VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 9 May 2010 - Saturday 15 May 2010]
[Notebook: DB 68: Salalah]
[page 372]
Sunday 9 May 2010
MOTIVATION. We are motivated by the probability of profitable success, either at escaping pain or acquiring pleasure. A truism which places motivation in the same category as physical potential, which in [modern] physics is just as real as an actuality.
Potential energy = rest energy ([form)]
Kinetic energy = energy of motion. (both relative to some frame [ie environment])
Ancient thinkers, usually of the wealthy, educated and ruling classes, often motivated by political and religious concerns, concluded that God and the heavens were sharply different from the world inhabited by humans. Modern science suggests differently. The archetypical role of God is as creator and sustainer
[page 373]
of the world. Here we argue against the ancient position by showing that the world as we now understand it is [formally] capable of creating itself, ie we produce of the world which associates no formal contradiction with the notion of self-creation. The argument proceeds in two steps: first, that we can reasonably model the world by a transfinite computer network; second that such a formal structure can explain its own origin. The world creates structure as my mind creates sentences, ordering elemental world to encapsulate a meaning that plays some part in the universal process.
Roman Catholic Church: fundamental claim, selling point and source of power and error is the claim of human immortality and post-mortem reward and punishment.
Quantum mechanics and communication theory are both worked out in function space which makes it easier to see the parallels between them (von Neumann, Shannon 1947 ? [1949] von Neumann Shannon). The main difference seems to be complex vsreal. We may attribute this to either full duplex communication or the dynamics of transformations represented by complex exponentials [recursive, periodic, functions]
Feynman's summary of quantum mechanics:
1. P = probability, Φ = probability amplitude, P = |Φ|2
2. Several [indistinguishable, unobserved] ways for an event to occur then Φ = Φ1 + Φ2, P = |Φ1 + Φ2|2
3. If the alternative taken is known or knowable, P = P1 + P2
'One might like to ask: "How does it work? What machinery lies behind the law?" No one has found any machinery behind the law. No one can "explain" any more than we have just "explained". No one will give you any deeper representation of
[page 374]
the situation. We have no ideas about a more basic mechanism from which these results can be deduced.' Feynman
Uncertainty: One cannot design equipment in any way to determine which of two alternative was taken without, at the same time, destroying the pattern of interference.
I will keep hammering on this for the rest of my life or until I find a satisfactory explanation, whichever comes first.
Interference = addition : real - classical - scalar 1D : complex - quantum - scalar 2D.
However, we limit our complex numbers to a norm of |1| which means that for z = x + iy, x2 + y2 = 1. |z| = 1, so we really only have one degree of freedom, not of magnitude but of angle, arg z.
More deply, maybe, what we are predicting is not a real number in the case of real waves but a probability amplitude from which we can predict a probability which occurs when the vectors (complex numbers) that are added are at an 'angle' to one another, which we wok out via the inner product. So is an angle one dimensional or two dimensional?
We assume that the reason one cannot predict quantum outcomes is because they are not determined, as Aquinas saw with free will. In other words they are indeterminate features in reality which we explain as interrupts in a network of deterministic computers.
At the root of quantum mechanics is the fact that all
information is represented physically and every movement or transformation of information requires a physical movement. There are no pure spirits.
The wonderful thing about quantum mechanics is that it is a symbolic system which appears to represent all that is representable about the world, ie it represents all the actual stationary points in the dynamics.
The slits in the two slit experiment are sources and when we observe them we see which source the electron comes from and the process is halted. If we do not observe them the process continues and so we do not know what the outcome is or will be.
OBSERVATION = HALTING (Turing).
The Schrödinger equation represents an ongoing but unobserved process of computation [transformation] The uncertainty principle says that we cannot both halt a process and observe the outcome and keep the process going and observe the process because any observation interrupts the process, so changing it. The wave function contains all the steps in a whole process [ie a complete set of states, anything that is possible] but we cannot see them without stopping it. [we can only get probability information, not phase information, which is 'private' like our own mental processes] All messages are formal, stationary points [particles]. Between the messages we cannot look except through imagination. The edge of reality. Reality comes in and out through the edges because it is a flow which can only be observed from the light cone of the observer. Coming in to view, going out of view. Coming under control; going out of control.
