Notes
[Sunday 10 May 2009 - Saturday 16 May 2009]
[Notebook: DB 66 Turing Field]
[page 155]
Sunday 10 May 2009
Lawrence page 300: "Without bothering to think to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of everything, let every man be given a rational proportion . . . and then, provision made, let every man look after his own amusements and appetites, as long as he interfered with nobody.' Lawrence
Overlooks the fact that the (near) perfect working of the social production machine requires parallel inputs from all its members, ie free and democratic creative response to the problems the machine will inevitably encounter To be effective, error correction must be local. Each worker does best to optimize control of their own work. Only by allowing freedom t the level of the workers cn the workers get what they want out of the system in return for what they put in.
The digits in an Arabic numeral are orthogonal. Because of the exponential growth in complexity that arises from concatenating orthogonal degrees of freedom, we can represent any world no matter how big on a
[page 156]
countable foundation of orthogonal binary dimensions, binary digits. Hilbert space reconciles the discrete and continuous worlds by having orthogonal dimensions parametrized by real (geometrical, continuous) numbers. Such a system enables one to construct any function, not just the continuous functions, since adjacent points, represented by different axes in Hilbert space, need have n correlation with one another, and may therefore fail to be continuous or differentiable.
dimension == degree of freedom [choice of next symbol to emit]. Creation means the creation of freedom by creating new dimensions. We may think of each word in a text as an element of a dimension, the complete sentence being a vector in the space of orthogonal dictionaries.
Texts are static, and so we think of formal symbols as static, but all formalism is implemented physically, that is dynamically. [texts represent fixed points in the dynamics]
A big catastrophe (like a tsunami or a hurricane) is the manifestation of a big inconsistency. Logical inconsistency appears in physics as a potential moving systems toward logical consistency.
PAIN --> MOTION ['-->' = motivates]
The torture lies in extremalizing motion, twisting, stretching, electrifying, etc.
What is the difference between stress energy (as in 'stress energy tensor') and potential energy?
[page 157]
Christianity tells us pain is to be endured, reality says that it is to be avoided by correcting the error causing it.
Like all software, theology is subject to upgrades, patches, service packs and all the other debugging channels that operate in software world. It did not become possible for theologians to make a reasonable approach to pain (and the more general problem of evil) without the help of cybernetics and the notion of feedback to correct deviant conditions. Feedback in living systems is often mediated by pain, leading then to keep away from fire, steep drops and lethal weapons [feed forward].
It is prudent to optimize the relationship between the pursuit of pleasure and the pursuit of profit. Some profit at the expense of others, taking the lion's share of the profit.
We are very familiar with the role of formalism in searching for model that map onto the world in science, but the more practical role of formalism is in public administration, symbolized by blind justice, where we are all treated formally the same (in principle) regardless of birth, race, education or any other attribute than humanity. From the pint of view of justice we are all quantum mechanically identical particles. Formalism applies in law, in accounting, in engineering and in all work, where a formal algorithm is adapted to a real situation to achieve a formally defined aim.
Monday 11 May 2009
Tuesday 12 May 2009
Waiting for information to determine the next move, to constrain the possibilities of the morning to a definite task.
[page 158]
Lawrence page 406: 'For day by day he felt more and more like a bubble filled with darkness round which whirled the irridescence of his consciousness, and upon which the pressure of the outer world, the outer life, roared vastly.'
Vacuum to vacuum, void to void, zero energy to zero energy, form to form via the dynamics of excitement.
Lawrence page 413: 'She nestld against him.'
I was saved by sensuality, liberated from the Church's dead formalist grip.
page 415: 'This is worth everything." Love & suicide, polar opposites.
The whole of Christianity is a polemic against the tree of knowledge, the people taking charge f their own lives, breaking out of slavery. The religion of slaves who want to be slaves.
Wednesday 13 May 2009
Thursday 14 May 2009
. . .
WORKAROUND: Logical pathway past an error. FORMALISM : DYNAMICS :: NATURAL : REAL (Numbers)
Friday 15 May 2009
I sometimes like to think of religion as the operating system of human society. It is the deep, mostly
[page 159]
invisible, guiding hand that keeps us all, the users of the social system, in relative harmony. There are plenty of glitches and crashes, but we cannot deny that the fundamental ideas of Christianity like caring for your neighbour and trying to make things better have done wonders for the economic prosperity of the West and the relative degree of peace that exists in our neighbourhood.
From this point of view, religion is the technology of human social organization. Corresponding to each technology, we have a body of science that helps to direct the technology. So the technology of health care is greatly assisted by biological science. So theology is the science corresponding to religion.
A measure of the depth of religion is the observation that people driven by one religion often have trouble understanding the behaviour of people of another religion, a situation that can lead to conflict unless much effort is put into understanding one another, the work of theology.
Historically, religions are strongly associated with a literature which has been copied and embellished over a very long period of time. Christian theology has expanded from the Bible (about 100 books) through the Fathers of the Church, thousands of books, to our current global network of Christian traffic.
Saturday 16 May 2009
The theology of operating systems: we may draw a parallel between a religion and, say, unix, which allows a large number of users to interact with the central processing unit. The difference
[page 160]
between Christianity and Natural religion is that the latter sees the CPU = Gd in the system whereas Christianity puts it outside the system where we have weak and error prone communication with it via the churches.
The sun rises again and another dark night is over, another work day dawns to provide for myself and my immediate and extended families.
Some of this is pretty boring, but it seems best to make everything explicit. Since most of our current religious ideas were generated by literate ruling classes who never stooped to manual wrk (or love for that matter) so they lived in a fairy tale, completely missing the reality of the Universe for an organism that is hard pressed to survive. Although they still had to face the realities of war and revolution which might unseat them from their position of privilege. They ensured against this by invoking divine right and the notion of 'lese majeste'.
So we prefer to write from the ground up, from the point of view of people (systems which are daily concerned with obtaining the inputs for continued loving existence. Huizinga pp 56 sqq. Huizinga
Natural religion is based on the day to day experiences of ordinary people rather than the mystical experiences of people living far from the worm pursuing invisible goals.
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