Notes
[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]
[Sunday 2 December 2001 - Saturday 8 December 2001]
[page 8]
Sunday 2 December 2001
'bringing up children' is another name for 'downloading religion' remembering that in a world of consumer sovereignty the protocol states that no system can be compelled to receive a download,
[page 9]
ie input control. If systems had complete input control, they could avoid perturbation, but this is not possible because every organism is less complex than its environment (as a part is less complex than the whole) and therefore will encounter situations outside its experience. So one is exposed once again to children and others who have grown up with more than their fair share of police, violence, deception, etc.
If we use education as the general term for the acquisition of religion by a new entrant in to the human race, the religious question becomes a matter of defining the nature and quality of the content of education and the method of its delivery.
We have vast volumes of historical precedent to draw on in our critical assessment of religion and educational methods. Some educational methods avoid violence. The fact that people have lived for hundreds of thousands of years before modern education was invented suggests that the old ways were effective, at least in a stable environment. Perhaps the deepest truth we can discern in this history is that the education of an individual contributes to its fitness approximately in proportion to the amount of care devoted to the task.
Why am I going to all this trouble? To communicate with other members of my species. Why do I wish to communicate with them? To increase the chances of myself and my children leading a happy life.
Monday 3 December 2001
There seems to be little doubt that it is possible to manage human affairs with relative peace and justice if the religion of the community is good. What do we mean by a good religion? This is the question we want to answer. Use the science of theology to develop a viable technology of peace. This task seems urgent to many aware of the state of the world, but is also difficult and
[page 10]
hard to comprehend as the confusion of this site shows. We go on despite the confusion (with the hope of eventually resolving it) motivated by our central slogan '(other things being equal) peace follows bandwidth', so the more we talk about theology the better, even if it is still the babble of babes who have not learnt the language yet.
We can talk of the abstract theory of communication (Shannon) or the more concrete theory (Semantics). As we move from physics to theology we become more and more concrete as we follow the functioning of the world across the spectrum from the quantum of action to the meaning of life. We study semantics by looking for symmetries in meaning. We model meaning using the set theoretical concept of mapping, so x means me, x corresponds to me, x is my name (in some language, eg English, genomic),
The spiritual power (grace) of the world flows from the fact that the mechanism of meaning enables us to complete a given task with less physical resource (action). So meaning ratchets the world ahead not least by enabling us to establish error free communication (first in physical hardware) and then in more spiritual realms, such as this discussion.
PEACEMAKING is not necessarily easy, because of the connection between grace, freedom and work. It is grace that gives us freedom, but it is work that unlocks the flow of grace, and faith, insofar as that faith is a true representation of the world.
These notebooks began as a private resource. A few years ago I decided to publish relevant sections of them on the web as a searchable resource enabling myself and others to trace the history of my development more clearly. Now since I am conscious of my intent to publish, the daily notes have become like a newspaper column describing and advertising the analytic work that lies behind the natural religion project.
[page 11]
Letter to the pope may take the form of a commentary on Thomas's first way.
Maximum bandwidth = UNLOADED. Loaded talk leads not to peace but to more trouble because it ignores large areas of the solution space. Note that complex numbers are necessary to complete the solution space of polynomials.
Tuesday 4 December 2001
Wednesday 5 December 2001
Thursday 6 December 2001
Friday 7 December 2001
It is impossible to write a textbook before you have the discipline. My dream since about 1964 has been to write a textbook of theology to update the Summa. Aquinas. Only one basic change was needed: to identify rather than distinguish god and the world. But the consequences are endless, and the location of the natural starting point of theology, god, becomes much more difficult because we have to reconcile the differences between our idea of god and the world that led the likes of Parmenides to distinguish these ideas in the first place. Parmenides.
The websites began as an attempt to write the textbook, developing the subject from first principles, etc etc., but the rate of change in the organization and the slowness of the production mean that I, like T, have to wait till the end of my working life to pull it all together. And when he stopped near the end and said he had seen unspeakable beauty, perhaps he himself saw the model dependent nature of the picture he was painting, and had stepped out of the model to confront god face to face.
