is creation makes, it, or something like it, probable.

Tesla, a creator. Margaret Cheney Cheney

Examples, collapse of the wave function; Insight, the divine light of intellectus agens informing the intellectus patiens. Active intellect - Wikipedia Passive intellect - Wikipedia

For this moment at least I feel that I have come to the end of my search for something to write. So far too many starts and too few completions, like an overloaded server. An anwer to my lifelong prayer.

[page 82]

So risk a bit more liver and lung damage to increase the wealth I can pass on to my children.

Can one patent the method of creation (one we can write down) - or is it a mystery, something whose opposite is contradictory, like Cantor's theorem.

First the formal model, then the application.

We say that creation is a property of networks.

Bergson Evolution Creatrice Bergson Henri Bergson - Wikipedia

But can it be done? Our faith lies in the exponential power of error correction.

Peano's axioms create the natiural numbers. Cantor;s theorme creates the transfinite numbers.

Creation - motion from continuum to discretum.
Annihilation - motion from discretum to continuum.

Creation - making entropy and information where there was none before.

It is of interest to know whether the Universe as we know it created itself or if it is the product of some outside agency. I argue here that it could have consistently created itself. Define creation and instance it as the collapse of the wave function.

[page 83]

Wednesday 18 November 2009

If the Universe was created by a being outside it, we might expect this agent to be responsible for the initial conditions (and possibly the ongoing guidance) that brought it to its current state. If the Universe creates itself, we have no need of specific initial conditions, and the only ongoing dynamic condition is lack of local contradiction,which will lead to local annihilation. [lack of inconsistency = logical continuity]

From personal experience, we can say that creation is a very roundabout and random process, since the initial conditions for any act of creation cannot be sufficient to determine it fully. All we know is that some systems once they do come into existence are self-sustaining, like life on earth given the sun.

The essence of experimental science is to put clearly defined questions to nature in the hope of getting clearly defined answers. Sometimes this process is successful. Often it is not. In the quantum realm we accept that no matter how well defined the question (the 'preparation of the state') the answer is not always the same, but rather a point in a probability distribution function that may be the product of a quantum mechanical computation.

The inability to create at will, to fall in love and stay in love at will, is one of the downsides of the Universe that has caused me a lot of grief and slowly taught me patience which has manifested itself in my thirty years stint of rather solitary self absorption here in the bush looking at myself and the world and trying to make sense of us.

[page 84]

To be aware of the unpredictability of creativity and to take it into account in everyday life might serve to significantly reduce the tension in life, if one wishes to do so. Do we create faster against a deadline, and the answer might be yes. The tension comes from the questions. Had I chosen to forget my questions and enter the public service, none of this writing could have happened, or its consequences, if any.

Eureka Street On Creation.

Looking forward to the Old Age Pension so I will have the leisure to become seriously wealthy.

The mechanization of people: call centres.

In many ways the atmosphere of the Earth limits our view of the rest of the Universe. The advent of space borne instrumentation designed with the principles of quantum mechanics is overcoming this limitation, so that by looking at old radiation coming from far away we can trace the history of the Universe almost from the beginning. At the same time our growing understanding of physics developed here on earth allows us to infer much of what is going on in the gaps where we do not yet have full information. The overall picture is clear, and has been with us for a long time: the Universe started from near enough to nothing and grew to its current state, either creating itself or being made by some outside agency.

[page 85]

Agatha Taken at the flood: 'There is a tide . . . ' William Shakespeare

The desire to do something grows until one finds oneself doing it, as when the line of thought followed here sent me off to the computer to look at previous efforts to say something useful about creation.

The physical world is quantized and so, given that all information is represented physically, cannot represent the real numbers [except as vectors or strings of natural numbers]

Literary allusions add layers of meaning to otherwise relatively simple sentences, as when I say I have no superannuation, I have lived as a grasshopper rather than an ant. The Ant and the Grasshopper - Wikipedia

How do we get a structure out of a continuum? We cannot answer that, but we can use the exponential power of error correction to explain how the structure can maintain itself once formed by 'chance'.

These notes are in effect the formal continuum out of which I wish to distil an understanding of creation. The notes themselves are the product of creation aristing out of my subconscious continuum of definite sentences like these which I can write down. Polanyi

We are interested in the creation of form or information out of matter, the opposite of information,

[page 86]

[materia prima est] nec quid, nec quale, nec quantum, neque aliquid erorum quibus ens determinatur. [ prime matter is neither what, nor what sort, nor how much, nor any of those things by which being is determined.]

