VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 5 September 2010 - Saturday 11 September 2010]
[Notebook: DB 70 Mathematical Theology]
[page 42]
Sunday 5 September 2010
Débray page 131: Alfred Loisy: '"We were waiting for God but it was the Church that came."' Alfred Loisy - Wikipedia, Regis Debray
Movements spontaneously organize = hierarchicalize = break symmetry.
[page 43]
Débray page 131: 'It was Christianity that invented religion as something apart -- a separation that has no meaning for a Greek (who did not even know the word, since he did not separate the human and the divine, matters civic and those pertaining to worship) nor for a Jew, because in Judaism nation and religion are one.
This is probably true in reality for everyone, the visible religion being almost irrelevant to real life. The real source of theology is science, distributed throughout the community.
Débray page 140: '. . . Roman Christianity is not, strictly speaking, a religion of the Book (like Judaism, Islam or Protestantism) and that for two reasons -- ceremonial and doctrinal. The ritual of the synagogue refers the believer to the text; Holy Communion refers him to an event, which is the last Supper. . . . it is the institution, as a last instance, which decides what should be read and how and at what time. This decision is both for the worse and the better. For the worse: the alienation of inquiry and the spirit of obedience. For the better the need to argue over revelation and structure one's understanding of the text, which is no longer sufficient unto itself.'
Débray page 141: 'Civilization might be defined as a slow effort destined to reduce the costs of succession wherever possible and the state of barbarism as one in which the passing of the torch is effected amid bloodshed or through a simple relation of forces.'
Democracy is Occupational Health and Safety for the ruling class: they can now lose the throne without losing their heads!
Débray page 144: 'The notion of an "overseer" (the bishop_ is not in tune, to say the least, with the spirit of the Gospels.'
Débray page 146: 'A hierarchy exists as soon as the holders of certain functions can be substituted for by others without the receiprocal being possible' Order
[page 44]
Débray page 147: '. . . two elements required to constitute a body: closure (in relation to the outside) and hierarchization (within). A limit and degrees' Quantized potential well.
page 148; '. . . (Africa being the cradle of the Latin Church) . . . '
page 149: '. . . the birth of the Church is a lesson in the way of things, to be examined as an archetype in the clinical understanding of groups.'
'To make the transition from sect to church, doors have to be opened and closed.'
page 151: 'What we regard as a source and foundation is clearly in itself an effect of organization, since the collection of normative texts (decisions of authoritative councils or books assumed to be inspired by God) resulted from an ecclesiastical (or administrative) decision.'
page 152: Edict of Theodosius (380). Edict of Thessalonica - Wikipedia
page 159 Gratian (1140) women not made in God's image. Decretum Gratiani - Wikipedia
page 162: 'Tota mulier in utero. Totus vir in libro.'
page 163: '"Better to burn the Torah than to entrust it to a woman,"' [Sotah 3, 4 Sotah - Wikipedia]
page 164: 'The Talmud is more macho than the Torah, the rabbis than the patriarchs, the mullahs than Mohammed, and the bishops than the Gospels.'
page 177: Hobbes: '"To govern is to cause to believe."'
[page 45]
Quantum mechanics is one dimensional as music is one dimensional, although it can also be analyzed as a superposition of a spectrum of frequencies, each represented by a dimension orthogonal to all the others.
What we are talking about is a sound as heard by a point source in space as a superposition of frequencies which we measure as a set of quasi-instantaneous sampled. What can we measure when we measure a computer? The traffic between operators.
Platonic vs network view of mathematics.
Collapse of the wave function. At some (randomish) time the wave function collapses and we observe a certain state, one of the eigenfunctions of our measurement operator (observable). It worries me that I do not really understand this but feel the need to press on to an understanding of it in my own way, which is through the network model.
