VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 22 August 2010 - Saturday 28 August 2010]
[Notebook: DB 70 Mathematical Theology]
[page 18]
Sunday 22 August 2010
Veltman page 36: 'The S-matrix contains all physical information for any scattering process' ie it represents the computation transforming the in state to the out state, ie changing the input probability distribution to the output probability distribution, eg transforming loads of bricks, sand, cement etc into a house. Veltman
Abbot: totally unmindful is the new black: 'I'll do whatever I want and fuck the rest of you. Unresponsive software processes. Will not accept an interrupt.
Quantum state / geometric space is a memory and particles (including ourselves) are states of that memory. We construct a memory big enough to hole the Universe using the transfinite numbers, a tree whose leaves and branches give an address to every memory pixel. 'mexel'
A person hidden in a thicket of family.
A rose by any other name = general covariance.
A continuum is a symmetry: Noether's theorem. Noether's theorem - Wikipedia
Mathematics defined symmetries; physics breaks them. Everything, whenever observed, will be found to be in a particular state. An answer to the problem of universals is that in physics there are no universals, but to understand the probability structure of the Universe we create mathematical symmetries and then invoke gauge principles to reduce these symmetries to the 'reality' which at any moment has probability one.
[page 19]
Veltman page 38: 'A physical state in Hilbert space is like a movie in a can.' [deterministic]
In physics a phase space is devised with a view to mapping it onto a set of physical observations. the first requirement for such a map if it is to be one-to-one is that the phase space has as many addressable point as the physical system has observable points. Al;though we have a complex continuous vector algebra in Hilbert space, all we ever observe are the eigenvalues of certain operators in this space. This is the power of quantum mechanics: so single out certain values of otherwise continuous parameters which correspond to observations like the spectrum of an atom.
Veltman page 38 (continued) 'It is the whole movie, not just the opening scene, even if the can is labelled that way. Seeing things this was it becomes hopefully clear that a progressing situation is not a vector in Hilbert pace (such as |pq>in [rotating to another state |pq>out in the course of time. A vector in Hilbert space has no time dependence, but like in a movie, all the action is contained in that state.]'
General covariance again: God is one, theology is one, but there have been and are as many representation as there are human social traditions. So there is no more Christian or Buddhist theology that there is Christian or Buddhist chemistry, Gomez in Jackson & Makransky page 369. Jackson & Makransky
Jackson page 370: Gomez: 'I would think that a greater commonality with Christian theological discourse would suggest that the disciplines of theology, Christian and Buddhist, provides us with some of the necessary tools to go beyond apologetics into the terrain of dialogue and rational, truly public, discourse.
Analyzing the layers of love. Theology learns from experience.
[page 20]
If experience is guided by theology, we have the makings of a (possibly vicious) circle.
Monday 23 August 2010
Faith can move mountains by entraining sufficient physical resources to move mountains, as eg the promise of valuable minerals underneath. Here the option is to entrain academia.
The most interesting part of my theology will come in the application of the model to the human layer of communication, where it is intuitively obvious.
At the most abstract level the Universe provides us with a connected series of identifiable events which have a tendency to select and organize themselves into states of stable equilibrium, either by occupying the whole of a state space equiprobably (Boltzmann) or by being confined by some mechanism that breaks the probabilistic symmetry. Cercignani
Fulfilling the 'vow' made after the theory of peace programs to get an academic qualification before beginning to teach ('doctor').
Every experience is a touch of God and for many the most divine of such experience surround the process of reproduction as being the most necessary for the survival of any species.
REPRODUCTION (COPYING) is the ANTIDOTE to ERROR.
A murderous network: The Agatha Christie house party.
[page 21]
A good work (and a good play) is a series (possibly with just one element) of perfect touches. The digital world can be perfect.
Divine digital perfection = deterministic computer.
Agatha Dead Man's Mirror: the ceremony of dinner Christie
It is possible to write because a process has stationary points (quanta of action) that can be seen as a function defining a curve, as this sentence marks a curve in the space of human written communication.
Love one another vs fight with one another.
Elastic love - no exchange of body fluids; plastic exchange and possible disease, death, reproduction, orgasm.
Growing into the role: construction in the light of feedback on the story so far. Any attraction, no matter how small, will eventually accelerate any body, however large, to finite velocity.
Anticipating an unknown decision - will the engine start? have I passed?
I go back to the indecision surrounding my exit from the Order of preachers.
