natural theology > notes

Notes

[Notebook: Transfinite field theory DB 56]

[Sunday 18 July 2004 - Saturday 24 July 2004]

[page 136]

Sunday 18 July 2004

An important political problem is the tendency for politics to decline into military dictatorship - a very common state today, openly or clandestinely. One finds that the US military has much more power than is prudent or safe.

[page 137]

Maxwell distribution: particles are nodes; collisions are edges.

Monday 19 July 2004

Russell: Russell It is comforting to read Russell's understanding the relationship between philosophy/theology and government. Also, on reading the history of a field, one can make inventory of one's own answers to the perennial problems besetting us, basically the tendency for peace to degenerate into war, a failure of civilization. Here we see the value of the monasteries, acting as spores to carry databases from one point in spacetime to another. Monasteries spread vegetatively, each sending out 'rhizomes' and taking root at another points. In every case people are seeking peaceful community. In the midst of earthly troubles, they seek it in the heavens. To bring people down to earth one must first of all let them be secure with enough food,, shelter, transport, sanitation and other basic needs.

I am no ascetic. Rather, I think that by following the path of comfort and satisfaction (which is possible in my community with a modest amount of work) I am following something like the optimum established in the 'environment of evolutionary adaptedness' (Cummins page 52) and so getting a bit closer to my humanity somewhat distorted by the weird otherworldly ideas of the old religions. Modern religion is embodied in standards (codes, protocols, laws rights etc), verbal statements directly related to situations in the real world, like how electrical insulators should be tested and the criteria they should meet, or the UN declaration of human rights.. To set and maintain standards is no easy task, but it is still worth the effort, if the standards are firmly based in reality and the state of the relevant art. From this starting point in practical religion, we can begin to develop the general theory of religion, which is theology. Theology is concerned with what can and cannot (should and should not) be done to ensure the religion's own spread and

[page 138]

survival. So the big old religions are the last stage of an evolutionary process which has led a few species to fill the whole religious niche. By drawing the emphasis back to individual religion (as the Reformers did) we ignore the old structure and looking at its elements (people) anew, seek new ways of peaceful organization which are much more complex and error resistant that the old systems that grew up in simpler timers. We are moving toward the time when all barriers between people arising from systematic affiliation will be removed, so that all of us become peers.

Russell page 344: 'St Augustine is in some ways similar to Tolstoy, to whom however he s superior in intellect. He was a passionate man, in youth very far from a pattern of virtue, but driven by an inner impulse to seek for truth and righteousness. Like Tolstoy, he was obsessed, in his later years, by a sense of sin, which made his life stern and his philosophy inhuman.'

The velocity of light maps a metric in space to a metric in time. Space and time are orthogonal (as are the three dimensions of space). Why 3? This would be an excellent question to know the answer to,

Russell page 345: 'It thus came about that Christian theology had two parts, one concerned with the Church, and one with the individual soul. In later times, the first of these was most emphasized by Catholics and the second by Protestants, but in St Augustine both exist equally, without his having any sense of disharmony.' [maybe because of centuries of belief that the state was more important than the individual.]

page 353: God = possibilities of nothing, ie the absence of all constraint. So the transfinite network is our model of nothing,(the vacuum).

Why is space 3D? Structure arises from constraint. What is the constraint operating to create 3Ds of space? Connectivity?

[page 139]

In 3D space any two points can be connected without the wires crossing (?) The necessary crossings in 2D can be 'split' in the third dimension.

Tuesday 20 July 2004

Theology studies the protocol of human communication, from quantum field theory to government to government relationships, and our interface with gaia.

Russell page 515: 'The important aspect of Protestantism was schism, not heresy, for schism led to national Churches, and national Churches were not strong enough to control the lay government. This was wholly a gain, for the Churches, everywhere, opposed as long as they could practically every innovation that made for an increase of happiness of knowledge here on earth.'

Wednesday 21 July 2004

Thursday 22 July 2004

LOVE <==> BLACK HOLE (?)

Information is encoded physically ++> all networks transmit value? The basic role of information is to reduce uncertainty so that agents can act with a higher probability of good success. We define the good as a function of fitness. In human societies fitness is measured by how well we manage to provide things for other people that leads them to give value to u. Economics studies the network of exchange of value without inquiring much into the meaning of the value, that is the 'good' that is linked to by exchange, eg potatoes for money.

Niven: Hollywood. Niven

[page 140]

Friday 23 July 2004

The cellular program. achieved by controlling the rate of manufacture of capital equipment that performs certain tasks and produces certain products (product = task_, coupled to a system of constant destruction (depreciation, death) which establishes a regime in which the probability of an event is a function of (maybe among other things) the rate of production of equipment for that task. This is a general economic model.

This is dissipative structure?

Parallel processing: speed is a function of the number of processors (and power of individual processors)

Single processor: speed is a function of the clock period and algorithmic efficiency.