Let us imagine that the Universe is alogical continuum rather than a geometric continuum. The mathematical foundatiuon of quantum mechanics is thge geometry of an infinite dimensional Hilbert space with certain convergence properties expressed in terms of a Euclidean metric, analogous to Euclidean space, although measured by the field of complex numbers. [in which z2 may be negative, decreasing rather than increasing the computed length of a vector]
We want to say that the collapse of the wave function is an instance of the universal act of intelligence which we take to be the halting of a computer in the foundational case a quantum computer. What is the program of the quantum mechanical computer? Indistinguishable
[page 46]
paths add; consecutive paths multiply.
There is so much I don't know. What are the operators for the two slit experiment? Enough to make me feel like giving it up, but i still believe the treasure is there and will still keep digging for it. It comes down to having the confidence to put a structure unto the public domain and that confidence comes from extensive testing of the proposed structure by seeking out weak points and attempting to break them and finding answers that suggest that the model is is formally consistent. First by giving every event a unique address and secondly by describing an event in terms of inputs and outputs, as a quadruple in a Turing machine does (an instruction in a computer). It is all coming in and out of focus as I look at different facets of the model.
The probability current is 'full' and incompressible. There is always something happening, an event out of a set whose total probability is one, which event is currently active, happening.
From a logical point of view, there is no information in a continuum and so it is not observable. What we do observe are eigenfunctions, stationary points in the continuous process.
The 'Christian project" has been an enormously successful business which has increased the fitness of many, but it may be losing its advantage as other forms of government (belief) enter the field.
[page 47]
Monday 6 September 2010
Natural theology takes incarnation to the limit, all information is physical, even of the meaning of the information is metaphysical. [a computer is a metaphysical structuring of a physical space]
Tuesday 7 September 2010
MYSTICISM - TRANSPARENCY - LOVE. The lower layers through which peers communicate are transparent to the peers so we converse totally unaware of the huge complexity of the processes which make conversation possible so that our conversation, in the case of love, appears simple and immediate, even though from a network point of view it is mediates by extremely complex process. Dynamically falling in love feels like seamless simplicity even though the process opens up a huge set of stationary points which are part of the love, all the conversation, work, nourishment etc that underlies the love and the creative (reproductive) processes that accompany it.
Theology: fides (moved by data) quaerens intellectum. I believe the Universe is divine. Now to understand this.
Hegel 1802 Faith and knowledge: the death of God (and the death of theology). HegelNatural theology brings him back to life as a secular (ie living) God.
Wednesday 8 September 2010
The whole Christian thing is just an attempt to boost our own egos. God became Man, one of us to save us, His Chosen People. Given this hypothesis, the Catholic Church has arrogated to itself the choosing of people: what
[page 48]
you bind upon earth shall be bound in heaven. [Matthew 16:16-19] A text. A fiction which has no meaning in the world we inhabit, even if it means something to those who delude themselves into the idea that they are in charge.
Academic theology is devoted to the production of text about text, all these texts being in some way related to the texts collected in the Bible. The hypothesis is that the Biblical texts tell us something about reality. This is a second derivative. Science, on the other hand, is a first derivative, text about reality, ie interpretation of the texts (stationary points) [embedded in the dynamic Universe].
People without courage are doomed to suffer if they lack the initiative to correct errors that are oppressing the, But first you need the knowledge to understand what is wrong and a route to correcting it.
Human text about human text vs human text about physical text. Computer algorithms are a set of fixed points in a dynamic process.
PHYSICAL (CONTINUOUS) VS LOCAL (DISCRETE)
Reality is the dual of our minds so we study mind to get a grasp on reality, a la Parmenides, Plato and all those others who think the world was made in their image rather than them being made in the world's image.
Death of god in the last few centuries has led to the death of theology as a science: it is now a branch
[page 48]
of literary criticism.
The network allows for uncertainty. Welcher weg. We are to understand the superposition of complex waves, as in the two slit experiment, in terms of processes and interrupts.
