vol VII: Notes
2016
Notes
Sunday 19 June 2016 - Saturday 25 June 2016
[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]
Sunday 19 June 2016
[page 95]
Monday 20 June 2016
Tuesday 21 June 2016
. . .
Wednesday 22 June 2016
We need an algorithm to turn Lagrangians into code.
Old question: what is the hardware the universe runs on. God? At [the] fundamental [level] all information is physical, so hardware = software [God serves the same function here as it did for Newton, forming a concrete foundation for the formal world].
phys12Ware.html
Fixed points are physical, ie they are made of action, ie angular momentum, spin, maybe identical to god, the initial fixed point.
The Feynman path integral, natural selection and the mathematical theory of communication combine to ensure that the fit are digitized and computable. Thankyou mum.
All those paths in the path integral method which interfere descructively (ie involve contradictions) eliminate themselves, leaving only the consistent ones. This is effectvely natural
[page 107]
selection. From a computing pint of view, each path is a string if cycles or waves described by the function ψ = ei/ℏ S, a function of the action, each quantum of action corresponding to one cycle [2π]. Contradictory cycles (fermionic) undo one another so nothing gets done. Harmonious cycles, on the other hand (bosonic) assist one another and create a effect. At the quantum level, each cycle of action (each quantum of action) annihilates one particle and creates another = spin 1 [ action remains constant regardless of energy which simply gets the action over quicker].
Where does Shannon come into this? quantum mechanics = digitization is equivalent to orthogonality which makes error free communication possible. Confused communications lead to error and failure and may be seen as something like random interference which leads to nothing. Looks like quite a good ansatz to beef up print / jlogiccomp/ computer_network. And so to bed.
Thursday 23 June 2016
Long ago I began to think about 'full duplex' communication. and maybe to see it in quantum mechanics where we have to multiply φ (forward) by φ* (reverse) to get the probability |φ|2. φ and φ* differ by phase, one is the mirror image of the other in the complex plane.
In one dimensional quantum mechanics [time dimension mapped onto countably infinite dimensional hillbert space], the proper time interval is equal to the normal interval because there is no space to deal with so dτ2 = dt2, ie dτ = ±dt. dτ = kdψ, Edτ = ℏdφ, (dφ/dτ = E / ℏ)
Aquinas: componens at dividens: we say combinations and permutations. Aristotle. Aquinas I, 16, 2
[page 108]
Shannon: the transmitter maps the message space into the signal space [and the receiver performs the inverse to yield the original message.]
One must follow the epistemological trail from inputs of bins and counts to outputs of bins and counts. The bins are fixed points (particles, symmetries, algorithms) and the counts are the rates of traffic between different algorithms, counted by the number of times the algorithm is invoked.
The binning is done with turing machines [the bins are turing machines?]
Amazing Grace Ralf Stanley Ralph Stanley
Just as an engineered computer can measure the frequency of each call to each subroutine (algorithm). We can use Einstein;s idea of the Newtonian Limit. Here we are trying to reproduce the quantum mechanical limit.
Friday 24 June 2016
Saturday 25 June 2016
Mum's death has removed my last tie to the Catholic Church. She was Catholic to the core. In her painful periods during the last year of her life when she had dementia, she would cry out the invocations of her youth, O Sacred Heart of Jesus, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. She was a GP and juggled her life between having eleven children and practising her beloved medicine.Mysterious forces guided me toward the Catholic clergy, and I entered the Dominican Order as soon as I was 18.
[page 109]
I do not really know what she really felt about this, but might have adhered to the official line that it was a privilege to give a son to God. [She was obedient. Later in life Archbishop Beovitch denied her the right to practice contraception after her ninth child, and she obeyed.]
Five years later I was asked to leave the Order and she never forgave them. This became more obvious in her later years, and I tried to explain to her that I live a charmed life. The time in the Order revealed to me the Church's feet of clay.