Control process is a source of order (constraint). Destruction (recycling) process is a sink of order. Order (entropy) is conserved between source and sink and so the process works like a reversible heat engine between hot (ordered) and cold (disordered) reservoirs, emitting or absorbing a stream of mechanical (zero entropy, ie certain) energy. Carnot engine extracts the certainty out of the hot reservoir while preserving uncertainty and relocating it in the cold reservoir. The subtlety here revolves around the ideas of order, control and so on. Chaitin shows us that that data compression can remove all semblance of order from a bitstream while not destroying any of the information carried by the data. So if we really want to decide where a datastream is random or maximally compressed and meaningful, we need to know how to decode the data to find its meaning. To do this is to model the environment in which the data stream was generated. The simplest environment is a black body and the resulting data stream is modelled by the

[page 141]

quantum harmonic oscillator.

The shape of the black body curve carries information which is measured by the entropy of the space in which the curve exists.

What we are looking for is peace, that is oases of clam in a Universe of war and black holes. We can see that the environment within our skin is much more stable than the environment outside, and that this stability takes a certain amount of energy to acquire, to maintain thermostasis. The reactions of our chemical process are tuned so that the control paradigm is valid at body heat, 37 degrees Celsius (or so). So perhaps the foundation of peace is social thermostasis, around which social justice might be built. What the human race is looking for is maximum peace for minimum energy consumption. In network terms, this might mean maximum security for minimum cycles, which implies optimum algorithm.

Using Chaitin's ideas of compression, we might say that the content of the black body curve is is equal to the information content of Planck;'s equation. All we have to do is find a representation where the line and the equation have the same information content, ie are determinations of spaces with the same entropy.

Can we say that insofar as they can be represented by clear and distinct ideas (natural numbers) all spaces have equal entropy log_ℵ₀( ℵ₀ ) = 1.

Gunpowder is the most powerful political force since democracy and vice versa.

[page 142]

We want to realize some of the value contained in the transformative power of an idea, a tool for moving some element of the universal system from one state to another. A hammer, for instance, provides us with a simple means to exert momentarily quite large forces. What we wish to provide is a tool for reducing chaos to order. This tool is a communication network, wherein, over an extended period of interaction via a set of links, a set of nodes reach some sort of equilibrium.

The heyday of the British Empire shows the power of order. The power of order grows exponentially with the size of the order, as the number represented grows exponentially with the length of the number.

At certain temperatures the power of order overcomes the power of disorder, and at other temperatures vice versa.

Not possible; not probable.

What we seek is an integrated (ordered) view of human existence which serves as an algorithm to guide us all in our actions for the best outcome for all. Something like a high Q in the direction of virtue and heavy damping on vice. Virtue and vice are themselves defined relative to the welfare of the system, measured as an integral of the welfare of its elements.

Meaning breaks the degeneracy of identical physical symbols. So the 's' at the beginning of 'symbols' is different from the 's' at the end of 'symbols'.

Dictatorship is an effort to reduce the variety of a system to the variety of one element of it, the dictator. Such a system is unstable, in that a higher entropy ordering of the elements is available by making them all equal. Equal power = equal probability = maximum entropy (Shannon).

[page 143]

Guidelines: the basic guideline is to maximize structure, ie maximize information, ie maximize entropy. In any given situation, maximizing entropy means making the occurrence of the letters of the systematic alphabet equiprobable.

Monk - monarch ; one who feels free to think exactly what he wants, and by taking a vow of silence, guarantees that he will not get into trouble by expressing these thoughts.

bodybuilding / mindbuilding

One with money can do whatever there is a contractor available for ie an entity capable of executing the necessary algorithm or set of algorithms.

LOVE : DOT PRODUCT : INTEGRAL ==> ow resolution strong attraction (vs high resolution weak attraction) Love is often stronger than death meaning that complexity (order) can determine power (cardinality)

We begin with the transfinite network an then allow random symmetry breaking to give lines through space.

Saturday 24 July 2004

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty

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Links

Adi Shankara - Wikipedia Adi Shankara - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Adi Shankara (788 CE - 821 CE?), also known as Śaṅkara Bhagavatpādācārya and Ādi Śaṅkarācārya, was an Indian philosopher who consolidated the doctrine of Advaita Vedanta, a sub-school of Vedanta.

