Notes
[Notebook: DB 60 Spotlights]
[Sunday 11 March 2007 - Saturday 17 March 2007]
Sunday 11 March 2007
Monday 12 March 2007
Tuesday 13 March 2007
Wednesday 14 March 2007
[page 118]
Thursday 15 March 2007
When we get things in writing we can test them against one another by formal means. In double entry bookkeeping this testing is clear and deterministic. At the other end of the scale we pass through literary criticism to high entropy tasks like dealing with strangers. The stress of dealing with strangers is reduced as dealing with them becomes less strange when we share a language, for instance, or come from the same school, town or mob.
So the procedure in court is designed to filter all the available data in a case to arrive at a 'true' written representation of what the event in question contained (in terms of sub events), that is reconstructing the event so that it can be formally judged.
Science is the protocol for formal communication with god.
GOD <>==> CULTURE, not god - religion. Religion is far too narrow a term.
[page 119]
Dealing with strangers is high bandwidth because one must process all human possibilities, possible actions and motives, whereas once one has got to know someone most things can be ruled out ie their probability assumed to be zero so that they drop out of the computation (vanish).
We have to risk it (a set of probabilities that we cannot control, ie in the case of bad events (errors) reduce to zero.
A novel is a snapshot of a network of characters designed to represent some meaning in the characters' interaction.
GOOD = BONUM EX INTEGRO = EXECUTION WITH NO ERROR (or no error that could not be normally anticipated and deal with by built in error correcting mechanisms.
ERROR is a relative term. All possible things are possible and have a certain probability.
. . .
Thou shalt not covet they neighbour's wife (or husband). This is a common social rule that recognizes the fitness value of a cooperative reproductive relationship. Another view is to say that everyone is free to covet anyone, but any relationships that develop must meet certain ethical norms. This is to replace a relatively simple control (enforced monogamy) with a more complex one where power
[page 120]
is perfectly balanced so that the needs of all agents are fulfilled, in other words (?) that the system becomes linear, like quantum mechanics. Is this the constraint that makes physics work. Incompressible flow. non-creative = deterministic. Just one variable is deterministically preserved, p = |psi|2.
I like to be surrounded by beauty, and the less I touch it the more I can enjoy. Communication both increases and decreases entropy. It increases entropy by reproducing high entropy states. It decreases entropy by constraining a permutation of states to one state (the message).
I and a photon are both messages, connections between two points in spacetime. We life in 4-space because it is dynamic and any part can be joined to any other by wires that do not cross. The set of all states does not exist, so we are constrained to make all our observations locally. Transformations [extrapolations]to the non-local realm depends on locally developed theories like general and special relativity .
I am a message from my point of birth to my point of death, but because I am massive, this message can be decomposed into a set of ultimately massless (?) (ie no internal process and therefore 'eternal' particles (?)
ETERNAL = FORMAL All formalism is grounded in the conservation of some measurable feature, like 'truth value'
Deighton MAMista 204: 'Why should he ever have
[page 121]
expected to find any more sentiment in politics than there was in detergents, in shipping, in oil or in the stock exchange.' Deighton
The dual of a space is a point (in information terms) The point carried as much information as the entropy of the space.
I am a point (or a line) in fourspace which can be decomposed in a local frame to a point in a Cantor Universe, a kinematic version of which we try to model with the transfinite network.
A 'symmetry' is a letter (word, sentence . . . of the cosmic alphabet. It is an absence of variety or complexity giving knowledge based action possibility, ie making them possible.
Pleasure comes when desire is fulfilled. Once the desire is fulfilled the pleasure goes and may turn to pain if one goes on filling unfelt desire, some species of greed, gluttony and the other psychological disturbances (errors as far as the 'via media' is concerned.
HOSPITAL = ERROR CORRECTION INSTITUTION. Health care : error prevention plus error correction.
Why do some Christians and Communists hate one another so? Because they are competing for the same delusional space of happy ever after. Natural culture, on the other hand, might preach 'happy as we go along' on a way that begins with birth and end with death.
[page 122]
Instead of 'gentil parfit knights' we are being defended by money grubbing corrupt centres of power which act in their own perceived interest. A network makes it possible for one node to help another and expect a reward. If properly used, this facility contributes to the fitness of all individuals in the network.
MAMista 226-227 'Any man found inside the women's compound of making any unwanted physical 'assault' on a female was in danger of being executed.'
Friday 16 March 2007
Saturday 17 March 2007
Brecht: Life of Galileo Brecht
page vii 'They want to play the apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their criticisms contains a threat.'
xvii: '[Brecht said] Galileo's like in scene 9 "My object is not to establish that I am right but to find out if I am" is the most important sentence in the play.'
xx: Brecht 'disbelief can move mountains.'
8: 'Galileo: "Getting people to understand it is why I go on working and buying expensive books instead of paying the milkman."'
17: 'Galileo: "I am 46 years old and have
[page 123]
achieved nothing that satisfies me."'
28: 'Sagredo: ". . . And I'm asking: Where is God in your Cosmography?"
Galileo: "Within ourselves or nowhere"'.
29: 'Galileo: "yes I believe in reason's gentle tyranny over people. Sooner or later they will have to give in to it . . . "'
To make the Universe itself divine is the final step in the Galilean revolution.
The Life Of Brian: 'We are all individuals', that is distinct particles, points far apart from one another in human space. Ancient institutions are based on the contrary view that realized humanity is a continuum, that is all the same, so that one size fits all and any who do not fir the mould must be killed, one way or another (withholding a living is one way). A system based on general covariance in communication between particular sources, on the other hand, allows for every possible point in human space and realizes a source at every fit point. '
I am a SOURCE (and therefore a SINK).
Taking Chaitin's algorithmic view of information, statements like F = ma (which relate two continua) tell us very little. Chaitin Following Lonergan, we can agree that there is no information in a continuum. It is just another name for 'empirical residue'. Lonergan On the other hand, we are inclined to assert that continua in
[page 124]
the classical sense do not exist., and that the whole system is particulate, the continuum arising not from proximity, but by connection, as a chain or (in a sense) a differentiable manifold. The acts of differentiation in effect mark boundaries in the continuum, thus rendering it particulate (with a certain grain size).
re demise of the Roman Catholic Church: The Little Monk and Galileo pp 65-67
page 67: 'Little Monk: "We have the highest of all motives for keeping our mouths shut - the peace of mind of the less fortunate."'
98 'Unhappy the land where heroes are needed"
106: 'Andrea: "Like the man in the street, we said 'He'll die but he'll never recant.' You Came back: 'I've recanted but I'm going to live". 'Your hands are stained we said.' You're saying 'Better stained than empty.
Galileo: "Better stained than empty. Sounds realistic. Sounds like me. New science, new ethics."'
Brecht page 118: 'Modern science is a legitimate daughter of the church, a daughter who has emancipated herself and turned against the mother.'
Nature 445:369 'The emerging picture of microbes as gene swapping collectives demands a revision of such concepts as organism, species and
[page 125]
evolution itself.' Goldenfeld
If we make the Universe divine we can accept that 'theocracy' means the rule of reality. By submitting to reality through a scientific understanding of the human condition, we increase our probability of salvation. On visible salvation
