VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 4 April 2010 - Saturday 10 April 2010]
[Notebook: DB 68: Salalah]
[page 300]
Sunday 4 April 2010
We can now see the Universe as an information processing system of unbounded complexity and so no longer the passive sublunary puppet that the ancients envisaged.
I was taught that philosophy is the study of the Universe by the 'pure light of human reason'. Leo XIII Events have shown that this is a very dodgy ground for the search for truth, since our scientific colleagues, grounded in observation, have found via quantum mechanics that almost nothing stands to reason and our rational expectations are often wrong. This is of course a common experience in human affairs, as economists, particularly, are becoming aware. Of course philosophy is grounded in the reality of philosophers, and their discourse. For practical purposes, we may take this discourse as representative of philosophy. Here we begin with the assumption that philosophical discourse is adequately represented by the printed philosophical literature. We will return to the justification of this hypothesis toward the end of this fragment of literature.
It may be objected that philosophers are infinite and the literature finite, and so incapable of such adequate representation. Here we will rely on Heisenberg's manifesto
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generated by his struggle to make sense of the physical experience without straying too far from classical models of the world whose roots are to be found in the work of Galileo and Newton. The principle was stated earlier: by their fruits you shall know them. Matthew 7:16
The experience that guides philosophers is to be found within the philosophers themselves.
We might claim that orgasm is a fundamental human experience that undoubtedly influences our whole understanding of the world, and that in the past organizations have tried to categorize orgasm as inadmissable evidence in their search for a model of the world. This is just a small example, however, of the general degradation of the world that entered Christian culture through its Platonic streak.
Modelling even the smallest feature of the world brings us up against intractable complexity.
The quantum of action is the atom of global dynamics, the minimum message. I love you. Also the maximum message. God is love; god = {message}.
'The great task of philosophy has always, in all ages, been to find the essential link existing between individual and social interests.' Tolstoy page 267. Tolstoy
Death is the formal inverse of birth and we can indicate their scale invariance by the quantum
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mechanical terms annihilation and creation [defined annihilation = not-creation]. When particles are annihilated and created, they do not come from 'nothing' but the process obeys the conservation of energy and momentum and angular momentum, quantities that form the 'prime matter' of the Universe as we now model it [and are purely formal by the fact that they are eternal, outside time, conserved].
There is nothing we can do about the concrete pains of death and childbirth. We just have to wear them, or take drugs to avoid them. No amount of explanation can take away the reality of the pain, but it can be given different interpretations that can affect the morale of the sufferer. The pains of birth are justified by the blessing of the new born, and those of death, perhaps, by accepting death as inevitable and not fighting against it unnecessarily.
Continuous functions are perfect for representing continuous motion, even if it is not exactly continuous but the steps in the motion are small enough [and frequent enough], which is guaranteed by pretty well all macroscopic situations by the smallness of Planck's constant. The positional steps taken by a 50 kg person at walking pace are about 6 x 10-26 meters, 1026 times smaller than the diameter of an atom.
'"How could schools help?"' '"By giving people fresh wants"' Tolstoy page 361.
No growth without increased demand. [Keynes Keynes ]
Monday 5 April 2010
Tuesday 6 April 2010
Neither the concept of limit nor of completeness establishes real continuity. We assume, however, that there is some
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sort of reality in the real continuum [if there is one[ that makes up for the defect in the formal continuum. We can see that from an information point of view there is no information (no mark) in a real continuum and therefore no meaning and nothing to be said about it. 2000+ years of argument about continua has all been a storm in a teacup [from an entropic point of view].
'. . . you have to see what your adversary is arguing for, what is precious to him, and then you can . . . ' Tolstoy page 421.
'She had completely caught and found the right words for his badly expressed idea. Levin gave a smile of pleasure: he was so struck by the transition from the confused, verbose discussion with his brother and Pestov to this laconic, clear, almost wordless communication of this very complex idea.'
