VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 19 September 2010 - Saturday 25 September 2010]
[Notebook: DB 70 Mathematical Theology]
[page 69]
Sunday 19 September 2010
,Standard physics assumes the existence of a continuous 4D spacetime with Minkowski metric in which to work. Here we assume only logical consistency and treat spacetime as an emergent phenomenon (structure).
It is Sunday so we can ditch the hard stuff for the easy history and turn to Cox, The Future of Faith Cox
[page 70]
Cox page 1: 'At the beginning of the new millennium three qualities mark the world's spiritual profile . . . . The first is the unanticipated resurgence of religion in both public and private life around the globe. The second is that fundamentalism, the bane of the twentieth century, is dying. . . . the third . . . is a profound change in the elemental nature of religiousness.'
page 2: 'Fundamentalists, with their insistence with obligatory belief systems, their nostalgia doe a mythical uncorrupted past, their claims to an exclusive grasp on truth, and — sometimes — their propensity for violence — are turning out to be rearguard attempts to stem a more sweeping tidal change.'
discovery of the sacred in the secular: Secular City, divine Universe.
Gerald Manley Hopkins: everyday world 'is charged with the grandeur [and detail] of God.' Hopkins
'"move to horizontal transcendance"'
Cox page 3: 'It is true that for many people "faith" and "belief" are just two words for the same thing. But they are not the same, and in order to grasp the magnitude of the religious upheaval now under way, it is important to clarify the difference [oportet distinguere -- we overcome inconsistency by increasing degrees of freedom - Cantor]. Faith is about deep seated confidence. It is what theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) called "ultimate concern", a matter of what the Hebrew's spoke of as the "heart".
'Belief, on the other hand, is more like opinion. . . .
[page 71]
We can believe something to be true without it making much difference to us, but we place out faith only in something that is vital for the way we live.' Practical epistemology.
Miguel Unamuno (1864-1936) "Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr." Unamuno
We move from belief to faith by testing: walk on it and see id it really is strong enough to carry you.
Priscillian of Avila first victim of Christian fundamentalism. Priscillian - Wikipedia
Cox page 7: 'One historian [who?] estimates that in the two and a half centuries after Constantine imperial authorities put twenty five thousand people to death for their lack of credal correctness.
"[The "Age of Belief"] was already comatose when the European Union chiselled the epitaph on its tombstone in 2005 by declining to mention the world "Christian" in its constitution.
Cox page 8: Joachim of Fiore: "Age of the Spirit". Joachim of Fiore - Wikipedia
Church: physical representation of a faith. The secular church is based on faith in the reliability of the world = God.
Cox page 9: 'Pentecostals, whoch stress a direct experience of the Spirit.' The message.
page 10: Meister Eckhart: Meister Eckhart - Wikipedia
page 11: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - Wikipedia
Spirituality: being aware of higher layers.
[page 72]
Megachurches: Saddleback and Willow Creek
'There are now more than four hundred of these churches with congregations of ten thousand or more. They are not fundamentalist. Their real secret is that they are honeycombs of small groups, hundreds of them, for study, prayer and action.'
Robert Wuthnow: Sharing the Journey . . . Wuthnow
Cox page 13: 'Echoing age old suspicions, for example, the Vatican has warned Catholics against the dangers of attending classes on Yoga. Pontifical Council for Culture, Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue
Cox page 124: Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969) ' "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" Harry Emerson Fosdick - Wikipedia
Cox page 18: 'There is no God but God and Muhammed is his messemger.'
In a dynamic Universe, we do not distinguish between message and messenger,message is a a staionary point in a dynamic messenger (essence, existence - essence is part of existence, not distinct from it) 24 Theses. 24 Theses of Pope Pius X
Cox page 19: 'Creeds did not exist [in the first phase of Christianity]; they are fading in importance now.'
No; the emergent creed is being delineated by science;: the nature of the World we inhabit and our own nature shaped in this world.
Brouwer: A wheel goes round by mapping itself onto itself and it has a fixed hub; The hub, however, is mapped onto the progress of the vehicle, which moves by mapping itself through an open set, so there is not fixed point
[page 73]
A creed:constitutional democracy and the rule of law: the emergence of new structure through parliamentary discussion arriving at a consistent (ish) way of dealing with a situation, eg traffic, drugs, trade.
Cox page 22: 'Faith starts with awe'. More likely with the social indoctrination of the newborn that firs them to survive in their biological and physical environment.
page 23: Rudolph Otto: Das Heilige 'mysterium tremendum et fascinans' Otto
Cox page 21: Einstein: '"To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly."' Through messages which are the stationary points in the dynamics,like these notes, which carry the skeleton of some of my mental flow.
page 26: 'Human beings might be defined as Homo quaerens, the stubborn creatures who cannot stop asking why and then asking why they ask why.' Anthropomorphic. The whole of reality is reality quaerens, seeking consistency through complexification.
