Notes
[Notebook: Language DB 57 ]
[Sunday 10 October 2004 - Saturday 16 October 2004]
[page 13]
Sunday 10 October 2004
A night of belly dancing ('Eastern dance') with many goddesses.
Politics: In our imagined distributions of power in the human world, we like to think of religion as above
[page 14]
or outside politics. It is the relatively static framework within which politics seethes and struggles. It give structure to these struggles, we postulate, with an eye to fitness. For religions, while theoretically outside politics are practically embroiled in it like everybody else. For there are many religions competing to embed themselves in newborn minds, and so the malthusian constraint on variety manifests as a struggle or existence. This religious struggle has no reason to cease until we are all united in one religion. We have defined the function of religion to be to bind groups of people together. But as long as there exist incompatible religions, to bind [us together] is also to separate [us from them].
Can we bind ourselves into one religion. I think the answer is yes, and we are already well on the way. [The unity of biological science based on the unity of the life is our clue] Apart from exceptions like Lysenko, political forces do not introduce error into biology. They might of course influence the direction of biological research, and so perhaps give some ideas undue weight and starve others.
We know without doubt that we are one species, living on one planet. The evolutionary assumption guarantees that all the elements of the world work together. Things that don't 'work' don't happen, like a cracker that does not go off. So we know [that] each of us, and every distinct entity, has an unbroken pedigree stretching back to the initial singularity.
The initial singularity is the natural religion version of god. It is indefinable, because you can only define things by putting them in a box, and the initial singularity, like the Universe that has emanated from it cannot by
[page 15]
definition be put in a box because it is all there is. There can be no box outside it. Apart from this undefinability, the initial singularity enjoys another important feature of god, it is the source of everything, the creator.
This is nice, but where did the initial singularity come form? Where did god come from? Both questions have the same answer: we don't know, we just know we are here. The difference is in the [assumed] relationship between god and creation. In the old view, we are outside god. Looks contradictory really, we are a little box outside god but not containing it. In a scientific religion we are inside god and can look around, see how things work and plan our activity to increase our chances of good success.
SCIENCE
The formal, funded part of this search is called science. But all knowledge, even gossip, has a scientific element. We observe (listen, pry), use our imagination to form hypotheses and then communicate these hypotheses to the rest of the community. Finally, we wait expectantly to see what everyone (= the Editors) think of the story.
Similar operations are performed in our individual selves. Playing tennis we watch a ball, form opinions about its future trajectory and then try to intercept is and return it on a trajectory out of the opponent's reach.
[page 16]
Science is the senses of the human religious organism. The rise of our technological culture over the last few centuries shows us the power of science. Not just the science of the Watts and Newtons, but the science of the bankers and politicians who had to learn how to deal with the violent new input of energy from fossil fuels and the assembly of large units of capital.
Science gives us the options. The political allocation of energy to particular options beings them to life. The options for religion are defined by theology, since every organism needs a knowledge of its environment to navigate safely and successfully.
Some would say that there are limits to science, but these are at least as wide as the limits of imagination and experience.
Corruption: politicization of religion, science, ie force wins over form, degrading the subtlety of form and the selectivity of force.
They key to a peaceful nation is a consistent set of laws implemented by an honest bureaucracy.
Monday 11 October 2004
Life is a rollercoaster ride: it looks like a stock market chart. The degree of fluctuation in price depends to come degree on the size of the company and the reliability of its business.
[page 17]
The general drift, measured by various indices, similarly maps the feeling in the national and global equity markets. To design a social system independent of stock prices, we have to establish orthogonality between the market and the relevant social parameters. It may not be good (or even possible) to produce a social system completely homeostatic with respect to economic conditions because then individuals may lose some of their adaptability. What we seek here, as everywhere in life, is not an absolute but an optimum (given the conditions).
If we live in trees the distance between points (entropy) varies as the logarithm of the number of points.
Roads, plumbing, flow conservation : our basic problem is to reconcile change and stability. What we observe is an hierarchy of structure ranked by durability. We understand the high frequency things through the low frequency things. More generally, we extrapolate from our own scale o all the other scales in the Universe by assuming that they are all the same to themselves as we are to ourselves. This, in a way, is the fundamental symmetry of consciousness.
We can divide life into reasonable and emotional. These correspond, in the model, to countably infinite and
[page 18]
transfinite.
TRANSFINITE = EMOTIONAL
FINITE = RATIONAL (Turing Machinable)
Love one another is good, but let us all treat one another nicely is more practicable = practical.
FORMALISM : that part of a dynamic system for which d(whatever)/dt = zero.
The theology company is going into the Jesus business.
Jesus was an old paradigm loser. He died to correct an error. Now we make money out of correcting errors - SERVICE
The more you do for yourself the smaller the economy.
Our business is to put ourselves out of business by showing you how to do it for yourself.
TTC morality : be nice / Be true.
A big question for me is how can one person, Caesar, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, influence the lives of so many people. More generally, what is the structure of human power over one another. Or Aquinas, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Kant etc. From a thermodynamic point of view, we may see each of these people as a
[page 19]
'nucleation centre' for a certain condensation (phase change).
How do we understand phase changes in religion = {human communication protocols}.
Original sin is a self fulfilling prophecy. To be brought up Catholic is to be brought up disabled. But also abled. And the question is does the cost/benefit of being a member outweigh the cost/benefit of not being a member.
The industrial revolutionists found [again] that formalism was power and took it to such extremes that their employees suffered.
. . .
The bureaucracy determines (by formal decree on paper) how individuals will act in order to achieve the ends of the bureaucracy which are as ever avoiding sudden death, growth and reproduction.
Infinite = unresolved; finite, rational, logical = resolved.
. . .
Anewtheology can follow the order of the Summa.
We progress by 'discretizing' things into tasks (the basic ones ad not and nand) and ordering the tasks to achieve the imagined end.
[page 20]
FAITH and INVESTMENT
The spiritual ones, the literate ones, the 'celebrities' may seek to isolate themselves from the masses, to be a closed partition of the boundless masses. This closed set lives off the masses, and so tends to cultivate them to maximize return, a a gardener might. Gardeners, of course, may be a well rewarded by the beauty of the garden as by its contribution to their domestic economy.
In a similar way, domestic economies are the closed system which cultivates the global economy ( and vice versa) and more generally, human minds are the (closed?) finite systems which radiate order into the body politic. [as the sun does] A polity that does not enhance the fitness of its population may not be worth the trouble.
By complexity invariance, we draw a line from economic faith, hope and charity to spiritual faith, hope and charity, that is from closed to open.
This hypothesis directly contradicts the notion that matter is inert, evil, dark, the enemy of spirit. It is the foundation of spirit. Landauer. Spirit therefore need to look after matter as its own
[page 21]
land, the source of its life.
