Notes
[Notebook: DB 57 Language]
[Sunday 9 January 2005 - Saturday 15 January 2005]
[page 45]
Sunday 9 January 2005
'Emergence' is a product of communication
Monday 10 January 2005
To the authors of 9/11. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States I like your report, as far as it goes, in seeking to understand why its enemies have been so successful in striking the US. The report focusses on 'Islamic Terrorism'.
page 362: 'But the enemy is not just "terrorism," some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by <i>Islamist</i> terrorism - especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology.
'As we mentioned in chapter 2, Usama Bin Ladin and other Islamic terrorist leaders draw on a long tradition of extreme intolerance within one stream of Islam (a minority tradition) from at least Ibn Taimiyyah, through the founders of Wahhabism, through the Muslim Brotherhood, to Sayyid Qutb. That steam is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, distorting both.'
The Christians also have intolerant elements among them, not just vis-a-vis internal parties of Christians, but with respect to other religions including Islam, Hindu, Buddhist etc. Over the centuries, the doctrine of secularism has developed to calm religious passion. You may believe what you like, but must also be a socially integrated person when it comes to the practicalities of everyday life, the
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physical context within which all living systems exist.
The secularist point of view sees religious conflict as unnecessary once we all begin to see our common humanity and learn to live together for the good life, both for ourselves and for our planet.
SECULAR RELIGION = PHYSICAL RELIGION
The torture and murder of captives is an example of the physical aspect of religion. There is a religious aspect to every war, otherwise people would not be motivated to risk (and lose) their lives in combat. Armstrong
9/11 Commission page 363: You write: 'Terrorism is a tactic used by individuals and organisations to kill and destroy..' You write as though terrorists are the epitome of evil, acting for not reason to destroy lives and property. In a just war, of course, individuals and organisations destroy lives and property for a good reason, to get their own way. All living things are licensed to kill by the imperatives of survival. But may not the terrorists also have a purpose which gives meaning to their actions? And if all acts of violence have meaning, how do we distinguish between terrorism and war? The US has declared war on terrorism while simultaneously and contradictorily claiming that its enemies have
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no rights under the conventions of war.
. . .
SECULARISM = METARELIGION ie a set of religions characterized by the common properties of religion.
ALL RELIGIONS SHARE THE SAME PHYSICAL WORLD. Only those acts which change the physical world are of public concern, so a public religion may recognize and perhaps attempt to control them. This understanding and control comes from knowledge of the world we inhabit. Each religion claims to have some special knowledge of this world and so instruct its followers that they may profit by the knowledge of the world passed on to them by their religion.
From a secular point of view, collecting and and interpreting knowledge about the world is the task of science and so a secular religion would be doctrinally a scientific religion.
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A scientific religion would differ from traditional religions in two important ways. First, science is mutable. Observations and interpretations of observations are subject to change and we expect that in the long run the scientific community continues to get a better understanding of the overall system we inhabit. The cosmos is our incubator and we can see in some detail how we arose as a consequence of the big bang and the laws of physics and chemistry.
You write 'In short, the United States has to help defeat an ideology, not just a group of people, and we must do so under difficult circumstances. How can the United States and its friends help moderate Muslims combat extremist ideas?' The answer is that the United States must renounce its own extremist ideas, so extreme that it often finds itself taking unilateral action because it is too intolerant to hear all sides of a situation.
The US, like every one of us, must realize the Newtonian law that action and reaction are equal and opposite. Every nation would like unfettered control over other nations, but this is no more stable than a system which makes any group of people slaves to another.
page 394: 'The terrorists have used our open society against us'. But is this not the very point of an open society, that one can air one's grievances in public. If nobody listens, shout louder. And if they turn out to be totally deaf, hit them hard. The US recognizes this principle in retaliating against its
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enemies, but fails to see that there are two sides to every question.
page 361 'This pattern has occurred before in American history. The United States faces a sudden crisis and summons a tremendous exertion of national energy. Then, as that surge transforms the landscape, comes a time for reflection and reevaluation.'
We model this as a transient with sudden onset and a rate of decay which measures the rate of 'healing' or 'annealing'
page 362: 'That stream is motivated by religion and does not distinguish politics from religion, distorting both. It is further fed by grievances stressed by Bin Laden and widely felt throughout the Muslim world - against US military presence in the Middle East, policies perceived as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim, and support of Israel.
The same problem (or its mirror image) exists in the US. We must diffuse polarities by 'earthing' them.
'The resentment of America and the West is deep, even among leaders of relatively successful Muslim states.
Do we resent them? We hardly even think of them unless they cut off the oil or perform acts of war. The definition of an act of war is physical: a visible expenditure of life, health, ordnance, fuel etc etc.
