Notes
[Notebook: Language DB 57]
[Sunday 12 December 2004 - Saturday 18 December 2004]
[page 46]
Sunday 12 December 2004
James Joyce: Ulysses and symbolic inner process - symbols interact through their physical substrates - gates. Joyce
There is a pressure to write, sometimes hard to resist, which is analogous to the pressure for an atom in a high energy state to relax and emit a photon. It might not matter to the atoms any more than to the writer that the writing is not ready by anybody - just the writing (speaking, gesture etc) seems to be enough in itself to achieve a lowering of potential, removing the need to write further. So, for the moment, this paragraph is enough, a formulated thought out of the rather chaotic mainstream of mind.
What am I trying to do: find a simple efficient
[page 47]
algorithm for life that can sustainably increase the level of human happiness? Love one another reasonably? Taking guidance from quantum mechanics which seems to have guided our world from nothing to its present glory.
Malthusian pressure, a relative of the Cantor force.
Who am I? An evolutionarily and culturally determined entity with a creative openness to the future.
Theology is concerned with the question Who am I? The tautological answer is I am who [I] am, and each of us is a particular manifestation of that abstract bit of text. Exodus 3:14
The most interesting feature of the Universe is that knowledge (and so consciousness) exists at all.
KNOWLEDGE (ABSTRACTION) RECURSION eit
'problems caused by the imprudent use of drugs'.
Ethics by branching ratios: take up drugs, 90% trouble, 10% not trouble; immunize against x. . . .
Monday 13 December 2004
CLASSICAL = ABSTRACT (result of measurement)
QUANTUM = CONCRETE
Nielsen page 29: '. . . Physicists believe that all aspects of the world around us . . . can ultimately be explained using quantum
[page 48]
mechanics.' Nielsen and Chuang
QM and Lonergan: this essay is built around two books, Lonergan Insight and Nielsen and Chuang Quantum Computation. Lonergan
Consciousness is made possible by abstraction. [The knower cannot contain an identical duplicate of itself, but it can contain an abstract duplicate] The value of abstraction lies in the broader view (ie 'more objective' view).
We are in a Universe where creatures like ourselves appear to ourselves as we do, and this appearance is the foundation datum upon which the edifice of more abstract knowledge is built.
So I sit and so my books, recording in a few words and figures a day building in the sin (with frequent thunderstorms and an early knock off). This writing is an abstract (compressed) version of events, recording only points of economic interest: hours worked [and expenses incurred]
Trading: trying to predict turning points so as to buy for the lowest price and see at the highest price in a window.
Tuesday 14 December 2004
Wednesday 15 December 2004
' . . . because of many experiments [like Stern-Gerlach] we now believe that the electron spin is best
[page 49]
described by the qubit model. What is more, we believe that the qubit model (and generalizations to higher dimensions; quantum mechanics in other words) is capable of describing every physical system. Nielsen and Chuang page 46
One may sound like an old testament prophet. Prophecy, as we see often in the Bible, is a feedback mechanism. The prophet, seeing the people going astray, preaches loudly the word of the Lord, attempting to define the ways of righteousness and shepherd the people into these ways. Historically, this general class of ways might be called the strait and narrow, that is the narrowly constrained.
Is narrow constraint necessary?
If religion is the technology of peace, its first task is to cut down on deliberate killing and then turn to all the subtler methods by which people disadvantage one another in the struggle for existence. Before we can do much good with welfare, we must cut down on the amount of 'illfare' circulating in society. We may speculate that all conflict is caused by narrowness, that is by the two parties being unable to imagine a space in which they can coexist. Given this, peacemaking is basically a matter of spacemaking, so there is room for everybody to expand to their full potential. This, in the limit, is peaceful equilibrium by maximum entropy. The only constraint on the amount of entropy created by the exercise of human freedom is the same as in the exercise
[page 49]
of all other freedoms, consistency; an addressing system which allows the entities within it to move (communicate) without collision.
Thursday 16 December 2004
Friday 17 December 2004
What we need to get passionate about is unnecessary constraint, that is people acting to reduce the variety of others, from a variety of reasons. Basically, these constraints have been designed by old men to keep themselves in power.
Saturday 18 December 2004
The basic evil/terror is fear/insecurity = error, ie peace is a product of effective error correction.
