natural theology > notes

Notes

[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]

[Sunday 16 March 2003 - Saturday 22 March 2003]

[page 163]

Sunday 16 March 2003

Sophie's World. Gaarder

page 97: Aristotle - state is the highest form of human fellowship. [These days, maybe planet]

108: Syncretism: '. . . the boundaries between religion and philosophy were gradually eliminated.' . . .

128: Semites. Mono- vs polytheism, linear vs cyclic history and hearing vs sight. . . .

132: Jesus not military or political. Muhammad was.

135: Christianity is a dramatic religion, unlike the later Greek intellectual religion. The old Greek gods were also rather dramatic. . . .

142: 380+ AD Christianity official imperial Roman religion.

[page 164]

143: 529 ad The Academy closed, Benedictines founded.

146: Ideas are the flattened channel by which reality speaks to reality across time. Mind and books are in effect 'store and forward' systems.

148: Augustine put Platonic ideas into God.

149: Augustine brought history into philosophy. . . .

154; '[God] can see and know everything in one coherent vision.' This is true if Universe is divine, but different parts of God cannot communicate instantaneously. . . .

166: New view of humanity, no longer sinful.

167: Individualism: relatio - trinity. The more broadband our communications with our environment, the more broadband our awareness of ourselves.

168: Pantheism: Giordano Bruno and judicial incineration 1600

169: Galileo: 'Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.' Measurements are comparisons of the world with itself (rather than comparisons of it with our ideas of it).

171: Galileo low of inertia, Newton's first law. . . .

[page 165]

178: Luther: Priests have no preferential position in relation to God. . . .

193 Leibniz 'the difference between the material and the spiritual is that the material can be broken into smaller and smaller bits, but the soul cannot even be divided in two.' This is the difference between an set of objects which are not a system, or a system. Breaking the system in two will kill it, ie change its nature, whereas breaking a not-system in two will leave us with two not-systems. . . .

200: 'God's guarantee" overcomes the gulf of dualism - Descartes.

205: Spinoza 1632-77 Pantheist, monist.

208: 'But when Spinoza uses the word "nature" he doesn't only mean extended nature. By Substance, God or nature he means everything that exists, including all things spiritual.'

208: For all we know, our entire life could be a dream. It is an experience with an explanation behind it.

Monday 17 March 2003

Tuesday 18 March 2003

Wednesday 19 March 2003

Oppression from within ([bad] religion) and freedom
oppression from without ([bad] politics) and freedom again

good = free
bad = oppressed (constrained)

Our religious story: navigating the transfinite transition, when a physical system melts, allowing all permutations of particles to be realized.

[page 166]

transfinite transition = phase change

not transformation = TRANSFORMATION = ADIABATIC; TRANSITION = ENTROPY CHANGING

Walls: energy proof; information proof; momentum proof, surrounding the Universe. [given Landauer's hypothesis, that information is physically realized, all these mean the same thing. There is no information without energy and momentum, no momentum without . . . ]

not real walls but 'negative walls' ie zones of contradiction/instability/null

Thursday 20 March 2003

Back to Sophie's World

Friday 21 March 2003

Knowledge is power. Power is what we all want. The ability to survive, grow fat and then support or help support a family. But like other regulators in a scarce world, power has no upper limit, only a minimum, the modicum of life below which we die. How do we measure power? In units of the minimum power, an act measured by one quantum of action[?] . . .

Insofar as it is knowable, the world acts as an indeterministic network of deterministic systems like Turing machines and competent tradespersons. (widely construed as any activity constrained by a body of public knowledge, ie plumbing. How to share the power of knowledge - by public dissemination. But what about intellectual property - this like patent and copyright stakes the author's right to derive a cashflow from the dissemination of valuable ideas.

KNOWLEDGE is POWER => IDEAS are VALUABLE.

[page 167]

But should one get money for an idea or the realization of an idea, that is a mapping from the mind to real world hardware, so that the idea materializes as an independent entity which nevertheless fits in with the world, ie works, like a NATION or a MOTOR CAR.