All war is terrorism, all terrorism war, ie WAR == TERRORISM fear, awe, death, destruction.
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SECULAR religion is not ETERNAL.
Mathematics is the eternal core of secular religion: mathematical theology.
9/11 Commission page 376: 'the simple shortage of experts with sufficient skills'.
page 406: Pearl Harbour: "'Surprise, when it happens to a government, is likely to be a complicated, diffuse, bureaucratic thing. It includes neglect of responsibility, but also responsibility so poorly defined or so ambiguously delegated that action gets lost.'" Wohlstetter page viii
page 416: Intelligence accountability
The non-communication and unilateralism within and between individual agencies with the US parallels the unilateralism of the US on the international scene. The key concept here is 'scale invariance'.
Tuesday 11 January 2005
A letter to the 9/11 Commission.
Wednesday 12 January 2005
Religions our noetic operating system. As such it is not easy to change as I have learnt in my transition from Catholic to natural.
Natural religion is an expansion of the idea of natural = {physics, metaphysics}
Thursday 13 January 2005
A religion of change must show us, among other things, how to change. We assume, with Newton, that all change results from the application of force: this is almost a tautology, of very ancient origin, that nothing changes unless it is moved. Newton founded dynamics by the simple assumption that the force and the rate of change were linearly related, the constant of proportionality being the mass upon which the force is acting, ie F = ma. This relationship, we postulate, holds at all scales down to the quantum of action. In the macroscopic world of pistons, connecting rods and vehicle suspension, Newton's relationship is effectively exact. In the quantum world the three laws of motion still hold, but now the force, mass and acceleration are vectors, not scalars, so that a force of a certain complexity acts upon a mass of a certain complexity to produce changes of a certain complexity. So, for instance, the idea of democracy may slowly penetrate a population (mass) of people and move those people from an authoritarian to a democratic form of social organization.
AUTHORITARIAN to SCIENTIFIC
ARBITRARY to SCIENTIFIC
The force of authority brings down the variety of society, so lessening its ability to deal with environmental change. We are in a transient of rapid change, which, when it interacts with state authoritarianism (maintaining the status quo) is trouble, without a well thought out
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agenda for change. The successes (and failures) of colonialism, occupation and independence and the international scene give us some clues.
On the one hand, thee is violent revolutionary change which seldom seems to do anyone any good. On the other hand, planned change can be so slow that it leads to a buildup of forces (as in an earthquake) that can only be resolved by a revolutionary change.
In the middle is a rate of individual change matched to the rate of environmental change, a state of moving at an adequate but safe speed. This state is an ideal balance between the rate of capitalization (ie the rate of long term change) and the rate of consumption (the rate of short term change) In other words, we are optimizing the frequency spectrum of the agent or force for change.
Safe change, like mountaineering, requires some connections be maintained while others are moved. The technique of violent revolution is rather like letting go at all points perhaps as a leap, perhaps as a fall. On the other hand stagnation arises when one cannot move any limb safely. The ability of a climber to move one limb is an example of headroom or redundance. To change successfully and securely, a living system must have sufficient resources to make the change while maintaining normal life.
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Friday 14 January 2005
Once we recognize the biological role of religion in mutation and selection, we can begin to see more clearly the spiritual means used by religions to archive their biological ends. Since we share a common biology, it is not surprising that we begin to see similarities (as well as differences) in the religions of the world (Reynolds and Tanner, Reynolds and Tanner) The similarities are the basis for religious union. Similarities are abstractions that form links between concrete entities.
COMMUNICATION = a) SIMILARISATION b) DIFFERENTIATION
In quantum mechanics the fundamental differentiation is between OBSERVED and POSSIBLE.
ACT = OBSERVATION (POINT)
POTENCY = ENTROPY (SPACE)
Countable (quantum) mechanics is controllable. The uncountable cannot be controlled. Countability is relative to the scale of computation.
WORK and PLAY : we often distinguish them, perhaps by their attraction - work is, at least sometimes, repulsive, and so is sought not as an end in itself, but as a path to an end made worthwhile by anticipated gains. Play, on the other hand, is undertaken for its own sake. Of course, some 'play' professionally, and for them the game (tennis etc) may be repulsive, but nevertheless a means to some other end.
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BONUM HONESTUM/UTILE Aquinas 30
Free running vs purpose driven ie CAPITALIZATION = SAVING
Survival requires saving to get over the lean periods in a random resource supply - deal with random elements and the predictables will take care of themselves.
MONOPOLY - GRAVITATION - MASS ATTRACTS MASS, INHIBITED ONLY BY CENTRIFUGAL FORCES, IE FORCES DUE TO CURVATURE.
So CAPITAL attracts INCOME which adds to capital.
