Notes

[ Sunday 9 October 1983 - Saturday 15 October 1983 ]

Sunday 9 October 1983

Monday 10 October 1983

Tuesday 11 October 1983

[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace I= CMP I: DB20]

[page 120]

You expect me to buy this? Not right away. I imagine that you should sit and let it sink in for a year or two before becoming judgemental It has aken me a long time and the overcoming of a lot of intellectual and emotional prejudice before I coud see it clearly enough to write this account. It is no new vision I am trying to communicate to you. It has been the stuff of mystics

[page 121]

and visionaries for millennia.What I am trying to do is to bring something out of the immediate experience of mysticism into the critical and dissecting world of science, of physics, and to show that even here in the stark practical realities of the bomb builder and the reactor designer, the way of mysticism. In trying to do it I will probably displease two parties - the dyed in the wool mystic who thinks that there are material entities to be despised and evaded, and the hard headed materialist who thinks a brick is a brick and a spade a spade and that is that. But in the middle there are a few (or is it many) others, jacks of all trades, masters of none, people who want to bring it all together and recognise that the whole of system we are part of is good, if only we don't fear it and try to limit it and kill it off.

Buddhism is the peak vision of a form of consciousness that has not yet moved out of the human mind into science and the profound and intellectually terrifying realisation that our own mind, of which we are conscious, is not the be all and end all of the Universe, but simply a step along the way. Enlightenment is in some sense tantamount to achieving the

[page 122]

ability to suppress the activity of the newly evolved creative self consciousness and revert to the state of animal unity (low mental entropy) that went before it. The advent of consciousness marked a new step in human differentiation and unity, an explosive growth of mental entropy as the minds of all are pooled, the results duplicated and sent out once more to be further differentiated in the mind of each individual, pooled and propagated again. This reflection gives an ever increasing degree of mental polyploidy (polymorphism) jut as the incorporation of individual cells into complex organisms massively increases the load of DNA they had to carry, as each had to carry the pattern of the whole while occupying its own small niche in the whole.

How do you reconcile this with the seven factors of enlightenment - mindfulness, investigation, energy, rapture, calm, concentration, equanimity?

Buddhism demands complete mental adherence to a set of beliefs which if strongly enough internalised and fixed upon can lead to a state of happiness. One must firmly reject the possibility of a paradigm change.

[page 123]

On the other hand, it leads each adherent to these beliefs with a relatively gentle hand. It seems to extol consciousness, but the emphasis on right belief seems suspect, except that the right belief be in fact right, ie like Lonergan's metaphysics, not subject to revision, only to elaboration. In this sense, enlightenment is akin to a vision of the true nature of the world, something that I feel that I am experiencing as a physicist . .. at the moment, at last a crack in the armour of impenetrability [ie the Universe is divine].

What we have in each religion, in each methodology or paradigm is a relatively stable and coherent way of dealing with the phenomena we experience. Buddhism is one such approach. Such approaches must be united in a higher viewpoint. Buddhism is obviously an ingredient for such a viewpoint. Buddhism itself is an area of apparent stability (local minimum in energy terms), but there are other minima accessible to it if it is shaken up a bit more, like Catholicism etc. All new knowledge comes from uniting odd bits and pieces.

"A tranquillised mind keeps away all superficialities and futilities - 7 factors of enlightenment Piyadassi Thera. Thera

[page 124]

Maybe Buddhism is organised imposition of consciousness on people, while trying to suppress the madness that consciousness brings, as marriage is an attempt to sanctify the childbearing from the madness of entropy seeking love.

"Uninvited he came, uninvited he passed away, as he came, so he went, what is the use of lamenting, weeping and wailing."

