natural theology

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vol VII: Notes

2018

Notes

Sunday 28 October 2018 - Saturday 3 November 2018

[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]

[page 318]

Sunday 28 October 2018

Kagan page 44; 'Within the confines of the new order, normal geopolitical competition all but ceased.'

[page 319]

' . . . the normal link between economics and politics was severed. Robert Kagan: The Jungle Grows Back

page 46: '. . . prior to 1945 most great powers converted their economic power into military power.'

page 47: 'The whole tenor of the new liberal order ran against spheres of influence even for the victorious powers . . . except for the US.

page 48: '. . . the new world order helped kill empires off.'

page 49: 'The US certainly benefited from being the dominant player in the international economy as well as the dominant player militarily.'

page 52: [The US] discouraged and in some ways prohibited independent European efforts to seek a relaxation of tension with the Soviet Union.' Rarely multilateral on security - covert actions and interventions without UN authorization. Hypocrisy.

page 54: eg Vietnam War / Ostpolitik. Ostpolitik - Wikipedia

page 55: 'Europeans . . . trusted America not to exploit its superior power at their expense.'

page 58: 'Because Americans feared radicalism . . . more than they opposed authoritarianism, they often supported reliable dictators . . . and acquiescenced in the overthrow of democratic regimes deemed unreliable.'

page 59: 'In the end, even if not always with idealistic motives, Americans ended up creating a world unusually conducive to the spread of democracy.' Security leads to democracy.

[page 320]

We are one flesh with the world but we have scratched it, bashed it, bruised and trashed and molested it almost beyond recognition and our violence has rebounded upon ourselves to our pain and impoverishment.

Monday 29 October

One beauty of the hypothesis that the universe is divine is that it encases the full range of science and human experience within the embrace of theology and puts the same constraints on the universe as we place on mathematics and God, that they be consistent. Mathematical consistency brings in Turing and Gödel, allowing room for variation, indeterminism and free will. I have written all this down before, but the story is so big that it is hard to keep it all in hand [or head] at once. Filling out the Master of Philosophy form I have to seek the broadest horizons available in a few words, so I should introduce the notion of mathematical theology.

In particular quantum computation holds that quantum systems are at least as powerful as Turing machines and therefore touch the limits of formal consistent mathematics and so are isomorphic to the classical god. Quantum systems and human minds reach the same epistemological and metaphysical limits.

We study the interior structure of God by considering the evolution of mathematics. We have variation in the minds of mathematicians, selection in the process of proof - a mathematical structure survives if provable.

[page 321]

Tuesday 30 October 2018

One might say that the modern era of cognitive science began with the invention of business machines, the first of which was probably the abacus. The task always was to simplify and if possible automate various business processes, the most importance of which is accountancy, the necessary collection and aggregation of the data necessary to guide a business to profitability. Turing's computer was modelled on the typewriter and Turing's principal adversary in later years was the Enigma machine, a typewriter with a mechanically implemented algorithm interposed between the keys and the typed output. The earliest attempts to produce automata in the form of clocks and representations of animal behaviour were oriented toward the entertainment business, trying to extract money from the wealthy and powerful by entertaining them. It seems clear that now the evolution of enterprises like IBM and its successors such as Google has led to far more investment in cognitive science that has been forthcoming from academia. While academics have been caught up in questions of experience, perception and consciousness industry has been more pragmatically concerned with data collection and processing with more mundane aims like controlling businesses and oil refineries. When it comes to psychology, we may be sure that the advertising industry has invested far more in learning how to drive people to perceive and act in particular ways than academic and clinical psychologists. Abacus - Wikipedia, Enigma machine - Wikipedia, Automaton - Wikipedia, Media psychology - Wikipedia

Wednesday 31 October 2018

[page 322]

What I learnt from James is that the body is the mind, and the mind is always devoted to action, which covers all possible human outputs including the actions we take to improve representation. William James: Psychology: The Briefer Course