Our task is to use text to explain the origin of text and show how continuum becomes discretum. Some sort of inverse of Cantor's theorem is needed, where he converted the determinate into the transfinite which is itself determinate.

Thursday 19 November 2009

To understand something one goes through the practical infinity of permutations of the apparently relevant elements until one comes up with a 'fit' when all conditions are met. So I have concluded (at least for a couple of days) that the notions if insight, creation and quantum collapse are all instances of the same phenomenon and like Lonergan, think I can base a theology on them. These notebooks contain some of the many trials and errors that have led me to this position. Who knows that the future will bring.

So the eigenvalue equation gives the condition for a quantum 'fit' that gives a stationary state. We observe transitions between stationary states.

Theological Studies On Creation 1. Introduction from Parmenides and Plato to Aquinas and Lonergan. A fitting section, providing a letter in the alphabet of explanation.

2. Quantum theory ie from quantum theory to

[page 87]

insight.

A model of the world: the good old transfinite computer network.

4. . . . applying the model. Communication theory and articulation.

5. Action, computation, layering and symmetry, messages, delay; time = numerus motus secundum prius et posterius [time is the indexing of motion according to 'before' and 'after']

6. Creation and annihilation and communication

7. Error correction and sustenance. Lonergan's schemes of recurrence.

8. Human organization (we are the letters), theology and religion

Writing the articles is in effect a mopping up operation after the messy 'Muddling Through' represented by these notes. Each time I produce a table of content I am trying to articulate my vision in an alphabet of about 10 letters (chapters, sections).

The Word is among us insofar as it is a symmetry of every action, moving from past (the Father, memory) via the present (the Word, the blueprint [the idea that makes me want to write]) to the desired end (the spirit, the love).

9. The embedded trinity.

10. The Universe might be divine - the hypothesis developed in the previous chapters is consistent with divinity.

11. The errors of the old model. Gödel and Turing show

[page 88]

that the old model of God (omnino simplex) makes sense in the sense that it is static, empty and tells us nothing. As soon as we bring this God alive, it loses its omniscience and so becomes isomorphic to the world of experience [where the future is seen at various levels of resolution]

12. Implementing creativity. Classical mechanics is not creative, quantum mechanics is. [the limits to prediction]

The annihilation of memory: search. I know her well but for a moment the name does not come.

The website can work by layering without ordering the articles in each layer. The current outline, running from epistemology to Heaven identifies 16 (?) convenient layers. Since the layers are self-contained subsets of something bigger, we can ultimately dispense with their ordering.

We articulate by ordering and once the articles are well defined dispense with the particular ordering and let the permutations run free. Theis is the way of the world, it makes sense wherever we step into it.

Like my house, a structural muddle on the way to completion.

F& B page 40: 'When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, overt civil war might have ended, but dissension and controversial beliefs of all manner remained pervasive threats to the civil order. Anything having to do with beliefs or knowledge claims underlying politics, religion, law or the natural world was a matter of vital social concern.

[page 89]

If there is a miracle it is the internet and the possibility of definite truthful communication in general. This is the foundation of the world.

Faith: to belive something on ehurtistic grounds. It would be so nice of Christianity were true, but it is not. We die. But we can have good lives nevertheless.

How many flavours can I taste? How many pictures can I see? What is the bandwidth of my input?

Friday 20 November 2009

The simplest code, what we might call a mass code, is to send each letter of the string a number of times, say n, so that the recipient can vote out erroneous messages with a certain level of confidence.

I have had a satisfying flow of ideas in my lifetime and because I have been permanently in an exploratory mode, have just skipped from one to the next, building up a map of possibilities in my mind, looking for focus. Now for a while I am focussed on creation, and because it seems to me to be a valuable fixed point for viewing the Universe, I am prepared to go into detail and attempt to capture the ideas in mathematical symbols.

To every permutation there is an operator that transforms a string from its natural order to the desired permutation.

The Hamming distance between permutations.

[page 90]

Saturday 21 November 2009

Every system in the transfinite network has a 'continuous' 'infinite' God above it an a discrete, finite physical foundation beneath it. At one end of this hierarchy we have the absolute physical layer, represented by energy and gravitation that can exist independently of higher layers. At the other, open, end, we have something tending toward ultimate complexity, unlimited entropy and information.

I would like the transfinite network to answer all my question, but it is till rather confused even though my hopes are high.