"all beings are the result of their actions" p 28

[notebook Articles I, DB 25]

[page 27]

For the time being context is invariant. Let us give contexts a half life or characteristic time which is measured in proper time A photon and other particles travelling at c have no proper time, and, lets say, are very primitive - get ll their information from their context and have no entropy of their own? Yes, they start and end.

context determines characteristics of a source - we cannot say context is a source, but we can characterise a communication as internal or external. Can only be internal. Sending coded messages unheard into thin air is not communication. But when someone picks one up and replies, you have a structure, followed by an evolution of the terminals and the messages to maintain stability. Context is not a thing, but stable structures. Messages and codes come into being together. Within a context there may be many sources, A. The message structure

Communication keeps things together, eg armies, and the overall intelligibility of the system resides in the whole, not in the parts of it. Let us define a form as an ordered set comprising a set of contexts, U_i, a set of messages S_k - is there anything else?

[page 28]

Assume there is no noise in the Universe, only indeterminacy.
Assume breakdown of structure means breakdown of communication.

terms for context deeper = wider = simpler = higher energy contexts are intelligible, not physical. They apply to whole Universe.

Entropy of form = context + message.
The specific component of a given form are its channels
The establishment of a [communication] channel is equivalent to insight = an event. A photon is only absorbed if it is the right frequency, that is the sender and the receiver have the same code.

State of motion determines how things will communicate. Random relative motions open up the possibility of an event = an act of communication. Absorption cross sections determine the rate of events happening, ie the rate of insight. A particular intelligence has a particular cross section for a particular sort of information. Explore the conditions necessary for cross section.

[page 29]

. . .

Sole condition for communication = mutual intelligibility. Code breaking is necessary to establish communication with an enemy. We already share language, species, etc with them.

The theory of communication itself has to be pretty deep context — ie entropy. Function of creation operator is to increase entropy. Claude E Shannon

Then as well as the theory of communication thee are the actual messages, which serve the function of keeping the act together. In a human household they have quite high entropy, dealing with food, sex, children, money, building, pleasure etc etc.

Extern messages from a structure are seeking new unions. At the level of U₀ the universe is irretrievably one.

[page 30]

. . .

New establishment of communication adds new context. . . .

Duration of communication determined by uncertainty principle. To be in the same context [peerdom] is to be ne being. We are al in the gravitational context, U_grav. Many things are in the electrical context U_elect, but not all. Similarly with strong force etc.

[page 31]

What structures have to face is competition - effects of the context trying to communicate differently from the structure - marital squabbles, jealousy, etc, cleaving to another - chemical equilibrium, evolutionary equilibria etc. Higher context removes things from equilibrium by inventing more and more states [eg impact of internet].

Entropy is the supreme good - diversity, ability to communicate enormous messages.

If we understand the dynamic process that produces something we can understand the structure of what is produced and vice versa, This is a boot-strapping situation.

[notebook Creation - The Metaphysics of Peace I= CMP I: DB20]

Wednesday 12 October 1983

Coding approach. Smoothly rounded thigh and sexy breast have a number of things going for them. In addition to minimising the surface area and thus heat gains and losses and surface vulnerability, they require a minimum of information for their specification. In general coding is a balance between data storage and calculation on the fly. Long used DNA in phi 174 can be expected to be optimally coded. Phi X 174 - Wikipedia

The simplest manifestation of contradiction in the process of communication is shown by diffraction if we consider the phase of the waves to me a manifestation

[page 125]

of some sort of binary state. What is continuous is not the wave, but the probability that something is in one state or another. When there is a contradiction of states, there is no being, no particle there. Where the states are in harmony, there is plenty of particle. Somewhere in this is the reconciliation between the wave and particle pictures of the Universe. And what about sampling theorem and Nyquist frequency. Justin Romberg

Pawlicki: The technology dominating a civilisation is determined by the concept of reality believed by its social leaders. Pawlicki page 108

[notebook Articles I, DB 25]

[page 31]

Entropy of code equal to entropyof source for given length of encoded message. What is special about a good code is not its entropy but the distinguishability of its code blocs. If noise becomes a problem, length of coded blocs must be increases. Actual and potential entropy. Given code entropy H the mber of possible codings is 2^H, of which a very small number will be the best. The best code is that which takes the most errors to corrupt., ie each [block] should differ from the others in the ost possibe ways and corruptibility should

<> [page 32]

be distributed. . . .

. . .

