Notes
[Notebook: DB 58 Bringing god home]
[Sunday 14 May 2006 - Saturday 20 May 2006]
[page 123]
Sunday 14 May 2006
Ross: Mishima 'One way about thinking of the balance of the mind is to acknowledge that human life is a drama between an invisible mindscape and a visible, more measurable exterior frame of reference that we have come to call the real world. An artist is by this definition someone who dwells out of balance, in the interior world of his own mind. ' Quoted in review by Nicholas Rothwell, Weekend Australian 123-14 May 2006 page R10.
Traditional Western Christian belief begins by postulating a vast distance between God and the World which is first bridged by creation, and then by the incarnation of the divinity in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Let us call it the perennial philosophy and cross out the Western. One of the many institutionalizations of the perennial philosophy broadly considered is the Roman Catholic Church, within which I was nurtured.
There is a danger in preliminary publication. The more distant the idea the better it must be justified. For many,
[page 124]
to see the physical world as a communication network may seem a long way from real physics, a condensation of mind and body. On the other hand, there is a need to expose a possibly useful idea to public criticism as soon as possible so that its validity may be judged socially, by the relevant disciplines.
To avoid misunderstanding the closer we get to a purely formal expression of our model of god the better. A pure mathematical statement is metalinguistic and so apples equally to all languages and conceptual frameworks, all of which are able to be found somewhere in the Cantor Universe. A meaningful structure is a recursive structure.
Trying to imagine what it would be like to be inside god. We make explicit the order of a set by putting its elements into correspondence with the natural numbers, or some set of higher cardinal.
LONERGAN : 'Schemes of recurrence'.
Lonergan, pages 72 and
passim
QUANTUM MECHANICS : constructive interference
(interaction)
The transfinite numbers are sale invariant and topologically distinguished from one another so that 2 ℵ0 = ℵ0 ℵ0 = ℵ1. All that matters is the permutational transposition between two cardinals, one larger than the other.
Once we accept that the world has an invariant nature of its own, we can learn to work with it.
Monday 15 May 2006
Every node on a fully connected network of peers has access to the sum of the states represented in the nodes of the network.
Network duality: NODE = EDGE, EDGE = NODE.
Both transform messages
[page 125]
PARTICLES are MESSENGERS between EVENTS which are meetings of PARTICLES
When in doubt, but in safety, come out. Coming out needs only to be inhibited insofar as it involves an element of potential loss as well as potential gain.
Phillip Adams article (Weekend Australian Magazine 13-14 May 2006) struck a chord very deep in my heart. I swallowed the Catholic story hook line and sinker. At an early age I already knew that touching my penis was very likely a mortal sin, sufficient my suffering soul to an eternity of hellfire. Whatever that may mean to a non-believer, our teachers made sure that we could smell the burning sulphur associated with sin. To supererogate my way out of this mess I joined a religious order at the earliest possible age and eventually took solemn vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. This on the doubtful hypothesis that god likes best those who reject the natural powers of reproduction, establishment of economic security and self determination. This seemed right at the time and turned out to be well worth it because my mind was opened to a whole lot of ideas about how life works. Specifically, the thirteenth century writings of Thomas Aquinas. His writing, in limpid Latin had, for a year or two an aura of perfection. I could see why the modern Catholic Church still places him first in the order of orthodox theologians and the only one mentioned by name in the Code of Canon Law (Canon 252, 3). Holy See
Then Lonergan, How Universal, and out on the street in a tight suit. Lonergan, How Universal is the Universe?
The Semitic-Christian God is a grumpy, vindictive and unreliable old bugger, with a sadistic streak best captured in the Book of Job. Job Demands complete obedience and promises very little, in a word, a dictator.
Quantum mechanics restated classical mechanics and they met in the 'correspondence principle' at high quantum numbers. Here network theory restates quantum mechanics but they correspond at the level of traffic analysis.
[page 126]
Natural languages are not capable of general covariance because they are bound to a context?
Metaphysics is the study of systems that ate able to reflect on themselves, ie the study of recursive systems.
Let us seek an alternative to transfinite numbers : the relationship we seek is between alphabet and word, spelling.
The 'History of Salvation' is the biggest lie ever told, even though it is an effective constitutional fiction closely connected to the 'Divine Right of Kings' (and Queens).
The most interesting stories come from those who have been on the longest journeys to the weirdest (or outest) places.
The pope is stark naked and not a pretty sight.
All this has led me to seek a new formulation of theology.
Everything is impossible until we work out how to do it.
The physicists have felt for a while that they are knocking on god's door, by studying smaller and smaller particles, but they miss the divinity they are swimming in.
. . .
After the peace lectures, I resolved to get my ideas published in a reputable journal. As a step in this direction I undertook an MA in theology at the Australian Catholic University with the plan of testing my ideas on the theological establishment. As it turned out, the plan was an expensive failure. One could not step outside the Catholic parameters. In Church law, after all, the University owes 'Institutional Fidelity" to the Church. A few of my badly failed essays are published
[page 127]
at Essays.
Things changed when I broke my achilles tendon. Now financial survival rather than theological perfection has become my goal. A release from the tension of poverty and a significant speedup in the the development and propagation of my ideas.
