Notes
[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]
[Sunday 10 February 2002 - Saturday 2 February 2002]
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Sunday 10 February 2002
Security by violence = increased power = yell louder vs security by complexity = application of Shannon's theorems. There is a space opening between the US and Europe, where US is espousing the violent approach, Europe the political or complexity approach.
We postulate that mathematical theorems are the symmetries (worm holes) that give intelligible structure to the transfinite network. Shannon's theorems are important examples of this, showing how the evolution of complexity and stability go hand in hand.
The idea first expressed in Ground for Concern (Elliott) but has not made much progress so far. Elliott. Perhaps it is present in the literature of political science, something which a search of the net might help to determine (make from question = infinite to answered question = finite). Otherwise we may take it as another example of the harm done by the establishment of theoretical and institutional differentiation between the natural and spiritual sciences that must be healed if we are to go further. My next submission to the ACU will be to the Vice Chancellor (as the natural coordinator of the arts and sciences) requesting a proper hearing for my proposals for returning theology to the fold of science, on the assumption that science covers the arts in the same way as the arts cover the sciences. A new file "The ACU Letters".
Muslim and Christian jihad are both examples of attempts
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to correct error by power rather than complexity. Here we have to discriminate the physical definition of power from the political, since while physical power can be simply measured in watts power is a matter of both watts (the battlefield output of an army) and bits (entropy, complexity) as a measure of the complexity of the political structure, giving a complex entity like the Roman Empire or the USA power over simple people. This power is wielded in the first instance by the religious missionaries, who, together with the army (the civil power) have united to extinguish so many small and relatively weak cultures and civilizations. We can see this reflected in the dominance of colonial languages.
Here is where the Lagrangian approach to human affairs (and the affairs of other entities whose survival depends upon the appropriation of adequate resources) ie the question of balancing physical power and entropy power. We see it best demonstrates in chemistry (statistical mechanics) in the definition of free energy: Free energy = f(energy, entropy).
Seen also in the culture of the gun is the culture of negotiation and adaptation.
Democracy is the political manifestation of the complexification approach to peace which in the last few centuries has been gaining power relative to the power approach taken by authoritarian and (consequently) military and police regimes. Onespecies, by distributing physical power (ie money) to every individual, thereby increases the entropy (and potential stability) of the society.
The writers of the Bible were scientists recording their experiences. Interpreters of the Bible are in the same position as historians of science, examining the scientific texts to see how they were generated and seeking to know what everyone was thinking and saying to one another as they carried the scientific effort forward. But like commentators everywhere, they add a human dimension to what is going on, but are effectively outside and after the creative loop where the real action is happening.
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O Brother Where Art Thou.
Gibbs (Helmholz) again. delta G = delta H - T delta S, ie change in G ('free energy') = change in enthalpy (internal energy) - T x change in entropy. H = energy per particle x number of particles (in a gas all kinetic, otherwise some energy due to potential) Reaction is favourable (will proceed) if delta G is negative, that is T delta S > delta H. As suggested, we divide through by T and consider 'microthermodynamic' behaviour, so delta G/T = delta H/T - delta S: all these quantities are entropies, that is energy/temperature. Map energy to money and temperature to cost of living, so that delta G, delta S etc relate to chances of survival of the system to which the values apply. Is this leading anywhere? Think of the reaction that forms a community out of a set of individuals. In chemical terms, this will proceed if it reduces the energy per particle or increases the entropy of the system. Since complex systems may be considered to have more degrees of freedom, and so more entropy, ie less energy per degree of freedom, the formation of complex systems may be seen to be favoured if the increase in entropy outweighs the energy released by the combination. Chew this over.
Monday 11 February 2002
Sunday: Senegal almost wins Africa cup - lost on penalties.
We may think of heat as distributed energy, and see that in a gas, for instance, we have a Maxwell distribution of kinetic energy among the particles, a result of pure collision without any overriding potential. We may think of a gas as a free individual economy in which every collision represents a 'deal' in which conservation of money (energy) [value] holds and each participant comes with a certain share of the energy [value] and leaves with another share. The actual sharing here is determined by the conservation of momentum, a vector quantity (while energy is scalar). What does this mapping suggest, if anything?
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Momentum: spatial information, ie information coded in spatial arrangement; energy: information coded in temporal arrangement; action: information coded in spacetime,
The existence of life and the survival all comes down to solar radiation. The sun, like the rain, shines on all people without favouritism. The onespecies initiative models this situation, injecting low entropy = profit = grace into all people, enabling them to purchase food and shelter at a minimum.
