vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 7 April 2013 - Saturday 13 April 2013]
[Notebook: DB 75 Reconstruction]
[page 95]
Sunday 7 April 2013
Theology and public health. A healthy system is one that is working effectively without error. It is effective if its design is such as to achieve its purpose, ie to confer fitness upon it. It works without error if its fitness is maintained and deviations from the effective design are corrected. In the case of theology, fitness implies a design that is consistent with the divine whole and error correction requires a conscious understanding of this fit and a level of vigilance sufficient to detect and correct failures in this consistency, quality control. The Catholic Church[page 96]
starting with the Bible, has constructed a picture of the divinity and what it wants and has, from this, designed a set of behavioural norms (moral theology) which are intended to guide individuals to its concept of fitness, ie salvation. Unfortunately for individuals, the business of knowing and pleasing God is surrounded in mystery and we have no control over our receipt of grace, a necessity for salvation, from God.
Lonergan, Grace Lonergan
From my point of view the Catholic idea of grace mysteriously bestowed by God on his Chosen Ones is a furphy, but we have an analogue in the divine Universe, insofar as the system provides the foundations for the creative development of more complex systems beginning with the initial singularity (pure action, the realization of all contemporary possibility) and continuing forever. So I have received by grace of my constitution, my family, my heritage and my nation the life, times and energy to pursue my natural theology project whose purpose is to reveal, in detail, the real concrete observable grace of God working through us.
Lonergan biography? Bernard Lonergan - Wikipedia
Lonergan Grace page 5: Augustine: 'God cooperates with good will to give it good performance; but alone he operates on bad will to make it good; so that good will itself, no less than good performance is to be attributed to the divine gift of grace.'
[page 97]
Lonergan: page 6: Augustine 'Grace is any gratuitous gift from God: . . . ' Ie all is grace and (for us) all is God. If we wanted to make a distinction, we might say grace is fixed points '. . . it is a vocation to the life of the celibate.' at least St Augustine thinks so!
Augustine again: 'the will of man is always free but not always good: either it is free from justice, and then it is evil: or it is liberated from sin, and then it is good.'
Consistent with its general mysterious nature. Christianity has a lot to say about the internal forum where hard evidence is difficult to come by because Christianity is all an internal forum thing, a state of mind that has been propagated from person to person and has had a considerable influence on human action in Christian communities.
Theology (science in general) the search for a state of mind consistent with the state of reality. Such states are propagated by communication in communities, churches, universities, and, for the purposes of soundly based discussion, in the literature. Our ability to know and learn is an everyday 'grace' that is essential to survival, and as they say a spark off the divine intellect. Mysticism made visible.
Dogma vs speculation - as a speculation satisfies more data it becomes 'dogmatized'. In science dogmas are open to revision., in the infallible Church they are not, and so the Church is condemned to an ultimate death in the changing world, as we see it dying in scientific societies and thriving in traditional ones.
[page 98]
To feel harassed is to be harassed.
Lonergan page 8: '. . . [Anselm] was driven by the imperious impulse of fides quaerens intellectum to try to construct a mode of conception that would lend coherence to the mystery.'
What makes the world go, creating new fixed points which forever add increasing detail to the fixed points already in existence, like turbulence? We see Cantor's theorem operating in a milieu of pure act, ie Cantor gives us a most general image of the increase in the number of fixed points. Turbulence - Wikipedia
From Plato to reality. We expect a mathematical theorem to become operative when its hypotheses are fulfilled. Two sheep is an instance of the formal statement 1 + 1 = two. Cantor works in pure meaningless symbols. We require only that they have distinct identities to construct ordered sets and we may ignore this identity to some extent when counting (but we must not count the dogs in with the sheep).
page 9: Anselm: 'The necessity of grace is first a dogma to be believed but second almost a theorem to be demonstrated.' In a milieu where creation is both distinct from God and 'fallen'.
Christianity looks in the internal forum to decide who is good and who is bad, guided by an assumed set of criteria (moral theology again). Maugham: Cakes and Ale Maugham
Domestic violence: slavery and ownership, the basic Christian motivation. The 'grace of a vocation' is the voluntary entry into the bondage of poverty, chastity and obedience
[page 99]
motivated by the fairy story of salvation.
