vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 10 February 2013 - Saturday 16 February 2013]
[Notebook: DB 74 CREATION]
[page 89]
Sunday 10 February 2013
We need a theological spring. We need a radical revision of the theological premises upon which our societies are built. Theology is a necessary discipline because it describes the space of human existence and so helps us to deal with our condition. At present the human world is failing to comprehend the signals it is receiving from its environment. Current Western development policies
[page 89
are based on the Christian claim that God made all of this just for us and gave us licence to use it as we will. This assumption is false. In the coupled Human / Earth system there is two way communication and all our human messages invite a response from the environment. The essence of survival is to elicit favourable environmental responses for ourselves. Genesis 1, Christianity - Wikipedia
Theology as practised became discredited as a science in the Galilean era. The epistemology of ancient authority began to be replaced with the epistemology aod immediate experience., Galaleo, with is telescopes, clocks and other instruments opened up a vast new and reliable world to human vision. This world is the foundation of modern civil and mechanical engineering. Galileo Galilei - Wikipedia
The birth of science did little to deflect the trajectory of theology. In modern times theology is not even listed as one of the disciplines covered by the pontifical academy of science. Pontifical Academy of Sciences
The problem, in a nutshell, is that our current crop of theologies and religions are all mystery theologies or religions. God is beyond our ken, they say, but we nevertheless have a mandate to speak and act for God. The overall world theological outlook is dominated by this outlook, as one may see by taking a census of academic theology faculties.
The alternative to the mysterious God is the visible God, the one advocated here. Instead of thinking of God as the mysterious other, existing outside the Universe
[page 91]
but somehow controlling its every move, let us assume that God and the Universe are one entity and that all of our experience is experience of God.
On this assumption, theology can become a real, evidence based science. Here we encounter a vast emotional obstacle. For many thousands of year the intelligentsia have deprecated the so called material worl, the world of reproduction, was trade and all these practical things that the majority of ancient and modern ruling classes try to avoid, laving them to slaves, mercenaries and servants [and machines].
Here we are making the material world divine, we still have a serious intellectual obstacle. Almost all the mystics and theologians of ancient times have held that God is completely simple, pure act, pure being, something that could be approached by the purely empty mind created by a lifetime of 'spiritual' training. Yet we are proposing this world of countless complexities as a vision of the absolutely simple divinity.
The formal answer to this conundrum lies in mathematical fixed point theorems. We often use mathematical structures to model the world. The whole of our trade, banking and engineering industry could not proceed without the help if arithtmetic. More generally we describe the world with mathematical functions that mimic the behaviour of the world. Galileo found that the velocity of a falling object depended on how long it has been falling, and physicists use thousands of other equations (functions) to describe other features of the observable world.
[page 92]
A function is a mapping, and we model motion in a certain space by mapping a certain set of points onto itself, so that here becomes there and so on. Mathematics shows that under certain conditions such mappings are logically bound to have a point which is unchanged by the mapping, f(x> = x So mathematically we should expect to fins fixed points in a Universe of pure action pictired as mapping itself onto itself, because there is, by definition, nothing outside to map to.
So we have two enabling conditions for the establishment of scientific theology and the birth of a theological spring., 1. Set aside the ancient beliefs and open our minds to new possibility; and 2. Mathematical fixed point theory shows is that the existence of fixed points is consistent with a God of pure dynamism. The fixed points are not outside the life of the Universe (like the Christian God) but part of the dynamics. We, insofar as we live as a fixed point in the human subset of divine space, are fixed points in the divinity so modelled, parts of God.
The foundation of modern physics is quantum mechanics, which enables us to connect the fixed points observed in the Universe (like the frequency of a certain spectral lie of a certain atom). Quantum mechanics is built on the fundamental observations that energy and frequency are related by Planck;'s constant, and that the evolution of structure is accompanied by the selection of certain frequencies and energies out of all the possibility.