Thursday 9 September 2010
Débray page 272: 'Fanaticism appears to be friction-induced behaviour, a pathology of the interface between 'us' and 'them,'. The skin disease of societies.' Nicely put. But true?
page 273: Octavio Paz on democracy: '"Other political systems are based on principles alien to men: the mandate of heave of the Chinese emperors, the divine right of absolute monarchs, the will of history and the proletariat of Communist leaders, Democracy founds the people in the name of the people; it is the law that men five to themselves. It is neither a fate promulgated from on high or from beyond history now a law dictated by blood and the dead. It is not a faith and it proposes nothing absolute. . . . "' Paz
ie it is consistent with a self creating Universe.
Débray page 274: Braudel: '"A civilization is generally reluctant to adopt a cultural good that puts one of its deep structures into question. Such refusals to borrow, such secret hostilities, always lead to the heart of a civilization."' Braudel
Some physicists claim to be approaching the nature of the world by studying its alphabet of fundamental interactions, while a better understanding [may arise if we study] how this alphabet combines to produce the overall complex structures built upon [it] which are more appropriately used to approach the nature of the whole which is traditionally called God. The network
[page 50]
paradigm seems to be a more appropriate way to approach this wholeness, since me may find in the structure of the whole an explanation of the nature of the parts, since parts and whole are shaped by interaction with one another, and we can best deal with this by seeing the world as a logical rather than a geometrical continuum. Our foundation then becomes logical consistency rather than the supposed will of a creator, since it enables us to see how such consistency leads us to the world we experience.
Peace, survival and happiness do not so much depend on orthodoxy (fitting in with institutional demands) as orthopraxis, fitting in with the way of the world into which we are born.
Auguste Comte. Auguste Comte - Wikipedia
Augustine: 'On the Usefulness of Believing.' [392] Augustine
Débray page 278: '. . . salvation is not in the dollar but in the federating impulse -- love, friendship or sharing. In in God we trust. For God and the devil, substitute negative entropy and entropy; for 'resurrection', the triumph of the former over the latter, and you have a prosaic scheme for the way things function.'
'. . . internal consistency being obtained by way of external reference. Since no system is able to 'enclose' itself solely by virtue of elements internal to the system, the crystallization of the collective would thus entail placing its members in relation with a given that is never given per se in experience, the object of a act of faith, deposed in a myth. . . . This point of attachment, our blind spot -- and each collectivity has its own -- is decreed unavailable to technical or critical manipulation,
[page 51]
an interdiction characterizing the sacred.
What about the Universe as a whole? Bounded by consistency.
page 281: 'Error is refutable; illusion is not.' (?)
Theology: drama, not documentary.
page 284: Belief is a disposition to act. And this is where is can become helpful or dangerous, depending on the outcome of the actions flowing from it.
Robinson: Absence of Mind Robinson
Leibniz 'monad = quantum of action.
Robinson page xiv: 'It would be more than miraculous, indeed an argument for something like special creation, if we were in any sense set apart from being as a whole. Our energies can only derive from, and express, the larger phenomena of energy. And there is that haunting compatibility of our means of knowing with the Universe of things to be known.'
page xv: 'It is not to be imagined that the character of matter would not profoundly affect the forms in which our reality has emerged.' ? On the one hand, matter enables us to construct universal computers, so evolution is not limited in this direction; on the other hand, matter os on some way limited, so establishing a competition among forms for the energy needed to exist.
page 37: Comte: 'To build a grand humanism on the foundation of the sciences was the dream and object of his philosophy'
[page 52]
based on an "inherent tendency to love."
It has taken me a long time but I think I have finally realized why I have trouble interfacing with the modern theological academy. Simply my theological training was pre-reformation, medieval Latin theology as practised principally by Thomas Aquinas the star of the Order of Preachers (probably second only to the founder). At that time people believed that the God, Universe, Angels, Us model of the world envisaged by Thomas really existed. In its day ()which due to the historical inertia of the order was my day) this model of the world has a strong influence on human behaviour through its institutional incarnation in the Roman Catholic Church. Much of Aquinas' speculation takes us a long way from the Bible which never envisages the divinity or the cosmology that Aquinas inherited and developed.