All the mysterious God thing is very tied up with ruling class attitudes, people claiming status and power by some sort of divine right diffusing down from the monarch through the elite to the plebs. In the divine Universe we are all plebs and need to be observant and humble enough to see what is going on [ie God].
The transfinite computer network is the set of [stationary, fixed] solutions to the energy equation.
Lonergan page 9: natura elevata - natura pura - natura lapsa
page 10: '. . . perhaps the real issue that [Anselm] faced and settled was the most general one of all: Is speculation possible and is it worthwhile? The strong words he used to describe his contemporaries—penitus desperant [utterly despair]—shows that the issue was real. . . .
'. . . natural truths can be reduced eventually to perfect coherence, but the truths of faith have the apex of their intelligibility hidden in the transcendence of God.' The root of the Christian scam.
'Without this basic rule, [crede ut intelligas 'believe that you might understand, the exact opposite of the scientifc 'understand that you may believe'] defined by Vatican Council I, speculation risks perpetually a twofold error: it may reduce the mystery to natural truth . . . [why not, except to obey the Church], or it may make the mistake of elevating natural problems to the order of mystery . . . '
page 12: 'It was as though [Peter] Lombard had assembled the basic data and left it to posterity to work out their coherence.
[page 100]
Coherence, logical consistency, linked together by logical continuity.
Lonergan page 11: Lombard: 'four states of human liberty, earthly paradise, fallen man, man redeemed, heaven' — four states of theological fantasy, a load of paper tigers.
Free will comes from symmetry = incompleteness = no direction [in Hilbert space]
page 14: Between Peter `Lombard and At Albert the Great there emerged the idea of the supernbatural habit.' ie governance by a higher layer.
page 15: '. . . from the writings of Peter Lombard, Dr Schupp has been able to list nineteen different expressions referring to the supernatural.' [a vestigium of the layered network]
Is nature supernatural? Yes because it is layered by the duality normal / super.
'. . . without the idea of the supernatural there can be no satisfactory definition of grace/' Each layer adds new functionality to the layer beneath it. Social organization, is for us humans, the source of the supernatural.
'The dogmatic issue is indeed secure, and all repeated that grace was God's free gift beyond all desert of man.' Wrong, we create our own grace and the [productivity of this creation is a function of the veracity, trustworthiness and acceptance of our theology.
page 16: '. . . St Bernard of Clairvaux added that nature in itself was crooked.' Poor bastard, he had to go to extremes to deal
[page 101]
with this as I did for a while but luckily I was thrown out precisely becvasue I did not fit in and pursued an embarrassing quest for love.
Lonergan page 16 [continued]: '. . . sin darkened the understanding and weakened the will; grace illuminated the understanding and strengthened the will.' Ie education, the uploading of the knowledge of ages into the newborn. Here we see the greatest evil flowing from the Church, the perversion of the young.
The issue of Catholic sexual perversion is well under control, since it has, after decades of struggle and cover up, become well known and the legal process has been alerted to a great evil. Now we can turn to an even greater perversion of the Church, the false indoctrination it provides about the source, meaning and end of life.
At its highest level, life is a walk through the noetic park, feeling the creative power of the Universe flow through us as wee take each new step, large or small., billions per second (like our brain) or once in a lifetime.
Creation — the emergence of self sustaining process which, because of its fixed points, can be represented in any other durable mode, like writing.
page 21: Aquinas: 'grace is divided into habitual and actual; each is subdivided into operative and cooperative.'
page 24: Aquinas: 'grace and the virtues are essentially distinct; the virtues are said to be infomred by grace not because grace is
[page 102]
in them, but it is their origin. Accordingly grace is one.' Meaning? self-consistent.
Aquinas and co building a verbal model interface between God and humans.
page 32: 'Sanctifying grace ,makes a man acceptable to God' (and the Church has a monopoly on it?)
page 341: Aquinas: 'A grace may be either a habit or a motion.' Here we are back to Parmenides and Plato. The habit is the fixed point of the motion: the form is the fixed element of the dynamics [energy replaces materia prima]
'Grace operates inasmuch as the soul is purely passive.' Nothing is purely passive, in any action all agents are active, not an agent and a patient.
Conversion: 'cum voluntas incipit bonum velle, quae prius malum volebat.'