Descartes started out well with his idea of beginning from an indubitable foundation, one's self awareness. But he very soon lost the critical touch and simply asserted that although matter and spirit were poles apart, God had arranged it so that our material and spiritual paths led parallel (harmonious) lives, so we are but one being. This shows touching faith in God, but it is justified by the theory of evolution. However we are constitutes, our lineage has been tried in the fire of selection and found good. Each of us is descended in an unbroken line from some creature which came into being more than two billion years ago.

Descartes faith in God is to be contrasted with the terrible thing God did to us all after our first parents failed some specious test in the Garden of Eden. This is just what you'd expect a nasty old bastard to do to disempower the creation (child) that stood up against him by disabling all its progeny. A mongrel God who laid the foundations of the rule of woggly old men that has lasted for 3000 years.

The Mrs Marple approach: cui bono.

LINEAR = tractable (horses, cows, sheep and other domesticated animals - opposed to the much greater set of non-domestics)

1. Let us start on theology - the Hebrew and Greek traditions - the invention of the trinity - the medieval synthesis - the rise of science - the

[page 168]

Lutheran revolution - the enlightenment and the distinction between natural and spiritual science. The unification and home to the Divine Universe.

2. Act and infinity

3. The trinity

4 the transfinity

5 the synthesis - quantum mechanics to cosmology via the transfinite network.

6. Openness and freedom.

7. The peace theorem.

Let us regard it as a likely hypothesis, to be tested when the resources become available.

Saturday 22 March 2003

Sophie's World

[page 169]

223: 'I've heard nothing about diapers and crying babies so far. And hardy anything about love and friendship.'

Hume: 'No philosopher "will eve be able to take us behind the daily experience or give us rules of conduct that are different from those we get from reflecting on everyday life."'

224: The rate of default decides the size of the economy, just at the Q defines the gain of the system.

225: Hume 'Nothing is ever actually invented by the mind. The mind puts things together and constructs false idea' [and new technologies]. 'cut and paste heaven'

227: Hume and Buddha: Decay is inherent in all compound things.

[page 170]

. . .

234 George Berkeley Irish Bishop 1685-1753 saw contemporary philosophy as a threat to Christianity.

234: Only things that exist [for us] are those that we perceive.

The real definition of a philosopher is moral. Is the stuff which I am propagating (and for which people are paying good money) a sound product, a reliable product something that is going to be giving us heartache and costing us money in the future when people (perhaps)_ find out that it doesn't work, and in fact leads to unnecessary expense.

At the other extreme are 'pure salespersons' who will sell anything by time honoured methods with no interest whatever in the reliability of the product, simply that to a sufficiently large proportion of the populace it seems like a valuable asset, and they are prepared to part with hard cash to gain title to it.

Knowledge is power. Power is all there is! . . .

Sophie's world, page 245 Berkeley 'denied the existence of a material world beyond the human mind.'

Hilde and Sophie are recursive worlds.

250 Creating people with words: "In a momentary vision of absolute clarity, Hilde knew that Sophie was more than

[page 171]

just paper and ink. She really existed.'

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. ... In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.'
Amazon back