Australia has just been through an election during which, when the religion question arose, it was revealed that one candidate was Catholic, the other an Atheist. In this thesis I argue that this distinction is purely a matter of nomenclature and
[page 22]
although the states of mind represented by these two terms may have very different understandings of the meanings of the events of human life, we can look for a position [from which] the experiences of life are interpreted as they are, rather than in the light of a theory about their meaning like the Christian history of salvation.
Al statistics are assigned probabilities by comparing them to some model distribution which might be appropriate. We can then compute the resemblance between the data and the model. So in theology we apply the transfinite computer network to explain creation, love, compassion and all the other virtues and their corresponding vices.
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Can we get from Einstein's general covariance to the unity of God and the Universe?
Theism vs Pantheism vs Atheism. This thesis is a contribution to the spectrum of relationships between God and the World. My own starting point was that of a Catholic Theist, but under the influence of my scientific education, I have moved toward pantheism.
My starting point is Einstein's principle of general covariance. Let us agree with the mystics that there is nothing to be said about the one, and discourse begins with simple dualistic statements like the east is read which can be abstracted to a mathematical statement life x = y where we may substitute anything for x and y provided only that the equality is satisfactorily
honoured. If x and y represent people, our equation implies that all people are equal.
Traditionally the academy has liked to stand outside its subject, looking at it and judging it objectively. Einstein, on the other hand, a person very aware of the role of gravitation in his life, was trying to build a picture of the large scale structure of the Universe from within, extrapolating from local experience to the whole.
Quantum mechanics also embraces duality
What physics gives us is the physical layer of the Universe, a set of discrete addressed events which serve in a sense as active building blocks in the structure of the Universe. Because they are discrete and addressed, we can map these physical realizations of information to the symbols of mathematics and logic. This gets us to set theory and the construction of the Universe of sets by Cantor (see Jech). Cantor Jech
These ideas first occurred to me in the 1980s and were published in inchoate form for the first time on the public radio station 2BOB after I had healed the wounds of Catholicism with the balm of Hippiedom and was coming back down to earth with a clear plan to point out the defects of monarchy and the advantages of democracy.
[page 23]
Encoding, decoding, reversibility, requisite variety.
We move into the magical world represented by Hofstadter. Hofstadter
Every representation is a representation of the one, and this places limits on representations and leads to evolution.
In some unfathomable way some sequences of operations are more stable than others, and it is these naturally selected ones that we are and see around us. The power that leads to popularity is the power to reproduce.
Finally, it has been argued against pantheism that motion and diversity are on some way inferior to stasis and simplicity, and that God and the Universe cannot be the same.
Some motions of the Universe (representable by Turing machines) are repeatable, mapping onto themselves. Others move onto new territory.
Agatha Christie Clocks page 120: 'I minded about this girl -- minded in a way I had never minded about a girl before.' Christie
There is nothing like a spot of unrequited love to move things along.
Each interrupt creates a new machine
Greenery is not a pleasant vista of fanciful ideas but a religion, that the the art (ie technology) of guiding a human
[page 25]
group to survival, reproduction and perhaps wealth.
Wednesday 25 August 2010
Thursday 26 August 2010
MTh - take the Lonergan approach. A carefully argued modern representation of the ideas [of] Aquinas that were built on foundations laid in Ancient Greece by people like Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle This tradition places the source of the world, its Creator and sustainer, outside the world. Aristotle argues for an Unmoved Mover, perhaps not necessarily 'outside' the world, although his mentor Plato clearly felt that the ideas that guided the world are distinct from it.
Paternalistic or honest? ideas of the nanny state. Minimise harm, ie error, by persuasion or enforcement or both.
Scriptures are transmitted to us in writing, which is a form of memory. Academia and the literature, or lest us say any community and their emails.
Network: memory + processors.
As Aristotle would understand it, the Bible is a form embodied in some way, ink and paper, little magnets pointing up and down, and so on. It seems to be a fact of life that all information is embodied physically.
How much information can physics carry: entropy increasing.
Given a 'textual' model of the world, the transfinite computer network.
[page 26]
EIGENFUNCTION - TURING MACHINE
Efn: so called because the natural language in which these mathematical ideas were first exposed was German.
Mathematics as a plug-in to natural language. The core codes are invariant., all we need are different interfaces to the natural languages of the world, that is a terminology in each language.
BOUND NETWORK = TURING MACHINE ('hard wired')
'Hard wiring' = memory state = connection state = communication state.