All this unnecessary theological structure is necessary to explain the sequence paradise - fall - redemption - heaven.
page 42: 'We are dealing with the development, not one one single mind, but of the speculative theology [model building] of grace itself.'
page 45: 'In estimating human nature St Thomas was a wholehearted pessimist. With conviction he could repeat numerus stultorum infinitus [there is an infinity of stupid people].'
page 103]
Lonergan page 45: 'Agere sequitur esse [to act follows to be]: perfection in the dynamic field of operation is radically one with perfection in the static order of being.'
Being ≡ message ≡ fixed points in the divine dynamics.
Grace is the theological means of depriving the world of its autonomy by claiming that it needs gratuitous help from the outside God to function. An assumption of Universal deficiency.
The habit of civilization: No violence / fair trade / welfare.
Grace = human software.
page 47: 'St Thomas's though on perfecting man . . . begins with an insistence on the immanent perfection of the virtues; it ends with a nuanced theory in which the transcendent perfection of God [whatever that means] is communicated to man through the double channels of immanent virtues and transient motions. A network linked to God = a theology.
page 51: 'The immovable fixity in evil proper to demons, [and Popes] Summa I;64:2. Aquinas 330
page 54: 'non posse non peccare [not able not to sin] . . . Habitual grace is henceforth not only elevans but also sanans! Always the assumption of human deficiency, the elite excuse for intervention.
A;; Thomas's psychological explications of the relationships between intellect, will, grace, nature, freedom, constraint etc
[page 104]
are an inchoate version of the transfinite network as a set of solutions to the energy equation. Is this the most far out thing we can say and is it credible? We already envisage solutions to the energy equation of countable and uncountable infinities depending on whether we are representing a set of discrete states or a .continuum. of states (in classical analysis of continuity. So we have ℵ0 and ℵ1, and presumably to increase ℵ0 to ℵ1 which, by Cantor symmetry can easily operate to make ℵ1 and ℵ2 and so on. We understand this Cantor expansion mathematically first by permutation and then by the tensor product of the spaces in which the individual state vectors reside. How many states has the tensor product got? ie how does the cardinal of the basis relate to the cardinal of the product space?
Lonergan page 63: '. . . without grace there is no merit.' [we are stuffed]
Software engineering in the transfinite network.
Monday 8 April 2013
Lonergan page 83: '. . . an instrument is a lower cause moved by a higher so as to produce an effect within the category proportional to the higher; but in the cosmic hierarchy all causes are moved except the highest and every effect is at least in the category of being: therefore all causes except the highest are instruments.'
God is everywhere local and the algorithm executed by a set of related fixed points is driven by the dynamics of which the fixed points are part.
It is probably a long time since I had any serious doubts, that Goid and the Universe are identical, and have ever
[page 105]
since been dealing with details, how to make my story vivid and convincing enough to catch someone's eye. I have been heartened lately by the number of downloads of the Research Proposal I wrote for the Australian Catholic University. Enough to make me want to reread it myself. The breakthrough into fixed point theory seems to me to have opened a potentially effective channel to recognition, ands I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that the transfinite computer network is the class of solutions to the energy equation. We work this out at first in a transfinite Hilbert space which is a framework for studying the rate and nature of communication in Hilbert space. What we are imagining is the entanglement of transfinite states to create a state of even higher cardinality which we model by the permutation group of which all other groups are subsets. The aim of physics these days is to discover symmetries and see how they break, that is see how points in the symmetry are brought into action by acquiring a modicum of energy (that is CPU time) in the vast parallel process that we call the Universe. Many of these paragraphs, like this one, just say the same thing in a slightly different manner, searching the space of narrative elements to find members for an ideal sequence of symbols to represent the ideal GOD ≡ UNIVERSE.
The loudest thing you can say really is martyrdom, chosen by Jesus and recommended to his follower as both personally valuable (pleasant afterlife) and of great benefit to the promotion of the corporation: The martyrs demonstrate most clearly the value of our brand. I am personally against martyrdom and would like to substitue scientific reasonablensss for the spectacular endorsements of dodgy products. Martyr - Wikipedia
[page 106]
This fragmentary text itself may be my best resource insofar as it shows how things have come together by fits and starts over a long period during which many of the possible objections have surfaced and been dealt with. I have been hung up on the relationship between the omnino simplex God and the omnino complex world, but with Brouwer's help it is all falling into place, I hope, but I have a long way to go which I can extract from myself by writing the website which seems to have settled down to a pretty standard shape, the different parts having held their own for ten years or more. Even though the glossary and the Persons have been handed over to Wikipedia, [Scholarpedia and other sites], they remain in place as windows to the outside world.
