vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 24 February 2013 - Saturday 2 March 2013]
[Notebook: DB 74 CREATION]
[page 119]
Sunday 24 February 2013
Johnson, Nemesis Johnson
Johnson page 26: US destruction of Iraq electricity generation and water purification with the express intention of causing civilian casualties. [The commanders of armies are responsible for collateral damage.]
Computability and incomputability are relative ideas. Something is computable if it lies within machine infinity, which may be any number greater than one (on the assumption that a system with a message space of one has nothing to compute [a representation of the Classical God, our starting point here.]
Monday 25 February 2013
Johnson page 48: Polk and Schuster Looting of Iraq Museum . . . Polk & Schuster
When a level or a discrete system at a certain level encounters a fatal error it must quit and be reloaded, which in the case of human and natural life in general means dies and is reborn, as I am reborn on my children.
We can only study the fixed points of a system and use some mathematical or other imaginative structure to bridge the gaps between the fixed points, that is a
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process that joins them.
The Pope's fundamental problem is that he institutionally bound not to admit that he has ever been wrong, and so if an error is made it becomes fixed (in principle) for all time. The fundamental error, as we repeat endlessly, is the claim that God is wholly other than the World and essentially invisible to us.
Tuesday 26 February 2013
Johnson Nemesis page 62: Holland: "The central paradox of Roman society . . . [was] that savage divisions of class could coexist with an almost religious sense of community." '
Euripides Medea Euripides - Wikipedia, Euripides
page 75: Arendt ' "administrative massacres" ' Arendt
Johnson page 76: 'All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial preeminence, manifest destiny or a "civilizing mission" to cover their often barbarous behaviour.'
Reinhold Niebuhr: ' "The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism. Reinhold Niebuhr - Wikipedia
The Catholic Church (through its various agents) did a good job of inhibiting me, but I am slowly
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breaking free and letting my lust for life flow. This is unlikely to do too much damage in my aging condition, but I do feel a prophetic urge in me to propagate my theological idea now that it seems to me to be sound and also capable of yielding great benefits to human intelligence and our collective power of survival by proving a firm empirical foundation to our dealings with the divinity, which includes one another, and the prediction that communication implies peace.
Drama/writing, converting words into emotions and vice versa—the words are the potential and emotion to resulting movement [kinetic]. I want to elicit an emotional response to my theological words. Speech and communication in general carry down through the layers to the physical layer by which we act.
Armstrong: Islam page x: 'We never experience transcendence directly: our exstasy is always 'earthed', enshrined in something or someone below.' [Landauer Rolf Landauer] Armstrong
Armstrong page x: 'Each tradition encourages the faithful to focus their attention on an earthly symbol that is peculiarly its own and to teach themselves to see the divine in it.' Natural theology teaches us to see all phenomena as divine. é
'In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical mission,. Their chief duty was to create a just community in which all members, even the most weak and vulnerable, were treated with absolute respect.'
page xi: 'A Muslim had to redeem history, and that meant
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that state affairs were not a distraction from spirituality but the stuff of religion itself.'
Armstrong page xi: 'Politics was, therefore, what Christians would call a sacrament: it was the arena in which the Muslims experiences God and which enables the divine to function effectively in the world.' As if we could stop it! Sacrament - Wikipedia
'. . . one of the chief characteristics of Islam has been its sacralization of history.'
Armstrong page 6: 'Axial Age' (c 700 BCE - 2000 AD)
page 7: 'The way forward lay in a single God and a unified ummah, which was governed by justice and equity.'
page 20: 'The life and achievements of Mohammad . . . expressed the Islamic experience of 'salvation' which does not consist in the redemption of an 'original sin' committed by Adam and the admittance to eternal life, but in the achievement of a society which puts into practice God's desires for the human race.'
Wednesday 27 February 2013
Armstrong page 52: 'Each Muslim has a unique responsibility to obey God's commandments, and no religious authority . . . could come between God and the individual Muslim.' How are we to know God's commands?
page 56: 'Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain was, rather than to accept certain credal positions.' Physical (behavioural) theology.
