Notes
Sunday 18 June 2023 - Saturday 24 June 2023
[Notebook: DB 89: Cognitive Cosmogenesis)
[page 94]
Sunday 18 June 2023
How is the quantum of action fixed before the beginning of spacetime? An answer will explain why it has remained fixed for all time.
cc03_Action: 1: Parmenides; 2: Aristotle and the definition of God; 3. From Newton to Lagrange; 4: Max Planck and quantum mechanics. Now we must add section 5: All the above discussion has assumed the existence of spacetime and is built on our spacetime experiences, but action is the definition of god and god predates spacetime so in this section we explain that action is best considered as a logical operator and this is the foundation
[page 95]
of theology as a theory of everything conceived in logical/cognitive terms and the idea that god is actus purus (unmoved mover, initial singularity) leads us to see the universe in logical terms as God's mind.
The revision is going well. I find writing exciting, like I used to feel about sport and play, and the excitement leads me on. We [that is me and my mental image of myself] speculate that the divine initial singularity feeds the universe within it on action, and each new quantum of action created is conserved and never destroyed but passes from process to process [like photons entering and leaving atoms] continually increasing the entropy of the universe, implementing the second law of thermodynamics [which is based on a count of the number of indestructable quanta of action existing at any moment?].
cc04_Theology, a new paradigm. Continue the work of Newton bringing heaven down to Earth, redeeming the awesomeness of material as the foundation of spiritual reality, like the writing of poetry. Are quanta of action eternal, ie if they are fixed points in the initial singularity is the mapping that creates them, ie the algorithm, also eternal.
I still haven't found what I am looking for.
Monday 19 June 2023
The material world exists in a potential well formed by gravitation. Atoms and molecules live in electromagnetic potential
[page 96]
wells and hadrons live in the deep wells arising from the strong force. How do we explain this? And can we say that the quanta of action, once created by the quantum initial singularity live forever as fixed points in the deepest possible potential well.
cc04 paradigm change: Replace Universe is not divine with Universe is divine. By divine we mean the awesome source and sustainer of human life and all that that entails. It means that we are responsible for ourselves and cannot rely on purported saviours that are basically marketing ploys for profit oriented ventures run by people who claim to have the support of an invisible god. We replace an omnipotent and omniscient benevolent God and an evil spirit Satan with an evolutionary process that has random input and selective outputs, a new answer to the problem of evil to replace the Catholic Church's claim to be saving us from our own sin, blaming us the victims of [the church's] rapacious intrusion into human minds.
Auntie Valerie funeral
The problem of evil: evolutionary solution. 1. The initial singularity knew nothing and so cannot, in the first instance, be blamed for anything unlike the omnipotent and omniscient god. 2. The problem of randomness, ie failures of control, mutations can
[page 97]
be bad. 3. The problems of selection.
I may like to liken myself to the initial singularity, dumb but persistent with limited power but infinite reduction and infinite traction, a tribute to Ray Greber and his bulldozers,
Tuesday 20 June 2023
cc04_theol_paradigm: Evolution and the problem of evil II: Selection. A big possibly awesome insight crept up on me while I was copying out the words on page 95 'Are quanta of action eternal'. For a while I have been thinking of a quantum of action at its simplest form is an implementation of the logical operator not but also writing that the execution of a Turing machine is also a quantum of action without really knowing what I meant. Now I can see that the proper representation of a quantum of action is a matrix (linear operator) and the operators are in the Schrödinger picture where they are not dependent on time but permanent things like s fundamental particles. Now we have to see how Schrödinger operators are encoded in Hilbert space and can represent computational processes. Up to now we have been thinking that quantum vectors can be Fourier transformed into Turing Machines but now we have to think about some sort of process that transforms algorithms into matrices [and the processing of the world is obviously quantum computation]. Nielsen & Chuang (2016); Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
[page 98]
Wednesday 21 June 2023
The cognitive cosmology site is very repetitive because I have tried to make every page a self contained unit. When I make it into a printed book much of this repetition can be removed. The great advantage of web publication is that a comprehensive collection of reference material is available from online resources.
Variation in relative simple structures may lead to self selection when a structure becomes cyclic in some way and begins to reproduce itself. We see [this] in periodic functions which are described by complex numbers and exhibit orbits, which are among the ubiquitous fundamental structures in the universe at all scales, from the insides of hadrons to galaxies, and are maintained by potential wells.
Thursday 22 June 2023
Darwin's innovations, Facsimile edition Introduction, Ernst Mayr. Darwin (1859, 2001): On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition
Mayr page vii: 'Only now can we appreciate how many different aways the Origin departed from established concepts and how many directions it opened up.
Darwin's work was never shadowed, whereas Einstein's genius led him to a dead end beyond which he could not understand the personal implications of quantum mechanics.
