VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 21 march 2010 - Saturday 27 March 2010]
[Notebook: DB 68: Salalah]
[page 289]
Sunday 21 march 2010
Stiglitz page 219: '. . . historians will mark the twenty years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. Stiglitz
As short as the Third Reich! Nazi Germany - Wikipedia
The physical separation and denial of reality inherent in monkish life is totally wrong.
goddess worship; every source is a source of revelation and so qualifies as a god / godess / server / . . . .
Briefing: passing the values of various variables, -- weather, enemy defences etc etc. Then action. Then return new values of inpiut variables (or some other values of other variables).
VARIABLE / VALUE
Because it is hard to understand the world just by
[page 290]
looking at it, we need documentation to explain how things work and how to manipulate them, documentation that sometimes has been thousands of years in the making.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy Australasian Association of Philosophy
We measure the bandwidth of the Universe in pixels per second, where the action of each pixel is h bar . . . pixels per second = E [energy]. Since we are moving through 4-spae at |c|, we can project energy into space (momentum = L-1) and time (energy = T-1).
Here are some clues about the mapping of logic to spacetime.
Transform the dimension of h bar to 1 (an event, count 1), then ML2T-1 = 1, so giving us relations like ML2 = T etc or M = L-2T. One would think it should be so simple, but I don't see it. What are dimensions anyway? Independent degrees of freedom, so one can (in the abstract) change M without affecting L or T.
Simply, mass is a measure of energy - E = mc2. This establishes a relationship between M, L and T? No, since the dimensions are the same on both sides of E = mc2, though the values of these dimensions are the scalars E, m and c only two of which are independent, so we can say E = f(m, c) etc. This same sort
[page 291]
holds in Pythagorean space in which, for a right angled triangle, c2 = a2 + b2M where a and b are the lengths of the sides adjacent to the right angle.
The philosophical questions of interest here are the relationships between matter and spirit (which defines them), movement and stillness, knowledge and ignorance and so on, perennial questions turned over by every generation. Here we approach these questions by the now time honoured methods of science, conjecture and refutation. Let is dream up a picture of how this works and then try to prove our conjecture wrong.
History, particularly the history of quantum mechanics, suggests that no conjecture can be too wild. Aside from the philosophical questions of interpretations, quantum mechanics as a mathematical toybox for constructing models of the world seems to be perfect. This suggests that the strangeness we eel when we study vectors in complex Hilbert spaces must be pointing to an interpretation of quantum mechanics [that] makes sense. Here we explore the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is a toolkit for estimating the traffic on various links of the universal computer network.
Mathematical physics uses spaces and models in these spaces to describe the behaviour of the objects of interest, The founding mathematical model in physics is based on Newton's four axioms constraining the motions of massive bodies in three dimensions of space and one of time.
Although we are intuitively familiar with moving about in space and moving inevitably through time, the
[page 292]
mathematical description of these motions can become very complex and we must use numerical methods to model situations involving more than 2 mutually attractive bodies.
One might think that the economics of information should be the simplest and most abstract because formally information may be cloned without limit, whereas in the real world all information has to be physically represented and there are only a (locally) countable number of representations (eg atoms).
Here is where order and creation enter as a couple, the ordering of a finite alphabet of symbols (ie countable) yielding the second transfinite cardinal, ℵ1 and so on without limit. This is the Platonic version, but what happens when we bring in the actual physical representations of this system? here the parameter of interest we will call resolution (a function of entropy), the number of individual entities that can be distinguished in a given situation, ie the [effective] number of letters in the alphabet.
Stiglits page 240 on regulation: Everything is economics (ie survival of the fit) so learn from physics. A unit of currency is a quantum of action.
Should we all be paid as indistinguishable individuals, and not according to our roles, banker, thief, house person etc.
page 252: 'Bubbles are a social phenomenon'
[page 293]
Monday 22 March 2010
All this is the output of one source, keen to get into the network to compare, contrast and learn from other points of view, ie the output of other sources.
Stiglitz page 266: 'The very fact that the market participants spend billions and billions trying to beat the market itself refutes that twin hypotheses that markets are efficient and that most market participants are rational.'
All I can do to facilitate my life is to communicate with my environment.
page 267: 'There is a curious inconsistency in the views of many of the efficient market advocates. They believed that markets are already fully efficient. Yet they boasted of the virtues of new innovations in financial markets, and they claimed their huge bonuses and profits were their just rewards for the social benefits brought by these innovations.
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Look no more for outside gods; the Universe itself is divine. . . .
Every computer (= network) is a tree of dependencies which define an ordinal set of layers, layer n+1 depending on layer n. No molecules without atoms, no atoms without atomic particles and so on. This tree is rooted in the structureless initial singularity (god)
[page 294]
and grows transfinitely from there to give the cone of meaning analogous to the physicist's light cones, whose growth in one dimension id linear, the velocity of light, c.
Live with it vs change it. On the whole we are inclined to change the world rather than live with it which has what has led to our present situation.
Formally, we take words at their value as ascertained by 'scholarship' which means essentially the construction and interpretation of texts, using the same rules for both construction and interpretation. In reality (ie spoken) words have an emotional 'mass' which may in some cases be inconsistent with their formal meaning. Why are Americans so upset about Health Care that the Republicans want to destroy the initiative at all costs?
If God is the Unquestioned Authority, then our society is a theocracy and the name of our God is $.
Epistemology: the science of trust. Stiglitz page 289.
Insofar as charity begins at home, we need to design all our public social systems to be robust against greed and remove the value from greed where possible.
Transparency: eating in public.