At various times, particularly when I was conscious of my old religious injuries I was inclined to the opium of the people point of view that religion is a relic of bygone human naivete. Yet it has always been with us, and its power is manifest in the world today. Its most pernicious features are to be seen in the various theocracies that dot the globe, some still prepared to torture and kill unbelievers. Many other nations are fortunate to have separated Church and State, so that the weird beliefs of the churches do not adversely affect the states. It is clear that the ancient religions need reform if they are to match the sophistication of modern states. They must be evidence based.
The essence of religion is that it is stronger than death - martyrdom. The fitness argument for this is that it is good for one to die to save many.
RELIGION = BEHAVIOURAL KINSHIP
For many writers, historians, sociologists, theologians and the like, religion has been a mystical sacred cow, something rather beyond human ken. The fitness picture brings it right down to earth.
The International Panel on Climate Change reports are designed to inform political negotiations on climate change. IPCC The Theology Company reports are designed to inform political negotiations on religion.
[page 128]
from LOCAL to GLOBAL in a series of small steps which imitate the evolution of the Universe from initial singularity to whenever.
The big change is linear --> recursive. Evolution is recursive, 'the history of salvation' is linear.
Tuesday 16 May 2006
Wednesday 17 May 2006
The status of theology has fallen so far that it is more likely to conjure up images of terrorism and religious was rather than the heights of human scientific endeavour. The fall of theology appears to be the result of institutional control of scientific endeavour. When I went to the Australian Catholic University and proposed an alternative model of god, it was ruled out as a possibility. I subsequently learnt that Catholic Universities owe institutional fidelity to the Church. So theology has been ??? and can only grow again outside the churches.
SCIENCE = TESTED FICTION
Truth is stranger than fiction : nowhere better demonstrated than in twentieth century physics which brought us relativity, cosmology, quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.
Our transfinite network of permutation, we hope, has sufficient states to model anything we might find in the physical world. We add a few constraints to this network, and arrive at quantum mechanics.
The distance between states is the amount of computation needed to transform one onto the other.
The network explanation of superposition, no cloning etc? Communications perform the mappings that we represent by a certain gate or matrix.
[page 129]
The quantum mechanical implementation of the world is computationally complete in that it can do anything a Turing machine can do.
MANY LOOKS = A LONG LOOK
. . .
We are looking for a way to conceive the whole which gives us assistance in our day to day decisions.
GAUGE THEORY : MESSAGE = 'A TRADE'
There are all sorts of alphabets all over the place.
The shape of the 'light cone' is a function of 'distance' and 'processing power'.
The Theological Company: To introduce scientific theology to the religion industry.
Thursday 18 May 2006
Friday 19 May 2006
Gödel showed that mathematics is a language by using arithmetic to talk (write) about arithmetic and so prove his famous incompleteness result. It is not a 'complete' language in some sense, but rather an extension of natural language. Although extremists like Whitehead and Russell may have set new highs in the ratio of mathematical symbolism to natural language, they nevertheless had to embed their Principia in English to make it readable and meaningful.
[page 130]
. . .
Counting, for instance, requires only that there be discrete, identifiable entities, no matter whether they be sheep or galaxies. Gödel used a formal language (arithmetic) to talk about another formal language (itself). This is recursion, and is the source of creation. [We talk about what we do]
LEFT = WE ARE ALL ONE
RIGHT = WE ARE ALL INDEPENDENT
BOTH TRUE = SUPERPOSITION
Dynamic process is an ordered superposition/sequence of states. The ordering principle are force and time.
TIME = {TICK} = {TICK, TOCK}
LOCAL TIME, LOCAL FREQUENCY = local processing power = local rate of change of momentum = local force. but also local energy = local frequency.
Momentum is conserved but [force] measures the rate at which momentum is transferred from one particle to another.
. . .
The motion of a Turing machine is a series of states. Differentiation and integration also tell us things about sequences of states, the differences between different states, and the total effect of the sequence. If the sequence of states obeys a suitable law, we can compress an infinite sequence of states into a simple recursive law which applied to one state gives its successor.
Peano's axioms are a differential, from n to n + 1.
[page 131]
Computable functions are the compressible subset (high frequency set) of representable functions, ie letters in the alphabet of functions whose source is the permutations of the set of natural numbers.
Let us DEFINE the relationship between finite and infinite by the relationship between an alphabet of a certain cardinal number and the set of all permutations of that alphabet.
Japan in the National Emergency Bix page 275: 'The urgent need was to abandon the pursuit of pleasure and accept personal sacrifice and pain in order to accomplish the great national mission. Bix
Saturday 20 May 2006
page 279 (Bix) 'The pleasant view of an indestructible and virtuous Japan confronting morally inferior, devilish foreign states spread widely.
',,, Ameratsu Omikami . . . she is the number one goddess' Bix page 282.
Let us talk of the constitution of the world.
Bix page 295: 'Because he equated himself with the state, and hence the state of the state, as it were, he tended to view all who opposed the established order as standing in opposition to him, and a threat to his sovereignty.
'On this last point he was not wrong. Many advocates of direct imperial rule rejected the very notion of a state based on law and sought a dictatorship unrestrained by any constitutional interpretation. Hirohito was never prepared to go that far. The irony is that in sacrificing Minobe, he and the Osaka cabinet sanctioned war against heresy that not only wiped out academic freedom but also abetted the very military radicalism they sought to control.'
