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vol VII: Notes

2018

Notes

Sunday 22 April 2018 - Saturday 28 April 2018

[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]

[page 136]

Sunday 22 April 2018

A big question: how does a neural network evolve? Go for a walk and think about this. Is there enough information in our DNA to define the structure of the brain, or does it just define an algorithm for defining the structure of the brain?

Still cannot get psychophysics going in the right direction for want of a starting point and a trajectory. In this essay I want to bypass Christianity as much as possible so the trajectory goes from Aristotle through Aquinas (treated as a metaphysician) to me, but I do not want to use my name so I am looking for something more general like universal mind, but this is a bit banal. So working on a new introduction which starts with Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, maybe Lonergan then the divine world, spiritual world. David Gonzalez: At Home in the Jungle, Everything Is 'Alive and Has a Spirit'

Monday 23 April

I enjoy writing polemical pieces but have to give up knocking the Catholic Church and get on with developing picture of the Universe that consistency introduces the 'better angels' of human thought since the early days of Ancient Greece. After this the next effort will be to embrace all of ancient thought, picking out the bits we can keep and the bits that have

in some way failed the test of time. The overall plan is to understand my own life with its pleasures and disasters and particularly to understand the consciousness which makes me conscious of these events and drives me to understand them by producing consistent models.

One byproduct of my Catholic upbringing is that when in doubt I feel guilty and must draw on the rational side of my nature to show myself that I am innocent.

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Psychophysics is in effect the logical interpretation of quantum mechanics.

My biggest difficulty is interpreting the feelings of acceleration I experience in a vehicle as curvature of space, from differential geometry to proprioception is a long distance that I still have not intuitively covered in fifty years or so. We follow the logic, but the feeling trails a long way behind, just as it does in the transition from tribalism to human rights. Differential geometry - Wikipedia, Proprioception - Wikipedia

Text For You Karoline Herfurth

One does not really know what one has been in until one has got out of it, ie you don't know what you have got till it is gone. So all my past life, which has gone, I have now got and it is the inut to the next phase of my life, on the next page of this book, with some new insight

[page 138]

into this life of mine which I am trying to put into a properly consistent divine context without the radical defects which have caused me so much pain in the world in inherited from my ancestors. Science is inherently a study of history, and my science is a study of my history, searching for myself in the world.

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Anzac Day, a celebration or memorial of evil, from a theological point of view the fundamental question: is it possible to construct a word without evil? Could God do it? If not, why not? If so, how? Another (the principal) task for psychophysics, constructing a system without evil means constructing a system without contradiction, without annihilation. This may be formally possible, in mathematics, say, but what about in reality where resources are limited imposing a zero sum substrate on the metaphysical game, rather like mathematics without infinities? Here is a problem worth working on, a PhD thesis on the problem of evil.

Time is hanging on my hands for the first time in my life, probably because my dream seems impossible and I cannot start, but, the dream seems worth a good try and I do seem to have the foundations in hand, as I explained in Scientific Theology. The starting point is that the universe is as big as mathematics so there is room for everybody without hatred and murder as long as the physical

[page 139]

foundations for life are prudently managed. Scientific Theology: A New Vision of God

A Prominent Patient Julius Sevcik (Director)

How much life can we get per unit of material foundation or how much life can we get per unit of energy.

The problem is enormously complex in this state of the human world but we can simplify it by going back to the beginning as I did in Scientific Theology. So should we revise scientific theology or start again? The decision seems to have been start again, which is in line with evolutionary theory. Scientific Theology is the parent, psychophysics is the child, sharing the basic genotype but also a variation guided in some ways by different selective principles, the things that I learnt in the process of writing it. It has just been rejected by T&T Clark, who are owned by Bloomsbury, but it may be time to finish converting it to .doc and submitting it to Google books. It is a bit messy, but I should let it stand and start anew. This is a bit boring because I have to repeat a lot of the historical and logical foundation, but all done from a new point of view, taking off from Aquinas and avoiding the Catholic Church as much as possible. So we do a chapter on the one god, a chapter on the trinity, proceeding as Thomas does on a priori principles derived from Aristotle. Then we can recast the first two chapters in terms of a quantum network, and then use this as the foundation for a trip through evolution, examining the role of death (= evil) in the generation of the planet Earth driven by the Sun.

[page 140]

Ultimately the purpose of psychophysics is to educate policy designers on the difference between zero-sum and positive- and negative-sum solutions to situations where there is potential or actual conflict, ie inconsistency in the physical and mental states of two actors in communication with one another. Zero-sum game - Wikipedia

Much of the solution to the problem of evil comes down to removing perverse incentives, most of which come down to money: Gittins, McDonnell. Perverse incentives, in their turn, are often the product of historical political accommodations made possible by previous perverse incentives. Ross Gittins: Banks' misbehaviour shows power of KPIs, Patrick J. McDonnell: In echo of Parkland shooting outrage. anger rises in Mexico after film students were killed and dissolved in acid

Maybe use physicaltheology.com site for psychophysics.