[page 99]
Mayr page viii: 'One would sure expect the Origin to be totally obsolete. It is startling to find out that it is not the case.' He has achieved a truth of the sort that Parmenides was seeking.
page ix: '. . . in 1858 [the dogma of creation] was virtually unanimously endorsed by anatomists, geologists and botanists, including some of Darwin's closest friends, whom he was later able to convert to his views.'
page x: Animal groups seen as totally distinct.
Main points:
1. domestic variation (Chapter I)
2. cariation in nature (II)
3. paleontology (X)
4. geographical distribution (XI, XII)
5. embryology, classification, morphology (XIII
' The Origin was the product of more than 20 years of dedicated labour. Darwin had become convinced of the occurrence of evolution somewhere between 1835 (his visit to the Galapagos) and July 1837 when he opened his first notebook on the "transmutation of species'.
page xi: Darwin started from as new basis by completely eliminating the last remnants of Platonism by refusing to admit the eidos . . . in any guide whatever.'
page xii: Three sets of observations (Chapters X - XII)
1. Fossils from South America are related to the living fauna of that continent (Chapter X).
2. Faunas of different climate zones in South America are related to each other rather than to the same climatic zone on different continents (Chapter XI).
3. Island Fauna related to the fauna on the nearest mainland (Chapter XII).
[page 100]
Mayr page xiv: 'Origin was the first publication to present scientifically sound well organized evidence for evolution, and to present it in abundance.'
page xv: 'Darwin was the first evolutionist to present a theory of evolution that did not seek refuge in "first causes" or vitalism.'
' page xvi: Variation and selection: 'survival, the ability to contribute to the genetic content of the next generation, is not at all a matter of accident, but a statistically predictable property of the genotype.'
page xvii: 'success in leaving progeny is a more important component than mere survival.'
page xviii>: ' . . . solved the problem of teleology' - 'it has taken 100 years to appreciate fully that Darwin's conceptual framework is, indeed, a new philosophical system.'
page xix: 'population thinking" vs 'typological thinking'. Population thinking emphasizes the concrete reality of a variegated population.
page xxi: Three routes of criticism; 1. Poor writer; 2. inadequate credit to predecessors; 3. unscientific method? Rejected deduction, preferred observe, model, test.
page xxiii: First edition published without critical review.
page xxv: 'Darwin makes no clear distinction between genotype and phenotype' since he was not aware of genes and Mendel's work.
page xxvi 'pangenesis'? Pangenesis - Wikipedia
page xxvii: 'Indeed, the 1859 edition of the Origin is a far more mature and finished product than is usually concluded.'
[page 101]
The important point about evolution is reproduction as that is the operation that carries the character of the parent into the future through the child. In biological reproduction we see the genes as the meachanical carriers of this influence but this is not essential in the broader picture of evolution. All the stuff that I write and that I say (if anybody ever reads is or listens) carries features of my personality into the world which may have some influence on the overall population that follows me.
This line of thought may serve to apply a view of evolution to fundamental particles. So when an electron in a particular orbit receives a photon it is common to say that it annihilates the photon and jumps into a more energetic orbit, but we may also imagine that the electron too is annihilated and a child created, more or less identical to the original electron, but because it is in a new environment, a new potential, it has experienced a sort of evolution. Overall the electrons in an atom are created and annihilated in different states as photons come and go, and we may see this as a very simplistic analogue of the evolution of species where the parents die (are annihilated) and create new versions of themselves in different states. This process in the complex world of humanity has both cyclic and linear features. The life of an electron's creation and annihilation is more linear, the electron remaining essentially identical while appearing in different states.
[page 102]
We might call this null evolution characteristic of very simple systems like electrons. The identical reproduction in the quantum harmonic oscillator that annihilates and creates suggests a cyclic process.
How can we think of Minkowski space as an algorithm expressed as a metric - how does Hilbert space create Minkowski space? The key remains contact communication but somehow it is like the Trinity as imagined by Augustine / Aquinas. Just keep forging ahead into the mist and shapes will appear if there is anything there. I do not understand it but quantum variation will find it. The clues must be in the properties of complex numbers described in Sonnenschein. Sonnenschein & Green(1977): Elements of Complex Analysis, Chapter 2: Holomorphic Functionds
Friday 23 June 2023
Titanic underwater sub squashed, very poor design and construction.
Meanwhile I am creeping along with my theological revolution after contrasting Charles Darwin with the Roman Catholic Church on cc06_evolution. I am operating on the skin of my teeth but nevertheless confident that if I keep at it until I die in about 20 years I will have achieved something nearly as spectacular as Darwin. Such is the romantic delusion that the Church has built into me which leads people the world over to give their lives for hopeless causes.
