Notes
[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]
[Sunday 14 July 2002 - Saturday 20 July 2002]
[page 81]
Sunday 14 July 2002
. . .
hope = non; faith = fermion; love = boson.
Is dark matter a boson, a fermion, or a non?
Is 'dark matter' the hope of the world.
The plight of the Arabs is foremost on my mind, a people chained to the past by an almost saturation alignment with their "Book" Christians through science (experience) have become largely disconnected from their book (about fifty percent are dead sure it is true. (source?)
[page 82]
The evidence for the thesis of the book is precisely this problem as captured (measured) by the UNDP AHD (Arab Human Development Report) UNDP.
In the language of this report religion is (might be) devoted to increasing the level of human development and theology to the definition of what human development is and how it is to be implemented. My personal experience is mirrored in a public way by the contrast between Islamic society and modern middle income society. The Roman Catholic Church, in itself, is just as fundamentalist as anything to be found in Islam: all that is different is that its overall impact on society has been greatly diluted by enlightenment in its myriad forms. Although its social average effect is diluted, its effect on me in the early part of my life was as intense as that of Islam on a person born into that tradition. Because I was a minority dark ages in an enlightened community I was able to break away from the faith of my birth, and to study the process in my own life. It is this personal insight that I bring to an understanding of the overall process of human development (to be contrasted with personal development, the personal reflection of the public process).
Order by empowerment vs order by disempowerment.
Do the developed have an incentive to develop the underdeveloped or to prevent their development? This depends upon one's feeding model, creative or destructive. Like farming, creative exploitation involves feeding the crop and giving it the best possible growing conditions, followed by the destructive mode when the crop is harvested and eaten (usually just before or just after it has died from natural causes). We cannot treat ourselves like a crop though many have done so (slavery, forced labour, genocide etc). Instead we must exploit one another in a different way, adding your degrees of
[page 83]
freedom to mine, thus finding a bigger space : max = tensor product you X me.
Monday 15 July 2002
We can contrast Christianity and Islam at many points, creating from this a sort of orthogonal bases for religion in general. Christianity, according to available records, started quite small and was practically invisible to the world as a whole for the first few centuries of its existence. It possibly looks bigger to us because its early penetration of the writing classes, and its attractive theoretical features, not to mention its subsequent growth to the currently dominant religious power in the world whose home countries are predominantly rich, all tended to the careful preservation and reproduction of its texts and icons to the detriment of other less literate movements around it. Islam, on the other had, started with Muhammad, his wife Kadisha and one student, and became a global power almost within its founder's lifetime.
The early literature of Islam is quite voluminous and there are clear historical records of Muhammad and his adversaries. We have very little contemporary documentation for Jesus of Nazareth. Existent written records do not begin until a few decades after his death.
We may contrast the slow. 'intellectual' evolution of Christianity (which grew up in a military regime so powerful that it was beyond challenge) to the rapid political evolution of Islam which combines intellectual and emotional appeal with a viable model of society and a degree of military and diplomatic skill which resonated with conditions in the Arab world.
The literary contrast contains another. Christianity began as an oral tradition, and gradually hardened into text, and in some cases into institutionally protected dogma. At the heart of Islam, on the other hand, is the Qur'an, a text dictated by God, or at least an angel, which is considered to be an exact replica of a text kept in heaven. Oral traditions
[page 84]
evolve, if only because of weakness of memory but written texts, insofar as their writing is durable and faithfully copied, can never change. This leads to the rigidity and deficits observed by the UNDP.
Human development - total development [creation]. Theology is a theory of total development.
Lots of momentum = lots of detail ; for a religion as for a heavy body. Angular momentum = momentum relative to self.
The practical and observable foundation of peace is a cooperative environment. Maximizing cooperativity is a control process whose resources are to be found in the cooperative process itself. Such a cooperative process is likely to be stable as long as it serves the needs of whatever portion of the population is in power, that is, in a position to feed and control the cooperative process. The controlling power we call the government, and the theory by which it operates politics or governance.
Many people hold it to be axiomatic that the path to peaceful government requires that every individual have an equal input to the decision process and that all should share the outcomes of collective decisions. This is the union of spaces often called democracy and socialism. We feel that this concept has a sound basis in cybernetics, the theory of control and communication, and hope to demonstrate this as the book rolls on.
I am still too confused to talk about my personal life. Hence the fictional approach. But politics has to be based on local, that is personal, experience. The idea here is the same as that used by Einstein to construct the general theory of relativity - how do we create a global structure which fits local experience. In Einstein's
[page 85]
case, local experience was defined by special relativity and he was eventually able to find a mathematical structure (Einstein's field equations) which yield a consistent whole with the observed local structure.
General relativity inhabits the rather deterministic mathematical world of classical physics. One of the bridges between classical and modern physics is statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics enables us to connect macroscopic structures like clouds, bushfires and people to the vast number of microscopic transformations that lie behind the scenes.
Here we conceive of societies and communities in a more statistical vein, concentrating on the flow of information, which appears physically as the flow of entropy. In a nutshell, Einstein was concerned with the structure of momentum/energy in spacetime; we want to talk about flows of information and entropy in a general symbolic space, the sort occupied by creatures such as ourselves that can read, write and do arithmetic.
The 1% world : control expenditure is 1% of total expenditure. (here refers to management of investment products).
