Notes
[Sunday 20 December 2009 - Saturday 26 December 2009]
[Notebook: DB 68: Salalah
Sunday 20 December 2009
We respond in proportion to perceived need or potential. So those whose needs are satisfied need not respond at all, whereas those in extreme need are moved to maximum response which may include killing other people [to save their own lives]. In the physical world need (potential, force) and response (acceleration) are linearly related. In the metaphysical world the relationship between force and action may be much more complex, involving for instance extensive planning, foresight and capital expenditure to get what we want.
Quantum statistics are constrained (contracted) versions of complete statistics. Whence the contraction? Error defeat?
'"One wonders," he said, "what it is all For".'
A Christie Mr Quin, The Man From the Sea Christie
The mystical pole is that there is nothing to understand, the world is totally simple, with no marks upon which sense and mind can get a
[page 133]
grip. The practical pole is that survival depends on a large toolkit of specific actions which need to be deployed in the correct order at appropriate times to maintain the supply of food, shelter (security) and reproductive opportunities. We have tended to divide ourselves into two classes of people, [those] who are wealthy enough to spend all their time contemplating the infinite, boundless, unmarked and the rest, workers, women, peasants, drones, labourers etc whose life is a ceaseless concern with making specific things happen. Some mystics might claim that their prayers make things happen, but this is hard to believe. Good theology mediates between the mystical and the practical, focussing the practicality into an effectively functioning, just and free society.
The mediating activity is creation, moving from the infinite to the definite as the world complexifies. Insofar as we are all of a mystical turn of mind, we continually try to see the unity, that is the guiding software, in the detail, and we have evolved to do this so effectively that our species dominates the world. Of particular importance to us is to find the unity in ourselves and our fellow people, a task made difficult by the Churches that preach that we are a fractured, broken, damaged good.
The superiority of contemplation over action is just as spurious as the superiority of celibacy to active sexuality, both spurious political ploys to control people, perhaps from a fitness point of view beneficial to the community but unjust, unfree and undemocratic. Does a society become more or less powerful as it becomes freer? What about Stalin, the Nazis and the
[page 134]
Chinese? Joseph Stalin - Wikipedia Nazism - Wikipedia
Religion: social software engineering.
Monday 21 December 2009
Tuesday 22 December 2009
Wednesday 23 December 2009
Thursday 24 December 2009
Ultimately we accept that most of the moral judgements of Biblical Christianity are pretty sound [except Old Testament genocide and similar divine excesses], and the task is not to replace them but to place them on new foundations better situated among the invariants of reality and so refine them and remove a lot of the institutional rubbish that has accumulated over the centuries as a result of the politicization and commercialization of religion. [Similar task as the Protestant reformers, but not back to the Bible, but back to the real world].Friday 25 December 2009
The Messiah, like the Buddha and other part real, part fictitious personalities, introduced large scale phase changes in human affairs which have radically increased our fitness as a species until we have become dangerous to the system. A new human wide change is becoming necessary to integrate our different religions and also to integrate us intro the planetary system.
Leadership: ability to inspire people to act for a common cause. [making fermions behave bosonly]
It seems at this moment (after my first Xmas beer) that I have nothing more to say to this
[page 135]
book, that everything is done (in principle) and now we must turn to the application, that is to writing the Gospel (= good news) according to natural religion [derived by 'critical naturalism']. For despite its often apparent harshness, the Universe is a benevolent place, yielding stability to maximum entropy which coincides with maximum sustainable complexity, which coincides with maximum sustainable cooperation, that is a level of cooperation sufficient to carry the inevitable load of cheats and freeloaders [parasites] that feed off a cooperative enterprise, a feat made possible by the error correcting power of complexity itself.