Tuesday 9 April 2013
Science 339:1290 15 March 2013: 'Memories enable animals to adapt to a constantly changing environment. Memories are never completely precise and always partially generalized, which enables an animal to quickly and appropriately respond to novel stimuli that resemble a previous experience.' Xui & SüdhofSo much of the success of the action depends on the quality and precision of the tools. My plane blade is blunt, so that it is tearing the wood rather than cutting it. I am reluctant to sharpen it because it is boring but eventually conclude that I must do it in order to get the quality surface I want. Aquinas and co, as recorded in Lonergan (Grace) have a lot of ideas about God, causality, action, being, grace and so on which are very general, applying to all human action, especially the internal actions controlled by moral theology. Such
theory, in my understanding of God, applies as much to smoothing a piece of wood as to making peace with God and the general theory we propose, is, as ever, an infinite network of Turing machines. The network is symmetric with respect to God, carpentry and anything else you can imagine, it is Lonergan's 'heuristic structure' subject to no limitation to proportionate rather than transcendent being. Celibate thought, as practised in the Church, has no real contact with the realities of life and their claim that contemplating God is a superior activity to making babies is false. Of course, like all actions, masking babies should be domes with all its consequences in mind.
Given that eigenfunctions are computable functions and that they form a set of codecs, ie mirror functions which losslessly encode and decode strings of symbols, the set of possible quantum transformations has the same cardinal as (ie equivalent with) . . . the set of computers (embodies computable functions), which is the cardinal of the natural numbers, we have a wide set of deterministic ingredients ('dyno' blocks) from which the Universe has constructed more complex structures like ourselves.
Dyno block = Embodied Turing machine.
Now that you are no longer under the whip, you true beauty can bubble to the surface.
So, among the many possibilities, the magnetic drop solitons. Science 339:1295. Mohseni et al
We have gradually extended our powers with prosthetic
[page 108]
tools of all sorts from microscopes and telescopes to supertankers. Behind this expansion lies a parallel expansion of our understanding of the nature of the world in which we live. At the highest level, this understanding is theology., so that our theology is the deepest root of our creativity as we might see in the artistic explosion accompanying Christianity.
Wednesday 10 April 2013
Lonergan, Grace page 90: 'The fundamental point in the theory of operation is that operation involves no change to the cause as cause.' No, as quantum mechanics suggests, all operations are two way communications.
Dictators take lives, if not by killing, torture and imprisonment, as least by restricting movement, creation and growth.
Requisite variety says one person cannot control the love of two people.
Insert from Dodgy Book (21 December 2010), page 195:
In a nutshell, the transfinite network is the fixed set of solutions to the energy equation, beginning from the zero dimensional E = hf to transfinite dimensions. As in the quantum harmonic oscillator, we look for some dynamic reason for the structure we observe, in this case the potential leading bosons to enter the same state, and we may see the initial singularity as a big boson. [Acting in the opposite direction, toward complexity, we have the tendency for entropy to increase.] This idea is to me only a few days old and stands as a sort of outlier, a further step in my theological development which has now to be elaborated by coupling it to the linear algebraic details of quantum mechanics and somehow rendering the underlying functionality of quantum mechanics in terms of discrete representable symbols. So we are led to the old idea that the dynamics is continuous and . . . punctuated with [individual] fixed points. Conventional computers move forward step by step, each step comprising a dynamic change of state initiated by a clock pule. This is very similar to the way quantum mechanics works, a preparation, a transition and a measurement, which serves as the preparation for the next observation. The transfinite computer network is dynamic and halting, like a computer or a quantum system. The beauty of this is that it shows how
[page 194]
we build up a gigantic complex structure of the world fixed within the divine life. How do we relate the dynamics and fixed points? The computation is dynamic, the fixed points halting. A computation is a network operationm, registers changing styate on receipt of messages from other registers. Fixed points are the result of measurements, ie the interaction of two systems.