His works in Sanskrit, all of which are extant today, concern themselves with establishing the doctrine of Advaita (Nondualism). He also established the importance of monastic life as sanctioned in the Upanishads and Brahma Sutra, in a time when the Mimamsa school established strict ritualism and ridiculed monasticism.' back

Albert Einstein Thermodynamics - Wikiquote 'A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts. Albert Einstein (author), Paul Arthur, Schilpp (editor). Autobiographical Notes. A Centennial Edition. Open Court Publishing Company. 1979. p. 31 [As quoted by Don Howard, John Stachel. Einstein: The Formative Years, 1879-1909 (Einstein Studies, vol. 8). Birkhäuser Boston. 2000. p. 1]' back

Axial Age - Wikipedia Axial Age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term the axial age (Ger. Achsenzeit, "axistime") to describe the period from 800 BCE to 200 BCE, during which, according to Jaspers, similar revolutionary thinking appeared in China, India and the Occident. The period is also sometimes referred to as the axis age.

Jaspers, in his Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History), identified a number of key axial age thinkers as having had a profound influence on future philosophy and religion, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged. Jaspers saw in these developments in religion and philosophy a striking parallel without any obvious direct transmission of ideas from one region to the other, having found no recorded proof of any extensive intercommunication between Ancient Greece, the Middle East, India, and China. Jaspers held up this age as unique, and one to which the rest of the history of human thought might be compared. Jaspers' approach to the culture of the middle of the first millennium BC has been adopted by other scholars and academics, and has become a point of discussion in the history of religion.' back

East-West Schism - Wikipedia East-West Schism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The East–West Schism, sometimes known as the Great Schism, divided medieval Christianity into Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches, which later became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, respectively. Relations between East and West had long been embittered by political and ecclesiastical differences and theological disputes. Prominent among these were the issues of "filioque", whether leavened or unleavened bread should be used in the eucharist, the Pope's claim to universal jurisdiction, and the place of Constantinople in relation to the Pentarchy.' back

Islam - Wikipedia Islam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Islam (Arabic: الإسلام‎ al-’islām, pronounced [ʔislæːm] ( listen)[note 1]) is the monotheistic religion articulated by the Qur’an, a text considered by its adherents to be the verbatim word of God (Arabic: الله‎, Allāh), and by the Prophet of Islam Muhammad's teachings and normative example (which is called the Sunnah in Arabic, and demonstrated in collections of Hadith). Islam literally means "submission (to God)." back

Martin Luther - Wikipedia Martin Luther - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest and professor of theology who initiated the Protestant Reformation.[1] Strongly disputing the claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin could be purchased with money, he confronted indulgence salesman Johann Tetzel with his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and condemnation as an outlaw by the emperor.' back

Prosperity theology - Wikipedia Prosperity theology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'Prosperity theology (also known as prosperity doctrine, the health and wealth gospel, or the prosperity gospel) is a religious belief found among "tens of millions"[1] of Christians centered on the notion that God provides material prosperity for those he favors. It has been defined by the belief that "Jesus blesses believers with riches" or more specifically as the teaching that "believers have a right to the blessings of health and wealth and that they can obtain these blessings through positive confessions of faith and the 'sowing of seeds' through the faithful payments of tithes and offerings." In the words of journalist Hanna Rosin, the prosperity gospel "is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity."[1][2] It arose in the United States after World War II championed by Oral Roberts and became particularly popular in the decade of the 1990s.[1] More recently, the theology has been exported to less prosperous areas of the world, with mixed results.' back

Protestant Reformation - Wikipedia Protestant Reformation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'The Protestant Reformation was the European Christian reform movement that established Protestantism as a constituent branch of contemporary Christianity. It began in 1517 when Martin Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses, and concluded in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia that ended years of European religious wars.' back

Simple vow - Wikipedia Simple vow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'In the Canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, public vows are either simple vows or solemn vows. Professed members of religious orders take solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience (the vows of religion), while members of religious congregations take simple vows. The practical difference lies in the vow of poverty. While in simple vows, a person maintains the right to own goods (but cedes their administration), in solemn vows a person renounces the right of ownership of goods.' back

Sweet spot - Wikipedia Sweet spot - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 'A sweet spot is a place, often numerical as opposed to physical, where a combination of factors suggest a particularly suitable solution. In the context of a racquet, bat or similar sporting instrument, sweet spot is often believed to be the same as the center of percussion.' back

The Brights' Network The Brights' Net - Home Page 'What is a bright?

A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview

A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements

The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview' back

The JESUS Film Project The JESUS Film Project 'Called by some "one of the best-kept secrets in Christian missions," a number of mission experts have acclaimed the film as one of the greatest evangelistic tools of all time. Since 1979 the "JESUS" film has been viewed by several billion people all across the globe, and has resulted in more than 225 million men, women and children indicating decisions to follow Jesus.' back

Yoido Full Gospel Church - Wikipedia Yoido Full Gospel Church - Wikipedia 'Yoido Full Gospel Church is a Pentecostal church on Yeouido Island in Seoul, South Korea. With about 1,000,000 members (2007), it is the largest Protestant Christian congregation in South Korea, [1] and in the whole world. Founded and led by David Yonggi Cho since 1958, it is one of the most internationally visible manifestations of Korean Christianity.' back