Notes
Sunday 16 January 2022 - Saturday 22 January 2022
[Notebook: DB 87: Cognitive Cosmology]
[page 161]
Sunday 16 January 2022
All human work falls into two major categories: changing the world by physical processes like carpentry, dentistry and agriculture; and changing peoples' minds by the sharing of information: education, marketing, politics, conversation, writing and preaching. Both these categories are instances of communication and so both may be comprehended by networks of communication. Getting older, I move from physical to mental.
Hilbert space uses complex numbers to get results that are impossible in real numbers. In a way complex numbers and Hilbert space are the modern analogue of the spiritual world and essential elements in the deeper roles of quantum mechanics in computation and communication
What counts for me from moment to moment is how I feel given all my current inputs. My situation is similar to a neuron receiving inputs from hundreds of synapses of different positive and negative weights integrating across a time window (rather like a Lagrangian) to decide whether or not it has reached the threshold to send a send an action potential down its axon to do something like write this little paragraph.
Going over the divinity of money which I wrote in 1992 30 years ago and finding it weird, a bit wonderful and not very coherent. Many of the ideas have dropped out of my repertoire, but they might still be valuable if reconceived [and have decided to do a major revision to be "an essay on the divinity of money, January 2022"].
Monday 17 January 2022After so much indoctrination about the defectiveness of the fallen world it is sometimes hard to appreciate the glory of the real divinity (Bend it like Beckham) and the wonderful consequences
[page 162]
of my natural theology project. So I am now setting into work as hard as I can to bring it to fruition. Bend It Like Beckam - Wikipedia
This task must eventually become a movement, but the story has to be right and I want to write something that would be worthy of a mainstream PhD, to be published on the new theology website where my honours work resides. The abstract of this work is slowly becoming clear and it goes like this: Over the centuries imaginative explanations of how the world works are being questioned by evidence based explanations. Most of us no longer believe in the efficacy of getting a reputed practitioner to bring about the mysterious death of an opponent. In the scientific age we use guns and poison.
(It appears to be a sad fact that an enormous amount of scientific and technical money goes into researching, designing and building weapons of war. So called "defence" is basically the grasp of power by violence, including large scale murder. The first and second wars demonstrated our tendency toward sickening evils like the Holocaust of infamous memory). Marilyn McCord Adams (1999): Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, Geoffrey Robertson (2000): Crimes Against Humanity: The struggle for global justice
There is a simple evolutionary explanation for this. Malthus pointed out that the dynamics of ecosystems would occasionally lead to a zero sum situation which is a matter of life and death. If you live, I die therefore I must kill you. Better to die pillaging than to sit down and die of starvation. Since this situation has unavoidable consequences once it is established, it is necessary to prevent it happening, just as it is necessary as it is necessary to foresee and work out how to cope with threatening zero sum situations [in all dimensions of life; some cultures may advocate passive starvation rather than agrressive violence but this is probably a minority position].
The key to security is variety [ie entropy of information]. We are facing a finite number of zero sum situations in different parts of the world. On the whole a large proportions of the population live in relative prosperity and harmony. The simple solution is to export prosperity and harmony to those [other] parts of the world, but here we come up
[page 163]
against tribalism. I count a tribe to be a group of people ranging from two to billions. Basically there is harmony within tribes and conflicts at their boundaries. The conflicts may be based on land, water, livestock or intimate partners, and the cultural protocols of dealing with these situations may vary widely, so that problem solving that involve two or more tribes can be difficult. Contested Histories Initiative
This is where I see a role for scientific theology. Theology is the study of spirit often understood as god in some possible meaning of the term [including angels, disembodied immaterial, formal spirits]. We are well aware of the fact that because the world is one the different sciences that study the world are forced to become one, so now we have one biology and one global science of healthcare which has [which has replaced many older concepts of the causes of sickness and health and] contributed enormously to our expanding population .
Theology, the science of spirit remains trapped in ancient institutions that collect their data not by studying the world but by reading ancient texts and other artefacts. Since these are often the possession of particular tribes, disputes arise which cannot be solved because there is no common literary foundation [that is agreed representations of cultural features in whatever medium]. The invention of writing has led to an explosion of fiction flowing from human imagination. Only a small fraction of this immense output can be counted as scientific literature, striving to describe what has been seen to be by careful observation. Pope John Paul II (7 December 1992): Catholic Catechism: §§ 399-400: God destroys Paradise, Pope John Paul II (1996): Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences October 22, 1996
This is getting too long for an abstract, and there is more to go. I try to be as economical as possible with my words but I must strive to avoid ambiguity by [redundantly] repeating the same ideas in many different ways.
