Notes
[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]
[Sunday 20 January 2002 - Saturday 26 January 2002]
[page 30]
Sunday 20 January 2002
Monday 21 January 2002
Tuesday 22 January 2002
Wednesday 23 January 2002
Thursday 24 January 2002
Does Brouwer's fixed point theorem require fixed points in all dynamics? In all permutations? Casti, p 43. Is it an answer to the 'Buddhist problem'. Simplicity.
Friday 25 January 2002
The golden rule (who's got the gold makes the rules) can be inverted. Given the democratic principle that we must all share in making the rules, it may be discerned that we must all share the gold, in order to share the rulemaking power.
We might set out to resolve the difficulties in mapping quantum mechanical Hilbert space onto general relativistic four space by examining the union and division of Hilbert spaces. The next required bit of software is a comprehensive tome on Hilbert space. Veltman.
Compassion and the Bodhisattva - flattening people's spaces. Capra 98: "A Bodhisattva . . . is not seeking enlightenment for himself [sic] alone, but has vowed to help all other beings achieve Buddhahood before he enters into nirvana." This is the normal attitude of a parent.
"The basis of [the Pure Land School of Mahayana Buddhism] is the . . . doctrine that the original nature of all human beings is that of a Buddha, and it holds that in order to enter nirvana, or the "Pure Land", all one has to do is to have faith in one's original Buddha nature.
Culmination of Buddhism = Avatamsaka school, based on Avatamsaka-sutra (Suzuki, "On Indian Mahayana Buddhism, p 122). Suzuki. Cleary.
[page 32]
"The central theme of the Avatamsaka is the unity and interrelation of all things and events . . . " Suzuki p 99.
Saturday 26 January 2002
Toward the book 'Physical Theology'
Introduction: Physics is the study of the dynamics of the Universe. Western dynamics has a long history. From a literary point of view, its roots lie in ancient Greece when those people first began to wonder in writing about what makes the world tick. Initial efforts in this direction were mythical and dramatic. Drawing on the experience of everyday life and the conscious mental experience accompanying human action, they imagined that the world was controlled by powerful personalities (sometimes called gods) who managed the world in a manner analogous to the way ordinary people managed their lives, farming, building, hunting, forming and breaking relationships, managing households, reproducing and so on.
The next stage was to devise a collective picture of a world full of gods which came to be called physics. Every entity became endowed with a nature that makes it do what it does in the various situations in which it finds itself. So fire naturally rises, heavy things fall, plants and animals follow their diverse natures and we too have a nature, difficult to understand and control which often leads to happiness or disaster, something to be captured by poets and dramatists.
Simple natures are easier to understand than complex ones, so progress in understanding the dynamics of the Universe has been faster at the simple end of the spectrum, the region now studied by physics, chemistry and biology. Although these sciences all have different names, they all have to do with the nature of things, and can therefore be considered branches of physics.
[page 33]
The evolution of the concept of nature was accompanied by a corresponding evolution of the concept of god, giving rise to the discipline we call metaphysics or theology.
. . .
So we come to the position that physics and theology lie at the opposite extremes of the spectrum of complexity.
. . .
The first version of the book will be the thesis, which when sufficiently perfected, can be submitted to a university in pursuit of a degree of some kind. This technical monograph can then be expanded with a non-mathematical expression of the core dynamical ideas, to give a publishable book.
We start with the largest imaginable dynamic structure, which we imagine to be a network of all ℵ0 possible Turing machines.
