Notes
[Notebook: DB 59 Draughts]
[Sunday 23 July 2006 - Saturday 29 July 2006]
[page 92]
Sunday 23 July 2006
Terra nullius : a fiction designed to keep the peace between the European powers as they raped and plundered the world, as any creature will do it it can (at least to first order) Kerr et al, Nature 442:75 Kerr
Chaplin Autobiography: 'Joseph Conrad wrote to a friend to this effect: that life made him feel like a cornered blind rat waiting to be clubbed. The simile could well describe the appalling circumstances of us all; nevertheless some of us are struck with good luck, and that is what happened to me.' page 76 Chaplin
Our greatest power, and the source of our power, is our ability to bullshit, or if you like, to compose creative fiction. It is clearly the foundation of the advertising industry, and is very important in religion and politics. Of all possible fictions, some small faction are true, that is they are in one to one correspondence with an observable feature of our world, like the energy of a spectral line, tectonic movements of continents or anything else that can be seen and remembered or written down in some way.
Observables can be written (spoken). Bell
What does terra nullius really mean? A peacemaking construct between the colonizing powers designed to create respect for colonizing claims. Is it true? To what does it correspond in reality? it is an instance of the fermion protocol. The law of the sea,
[page 93]
on the other hand, creates a boson state whereby the surface of the seat (or at least some of it) is open to all.
What goes on in the physical world does not depend on how we write it down.
Einstein moved from a system of particles moving in an absolute space to a system of particles each carrying its own space, a local 4-D frame of reference. In our local frame, we have to meet the school bus at time t and place x. A function of t and x can map the progress of the bus along its route. The first derivative of this function tells us how fast the bus is going, the second derivative the force acting on it to make it move this way. Lost the plot. We see all things from our local frame in a high dimensional space, and we use transformations to put ourselves in other people's shoes: how would I feel if that happened to me? [compassion]. How would she feel if this happened to her? and so on. The Lorentz transformation is the minimum complexity archetype of this 'personal' transformation. This transformation may be proposed as the key to peace on earth.When we all begin to see the logic behind eachothers point of view. Now a large transformation, (as between two people) may be viewed as a nested series of smaller and smaller transformations and communications. The human transformation is a gauge transformation whose gauge is human communication. Among other things, we wish to minimize violent communication, ie resorting to lower peer levels like treating a certain population as untermensch and in the extreme, systematically killing them.
[page 94]
Monday 24 July 2006
Chaplin page 267: 'I found poverty neither attractive nor edifying. It taught me nothing but a distortion of values , an over-rating of the virtues and graces of the rich and the so-called better classes. Wealth and celebrity, on the contrary, taught me to view the world in proper perspective, to discover than men of eminence, when I came close to them, were as deficient in their way as the rest of us.'
page 279: '. . . for in work was orientation; all else was chimerical.'
page 299: 'In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defence: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature -- or go insane.'
We gain on error by using exponential methods.
Quantum theory and tolerance.
We are not talking so much about beliefs : the belief that the best foundation for belief is the word as we find it. This is the scientific faith, that all statements can be mapped to a body of evidence which gives reasonable probability that the belief is true. We believe that quantum electrodynamics describes atoms because it gives results accurate to parts per billion after an enormously complex computation whose size varies exponentially with the number of decimal points in the answer.
[page 95]
. . .
Chaplin page 414: "As I got to know Oona, I was constantly surprised by her sense of humour and tolerance; she could always see the other person's point of view.
So: definition Religion is a set of learned protocols that bind unrelated groups of people to one another and the environment. We are aware of its visible elements, ceremonies, schools, languages ad so on but its everyday working is so familiar to us as to be almost invisible, and is something which has evolved without particular reference to any human institutions.
Tuesday 25 July 2006
This site is intended as a search for a new theology. I want to document a few ideas of my own, and then, as my
it skills grow, make it into a wiki open to anybody who can accept the basic assumptions that the Universe is divine. A number of consequences follow, the first being that the Universe is not the arbitrary creation of a preexisting god, but is all that thee is. The Universe is not therefore an arbitrary construction whose form could be other wise. Any constraints we find within it must be explained within it. The only constraint recognized by scientific method is consistency.
[page 96]
In traditional theology the epistemological role of god is to be the answer to all unanswered questions. It follows that there are many questions hidden from scientific view because science is based on experience of the created world, not of the creator, who can only be seen in an hypothetical life after death.
Microcosm-macrocosm. The relationship between god and god's body (of which I am part) is the same (up to the set-element relationship) as the relationship between me an my body.
Cantor's set theory is invariant with respect to complexity because a set may be an element of a set so that there is a symmetry between set and element which is broken by the relationship e = is a member of. This formally expressed invariance is the foundation of the notion of invariance with respect to complexity and makes knowledge and communication possible.