A process of limited complexity must be periodic if it goes on for long enough because it has nowhere else to go but back over its tracks. [group is dynamically closed]
In the real complex world there are countless instances of quantum mechanics at work spread through space whereas in the initial singularity there is but one instant.
The energy equation is the fundamental form of the world (the brick) from which all else is built.
Every Turing machine is isolated while it is running because it is deterministic, ie no outside information.
Aquinas is the Feynman of theology. Feynman is the Aquinas of physics. What does this mean? You probably have to read both writers extensively to find out (and then decide if this meaning is true or false).
Logic and geometry: Klein and Tarski Felix Klein - Wikipedia Alfred Tarski - Wikipedia
Motion is relative, so motion of one thing makes no sense. We need two things to have motion and then the motion is the simplest periodic, p, not-p, p, not p . . . This may be why we need complex numbers.
ADD [complex number] = triangle [of vectors]
MULTIPLY = multiply [absolute values] and rotate [add arguments] Complex number - Wikipedia
zi = ri exp i θi
[page 377]
No mark, no information. The Bible, which some regard as the most important spiritual information of all, is after all nothing but a set of marks on paper which have certain meanings in certain cultural milieux.
Polya and Latta: Analytic functions might have measure zero in the set of all complex functions. page 80. Polya & Latta
1. A function is analytic of its real and imaginary parts satisfy the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Cauchy-Riemann equations - Wikipedia
2. . . . if it is represented by a conformal [mapping] (Polya page 98-99)
[3. 'A function is analytic if it is represented by a sourceless and irrtational two-dimensional vector field.']
d ex / dx = ex, ie ex (ez) is invariant under differentiation.
Platonic vs physical mathematics: in Platonism, anything goes that is consistent; in physical mathematics we require both klocal consistency and local representability.
Monday 10 May 2010
Since continuous functions tell us nothing they are adequate to describe a completely simple God,so we must model such a god with a 1D Hilbert space. Creation then becomes equivalent to increasing the dimensionality of the Hilbert space [number of distinct frequencies/energies], as in the procession of the Word.
Spanish Civil War: Philby: Knightley Knightley
I am on a random walk away from my origin, which is best characterized as Aquinas' Summa embedded in an Irish Catholic version of the Dominican Order. Dominican Order - Wikipedia
Orwell: Homage to Catalonia Orwell
[page 378]
The basic dynamic structure of the Universe seems to be represented by the complex numbers [because they are periodic/recursive?]
Last night I dreamed of buying clothes. Does this mean that my subconscious really thinks that I can make a profitable impression on the religious world?
SUBCONSCIOUS = TRANSPARENT
How many computer ops to send an email from Sydney to Paris? Peking aka Beijing?
To the Chinese Party Apparatus: Monarchy is doomed.Here is the appropriate mathematical theory and some clues to the path to peacefulpolitical phase change from monarchic to democratic with some note on the effect of corruption.
Churchill Arms and the Covenant Churchill
Burgess: Propaganda and subversion: Knightley page 76.
Network of spies = secret = isolated networks, we might say taking in data without being observed to do so.
The steam engine introduced the concept of entropy, the quantity that is conserved by a reversible heat engine executing the Carnot cycle. Statistical mechanics showed that thermodynamic entropy is equivalent to the logarithm of the number of states open to the system whose entropy we are measuring, hence Boltzmann's headstone S = k log W Shannon saw that what we are really talking about is information. The information carried by a point in space
[page 379]
is the entropy of the space.
This article may be interpreted as an ordered set of letters. This set is partitioned into other ordered sets of ordered sets of words, sentences, paragraphs and so on. So we explain the whole system by reference to the article itself. That is what mathematics does. Given the rules the marks on the paper are the evidence for the proposed theorem. ,p> From steam engines to computers.
The fundamental requirement of a code is reversibility. What has been encoded must be decoded to be of any use to the user.
From computers to networks. A communication network connects users by receiving information and giving it out in machine readable form.
The article to be chapter 1 of the book: On Crestion
The job here is to encode my picture of the world in a way that can be decoded by other people thinking about theological issues.
The philosophers of one generation become the theologians of the next as they become engaged in the practical application of theor ideas: first model the world; then decide what to do.
On theology and navigation: public, not subversive.
I would therefore like to state my case before a suitable tribunal of the Holy See. Since I would expect this to be an open public theological inquiry, I see no reason why I should not publicize this request.
