vol VII: Notes
2016
Notes
Sunday 14 August 2016 - Saturday 20 August 2016
[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]
Sunday 14 August 2016
[page 189]
Monday 15 August 2016
War starts when people use guns to express their emotions rather than talking about them [and those with power acting to redress injustices].
The fundamental theorem of this exercise is that [successful ?]
[page 190]
communication is creation of space which is the source of peace (?).
Can I do it? It is at or beyond the limit of my abilities so have to be very cautious.
Power outage! and innage.
Apple, Cook: '. . . making insanely great products that really change the world in some way'. Jena McGregor
Getting from the procession of the Word to the current state of the universe. We can say only one thing about the Word, the Word is not the Father. It is an identical copy of the Father but differentiated from it by that not [and we can say the same for electrons and other identical species of particle]. Aquinas implements the not by a procession which he called generation. Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 2
'[Procession] is to be understood by way of an intellectual emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands processions as existing in God.' Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1
In quantum mechanics not = orthogonal, and orthogonal systems are produced by observation. So Aquinas got it pretty right — we can describe an abstract version of the trinity using quantum mechanics. Two distinct but identical electrons are orthogonal, as are all fermions.
[page 191]
'. . . the procession of the Word in God is generation; for he proceeds by way of intelligible action, which is a vital operation — from a conjoined principle . . . . by way of similitude inasmuch as the concept of the intellect is a likeness of the thing conceived — and exists in the same nature, because in God the act of understanding and his existence are the same . . . . Hence the procession of the Word of God is called generation; and the Word Himself proceeding is called the Son. Summa, I, 27, 2
The spiritual model devised by philosophers beginning in the time of Parmenides has a number of properties which we associate with formalism, but also contradicts formalism by maintaining that spiritual beings like God, the angels and the human soul can store information without markers, in other words they do not accept that information is physical.
Fixed points are orthogonal to one another, one per dimension, like the eigenfunctions of a measurement operator [transformations between fixed points break the orthogonality: Pythagoras theorem].
Aquinas used the distinction of intellect and will in humans to argue for two classes of procession, intelligent and wilful. A modern understanding of human psychology probably allows us to multiply processions ad infinitum to get the world of personalities we now see [we see these processions looking back along the evolutionary tree].
We see intellect and will as a dynamic system whose fixed points are ideas or images and whose dynamics is the desire for the goods so apprehended.
[page 192]
Getting greedy: Tomorrow is my day. No plumbing, only writing.
Actions that remain in the agent: internal communication and information processing. Actions that go outside the agent: execution of an action on one's environment.
Tuesday 16 August 2016
All this is a series of wild guesses motivated by the cognitive dissonance I experienced in the Order of preachers and my subsequent inclination to support, "green", democratic and scientific causes. My answer is to put it all together as a network. This can be done abstractly and formally so that the theory may be applied in numerous real world situations.
Wealth = potential. The entropy of the human world is at a maximum when wealth is equally distributed and this situation favours stability. However, it requires active management to eliminate the positive feedbacks which allow the rich to get richer faster than the poor.
God is above all things, below all thing, is all things, ie messages. Since information is physical a message is a thing.
It is comforting to come back to the first part of the Summa to see how little has to be changed to transform it into a defensible modern hypothesis. Lonergan failed because he tried to maintain the dichotomy between God and the world by his distinction between 'proportionate'
[page 193]
and 'transcendental' knowledge. They are an effectively continuous spectrum [anciently dichtomized by political leaders to given themselves to access to self-assuming divine right].
Summa theologiae I, 43, 3; '. . . the divine person is sent and proceeds temporally only according to sanctifying grace'. Aquinas, Summa, I, 43, 3, Joseph Pohle
A perverse positive feedback; making enemies, so needing to boost security fores which have a tendency to make more enemies, and so on until we come to civil war, the national security fores against those who wish to be free of government oppression.
Vilification reduces the space in which people can move. Kristof Nicholas Kristof
Scientific theology Chapter 1 Creation we are not talking here about creation out of nothing, but the appearance (and disappearance) of fixed points in the divine dynamics. Gravitation is coupled to energy, and energy is the firstborn of act, the duality Father / Son is like the duality potential / kinetic superposed on itself kinetic / potential.
We are talking about the workings of magic here - how real communities cause real actions. So I open a door with a big hammer, not a wand.
To change the meaning of "God" is to change everything in the human noosphere.
NOOSPHERE = HUMAN NETWORK LAYER
[page 194]
Calypso offers Odysseus immortality and he refuses.
Hypothetication - mythopoiesis.
Wednesday 17 August 2016
Scientific theology: creating a line between the ancients who first began to model the world in writing to modern scientists. Many like to point to revolutions in science because they are newsworthy events, and we celebrate the creation of a new theory that annihilates some aspect of the old theory. Quantum mechanics began the reappraisal of geometric continuity, the subject of millennia of mathematics, culminating in the nineteenth century. Until this point continuity was a method of argument. The digital era began with Cantor and set theory, and introduced the more powerful method of logical continuity into the subject of mathematics. Up until then logical continuity (ie proofs) had been constrained to the method rather than the subject or material of mathematics. The application of mathematical ideas [to mathematics] led us to discover the boundaries of mathematics. The existence of boundaries on deterministic consistency opens the way for symmetry and uncertainty at all scales. Every event is to some extent a throw of the die, so there is a distribution of probability across te outcomes which the law of large numbers allows us to treat as a continuum., although the events being counted (by the definition of event) (symbol, message) requires discreteness. Lonergan introduced me to understanding the world in psychological terms which, in engineering terms means information processing.
