Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 12 November 2006 - Saturday 18 November 2006]
Sunday 12 November 2006
Monday 13 November 2006
[page 25]
Tuesday 14 November 2006
This paper addresses what I consider to be the fundamental issue for humanity: how do we construct and validate our model of god? God here mean the whole of reality. Since we must survive within god, so defined, knowledge of god is of supreme practical value.
The transmission of Aristotle's works from East to the medieval intellectuals, effectively all employees of the Catholic Church sparked off a revolution in knowledge. The key was Aristotle's epistemology, which embraced and united logic and observations. Some moderns are inclined to disparage Aristotle's work. I feel that they would do well to consider the uncertainties in the history of the texts attributed to him, and his starting point. Plato's ruling lass position that effectively supported the divine right of monarchies and governments in general.
[page 26]
Aristotle revitalized Catholic theology in the newly [founded] universities of Europe through the work of Albert the great and his student, Thomas of Aquino.
The sudden appearance of the internet and the wide dissemination of networking, computing and communication have given many of us an intuitive grasp of networking concepts. Additionally, even [though] the technical realization of computation and communication which underpin them still hold in the transfinite domain. We therefore propose a model of god called the transfinite network, constructed as follows.
What our model shows is that all our pictures of god are pictures of the same god differently expressed. Concept of god and concept of self go hand in hand. Each of us us a point in a divine space and each of us carries as much information as the entropy of the space [each of us] inhabits.
This exposes the foolishness of the resistance to change manifest in the top management of the Roman Catholic Church.
On the liberation of theology. A catholic manifesto.*
The Vatican says some things may not be written or spoken. We explore the limits to speech in a divine world.
[page 27]
Under John Paul II the Roman Catholic Church began to respond to modern expectations by creating sham consultations with the constituency to get an acceptable spin on their monarchical behaviour. Bernstein on the Synod of Bishops, page 469 sqq Bernstein and
* I am a baptized Catholic and therefore, I believe, a stakeholder in the Roman Catholic theological enterprise.
The aim: to capture the Catholic Church within a new vision of divinity and use its networks [and symbols] to propagate, develop and implement the new concept of divinity. In other words, to engage an abstract idea.
Wednesday 15 November 2006
Thursday 16 November 2006
Aquinas produced the 'standard model' of the Christian god, creating a plausible harmony of the One God of the Hebrews and the Trinity instituted with the Christians. The 'splitting' of god has progressed much more in the older Eastern religions which envisage large numbers of different appearances of the one god. The purpose of this essay is top take this process of distinction in unity to its mathematical limit, which we imagine in the form of a layered network whose higher peer layers relate to one another as the sequence of transfinite ordinals.
Friday 17 November 2006
Aristotle modelled the world with two parallel dichotomies whose traditional English renderings are matter and form and potency and act. Plato and his predecessors
[page 28]
held that 'true' reality was eternal and unchanging. Plato considered that any order in the observable world resulted from its participation in a parallel world of ideas or forms. Aristotle brought these forms down to earth and explained change by postulating an underlying indeterminate matter which could be determined by different forms, as a quantity of bronze might be given the form of a sword or a sculpture.
Strength of correlation = f(bandwidth of communication)
The Theology Company is a startup in the religion industry. Currently the dominant players descend from thousands of years of tradition into five predominant streams, which we name Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and ? (find some book, eg Economist Global Statistic better UN something - google 'global religious affiliation'.)
We are ambitious and aim to find a formula which emphasizes the essential unity of all religious traditions. Our assumption is that religions confer fitness. Fitness is a measure of the ability of an entity to live and reproduce in its environment.
The entity is the message. A communication is the execution of a Turing machine or network of Turing machines. So I am a message. My interface with the world is a personality whose responses are influenced by my whole history.
Focus on der Panzerkardinal. (but don't mention
[page 29]
the war), only totalitarian mentality of closure and control by reducing the variety of the controlled rather than by increasing the variety of the controller. In a fully differentiated society, all control is local, ie self control. This is to be achieved by propagating self controlling algorithms by creating an environment in which such algorithms grow and reproduce.
INPUT - TRANSFORMATION - OUTPUT
IRON ORE ETC - BLAST FURNACE ETC - STEEL (AND BY-PRODUCTS), eg carbon dioxide.
General covariance again Event = entity
General relativity is expressed as a metric in a continuous differentiable manifold. This manifold is constructed from a 'dust' of four dimensional frames with Lorentz metric. The requirements of continuity and differentiability place constraints on the metric of the manifold which appear as Einstein's equation G = 8 pi T, where G and T are arrays of differential coefficients expressing the motion between neighbouring rigid frames.
Another idea released by the first cigarette of the day (cold makes writing shaky) It is strange how ideas hover in the background for a long time waiting for written expression. Power engineering and popular myth about the heat death of the Universe makes is think of the increase of entropy as a bad thing that happens automatically, this giving us the modern view that Satan is loose in the world and that we must work continuously to keep entropy down. On the other hand
[page 30]
entropy is the basic resource of communication engineering in the form of bandwidth and engineers are continually working to increase the entropy per symbol and frequency of symbol emission of their sources. Controlling these two points of view suggests that there is an optimum in the production of entropy which corresponds to a binary alphabet at maximum frequency (where is the paper?) and that this optimum corresponds in some way to the point of minimum action. it also has something to do with the phrase (h bar x omega) / (k x T).
Riemann showed how to use differential transformations of systems of Gaussian coordinates to create a flexible or curved space out of a manifold of rigid (Cartesian, Euclidian) spaces.
General covariance is an epistemological stance whose mathematical consequences give us a model that closely resembles the Universe of our experience.
What we are saying is that while the continuous model has enough entropy to describe the large scale structure of the Universe with all quantized features except the initial singularity and black holes blurred out, logical continuity and the computable manifold provide a route to introducing all the detail of the real world described by quantum mechanics into the model, thus harmonizing quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Christians claim a spurious 'inside story'.
[page 31]
COMPUTABLE MANIFOLD is the physical layer of the transfinite network.
It is logically deterministic and has the same cardinal as the set of all halting Turing machines, that is processes that given a definite input give a definite output. This network describes general relativity, where we use the set of transformations that can be represented by Turing machines to describe the deterministic limits of communication. Already the set of ℵ0 computable functions is a very small fraction of the set of ℵ1 mappings of the natural numbers onto themselves.
In quantum mechanics, one 'looks' with an operator which is 'diagonal in a certain basis'. What one sees with this operator is the frequency with which the observed system makes transitions between the various pairs of basis [states]. All this is normalized to 1 to preserve the probability of different outcomes. What is this the probability of? The execution of a certain snippet of code (function, Turing machine).
Quantum mechanics is traffic analysis: how often do these pairs communicate?
General relativity is also traffic analysis in the energy-momentum domain. The more traffic the more momentums and the tighter the curvature of space.
We do not observe the classical continuum. It is a fiction and a very useful one; but, like all fictions, it is open to [interpretation].