A result of a common code = meaning space.
Feynman diagrams: when you address any point in the Universe you ultimately, given time, tend to address the whole Universe.
The physical layers of my spiritual support for my sister and the families goes to repairing the motor vehicle for the voyage, an option chosen (despite the considerable increase in fuel consumption over public transport) because of other detailed advantages, including moving a computer.
log: a formal presentation of where one has been; a map.
Let us assume that all these words are representatives of something in my mind, a map of my mind; a submap;
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abstract map.
Death carries most of the weight in the problem of evil, and the wishful thinking approach is that it is not real.
Freedom = freedom to move = freedom to change [painful situations, ie FORGETTING - from this comes the cost of the energy of forgetting (Landauer) Rolf Landauer.
Working set: hands never empty
Idle set: hands never full = Asypmtotes (dimensions) usually superposed.
Me and the Church are divorced, though the Church probably still thinks it possess me. I feel that I am the wronged party, and am seeking alimony, perhaps by taking over some of the Church's business.
We imagine that Christianity is the product of a very long period of thought that crystallized around the time of Jesus, who may have been instrumental in its development or perhaps just a personality constructed to help with marketing, a mascot.
Wednesday 7 April 2010
'Karenin . . . was quite devoid of that deep imaginative spiritual faculty in virtue of which conceptions springing from the imagination became to vivid that they must needs be given harmony with other conceptions and with actual fact. He saw nothing impossible and incongruous in the notion that
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death, although existing for unbelievers, did not exist for him, and that being in possession of the most perfect faith -- of the measure of which he was himself the judge -- his soul was free from sin, and he was already experiencing complete salvation here on earth.' Tolstoy page 539.
What does Tolstoy think of this?
The essence of revolution is to extend the privileges of the wealthy to all, perhaps by making fun of their pretensions to rule, deciding not just law but taste. Taste is the incentive, and it may become perverse, particularly when it militates against the poor and the environment [the commons].
'It is true that the shallowness and error of this conception of his faith were dimply felt by Karenin, and he knew that when, without the slightest thought that his forgiveness was the action of a Higher Power, he had surrendered directly to the feeling of forgiveness, he had known more happiness than now, when he was perpetually thinking about Christ dwelling in his heart, and that in signing official documents he was doing His will. But for Karenin it was necessary to think thus: it was so essential to him in his humiliation to have some elevated standpoint, however imaginary, from which, looked down upon by all, he could look down on others, that he clung to this delusion as if it were the real thing.'
SALVATION = EFFECTIVE PUBLIC SERVICE
All bureaucracies (all networks) are built around a notion of God and the distribution of power. In a network of
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network of people all working toward the same end, fitness is maximized by distributing power evenly. This may be true also in the case of conflict, although the conflict is generally motivated by gaining power at the expense of others.
POWER - CONTROL - BENEFIT
The rulers rules for their own benefit, so the structure of a society must in some way promote the rule of all for the benefit of all. Local power and private property.
A proof is a formal description of an action. So the bond between crankshaft and piston 'proves' the motion of the piston as the crankshaft rotates. The two motions are deterministically coupled and so we can postulate a Turing machine operating between them, sine all deterministic couplings (computable functions) can be represented by Turing machines.
We have faith that the epsilon-=delta process will carry us to whatever level of precision is required. Further, the quantum nature of the world tells us that insofar as we use mathematics for modelling reality, this precision need not go very far past the relevant representation of the quantum of action in the system that we are modelling.
Light cone - computation cone - action cone. It is beyond my power to go to Adelaide - outside my action cone,
The minimal Turing machine is the not gate. Read p, write not-p. Don't move. Read not-p, write p.
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The Church devised the marital prison and propagated it s a means of controlling the faithful by getting them to disparage those among them that do not toe the line.
The layers in the network are layers of meaning, ordered, as is the Cantor Universe, by complexity.