[page 195]
Carve out a career' as a theological reformer.
Zack Beauchamp: A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. Zack Beauchamp
Same for the Church unless it undergoes a disruptive theological revolution.
What I am doing in scientific theology is announcing a discovery, narrating the steps that led to it and listing some of the consequences. So I want to place it next to Kepler's Astronomia Nova, Newton's Principles, Maxwell's Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Feld and so on.
Maxwell 1865
Darwin 1859
We want trustworthy guidance.
Thursday 18 August
Scientific theology is intended to be a personal report of my thoughts and explorations since I left the Dominicans. It is proving difficult but very valuable to write. In particular it is sending me back to my sources, ranging from Aristotle and Aquinas to the history of science and theology since the time of Parmenides. Ultimately it is intended
[page 196]
to show that at both hypothetical and experiential levels identifying God and the Universe involves no contradictions. At root is the notion that there is no way to differentiate the classical God and the initial singularity. Both are absolutely simple, pure act, and both are the source of the Universe.
Does a bit of disease help thought?
Atomic politics, atomic rights, avoiding environments that destroy atoms.
My thanks to the Catholic Church for teaching me how wrong politicians can be. Why cover up child sexual abuse? Because it would bring the imperium into disrepute. Why deny reality? Because the whole rig is built on a false fiction. The little error in the beginning when not was inserted into the proposition God is the World.
Sex dynamics driven by pleasure, a sensuous and realistic paradigm for all action and potential. Here is an opening to make theology sexy again, as it was in the good old days of Homer and his mates, yet to be tamed by a new religion.
Friday 19 August 2016
A serpent in the form of Bernard Lonergan entered my life. I ate the fruit. My eyes were opened. I slowly began to realize that that I had a share in God and could, like Einstein, extrapolate from my local frame to the whole of being. Transfinite network has become medium for this message.
[page 197]
Invariance with respect to size. No matter how complex a system is, it can be treated as a single entity with a name and so becomes something that can be placed into [correspondence with a symbol whose meaning is the entity].
I hope that when scientific theology is finished I feel that it is good enough to promote, so I try to make it so, leaving no gaps.
We are criticizing both the street view and the constitutional foundations of the Catholic Church.
The Catholic frame of reference constrains reality, in other words is is not sufficiently broad to embrace the real world. A good reference frame must be able to represent all the states of the system is references. The catholic epistemology consigns most of the interesting work in the universe to the mysterious interior of God where we can never go until we are dead. By unifying God and the world we begin to see the beatific vision and respond to it.
The Cantor universe is a Platonic formal model which cannot be realized with a finite quantity of action or energy because information is physical, a packet of information embodies [at least] a quantum of action.
Our God is vulnerable, at least in parts. It may be possible that human activity will compromise the ability of the Earth to feed and house us.
Real sex - full spectrum love [full spectrum communication?], from UV (physical) to IR (spiritual).
[page 198]
Saturday 20 August 2016
Trying to focus scientific theology. The low resolution [one bit] picture is very clear: out of the two possibilities God is and God is not the universe, we opt for is.
Make the introduction a summary of the book: theme navigation inside God.
Chapter 1: Creation, navigation, motion, creation and annihilation.
Chapter 2: Language, our mental frame of reference for navigating the world, morphing into mathematics.
Chapter 3: Imagining God: a history fo God from dreamtime to Roman Catholic Church
Chapter 4: Scientific world view: what we have achieved by conjecture (creation) and refutation (annihilation)
Chapter 5: A hypothetical model of God, fixed points and network beginning from quantum mechanics and relativity
Chapter 6: Application of the model to the creation of the world from God
Chapter 7: Application of model to the creation of humans and society
Chapter 8: Application of model to social and political guidance
Chapter 9: Costs and benefits of the new model of God.
The Old Guard is coming up against it is many ways. The marquee indicator of this for me is the Australian Governments investigation onto the Church's (and other institutions') responses to child sexual abuse. This has focussed much attention on the fact that the Church thinks it is above the law and places its own rights and prerogatives over human rights. This is the political message of scientific theology. Australian Government
[page 199]
How much ego does one need to want to rule / change the world?
The cunning plot behind all this is to get people to treat the world and themselves with the respect, obedience and worship which they would attribute to the divinity which created us.
To get anywhere, I have to get behind the words, but before I do that I want to convince myself of their value. I hope that the synthesis I'm planning for scientific theology works out well enough to convince me.
A plausible sequence of events, encoded as ?, an algorithm.
Algorithm, symmetry, invariance, potential (?) [symmetries are active shannels of communication],
An algorithm is an invariant pipeline. In quantum mechanics the quantity conserved by algorithms is probability [What does this mean?].
Wodehouse Indiscretions Archie Wodehouse
While I am still tunnelling I am something of an underdog facing some probability of failure.
To get the maximum impact I wish to focus all my knowledge on the one target by building all the little insights of my life into a coherent whole.
There seem to be two extremes to writing technique. One is to sit around and wait for the flow and set it all down The other is to plug on regardless writing and revising but trying to make consistent headway.