In the last few decades, we have come to see quantum
[page 93]
mechanics less as a 'mechanical' theory describing the collisions of little particles something like billiard balls so a description of information processing, transmission and computation, The first piece of evidence is quantization itself. Although physicists ancient and modern use continuous (geometrical) mathematics to describe the world, all observable events are discrete, non overlapping entities. [Quantization arises, we guess, because the mathematical theory of information tells us that error free communication requires quantized signals.]
From the communication point of view, all our observations are communications between ourselves and the Universe and the messages are encoded in particles of various complexity ranging from photons and electrons to complex structures like ourselves. I am a signal propagating from my birth to my death, one of the vast traffic in human life running on the human part of the Universal network.
In this context, theology becomes the study of information flow in the divinity, It is bases on the information that flow into and out of each other. From this abstract theological point of view, we are all different but nevertheless identical particles in the world, and we must structure our societies both on human equality and fair trade with one another and our global environment.
A religion based on this theology does not need a remote central commanding authority, All the information needed for someone to fit in and have a good relationship with the divine whole us available locally, either by immediate experience or by messages through the network, like this little essay.
Monday 4 February 2013
Tuesday 5 February 2013
[page 94]
Sent the latest theological spring to the Guardian and Ossevatore Romano (inspired by the [resignation] of Ratzinger). Now is a good time to write a Catholic manifesto in the interregnum, when the system is somewhat unstable and easy to shift into a new mode orthogonal to the current mode. Catholic = Universal.In the context of modern Science the Catholic story is obsolete. Can we really believe that God created a perfect Universe, some fault of early humans deranged it, God had his son murdered in satisfaction of this original sin and come the last day people will be drafted to Heaven or Hell and the whole system made over into its original underanged form. There is no evidence for any of the Church's claims except documents written by the Church itself, a delusory castle in the air.
Which is not to deny that the Church has contributed to human development by uniting many people in cooperative networks. The downside of this is that successful networks may often work to the detriment of less successful networks as Christian ideas and Churches has colonized the world and paved the way for imperial denial of human rights,
Sexuality is a potential and quantum shows us how potential wells give rise to structure, as in the atom. [the Catholic Church, by suppressing sexuality, cripples the whole consequent structure of human love].
We are failing to read the signals form our environment and we can imagine that one of the roots of this blindness is the Christian deprecation of the 'Material World'.
[page 95]
As the Hebrews noted, God is wild. Each of us has to live in the divine wilderness.
Seymour-Smith: Graves page 22 'He was instinctively aware from very early on, the biological truism that "the price of sex is death".' Or maybe the reward for death is sex. Seymour-Smith
Butler The Way of All Flesh Butler
Seymour-Smith page 26: 'At this time [1913?]all sex to Graves was vice.'
Wednesday 6 February 2013
God, as we know, can be rather fickle, participating in floods, fires, famines and wars, and it is against this noisy background that we must construct the social networks that cocoon us, sheltering us from dangers and repairing the damage done. In a good society those hit by a storm can rely on help from those who were spared in memory or anticipation of times then the situation is reversed.
Thursday 7 February 2013
God's worst imposition on us is death, something which Christianity (and other theologies) tries to avoid by equipping us with immortal souls and the promise of an eternal life of bliss if we behave ourselves as the ruling priesthood requires. Our consolation for death is life as part of God, not the sinful and suffering life that Christianity holds to be our due.
The search for redemption may be motivated by a
[page 95]
misunderstanding of error in the cosmic process, attributing it too closely to individual guilt rather than simply to ignorance or the failure to perform an action with sufficient precision to get the desired result. 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do'. The world is so complex that we very rarely if ever know the full consequences of our actions and so our control of our actions is limited. 'Original Sin' is equivalent to original ignorance, and nowhere is it more clearly manifest that in the Catholic Church which has concreted its ignorance of the world into dogma, so blighting the lives of billions of people with an almost invincible error which it is my pleasure to correct.
Seymour-Smith page 95: Graves, Reproach
Your grieving moonlight face looks down
Through the forest of my fears,
Crowned with a spiny bramble crown
Dew dropped with evening tears.Why do you spell 'untrue, unkind'
Reproachful eyes plaguing my sleep?