[page 380]
The case is that Roman Catholic theology,like the practice of magic, is no sound basis for political decision making. What I am clearly setting out to do is to conduct a trial in the public domain to provoke a trial before the Roman Curia.
Malcolm Muggeridge: 'I went in for an interview with the SIS at Broadway headquarters. It seemed to me that the whole place was so absurd that it must be some kind of facade. I reasoned that this was where they tried you out and when you passed they'd day "Well, he's all right. Now we will show him the real Secret Service.' Then I found out that this was the real Secret Service. Knightley page 79 n.
I seem to moving into a dangerous (deluded) phase in which I begin to believe in myself and feel that I have devised an alternative to the failed elements of Catholic Doctrine which is worth a public hearing. The constituency for that hearing is the membership of the Roman Catholic Church and so that is where I should state my case.
We need a file of Church Newspapers.
I could do nothing but accept the Church's judgement at the time, but I still think they were wrong and that it is an issue that needs public discussion.
The whole theological foundation of the Catholic Church needs complete revision This will entail little change. The same organizational network simply begins to transmit a different message about the theological foundation of its social work.
[page 381]
Philby and the 'subversive rumour'.
Knightley page 83: '. . . Philby got permission to seek political guidance on Britain's views of Europe after victory.
Classical statistical mechanics, reversibility and perpetual motion.
Seem to be slowly overcoming my reluctance to see public relations and promotion as real work, but they are a necessary part of the project to monetize and propagate natural religion: toward natural religion project.
Knightley page 86: British SIS 1909, CIA 1947, Vatican ?
. . .
page 88: a basic plot that is almost as ancient as man himself: the overcoming of the monster. The story of how the hero alone recognizes the danger the monster poses to the tribe, how he prepares for the confrontation, how he divines the monster's secret and eventually kills it, has been told for centuries in all civilizations as a harmless allegory for man's struggle against evil.
W HH Waters: 'My view always was -- and experience has only tended to confirm it -- that the results of secret service are virtually negligible.'
. . .
Knightly page 91: 'Communism was a godsend to the SIS' and now al Qaeda!
[page 382]
Two requisites: 1.Good doctrine attractively presented.
2. Political power necessary to spread the doctrine.
eg 1; Christianity; 2: Roman Imperial bureaucracy.
So we want to infiltrate the world with 'natural religionists' whose role is to bring peace and global salvation.
Natural religionist = natural scientist.
General relativity achieves the same end as theology, tracing the structured Universe back to an unstructured point.
We can talk about quantization without introducing [quantum mechanics]. In fact quantum mechanics describes the continuous substrate (the continuous flow of probability.
To DB 69 CREATION.
[page 1]
Tuesday 11 May 2010
Knightley page 234 Philby: 'The KGB seemed to have no idea of my real potential. I became depressed, unhappy and prone to doubt. Now doubt is a terrible thing. ASs you know I have met graham Greene several times over the last couple of years. They were the most rewarding meetings in our long friendship. For the first time we were able to speak frankly with each other. We were able to discuss doubt, a matter of great importance to us both -- the nagging doubt we both felt, him as a Roman Catholic and me as a communist.'
Doubt is one thing I do not seem to have suffered. Lonergan converted me and ever since (starting with How Universal) [I] have not looked back. I was still emotionally attached to heaven, but gradually my intellectual conviction lead me to see the possibilities of heaven (and hell) on earth and I realized that pain is not a punishment for ancient sin but a warning that the stress on the system is too much. Since then the program has been fairly straightforward, spending as much time and money as possible on learning enough of everything to develop a model of God that fits the world. I now think I have really cooked up a good enough picture to get published in a mainstream journal, but that awaits their editor's judgement. Meanwhile keep polishing.
My certainty comes from my sympathy with the world.
Preaching (promoting, propagating) natural religion. My time in the Order of Preachers was blighted by the fact that I could not honestly preach what they wanted me to preach.
[page 2]
Si I offered to become a lay brother, to serve and pray, but not to preach.M wonder remains: how can grown men say such things?
Wittgenstein: you can't speak the unspeakable,that is the unresolved. Resolution is possible when the observer is equal (equivalent to) the observed. Knightley 241.