'Here religion emerges in the evolution of humanity'. No. It was always there from the beginning, making consistent structures out of 'atoms', ie functional units whose interior is visible only through their properties.
Cox page 29: Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) Reinhold Niebuhr - Wikipedia
Cox page 30: 'The self is not a static entity. it is a battle site.' Really?
page 34: 'Our meeting with the "other carries with it horror as well as
[page 74]
promise.' A perfectly evolutionary situation.
We need to provide lgoical explantions for all the parameters of geometric physics - eg continuity = NOP = symmetry.
Cox page 38: 'A Christian atheist is different from a Buddhist atheist because they are each rejecting a totally different concept of the divine. This is important for the study of religion, since what we eventually come to see is that there is no neutral platform, no place where anybody can stand outside them all and make comparisons and judgements.'
The not-p's are differentiated by the p's: logical duality.
Cox page 40: Ernst Bloch (1885-1977): the biblical God is one "whose essence is futurity". ie empty political promises to be fulfilled not by God but by a people inspired to fight to the death by the promise of a promised land. Ernst Bloch - Wikipedia page 49: 'Simply states, Jesus was not preoccupied with himself. The age of shalpm that God had promised continued to be his ultimate concern throughout his life. It was the object of his faith.'
Same here, but on a far more sicnetific basis, givin the visible and trustworthy God revealed by science.
Jesus offered nothing new to human wisdom. He is just the product of a new institutional approacjh to using religion for political control.
[page 75]
Motion is the source of comfort. Roll over when it becomes uncomfortable to sleep on that side.
Cox page 33: ". . . the Catholic Church has largely retracted [its] claim to exclusivity . . . (Ref?)
page 62: Left Behind Left Behind - Wikipedia
Monday 20 September 2010
Cox page 95: Didascalia Didascalia Apostolorum - Wikipedia
I am the dual of my niche, and at any particular moment this duality is expressed by messages between the peer layers in me and my niche, gravitation, redox etc. Redox - Wikipedia
Cox page 124: 'It is the evolution of this cultural. spiritual and moral dimension of the papacy that is left out of most of the suggestions I see about the future of the papacy.
After the Age of the Spirit comes the Age of the Divine Universe, combining all three personalities, the two images and the bond between the, into one dynamic unity with a transfiinite set of stationary points.
Cox page 128: 'Adherents of the different world religions can no longer avoid each other, so understanding each other is no longer merely an option, but a necessity.'
128: FAITH = HUMAN OPERATING SYSTEM (embodying a religion, ie a protocol for interacting with other people).
[page 76]
Tuesday 21 September 2010
Cantor explored the relationship between continuous and discrete using the notion of order, finding that the cardinal of the countable ordinals (ie the cardinal of the set of permutations of a countable set) is uncountable. Later Cohen found that Cantor's 'continuum hypothesis' is independent of the axioms of set theory, meaning that it could not be proven from set theory. Nevertheless, the power of ordering to generate cardinals greater than the cardinal of the set being permuted remains.
The fundamental scientific article of faith is that the Universe is consistent (at least locally [in space-time]) and so any formal system which is a candidate for modelling the world must be itself consistnet. Cantor proved 'Cantor's theorem': Given any set S there exists a set of arrangements of S, P(S) such that cardinal (P(S)) > cardinal (S). Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia
Cox page 195: 'Liberation theology is more than just a regionally specific "Latin American Theology" or a passing fad. It embodies a momentous leap out of many centuries in which Christianity was defined as a system of beliefs imposed by a hierarchy. [Why does the hierarchy evolve and survive?] It symbolizes the resurrection of faith-as-trust [ie stupidity, lack of critical testing of models of incoming data] and represents the retrieval of the core of the Gospel messae [hippy trippy bullshit about the "Kingdom of Heaven"] as it was understood and lived in the earliest [pre-critical because pre-political] centuries of Christianity. It is an unshakeable sign of the coning of the Age of the Spirit.
[page 77]
The sprit is a boson, a message, and as such is 'viral' without a life of its own. It is not subject to testing until it is received and put into practice. Then the devilish details appear as the initial passionate love gradually differentiates into the details of life together, arranging income, food, shelter, peace in the home and with the neighbours, and so on. So the new Age of the Spirit (that includes the hippies and their ideas) may be seen as a new human love affair to be gradually worked out in the details of a just and sustainable human pattern of existence on Earth.