So we need to found a scientific theology which studies first of all the divine spirit and then all the other spirits in the world, including of course the human spirit. This may seem a tall order but it is worth a try. Also, because this text is meant to suit all tribes, it must be written in the principal global language, mathematics. I am not going to do a lot of
[page 164]
lot of mathematics in symbols but will try to transmit mathematical ideas in plain language [which can be translated exactly by reference to the relevant symbolic expressions].
The theory of peace is about space. I think I might put the peace lectures in a new theology, loaded with references, as my first public expression of the idea that spirit is space, abstract mental space [grounded in physical space]. The ancient idea that there is matter and spirit is well founded and here we give it a new interpretation. The spirit drives the matter. We can see and touch the matter and we study it through physics, chemistry, biology, ecology and astronomy and myriad other sciences. We call this, for historical reasons, the classical world. Jeffrey Nicholls (1987): A theory of Peace, Classical physics - Wikipedia
The spiritual word driving the classical world has been known to science for a little over century: quantum mechanics [although it has been an element of many cultures since time immemorial]. The quantum mechanical world is invisible but we have worked out how it might be work. The first step was taken by [Max Planck in 1900 when he saw that there is a minimum quantum of action]. Max Planck (1901): On the Law of Distribution of Energy in the Normal Spectrum, Max Planck - Wikipedia, Quantum mechanics - Wikipedia
. . . Now, as I do so often, I use [the previous pages of my notes] as part of a new website except that now it is to be a new part of an old website. A new theology now falls into four sections: the 2BOB lectures [1987]; the honours thesis [2019]; the honours essays [2029] (to be revised and expanded); and the latest view of the new theology as the science of spirit as worked out in the transfinite quantum mechanical Hilbert space, ie a complex vector space with an inner product. Can this be done? I have just started a new fork of moneyMay1992 (moneyJan2022) which will explain the transfinite Hilbert oscillator in quantum mechanical terms, starting from the initial singularity represented as the empty set and building up from there. E30 cognitive cosmology and e35 a path to theory of everything [ie theology] will elaborate on this and be migrated to cognitive cosmology and new theology websites.
Tuesday 18 January 2022
[page 165]
Catholicism has created a false virtual world designed to make people conform to its business plan. The Chinese Communist Party is pursuing a similar project as in a way are the companies profiting from the use of the internet for whatever purpose, an approach that has grown out of the initial creative writing of virtual worlds in the print world. What we need for peace and prosperity is to insert a scientific background into all this imagination in order to keep people consistent with one another and the world in which we live. Zhou Xin: China’s efforts to shape country’s internet content look like a gigantic social experiment, Richard McGregor (2010): The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers
Science referees the game between the spirit of imagination and the observable features of our reality.
Melanie and Edina: a naked playful spiritual battle ending in orgasm.
The extraordinary fertility of human imagination has delivered to us, through spiritual evolution a vast spectrum of ideas about how the world came to be, how it works and our role in it. It is commonly believed that we are created in the image of god. Many of the ancient gods are eternal, omniscient omnipotent beings totally incapable of change [because they are conceived as the realization of all possibility and so have nowhere to go]. This is completely at odds with the real god which is a self creating being whose creativity we all share as literal children (in the software sense) of this god.
Let us assume that from a psychological point of view all abuse arises from a sense of entitlement and much of the sense of entitlement arises from power, military, financial or reputational. And those with the most power are the worst abusers (Hitler, Stalin, Mao) and above these we find the supreme abusers, the gods for whom mere humans are playthings.