Asimov: "No one can say that science fiction writers and readers put man on the moon all by themselves, but they created a climate of opinion in which the goal became acceptable." Benford.
We want to do the same for heaven using applied dynamics (theology) to bring heaven down to earth just as we applied Newtonian dynamics to the task of getting people into the heavens.
The decision to publish my notebooks (despite some embarrassment contained therein) stemmed from the need to have available a body of relatively raw data within which to search for theological models. Unlike purely physical sciences, theology embraces the whole and must therefore embrace mind and consciousness as well as molecular dynamics. We are all privy to our own mind, but the only written (and therefore publicly examinable) record of a mind that I have to present is my own.
Mind is conscious, so these notebooks represent a conscious person seeking to understand consciousness: (since it seems relatively easy to understand physics) what do atoms and I have in common that could enable us to understand one another's feeling? Assumes that it is the needs to communicate, because it is only through communication that one becomes part of the whole and so survives.
There are implications of a divine Universe for the survival of the human race and our planet, since most of our wars and treatment of one another have theological and religious boundaries. The conflicting elements in distinct theologies and religions can only be ironed out by a thoroughgoing scientific exposition of the consequences of the fact that we are all potentially one mating, reproducing and loving species of animal closely bound to the other plants, animals and other elements of our environment.
The urgency of this matter is a reason to communicate loudly, to yell for help in fact. So the web site is making a gradual change from a textbook to a player at the theological, religious, political and economic
[page 13]
tables. We have come a full circle here, because we want to get into the top game, and so our theological foundations must have textbook precision. So this incarnation, as a research and consultant organization. Here we hope to develop the scientific clout which will eventually launch us onto the path of exponential growth as intellectual power is expanded into political and economic power.
Without doubt this project would proceed faster if more people were working on it, and so has to make itself attractive in some way. This means to predict a rosy future if one assimilates our wares. The dreams alluded to in these notes are probably more attractive than the difficult business of teasing the truth out of thousands of years of theological, metaphysical and physical speculation.
David Hume: "Be a philosopher, but amidst all you philosophy be still a man [sic]" otherwise ones attempts to philosophize about humanity are bereft of data.
T S Eliot "We are the music while the music lasts", Quoted in Benford.
We can parametrize political left and right by their [frequencies]. At the extreme right, t = 0, at the extreme left, t = ℵ0
Saturday 8 December 2001
[page 14]
Lonergan's metaphysics is based on an n-thousand year record of introspection which is encapsulated for us in the set of all human literature interpreted through the minds of individual readers, which are themselves the product of a lifetime of experience mediated by the senses and the central nervous system. We might call this the inside, or geisteswissenschaftlich approach to metaphysics.
The alternative which I propose here is an outside view, ie naturwissenschaftlich. Introspection provides the data which is understood through the traditional models such as that proposed in Insight. Lonergan. In Insight , insight is taken as a given mental phenomenon, rather similar to other singular events in human experience like orgasm or the explosion of anger [or death].
We take the same introspective data, common in some degree to all of us, but we add physiological or cybernetic dimensions to it. Like orgasm, we see insight as a complex physiological phenomenon involving numerous sensors, processors, communication links and effectors which combine to produce a certain experience. The theory of evolution tells us that whatever else we may say about our responses to various inputs (or lack of input), they have contributed to our survival. More detailed models show us both how they contribute and how they work.
Insight is one such experience, the feeling of successfully seeing the relationships and implications of a certain body of data, and it is ripe for physiological explanation. From the point of view of a standard metaphysical hunch, the very universality of insight suggests that its explanation may shed light on the whole of reality, hence the deep path worn between the theory of knowledge and the theory of reality.
Physics showed the way beginning from Galileo's insight that mathematics is the language of nature. Here we want to add that mathematics is the language of god.
[page 15]
What is a language? We begin with a more general question. What is language? And we give a mathematical answer, thus establishing, in a way, that mathematics is self explanatory, one of the marks of divinity.
Computer games vs mind games (social games, sexual games, etc). Bandwidth.