'"We terrified them", We are the mightiest military in the history of the world.' Senator Joseph Wegener. Axis of evil.
A momentum operator projects the momentum of a system onto a particular basis vector? There is enough complexity in a Hilbert space to represent any countably infinite structure.
Career: fundamental role in a social system - engineer, hunter, child raiser, psychologist, theologian, plant operator, craftsperson etc etc. a) manipulating the physical world; b) manipulating human psychological world. a) farmer; b) teacher.
Koran is our constitution. Anything that contradicts our Surah is not possible. "Our traditions and our culture is different from those of the west." Saudi Arabia Prince Anwaled bin Saleed, Hard Talk, BBC World.
Tuesday 12 February 2002
Wednesday 13 February 2002
Thursday 14 February 2002
Until this trip, I did not understand how fundamentalist the fundamentalist wing of the Muslim centres of power can be. Comparable to the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican I days, where it codified its claims to absolute power and truth in the constitution on the church. The RCC operates on the premise that it has an absolutely sure channel to an all
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powerful, knowing and truthful God. Now, while we take it as fundamental that such a god exists (and we identify it with the Universe revealed by science and human knowledge and action in general), we disagree that a reliable channel is established to god through the interpretation of ancient texts. These texts themselves are works of science, that is the translation of experience into writing. In science, as in religion, the text is both the output and the input for further development. The corpus of scientific texts ('the literature') is huge and growing at an exponential rate (the knowledge explosion). Each item in the literature refers to items that went before it, and brings in some new data, and an interpretation of this data in terms of the language developed in relevant portions of the literature (dealing, say, with the transformation of a healthy cell into a cancerous cell). In the scientific view, the literature is a growing set of points (the articles) which are connected in various ways. The fundamental constraint on this connection is an ordering in time. An article, to be intelligible relies on the language developed in previous articles. The evolution of scientific language (like the evolution of genetic language) is a time ordered process, a tree whose every layer (measured through time) is bound into a network of communication and influence. The literature, like the genes, adapts to the evolving phenotype of individual and environment. Items in the literature are fixed points in the dynamic space of our growing knowledge of our environment, which we assume to be god. God is continuously revealing itself to us, and the literature is a set of discrete points in the space of this revelation. New publications continuously adapt the literature to the different threads of scientific perception of god. In sum, the literature adapts to reality. [with a certain time lag]
Fundamentalism adopts the reverse hypothesis: that the literature (often called sacred literature) is a fixed identity and reality (or at least human reality) must conform to this text. While there is an active industry devoted to interpreting the invariant literature in the light of changing circumstances, the fundamental assumption is that the corpus of sacred (that is primary) literature is fixed for all time. This is the firm view of the Roman Catholic Church (rcc), the most powerful western fundamentalist organization.
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The Muslim world also has a strong fundamentalist streak, but its implementation in human affairs is different. The rcc is a single organization with one person, the Pope, at its head, and RCC law attributes absolute power to the Pope in the Church, and indeed in the world. Although it actively proselytizes for adherents (converts) the rcc has failed to exercise its mandate over many parts of the human world. It has, nevertheless, about one billion adherents, nearly 20% of the population of the globe. I was raised in the rcc and tried (but failed) to enter its structure. Islam has no global organized power structure to mirror the hierarchy of pope, cardinals, bishops, priests, religious superiors, tribunals, councils etc etc that manage the church and attempt to maintain its unity and its fidelity to tradition. What it shares with the rcc, however, is adherence to a fundamental text, the QUR'AN which serves a function similar to the BIBLE in the rcc and the other (usually less organized) Christian churches. Surrounding both the Bible and the Qur'an are bodies of scholars devoted to interpreting the sacred text in modern language. The fundamental hypothesis of Qur'an scholarship is the primacy of the text. (Picthall)
"The Qur'an cannot be translated. This is the belief of the old-fashioned Sheyks and the view of the present writer. The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur'an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men [and perhaps women] to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to represent the meaning of the Qur'an - and peradventure something of its charm - in English. It can never take the place of the Qur'an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so. Pickthall.
The power structures associated with the Qur'an are not Churches (largely independent of States) but states that, as the prince says, use the Qur'an as their constitution.