[page 38]

Park page 5: 'Maxwell's equations describe the phenomenon quite accurately, and so any new theory must be abe to be approximated to Maxwell where the phenomena are observable. Park

page 8: Compton scattering, a test case of communication. All those processes in which conservation of energy/momentum provides the sole intelligibility to be gleaned can be treated as having very low (the lowest?) level of coding, Physics as a lot to say about this level, though most of the information input is via boundary conditions, Compton scattering - Wikipedia

Wave communicates energy and spatial information to the electron. Head on collision, the incident photon is reversed in direction. Phenomenon is explained by the relativistic conservation of energy and momentum, compton shift Δλ = h / mc (1 - cosφ) where φ is the scattering angle of the electron.

. . .

[page 39]

Here simple superposition applies at the simplest level in physics, ie photons and moving particles.

Park page 10: Newtonian mechanics does not account for stability and size of atom. Electron's orbital angular momentum is restricted to be an integral multiple of ℏ = 1 bit per second (??) spacewise, 10¹⁵ bits / sec timewise.

page 11: total energy in nth orbit = -1/n² Ry = rate of communication with nucleus. When this rate changes, by absorption of a photon, ration of internal / external communication changed.

page 12: emitted and absorbed energies related to differences in energy levels of electron. What we want to say is that emission of a photon somehow corresponds to more efficient coding[communication] in the atom, ie electron gets closer.

. . .

[page 40]

Bohr is not so much quantum mechanics as ad hocery, and thank goodness because it does not seem to make sense.

Thursday 13 October 1983

Numerical, quantitative, conservation type arguments apply to the lowest level of coding (?).

. . . Planck oscillator: continuous wave emits energy but not entropy, or perhaps entropy of one bit per cycle, in physical terms, since there are two states.

Stationary state emits zero spatial entropy but communicates with itself through time.

. . .

[page 41]

Monochromatic (zero entropy?) beam cannot define anything. Modulation required to put structure into it. Yet it can (theoretically) carry energy.

page 20: . . . superposition is a mechanism for modulation, ie adding entropy.

Noise may be considered as incoherently superposed waves - incoherent standing waves - spatial structure. Wave function is superposed . . . suppose that it specifies all that is to be known about the system it represents. scalar. We want equations of motion? structures of motion determined by the structure of the universe. Schrödinger equation - Wikipedia

page 22: . . . bounding a wave automatically results in quantization
Wave mechanics, one of several equivalent formulations of quantum physics - this is an artefact of the mathematics.

What we want to do is reinterpret the wave function in terms of entropy - maybe merely mathematical mucking around. But |φ(x)|² is the probability that a particle will be at <>x, . . .

[page 42]

If once we have formalized the relationship between wave function and entropy we can relate quantum mechanics to coding or something lovely like that, we will have a paper.

'Only those quantities that can be measured have any real meaning in physics (?) complementarity.

Vectors, tensors, etc are in the end notational rules that have to be decomposed into their elements (contexts) to carry out actual calculations.

. . .

[page 43]

Confinement automatically gives the electron energy, depending on the quantum number, momentum etc, How do we calculate entropy of ψ²? [Shannon's formula]

. . .

[page 47]

Park page 30: Hydrogen atoms are all alike, but differ in their states. This is a case of context vs message. The nature of the H atom (context )determines the states (symbols, letters) it can be in. It emits symbos according t its changes of state. The full symbol set of a free hydrogen atom is its set of spectral lines, From this set of messages, we have reconstructed the nature (code) of the atom, which contains a lot of redundancy explored in the laws of quantum mechanics. The set of states of the has the same entropy as the atom which is a probability space created as a product space of its deeper contexts.

So many mental blocks. What are they? Subconscious saying this is the wrong way.

page 32: Fourier's theorem. Fourier series is like Tayyor series - merely a mathematical model for approximating a given function by the superposition of periodic functions, It may or may not have true physical significance although the odds are that ui has in some way. We are given a set of lego blocks of different sizes ad may fit them together howsoever we want, specifying the resulting structure either as itself or as its block mix. The same information is carried in both representations, Does information theory undercut this?

