Notes
[Notebook: TURKEY DB 55]
[Sunday 6 July 2003 - Saturday 12 July 2003]
Sunday 6 July 2003
Monday 7 July 2003
Tuesday 8 July 2003
Wednesday 9 July 2003
Thursday 10 July 2003
Friday 11 July 2003
[page 364]
Saturday 12 July 2003
Sampson Seven Sisters page 300 Chapter 14: Sampson
'The Opec revolution was the consequence of the old dilemma of running any liberal empire which educates its subjects to rise up against it.'
What is the name of this feeling? Restlessness because everything is too good, no challenges, getting bored and lazy? Hopelessness because I really have nothing to offer and the world seems too bad. No, love maybe, or just a hangover from . . . [a] party? On such a beautiful sunny winter's day too. What does my feeling motivate me to do (by their fruits you shall know them)? Not much, except write this. Overall it says my head is too full of stuff to yield any particular decision. So? Press on with building an economic foundation, to that if anything becomes obvious I am in a position to do it?
[page 365]
'The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao'. Nice, but not necessarily true. Nyquist's theorem tells us that we can capture all the information in any function that can be represented by a Fourier series if we sample it at twice the maximum frequency. This seems consistent with the idea that we can describe a motion: we simply have to represent its starting point and its endpoint. Intelligence (through the act of insight) joins these two images in a single dynamic feeling for the process so represented. The sentence 'they fell in love' tells us that at one point they were not in love and at a subsequent point they were in love. We readers of romantic novels at least can join these dots to get a feeling for the process defined by the lovers and their change of state from not love to love. The result is a rather abstract view of love but we can fill it in (as the novelist of gossip system does) by recounting all the ins and outs of the love affair as the power of love overcomes all the physical and spiritual obstacles to (at least momentary) seamless union. The detail of a love affair are far more intricate than any writer can capture, and if we add in what we know of the hugely complex functioning of living organisms as big as us, we are able ultimately to arrive at an account of every single quantum of action that was associated with this wonderful process. This process of analysis is analogous to (but far larger than) the process of breaking down a fast and furious computer game down into the sequence of binary operations that actually lies behind the action. In the physical world speech is equivalent to quantum measurement, a process by which two processes become entangled so that we can learn about one by looking at the other.
'The collapse of the wave function' is the act of knowledge which selects one of a superposition of possibilities to be 'uttered' ie encoded in some way and transmitted to another system.
[page 346]
Transfinite dynamics.
The advent of quantum information theory has changed our view of quantum mechanics and brought it into the field of logic, language and communication. The founding fathers of quantum mechanics (and their students) found the whole thing rather strange. Physicists had been used to thinking of the world as points of mass moving around in an infinite 3D space. This is the point of view pioneered by Galileo and Newton and it has been hugely fruitful.
Newton's laws are quite simple, but not so easy to apply to the real world. This forced the development of many subtle mathematical ideas. Here the relevant invention is phase space. In the intuitive picture of particle (planets, stars, atoms) moving around in 3D space we encode what we know about each particle by recording its position and momentum at suitably spaced intervals of time. In 3D space it takes six numbers to specify the state of motion of each particle at each instant in time. When we come to deal with a collection of n particles, we need 6n numbers to define the state of the whole system at each instant. By analogy with 3D space. all the information about the movement of n points in 6 dimensional space can be encoded as the movement of one point in 6n dimensional space. Information is conserved between the two representations which in the classical world of real numbers were considered sufficiently powerful to mirror the dynamics of the real world exactly. The 6n dimensional space is called a phase space. Many different phase spaces may correspond to a given real space, depending upon how the information carried by states in real space is encoded for representation in the phase space. Clearly there are as very large number of mappings from the real space to the phase space.
Quantum mechanics does not fit the 'point mass in infinite space picture, and hence its strangeness, to those accustomed to the old view. But now we can see that quantum mechanics does make sense if we wee it as a description of the protocol
[page 347]
[for] a network of communication between different physically identifiable entities like electrons, quarks, photons, atoms, molecules and on through planets and galaxies to the Universe as a whole.
To do this we must first see how the phase space idea served as the key to developing a space in which to model the behaviour of the Universe. The phase space for quantum mechanics, it has turned out, is Hilbert space.
Hilbert space is defined axiomatically as follows:
. . . Hilbert space
Fitting Hilbert spaces together via the transfinite network via the collapse of the wave function [? entanglement]
Violence will only be permanently eradicated when we can understand, identify and remove the conditions for its growth. Basically, contradiction creates conflict stress/energy and the action of the energy degrades the structures in the vicinity of the violence. Violence is the enemy of structural complexity, and it is through structural complexity that we can create the means to avoid violence.
Communication (classical) correlates, reducing the overall entropy of the system. This is the entropy of a newborn mind reduced by being correlated with its environment.
The formation of a community requires constraint (correlation) so as to make possible the communication that maintains the community, since all must agree
[page 348]
on various protocols for dealing with one another and their environment. One suspects that small communities with limited resources will be more heavily constrained than large communities, and that all communities will be more heavily constrained in times of trouble. So governments tend to restrict the rights of their citizens in times of war. Many constraints, however, may be unnecessary, and serve only to entrench the privileges of one element of the community against the rest. In the Roman Catholic Church we have apparently unnecessary constraints on sexual behaviour. Celibacy condemns the elite of the church to sexual immaturity which has had the result of many of them finding their sexual peers among children. This evil is now common knowledge. Less common is awareness of the intellectual immaturity forced on the Catholic elite by the policing of thought which is necessary if an individual is to be admitted to the upper echelons of power.
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice gives a good account of the constraints affecting the upper classes of England in her time. Austen Much of this restraint, which has at least some roots in the Church arises from the magical (sacramental) notion that words, especially written words, change everything. A particular instance of this is marriage, where a few words and promises totally change the social position of individuals while making no real change in their own internal states.
Austen page 190: 'Let them triumph over us at a distance and be satisfied.' Everybody is imprisoned by social protocols that are narrower than nature demands. Such protocols seem in general to be the result of elements of the community trying to be (and considering themselves to be) above the common herd. This might apply particularly to the clergy.
HONOUR and DUELLING
The aim of natural religion is to remove all . . . pain and suffering caused by [artificial] protocols which unnecessarily constrain the global community.
[page 349]
Austen page 192: Mr Collins (clergyman) on the elopement of Lydia Bennett: 'The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison to this. . . . [page 193] Let me advise you then, my dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off your unworthy child forever, and leave her to reap the fruits of her own heinous offense.'
Much social order is devoted to the regulation of love so that the children may be provided for and family and other capital not unnecessarily dissipated. This is of particular concern among the idle rich, who, if they lose their capital, may be forced to become tradespeople to survive.