Sad that Gladney Oakley is dead. He is the only one I could talk to about this stuff, even though he tended to the Adyar Bookshop take on the world. Gladney Oakley: With Angels in Mind: Active Intelligent Agents in Nature

Thursday 26 April 2018

Because both the universe and (central) nervous systems are networks, it is relatively easy to map one into or onto another.

Friday 27 April 2018
Saturday 28 April 2018

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Aristotle, and P H Wickstead and F M Cornford, translators, Physics books V-VIII, Harvard University Press,William Heinemann 1980 Introduction: 'Simplicius tells us that Books I - IV of the Physics were referred to as the books Concerning the Principles, while Books V - VIII were called On Movement. The earlier books have, in fact, defined the things which are subject to movement (the contents of the physical world) and analyzed certain concepts - Time, Place and so forth - which are involved in the occurrence of movement.' Book V is a further introduction to the detailed analysis in Books VI - VIII. Book VI deals with continuity, Book VII is an introductory study for Book VIII, which brings us to the conclusion that all change and motion in the universe are ultimately caused by a Prime Mover which is itself unchanging and unmoved and which has neither magnitude nor parts, but is spiritual and not in space.' 
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Brown, Dan, The Da Vinci Code, Doubleday 2003 From Publishers Weekly: 'Brown's latest thriller . . . is an exhaustively researched page-turner about secret religious societies, ancient coverups and savage vengeance. The action kicks off in modern-day Paris with the murder of the Louvre's chief curator, whose body is found laid out in symbolic repose at the foot of the Mona Lisa. Seizing control of the case are Sophie Neveu, a lovely French police cryptologist, and Harvard symbol expert Robert Langdon, reprising his role from Brown's last book. The two find several puzzling codes at the murder scene, all of which form a treasure map to the fabled Holy Grail. As their search moves from France to England, Neveu and Langdon are confounded by two mysterious groups-the legendary Priory of Sion, a nearly 1,000-year-old secret society whose members have included Botticelli and Isaac Newton, and the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei. Both have their own reasons for wanting to ensure that the Grail isn't found. Brown sometimes ladles out too much religious history at the expense of pacing, and Langdon is a hero in desperate need of more chutzpah. Still, Brown has assembled a whopper of a plot that will please both conspiracy buffs and thriller addicts.' 
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Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: superstrings, hidden dimensions and the quest for the ultimate theory, W W Norton and Company 1999 Jacket: 'Brian Greene has come forth with a beautifully crafted account of string theory - a theory that appears to be a most promising way station to an ultimate theory of everything. His book gives a clear, simple, yet masterful account that makes a complex theory very accessible to nonscientists but is also a delightful read for the professional.' David M Lee 
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Hobson, M P, and G. P. Efstathiou, A. N. Lasenby, General Relativity: An Introduction for Physicists, Cambridge University Press 2006 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description 'After reviewing the basic concept of general relativity, this introduction discusses its mathematical background, including the necessary tools of tensor calculus and differential geometry. These tools are used to develop the topic of special relativity and to discuss electromagnetism in Minkowski spacetime. Gravitation as spacetime curvature is introduced and the field equations of general relativity derived. After applying the theory to a wide range of physical situations, the book concludes with a brief discussion of classical field theory and the derivation of general relativity from a variational principle.'  
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Klir, Jiri, and Miroslav Valach, Cybernetic Modelling, Iliffe, SNTL 1965, 1967 Preface: 'The principal purpose of this book is to show the part played by cybernetic modelling in the solution of problems common to the animate and inanimate world. The system, its behaviour and structure are used here as fundamental concepts forming the basis of a wide approach that utilizes the model as a methodological instrument. ...' J Klir and M Valach, Prague, 1965.back