Thursday 1 November 2018

We and our minds are products of evolution and evolution is bound by reality to follow the laws of nature. Ultimately the natural selection is based on these laws to that forms of life that do not conform are selected out. James' work is heavily influenced by his understanding of Darwin, particularly by the idea that the ancient distinction between mind and body is false. Here, using James' approach, I argue that the question 'Is my experience what I agree to attend to correct' must be answered in the affirmative. I then turn to a aper by Seth and Tsakiris that goes toward a modern understanding of the relation between attention, consciousness and self-awareness by seeking a cybernetic explication of the somatic basis of selfhood. I am heartened by the appearance of cybernetic argument in cognitive science, but explain in the final section that I believe these authors and many others have failed to appreciate the central role that cybernetics as a mathematical discipline plays in explicating the natural constraints and lack of constraint that operates in evolutionary selection. I suggest that more attention to Ashby's principle of requisite variety and its roots in mathematics could serve as a central organizing principle in the development of cognitive science. Both James and the current authors (by

[page 322]

their use of "machine" in the title) assume that the universe is a deterministic process, whereas the most deterministic discipline we have, mathematics, reveals that it has an incomplete and incomputable, that is uncertain and creative, foundation. Anil K. Seth and Manos Tsakiris: Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood

One cannot understand the essay until it can be conceived as a unit. We begin with the introspection, move on to the local theory, and then move to the general theory that puts it all in context.

Bohemian Rhapsody Freddy Mercury. It would be nice to be talented but inconsistent with the quiet life I enjoy. Somehow I want to make an impression without really doing anything, a rather self-contradictory stance. My only approach is to live long to compensate for working slowly. Bohemian Rhapsody (film) - Wikipedia

Friday 2 November 2018
Saturday 3 November 2018

I don't know what I feel [which suggest a cognitive gap between knowledge and feeling]. Most people do not know what they feel until they are 40 (From Time to Time). From Time to Time (film) - Wikipedia

Freddy: We are the Champions Queen

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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!)

Benzoni, Juliette, Catherine and A Time For Love, William Heinemann 1968  
Amazon
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Feynman, Richard P, and Albert P Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, McGraw Hill 1965 Preface: 'The fundamental physical and mathematical concepts which underlie the path integral approach were first developed by R P Feynman in the course of his graduate studies at Princeton, ... . These early inquiries were involved with the problem of the infinte self-energy of the electron. In working on that problem, a "least action" principle was discovered [which] could deal succesfully with the infinity arising in the application of classical electrodynamics.' As described in this book. Feynam, inspired by Dirac, went on the develop this insight into a fruitful source of solutions to many quantum mechanical problems.  
Amazon
  back

Kagan, Robert, The Jungle Grows Back, Alfred A. Knopp 2018 ' Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe from declining democracy to growing geopolitical competition. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward going it alone or withdrawing in the face of such disarray. In this powerful urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons that American withdrawal or selfish unilateralism would be the worst possible response, based on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world.' 
Amazon
  back

Papers

Krystal, Arthur, "Age of Reason", New Yorker, 83, 32, 22 October 2007, page 94 - 103. 'In his hundred years, Jacques Barzun has learned a thing or two.'. back

Landauer, Rolf, "Information is a physical entity", Physica A, 263, 1, 1 February 1999, page 63-7. 'This paper, associated with a broader conference talk on the fundamental physical limits of information handling, emphasizes the aspects still least appreciated. Information is not an abstract entity but exists only through a physical representation, thus tying it to all the restrictions and possibilities of our real physical universe. The mathematician's vision of an unlimited sequence of totally reliable operations is unlikely to be implementable in this real universe. Speculative remarks about the possible impact of that, on the ultimate nature of the laws of physics are included.'. back

Links

Abacus - Wikipedia, Abacus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The abacus (plural abaci or abacuses), also called a counting frame, is a calculating tool that was in use in Europe, China and Russia, centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu–Arabic numeral system. The exact origin of the abacus is still unknown. Today, abacuses are often constructed as a bamboo frame with beads sliding on wires, but originally they were beans or stones moved in grooves in sand or on tablets of wood, stone, or metal.' back

Actuarial science - Wikipedia, Actuarial science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Actuarial science is the discipline that applies mathematical and statistical methods to assess risk in the insurance and finance industries. Actuaries are professionals who are qualified in this field through education and experience. In many countries, actuaries must demonstrate their competence by passing a series of rigorous professional examinations. Actuarial science includes a number of interrelating subjects, including probability, mathematics, statistics, finance, economics, financial economics, and computer programming.' back

