vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
[Sunday 5 October 2014 - Saturday 11 October 2014]
[page 33]
Sunday 5 October 2014
Since it is a faith based organization, the Catholic Church has no objective means of telling truth from falsehood and so the only course open to it has been to cultivate credibility by stability, even though objectively speaking its positions may contain errors.[page 34]
Back to Lonergan (Insight) after all these years (1965). Lonergan I remember as ny Saul/Paul moment Acts 9. This was my conversion from Catholic to natural, and I have continued on this trajectory without doubt ever since. Acts 9, Lonergan
I am gradually becoming aware of the tight coupling between religion, politics and power. Power in the human space is the ability to gt significant numbers of people to enter one's noetic state, ie think and act according to the wishes of the source of power.
Lonergan Preface page 4: 'act of understanding' = decoding the data encoded by the process to be understood.
page 13: '. . . more than all else the aim of this book is to issue an invitation to a personal decisive act.' Maybe I did that act, seeing in Lonergan's misunderstanding of understanding a clear message that God was not the mysterious other of traditional Catholicism, but that God is what is and what is is what I experience without the weird philosophic fantasies that led the ancients to segregate God and the World.
Monday 6 October 2014
The layered network paradigm plus the principle of symmetry with respect to complexity should allow us to extrapolate the laws of physics to the laws of politics, thus enabling us to derive the conditions for a stable democracy, stable dictatorship and dynamic transitions between the two. I wish. but this has been the target all along.
[page 35]
Tuesday 7 October 2014
A new theology
Fixed point theory
Quantum mechanics and gravitation may both exist before space, but which comes first? No space, no mass? In the light world no space and no time since all inertial frames are moving at c with respect to one another so see one another spatially contracted to zero and temporally slowed to zero. What does this mean?We imagine the eternal act in which there is no difference between formalism and reality. Then we introduce time, and energy, the rate of change of phase/action, then a spatial dimension.
So we imagine that act is the fundamental unit and like a point or a number is a scalar (which has one dimension [of change]. The clock is a scalar, ordered. So does it go 0, 1, 2, 4 dimensions or 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 1, 4? Why is the appearance of new fixed points in god ordered (like entropy, increasing) instead of them all appearing at once? In other words, why time?
Sex: manoeuvring oneself (maybe with the help of other) so that one comes, ie completes the process and halts, at least temporarily.
Yourgrau page 47: Hamilton's principle 'a system moves from one configuration to another in such a way that the variation of the integral ∫ Ldt between the path taken and a neighbouring virtual path coterminous in space and time with the actual path,
[page 36]
is zero. Yourgrau & Mandelstam
Yourgrau page 49: 'One of the most salient characteristics of variational principle is . . . that they express the pertinent laws without involving a coordinate system.'
The principle of general covariance says that we can use any consistent coordinate system of adequate variety [and the transformations between these coordinate systems are computable].
Wednesday 8 October 2014
I think (hope) that if the Universe created us its power is at least as great as our own minds which operate through a network and so the symmetry with respect to complexity enables us to see the whole Universe as a digital network (as our neurons are digital, giving discrete signals after observing their surrounding (through synaptic inputs). These heuristic considerations are driving what I see as the fundamental search to rewrite quantum field theory in terms of a digital network. A lot of study lies ahead of me. And so to town.
Digital networking leads to a whole new world of complexity. The mathematical continuum is our model of zero entropy, ie a symmetry [no marker] a bound on the vibrations [realization] of the Universe we might say.
The first step is to digitize the path integral argument, the coupling between state 1 and state 2, which path is constrained by a law of nature represented as the superposition of a space filling infinity of paths [modelled as permutations of some actual path].
Can we say that everything that the Universe does
[page 37]
repeatedly are the repeated executions of some algorithm, and that insofar as this algorithm is computable, it can be executed by a Turing machine, producing a definite correlation between input and output.
Metaphysics and symmetry: to be is to communicate. To be symmetrical is not to communicate and therefore not to be, outside the bounds of observed reality. [event = being]Path integral method: maybe we can avoid needing to integrate by avoiding differentiation in the first place. Subdividing quanta of action is 'unphysical' [and it may be a bit off track to think that unphysical processes dreamt up by ourselves are necessary to understand what is going on].
Thursday 9 October 2014
Lewis: Media moving from informing to entertaining.
Noether: if its not in the Lagrangian it is a symmetry, ie Lagrangian only shows broken symmetries, what actually happens?
I am gradually working toward one basic essay whose elements can be permuted for different markets.
Between P and not-P lies a continuum of uncertainty, represented by the real numbers, where P and not-P are binary integers.
From a set theoretical point of view the number of elements in a set is irrelevant, since the concept set is symmetrical with respect to cardinality, ie the set looks the same no matter how many elements it contains, it is an entity, a unity.
Heaven: the aura of possibility surrounding every reality, the incomputables out of the range of the computable and which
[page 38]
have been [brought] into the range of computable by devising new processes (like the Wright brothers and flight, linking all the processes necessary to build and fly an aeroplane into a logically continuous path).
Corrs: Little Wing, Jimi Hendrix. The Corrs
To answer to the P vs NP via the physical approach, we must first identify it in action in the world. We do this with a set of guesses that will be justified by the result. We begin by considering the Universe as a computer network whose physical layer is described by quantum mechanics.
Only computable processes survive. Here we can introduce a probability of computational success which depends upon a process being formally computable and not suffering too many errors (or any?) so that it sometimes succeeds, frequently enough to keep the population static or growing.
Heaven is not above, and the deeper wo go into the Universe [the closer we get to heaven]. The whole of Christian politics revolves around the idea that we should bow down to Christ the King and humbly thank him for what he has given us and beg forgiveness for all our transgressions against Him.
Friday 10 October 2014
The first step toward digitizing the path integral method would be to digitize the two slit experiment, something on which I have made precious little headway over the last 40 years, but maybe something will occur to me one day or maybe I am just wrong and the standard continuous approach is good. Going to the bath looking for inspiration.
[page 39]
We can apply the notion of phase to microscopic objects in terms of their positions in space and time and expect a macroscopic event involving two object (ie a collision, conversation etc) when they coincide which we might understand as being in phase. This gets us a bit closer to the two slit experiment, although there there particle is interfering with itself, but it has two sources, and so might be considered to be two particles. The big difference is between amplitude and probability.
Saturday 11 October 2014
Another tiny step: Hamilton's principle depends on stationary action. The digital computation (logical) approach depends on completed action, ie a completed computation, Nor, really, is the logical approach any less weird than the Hawking-Feynman view that the path from a to b involves wondering around the whole Universe adding complex phases.
An important argument for and against the continuous approach is that the continuum carries no information, so while the point set approach to continuity makes it look very complex, the reality is very simple. This seems especially important in gravitation, where the continuous mathematics, since it carries no information, in fact acts as a very tight constraint on the nature of the world, The mathematics of gravitation approximates the discrete flow of action, which is energy, to give is a very simple picture of a meaningless network in 3D space and 1D time,
[page 40]
How does the digital model deal with entanglement? Logic and non-locality. Logic - Wikipedia, Nonlocality - Wikipedia