I am not guilty in my mind
Of aught would make you weep.Unjust? but how, what broken oath?
Unkind? I know not even you name.
Untrue, unkind, you charge me both, Scalding my heart with shame.The black trees shudder, dropping snow,
The stars tumble and spin.
[page 97]
Speak, speak, or how may a child knowErrors are relative to the environment, so changing environments induce errors that are corrected by the evolutionary process, erroneous systems failing to thrive, or should we say erstwhile perfect systems failing to thrive in the changing environment while those with the right errors do thrive.
His ancestral sin?
God: the ultimate sugar daddy
Seymour-Smith page 101: Graves: '. . . both the controlled and the uncontrollable parts of the art . . . [are] helpless without the other.' And if we interpret this as complete and incomplete, they are inseparable.
Unreasonable effectiveness: the approach here is theological. Theology is the study of the whole, commonly called in English God (Greek Θεος, so theology = talk about God).
Mathematics and theology agree that the whole, whatever it may be, is self consistent. So we grant mathematical existence to consistent systems and deny it to those which result in inconsistency. So the set of all sets cannot be said (mathematically) to exist, although we can clearly represent it in words.
Alexis Carrel: Man the Unknown page 38: 'Man should be the measure of all' ? Why? Carrel
Carrel page 39: 'We are victims of the backwardness of the sciences of life over those of matter.'
[page 98]
Carrel page 39: 'Since the material conditions of our existece have ben destrpyed by modern civilization, the science of man has become thje most necessary of all sciences.' Theology.
Seymour-Smith Graves page 114: 'Graves was prepared to face u to the unpleasantness of human nature even though he loathed the process . . . Graves subjected himself to critical self-examination, and used very modified Freudian concepts to do it. He was the only English poet to take this line and it is no wonder that readers found Wjipperginny bewilderingly difficult.'
page 115: Graves: ' "The true fiend rules in God's name". '
Isaiah xxix [divine intervention]
Poetry is a channel of communication defined by its methods of encoding and decoding human experience to and from strings of words (ie like every other channel).
Friday 8 February 2013
It has long been held that the nature of God is incompatible with the observed world. Mathematically the apparent incompatibility is solved by fixed point theorems.
1. Theology --> mathematical theology
2. Fixed point theorems and the nature of god.
3. Quantum mechanics and fixed points
4. Why is the Universe quantized?
5. The Universe as a computer network
[page 99
6. The transfinite network, layering, meaning, determinism and mystery (symmetry, incompleteness) A symmetry exists where there are no grounds for decision [halting])
7. Back to earth, Landauer
8. Unreasonable effectiveness explained
This outline gives me a feeling of completeness: I am within cooee of establishing mathematical theology as a legitimate discipline, about 50 years after the idea began to seep into my head.
I was fortunate to enter an order operating in a 1000 = 3000 year time warp. It gve me perspective on theology, which has a very long half life, compared to say gossip, ie the network world of small things, somewhat despised by the ancient ruling classes and their think tanks.
Ancient writings about god tend to be mystical, emphasizing the inaccessability of God (just like a King behind a palace guard) and the extreme difficulty (and benefit) of making god's acquaintance. Here (say it again) we are bringing god down to earth, not incarnate in one man but as the reality of everything. This completes the trifecta, begun with the Hebrew's inaccessible and capricious god, the suffering human god of Christianity to the real god, ourselves and our Universe, subsets of the whole divine Universe.
SECULAR GOD <==> SECULAR RELIGION
Saeculum = world, the observable fixed points in a truly dynamic god.
[page 100]
Saturday 9 February 2013
'He who rides the tiger . . . . My tiger is now lying down contented because I know how to make the World plausibly Divine. My task will not be complete, however, until this new point of view begins to propagate through the colleagues on its way to becoming the new theological paradigm, mathematical theology.
Seymour-Smith page 153: Rilke " 'for the beautiful is nothing but the first apprehension of the terrible' Duino Elegies Rainer Maria Rilke