I saw that the Catholic God is a fiction that has grown and been embellished in written records for about 3000 years, and who knows how much oral tradition before that. We need to know for our peace of mind that everything is under control, for the best, even if it does not look like what is happening in our rather troubled world. Gods job is to provide this reassurance.
To achieve this credibility the Catholic version of God us endowed with a comprehensive set of superpowers, particularly omniscience and omnipotence. The eternal God knows everything [past, present and future] and on the basis of that knowledge and its role as creator and sustainer, could do anything. Not a leaf falls without God's knowledge and agency. I learnt all this by voraciously reading the Summa of St Thomas, which I have in a single beautifully printed 3000 page edition by the Pauline Press.
Then the snake entered, via Bernard Lonergan's tome, Insight. Lonergan sets out to put Thomas's work into modern language. He used the psychological phenomenon of insight to discern the metaphysical structure of our knowledge and the world that we know. Like Thomas and the Catholic Church, he
[page 110]
would like to divide reality into two classes, the 'proportionate' world known to us fallen humans, and the transcendental world of the mysterious divinity which will be revealed to us post mortem in the beatific vision. To me, Lonergan proved the opposite. His story is false. The opposite is true. Reality is not divided into god and the world, the world is divine. In particular, according to the mathematical theories of communication and computation, there are no limits on human collective knowledge. I expressed this view and was asked to leave. Catholic theology is not a science, it is a dogma established by politicians, not scientists. The insight, however, has been well worth living five years in a modern imitation of ancient medieval life.
I tried to counter mum's anger at the Church with explanations about how I had abandoned an ancient and childish faith for the foundations of scientific theology based on the notion that all our experience is experience of God. I got nowhere, and was deeply impressed by the depth of her faith and let the matter drop. The relationship of mothers's and children us deeper than religion. Now I can come out without offending her faith.
The use of science has seen the gradual erosion of arbitrary political fiats primarily designed to improve the lot of the politicians. Evidence based decision making is becoming the norm, particularly now that we are designing better and better machines to gather evidence about food safety, disease and
[page 111]
every other issue, and use this to devise the best way to deal with our problems. The principal difficulty with many ancient religions is that they still continue to put more weight on tradition than evidence. So women are second class citizens in the Church with no voice.
Mum was indoctrinated as a child and held her beliefs to the end. This may be the case with the majority of believers and explain the age and power of the Church. God is the creator, and the world is creative. Those ancient political powers that cling to ancient ways must lower their sights from gazing at a God of their own creation in the sky and look at the real world we inhabit.
The Catholic notion that we live in a vale of tears is a self fulfilling prophecy. The scientific idea that we are enjoying the beatific vision now, warts and all, and we can improve our lots with collective action based on reality, not the dreams of ancient potentates.
Many devilish details of this proposal are recorded in Natural theology. The distinction between God and the world is not a dichotomy but a spectrum.
Signal
Quantum mechanics works on the inner product / overlap integral. How do we translate this into digital? It is a timing thing. If processes finish simultaneously they add - ie both of the same sign. Opposite signs subtract.
Statistics x/n successes (halts) (x − 1)/n failures (incomplete, not yet halted?
. . .
[page 112]
Insight /orgasm / event.
How long can structures stay together? It depends on the phases of the interests in a coalition, ranging from cooperative (boson) to isolationist (fermion) and when the isolationist tendency comes to the fore the structure disintegrates. quantum mechanics holds at all scales [of complexity and frequency], but you have to look to see it. Quantum mechanics embodies symmetry with respect to complexity.
Two of my brethren have opened my eyes to what it means to be old in the pejorative intellectual sense. Jochen Bittner: Brexit and Europe's Angry Old Men
Why did Britain leave? They've got to find out. It is a superposition of cycles [embodied in different realities, but communicating, unlike simple complex addition in quantum mechanics (?)].
We need to detect and occupy political stationary states.