Cox page 209: '. . . "the gospel of [prosperity" . . . has found its major bearer in the United Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG). It is the fastest growing denomination in Latin America and has now spread to dozens of other countries. The UCKG promises its adherents that if they contribute generously they will receive not only salvation and health, but wealth, not just in the world beyond, but in this one.'
"pseudo-Pentecostal"
210: have the Catholics done nothing in all this?
Cantor: a consistent system is unbounded. And an unbounded system is at least partly incomplete and incomputable. [Each higher transfinite layer is incomplete and incomputable from the point of the layer upon which it is built.]
Cox page 216: Shane (note 2) New York Times Scott Shane
Soka Gakkai 'value creation'. Soka Gakkai - Wikipedia
page 217: 'Boston Research Centre'
[page 78]
Cox page 218 "emerging church movement" Emerging church - Wikipedia
Marcus Borg: Heart of Christianity
Spirit: All energy, no structure, a boson that was encoded and will be decoded by fermions.
Cox page 221 '. . . Cheristianity gradually stepped away from faith and into ideas'. Very bad. This is the sin of Adam and Eve, curiosity. The Age of the Spirit demands blind (content free) faith, so it is just plain Lutheran, unbalances. In reality essence and existence are identical, as in God.
Cox page 222: Tissa Balasuriya Tissa Balasuriya - Wikipedia
page 223: 'The wind of the Spirit is blowing. One indication is the upheaval that is shaking and renewing Christianity. Faith, rather than beliefs, is once again becoming its defining quality, and this reclaims what [I think] faith meant during its earliest years. I have described how that primal impetus was nearly suffocated by creeds, hierarchies and the disastrous merger of the church with the empire. But I have also highlighted how a newly global Christianity enlivened by a multiplicity of cultures and yearning for realization of God's reign of shalom, is finding its soul again. All the signs suggest we are poised to enter a new Age of the Spirit and that the future will be a future of faith.
Spiritist, pentacostalist triumphalism!
[page 79]
Wednesday 22 September 2010
We seek the 'cause' of stationary points in the dynamics of which they are part. Where we se stationarity we assume the existence of control. Every alphabet is controlled (defined and maintained) by a user layer. [which values it for its stationary points and acts to maintain them]
We can examine the whole system in terms of two layers, physical and user. Boff Theology and Praxis (= politics) Boff
Desperate to please = seeking perfect understanding (so as to be able to deliver attractive inputs to the one to be pleased, so horticulture [massage parlours, etc].
We label the physical and user layers with numbers, then label(user) > label(physical).
To deal with the prudes of this world we need to establish a reference frame in which reproductive activity fits as easily as metaphysics and spirituality.
Basically questions of evolution, survival and fitness are questions of power: the ability to obtain the resoures needed to realize one's potential as a liver, breeder and playperson.
Power is everything == fitness.
Theological power = making a living in the theological community.
[page 80]
I watch the trades to see my day in the stock market evolve.
Why am I doing this? Ultimately because I want to, but what is the source of the desire: the perception of a series of errors which, when corrected, put reality in a whole new light. It is not the same deceptive and heavy evil, but the divinity itself.
John Reed Man Without God 0091051703 Reid
Editor's Foreword: John P Whalen and Jaroslav Pelikan page ix: 'When Dostoevsky said that the choice was "either God or murder" he was voicing a widespread Christian conviction that only theistic belief . . . could restrain the beast in man from taking over. The exemplary lives of many of our unbelieving contemporaries are a refutation of that conviction -- a refutation with which theology must somehow come to terms."
Faith in God is an evil as long as it diminishes faith in the world. Since the Word is God, this stance is self contradictory.
page x: '. . . the atheist, for his part, must ask . . . whether his view of the world and of man can perpetuate itself without a transcendent point of referral: in short whether it is finally possible to be human without the divine.'
Of course we need the divine, it is our niche, our dual, for the world is divine. The atheist position of rejecting some global organizing force is self-contradictory in that it does not explain the existence of atheists, quite well organized entitites well tuned to their environment.
[page 81]
An aim of natural religion is to make us all into critical believers.
Thursday 23 September 2010
Moltmann: The Church in the Power of the Spirit Moltmann
Reed: Man Without God
Jaspers: Philosophical Faith and Revelation Jaspers
Al;l three from a thoroughly Christian project and no real use of this project except to illustrate rather ineffective efforts to correlate Christian stories with contemporary experience.
Moulakis: Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial Moulakis
page 58: 'Weil hoped that the trade unions would serve as agents for revolution that could not only seize bureaucratic and military machines but smash them as well.' ~1933
'After three years as a militant syndicalist, Weil acted on her perception of the movement;'s structure and course of action on the one hand and her analysis of the contemporary crisis on the other. She felt she has no choice but to abandon, if not her revolutionary hope, at least her conviction that the trade unions could be the embodiment of that hope.'
