Notes
[Notebook: DB 58 Bringing god home]
[Sunday 19 March 2006 - Saturday 25 March 2006]
Sunday 19 March 2006
Monday 20 March 2006
[page 74]
Tuesday 21 March 2006
How do we prove that god cannot do intelligent design? One past cannot control future. Two computability. Three spacelike separation, ie no causality [no communication]
[page 75]
The short proof that god can no more design intelligently that the rest of us: a) I can't; b) complexity invariance; c) therefore god can't.
Unitarity: the probability of the Universe is always 1. What changes is the total rate of trials. p = 1, n = aleph(0), dn/dt = ℵ0.
People struggled for millennia to explain motion then along comes Galileo and says motion is normal, change of motion needs explanation. For us, moving is happening. EVOLUTION CHANGES MOTION. The clock hides the motion in a computer.
Inner product is like a market, condensing the opinions of many into a single price.
Things happen when people become enthusiastic about them. I will become publicly enthusiastic when my private enthusiasm has driven me to make an adequate and coherent record of what I an enthusiastic about - the nature of god. The Cantor symmetry tells us that Aquinas was sort of wrong when he said that the only way to god was the via negativa. I say sort of wrong because we know that the via negativa applied to symbolic systems gives us the whole of 'non-constructive' mathematics, including Cantor, Gödel, Turing and Shannon's results.
CONTRADICTION ==> CONFLICT ==> ANNIHILATION.
Communication network gives a natural model for the creation and annihilation of particles. We consider a particle as a packet, part of a message,
[page 76]
carrying information from one point in the network to another. The observable network of communications in this system occurs in 4-space, but the processing behind the communication occurs in Hilbert space (for physicists) or in logical space (for information processors) The two meet in quantum information theory, where we make another practical use of Landauer's hypothesis that all information is represented physically. The fundamental requirement of information processing systems is bandwidth--the bandwidth of the physical system must be greater than the bandwidth required by the information processor (computer) in order to allow for error correction. But that is all. Methods of encoding and decoding will do the rest.
So OPERATOR = TURING MACHINE? Can all the operations of quantum mechanics be realized by Turing machines? If not, is this just a mathematical artifact: the fact is we can do all the physics with a Turing machine, so some of the theoretical powers of analogue (continuous) machines must be sacrificed. But are thee continuous machines? Is this how the wave function of the Universe behaves? Not quite. Quantum mechanics has to introduce a non-continuous event, 'the collapse of the wave function' to 'explain' the actual emission of a [particle].
We think of a network as a set of processors in a memory space, and we think of a computer as a network. Processors interact by reading and writing to the memory space and they respect one another by not overwriting things that will upset some other processor. This sort of good behaviour is achieved by addressing and collecting addresses into sets (files) with various permissions.
NETWORK == COMPUTER. We can recursively analyze (synthesize) computers into networks and vice versa.
Wednesday 22 March 2006
Thursday 23 March 2006
Lo, Popescu and Spiller, Lo, Popescu and Spiller
Superposition
Entanglement
Unitarity
Measurement
No Cloning
CLASSICAL : QUANTUM :: WRITTEN MUSIC : PLAYED MUSIC
Wave packet = information packet = superposition of symbols. If we do not look inside, the symbols are superposed - Einstein on Specific Heat.
We cannot talk about the set of all sets, but given a set, we can talk about some of its subsets, the ones containing redundancy or compressibility.
We test for compressibility using group theory. This theory shows us how to use symmetries in the world to build deeper understanding of how it works.
Khinchin.
We could say that the fundamental symmetry is the countable 'actus purus' of the Universe, ℵ0 x h bar.
Collapse of wavefunction means going from uncertainty to certainty, as when we learn the actual outcome of an 'event' (choosing from the possibilities, rolling a die). This is the transition from future to past.
[page 78]
The communication between Hilbert spaces manifests itself as 4-space (spacetime. Veltman. Veltman
The initial singularity is a space of one event with probability 1. Subsequent states of the Universe are space of n possible events for which the sum of the probabilities is 1.
Written long ago on Khinchin page 44: 'The Universe is an elementary event in the space of its possibility.'. Khinchin
Form determines probability, the form being the time invariant structure which determines the shape of the output of a stationary source.
The Universe is transfinite dimensional music.
. . . things were not so much by the will of god as by the way things are. God does not arbitrarily constrain us.
TEXT == CAPITAL
Text does not change : it covers such things as books and invariants in the Universe but things like machine tools, ribosomes, buildings which stay the same while constraining processes within themselves - you can only get from room to room via the doors etc.
WALL = place you cannot go = boundary. [reflective wall vs 'consumptive' wall (event horizon of black hole etc)]
Bounded operators are in effect constrained by their sources - they cannot go too far away. An unbounded operator, on the other hand may take us all the way from space-x to not-space-x. An operator that leads us into contradiction, like a policy that leads to destruction, is selected against.
[page 79]
again OPERATOR = TURING MACHINE
A peaceful process is one with sufficient bandwidth to deal with all possible errors before they become too big. This process must be based on effective local reporting (identifying areas of stress) and effective compassion (response to the stress - annealing)
The fire brigade:
1. get them while they're small
2. recruit resources to extinguish them as least as fast as they grow.
Social error correction. But what do we mean by an error? A situation which is stressing a subset of the population more than the average. An underclass. Formalize this!
We cannot be certain of any machine more complex than a Turing machine, but even a Turing machine may fail to reach its potential due to inconsistencies in the program, ie in itself. Suicide and self destruction. Who is writing these words?
The no-cloning theorem says there cannot be absolute truth. We can measure truth in Hilbert space by the inner product. For any space of sets may be interpreted as a probability space, and so we connect a set of probabilities with every form. Ie the walls control the probability structure [density] of where people walk. Every probability argument must start from a flat space (domain) and map to a non-flat space, the range.
Machine = channel = Turing machine.
[page 80]
Theorems are wormholes in mathematical space = symmetries.
Friday 24 March 2006
Saturday 25 March 2006
A new chapter in the Synopsis - SACRIFICE. A lot of ancient religion revolves around sacrifice and Christianity claims the biggest of all: God the Father sent Jesus Christ, his only Son, to earth to be sacrificed. According to the Christian story, the sacrifice of his own flesh and blood sufficiently appeased the Father for him to partially reverse the sanctions imposed at the fall.
. . .
Naming things creates new spaces. Once, for instance, we had a space of plants. When we named them all we duplicated the space of a new abstract 'namespace'.
Gladney's memorial. Did he sacrifice himself to an ideal? Could he have been any other? He moved from the world of nuclear war to an imaginary world of angels and reincarnation : the same as heaven.
We accept heaven on earth. We accept death. In fact we accept everything that theology tells us to be fixed features of the Universe and work out our situation within these constraints. It turns out that they are not constraints at all for beyond them is nothing, ie inconsistency, meaninglessness in fact.
[meaningless = does not lead to anything]
Death is the end of the message. When I have said my bit, exercised my influence on the world I will die (and vice versa). Until then the search is on for the phase change that will bring us into a peaceful world, and how to nucleate it.