Scientific theology must be based on personal experience shared through the community, like JJJ's family week programs. JJJ
Thius research is an exploration of the hypothesis that shared personal experiences are the empirical foundation of scientific theology. Compassion.
The God of the Christian world has gone through many different incarnations in its 3000 year history.
No Committee can work unless its members are in regular communication between meetings.
[page 53]
I am a relic of a bygone age, which circumstance I hope to exploit to develop a new model of God.
Christian theologians, after the Reformation, reflected the comfortable view that they just had to promulgate the text of the Bible, they did not have to produce a cosmology to go with the bible. That role had been taken out of their hands by the astronomers.
I have seen theology change from a science to literary criticism and wish to see it make the inverse change by exploiting the network approach to literature = text.
Friday 10 September 2010
Robinson page 39: '. . . the traditions of modern though, however rigorously self-consistent, are not consistent wit one another -- except in the shared impulse to nullify individual experience, which is perhaps as much a motive as a consequence of their rigor.'
page 42: 'By the word "altruism", altruisme in French, Comte intended a selfless devotion to the welfare of others which was to fill the place of belief in God left empty by the triumph of scientific positivism.
. . .
[page 54]
. . .
Saturday 11 September 2010
Robinson page 53: 'The cultural contamination to which science is most vulnerable os the kind that seems to the writer not to be cultural at all, to be instead commonsensical, for instance the very Western, very modern exclusion os subjectivity from the account to be made of human nature.'
As opposed to the Christie/Poirot position that psychology is all. Cards on the Table. Christie Network/communication approach easily embraces subjectivity. It takes two to make a message.
Robinson page 59: 'A central tenet of the modern world view is that we do not know our own minds, our own motives or our own desires. And -- an important corollary -- certain well qualified others do know them. I have spoken of suppression of the testimony of individual consciousness and experience among us, and this is one reason it has fallen silent. We have been persuaded that it is a perjured witness.'
The 'selfish gene' approach sees the dynamics through the stationary points which are the result of the dynamics, ie the interaction of phenotypes.
Robinson page 75: 'Our conception of the significance of humankind is and for the Universe has shrunk to the point that the very idea we
[page 55]
we ever imagined we might be significant on this scale now seems preposterous. These assumptions about what we are and what we are not preclude not only religion but also the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought. That the debate about the nature of mind has tended to center on religion is a distraction which has nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the more central issue. While it may not have been true necessarily, it has been true in fact that the renunciation of religion in the name of reason and progress has been strongly associated with a curtailment of the assumed capacities of mind.'
Religion binds smaller minds into larger minds and operates at all layers from the initial singularity up. What should be rejected is rot religion as such but species of religion that are no longer fit in the modern environment.
Robinson page 90: '[Freud's] model of the self, made passive by constraints imposed on it through the internalization of an identity not its own, one that is indeed antagonistic and intimidating, is broadly consistent with versions of the self that flourished among his contemporaries.
page 99: Metaphysics = modelling.
Oswald Spengler page 100 Relativity: "a ruthlessly cynical hypothesis."
Reality is staring us in the face but we find it hard to see because we think that we are special rather than just the
[page 56]
physical realization of ideas in the divine mind. No information without real (= physical) symbols. The notion that ideas and other mental constructs [are purely spiritual] is exactly wrong. All meaning is encoded as ordered states of the physical system, beginning with the bit.
Continuous mathematics does not apply to physical symbols but only to probability density functions of physical symbols, ie |ψ|2.
page 105: 'If there is one thing Freud asserts consistently, from which every theory proceeds and to which ever conclusion returns, it is just this -- that the mind is not to be trusted.
And yet we survive. Freud, if this is a true account of him, is wrong.
'For Freud, self alienation is a consequence of human ontogeny.'
Original sin redux. Original sin - Wikipedia
Robinson page 106: 'Why a vision of man and society so specific to an extraordinary historical circumstance should have been universalized as for many years as it was is an interesting question.
Science, checking checkable hypotheses, all of which have a probability 0 ≤ p ≤ 1 of being true.
