Notes
[Notebook: DB 58 Bringing God Home]
[Sunday 27 November - Saturday 3 December 2005]
[page 20]
Sunday 27 November 2005
To be a dictator is to reduce the variety of a corporation to that of one person. Not only does this imply the deployment of violence, but it most probably reduces the fitness of the corporation (organization, system). The pure pyramid is a null system in the sense that the cardinal of the whole is no greater than that of one part, der Furrier, and the power of the whole varies only linearly with its cardinality (population)
Corporatization allows superposition of the ideas of employee and shareholder, as with The Theology Company.
Fitness and science link through the art of compression., whose boundaries were defined by Shannon: one can compress until all redundance us gone and the compressed output is indistinguishable from a purely random (equally weighted) string of letters from the source alphabet.
The quantum constraint: all observable source alphabets are of cardinality aleph(o) or less.
Science searches for redundancy (symmetry) in the world and expresses it as a statement of the form (with probability p) all As are green, etc. Having learnt that they are green, we seek to know why and eventually, find a succinct explanation which fits a vast number of different phenomena, eg Quantum electrodynamics.
This symmetry adds to the fitness of the community by enabling it to design its future more precisely, leaving less to change.
The evolutionary balance lies in the costs and benefits of compression vs transmitting 'raw data'.
Maximum entropy = maximum information per symbol = minimum bias.
Alexis de Tocqueville "In history there are many copies
[page 21]
but few originals. De Jonge Stalin page 492. de Jonge
'We think of terror as the reign of those who inspire terror; on the contrary it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. Terror consists of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves. Marx to Engels during the Paris Commune, de Jonge 510.
DEMOCRACY - LAND TENURE de Jonge page 515,
NETWORK {SOURCES, SINKS, SYMMETRIES}Source == SERVER, sink == CLIENT
The symmetries are the protocols of communication shared by the sources and sinks that make the communication possible. The first step is to choose an alphabet and then develop the representations which use this alphabet to express more complex truths than can be captured by one letter.
Distinguish entropy - order - information. Information reduces entropy by creating order and so simplified the system, as the Stalinist model of secret police, informers and executioners tended to do in twentieth century Russia. The politics of death.
As the formalism grows in power it more clearly reveals misinterpretations of its meanings. We want to connect Gödel's theorem to the real world by showing that the quantum world of experience matches the hypotheses of the theorem.
Lysenko: Those who hold falsified or unfalsifiable models of the world must turn to political means to gain recognition. Roll-Hansen
[page 22]
Monday 28 November 2005
On intelligent design
We consider the Universe as a network of sources and sinks transmitting natural numbers (or entities that can be put into correspondence with the natural numbers, ie elements of a countable alphabet). to one another.
Then we can apply Gödel's "On formally undecidable propositions" to this system. (Feferman page 145).
We know that the Universe is strong enough to express [the logic of] Principia Mathematica because Principia is expressed in [the Universe] Russell and Whitehead So the theorem must hold and the Universe is capable of emitting strings which represent undecidable propositions.
Haroun al Rashid [?]: a Stalinist converted to a naturalist by the wiles of Scherezade. (Get a reliable translation of the 1001 Nights. reference
Beneath the observable network quantum mechanics proposes a hidden layer (or layers) of elementary Hilbert spaces corresponding to individual particles like photons and electrons. The 'inner life' of these particles is described by 'state vectors' and 'unitary transformations'.
We describe interactions between particles by state vectors in Hilbert spaces which are tensor products of the elementary spaces of the particles involved. The 'wave function of the Universe" is represented by a state vector in a Hilbert space constructed by the tensor products of tensor products . . . of all the possible observable subsets of interacting particles in the observable network.
History tells us that there was once a set of interacting particles called Kurt Gödel, and that the observable behaviour of this person (including his published writings) can (in quantum theory) be described by vectors and transformations in the tensor product of Hilbert spaces that lies behind
[page 23]
the 'persona" (mask) Kurt Gödel as he appeared in human history. The Hilbert world that lies behind this persona might be taken to correspond to the 'soul' of Kurt Gödel. [This soul is in communication with the rest of the Universe through the transfinite network described by quantum field theory. ]
The construction and properties of Hilbert spaces is most easily understood in the two state version of elementary quantum mechanics whose development has exploded with the development of theories of quantum communication and computation, that underlie the quest for practical quantum information handling systems.
