VII Notes
2010
Notes
[Sunday 26 September 2010 - Saturday 11 September 2010]
[Notebook: DB 70 Mathematical Theology]
[page 89]
Sunday 26 September 2010
Moulakis page 110: 'Statics determines dynamics. progressivism appears as mystification or as compensatory fantasy for minds that are not in themselves strong enough to bear the reality of statics. "There is deceit in the idea of progress."' Moulakis
Maybe, but I still feel better off that I feel my ancestors to have been, and I occupy somewhere near the median of social development. Like to disagree on the 'statics determines dynamics' and suggest that the stationary points of dynamics are part of the dynamics which may exhibit the same stationary points in an infinity of ways.
Hegel: thesis -- antithesis -- synthesis. Quantum field theory creation -- annihilation.
[page 89]
On the average we can expect the number of 0 states and the number 1 states in a binary digital computer to approach 50:50, just as we do with a two state quantum system, although we know that the detailed processing in the machine depends on the particular states of particular bits at particular steps in the process.
Hegel: Idealism; Marx: materialism: seeking causality in the "spiritual' vs seeking determinism in the 'physical'. In fact a network operates at all layers simultaneously, the spiritual (user) executing itself through the physical.
Internet pornography : woshipping a predominantly male version of female seculity as seen through the genital layer of human communication.
No amount of willpower can solve a problem without the means. One cannot escape from a prison without the means to open the walls, no matter how much one longs for freedom. So the theoretical and technical work that develops new means to escape old constraints is an essential feature in the growth in human entropy (freedom).
Moulakis page 112: 'Weil sees Marx's greatest achievement in the fact that he pointed not only to the necessity but also to the possibility of a social science buy calling attention to the existence of "social matter"' (Oppression et liberté page 233).
Weil: '"Marx was the first and, unless I am mistaken, the only one -- for his researches were not followed up -- to have the twin idea of taking society as the fundamental human fact and of studying therein, as the physicist does in
[page 91]
matter, the relationships of force."'
Moulakis page 113: Weil, echoing Parmenides: '"Only necessity is an object of knowledge. Nothing else can be grasped by thought . . . Necessity is the thing with which human though has contact."' (La connaissance supernaturelle, page 94)
For 'necessity' we would read 'fixed' (but subject to creation and annihilation, ie fixed for a certain lifetime.
All the numbers in physics can be interpreted as frequencies, events per unit time, ie energies.[more generally a frequency is a ratio, a's per b
Monday 27 September 2010
'In love". Christianity says love everybody, turn the other cheek etc but this is abstract love. Concrete love cannot be commanded because it is bigger and more complex that the lovers, beyond their control because they do not have the requisite variety.
Tuesday 28 September 2010
Moulakis page 122: 'Thinking -- and here Weil is absolutely right -- is something only human being can do.' We think./
page 137: 'In her sevenths week she noted in her journal that she was too exhausted to remember the real reasons for spending time in a factory, that she felt the strongest temptation not to think in order not to suffer'. cf Jaynes . . . [Jaynes] 'What surprised her most: the brutal constraint provoked in her not rebellious reaction, but docility.' [a reasonable reaction if survival is the aim]
page 142: 'Weil's God creates not ex nihilo but out of himself.
[page 92]
From revolution to poet: Martin Seymour-Smith Robert Graves Seymour-Smith
Smith page 12: 'We have in Robert graves an example of one who decided to become a poet when he was fifteen years old, in 1910. Since that time, he has written in The White Goddess, "poetry has been my ruling passion." . . . His poetry arose directly from his urgent need to reconcile the opposing forces in his nature.' [induced by an inconsistent society]
Contradiction --> creation (Cantor) [non-constructive proof]
page 19: 'graves's two most pressing problems were religion and his now rapidly deeloping sexuality -- matters intimately connected.'
All religion is devoted to control and control of sexuality is seen as essential to keeping the race pure.
'salvation came before "human love"'.
page 20: 'Only later during the war could he lose his faith and keep a good conscience about it -- and even this was painful, as it is to most of those brought up as Christians.'
page 28: '"Well, goodbye Graves, and remember that your best friend is the waste-paper basket."'.
