Notes
[Notebook: Transfinite field theory DB 56]
[Sunday 18 January 2004 - Saturday 24 January 2004]
Sunday 18 January 2004
Monday 19 January 2004
Tuesday 20 January 2004
Wednesday 21 January 2004
Thursday 22 January 2004
Friday 23 January 2004
Saturday 24 January 2004
Science founds the theology of natural religion. Religion yields
selective advantage most richly in the military realm, where a small
advantage eventually leads to total domination and the 'plundering'
of people (mothers, slaves) property and territory. We still see this
process in operation around the world, the Christian religion, armed
with modern weapons having enforced itself around large parts of the
world
[page 35]
and moving strategically to take over as much as possible of the
remainder. There will not be peace on earth until one overarching
religion dominates all. This does not mean the dead hand of
extinction characteristic of the Roman Catholic Church. A better
paradigm is the pre-Christian attitude of the Roman empire to the
religions that it overran. The Roman were more interested in physical
rather than spiritual values. Hence we see a niche for a physical
theology and a physical religion which regulates the physical side of
the human world, leaving people to manage the spiritual how they
will. This requires the basic agreement of everybody on earth that
ourselves and our planet are one organism. This holism, coupled with
physical experience and the notion of consistency places necessary
and sufficient constraints on the physical outcomes of any spiritual
system. Through consistency this constrains spiritual systems also.
By founding ourselves on physics, we hope to show how to construct a
consistent spirituality which, because of its very consistency can
lead to an explosion of variation of human spiritual visions,
allowing us to burst the chains of ancient religion that are the
source of so much misery,
Nevertheless,
we must build on history, so a lot of delicate surgery will be
required to eliminate the constricting elements of historical
religious messages (like that of Augustine) while preserving the life
and richness that have brought us from the wild animals to what we
are (still wild animals, but living in an environment more of our own
construction than in the old days). Augustine,
Brown.
natural religion = inclusive religion.
The ancient churches maintain (or attempt to maintain) physical
control, through thought control based on a 'transcendental'
(non-physical) message
[page 36]
from the source of religious authority claimed by each particular
religion. This tends to lead to closed points of view by saying that
which is on high is closed. This we claim is not so. The Universe is
closed at the physical end, not the spiritual: it has a beginning and
no end, like the Cantor Universe.
God sees and controls all is, in the light of Cantor, Gödel,
Chaitin etc, a proposition with 1/aleph(n) chance of being correct.
Adaptation: we begin with Aristotle's seal in wax and expand it to
the way children develop and learn from egg on to fit into their
environment in a way which yields survival and more.
A normalized market: one in which the money supply (energy
supply?) is fixed. In the real market the value created by rising
prices is used to secure the loan of more money from the bank of the
world. This is a metaphysical (not necessarily normalized) process.
In the Cantor Universe everything is names and every name is a
combination (cardinal number) or permutation (ordinal number) of its
antecedents (Aristotle: material cause).
For us prime matter [logically includes] natural numbers, ie prime
matter is a set of elements which can be combined and permuted to
produce complex systems.
Babysitting three toddlers: this is the physical end of the
Universe. No wonder our spiritual fathers fled domesticity and
confined themselves to childless (but hardly sexless) monasticism. As
their writings show, many
[page 37]
monks have been obsessed with sex. Here is the opposite side of
the coin, no sex and heaps of children, the harem rather than the
monastery.
Philip Gourevitch: We wish to inform
you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. Gourevitch.
Gourevitch page 6: 'In Rwanda, a year before I [visited], the
government had adopted a new policy, according to which everyone in
the country's Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone
in the Tutsi minority. The government and an astounding number of its
subjects imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people, they could
make the world a better place, and the mass killing had followed.'
Ideas to action; we forbid the action, though leave people free to
have the idea. This is a small risk that some people will be inclined
to put the idea into action. We can only cope with this by physical
restraint, or by attaching an inseparable tag to the idea 'not for
execution, contemplation only'.'
