VII Notes

2010

Notes

[Sunday 10 October 2010 - Saturday 16 October 2010]

[Notebook: DB 70 Mathematical Theology]

Sunday 10 October 2010

[page 112]

Monday 11 October 2010

MATTER = naked symbol, ie distinct entity

Tuesday 12 October 2010

Wednesday 13 October 2010

Simone Pétrement: Simone Weil Pétrement

page 88: Weil: '"At all times the ability to handle words has seemed to men something miraculous. In primitive societies the run of men, those who know how to hunt, fish, handle tools and weapons with admirable ingenuity, docilely obey certain privileged beings whose only knowledge consists in being able to express certain formulas. These

[page 113]

privileged beings are priests; and the fact that their formulas are absolutely bereft of effectiveness does not prevent them from being regarded as possessing an essence superior to those who know how to act. This domination of those who know how to handle words is rediscovered at every stage of human history. It is necessary to add that as a group, these manipulators of words, whether priests or intellectuals, [or spin doctors] have always been on the side of the ruling class, on the side of the exploiters against the producers."'

Thursday 14 October 2010

Friday 15 October 2010

Pétrement page 123: Weil: '"Since there are exploited people there are people who revolt. These rebels have killed and been killed: yet they have neither destroyed exploitation nor did they even generally mitigate it. It is not enough to rise up against a social order based on oppression; one must change it, and one cannot change it without knowing it."'

page 142: 'I remember we talked about Panaït Istrati, the Rumanian writer who had recently defected. I had just read, I believe around this time, a statement of his that struck me: "no organization can help or ever will help anyone but the organizers themselves."'

page 191: Weil: '"We will not have a method of overturning oppression except on the day when we will have understood the causes of oppression s clearly as we conceive of the conditions that produce the equilibrium of a stone."'

Page 210: Weil: '"One cannot be a revolutionary if one does not love life . . . The revolution is a struggle against all that which forms an obstacle to life. It has no meaning except as a means [a lower layer]; if the end pursued [user] is vain, the means loses its value."'

[page 114]

Pétrement page 216: [Weil] Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression

page 223: 'She does not at all condemn the pleasures of the senses. But she does seem to condemn desire. In her view, love or friendship should be entirely free of the tendency to dominate or let oneself be dominated. If some people had the feeling that her friendship was a dominating one, it was certainly not what she wished.'

Carbon Copy Cloner is the same software no matter how many files are to be copied and this is a general feature of algorithms, that they are a structure which is indifferent to the number of times they are invoked. This is rather like the layering of transfinite cardinals and their symmetry expressed by the equation 2^aleph(n) = aleph(n)^{aleph = aleph(n+1)}. Poorly expressed, but what we are getting at is the invariance of algorithms with respect to the number of instances of the algorithm, ie symmetry.

Am I getting anywhere with this, or just going in circles? Time to write something [On modelling the world, Australasian Journal of Philosophy]

Saturday 16 October 2010

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You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Pétrement, Simone, and Raymond Rosenthal (translator), Simone Weil: A Life, Schocken 1988 Jacket: 'A French Jew who broke with Judaism and wavered on the edge of Roman Catholicism, the daughter of a respected physician, the sister of one of the century's greatest mathematicians, Simone Weil devoted her life to the search for truth and God amid the poverty and misery of the poor. Since her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, Simone Weil has become a person of legend. T S Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Coles spoke of her as the saint of the twentieth century who lived the contradictions of our era more intensely and continuously than anyone else.'  Amazon   back

Papers

Landauer, Rolf, "Information is a physical entity", Physica A, 263, 1, 1 February 1999, page 63-7. 'This paper, associated with a broader conference talk on the fundamental physical limits of information handling, emphasizes the aspects still least appreciated. Information is not an abstract entity but exists only through a physical representation, thus tying it to all the restrictions and possibilities of our real physical universe. The mathematician's vision of an unlimited sequence of totally reliable operations is unlikely to be implementable in this real universe. Speculative remarks about the possible impact of that, on the ultimate nature of the laws of physics are included.'. back

Landauer, Rolf, "The Physical Nature of Information", Physica A, 217, 4-5, 15 July 1996, page 188-93. 'Information is inevitably tied to a physical representation and therefore to restrictions and possibilities related to the laws of physics and the parts available in the universe. Quantum mechanical superpositions of information bearing states can be used, and the real utility of that needs to be understood. Quantum parallelism in computation is one possibility and will be assessed pessimistically. The energy dissipation requirements of computation, of measurement and of the communications link are discussed. The insights gained from the analysis of computation has caused a reappraisal of the perceived wisdom in the other two fields. A concluding section speculates about the nature of the laws of physics, which are algorithms for the handling of information, and must be executable in our real physical universe.'. back

Landauer, Rolf, "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5, 3, 1961, page 183-191. 'Abstract: It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. This logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility and requires a minimal heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. This dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. '. back

Links

Bombich Software Carbon Copy Cloner 'Spinning for years at 75MPH, your hard drive's catastrophic crash could really hinder your productivity. Use CCC to make a bootable backup of your digital life today!' back

Landauer Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process Rolf Landauer: Abstract: 'It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. The logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility, and requires a minimum heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. The dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. back