BANDWIDTH: Broadcast (high power, no addressing) vs personalized (addressed, low power)
Tolstoy's high society exercizes powerful control over its members. This control is in a way the definition of the ruling elite. "Society".
Go into society; go out of society; be admitted to / expelled from society.
One must either fit in or have sufficient power to change society rather than oneself.
How is the transfinite network creative? 1. Owing to symmetry all sequences of action in a given set of actions (like taking a ball from an urn) are equiprobable.. 2. Some sequences are self-sustaining and they become actually unconditioned, recursive, periodic, etc. As quantum mechanics shows, everything is periodic, ie everything can be represented by recursive function theory. Periodic = durable.
PERIODICITY - SYMMETRY - CLOSURE
We can make any group into a cyclic group by defining an order on the group actions.
University of Toronto Citizen Lab "Shadows in the Cloud" University of Toronto Citizen Lab
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Real numbers and limits.
Thursday 8 April 2010
Atomism (separatism) vs synechism (Aristotelian continuity). John L Bell Physicsts see that the Universe is atomic but nevertheless hold that the underlying process is synechistic, in order to avoid action at a distance.
Tolstoy page 689: 'We work without making anything, as though we were ordained, like the vestals of old, to keep some sacred fire burning.' NOBILITY, STEWARDSHIP
A short quote conveys little outside the context of the whole book and the society from which the book emerged, yet we are so familiar with the situations described in the book that the quote carried meaning even for those who have not read the whole.
Fqxi: It is clear from the fact that we . . . consider ourselves at least partly spiritual beings, that the cosmos and therefore cosmology has a spiritual aspect. The only way to deny this given the definition that spiritual is not material, is to place the spiritual world outside the cosmos as Christians do. Here we take the view that both material and not-material entities are part of the cosmos. This is possible because we can distinguish between the material basis of a given process (algorithm, form) and the process itself. Material and not-material are relative terms, and thei meaning sufggests that there as at least a duality in the Universe, p and not-p, a facg abundantly supported by observation and which might be expanded beyond duality by the observation that for every p (eg a flower) there exists a coutbale
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infinity of not-p's.
Fqxi: Material vs spiritual
The world adjusts its work rate to the rate of payment never letting things get out of kilter by more than 1 accounting unit, ultimately the quantum of action. So 'tunnelling'.
Tunnelling is said to be a physical mystery, and it is on the space view but makes perfect sense in the logical space where every event has a certain probability, running from 1 to 1/aleph(n), where n itself may be an aleph.
Very simple ideas, elaborately dressed, ie arranged into complex networks of creativity that in come way create an maintain themselves.
Friday 9 April 2010
Quantum mechanics the rate of execution of the algorithms represented by state vectors (eigenvectors) thorugh the eigenvalue equation. Its output is a probbaility density fiunction (encoded in a mateix) whose range is the set of eigenfunctions and domain a set of eigenvalues normalized to 1.
Universal Turing machine = {input, algorithm, output}
I wrote my first predictive deconvolution program (debubbler) in Fortran at Western Geo and was very proud of myself. Since that time, my understanding of mathematics comprises putting functions into computer code to see them 'in action'.
I have said this many times before, that the insights seem to be coming faster and I am in the end game of a phase of development. The key concept now is that the Universe is inherently dynamic and the fixed points in the dynamics are part of the dynamics. The ancient view was that the fixed points (forms) are superior to the dynamics, a second rate performance excluded from divinity. Brouwer showed us how to correct this conceptual error. [also 'corrected' by Aquinas in his recognition that the life of God involved motion taken in the sense of act to act (as happens in reality) rather than from potency to act which needs to be driven by some other entity in act.]
Fixed points theorems and the nature of God. A theorem is a fixed point [a fixed logical link]
Saturday 10 April 2010
'I don't know myself. I only know my appetites, as the French say.' Tolstoy page 793.
