[ Sunday 3 July 1983 - Saturday 9 July 1983 ]
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace = CMP I: DB20]
[page 85]
Information confers certainty; uncertainty is due to lack of information [ie information less than the entropy of the situation under consideration] Truth is opinion which agrees with reality. Uncertainty may result from lack of the whole truth, ie not knowing all that there is to be known about reality; or there may be a limit to the information content, ie certainty of reality.
Planck's argument for his constant is tantamount to saying that a perfectly defined system requires infinite energy. This not being possible, we say, let us say that the system is quantised, ie imperfectly defined.
Popper II, 373 "There can be no general criterion of truth" (an immediate result of Tarski's work on truth) Popper, Alfred Tarski
Fallibility is necessary for creation. Infallibility is meaningless.
Popper p 375: "The quest for certainty . . . is a mistaken quest."
[page 86]
Popper p 378: Everything is open to criticism. This applies not only to knowledge, but to reality itself. Evolution is nothing more than the application of the scientific method. Science does not have a monopoly on this method. It merely uses it with conspicuous success because it restricts itself to situation with very low complexity.
The social sciences, which deal with very high complexity situations use the scientific method wrongly when they look for laws. Science is not really looking for laws, although they are there to be found in an analytical treatment of simple systems. Once, however, variety becomes high enough, law may no longer be present, ie in the output of a free society.
Every winter's night I sit before my fire, feeling the gentle warmth of sunshine trapped long ago in those clever woody plants., and I wonder about this planet and the Universe and its memories. We are all contents, constituents of a universal memory, structures that endure over time, a mystery? No, more of a non-mystery. We know that enduring motion is nothing. Acceleration is the interest. So endurance is nothing, change is where its at. That wood gathered the sun's energy endures unless it is burnt or decays (due to living creatures) or in the very long run falls apart due to uncertainties in its own makeup, perhaps with a half life comparable to a proton. All change arises from uncertainty of one sort or another. Stability = certainty = tautology?
Superman is superviolent, not superintelligent.
Luria in Bronowski page x " The mind acts upon the natural world in the creation of knowledge in the same way as it acts on elements of human sensibility in bringing forth a poem or a painting or a symphony". Bronowski
Traditional philosophies make much of cause and effect. A causes B iff blah blah. We speak of causal relationships. What such relationships have is an element of time and an element of change. We can also speak of structural relationships which are causal in the sense that both (all) the related things (terms) are both cause and an effect of eachother. Language, for instance, is both a cause and an effect of close social relationships. We have a positive feedback situation operating, as in a child's game, where each child both contributes to and receives form the structure of the game. What each does depends upon what all the others do and vice versa.
[page 88]
Benjamin Disraeli: "Increased means and increased leisure are the two civilisers of man."