Weil: "The problem is to find some way of forming an organization that does not engender bureaucracy. For bureaucracy always betrays. And an unorganized action remains pure but fails."
[page 82]
Obviously she had experienced only ineffective and self-serving organizations.
Moulakis page 59: 'From that time on, Weil was intent on keeping her distance from all political activity save theoretical research. On October 1, 1934, she took an unpaid leave of absence "for personal studies", to start working on December 4 of the same year on an unskilled factory job.'
page 61: '. . . she agreed with Trotsky that the Soviet Union represented a bureaucratic derailment of the revolution.
An ode to Trotsky. Leon Trotsky - Wikipedia
Mouloakis page 62: 'Persecuted, isolated, rejected and yet -- or perhaps for that very reason -- courageous, hopeful, clear-sighted, his candid theoretical analysis directed straight at praxis, this Trotsky combines all the virtues of the earlier "heroic" phase of Weil's theory of man.'
FREEDOM - SYMMETRY - EQUIPROBABILITY - EQUAL ENERGY - EQUAL PROCESSING RATE (eg all multiplications of a certain length are the same).
The key is free (minimal barriers to opt-in, opt-out) organization and those organizations that do not attract supporters die.
'The economic crisis raises the question with greater acuteness. Normal police methods are no longer adequate to keep capitalist society in check. This is the hour of fascist tactics. "Using the fascist agency, capital mobilizes the masses of the stultified petit bourgeoisie, the hands of the degrade,
[page 83]
demoralized lumpenproletariat, and all the innumerable human beings who have been thrown into despair and misery by that same finance capital."'
Page 63: 'It was the crisis that seemed to create that dependence pf the individual on society that revolutionary theory talks about. On this theory society is understood as the system of economic relations.'
SOCIETY = TRADE +
Enlist Geoffrey Robertson. You can attack the pope but he is cornered and, like the Japanese Emperor, cannot give in for historical reasons. The historical trap in which the Vatican finds itself was set by the propensity of the Christian intellectuals to embroider the basis Bible story with deep and complex metaphysical [fandangles].
Friday 24 September 2010
I think by endlessly going round and round on more or less the same track, usually making a small change here and there (at least in time) so the track is spiral in computation space (= time + logic). This space is equivalent to the platonic Cantor Universe made active by considering symbols as events rather than as static marks on paper or elsewhere. Every such event (modelled by a computer) has a beginning, middle and end, Large scale events are constructed of smaller ones, the atomic event being measured by the quantum of action. A computation is an atomic event which can nevertheless be observed in detail in a debugger or emulator.
[page 84] This is a use of the scale invariant hypothesis, event = {event}. The empty set corresponds to the atomic event with no interior observables.
MODELLING = EMULATION
Are these words worth the discomfortable side effects ot he drug that elicited them. No more uncomfortable that the need for a shave, however.
First order is rotation. Second order is perturbation of the rotation to a spiral in noetic (= logic + time) space. How do we describe a circle in the Cantor Universe - a symmetry, NOP.
for NOP dp/dt = 0 (p = proposition, t = 'time step') = quantum of action, so we might write dp/dh = 0, ie an actin happens but nothing else. An event that leaves the relevant p unchanged.
The idea that the world is a computation became popular around the time of Deutsch's early work and book. Deutsch
Classically a continuum is a string of points so dense that we can always find another point between any given pair of points. This continuum is felt to be infinite in extent and infinitely finely divided, the combination of these two infinities leading to the idea that the cardinal of the continuum, the second transfinite cardinal ℵ1. From this idea, applied to the dimension of space and time we get some of the characteristics of the mathematics of quantum theory: a continuum
[page 85]
represented by an infinite dimensional Hilbert space, ratios whose denominators tend to zero, Dirac's delta, renormalization and so on, all 'epicycles' that suggest that there is something fishy about the current incarnation of the continuous model.
The trouble, I feel, lies in our understanding of continuity. Aristotle defined a continuum as a set of elements whose ends overlapped. Adjacent points do not overlap, but logic does if we visualize it in geometric space as Venn diagrams. Venn diagram - Wikipedia Classical space is a 6n-D Venn diagram.
Time stands still (or proceeds at an infinite pace) when we are asleep or otherwise not conscious of ourselves (immersed in a process, rather than standing outside the process) Falling in liove vs thinking about falling in love.