ORDERING = {SUBSETTING, PERMUTING} / boson, fermion.
The ancients invented spirit (immaterial being) in order to be able to represent all the forms in the Universe in one mind. The idea is rather like quantum mechanical superposition. Here explain superposition in Hilbert space.
Now we map out network onto the events of the Universe. General covariance is necessary because we are partcipants in our own observations, and so confine them to our own eigenfunctions.
Horticulture: creating an environment where the chosen plants flourish, fencing out predators etc etc.
[page 27]
A transfinite computer network can do anything possible, that is it can pursue complexity to the nth degree. ,p> All that incense and exhortation strengthens us to deal with the adversities of life and unites us to overcome our enemies, be they other human groups or 'natural' disasters.
Selection vs transfinite growth. Selection maintains the layers but 'digitizes'; (pixellates) the species into a set of orthogonal dualities of creatures and niches. The niche makes it possible for the creature to life; the creature has evolved to take advantage of the niche, and no two species can occupy the one niche.
The invariant in all organism / invariant relationships is fitness.
As soon as something logs on it is given an address and then it is part of the network.
The Universe is a computer network because it comprises discrete events.
In general relativity 'absolute' energy is hard to pin down and we might make the dualist assumptiom that the total energy of the unvierse is zero (pure formalism) divided into equal quantities of positive and negative energy, ie rates of action where negative (potential) ios simply the negative of positive (kinetic) and they are born (creatred) and die (annihilate) in unison. This looks digital.
[page 28]
Mathematics is itself a network, an example of itself.
The theological academy is such a network, spanning public and private communications between the participating individuals. The memory logs the communications and this log serves as a formal record of the work of the academy. This idea extends to all networks which we view as a space of memory and a set of processors changing the states of the memory, each according to its own algorithm.
'Creative evolution vs empirical residue'.
To refute Lonergan's claim we need to produce a model of the world without empirical residue and show that at least prima facie this model fits the world as we know it.
Search engine: addressing, mapping address content (search term) to logical address www. . . . , which will be decoded by the network machinery to a physical address where the desired data is stored.
Each of us is a point in a space of high transfinite cardinal, the human layers.
DSubsetting and packaging: mass of parcel = energy = rate of action.
The path integral integrates a path in state space which might also be a path in real space.
The vocabulary of an atom is a countably infinite
number of words expressed as the frequencies of the photons the atom can (is most likely to) emit and absorb. ,p. Another layer of deceit in the endless game of survival.
Is Bernard Lonergan's 'empirical residue' real
'Constant of motion' = fixed point. Engine block stays the same as the engine moves within it.
Friday 27 August 2010
Dissipation of energy = reduction in temperature = reduction in energy / entropy ratio = reduction in boson / fermion ratio.
E = hf, Power = E/t = hf/t.
Quantum regime: reversible : dissipative regime (irreversible).
Saturday 28 August 2010
McGrath Heresy page 18: 'For many Christians, an experience of God lies at the heart of the religious dynamic.' McGrath
In fact this is true for everybody!
McGrath page 21: 'To believe in God goes far beyond the mere factual acceptance of God's existence' it is to declare that this God may be trusted.'
[page 30]
'Trust me", the first words of scoundrel!
McGrath page 23 "Christians do not believe in Jesus of Nazareth; they believe certain things about him as well. The emergence of the notions of both heresy and orthodoxy during the second century are ti be set against an increasing recognition of the importance of developing and sustaining a secure, doctrinal core for the maintenance of Christian identity and coherence.
Which need not be true, just agreed by all members so uniting them into a powerful bloc which has come to dominate much of the religious world.
McGrath page 31: 'A heresy is a doctrue that ultimately destroyes, destabilized or distorts a mystery rather than preserving it.'
How can you say this when you cannot, by definition, know the truth about a mystery.
page 35: 'If evolution can be regarded as a religion, then it has both its orthodoxies and its heresies.' The difference being that the theory of evolution iws evidence based and so must be asymptotic to the truth whereas much of religion is faith bases and so fundamentally arbitrary.
Determinism is broken in the network by the process of interruption where new information enters a machine and changes its course [into a different Turing machine, so we establish permutations (ordered sequences) of Turing machines] This notion parallels Aquinas explanation of freedom of the will through the complexity of reason. Aquinas 412 Aquinas 412
The spirituality of the Bible and other religious classics is not in conflict with their physical realization, whether it be in
[page 31]
print or subtler quantum mechanical memories. Their spirituality arises as messages in the human network, messages which transcend time because as formal entities they are outside time.