A new theology: the book — taking possession of your divinity.
[page 193]
Thursday 11 April 2013
My processing rate = mc2 / h = 100 x 9E16 x 1 / 7E-34 = E52 ops per sec.
From procession of the Word to procession of the Universe. I am a spark of the divine life, not just my
[page 193]
Initial singularity = root.
[Back to Reconstruction page 108]
The novel: a sequence of sequences of events. Carter Dickson, Night at the Mocking Widow Dickson
Friday 12 April 2013
So we say the transfinite computer network is a representation of the fixed points in the divine dynamics. Given this we understand the emergence of the fixed points at all scales from the collapse of the wave function to the emergence of Pythagoras theorem to be a scale invariant process. And this more of less sounds like qed in the classical sense. Q.E.D - Wikipedia
Saturday 13 April 2013
Given the model, we now turn to application, which is in effect testing and refining prompted by the observation that in its cruse state the model shows promise. It embraces all the ancient research about `God, and, building through the Trinity, shows how this is consistent with modern science, both method and findings. More than that, it puts God and the World in a context that heals the very ancient rift between them. This right has propagated itself through the ages because an elite has been able to use it to gain sufficient power to sustain itself. The clearest instance of that elite is the Pope and his administration in the Roman Catholic Church, a wealth magnet if ever there was one.
Trouble causes inflammation: Dickson chapter 8.
Page numbering is a reference frame external to the text. We can also address the text self-referentially by using its own divisions, Chapter 8: a Gaussian approach.
[page 110]
Where there is inconsistency in a system there is a loss of function which may be localized by error correcting operations or which may spread, bringing down the whole system.
Dear Mum and Dad,I am beginning to feel that I have come at last to a solution to the theological problem that has motivated me for the last fifty years. From time immemorial, the Gods, whoever they are, have been conceived as outside the World, deciding what is going to happen. Often the Gods have been loving and helpful, from the human point of view, and often they have been capricious and violent. In this they reflect the difficulties people have encountered living in a wild Universe.
For me, this idea is wrong, and I wonder why it has lasted so long and become embodied in a huge and powerful organization like the Roman Catholic Church. Here we have a set of people who claim first that God is a complete mystery, and secondly, that they alone are privy to what God wants of us. They have gone so far as to declare themselves infallible when they formally declare God's will. For this service they have claimed tithes of various sizes which has made them wealthy and enable them to propagate the idea of the supremacy of this God around the world.
So how do we fix it? We see that information brings power, even if it is false, if people believe it. But what are we to believe? The Church says believe what we are told. Not all agreed. There have always
[page 111]
heretics. In the old days they were easy to silence, but the evolution of civilzation began to limit the Church's options and it eventually gave up torture and execution and heresy began to spread, particularly the scientific heresy that says God is the way things are and if we want to know God we just have to look at the way things are [and try to understand it: Fides (the fruit of experience) quaerens intellectum, belief seeking understanding]. We need no Bible, and no institution telling us what the Bible means.
The most famous of the scientific heretics, Galileo Galilei [1564—1642] also guessed that the language of the world is mathematics. I also thought long ago that mathematics is the proper language for theology. [Mathematical theology] One beauty of mathematics is that it defeats the tower of Babel by being the same in all human languages. Nothing is lost in translation. If there is but one God (and so one way things are) we should all see the same God. A mathematical and evidence based theology will help us break down the theological barriers that we have inherited from the past. Galileo escaped physical violence by the skin of his teeth accepting house arrest in turn for formally agreeing with the Church's view.
I first expressed my ideas of mathematical theology in an essay I wrote while I was in the Dominicans. [How Universal is the Universe ] This essay marked me as a heretic and the specific reason for my dismissal was that I appeared to deny some propositions that Pope Pius X had declared to be almost mandatory. [The 24 Theses of Pope Pius X ] In my monastic days I thought people would understand my point of view, but I gradually saw them become 'company men', prepared to fit in for the living it brought them.
I know my decision to be a Dominican was very painful for you, and you may think that they treated me badly. From my point of view, the little pain that I suffered was worth it because it extended my theological perspective back another two or three thousand year and demonstrated to me the very practical effects that shared ideas, no matter how weird, can have on human behaviour.