Catholic and communists doubt because there is no evidence for their positions. They are castles in the air which must be taken on faith. Philby grounded himself (was coupled to reality) by his love for Rufa. Knightley page 236 sqq. Part of the essence of Catholicism is to prevents its theologians and preachers from so grounding themselves by enforcing a celibacy ceiling and a ceiling for women at ground level.
The worst feature of the Church (shared by secret police and their masters the world over) is their invasion of the internal forum, convincing people that the world they see is not the true world, but rather the picture they are presenting with smoke and chants. The scientific attitude is the opposite of this.
Theology is the last bastion of pre-science (incredulity). We are born to believe everything, so it is easy to mislead children.
Knightley page 245: Philby: '[Greene] said he saw approaching an historic alliance between Communism and the Roman Catholic Church, the two marching shoulder-to-shoulder against poverty and repression.
[page 3]
Two of the greatest repressors of all time in terms of number of people repressed!
'. . . like any religious faith, communism required a suspension of belief.' Knightley page 263.
Natural religion requires no suspension of belief.
Wednesday 12 May 2010
The Great Gadsby Fitzgerald: Creating a persona for oneself.
The Church has always been quite proactive about marketing itself. Holy See We cannot tell what the world would have been like without it, but we can see how it fitted into the actual political climate of the Roman Empire and flourished because enough people believed its story, either from conviction or pragmatism, to give it power. Add to this the power and reputation of many of the leading thinkers ('Fathers of the Church') who became convinced that Christianity was a good thing and promoted it. Everything seemed to fit together perfectly, with a few dissenters who were eventually overcome by 'scientific' political, police or ultimately military force, although this did not become important until the crusading movement gathered momentum. Given that changing momentum is a sign of force, we can search history for all the forces that promoted Christianity to its current dominant position in terms of power, wealth and constituency.
Church politics - church = political unit defined by a purpose.
Natural theology tells us that natural religion is always with us and it is the force that binds complex structures together.
[page 4]
RELIGION = BINDING (Latin?)
Thursday 13 May 2010
The future dichotomy between God and the World seems to have been already in place in the opposition between Parmenides who saw true reality as completely static and eternal and Heraclitus who felt that everything flowed. We resolve this dichotomy with Brouwer's fixed point theorem: the mapping of a convex compact set onto itself must contain a fixed point. Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia It is reasonable to see the Universe as compact (containing its own boundaries) and convex (no holes) and so its dynamic mapping onto itself implies the existence of fixed points. Since, as Thomas notes, it obviously moves, we are led to see Parmenides eternity in the midst of Heraclitus' flux.
Thew inherently dynamical nature of the Universe is just as unexplainable as the dynamics of God. We are here and we are moving and that is that.
The fundamental moral principle m,ay be phrased 'respect creation' or 'love God'. In general maintain complexity and the freedom (symmetry) that generates complexity.
SYMMETRY = EQUIPROBABILITY
We might say that every possible state in an unobserved system is equiprobable, the symmetry of probabilities only being broken when we observe it by the broken symmetry of an observation operator.
[page 5]
Tender is the Night: Shopping scene (12). No shopping without recycling. It is a fact of life that all information (which is the spice of our life - think sex) is embodied physically and to make room for new information we must recycle the material basis. A materialist, you will say? Ugh. But we must take care of the matter of we are to have the information. The internet works on matter. Basically it is a flow of electrons and photons. The electrons are conserved, neither created nor destroyed in the energy levels used for transmission and computation. [the photons are frequently created and annihilated.]
We model matter by discrete entities. We model form by the communication between these entities. Information is carried by the discrete entities. You can write a message with black ink and white ink (starting off with nothing and arranging the two inks into a string of words). But mix them together to make grey ink and you can write nothing. As MTW say, in every case all the necessary symbols are defined by the dynamic relationships between them, ie E = hf, F = ma, E = mc2 etc etc. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler
Dynamism sculpts the stationary points as in grinding a telescope mirror of shaping the articulatory surfaces of a baby's skeleton.