MUHAMMAD was born 53 years before the Hijrah (Picthall page xv)
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Married Khadija and lived together 26 years until her death,
'This marriage gave him rank among the notables of Makkah, where his conduct earned him the surname Al-Amin, the trustworthy.'
'The Makkans claimed descent from Abraham [also a father of Christianity whose history is recorded in the Bible] through Ishmael, and tradition stated that their temple, the Ka'bah, had been built by Abraham for the worship of the One God [who is the ancestor of the modern day Christian and Muslim ideas of God] [see decree of Vatican II, Dei Verbum]
Muhammad became a Hanif 'a word originally meaning "those who turn away" (from the existing idol worship) [ie mistaking the representation for reality] but coming in the end to mean "upright" or "by nature upright", because such persons held the way of truth to be right conduct [a very common hypothesis of religion shared with Christianity and the other big religious groups, Hindus and Buddhists]
'It was his practice to retire with his family for a month every year to a cave in the desert for meditation. His place of retreat was Hird, a desert hill not far from Makkah, and his chosen month was Ramadan, the month of heat.'
First revelation at age 40 during Ramadan retreat (page xvi)
'He was asleep or in a trance when he heard a voice say "Read". He said "I cannot read" . . . He said "What can I read?" The voice said
Read: In the name of the Lord who createth.
Createth man from a clot.
Read: And it is thy Lord the Most Bountiful
Who teacheth by the pen,
Teacheth man that which he know not. (Qur'an 96:1-5)
When he awoke the words remind 'as if inscribed upon his heart'. He went out of the cave on the hillside and heard the same inspiring voice say: "O Muhammad! Thou art Allah's messenger, and I am Gabriel." A voice of natural power like the Universe talking to us and revealing what we must do to survive and grow from
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moment to moment at every scale of temporal resolution. The scientific literature provides us with a model of this process by which the structure of each moment is determined by previous moments. Every life is a dialogue between self and environment which we hope to model with the transfinite network.
'Muhammad (god bless him) stood quite still, turning away his face from the brightness of the vision [which we are all inclined to do when faced with reality] but whithersoever he might turn his face there always stood the angel confronting him. He remained thus a long while till at length the angel vanished, when he returned in great distress to his wife Khadija. [Is there a movie of this parallel to the lives of Jesus?] She did her best to reassure him by saying that his conduct had been such that Allah would not let a harmful spirit come to him and that it was her hope that he was to become a Prophet of his people. [cf the Messiah].
Now the good news does not come from an individual, but the nature of the world, which opens up a prospect of heaven for us if we learn to exploit it wisely.
'On their return to Makkah she took him to her cousin Warada ibn Naufal, a very old man "who knew the scriptures of the Jews and Christians", who declared his belief that the heavenly messenger who came to Moses of old had come to Muhammad, and that he was chosen as the Prophet of his people [compare Einstein and all like him, who to a greater or lesser degree are 'chosen' top revel new features of the divinity].
'the Hinafa . . . sought true religion in the natural and regarded with distrust the intercourse with spirits of which men "avid for the Unseen (81:24)" sorcerers and soothsayers and even poets, boasted in those days.'
'The early biographers tell how his wife Khadijah "tried the spirit" which came to him and proved it to be good, and how, with the continuance of revelations and the conviction that that they brought, he at length accepted the tremendous task imposed
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on him and became filled with an enthusiasm of obedience which justifies his proudest title of "The Slave of Allah".' (Pickthall xvii) A scientific outlook, as the early quantum mechanics were enslaved by their observations of the world to come up with a remarkable new model of how the world worked. (xvii).
'The words which came to him in a state of trance are held sacred by the Muslims and are never confounded with those that he uttered when no physical change was apparent in him. The former are the Sacred Book; the latter the Hadith or Sunnah of the Prophet. And because the Angel on Mt Here bade him "Read" - insisted on his "reading" though he was illiterate - the Sacred Book is known as Al Qur'an, "The Reading", the Reading of the man who knew not how to read.' (xviii)
'At the end of the third year the prophet received the command "to arise and warn" (74:2) whereupon he began to preach in public, pointing out the wretched folly of idolatry in the face of the tremendous laws of day and night, of life and death, of growth and decay which manifest the power of Allah and attest his sovereignty.' (xviii)
ie he preached a natural or scientific foundation of religion, based on our experience of the world. We assume his 'angel' was an image of himself.
'It was then, when he began to speak against their gods that the Quraysh became actively hostile, persecuting his poorer disciples, mocking and insulting him' (xviii)
This is the natural reaction of a fundamentalist society, to resist change.