[page 93]
Smith page 30: 'In all his poetry experience is primary.' So we may see poetry providing data for theology.
Hooper 'ex nihilo nihil fit'. Weil: Gods do not create ex nihilo sed ex seipsis. So put off my glasses and put me to bed. Antiphonarium OP. Order of Preachers
Smith page 82: Graves on Masefield: '"he never lost what is the supreme poetic quality: an unselfish love for his fellow men."'
page 96: Gertrude Stein: '"the way to say it is to say it"'.
We escape contradiction by complexity, so eventually we seek a society so complex that everybody can go their own way and not be subject to painful constraint and control by the whims of other people only by the constraints imposed by the physical embodiment of our spirits.
page 99: 'The poetic impulse, graves postulates, originates in conflict: . . . "
page 114: Basanta Mallik: '. . . "recommended constant self-watchfulness against either dominating or being dominated by any other individual."'
Maximizing entropy and meaning in the human layers.
Evolution (utility <--> fitness) --> beauty (eg flowers)
Smith page 133: 'The twenties was the decade when the moral style of the nineteenth century first came under wide (and not
[page 94]
always understanding) scrutiny; many found D H Lawrence and Bertrand Russell (in particular) liberating influences.'
Graves seems rather like Parmenides and his Goddess.
The interactive Universe: Newton's third law = interactive God.
Graves Goodbye . . . Smith page 192 Graves
. . .
Smith page 239: : Graves: '. . . scientists . . . "fail to understand that the cabbage-white's seemingly erratic flight provides a metaphor for all original and constructive thinking."'
Quantum field theory attempts to get the numbers right by inventing particles and giving them personalities (rates and forms of action) that fit the numbers. Nevertheless it has no place for gravitation, ie it cannot come up with a graviton consistent with all the other particles which explains gravitation as a particle / field phenomenon. This seems to be basically a normalization problem whose source, i feel, the the attempt to describe the observed world with continuous mathematics when all that is observed is particles (since only particles, not continua, are observable).
Continuity, modulation and the sampling theorem. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia Is the fact that two samples are required to define a period (ie sample at twice the maximum frequency for perfect fidelity)
[page 95]
connected to the use of 2D (complex) numbers to describe waves via the complex exponential.
Smith page 257: Graves: '"The essential work that is being done here by Laura, a few others & myself takes in the subject of crime and explains why people are now so interested in it.'" Error and error correction.
This book is written on the premise that most of the trouble in the world is religious. This is not to knock religion in general. I also accept that the good things in the world have a religious foundation. These two ideas make sense to me because I see religion as the art of human cohabitation. Without religion, we cannot live together. We are not born with a religion, any more than we are born with a language We have the ability to learn language. And we learn religion, the whole repertoire of skills that enable us to make our way in the world, prosper, be happy and perhaps even reproduce ourselves.
Religious conflict, like most other conflict in the world, arises from the conflict between the finite resources of the human environment and the very human desire to consume and reproduce. In a 'full' world, my tribe can only get bigger if yours gets smaller.
A little book about peace . . .
The relationship between the personal subjective and the universal objective.
Sitting here by a warm fire while the rain falls adoring my divine
[page 96]
world.
Graves in Smith page 382: '"The craft of writing Good English is based on a single principle: never to lose the reader's attention. Since the most obvious ways of losing it are to offend, confuse or bore him, good writing can be reduced simply to the principle of active care for sensibilities."'
Smith page 400: 'The White Goddess is above all the testament of a practicing poet.'
page 408: 'But woman as deceiver and inconstant lover does after all fit in well with a vital tradition in poetry -- and indeed with the notion of true romantic love, which is squarely based on the premise that it will end unhappily.'
Romance: creation and annihilation. But social structures have some bearing on the rates of creation and annihilation, and so modulate the lovers' experiences.
'. . . the test of the value of any 'system' is its relevance to general experience, not in its 'truth'.' Fitness <-?-> Truth
Wednesday 29 September 2010
Thursday 30 September 2010
Friday 1 October 2010
Saturday 2 October 2010