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The world is a creative place and one cannot expect two geodesics to remain parallel. This applies both in general relativity and in the realm of 'generalized geodesics' which map the progress of each particle (eg me) through the peer space, ie the space of al entities with which it interacts as an equal. Notes 20 April 2003 generalized geodesic
Armstong page 90: Ibn-Khaldun and the study of history. - Al-Maqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Muqaddimah - Wikipedia
History is (for us) large scale dynamics.
page 97: 'The discovery and exploitation of gunpowder led to the development of military technology that gave rulers more power over their subjects than before.'
We think of the mi8litary as publc health technology and judge it accordingly, in life years saved per dollar spent. On this reckoning, most militaries are abysmal failures relative to all other public health measures.
Thursday 28 February 2013
The world has a skeleton of fixed points which acts as a control on the dynamics, rather like my skeleton. My skeleton itself has been shaped over a much longer period than my life by the dynamic necessities of fitness.Waugh Brideshead 'When people hate with all that energy it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is gating all the illusions of boyhood—innocence, God, hope.' Penguin 1982 page 120. Waugh, Evelyn Waugh - Wikipedia
The inherent inconsistency of Catholicism and reality causes much
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pain.
Droughts, flood, fires, famines and relatives. These days I am preaching that the Universe is the Divine, but one thing I notice is that the Divine Universe is just as capricious in its treatment of us as the Gods of old, who killed everyone whenever they felt like it.
PREACHING = MARKETING = EVANGENIZATION.
Marketing is aimed at the animal in us, evangelization at the angel, for we are embodied angels, given the formal models of bodies and angels.
The psychology of the sugardaddy site: principal component love for sale, support me and I will love you. This is in effect a trade in human hardware, it is that warm, soft, living, intelligent body I want at the core of my being. This is closely connected with the fundamental act of the survival of the species, reproduction. The sugarbabies are to be found at this end of the spectrum. At the other end are those communications between is in which our bodies are means rather than ends, that is public behaviour, in offices, on streets, beaches, in church and courthouse and so on.
Friday 1 March 2013
It is easy to feel that one is fighting a losing battle against the deterioration of the world. The ultimate answer to this, given that one cannot work any
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harder, is to increase productivity by working more intelligently, which requires that we understand better the causes and remedies for our problems. This approach has proven powerful in the case of public health, for instance, where relatively simple behavioural changes that break cycles of infection have proven effective when people can be induced to work together. This requires education, that is explaining to people the nature of the world and how to deal with it. This process is inhibited by teaching people false pictures of the world. Here one encounters the problem of traditional theologies and religions insofar as they lead us away from, rather than toward, real salvation. We are fortunate that our advances in science (an in general the understanding of history) are gradually introducing a secular (that is dynamic) theology among us, so that many of the causes and solutions of public problems are coming clear. Our principal need, then, becomes a political consensus about what to do. At present (as always ?) we are confronted by the traditional view that God is in control and doing everything for the best and the more modern view that we are the controllers of our own fate and must see what is happening around us and respond appropriately.
My principal contribution to this may be the ideas contained in Unreasonable Effectiveness, which is not making much progress on paper, but is still bubbling away in my mind.
A principal problem in dealing with our problems is 'denialism', eg we are not influencing global climate and so there is no need to do anything about it. The scientific answer to this is the weight of evidence and the political answer is to collect sufficient evidence to show that there is a
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need to collect more, as we are doing with the instrumentation of the world. The biggest denial facing us is the religious denial of death, which focusses our interest away from the World to another imaginary world where all is well, the work of God [who has our individual best interests at heart].
The first move a new Pope must make is to strike out the doctrine of infallibility. Infallibility, denialism and other enemies of human survival = salvation. Practical salvation, preached in myth and metaphor by the old religions lies in reproduction, growing the body of the faithful and the corresponding concentration of political power.
Catholicism envisages a static God, eternal and unchanging,. The reality is an evolving divinity in perpetual motion, the living God.
Washington Post Op Ed: Infallibility, denial and death.