Wednesday 19 January 2022
How can one match the marketing power of the Roman Catholic Church, offering an eternal life of heavenly bliss for members in good standing, an eternal life of pain for the rest. The practical
[page 166]
policy is to offer heaven on Earth, the recovery of paradise, and the elimination of pain. The technology is well on the way, the big problem lies in the distribution and the theroetical challenge is to show that human cooperation along the lines pioneered by, for instance, hydrogen atoms, can lead to this blissful state and that the mathematical and physical proofs of this contention are to be found in the properties of a transfinite quantum network in Hilbert space as the spiritual driver of classical Minkowski space. As Aristotle noted, this description might show that the life of god, which includes us, is more marvellous than anything we currently express. I now stand at the beginning of a two year drive to replace Aristotle's dream by devising a clear expression of divinity of the universe we inhabit. The starting point, following Aristotle, Aquinas and Lagrange is the divine quantum of action. Great words, Now for the great deeds, the long sought after answer to nuclear weapons.
. . .
I think the mathematics will eventually work becaUSe the universe has made me out of hydrogen after a large number of steps. In the beginning there was a quantum of action, powerful but uncontrolled.
Thursday 20 January 2022
Wheeler and feynman imagined that there was only one electron. We can go a bit deeper and imagine that there is only one quantum of action, the logical not, and one nand gate, the product of the quantum of action and the no-cloning theorem producing the logival equivalent of a fermion, not-and. What we are needing is Feynman's physical intuition to give interpretations to state vectors and operators in Hibert space
[page 167]
We want to develop the equivalence of the quantum of action and an act of insight, the creative link connected to an observation in Hilbert space yielding an event in Minkowski space, two factor authentication.
A woman is a perfect creature designed to make the initial phases of reproduction heavenly, to be followed by moments of hell.
One may watch tennis concentrating on the visible bodies and motions, the physical approach, or concentrating on the inner on the inner states of the players, the spiritual approach. We see here that a spirit is always enclosed in a body, and the observable quantum of action is the universal body, consistent with Landau's idea that information is physical The quantum action is the shell of the mollusc made of a continuous Lie group. This seems bit wild but the Hilbert space is created inside the mollusc also by the quantum of action which defines the compact and convex set which is realized as fixed point inside the mollusc, reflections of its shell which is an entity in Minkowski space.
Friday 21 January 2022
The world of god is god, verbum. The quantum of action emits quanta of action [there is no abstract or concrete, no substantial or accidental, jusdt action].
Lonergan page 10: 'Aquinas identified verbum with the immanent terminal object of intellectual operation. Bernard Lonergan (1997): Verbum : Word and Idea in Aquinas
page 13: 'in God alone is there perfect reflection, in which the principal and term, essence and intentio intellecta are identical.' Meaning what? And is this true on the divine world?
Zero entropy is the equivalent of logical confinement since there is but one state which cannot go anywhere. This is the condition of the initial singularity seem (per impossibile) from outside and so we suspect it is true for god and the universe throughout their existence.
[page 168]
We are phrasing everything n terms of communication, computation, entropy and control. Each step in all this is a quantum of actin, an act of god, the opposite of a continuum
The active ingredient in the theory of the trinity is the procession of the son from the father by an act equivalent to Lonergan (or archimedes') insight, that is closure, a la Eccles with the dimension of angular momentum, a full circle.
What can Lonergan tell me that I do not already know? How far has he gone past Aquinas. Is his name just a crutch to lean my case on? Read on (Verbum) for a while to see if it is going anywhere. I want to identify human insight, the procession of the son, the execution of an action and a quantum observation unifying these four realms in a scale invariant logical process. John C. Eccles (1958): Innovation in Science: The Physiology of Imagination
The point is that elementary actions blend seamlessly by logical continuity which is why the trinity is one despite its internal action and human insight is a complex action identical in principle to a quantum event [breaking through from invisible process in Hilbert (neural) space to a visible process in Minkowski space].
Why do they blend seamlessly. Because 'per se' they have no internal structure [and so cover one another exactly like Aristotelian middle terms in logical argument]. A pure quantum gets its internal structure by its relations to others in Hilbert space where they all have access to one another's interiors [via superposition?]. The 60 or so fundamental particle states form a complete group of actions created within the initial singularity sufficient to build a universe, each having a role in the completion of a certain process like beta emission.
Dream on I can say all these things because every process can be completed in algebraically complete Hilbert space. Is this true from a mathematical point fo view? Do Gödel and Turing hold in complex space? Ask Riemann.
Saturday 22 January 2022
[page 169]
More Verbum. The currency of the universe is action, that is angular momentum, spin. How do we see spin in a sentence like this, I spin something to you, the reader, as a photon changes the orbit of an atomic electron. Reading this, you rearrange some synapses in your brain.