We learn here that the size of Hilbert spaces grows exponentially when we construct tensor products, just as the power of the bits of a binary representation of natural number (ie a binary numeral) grows along the bit string as we proceed in the direction of the most significant bit.
Quantum information theory is a 'toy' model of the Universe. We step up to reality by representing particles, such as the hydrogen atom, in Hilbert spaces with countably many dimensions, ie as many dimensions as there are natural numbers. The rate of exponential growth arising from the tensor products of such spaces is isomorphic to the Cantor Universe. In other words, we postulate that the observable network is the tip of a transfinite iceberg of hidden quantum computation.
The biggest break between quantum and classical mechanics lies in the interpretation of the mathematical formalism. When a classical mechanics writes F = ma, it understands that there are three precisely measurable quantities available to us, Force, mass and acceleration, whose numerical values . . . correspond exactly to values predicted by the arithmetic expression F = ma.
We have unbounded faith in arithmetic as a formal system but its application is problematic (did you really count
[page 24]
the sheep properly?). We have similar faith in the formalism of quantum mechanics, which is considered to evolve with mathematical precision and determinism. However, while the equation F = ma has the same complexity as the measurements it models, there is a vast difference between the transfinite complexity of our mathematical models of the world and the countable number of observations upon which we have based our (very effective) mathematical conjectures.
This situation has led to a lot of philosophical head banging about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Max Born formulated it very precisely for practical use: the normalized probability of any event is proportional to the absolute value of the 'inner product' of the state vector representing that event with itself. The mathematical construction of the inner product adds (or integrates) the complex details of the wave function down to a single real number between 0 and 1, the probability of the given event. 0 means impossible, 1 means inevitable. Physics, on this analysis, is a sort of network traffic analysis which is not sensitive (at the measurement level) to the fine detail contained in the wave function. In other words we cannot see a state, but states can be communicated over quantum channels as long as they cannot be observed.
Where does intelligent design fit into this picture? To get started we need a few words about knowledge, intelligence and design. To do this we start with a standard description of the history of the observable network, the theory of evolution. This perspective is possible because events in the observable network are spread over a timescale ranging from the age of the Universe to the time required for a single event whose energy is the maximum possible (in quantum mechanics, frequency = 1/duration is proportional to energy - f = E/h (Planck's constant))
Evolution basically seeks to describe the origin of relatively stable aggregates of particles in the Universe like stars, planets, bacteria, plants, animals and so on.
[page 25]
Evolution explains the present population of the Universe by applying the notion of 'survival of what fits' to the Universe, since the 'initial singularity' which is postulates to have the minimal structure consistent with actual existence.
Using the power of ordering, a countable sequence of bits can be used to represent an uncountable large number, the first cardinal number of the continuum, ℵ1
Does the evolutionary record manifest intelligent design? I answer yes and no, and begin from my own experience of sixty years of trying to establish areas of intelligent design in my life. (ranging across child rearing through building houses to boiling eggs and driving nails).
Tuesday 29 November 2005
Wednesday 30 November 2005
Thursday 1 December 2005
Intelligent design is only possible insofar as the Universe is provable == predictable.
The Universe as we experience it is a source to our sink, as we absorb photons, phonons and other particles originating in our environment (which includes, in a way, our own bodies). In a sense the observable Universe is a channel communicating between different states of the 'wave function of the Universe' wfotu or fotu.
The political/legal task is to formalize peace and fairness and so place closer bounds on their opposites, war and corruption. Formalization takes the heat out of situations. The temperature of a perfectly drafted peace treaty is absolute zero. One class of formalism (the absolutist)(Stalinist) lays down a central [normative] line and kills everybody who is not seen to toe the line. The other class (democratic) allow all members of society to do everything that is possible which does not entail harm to other things.
Friday 2 December 2005
Saturday 3 December 2005
