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Notes

[Notebook: DB 57 Language]

[Sunday 19 June 2005 - Saturday 25 June 2005]

[page 162]

Sunday 19 June 2005
Monday 20 June 2005
Tuesday 21 June 2005
Wednesday 22 June 2005
Thursday 23 June 2005
Friday 24 June 2005

The key practical insight of natural religion is that the world is not dead inert matter associated with the dark side but a divinely intelligent system which creates us and to which we must pay the respect due to god if we are to survive.The key word in the paragraph above is 'intelligent', a bone of contention. How are we to understand intelligent, ie what is the intelligent view of intelligence? This is an old philosophical and scientific problem which I first came to grips with while reading and rereading Lonergan's Insight. Lonergan Insight is a twentieth century restatement of a line of thought running from ancient Greece through medieval Christian Europe to the present, still carrying considerable weight in Christian scholarship. This tradition maintains a distinction between 'matter' and 'spirit', and holds that 'intellect' is a purely spiritual function distinct from our 'material' senses that collect information from our environment and feed it to

[page 163]

the intellect which discerns the meaning of the data.

In contrast, we may found a natural view of intelligence on the theories of communication and computation, applying them first to quantum theory and then to a general understanding of all process, which includes 'acts of intelligence'

Search and discovery. The tale of the lost (carefully hidden?) car key. Either I dropped it somewhere in the grass (and it is effectively gone forever) or I carefully (but unconsciously) put it somewhere (and one day may find out where.

INTELLIGENCE = EVOLUTION = RANDOMIZATION --> MEMORY --> SELECTION

Our natural hypothesis is that intelligent design and evolution are identical. The classical Western god is omnipotent and omniscient, and so can instantly find and implement perfect designs. Because the world seems imperfect, Christian storytellers have invented the Fall to explain how God's perfect creation became imperfect.

Dawkins has popularized the general functioning of evolution and shown how the appearance of intelligence can be achieved by the interplay of [limited] randomization and selection. Dawkins

Question 1: Is the 'stochasticism' real or just a lack of knowledge of the system? Let us say that it is real, motivated by Gödel's finding that no system is [can be] big enough to fully constrain itself.

[page 164]

The Poirot approach to searching : use the available evidence and logic to constrain the search space as tightly as possible, so reducing the physical task to a minimum - minimum action lies somewhere between spending too much time looking and too much time thinking.

Heisenberg's principle of justice/judgment/retribution/control - we can only deal with observables. What is not observed is the internal forum, the evolution of the universal function.

Dynamics = nature and frequency of communication.

Natural justice = observation/evidence based

EVIDENCE = ACTION

The world is a complex of little wheels [Feynman's arrows. Feynman]

Newtonian justice : action/reaction

Can we say that 4-space is a consequence of quantum mechanics and not vice versa?

The Roman Catholic intrusion into the internal forum is the epitome of psychological terrorism

A world of spin = recursive process (maybe with 'complexification index' 0, so that recurrences are identical (symmetrical)).

. . .

[page 165]

The 'forbidden fruit' approach to social control.

The layers of a network are orthogonal in that they place no constraints on each other so that the letters themselves exercise no control over the spelling or words.

States described (partly) by positions in spacetime - The Hilbert space of the natural line.

'The world is a network of spins' (?) Feynman III A-13

Stern-Gerlach observation 'experimental fact' Feynman III A-16

'Don't daydream' - mind control ('pay attention' (for what?))

Sharing/bonding/lower energy. Can we see this quantum mechanical fact as a feature of a network, and scale invariant, so that we can speculate that cooperative sharing reduces the workload (per individual) of a system and so enables us to produce the same quality of life with less work (energy)?

Saturday 25 June 2005

 

Related sites

Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty


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Further reading

Books

Copleston, Frederick C, Aquinas: An Intoduction to the Work of a great Medieval Thinker, Penguin Books 1955-1975 'Aquinas (1224-74) lived at a time when the Christian West was opening up to a wealth of Greek and Islamic philosophical speculation. An embodiment of the thirteenth-century ideal of a unified interpretation of reality (in which philosophy and theology work together in harmony), Aquinas was remarkable for the way in which he used and developed this legacy of ancient thought—an achievement which led his contemporaries to regard him as an advanced thinker. Father Copleston's lucid and stimulating book examines this extraordinary man—whose influence is perhaps greater today than in his own lifetime—and his trought, relating his ideas wherever possible to problems as they are discussed today.' 
Amazon
  back

Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants" -- a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.' 
Amazon
  back

Denzinger, Henricus, and Adolphus Schoenmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum, Herder 1963 Introduction: 'Dubium non est quin praeter s. Scripturam cuique theologo summe desiderandus sit etiam liber manualis quo contineantur edicta Magisterii ecclesiastici eaque saltem maioris momenti, et quo ope variorim indicum quaerenti aperiantur eorum materiae.' (3) 'There is no doubt that in addition to holy Scripture, every theologian also needs a handbook which contains at least the more important edicts of the Magisterium of the Church, indexed in a way which makes them easy to find.' back

Feynman, Richard P, and Robert B Leighton, Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 3) : Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley 1970 Foreword: 'This set of lectures tries to elucidate from the beginning those features of quantum mechanics which are the most basic and the most general. . . . In each instance the ideas are introduced together with a detailed discussion of some specific examples - to try to make the physical ideas as real as possible.' Matthew Sands 
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Feynman (1988), Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. . . . In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.' 
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  back

Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics. 
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  back

Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Mariner Books 2000 Jacket: 'At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing.' 
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  back