[page 103]
This is presumably what Jesus of Nazareth was thinking and the smart writers of the New Testament built an epic myth around his death which has been the source of false hope and pain for billions of people over 2000 years, made a few of the ruling class exceedingly wealthy and led to the murder of millions more, not least the Russians and Ukrainians involved in Putin's holy war. The key to our salvation is to use our science to track the real world and bring ourselves into conformity with it. This is my project. At its core is the notion that the source of evil in the world is the evolutionary algorithm which is also the source of the good. [This] in its own way confirms the ancient belief that god allows evil for the greater good. Since I have never encountered the ideas thaat I am documenting in any other literature I have a strong feeling that I am bringing [something] new and valuable to the human world and must take advantage of my unique position to document and propagate what I know. The first step is my weekly posting of these notes on the internet where they have some chance of being discovered.
Both modern theology and modern physics are very complex systems and subject to much confusion. If we go back to the beginning, however, the corresponding realities god and the world are very simple. God is known to be absolutely simple. The initial singularity has no structure.
[page 104]
So, to simplify matters, I propose to go back to the beginning, following the example set by the most influential scientist who ever lived, Charles Darwin. He showed us that all the species that have existed since the Earth began have a common ancestor. We will follow the trail first travelled by Aristotle, who worked his way from physics to theology. His ideas were primitive but his heart was in the right place, the first scientist to break away from the archaic speculations of philosophers like his teacher, Plato.
This job is keeping me on edge [so I am not bored]. Do I really have something to say or should I just shut up and be a retired old man sitting in a club or playing bowls? I often look naive and stupid to myself but at least, as far as I can see, a lot of what I am saying has not been said before so at least it has the advantage of being outside all the boxes I have looked in. And so, as ever, press on because you can never know what you are going to find and I remain convinced that the heuristic of simplicity will cut through a lot of rubbish. Look at the Titanic sub. They complicated matters by trying to join carbon fibre and titanium and it cracked up.
Evolution and imagination: same process, different time rate. One idea per week vs one new species per million years.
Evolution and imagination: same process, different rate, One [new] idea per week vs one new species per million years.
Saturday 24 January 2023
cc07_network_brain.html. What was I thinking back in February 2022 when I first started this page? Now I see it as a record of the creative power of the human imagination which does not arise from the specially created human spiritual soul that the Catholic Church relies on but the complex neural networks in our brains. The message is that networks are intelligent, meaning that fed with data by for instance, our senses, they are able to discover the meaning of that data and based on this meaning work out a program of action to deal with it. So in a conversation, you say x, I form an opinion about what you mean and I reply y. 'What you mean' is in fact a correspondence between your words and some feature of reality which may be something physically observable like the state of our baby's nappy, or some reference to previous statements in the conversation. In a world where all information is physical all meanings are physically represented by a correspondence between two physical realties. One of the origins of this idea is Augustine's use of the words of Genesis that we are made in the image of God; and John's Gospel that in the beginning there was the Word, where he gives these statements a form of concrete reality in his theory of the Trinity which is a starting point
[page 106]
for cognitive cosmology to be made concrete in cc08_trinity, the theology of the Trinity. All this revolves around the idea that information is physical, that is no information is pure spirit, a mathematical continuum [which may nevertheless represent non-quantized gravitation through a continuous differentiable manifold]. This in a way is my analogue of Darwin's rejection of Platonism. So with all this in mind I am ready to rewrite cc07_network_brain, a job for the weekend,
What is cc07 adding to the story?Imagination +verification = science. Imagination + violence = dictatorship.
My idea is to redeem the world from the sins of the Catholic Church by going back before original sin. Starting again from the beginning, no vicious god, no bad angels, no Satan, no paradise just reality created by unbounded possibility constrained by consistency, in other words a divine world, the world as it is, not destroyed by greedy imperialists impelled by stupid theologians: Patriarch Vladimir and autocrat Vladimir and their ancestors who have made life for [the people of Russia] catastrophic for centuries. We are looking for the peaceful divine wilderness into which we evolved before the ruling class began to evolve. Does this make sense? Have theologians and warlords made things worse? Is there a way back to the primordial paradise? We look to multicellular creatures for answers.
[page 107]
Daisies: "This film is dedicated to those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle." Daisies (film)_ - Wikipedia
The greatest scientific discovery may be writing which enabled a perennial [physical] record to be made of ancient human thought [thus facilitating science, which is a study of history].
Faced by the majesty of my chosen subject I have no choice [but] to feel in some way an imposter to take it on, but as ever I go ahead because I feel that it must be done. Here I pay homage to Darwin who was acutely aware of the novelty of his work and the upset it would cause and still causes more than a century and a half later. Creation (2009 film) - Wikipedia