Anil K. Seth and Manos Tsakiris, Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood, 'We conceptualise experiences of embodied selfhood in terms of control-oriented predictive regulation (allostasis) of physiological states. We account for distinctive phenomenological aspects of embodied selfhood, including its (partly) non-object-like nature and its subjective stability over time. We explain predictive perception as a generalisation from a fundamental biological imperative to maintain physiological integrity: to stay alive. We bring together several cognitive science traditions, including predictive processing, perceptual control theory, cybernetics, the free energy principle, and sensorimotor contingency theory. We show how perception of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, happens with, through, and because of our living bodies. We draw implications for developmental psychology and identify open questions in psychiatry and artificial intelligence.' back

Automaton - Wikipedia, Automaton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' An automaton . . . is a self-operating machine, or a machine or control mechanism designed to automatically follow a predetermined sequence of operations, or respond to predetermined instructions. Some automata, such as bellstrikers in mechanical clocks, are designed to give the illusion to the casual observer that they are operating under their own power.' back

Ben Guarino, Immigrants arrive with flourishing gut microbes. The American diet trashes them, ' The microbiome begins as a departing gift from mothers at birth, but many factors alter its composition. Growing evidence shows location has a profound impact on the diversity of microbes, and some places are much less diverse than others. A study published this week in the journal Cell follows multi-generation immigrants from Southeast Asia to the United States. As they moved, their microbes responded. Once in the United States, the immigrants' gut diversity dropped to resemble the less-varied microbiomes in European Americans. At the same time, obesity rates spiked.' back

Bohemian Rhapsody (film) - Wikipedia, Bohemian Rhapsody (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Bohemian Rhapsody is a 2018 biographical film about the British rock band Queen, focusing on lead singer Freddie Mercury's life leading up to Queen's Live Aid performance at Wembley Stadium in 1985. The film gets its title from the 1975 Queen song of the same name. It is a British-American joint venture produced by 20th Century Fox, New Regency, GK Films, and Queen Films, with Fox serving as distributor.' back

Declan Walsh, The Yemen Girl Who Turned the World's Eyes to Famine Is Dead, ' CAIRO — A haunted look in the eyes of Amal Hussain, an emaciated 7-year-old lying silently on a hospital bed in northern Yemen, seemed to sum up the dire circumstances of her war-torn country. A searing portrait of the starving girl published in The New York Times last week drew an impassioned response from readers. They expressed heartbreak. They offered money for her family. They wrote in to ask if she was getting better. On Thursday, Amal’s family said she had died at a ragged refugee camp four miles from the hospital.' back

Enigma machine - Wikipedia, Enigma machine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Enigma machines are a series of electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines mainly developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication. Enigma was invented by the German engineer Arthur Scherbius at the end of World War I. Early models were used commercially from the early 1920s, and adopted by military and government services of several countries, most notably Nazi Germany before and during World War II.' back

From Time to Time (film) - Wikipedia, From Time to Time (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'From Time to Time is a 2009 British fantasy drama film directed by Julian Fellowes and starring Maggie Smith, Timothy Spall, Carice van Houten, Alex Etel, Eliza Bennett, Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh, Dominic West, Hugh Bonneville, Kwayedza Kureya, and Pauline Collins. It was adapted from Lucy M. Boston's children's novel The Chimneys of Green Knowe (1958). The film was shot in Athelhampton Hall, Dorset.' back

Geodesic - Wikipedia, Geodesic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, particularly differential geometry, a geodesic . . . is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line" to "curved spaces". In the presence of a Riemannian metric, geodesics are defined to be (locally) the shortest path between points in the space. In the presence of an affine connection, geodesics are defined to be curves whose tangent vectors remain parallel if they are transported along it. The term "geodesic" comes from geodesy, the science of measuring the size and shape of Earth; in the original sense, a geodesic was the shortest route between two points on the Earth's surface, namely, a segment of a great circle. . . . Geodesics are of particular importance in general relativity, as they describe the motion of inertial test particles.' back