Flight to Abyssinia, a Christian country. A number of poorer [and so more vulnerable?] converts went - the first Hijrah.
When Abyssinian bishops questioned him Ja'fa ibn Ali Talib, cousin of the Prophet, answered:
We were fully immersed in ignorance, worshipping idols, eating carrion, given to lewdness, severing the ties of kinship, bad neighbours . . . (page 419, Introduction to Surah 19)
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Friday 15 February 2002
Saturday 16 February 2002
Picthall xix: deed of ostracism: 'The exasperation of the idolators was increased by the conversion of Umar, one of their stalwarts . . . . They decided to ostracize the Prophet's whole clan, idolaters who protected him as well as Muslims who believed in him.' Economic, political and social ostracism.
Destruction of the Sahifah. Friends managed to have the document of ostracism revealed. When brought out from the Ka'bah, it was found to be all destroyed by white ants except the words 'Bismiha Allahumma (In the Name of Allah). Elders, on seeing this ban, revoked ostracism, but opposition continued to grow.
Muhammad, recognized as the Prophet expected by the Jewish Rannis in the city of Yathrib (Al-Madinah "The City"). In the next year a deputation from Yathrib went to meet the Prophet and swore allegiance to him in "The first part of Al-'Aquabah" 'the oath they took being that which was afterwards exacted from women converts, with no mention of fighting' (xxi)
Plot to murder the Prophet.
'They cast lots and chose a slayer out of every clan. All these were to attack the Prophet simultaneously and strike together as one man. Thus his blood would be on all Quraysh. It was at this time (Ibn Khaldim asserts, and it is the only satisfactory explanation of what happened afterwards) that the Prophet received his first revelation ordering him to make war upon his persecutors "until persecution is no more and religion is for Allah only" '(8:39)
The beginning of the Muslim role in the wars of religion which appear to have been always with us.
The Hijrah (June 20, 622 ad).
Muhammad left Makkah on the night appointed for his
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murder. ' . . . the Hijrah, the flight from Makkah to Yathrib, which counts as the beginning of the Muslim era. The thirteen years of humiliation, of persecution, of seeming failure, of prophecy still unfulfilled, were over. The ten years of success, the fullest that has ever crowned one man's endeavour, had begun. The Hijrah makes a clear division in the story of the Prophet's Mission, which is evident in the Qur'an. Till then he had been a preacher only. Henceforth he was the ruler of a State, at first a very small one, which grew in ten years to the empire of Arabia ".(xxii - xxiii)
Makkan Surahs:
Very early : before the beginning of persecution
Early : beginning of persecution to conversion of 'Umar.
Middle : conversion of 'Umar to destruction of deed of ostracism.
Late : raising of ostracism to Hijrah.
Qiblah (the place toward which the Muslims turn their face in prayer changed from Jerusalem to the Ka'bah at Makkah (xxiv)
'The Prophet's first concern as ruler was to establish public worship and lay down the constitution of the State; but he did not forget that Quraysh had sworn to make an end of his religion, nor that he had received a command to fight against them till they ceased from persecution'.
xxv. The campaign of Badr.
'The battle went at first against the Muslims, but ended in a signal victory for them (Surah 8). The victory of Badr gave the Prophet a new prestige among the Arab tribes; but henceforth there was a feud of blood between Quraysh and the Islamic State in addition to the old religious hatred.' xxvi
The battle of Mount Uhud.
Not so good. Muhammad wounded.
Massacre of Muslims and expulsion of Bani Nadir.
'The reverse which they suffered at Mr Uhud lowered the prestige of the Muslims
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with the Arab tribes and also with the Jews of Yathrib (Medina). . . . The Prophet's followers were attacked and murdered when they went abroad in little companies. Khubayb, one of his envoys, was captured by a desert tribe and sold to Quraysh, who tortured him to death in Makkah publicly. (xxvii)
The war of the Trench (xxviii)
A major attack by 10 000 against Yathrib prevented by a trench dug before the city coupled with bad weather.
Al-Hudaybiyah
'In the sixth year of the Hijrah the Prophet had a vision (48:27) in which he found himself entering the Holy Place at Makkah unopposed."
Luther broke the hold of theocracy and laid the foundations for democracy, which requires that the power devolving from above (to use the old metaphor) is balanced by the power arising from below. Friedenthal.