Khinchin, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory (translated by P A Silvermann and M D Friedman), Dover 1957 Jacket: 'The first comprehensive introduction to information theory, this book places the work begun by Shannon and continued by McMillan, Feinstein and Khinchin on a rigorous mathematical basis. For the first time, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, cyberneticists and communications engineers are offered a lucid, comprehensive introduction to this rapidly growing field.' 
Amazon
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' 
Amazon
  back

Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . ' 
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Popper, Karl Raimund, The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 1) : The Spell of Plato, Routledge 1966 Introduction: 'This book ...attempts to show that [our civilisation] has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth - the transition from tribal or 'closed society', with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. ... It further tries to examine the application of the critical and rational methods of science to the problems of the open society.'  
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Links

4 Non Blondes, What's Up,
' Twenty-five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination
And I realized quickly when I knew I should
That the world was made up of this brotherhood of man
For whatever that means
And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What's going on?
And I say, hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what's going on?
ooh, ooh ooh
and I try,
oh my god do I try
I try all the time,
in this institution
And I pray,
oh my god do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution
And so I cry sometimes
When I'm lying in bed
Just to get it all out
What's in my head
And I am feeling a little peculiar
And so I wake in the morning
And I step outside
And I take a deep breath and I get real high
And I scream at the top of my lungs
What's going on?
And I say,
hey hey hey hey
I said hey, what's going on?
Twenty-five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
For a destination.'

back

Aquinas I, 16, 2, Does truth reside only in the intellect composing and dividing, 'I answer that, As stated before, truth resides, in its primary aspect, in the intellect. . . . Truth therefore may be in the senses, or in the intellect knowing "what a thing is," as in anything that is true; yet not as the thing known in the knower, which is implied by the word "truth"; for the perfection of the intellect is truth as known. Therefore, properly speaking, truth resides in the intellect composing and dividing; and not in the senses; nor in the intellect knowing "what a thing is." back

Bronwen Dalton and Anne O'Connell, Election Factcheck: Is the Australian Sex Party right about religious organizations, tax and record-keeping?, 'The Australian Sex Party is correct on both claims. Religious organisations do receive tax-exempt status. And “basic” religious organisations do remain exempt from standard accounting and record-keeping obligations.' back

Charles Livingstone and Maggie Johnson, Paying the piper andcalling the tune? Follwoing ClubsNSW's political donations, 'A search of the Australian Electoral Commission political donor records reveals that between July 1999 and June 2015, ClubsNSW declared political donations worth $2,569,181. Almost all of this money went to either the ALP ($886,505) or the Coalition parties ($1,682,676). . . . For its campaign against the Wilkie-Gillard reforms, ClubsNSW allied with casinos, the Australian Hotels Association, and major players such as the Woolworths subsidiary, pokie operators ALH Ltd. It declared additional expenditure of $3,478,581 for this during 2010-11 and 2011-12. Of that, $2,989,600 was for broadcasting expenses.' back

Jochen Bittner, Brexit and Europe's Angry Old Men, 'And now this. Just as Europeans of my generation were being relieved of those anxious old men, another type stepped onstage: the angry old men. These politicians — men and women, to be sure — are young enough not to have experienced world war, but they are old enough to idealize the pre-1989 era and a simpler, pre-globalization world. At the same time, they are obviously too sclerotic to imagine how democratic institutions can adjust to the new realities. With their aggressive posturing, these Nigel Farages, Marine Le Pens, Geert Wilderses and Donald J. Trumps are driving the debate — and possibly driving the West off a cliff.' back

Lawrence Peter Fitzgerald OP, Deceased 29 May 2003 (Canberra, ACT; Melbourne, Vic), back

Lorentz covariance - Wikipedia, Lorentz covariance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In physics, Lorentz symmetry, named for Hendrik Lorentz, is "the feature of nature that says experimental results are independent of the orientation or the boost velocity of the laboratory through space". Lorentz covariance, a related concept, is a key property of spacetime following from the special theory of relativity.' back

Melissa Fyfe, The Undoing of Slater and Gordon, 'But what is not widely known is that Slater & Gordon was in trouble long before it considered buying Quindell, . . .. Ben McGarry, portfolio manager at hedge fund Totus Capital, recalls someone aptly describing the situation as a "skyscraper of cards", with the Quindell house of cards teetering atop the Slater & Gordon house of cards. In other words, despite the sharemarket hype and rising share price, something was seriously shaky at Slater & Gordon.' back

Michael Pascoe, Aged care, clients, staff set to pay for government crackdown, 'Where's the dividing line between systemic fraud and "innocent mistakes" in the aged care sector? It's somewhere in the hundreds of millions of dollars very-much-for-profit aged care providers have been ripping out of the system by exploiting a flawed funding model – a model that encourages exaggerating care needs and discourages improving the health and independence of individuals.' back

NYT Editorial Board, The Broken Promise of Closing Guantanamo, '“What is the moral superiority of the United States of America if we torture prisoners?” Mr. McCain said shortly before the election. Mr. Obama vowed to shut down the prison during his first year in office, calling it a legal and moral abomination. As Mr. Obama’s administration draws to a close, there is less and less hope that the president will find a way to fulfill his promise.' back

Ralph Stanley, Amazing Grace, 'Ralph Stanley at Mt Juliet, TN Homecoming 10-10-09 sings one of my favorite gospel songs the way they sang 'em before they could afford hymnals in churches....long before today's video versions of hymnals. Thank God for technology, AND for reminding us of our roots and where we came from.' back

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