Dominican Order thought it had a pretty good plan: action
(preaching) and contemplation (thinking up sermons). Action also
included fundraising, in cash or kind (including patronage).
page 6 (continued): All at once, it seemed, something we have only
imagined was upon us - and we could still only imagine it. This is
what fascinates me most in existence, the peculiar necessity of
imagining what is in fact real. '
Ie knowledge mediated through image. Image goes into action, so
that some people did actually kill, hacking their neighbours to bits.
A disastrous course of action motivated by a system of
[page 38]
false (inconsistent with reality) concepts. Was the place really
better off after the milling? Even if this was so, did such an end
justify such a means. What about the 'moral damage' to the killers?
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Related sites
Concordat Watch Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
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Further reading
Books
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Beale, R, and T Jackson, Neural Computing: An Introduction, Adam Hilger 1991 Jacket: '... starts from basics and goes on to cover all the most important approaches to the subject. ... The capabilities, advantages and disadvantages of each model are discussed as are possible applications of each. The relationship of the models developed to the brain and its functions are also explored.'
Amazon
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Bierce, Ambrose Gwinnett, and David E Schults, S T Joshi (Editors), The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary, University of Georgia Press 2001 Amazon customer review: 'Ambrose Bierce, in this hilarious book, satirizes all aspects of human behavior. This lexicon that he has created provides often true insight in to the tacit meanings of otherwise benign words. For example, PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the Universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy. This book is a must-get.' Doshi
Amazon
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Brown, Peter Robert Lamont , Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, University of California Press 2000 Amazon book description: 'This classic biography was first published thirty years ago and has since established itself as the standard account of Saint Augustine's life and teaching. The remarkable discovery recently of a considerable number of letters and sermons by Augustine has thrown fresh light on the first and last decades of his experience as a bishop. These circumstantial texts have led Peter Brown to reconsider some of his judgments on Augustine, both as the author of the Confessions and as the elderly bishop preaching and writing in the last years of Roman rule in north Africa. Brown's reflections on the significance of these exciting new documents are contained in two chapters of a substantial Epilogue to his biography (the text of which is unaltered). He also reviews the changes in scholarship about Augustine since the 1960s. A personal as well as a scholarly fascination infuse the book-length epilogue and notes that Brown has added to his acclaimed portrait of the bishop of Hippo.'
Amazon
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Chaitin, Gregory J, Algorithmic Information Theory, Cambridge UP 1987 Foreword: 'The crucial fact here is that there exist symbolic objects (i.e., texts) which are "algorithmically inexplicable", i.e., cannot be specified by any text shorter than themselves. Since texts of this sort have the properties associated with random sequences of classical probability theory, the theory of describability developed . . . in the present work yields a very interesting new view of the notion of randomness.' J T Schwartz
Amazon
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Damski (director), Mel, and Graham Chapman, Peter Cook, Bernard McKenna, David Sherlock (writers), Yellowbeard, 1983 Amazon customer review'I'll kill anyone who get's in the way of me killing anyone.'
'Tears stream down my face from laughing so hard when I watch this movie. This is one of the funniest darn movies ever, and for some reason it's so under appreciated. Do I just have a weird sense of humor? It's so darn funny! How can it not be funny with the cast of Monty Python, Cheech and Chong, and of course the wonderfully talented Madeline Kahn...oh, also, if you watch closely there is a very short scene with David Bowie in it. How can you go wrong? Admittedly, the quality of film isn't exactly the best, but with that aside one can still enjoy the hilariously witty one-liner's in the movie that will leave you quoting it after seeing it. So aside from it being a bit rough around the edges, you will laugh your [...]off wat
'For twelve years, Yellowbeard (Graham Chapman) has looted the Spanish Main, making men eat their lips and swallow their hearts. Caught and convicted -- for tax evasion! -- he's sentenced to 20 years in St. Victim's Prison for the Extremely Naughty. In a scheme to confiscate his fabulous treasure, the Royal Navy allows him to escape and follows him to the Spanish Main, where saucy tarts, lisping demigods and some awful puns and punishments await. Starring a who's who of comic cutups and cutthroats including Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Cheech and Chong, Marty Feldman, Peter Cook, Madeline Kahn and more!!'