Creation and annihilation lie at the boundary between something and nothing. Heidegger asked 'why is there something rather than nothing?' [Jim Holt Nothing cannot explain this, but something can, and because something has more states than nothing, it is probabilistically attractive, and so comes to be. However, we can only talk about it from the something side, and here we use communication theory to show that the gates of nothing can be thwarted in their attempts to destroy something. What we need to show is how complex system,s by their error correcting power, maintain their own symbolic substrates and so keep themselves in existence, rather as agriculture keeps us supplied with food.

FOOD = {ENERGY, INFORMATION} = {ENERGY, SYMBOL}

We may think of the world formally as literature.

[page 91]

Literature (in the human sphere) is a product of insight, seeing and reproducing patterns in reality.

. . .

The last words, like all the words in this book, represent me jockeying for a position from which I can see everything. In geographic terms, climbing all the hills in the landscape trying to find the highest one from which I can see how all the others fit in. So this is a record of dim perceptions trying to see ordered clarity.

ORDER ==> CLARITY by giving a place to every subroutine in the global computation.

One starts with an embryonic idea represented by an embryonic bit of writing and then proceeds to analyze it in terms of sections and chapters. Finally, having arrived at a satisfactory analysis, that is a meaningful orthogonal basis for representation, one may go on to create a synthesis whose totality gives and maintains precise meanings to the analytic symbols by coupling them all together. [this is like resolution, the larger the space over which we coherently add, the better the resolution, here the resolution / space function is linear. Position significant notation enables it to become exponentially non-linear in favour of resolution]

The hardest thing with thoughts is catching them as they fly past. Of course, by repeating the thought over and aver again (as with repeated quantum mechanical observations) one can hold it in mind until you get to a friend, but if I have a string of thoughts while I am driving home about half of them have gone by the time I get to the desk.

[page 92]

Here is another hint that quantum mechanics, insight and creation are all related. We want the transfinite network to formalize this.

Watertight formalism is good if it is applicable. We might claim that all mathematical formalism is applicable to the Universe, at least to that part of the Universe that dreamt up the formalism in the first place.

Latifa : My Forbidden Face You learn how violent the society is when you kick against it. Latifa