Messages = stationary points = eigenfunction = Turing machine = software.
Software is eternal, totally hard.
Tom Wolfe Pump House Gang Wolfe
The messages are the stationary points in the network of pure act.
The Trinity as conceived by Augustine and Aquinas, is a network.
Although we represent God by a transfinite cardinal greater than our own, the Cantor symmetry enables us to project our own properties onto God and see God incarnate in all our peers.
Formal models of the world (like general relativity) if they are good, reproduce the stationary points of the Universe perfectly.
To date theology is the Christian West has been largely a matter of the exegesis of a very limited set of tests, the Christian Bible. By recognizing the textual nature of all the messages coming to us as a physically embodied form, we greatly increase the set of data available to theology and anticipate that theology will gradually come to rival the other sciences that have already undergone the empirical revolution (the mathematical-empirical revolution). This revolution is possible because mathematics deals in discrete addressable (namable) entities which are exactly what the quantized world presents to us for interpretation.
[page 32]
Barrett Aristophanes page 151: '. . . the concept of literary criticism as a purely intellectual activity, a sort of school subject, simply did not exist in Aristophanes' day. Questions of poetical technique were doubtless discussed, and there were teachers of poetical composition just as there were teachers of rhetoric. But to judge a work of art on its technical merits alone, without reference to its moral value, would have been regarded by every Athenian, whether he happened to be an expert or not, as the height of absurdity.'
We create structures by dynamically uniting stationary points in the Universe. We can only see and manipulate stationary points, ie parts, letters, words, etc.
Euripides Hippolytus Vellacott, Penguin. 'Nurse. . . . When love sweeps on in the fulness of her power, there is no resisting. She steals gently on those who yield to her, but those she finds arrogant and haughty she takes and -- what do you suppose -- tramples in the dust. Love rides on clouds and strides thjrough swollen seas. The whole world is born from Love; she sows every seed; every living creature on earth sprang from that sweet desire which is her gift to us. ' ~ ll. 430 sqq. Euripides
Much more realistic than words about love attributed to Jesus of Nazareth.
'. . . you are in love: then bear -- and dare -- what the God has willed.' ~ l. 478
This work may be seen as a possible step in the evolution of our conception of God which has moved from the unknown and various beliefs of pre-historic times through the rather capricious
[page 33]
Gods of the Classical Greek poets, who had a tendency to treat human like chattels (Homer, Euripides Homer) and the loving but vengeful God of the Old testament to the loving Trinity of Christianity, and through the abstract philosophical work of the Middle ages became the reasonable and reliable Nature revealed by the scientific method applies both to ancient texts and the contemporary world. Debray, God: . . . , Miles, God: . . .. Debray MilesUnderstanding this nature opens the way to the arts necessary to constrain many of the evils that flesh is heir to.
McGrath Vincent of Lerin on doctrinal constraint page 53: 'Every doctrine nöeeded to conform to three criteria. It had to be shown to have been accepted (1) everythwere, (2) always, and (3) by all believers.' Vincent of Lerins - Wikipedia
McGrath page 55: 'lex orandi, lex credendi': this is true of all technology. We must respect the nature of things (eg horses) if we are to be able to use them safely and efficiently. Lex orandi, lex credendi - Wikipedia
The 'basis' is the alphabet for an expression (sentence, word, wave function). A wave function, like any other symbol, is a representative of a process.
McGrath page 62: '. . . heresy is not a neutral concept but is determined by prior understandings of what Christianity ought to be.'
However, creative doctrinal development requires flirting with heresy, but such flirtations may settle into stable reproductive relationships.
McGrath page 67: 'During the 1830s and 1840s, a group of Catholic theologians based at the University of Tubingen, including Sebasian Drey (1777 - 1853) and Johann Adam Möhler (1796 - 1838), developed an organic approach to doctrinal development that likened the process to the
[page 34]
natural growth of a biological seed.'
McGrath page 68: Newman: '"From the necessity, then, of the case, from the history all sects and parties in religion, and from the analogy and example of Scripture, we may fairly conclude that Christian doctrine admits of formal, legitimate, and true developments, that is, of developments contemplated by its Divine Author. Newman
Materiality or immateriality have nothing to do with intelligibility, in fact all intelligible structures are embodied in the physical layer of the Universe. Aquinas 391