Jonathan Hunt, Why the arms race is still white hot decades after the Cold War ended - and how to sto it, ' The Trump administration’s looming withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signals more than a new era of quick-strike competition in Europe and East Asia. It demonstrates that the nuclear arms race has now outlasted the Cold War by three decades. To slow down the rush to stockpile new, more powerful weapons of mass destruction, we need not only visionary leaders like Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, but significant changes in military and political culture.' back

Matthew Taylor, Antarctica's future in doubt after plan for world's biggest marine reserve is blocked, ' A plan to turn a huge tract of pristine Antarctic ocean into the world’s biggest sanctuary has been rejected, throwing the future of one of the Earth’s most important ecosystems into doubt. Environmental groups said Russia, China and Norway had played a part in blocking the proposal, with the other 22 members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the organisation set up to protect Antarctic waters, backing the proposal.' back

Media psychology - Wikipedia, Media psychology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Media psychology is the branch of psychology that focuses on the interaction of human behavior and media and technology. Media psychology is not restricted to mass media or media content; it includes all forms of mediated communication and media technology-related behaviors, such as the use, design, impact and sharing behaviors.' back

Ostpolitik - Wikipedia, Ostpolitik - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedisa, ' Neue Ostpolitik (German for "new eastern policy"), or Ostpolitik for short, was the normalization of relations between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, or West Germany) and Eastern Europe, particularly the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) beginning in 1969. Influenced by Egon Bahr, who proposed "change through rapprochement" in a 1963 speech at the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, the policies were implemented beginning with Willy Brandt, fourth Chancellor of the FRG from 1969 to 1974.' back

Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, 9. For while there still survives a false rationalism, which ridicules anything that transcends and defies the power of human genius, and which is accompanied by a cognate error, the so-called popular naturalism, which sees and wills to see in the Church nothing but a juridical and social union, there is on the other hand a false mysticism creeping in, which, in its attempt to eliminate the immovable frontier that separates creatures from their Creator, falsifies the Sacred Scriptures.' . . .
Given at Rome, at St. Peter's on the twenty-ninth day of June, the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, in the year 1943, the fifth of Our Pontificate.' back

Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, 'Venerable Brethren, Health and Apostolic Benediction. The doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church,[1] was first taught us by the Redeemer Himself. Illustrating as it does the great and inestimable privilege of our intimate union with so exalted a Head, this doctrine by its sublime dignity invites all those who are drawn by the Holy Spirit to study it, and gives them, in the truths of which it proposes to the mind, a strong incentive to the performance of such good works as are conformable to its teaching. For this reason, We deem it fitting to speak to you on this subject through this Encyclical Letter, developing and explaining above all, those points which concern the Church Militant. To this We are urged not only by the surpassing grandeur of the subject but also by the circumstances of the present time.' back

Queen, We Are The Champions (Official Video) - You Tube, ' I've paid my dues
Time after time
I've done my sentence
But committed no crime

And bad mistakes
I've made a few
I've had my share of sand
Kicked in my face
But I've come through
And we mean to go on and on and on and on

We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting
'Till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
'Cause we are the champions of the world

I've taken my bows
And my curtain calls
You brought me fame and fortune
And everything that goes with it
I thank you all

But it's been no bed of roses
No pleasure cruise
I consider it a challenge before
The whole human race
And I ain't gonna lose
And we mean to go on and on and on and on

We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting
'Till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
'Cause we are the champions of the world

We are the champions, my friends
And we'll keep on fighting
'Till the end
We are the champions
We are the champions
No time for losers
'Cause we are the champions.'
back

United Nations, Official UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Home Page, 'The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) (French) (Spanish) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected.'' back

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, 'The definition of Psychology may best be given in the words of Professor Ladd, as the description and explanation of states of consciousness as such. By state of consciousness are meant such things s sensations desires emotions cognitions, reasonings, decisions, volitions, and the like. Their 'explanation' must of course include the study of their causes, conditions, and immediate consequences, as far as these can be ascertained. back

World Council of Churches, WCC - World Council of Churches, 'A worldwide fellowship of 349 churches seeking unity, a common witness and Christian service . . . The Catholic Church has never been a member of the World Council of Churches, but is actively participating in the ecumenical movement in different ways.' back

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