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Bergson, Henri, Creative Evolution, General Books LLC 2009 'Long absent from the center of discussion in Western philosophy, Bergson has recently made a reappearance. The Centennial Series of his works undertaken by Palgrave Macmillan thus comes at an opportune time, making it possible for those interested in Bergson's ideas t have access to newly annotated versions of several of his chief writings, freshly introduced and discussed. It is particularly good to see the republication of Mind-Energy, a treasure trove of Bergsonian insights long out of print.' - Pete A.Y. Gunter, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of North Texas 
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Cheney, Margaret, Tesla: Man out of Time, Touchstone 2001 Jacket: 'In Tesla: Man Out of Time Margaret Cheneyexplores the brilliant and prescient mind of the twentieth century's greatest scientist and inventor.  
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Chrsitie, Agatha, Taken at the Flood, Collins Crime 2000  
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Fortun, Mike, and Herbert J Bernstein, Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century, Counterpoint 1998 Amazon editorial review: 'Does science discover truths or create them? Does dioxin cause cancer or not? Is corporate-sponsored research valid or not? Although these questions reflect the way we're used to thinking, maybe they're not the best way to approach science and its place in our culture. Physicist Herbert J. Bernstein and science historian Mike Fortun, both of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS), suggest a third way of seeing, beyond taking one side or another, in Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century. While they deal with weighty issues and encourage us to completely rethink our beliefs about science and truth, they do so with such grace and humor that we follow with ease discussions of toxic-waste disposal, the Human Genome Project, and retooling our language to better fit the way science is actually done.' 
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Fortun, Mike, and Herbert J Bernstein, Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century, Counterpoint (October 20, 1998) Language: English ISBN-10: 1887178481 ISBN-13: 978-1887178488 1998 Amazon editorial review: 'Does science discover truths or create them? Does dioxin cause cancer or not? Is corporate-sponsored research valid or not? Although these questions reflect the way we're used to thinking, maybe they're not the best way to approach science and its place in our culture. Physicist Herbert J. Bernstein and science historian Mike Fortun, both of the Institute for Science and Interdisciplinary Studies (ISIS), suggest a third way of seeing, beyond taking one side or another, in Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the 21st Century. While they deal with weighty issues and encourage us to completely rethink our beliefs about science and truth, they do so with such grace and humor that we follow with ease discussions of toxic-waste disposal, the Human Genome Project, and retooling our language to better fit the way science is actually done.' 
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Grgin, Emile, The Algebra of Quantions: A Unifying Number System for Quantum Mechanics and Relativity, AuthorHouse 2005 Amazon Product Description 'Quantum mechanics and relativity have been in structural conflict for eighty years. This work shows that the incompatibility in question stems only from the assumption that their unification must be based on the field of complex numbers. Dropping this assumption, one can derive a simple mathematical structure which subsumes both theories as special cases. While the idea of generalizing the number system of quantum mechanics to make structural room for relativity is very old, no attempt has been successful in the past. The novelty brought out in the present work is based on a self-evident observation: there is no reason to expect the development of mathematics and physics to be synchronized in a manner that would keep the former forever one step ahead of the latter. More specifically, if a new number system seems to be needed in physics, there is no reason to believe that this system already belongs to our mathematical heritage.This observation changes the nature of the problem from 'finding' a unifying number system among the algebras already studied by mathematicians, to 'discovering' it ab initio from the requirement that it should lead to a structural merging of quantum mechanics and relativity. The solution, named "algebra of quantions", is derived in this book from several viewpoints, together with proofs of its mathematical uniqueness. Its physical relevance stems from the fact that the Standard Model depends less on observations if formulated over the quantions. This work is a philosophical and technical introduction to the algebra of quantions, to quantionic analysis, and to quantionic field equations.' 
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Latifa, My Forbidden face: Growing Up Under the Taliban: A Young Woman's Story, Miramax 2003 Amazon review From Booklist 'Latifa was only 16 when the Taliban overran Kabul, changing her life dramatically. On the morning of September 26, 1996--the day the Taliban took Kabul--Latifa, her sister, Soraya, and their father drove to Aryana Square and saw the body of the murdered former president, Najibullah. The Taliban began issuing edicts, forbidding women to leave their houses without a close male relative to escort them; forcing them to wear chadris, which cover their entire bodies; and refusing to allow them to work. Latifa, Soraya, and their mother suffered greatly, falling into depression. Their mother, a doctor, continued to see patients secretly, and Latifa eventually started an underground school for girls, an action that put both her and her students at great risk. Latifa and her parents left Afghanistan to be interviewed by the French magazine Elle, but when they tried to return, they discovered that the Taliban had declared them enemies of the state. A moving firsthand account with a real sense of immediacy.' Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association. 
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Park, David Allen, Introduction to the Quantum Theory, McGraw-Hill Book Company 1992  
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Polanyi, Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 2009 Amazon product description: '“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.' 
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Links
Active intellect - Wikipedia Active intellect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Active intellect or agent intellect is a term used in philosophy to refer to the formal (morphe) aspect of the intellect (nous), in accordance with the theory of hylomorphism. . . . Aristotle: the active intellect was the subject of much intense discussion in medieval philosophy. The idea is first encountered in Aristotle's De Anima, in which he discusses the human mind and distinguishes between the active and passive intellects.[1] Aristotle says that the passive intellect receives the intelligible forms of things, but that the active intellect is required to make the potential knowledge into actual knowledge, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors. back
Henri Bergson - Wikipedia Henri Bergson - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Henri-Louis Bergson (. . . 18 October 1859–4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century.' back
Jim Holt Nothing Ventured 'In 1935, around the time he began proclaiming that Hitler would rescue the German people from their forgetfulness of Being, Heidegger declared "Why is there something rather than nothing?" to be the deepest and most far-reaching of all questions. Each of us, he claimed, is "grazed...by its hidden power" at least once in our lives, whether we realize it or not: The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured....It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it might be easier to think they are not than to understand that they are and are as are. The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not... ' back
The Ant and the Grasshopper - Wikipedia The Ant and the Grasshopper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Synopsis The fable concerns a grasshopper who has spent the warm months singing away while the ant (or ants in some editions) worked to store up food for winter. When winter arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger, and upon asking the ant for food is only rebuked for its idleness. The story is used to teach the virtues of hard work and saving, and the perils of improvidence. Some versions of the fable state a moral at the end, along the lines of: "Idleness brings want", "To work today is to eat tomorrow" or "It is best to prepare for the days of necessity". back
William Shakespeare Julius Caesar Act 4, Scene 3 'BRUTUS Under your pardon. You must note beside, That we have tried the utmost of our friends, Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe: The enemy increaseth every day; We, at the height, are ready to decline. There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat; And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.' back

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