[ Sunday 24 July 1983 - Saturday 30 July 1983 ]
[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace = CMP I: DB20]
[page 100]
Lorentz: Behind the mirror. It has long been the belief that science owes its strength to its objectivity, ie it deals with the world outside the subject. This is not necessarily a strong foundation. Science attempts to make models of what is, both subject and object. It is time we grasped the nettle and faced this fact. Popper's model of science, the construction and attempted falsification of hypotheses can quite easily handle the inclusion of the subject as well as the object in the scientific process. What guarantees science is not its objectivity, but its communicability and repeatability. Just as the structure of the world is the same for all of us, the structure of our knowing is the same for all of us, and we can as readily talk to one another about our process of knowledge and even about our feelings as we can about the states of the electron. In fact the findings of quantum mechanics force us to recognise that the activities of the knower are closely involved in the activities of the known, and we can no longer think of ourselves as non-involved observers of the world. Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Lorentz
[page 101]
Things may be divided into those dependent on our cognition and those independent of our cognition.
Invariance, on relative timescales, is our indicator that things exist independently of our highly variable perception. [Maybe why we trust old things, like the Church even though their obsolescence is becoming obvious.]
Began to construct a mathematical model: "communication tensor" between particles - commons with no other characteristic than two states, corresponding to binary 1, 0, etc. "communication" = connected change of state of two commons. Rate of connected changes of state in a subspace is to be eventually identified with the mass-energy content of the subspace. A loop of such changes of state may constitute a particle. There is competition for loops - is equivalent to competition of states. Commons are like memory cells. So what gives us spacetime? . . .
[page 102]
Lorentz claims that we cannot know the real world, only the phenomenal world. Agreeing with Popper and Planck. This has to be admitted. We only have creative and hypothetical access to what is going on, but can't we assume at least that we are on the right track, like children who classify all men as father and all animals as dogs? The hypothesis that we and the Universe are intelligent in the same way makes this easier to understand. Konrad Lorenz - Wikipedia
The process of individual knowledge does not begin with the individual's accession to consciousness. It is, in effect, the only process in the Universe, and has continued throughout evolutionary time, each part communicating with the others and adapting to them to form new and more complex structures. The structure of our present human knowing has evolved through this process and is of
[page 103]
course coloured by it. However, our ability to change our minds in may ways guarantees that we are better equipped than other animals. We have, in effect, a lot of non-determined random access memory which we can use for the purpose of approximating the Universe and we do not have to respond only to the necessities of survival. Through individual, communicating consciousness we have a chance of objectivity.
Our invention of the computer gives us another objectifying component to our knowledge of one another and of ourselves. It shows us in further detail what knowledge and intelligence are and aren't.
"the principle of mutual elucidation" - as the amount of information crisscrossing a subject increases, so the definition of each individual component increases. Polanyi
This book is for me a cry of joy, for the release from a desperate bondage; a brief history of my own intellect and an attempt to communicate a view of the world which I feel will be of value to us all.
In Athens, democracy was invented, and suppressed by Plato [?]. Jesus came, and if we are able to read between the lines of the
[page 104]
Bible, preached a world of love, caring and equality. The powers that be, mindful of the threat, quite happily combined this with Platonic views stating precisely the opposite to give us the New Testament, the Fathers and the Catholic Church. This unholy mixture became the millstone of the west, full of the contradictions necessary to confuse and demonise the people, thus throwing them merciless into the hands of priests and princes, unable to defend themselves against a power that claimed dominion from heaven over all the earth. I managed, anachronistically, to get caught up in all this and thus in a way to have experienced the last 2500 years of the world's intellectual history in my own flesh. It is this experience, and the intellectual struggle to come to terms with it, that I wish to recount here. As a bricklayer, carpenter, monk, philosopher, mechanic, builder, writer, student, plumber, lover and father, I have learnt one consistent thing - we learn by doing. Writing this book has been no easier than living the life and arriving at the views that it recounts. I am glad it is done, however, because it represents to me a big step toward authenticity, toward making sense of a cultural heritage that is multiply flawed, bent in the self interests of its makers.
[page 105]
One always suspects that simplicity is a keynote of truth, or at least has a lot to do with it. The explanation that is filled with ifs and buts and exceptions is a little suspect. Perhaps it is not the best and cleanest and least complex. It is like a program which deals with cases one by one where a more sophisticated programmer might find a classification or algorithm to radically shorten the code but still cover the ground satisfactorily.
"What is true of logic is true of psychology" Popper. This is very close to tautology. Logic is in a way what is thinkable - illogic is unthinkable, once it has been exposed to clear view. Thus the power of proof through reductio ad absurdum. Reductio ad absurdum - Wikipedia
The adaptive value of philosophy is very important. Views like Hume's or Bishop Berekely's, as powerful and logically attractive as they might seem, lead nowhere except to despair and despond, like the cynics and stoics and reductionists, and various other philosophies that claim that human mental process leads nowhere. The fact is that it does [lead to survival], and so any philosophy that claims that it doesn't must be revised.
[page 106]
Lorentz (98) points out that the status of human logical thought is the same as animal conditioned responses and similar behavioural adaptations to the world.
The time rate of change of a system is a measure of its intelligence. Human beings, through greater intelligence, modify themselves and other part of the environment at a rate that is well outside the ken of non-human animals. We might characterise violence as a rate of change that is too fast for the system to which violence is being done, although this is by no means a full characterisation of violence.
All adaptation is a cognitive process.
Lorentz page 128: graphic description of ape discovering the was to get a banana by moving a box across a room "turning head over heels with delight" [Archimedes].
W Porsig: Das Wunder der Sprache "Language translates all non-visual relationships into spatial relationships. All languages do this without exception, not just one or a group . . .". Lorentz page 129.
[page 107]
It is the creative leap of insight, and it alone, which makes nonsense of the reductionist position. For by it we can move into an entirely new space, not explored before, and to which there is no logical access from prior spaces. It is this same leap that gives us creation in the Universe, and it is this leap which forms the theme of this short book.
Evolution has the appearance of being a continuous and analogue process, but it is not when examined closely. All mutations are digital, discrete, jut as insights are. There are real differences in form, and the analogy between before and after exists not along some space-time continuum, but in some sort of meta-space of forms where the classification is not by a spatial metric but a taxonomic one. The differences are measured not on some Euclidian manners, but by discrete changes, mutations or insights. It must be assumed that this taxonomic space is prior to the metric for the intelligent world, and all the world is intelligent.
The measure of complexity a la Chaitin is such a taxonomic measure. Chaitin