Feynman, Richard, Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, Westview Press 2002 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description 'The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 1962-63 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. These lectures represent a useful record of his viewpoints and some of his insights into gravity and its application to cosmology, superstars, wormholes, and gravitational waves at that particular time. The lectures also contain a number of fascinating digressions and asides on the foundations of physics and other issues. Characteristically, Feynman took an untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the principle of equivalence.'
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Gaarder, Jostein, and Paulette Moller (Translator), Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, Boulevard 1996 Amazon editorial review: 'Wanting to understand the most fundamental questions of the Universe isn't the province of ivory-tower intellectuals alone, as this book's enormous popularity has demonstrated. A young girl, Sophie, becomes embroiled in a discussion of philosophy with a faceless correspondent. At the same time, she must unravel a mystery involving another young girl, Hilde, by using everything she's learning. The truth is far more complicated than she could ever have imagined.' An excellent essay on the relationship between literature and reality.
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Kauffman, Stuart, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Complexity, Oxford University Press 1995 Preface: 'As I will argue in this book, natural selection is important, but it has not laboured alone to craft the fine architectures of the biosphere . . . The order of the biological world, I have come to believe . . . arises naturally and spontaneously because of the principles of self organisation - laws of complexity that we are just beginning to uncover and understand.'
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Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the Universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the Universe. John Archibald Wheeler. ... this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity).'
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Nakahara, Mikio, Geometry, Topology and Physics, Adam Hilger 1990 Jacket: 'Differential geometry and topology have become essential tools for many theoretical physicists. [this book] introduces the ideas of differential geometry and topology to postgraduate students and researchers of theoretical physics. ... Throughout the book there are explicit calculations and diagrams to clarify the abstract ideas involved. A large number of problems and exercises are included to help develop the reader's understanding of the subject.'
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Peacock, John A, Cosmological Physics, Cambridge University Press 1999 Nature Book Review: 'The intermingling of observational detail and fundamental theory has made cosmology an exceptionally rich, exciting and controversial science. Students in the field — whether observers or particle theorists — are expected to be acquainted with matters ranging from the Supernova Ia distance scale, Big Bang nucleosynthesis theory, scale-free quantum fluctuations during inflation, the galaxy two-point correlation function, particle theory candidates for the dark matter, and the star formation history of the Universe. Several general science books, conference proceedings and specialized monographs have addressed these issues. Peacock's Cosmological Physics ambitiously fills the void for introducing students with a strong undergraduate background in physics to the entire world of current physical cosmology. The majestic sweep of his discussion of this vast terrain is awesome, and is bound to capture the imagination of most students.' Ray Carlberg, Nature 399:322
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...'
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Weyl, Hermann, Space Time Matter (translated by Henry L Brose), Dover 1985 Amazon customer review: ' The birth of gauge theory by its author: This book bewitched several generations of physicists and students. Hermann Weyl was one of the very great mathematicians of this century. He was also a great physicist and an artist with ideas and words. In this book you will find, at a deep level, the philosophy, mathematics and physics of space-time. It appeared soon after Einstein's famous paper on General Relativity, and is, in fact, a magnificent exposition of it, or, rather, of a tentative generalization of it. The mathematical part is of the highest class, striving to put geometry to the forefront. Actually, the book introduced a far-reaching generalization of the theory of connections, with respect to the Levi-Civita theory. It was not a generalization for itself, but motivated by the dream (Einstein's) of including gravitation and electromagnetism in the same (geometrical) theory. The result was gauge theory, which, slightly modified and applied to quantum mechanics resulted in the theory which dominates present particle physics. Weyl's unified theory was proved wrong by Einstein, and his criticism alone, accepted by Weyl and included in the book, would justify the reading. Though wrong, Weyl's theory is so beautiful that Paul Dirac stated that nature could not afford neglecting such perfection, and that the theory was probably only misplaced. Prophetic words! The philosophic parts are, alas, too much for our present cultural level, but you can ignore them. The mathematical and physical parts are perfectly accessible and, of course, of the highest class. The pity is that the number of misprints is immense, particularly in the formulas, so that the reading is made much more difficult than it should. Also, the English edition is not the latest one. If you read German, choose the original, also available here.' Henrique Fleming
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Links

Aquinas 20 Summa I, 3, 7: Whether God is altogether simple? 'I answer that, The absolute simplicity of God may be shown in many ways. First, from the previous articles of this question. For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His "suppositum"; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple. . . . ' back

Aquinas 20 Summa: I 3 7: Whether God is altogether simple? 'I answer that, The absolute simplicity of God may be shown in many ways. First, from the previous articles of this question. For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His "suppositum"; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple. . . . ' back