By Staring Girl August 19, 2006
Amazon
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Gourevitch, Philip, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, Picador USA 1999 Amazon Book Description: (Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction) 'In April 1994, the Rwandan government called upon everyone in the Hutu majority to kill each member of the Tutsi minority, and over the next three months 800,000 Tutsis perished in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the war in Rwanda, a vivid history of the tragedy's background, and an unforgettable account of its aftermath. One of the most acclaimed books of the year, this account will endure as a chilling document of our time.'
Amazon
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Homer, and A T Murray, Wiliam Wyatt, Iliad (Volume 1, Books 1-12), Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library 1999 Amazon Product Description
'Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of Homer's stirring heroic account of the Trojan war and its passions. The eloquent and dramatic epic poem captures the terrible anger of Achilles, "the best of the Achaeans," over a grave insult to his personal honor and relates its tragic result--a chain of consequences that proves devastating for the Greek forces besieging Troy, for noble Trojans, and for Achilles himself. The poet gives us compelling characterizations of his protagonists as well as a remarkable study of the heroic code in antiquity. The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the "Odyssey" and the "Iliad," These have been published in the Loeb Classical Library for three quarters of a century, the Greek text facing a faithful and literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. William F. Wyatt now brings the Loeb's "Iliad" up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray's admirable style but is written for today's readers.'
Amazon
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Homer, and A T Murray, Wiliam Wyatt, Iliad (Volume 1, Books 13-24), Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library 1999 Amazon Product Description
'Here is a new Loeb Classical Library edition of Homer's stirring heroic account of the Trojan war and its passions. The eloquent and dramatic epic poem captures the terrible anger of Achilles, "the best of the Achaeans," over a grave insult to his personal honor and relates its tragic result--a chain of consequences that proves devastating for the Greek forces besieging Troy, for noble Trojans, and for Achilles himself. The poet gives us compelling characterizations of his protagonists as well as a remarkable study of the heroic code in antiquity. The works attributed to Homer include the two oldest and greatest European epic poems, the "Odyssey" and the "Iliad," These have been published in the Loeb Classical Library for three quarters of a century, the Greek text facing a faithful and literate prose translation by A. T. Murray. William F. Wyatt now brings the Loeb's "Iliad" up to date, with a rendering that retains Murray's admirable style but is written for today's readers.'
Amazon
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Omnes, Roland, and Arturo Sangalli (translator), Quantum Philosophy: Understanding and Interpreting Contemporary Science, Princeton University Press 2002 Amazon editorial reviews: From Booklist
'Einstein and Aristotle meet and shake hands in this illuminating exposition of the unexpected return of common sense to modern science. A companion volume to Omnes' earlier Understanding Quantum Mechanics (1999), this book recounts--with mercifully little mathematical detail--how this century's pioneering researchers severed the ties that for millennia had anchored science within the bounds of clear and intuitive perceptions of the world. As an abstruse mathematical formalism replaced the visual imagination, scientists jettisoned normal understandings of cause and effect, of coherence and continuity, setting science adrift from philosophical conceptions going back as far as Democritus. But when theorists recently began to weigh the "consistent histories" of various quantum events, the furthest frontiers of science became strangely familiar, as rigorous logic revalidated much of classical physics and many of the perceptions of common sense. With a contagious sense of wonder, Omnes invites his readers, who need no expertise beyond an active curiosity, to share in the exhilarating denouement of humanity's 2,500-year quest to fathom the natural order. And in a tantalizing conclusion, he beckons readers toward the mystery that still shrouds the origins of formulas that physicists love for their beauty even before testing them for their truth. An essential acquisition for public library science collections.' Bryce Christensen
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Papers