Tender (16) '"The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing," he said. "Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged"'
Trying to force a conclusion is a waste of time. All things take time and timing (= relative phase [relative complete of a process]) is of the essence. The rate of processing (= phase change) is directly proportional to
[page 6]
energy, but as in the hydrogen atom, the proportioning of energy among the electrons is a function of structure, of finding frequencies where everything is in phase and we have a stationary phase difference which translates into a stationary probability. Probabilities can be fixed points too, like the symmetric probabilities of the faces of a fair die. Bohr's use of de Broglie's theory to explain the stationary atomic orbits as paths of integral phase so that the smooth circle of phase is unbroken. A similar idea is that the amplitude of the momentum of a particle reflected from a wall is 0, so that one finds the states in the potential well have zero amplitude at the walls. The Universe has no boundary and so no overall need for the digitization of momentum in a box, but locally there is almost always a potential well at hand to structure the motions within it. So what is the difference between the structured motion and the potential well? Quantum mechanically, we conceive of it as wavelengths and frequencies in space and time (which are locally orthogonal).
To study locally is to study deterministic processes. Once we break the locality by allowing outside influences in the determinacy is broken and the breaking is in some was a function of the relative phases of the two processes which they interrupt one another. Why do we need complex numbers? Because the observer's machine is real (from the observer's point of view) and the observed is pure imaginary. Since in quantum mechanics to observe is to be observed, real and imaginary may be permuted, with the proviso that the product of two positive or two negative reals is positive, the product of two imaginaries of the same sign is negative. From the point of view of absolute values, real and imaginary are symmetrical.
[page 7]
Always trying to push myself over ne more line to the Holy Grail, the source of life.
The Pope and other monarchs and dictators in general want to move other people without being moved themselves, rather like the black hole at the centre of the glaxy or the sun in the solar system ort the nucleus of an atom. In a democracy, on the other hand action and reaction are equal and opposite, so that both particles are affected [equally] by all interactions.
Friday 14 May 2010
Writing, talking etc = putting one's conscious forms into the public domain, ie breaking one's locality.
Fitzgerald, Tender II, 4 'Like so many men, he had found that he had only one or two ideas . . . ' For me, Universe is Divine is my one idea and all else falls into place under this rubric.
'It seemed to him that when a man of his energy was pursued for a year by increasing doubts, it indicated some fault in the plan.'
Love arises from a probability of having a good time together. The goodness of sex is in many cases quite enough to overcome the difficulties of survival and reproduction.
I took a vow of poverty, but this did not mean that I did not have it all laid on for me so that I lived a life without economic cares supported in one way or another by contributions from the faithful over hundreds (or even thousands) of years.
[page 8]
The reproductive (romantic) layer of humanity (and all sexual species) is built on the individual layer and is part of the social layer each newborn enters at birth (and before).
Layering is local, in me and my machine as I transform my thoughts about my human condition into a physical structure of paper and ink.
'-- Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?
-- Please do its too light in here.'
Nevertheless the only way to take the pain out of inconsistency is to shed enough light on it to understand it well enough to see how to resolve it: choose one or the other. one might say that romantic inconsistency (and of course, romantic consistency) are the cause of romantic dynamics.
A pantheistic line of thought like the one proposed here has been excluded from mainstream Western theology for thousands of years, but is due for a resurgence as our scientific explorations make it clearer that we are children of the solar system (in the object oriented programming sense as well) which is itself a child of the Universe.
Why has theism lasted so long after the emergence of science after the Renaissance.
Saturday 15 May 2010
Actus purus: the Universe is in perpetual motion (through quantum mechanics and the conservation of energy)
[page 9]
and is continuously creative as indicated by the increase in entropy).
We spend most of our time communicating with ourselves, since each of us is our own local stationary states.
Every change of mind requires a change of matter, in that the mind is ultimately encoded in physical symbols since all information is encoded in physical symbols.
Parmenides: The inconceivability of what necessarily is not, eg round square. Palmer. John Palmer - Parmenides
Writing: bringing into formal existence, like Gates' DOS. MS-DOS - Wikipedia
Networks grow by sending out new branches, ie copying themselves = apostles απο στόλος.
στόλος: 'an equipment for warlike purposes, an expedition, by land or sea, a journey, voyage. Liddell & Scott Liddell
Somewhere above I claimed to have no doubt about the proposition 'the Universe is Divine". This is not completely true in that I do have some doubt about my ability to ever render my understanding of this proposition intelligible and valuable to anybody else (and so derive some income from it and allow myself to develop it even further). My Amazon and Adsense accounts total nearly $200 after five years or so!