Tolstoy: People are shaped by their environment (the potential in which they live in the same way that quantum systems are shaped by potentials, as the electrons in an atom.
POTENTIAL = (RELATIVELY) FIXED POINT: the nucleus is to a first approximation unaffected by the electrons whose destinies are guided by its presence.
Sometimes the idea seems better than the words, sometimes the words as they are formed extend the meaning of an idea by revealing its symmetries, those motions which do not affect the formal expression of an idea, all the functions that obey a given differential equation.
The calculations implied by Einstein's equation are very
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complex, and those implied by Schrödinger's equation, which works in spaces of any dimension, no matter how large, even more so.
Can I look at the shining trees wavering in the breeze and see an instance of a transfinite computer network. We see it all as springing from a combination of the local determinism of Turing machines coupled to the indeterminism of a network of communication. Do the computers of the internet obey the protocols laid down for them and seamlessly handle all the errors that the physical layer of the network can throw at them. At the same time they have absolutely no control over the actual content and timing of the messages being transmitted [in this way they are analogous to as pipeline that can carry any fluid] So it is that quantum mechanics describes the statistics of a certain space of messages. That this system has deterministic roots is (possibly) demonstrated by quantization on the grounds of the coupling between quantization and error control established by Shannon. The 'the Shannon layer' in a network creates a virtual error free foundation upon which all manner of higher layers can be run knowing that they can trust the fidelity of the inputs and outputs to the Shannon layer.
Given such an error free foundation we can implement the propositional calculus, but this formal system has no control over the timing of operations in different computers, to affecting the timing of inputs to one another and the consequent consequences which arise from the non-commutativity of some complex operations.
Since all motion is relative, we must study each motion from the ppoint of view of one or other of the relative movers, making the observer at rest in the rest frame [of first one and then the other]
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I am my own fixed point and my self development must all take place constrained by this boundary.
FORM = {CONSTANTS OF MOTION = SPACE / TIME INVARIANTS}
ie forms exist in spaces invariant with respect to tome,durable, eternal.
Formally, a DO loop can run forever without in any way 'wearing out' although the hardware in which it runs may eventually fail, a situation that can be avoided by distributed processing and redundancy.
We understand formalist mathematics through the computer.
The writer of software is confronted with a palette or alphabet of operations that he can perform on his data to get the desired result, a sum, or statistical distribution of some such. The art is to assemble the atomic operations into the optimum sequence for performing / executing the desired transformation of the data.
Having shown that quantum mechanics shows us how to compute the traffic on a network connecting a set of quantum states. The essential feature of quantum mechanics is that its answers come not as fixed values but as distributions calculated by a straightforward algebra of state vectors and Born's rule for interpreting the results. Vector space - Wikipedia Born rule - Wikipedia Now we draw a parallel with networks of human users. There, the statitical rules of communication still hold, buit we also know that most of these messages are a definite sequence
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sequence of symbols determined to convey some definite meaning between sender and receiver. In an ideal network the occurrence of these symbols appears more random as the messages are more efficiently coded, so the ideal system, appears perfectly random.
Now we want to work back the other way and discover and write down the code that is being executed by a system with the statistical distribution characteristic of a quantum system. We approach this question locally, using the insights of calculus. What, in other words, do Schrödinger's equation and the eigenvalue equation mean in terms of the traffic they control on the network.?
The eigenvalue equation determines the alphabet, a set of basis vectors which serve as the stationary node in relative motion.
Back to Feynman's ammonia molecule. Feynman
Narrowing the quest: what is the digital algorithm that yields quantium mechanical traffic rates? All we ever know are traffic rates, statitics, which require extended observation to acquire.
Like a clairvoyant, I might feel that something is coming through. How does a thought bubble to the surface with sufficient clarity to become conscious, to be remembered and written down as a permanent record of a moment of consciousness.
Casey: Intelligence 'the complex process of mosaic making'. Woodward, page 53 Woodward