[page 112]
I am now secure in the belief that God and the Universe are the same thing. This means that all our experience is experience of God. We do not need any mysterious mystical experiences to see God, everything we wee isd God. This means that theology can become a real evidence based science like all the others. We no longer need a central authority to tell us what to do, we can work it our for ourselves, as we have worked out medicine and engineering.
Ancient philosophers differentiated God and the World because they thought God was eternal and the World is ephemeral. Some things, like atoms, are always the same. Others change in the blink of an eye, and we can now make a mathematical bridge between motion and stillness. They are not distinct but parts of the same thing, The classical God is pure action. Mathematics tells us that pure action has fixed points and the fixed points are what we see.
Here is a more technical expression of my Idea. It will not make sense because the language is strange to you, but I want to give it to you because it is my first clear and succinct expression of the ideas that have taken me so long to crystallize.
We begin with Aristotle who held that everything that moved was moved by something else. He rationalized this by inventing a duality he called potency and act (in Greek). He then defined motion as the passage from potency to act, and he laid down the axiom that no potency can actualize itself. This led him to postulate a first unmoved mover that moved everything else. This entity must be pure actuality.
Over the next 1600 years these thoughts fermented in the minds of philosophers and Christian theologians until Aquinas came along in the thirteenth century and used Aristotle's idea as the foundation for a model of God. Using his understanding of pure actuality, Aquinas proved the standard properties of the Christian God, infinity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience and so on. He also used this model and contemporary models of the world to prove that God and the Universe are totally different.
The Company, however, is developing theology on the basis that God and Universe are simply synonyms for the same entity. We start with Aquinas' God, and invoke fixed point theorems to suggest that a pure dynamic system (like the classical God) mapping onto itself must have fixed points. We identify these fixed points with our experiences of the world. Formallyl we understand them as memory states in a computer network. This memory k is described by Cantor's transfinite numbers, and manipulation of the memory is carried out by formal computers, Turing machines.
The key process we use this network is creation, ie the emergence of all the fixed points in the divine dynamics. We interpret these fixed points as observable messages whose source is God, ie all human experience is divine revelation. In this model we understand causal processes as the action of computers and random events as consequences of Turing's limitations on computation and Goedel's incompleteness.
The transfinite computer network is layered, like engineered networks, and we imagine the appearance of fixed points (new software) in any layer is underlain by the same creative process, made possible by incomputability and incompleteness. These constraints allow the random appearance of incomputable processes which can nevertheless be checked by computation, an echo of the P-NP question.
The scale invariance of creativity illustrated by this model enables us to make the suggestion that the quantum mechanical 'collapse of the wave function' and human insight are just examples of the same creative process. Behind this formalism, making it go, is the pure actuality of God which we see everywhere in the quantum mechanical notion of energy and as the source of all our personal action and experience.
This model, cooked up into a book / website etc will hopefully become a nucleation point for a phase (paradigm) change in theology from mythology to science.
Your loving son, forever grateful that you introduced me into life, to explain to you what I have been doing with my time.
[page 113]
I now look forward to a happy old age marketing this idea to the theological establishment.
History suggests that it can take centuries for a new idea to spread in our collective consciousness, but physics tells us that the rate of change of momentum is proportional to the force acting and we are beginning to see that we face big problems in the future if we go on the way we are. Traditionalists are inclined to think that God (who loves us) will take care of everything and we need not worry. A more modern view is that we are responsible for our own fate and it we get things wrong we will suffer. like a motorist who goes to sleep at the wheel.
WORLD = REVELATION (of God)
Events are messages from God, and our scientific work is to find out what God means by the messages it is sending us. The ancients thought God was such a mystical and mysterious being that this was a hopeless task. Here we understand God as pure actioon, as the Catholic Church does, but we add that the messages we observe are fixed ppoints in the divine action.
[page 114]
If we are not looking where we are going and not acting on that information we cause ourselves and others pain and loss, a large fraction of which would be avoided by more prudent action.
A new theology: A whole different view of the world.
Cryptic crossword clues are an example of a relative NP-P problems: one cannot compute from the clue to the solution but one can compute from solution to clue, convincing oneself that the answer is right because it fulfills all the conditions. Cryptic Crossword - Wikipedia
Lonergan Institute Boston College