Luke, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'The third gospel's distinguishing quality is due to the attractive personality of its author, which shines through all his work. Luke is at once a most gifted writer and a man of marked sensibility. ... The originality of Luke is not in his key ideas (they are identical with those of Mark and Matthew) but in his religious mentality which, apart from slight traces of Paul's influence, is ovewhelmingly distinctive of Luke's personal temperament. Luke, in Dante's phrase, is the 'scriba mansuetudinis Christi', the faithful; recorder of Christ's lovingkindness.'  
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Newton, Isaac, and Julia Budenz, I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman (Translators), The Principia : Mathematica: l Principles of Natural Philosophy, University of California Press 1999 This completely new translation, the first in 270 years, is based on the third (1726) edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. . . . The illuminating Guide to the Principia by I. Bernard Cohen, along with his and Anne Whitman's translation, will make this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students. 
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Soames, Mary (editor), Speaking for Themselves: The Persona Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, Doubleday 1998 Jacket: 'Winston and Clementine Churchill wrote to each other constantly during the fifty seven years of their life together. . . . Speaking for Themselves provides a rare insight into Winston Churchill's extraordinary career, the central role he played and the world figures he met in over half a century of turbulent history. Clementine's interest in politics was almost as intense as his, and her political instincts acute. Here, therefore, are Winston and Clementine's vividly expressed reactions to the social reforms of the Edwardian era, the agitation of the Suffragettes, the Abdication Crisis, the early disasters and then the long awaited victories of the Second World War and the electoral defeat of 1945. But here also are domestic minutiae, society gossip, financial anxieties and minor quarrels,. nicknames, private jokes and endearments. . . . ' 
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Soames, Mary (editor), Speaking for Themselves: The Persona Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, Doubleday 1998 Jacket: 'Winston and Clementine Churchill wrote to each other constantly during the fifty seven years of their life together. . . . Speaking for Themselves provides a rare insight into Winston Churchill's extraordinary career, the central role he played and the world figures he met in over half a century of turbulent history. Clementine's interest in politics was almost as intense as his, and her political instincts acute. Here, therefore, are Winston and Clementine's vividly expressed reactions to the social reforms of the Edwardian era, the agitation of the Suffragettes, the Abdication Crisis, the early disasters and then the long awaited victories of the Second World War and the electoral defeat of 1945. But here also are domestic minutiae, society gossip, financial anxieties and minor quarrels,. nicknames, private jokes and endearments. . . . ' 
Amazon
  back

Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...' 
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Links

Alan Turing, On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, 'The "computable" numbers may be described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by some finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost equally easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integral variable of a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. . . . ' back

David Gonzalez, At Home in the Jungle, Everything Is 'Alive and Has a Spirit', 'The Sarayaku Kichwa who live in the Ecuadorean Amazon believe in the “Living Jungle,” where rivers, land, animals and even the wind are interconnected. “Everything in the jungle is alive and has a spirit,” said Misha Vallejo, who has been documenting this indigenous community for three years. “If you destroy something, you will see the consequences somewhere else.” back

Differential geometry - Wikipedia, Differential geometry - Wikipedia,the free encyclopedia, 'Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that uses the techniques of differential calculus and integral calculus, as well as linear algebra and multilinear algebra, to study problems in geometry. The theory of plane and space curves and of surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space formed the basis for development of differential geometry during the 18th century and the 19th century. Since the late 19th century, differential geometry has grown into a field concerned more generally with the geometric structures on differentiable manifolds.' back

Frances Butler, A Tasmanian Requiem, 'A Tasmanian Requiem is a concert performance to be held at the Theatre Royal, Hobart in April 2018. This groundbreaking collaboration between four creators: Helen Thomson (composer), Greg Lehman (writer), Julie Gough (artist) and Frances Butler (producer) acknowledges the impact of the Tasmanian Black War. Film by Michael Gissing, Digital City Studios.' back

Gladney Oakley, With Angels in Mind: Active Intelligent Agents in Nature, 'There is no original manuscript. The work was composed on electronic media from the outset. About half of the images as slides were used to illustrate a short lecture series which touched on the iconography of the disembodied.' back

The Disasters of War - Wikipedia, The Disasters of War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Disasters of War (Spanish: Los desastres de la guerra) is a series of 82[a 1] prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya (1746–1828). Although Goya did not make known his intention when creating the plates, art historians view them as a visual protest against the violence of the 1808 Dos de Mayo Uprising, the subsequent Peninsular War of 1808–14 and the setbacks to the liberal cause following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814.' back

John Keane, On Love and Politics (18 March 2014), back

Julius Sevcik (Director), A Prominent Patient, 'Winter 1939. Flamboyant Czech diplomat Jan Masaryk has fled to America to escape his past, and forget the personal and political betrayal he and his country have suffered. As the Czechoslovak ambassador in London, Masaryk failed to win the support of the British and could not avert the ruin of his country. With the help of Dr. Stein, a German immigrant and psychiatrist, and the beautiful writer Marcia Davenport, Masaryk tries to overcome his demons and re-live the dramatic event leading to the outbreak of World War II.' back

