Notes
[Notebook: Transfinite field theory DB 56]
[Sunday 1 August 2004 - Saturday 7 August 2004]
Sunday 1 August 2004
Monday 2 August 2004
[page 149]
Tuesday 3 August 2004
We say knowledge is power, but it is far from all of power. Power also comes out of the barrel of a gun,
[page 150]
though we might say that knowledge made the gun possible. Science and military technology have always been close, and those groups with superior weapons often triumph over their less well armed neighbours. Just as governments, dictators and others, can do things that knowledge shows to be ultimately self destructive (and generally destructive), like killing the goose that laid the golden eggs. Knowledge is the model exploration of the possibilities of life. So we say that good theology supports good religion which will support a good polity. But not always. The entrenched power of bad religion may for a long time fend off knowledge based attempts to improve the system. One may guess, however, that natural selection will eventually deliver the prize to good theology, religion, and politics, because we identify 'good' and 'fit'. The fit survive, so on this definition, the good survive, on the average. This discussion reflects the quantum mechanical ideas that the 'wave equation' acts as knowledge which in a probabilistic way gives weights to the different possible outcomes of a given prepared situation. 'measurements'
Do I want power? Have I got it? What would I use it for? I definitely want the power of knowledge to resolve some of the disequilibria of the planet.
The day is windy and I feel ? a change coming on ?
Owen Gingerich N430:407 22 July 2004. Gingerich
'With the perspective of history, we can see that a persuasive coherency can finally displace an entrenched world view, bit it take time to build a constituency. The tortoise-like pace of the Copernican revolution reflects the radical reorientation of thought required to accept that his 'theory pleasing to the mind' described a real physical Universe and was not simply an imaginary device for calculating the positions of the planets.'
[page 151]
Much high culture is (or was) built on slavery. Some slavery was established by capture and violence and the remainder by religious belief in service without reward. The condition of most people is a mixture of these elements. We would define a slave as an entity that gives more to its environment than it gets back, so it is a net loser. A master, on the other hand, does the opposite, taking more than it gives. In a 'just' society of entities giving and getting would be equal and the system at 'justitial equilibrium' since no entity that is capable of accurately measuring its receipts and expenditures would have any reason to claim (or the only reason, which has motivated many a master) that because [it] is better it is entitled to more. The reality is that because we are more powerful we take more. We see this in the structure of our Universe where masses of gas that are large enough (eg black holes) attract more matter to themselves so the distribution of the matter in the Universe has become clumpy. The distribution of power has a similar tendency, a property characteristic of bosons. Maybe banks are the archetypal social bosons (a bank is in a sense an abstract element of power represented by money)
PEER OF = COMMENSURABLE WITH (com = with)
In other words we can only really measure justice in per groups and peer groups may be incommensurable as the reals cannot be measured by the rationals, one of the oldest and most important discoveries of mathematics.
Justice can only be measured locally, in the interaction of two peers (eg two human beings who have not been acculturated to believe that one is superior to another). How do we measure justice among peers? Start as usual in physics and wonder whether the conservations of energy, momentum and action are manifestations of fundamental justice. Noether's theorem linking conservation and symmetry suggests yes,
[page 152]
where symmetry is taken to be the property which creates peers. Emmy Noether, Nina Byers
Justice means an equal measure of something. The evolutionary paradigm suggests that this something is fitness. In a just society fitness is shared, so that individual fates are the result of random fluctuations rather than any systematic bias (entrenched injustice)
Fitness is measured by probability of successful reproduction, ie (in Darwin's view) the probability of a copy of one's genes making it into the next generation. This probability may be normalized by considering the whole gene pool for the entity in question.
Get a statistical genetics book.
To get the big picture, we zoom out, ignoring detail while knowing that the detail and the big picture are compatible with one another so that no contradictions are encountered while zooming. This is sometimes not the case with big pictures generated by philosophers who have no grasp of detail. This was more common in the days when the literate and communicating ruling classes considered themselves superior to tradespeople who actually got their hands dirty dealing with the concrete details of the world, food, safety, childrearing, etc. Science united tradesperson and philosopher in one, as we see so well in the instrument maker Galileo. So science has a chance of a smooth zoom from microscopic to macroscopic. The invariant with respect to zooming (complexity) is the network structure of computation and communication.
PEER = RESOLVED We cannot be peers with (to us) unresolved entities.
PEER = REVERSIBLE
So we find unitarity within our peer groups but have to 'normalize' between incommensurate groups.
[page 153]
Irrationalism = incommensurability
Each sentence links two processes in the network. This sentence links processes and sentences. An opinion (sententia) or proposition.
CHANGE = COMMUNICATION
A logical opposition is one that proposes alternative paths to the future which accepting the status quo as a starting point. A revolutionary opposition wants to start from somewhere else.
One might argue that the time for gratuitous romance is over, and it is tie to settle down to do a bit of serious thinking about how to save the world from its present predicament = {states of the world}. Now natural theology argues that god is the biggest thing there is; from the point of view of cardinal numbers, this is the state of maximum entropy. The actual world that exists in a state of maximum entropy maximizes the information contained in each determinate state of the system.
One operates under a heavy load. To believe that there is an algorithm which will lead us asymptotically to global peace in the human world, and the maximum harmony between the human world and the reset of the Universe (most intimately, gaia). Basically by understanding flows of energy and information, we can gain an overall picture of how the Universe works. Entropy and energy are orthogonal.
Nobody's plight is so bad that they are justified in killing other people to remedy it, since the relevant plight is their own non-existence.
[page 154]
Society is based on rational calculations of justice. In the area of commodity trade, justice is established by the market, so much money for so much stuff. Money plays the role of metric, ie dot product.
Theorem: (?) The bossier you are the less you learn.
Every potential business proposition (on every timescale from 1 to ℵ0) grows as it merits the expenditure of more energy (investment). The essence of growth is to be attractive in proportion to one's size, so that the influx of resources is proportional to size and growth therefore exponential.
One may see the world as a set of competing exponentials (replicators). Say this in quantum mechanics. The introduction of complex exponentials makes periodicity (and normalization) possible.
At a peer level, every killing is an error in the system.
FITNESS <=> SUFFICIENT REASON.
The basic task of writing is testing a proposition to see if it is true to reality.
suspicion = probability of error.