The fundamental problem is that Christian theology is too narrow to deal with the material world so that it tends to deprecate it/ It fails to understand that a Word is not a Word unless it is made flesh.
Lirerary criticism: hopw to construct a telling adventure, a consuming verbal picture, an exciting text, a form of pornography in fact, not too explicist, not too complexified. We want to suck the unters in with a good yarn.
Quantum mechanics comes down to solving the characteristic equations of operators on Hilbert space. How do we achieve these solutions with a computer? What if eigenfunctions are Diophantine?
the transfinite numbers are represented by 'floating base'
[page 86]
numbers [numerals], where each successsive digit is an element of a base equal to the largest number representable by the preceding digits. So
1 4 9 6
base 10 base 100 base 1000 base 10000 etc. Something like this but grows faster.
The heart of Cantor's idea is the generation of infinite possibilities from finite resources by givi8ng significance to position, ie ordering, encapsulated bnuy the general idea that the cardinal of the countable ordinals is ℵ1 and so on.
INFORMATION / ACTION = MEANING. The bit that says bomb the world has more meaning than the bit that says make this pixel white. so does MY whole life (like the whole life of anyu other particle) correspond to one quantum of action: we measure meaning as Google does, by linkage. Have thought of this possibility long ago but it seemed too weird to write down.
Moulakis page 74: 'For Simone Weil revolution was never an end in itself, an intoxicating fantasy: it was merely a means of arriving at optimal social conditions. . . . "the revolution is a job, a methodical task that the blind or people with blindfolded eyes cannot perform. And this is where we are at this moment."'
Christianity is an hypothesis thjat does not fit modern daya, either constitutional or anthropological. Similarly Marxism, but it died much more quickly [leaving us christian capitalist democratic socialism].
[page 87]
Moulakis page 77: 'Not only because external conditions had changed in the course of time but also because of its internal deficiencies and inconsistencies, marxism, according to Weil, cannot meet the task assigned to it: to be a revolutionary theory.' [Natural theology is an evolutionary theory embracing revolutions at all scales]
Moulakis page 89: Weil: 'Man is a limited being to whom it is not given to be, as in the case of the God of the theologians, the direct author of his own existence; but he would possess the human equivalent of that divine power if the material conditions that enable him to exist were exclusively the work of his mind directing the effort of his muscles. This would be true liberty.' (Oppression et liberté page 117 Weil)
page 92: Alain: '"Geometry is the key to nature. Without it we cannot perceive the world in which we live and on which we depend.'
We say wrong: logic is the key to nature, ie communication and computation.
page 94: 'The concept of workl is the linchpin of Simone Weil's thought.'
page 100: Weil: '"Powerful means are oppressive, non-powerful means remain ineffective."'
The logical model sees causality in implication.
Saturday 25 September 2010
Moulakis page 96: 'Even those activities that appear to enjoy the greatest degree of freedom -- science, sports, art -- are valuable only to the degree that they imitate or even exaggerate the strict rigor and accuracy of work. Pétrement reports thjat in the Weil household, when Simone was growing
[page 88]
up, not a single toy was to be found.'
Moulakis page 99: '"The most fully human civilization would be that which has manual labour as its pivot, that in which manual labour constituted the supreme value."' (Weil, Oppression and liberté, page 137)
oage 101: Weil: '"The only hope for socialism resides in those who have already brough about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labour which characterizes the society we are aiming at. (OL page 37).
'"The enlightened goodwill of men (sic) acting in an individual capacity is the onlyu possible principle of social progress'" (OL 84).
page 102: Weil: '"The keystone supports the whole building from above. Archimedes sais "Give me a point of leverage and I will lift the world.' The silent presence of the supernatural here below is that point of leverage."' (OL 230).
Complexity - Control. A complex system needs to control its alphabet ('material basis') to survive, which is possible because the set of the orderings of [the] alphabet has more than enough variety to control the alphabet.
Higher layers maintain the symmetry of the layers beneath them? [homework, economics]
Moulakis page 104: 'The idea of work as a contact with nature and as an intersubjective link -- that is, as an activity that turns an individual into a subject -- furnished Simone Weil with the theoretical basis of her concern with Marx.'
[page 89]
Here in nature we have the supernatural foundations of human society and community as it is experienced through work and trade.
Moulakis page 107: Weil: '"Marx was incapable of any real effort of scientific thought because that did not interest him. All this materialist was interested in was justice. He was obsessed by it."'
Weil again:' "[Marx] began to take himself seriously. He was seized with a kind of messianic illusion which made him believe that he has been chosen to play a decisive role for the salvation of mankind."'
Moulakis page 108: '[Marx's] method turned into inexorable materialistic determinism, in which there is no room for liberty.'