| Griffiths, Robert B, "Consistent histories and quantum reasoning", Physical Review A, 54, , 1996, page 2759-2774. 'A system of quantum reasoning for a closed system is developed by treating nonrelativistic quantum mechanics as a stochastic theory. The sample space corresponds to a decomposition, as a sum of orthogonal projectors, of the identity operator on a Hilbert space of histories. Provided a consistency condition is satisfied, the corresponding Boolean algebra of histories, called a framework, can be assigned probabilities in the usual way, and within a single framework quantum reasoning is identical to ordinary probabilistic reasoning. A refinement rule, which allows a probability distribution to be extended from one framework to a larger (refined) framework, incorporates the dynamical laws of quantum theory. Two or more frameworks which are incompatible because they possess no common refinement cannot be simultaneously employed to describe a single physical system. Logical reasoning is a special case of probabilistic reasoning in which (conditional) probabilities are 1 (true) or 0 (false). As probabilities are only meaningful relative to some framework, the same is true of the truth or falsity of a quantum description. The formalism is illustrated using simple examples, and the physical considerations which determine the choice of a framework are discussed. '. back |
| Kirsch, Adam, "Beware of Pity", New Yorker, 84, 344, 12 January 2009, page 62 - 68. 'Hannah Arendt and the power of the impersonal.'. back |
| Landauer, Rolf, "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5, 3, 1961, page 183. back |
| Turing, Alan, "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 2, 42, 12 November 1937, page 230-265. 'The "computable" numbers maybe described briefly as the real numbers whose expressions as a decimal are calculable by finite means. Although the subject of this paper is ostensibly the computable numbers, it is almost as easy to define and investigate computable functions of an integrable variable or a real or computable variable, computable predicates and so forth. The fundamental problems involved are, however, the same in each case, and I have chosen the computable numbers for explicit treatment as involving the least cumbrous technique. I hope shortly to give an account of the rewlations of the computable numbers, functions and so forth to one another. This will include a development of the theory of functions of a real variable expressed in terms of computable numbers. According to my definition, a number is computable if its decimal can be written down by a machine'. back |
Links
| Aquinas 165 Summa I, 28, 1: Are there real relations in God? 'Reply to Objection 4. Relations which result from the mental operation alone in the objects understood are logical relations only, inasmuch as reason observes them as existing between two objects perceived by the mind. Those relations, however, which follow the operation of the intellect, and which exist between the word intellectually proceeding and the source whence it proceeds, are not logical relations only, but are real relations; inasmuch as the intellect and the reason are real things, and are really related to that which proceeds from them intelligibly; as a corporeal thing is related to that which proceeds from it corporeally. Thus paternity and filiation are real relations in God.' back |
| Augustine Church Fathers: Home Browse to Augustine of Hippo for a list of Augustine's works online. back |
| Hannah Arendt - Wikipedia Hannah Arendt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was an influential German-Jewish political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she always refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.' back |
| Karl Weierstrass - Wikipedia Karl Weierstrass - Wikipedia. the free encyclopedia 'Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass (Weierstraß) (October 31, 1815 – February 19, 1897) was a German mathematician who is often cited as the "father of modern analysis".' back |
| Landauer Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process Rolf Landauer: Abstract: 'It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. The logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility, and requires a minimum heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. The dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. back |
| No cloning theorem - Wikipedia No cloning theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The no cloning theorem is a result of quantum mechanics which forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. It was stated by Wootters, Zurek, and Dieks in 1982, and has profound implications in quantum computing and related fields.' back |
| Roland Omnes - Wikipedia Roland Omnes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Roland Omnès is the author of several books which aim to close the gap between our common sense experience of the classical world and the complex, formal mathematics which is now required to accurately describe reality at its most fundamental level.' back |
| S Matrix - Wikipedia S Matrix - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In physics, the Scattering matrix (S-matrix) relates the initial state and the final state for an interaction of particles. It is used in quantum mechanics, scattering theory and quantum field theory.' back |
| Second law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia Second law of thermodynamics - Wikipedia - The free encyclopedia 'The second law of thermodynamics is an expression of the universal law of increasing entropy, stating that the entropy of an isolated system which is not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.' back |
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