Karoline Herfurth, Text For You, Germany, 2016, back

Keith B Richburg, China clamping down on Mideast-style protests, 'Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, February 23, 2011; 11:25 PM BEIJING - A previously unknown group has called on the Chinese to replicate the popular protests in the Middle East by staging their own peaceful "jasmine rallies" in cities across China every Sunday afternoon, to demand an end to corruption, greater accountability and an independent judiciary. THIS STORY Experts say Gaddafi relying on paramilitary forces, foreign mercenaries to crush protests In eastern Libya, town keeps shaky hold after fighting off forces loyal to Gaddafi Obama condemns Gaddafi's crackdown, sends Clinton for talks on Libya View All Items in This Story The appeal comes as China's Communist rulers have displayed signs of being alternately alert and nervous about any replica of the popular unrest that began last month in Tunisia, convulsing much of the Middle East and North Africa and threatening to topple long-standing authoritarian regimes. ' back

Kristyn Harman and Carolyn Philpott, A Tasmanian Requiem is a musical reckoning and a pathway to reconciliation , 'On December 26, 1847, a small group of Aboriginal people sat in the Lieutenant-Governor’s box at Hobart’s Theatre Royal watching a new pantomime. . . . More than 170 years later, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people came together at the same theatre on 13 April 2018 to witness the world premiere of A Tasmanian Requiem, an oratorio for voice and brass described as “a long-overdue mourning” for Tasmania’s “war of extermination”.' https://www.theatreroyal.com.au/shows/tasmanian-requiem back

Louise Pryke, In ancient Mesopotamia, sex among te gods shook heaven and earth, 'Sexuality was central to life in ancient Mesopotamia, an area of the Ancient Near East often described as the cradle of western civilisation roughly corresponding to modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, and parts of Syria, Iran and Turkey. It was not only so for everyday humans but for kings and even deities.' back

Martin Parker, Why we should bulldoze the business school, 'Most business schools exist as parts of universities, and universities are generally understood as institutions with responsibilities to the societies they serve. Why then do we assume that degree courses in business should only teach one form of organisation – capitalism – as if that were the only way in which human life could be arranged?' back

New Yorker, The New Yorker, Timeline: '1925 Harold Ross launches The New Yorker on February 21st, with financial backing from Raoul Fleischmann, the founder of the General Baking Company. Dorothy Parker, Ralph Barton, Alexander Woollcott, Ring Lardner, and Robert Benchley are among the early contributors. Rea Irvin draws the first cover—a mythical, monocled Regency dandy, later dubbed Eustace Tilley, who becomes the face of the magazine. Katharine S. Angell (later Katharine S. White) joins the staff as the magazine’s first fiction editor. ' back

Patrick J. McDonnell, In echo of Parkland shooting outrage. anger rises in Mexico after film students were killed and dissolved in acid, 'The frozen, youthful images of Salomon, Marco and Daniel — the slain students' first names have already entered into common usage — have become emblematic of the intractable crisis that escalating violence poses for Mexican society, especially for the young. Their grisly trajectory from exuberant would-be filmmakers to rendered remains in vats of sulfuric acid has exposed as hollow the vows of politicians, police chiefs and generals to fix the problem.' back

Philip Kennicott, A powerful memorial in Montgomery remembers the victims of lynching, 'MONTGOMERY, Ala. — The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a somber, hilltop pergola of rusted steel overlooking the city that saw the birth of both the Confederacy and the civil rights movement, is one of the most powerful and effective new memorials created in a generation. When it opens on Thursday, this ambitious project will force America to confront not only its wretched history of lynching and racial terror, but also an ongoing legacy of fear and trauma that stretches unbroken from the days of slavery to the Black Lives Matter movement of today.' back

Problem of evil - Wikipedia, Problem of evil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil is the question of how to reconcile the existence of evil with that of a deity who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent (see theism).[1][2] An argument from evil attempts to show that the co-existence of evil and such a deity is unlikely or impossible, and attempts to show the contrary have been traditionally known as theodicies.' back

Proprioception - Wikipedia, Proprioception - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Proprioception, from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own", "individual", and capio, capere, to take or grasp, is the sense of the relative position of one's own parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. In humans, it is provided by proprioceptors in skeletal striated muscles (muscle spindles) and tendons (Golgi tendon organ) and the fibrous capsules in joints. It is distinguished from exteroception, by which one perceives the outside world, and interoception, by which one perceives pain, hunger, etc., and the movement of internal organs.' back

Ross Gittins, Banks' misbehaviour shows power of KPIs, 'Amid all the reluctant truth-telling at the banking royal commission, one big lie has yet to be apprehended: shame-faced witnesses keep admitting they put their shareholders’ interests ahead of their customers’. Don’t believe it. From the chief executives and company directors to those middling managers who seem to be the main ones being sent into the firing line, it’s not the shareholders’ pockets they’ve been so keen to line, it’s their own.' back

Zero-sum game - Wikipedia, Zero-sum game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant's gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. If the total gains of the participants are added up and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero. Thus, cutting a cake, where taking a larger piece reduces the amount of cake available for others, is a zero-sum game if all participants value each unit of cake equally (see marginal utility).' back

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