[page 48]

The entropy of a given function can be measured by the number of terms of a fourier series needed to approximate it. An infinitely steep step function requires an infinite number of terms, and therfore an infinite amount of entropy to express it. Each infinite wave train can be counted as adding one bit of information, Maybe maximum information per energy occurs only at zero frequency, in which case instead of getting 0101010101010 we just get 01.

. . .

[page 49]

. . .

[page 52]

. . .

Park page 47: complementarity / measurement = communication in a context, The meaning of the communication is defined by the context. When we start to get a message that we can no longer understand we assume that the sender has changed his context. Either we can ask for the new code or we have to work it our ourselves. Neither message or context are logically rpior. Only the context is more stable, but it did not exist before the first message, now will it exist after the last.

. . .

Friday 14 October 1983

[notebook Articles I, DB 25 continued]

[page 55]

Park page 168: Would do well to calculate the entropy of all possible states of the hydrogen atom. Radial coulomb field produces an infinity of energy levels, but these are occupied with varying probability. Where does this large entropy come from? Two spin states of electron and proton, and a large set of stationary angular momenta - eigenstates, These states are occupied with low probability unless the atom is excited by energy from outside.

Where, if anywhere, does this fit into our model? States are solutions to the wave equation, which provides a context, as a differential equation, which expresses conservation of energy and momentum and the relationship between these quantities and frequency and wavelength. What we have is a structure which explains the atomic spectra of the elements. From Chaitin's point of view, the actual entropy of the structure is expressed in the wave equation and boundary conditions. Many acts of insight are required to arrive at the final solution for the equations, as witness treatises on the subject. . . .

[page 56]

Heuristic structures are deeper contexts. Such is metaphysics to all knowledge , the wave equation and conservation laws to quantum mechanics. Previous context/ messages make heuristic structure. So the electron entering the atom works it out, and how does it do it? By talking to the proton, there is no other way. And the relationship is maintained by continuous conversation, otherwise thee is no way for it to happen. The only memory the Universe has is stable, continuous interaction. Instability is caused by breakdown in communication. So the lack of definition of the position of an electron in an atom is the limitation of communication necessary to localise it more sharply. The Universe simply cannot be resolved any more sharply at that energy. Within the nucleus and the electron itself, the energy of communication is much higher. The rest mass is simply the irreducible mass at the most efficient possible coding. Excited states represent some sort of less efficient, but nevertheless stable structure. Every energy level is a more redundant form of the ground state. Where are the parts of the electron then? You cannot take it apart. It is the most fundamental structure possible in that form. It has no stable parts. Its size and mass are dictated by the very rate of its internal communication. . . . Lonergan: Insight

. . .

[page 59]

. . .

Each particle is a net of points held together and differentiated by communication. The distance between points is in some way determined by energy. ...

...

[page 65]

The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, DeWitt and Graham eds. de Witt and Graham.

de Witt page v: The state vector for the whole Universe .. is rigorously deterministic.

page vi: Actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism days, such possibilities exist and form part of the truth' William James, Entropy.

page 3: The Theory of the Universal Wave Function: Hugh Everett III.

The state function is an element of Hilbert space. Two ways for the state function to change: a) by observation; b) by deterministic process according to the wave equation.

page 5: 'the general validity of pure wave mechanics, without any statistical assertions, is assumed for all physical systems.

page 9: the theory of the universal wave function.

'The present thesis is devoted to showing that this concept of universal wave mechanics, together with the necessary correlation machinery

[page 66]

for its interpretation, forms a logically self consistent description of a Universe in which several observers are at work.

'We are then led to the novel situation in which the formal theory is objectively continuous and causal, while subjectively discontinuous and probabilistic.'

page 16: He has missed the most important part of the definition of information, which is that it depends upon the entropy of the state about which one learns. One learns most upon hearing the outcome of an equiprobable situation. He says one learns most in a situation where there is only one overwhelmingly probable outcome.

...

[page 71]

...

deWitt page 141: 'Relative State' Formulation of Quantum Mechanics: Hugh Everett III

No experimental evidence is known which contradicts quantum mechanics.

...

It takes time for the system and the observer to become correlated.

Saturday 15 October 1983