How is invariance with respect to complexity related to 'renormalization', or is renormalization just the correction of an error arising from a false theory? Falsification is a movable feast. One would think that the cosmological constant problem would falsify something, but life seems to go on pretty much as normal.
spin: up/down, up/not-up. p/not-p. The only property we can ascribe to a unary system Like the Universe) is is: 'the Universe is', god is. A binary system comprising a and b can form four propositions, a is, b is, as is not b, b is not a. This exhausts the entropy of two bits, and so on.
This log is just a thread (abstract geodesic) of my life but it does convey something about my search for the ;unifying human transformation' we call love. This transformation is modelled on the Lorentz transformation which itself arises from the structure of the 3+1 space in which we live (communicate). I sit here talking to god though my bottom by exchange of gravitons. I am pushing the earth, it is pushing on me and it is this force which I feel directly. But why are me and the earth pushing eachother? gravitation. And why gravitation? Ask Einstein: because the presence of matter/energy constrains the geometry of space, and my attraction to the earth is a result of this.
While the physics of communication (momentum exchange) repels, the 'meaning' of the communication attracts (I want to get closer to see that better). In quantum field theory, the exchange of particles may be attractive or repulsive depending on whether the combined energy of the particles decreases or increases as they come closer together. A stable solution arises when a superposition of attractive and repulsive potentials creates an energy minimum when the particle are some distance apart. This we interpret as minimizing the processing (optimizing the software) that manages the relationship. Maximum meaning for minimum effort.
The only people you can trust are those who are clearly acting in their own interest. Those who cannot be seen to be so most probably have a hidden agenda which must be revealed before trust is possible. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church says trust our mystery.
[page 98]
The evolutionary paradigm suggests that all survivors act in their own interests. The question is how far do these interests extend? Our answer is to the boundaries of the cosmos (or the ends of the earth will do), that is god is the domain of our interests, and to know god is to get fit.
The Theology Company is no more a religion that General Motors is a car. We study, design and promulgate religious ideas, just as General Motors does for automotive ideas.
If we think of quantum theory as network traffic analysis, the symmetries of physics become common features of certain classes of traffic, eg actual spacetime coordinates of a message may be abstracted from when we come to examine the message itself ie (eg) an electron class of message is the same wherever we find it.
A field is a function of spacetime. But what is the gravitational field: spacetime itself. There is no 'flat' domain whose function is the gravitational field?
Set theory itself is invariant with respect to size.
Landauer says that information is represented physically? We seem to be looking for the Universe, that physics is represented informationally. This, . . . we can see from the totality of literature about physics.
We reject the notion that conscious or human observers are unique in their physics.
[page 99]
Any realizable formal description of the Universe will necessarily be a (improper?) subset of the whole for formal mathematics, ie the Cantor Universe.
Plenio and Vitelli 2001 'The physics of forgetting: Landauer's erasure principle and information theory. M B Plenio and V Vitelli
Wednesday 26 July 2006
This idea (that the Universe is divine) came to me while I was studying to become a priest. I explored it in a few essays and was asked to leave, because what I had written was considered contrary to [accepted Catholic belief].
Since Marx branded it as opium, it has become popular to believe that religion is some atavistic remnant of our mythical past. Certainly, modern constitutions have benefited from the separation of church and states, and we could do without the warring groups of fundamentalists tied to eachother by oil. Nevertheless, modern sociobiology establishes a clear niche for religion, and shows both that it is essential for peace and the cause of war. We take the view that all wars are religious wars, and that war will only end when we all find a common foundation for our religious views, no matter how diverse they may seem to be in detail.
The Macquarie says religion is '3. recognition on the part of man of a controlling superhuman power entitled to obedience, reverence and worship. But what s that power? Here we turn to theology, and the usual story: Universe divine; vast quantities of guidance about what we should do, not one little book.
[page 100]
One law: what is observed is consistent. What if we are observing an inconsistency? The observation will b consistent of the inconsistency is observed to be inconsistent.
The study of consistency began with the invention of formal systems. Formal systems such as arithmetic and geometry have been with us since antiquity.
Non commutativity: mystic poet - poetic mystic <> 0. Frye page 7. Frye
The laws of nature are the same for all observers = all observers use the same algorithms to encode and decode their messages to one another.
Thursday 27 July 2006
Quantum mechanics received guidance from the correspondence principle. If we let the quantum of action go to zero or the principal quantum number of a bound particle get very are, the quantum calculation should approach the classical calculation. Not only in the arithmetical result, but also in the general forms used. So for instance, the notions of place, time, energy, momentum, the Lagrange function and many others carry over from classical to quantum unchanged (at least to a first approximation) Energy and momentum, however, have gained new relationships to space and time. Energy and time, and momentum and positions do not commute, giving two versions of the uncertainty principle.
[page 101]
'Number' and angular momentum do not commute either [which might mean that we need a 2 pi phase change before we can be sure of our count]. Energy becomes equivalent to 'per time' (= frequency) and momentum becomes equivalent to 'per distance' = spatial frequency. We may interpret frequency is space or time as the amount of detail in a given volume of spacetime and so it becomes another interpretation of the stress energy tensor.