Everything begins as an idea in some mind and, if it is fit, gradually realizes itself, first in writing and then in production. As I get older my position on theology becomes clearer to me, and as it becomes clearer it becomes more irresistible as a replacement for current doctrine. Every idea may be seen as a rearrangement (permutation, combination) of existing ideas. This is how evolution works. 'Jesus' rearranged Old Testament ideas to create the New Testament, a piece of writing which has guided the development of a large part of the human race and brought us to the present condition, but it is showing itself powerless to take us further because us us bases on face on a false doctrine, the alienity of God.
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Christianity vases our human rights on the idea that we are all children of God, but has perverted this insight by claiming that we are not all equal [in the sight of God], but some are better than others. This is countered by modern definitions of human rights which stress equality and so repudiate hierarchy.
Am I an erotic man? The answer is yes and it is this eroticism which ultimately gave me the impetus to break away from the Church and its denial of the role of the erotic in human life and survival. [the Universe is hot in the creative/erotic sense, it moves when inhibitions are removed since it is full of potential.]
Text is a potential which [physically embodied value] which controls and is controlled by mental process. The aim is to write a theological text of maximum potential to induce maximum force, ie maximum acceleration of the mind politic.
A signal requires a difference, a symbol, a discrete observable [a sacrament], so the rate of signalling is the rate of differentiation, rate of change. The velocity of light is a standard (fixed point) established very early in the evolution of the Universe, like Planck's constant, G and Boltzmann's constant. Speed of light - Wikipedia, Planck constant - Wikipedia, Gravitational Constant - Wikipedia, Boltzmann constant - WikipediaSaturday 2 March 2013
The Catholic Church walled me in with sin and shame and despair. The heavenly carrot was never so powerful
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as the scourge of hell. I can now look back and see how my colourful childhood gradually turned grey as me and my world was slowly turned sinful before my eyes. I have built a scaffold of logic to lift myself out of it and now I am coming into the sunshine again. Although it has rained now for a fortnight, somewhat depressing, I am conscious that the sun shines above the clouds and brings the rain to water the earth, a magnificent system that turn our thoughts to divine design.
As I am coming out of the grey world of ancient religion, the world is still suffering the wars of religion that have beset us from the beginning of known history. My idea is that war is rendered obsolete by true theology and now seems to be a good time to propagate the idea to cheer ourselves up. A third wave of 'good news', the fruit of the tree of knowledge that the monarchs who rule by violence and despair have struggled so long to suppress. The evil we face is secrecy, the playground of the devil, undetected error, undiagnosed disease, sapping the spirit of the body politics.
Here ends DB74 Creation
Go to DB75 Reconstruction
[page 1]
Every day begins for me in the grey dawn and the waking worries that go with it, to be gradually dispelled by the awakening of energy and reason that accompanies the rising sun (even when it is invisible behind the rain clouds, as this morning).
Brideshead page 209: 'Nothing could have been further from Julia's ambition than a royal marriage. She knew, or thought she knew, what she wanted, and it was not that. But wherever she turned, it seemed to her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural goal.
'And it seemed to her the thing was a dead loss. If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the [Catholic] Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world and get to heaven before her.'
Cooperation is equivalent to parallel processing and requires common communication protocols to enable subprocesses to interact with each other for the 'common good'.
page 207: 'From that moment [Julia] shut her mind against her religion.'
The power of cooperation is so great that it will often prevail no matter how inefficient and violent the means of obtaining it, as the elite know, those
[page 2]
inclined to become wealthy by controlling (ruling) others.
the power of an embodies symbol comes from its consistency, it works.
WELL BUILT = WORKS WELL
So we are looking for an operating system for the human layer of the Earth that works well, that is, respects, maintains and exploits the subsystems from which it is constructed.
Bently in Brecht Galileo page 34: 'At the end the play abuts upon the Marxist realization that the people must learn not to rely on the Great Men of the bourgeoisie for their salvation, they will have to save themselves . . . Brecht
Though a social setback is recorded, science marches ahead—in which contrast, between a rotten society and a flourishing science, we again glimpse the twentieth century.'
Society will remain 'rotten' until science expands to embrace the theological foundation of society and shows that it is possible to construct a society consistent with the world which we inhabit.
MEMORY = FIXED POINT
