Notes
[Sunday 17 May 2009 - Saturday 23 May 2009]
[Notebook: DB 66 Turing Field]
[page 160]
Sunday 17 May 2009
[page 161]
The task of natural theology is to explain the existence and success of all the other theologies recorded in art and literature and show how they relate to the core facts of the network Universe in which we have come to be.
Huizinga Le Jouvenal page 76: 'In the Jouvenal we find a remarkable portrayal, hardly to be surpassed, of warlike courage of a simple and touching kind. "It is a joyous thing, is war. . . . You love your comrade so in war. When you see that your quarrel is just and your blood fighting well, tears rise to your eye. A great sweet feeling of loyalty and of pity fills your heart on seeing your friend so valiantly exposing his body to execute and accomplish the command of our Creator. And when you prepare to go out and die or live with him, and for love not to abandon him. And out of that there arises such a delectation that he who has not tasted it is not fit to say what a delight it is. Do you think that a man who does that fears death? Not at all; for he feels to strengthened, he is so elated, that he does not know where he is. Truly he is afraid of nothing.''
The path integral approach (ie the effectiveness of same) seems to suggest that there are a large number of algorithms that approximate perfection and so create the infinitesimal region of stationary action that 'surrounds' the classical path.
Huizinga page 94: 'For the history if civilization, the permanent dream of the sublime life has the value of a very important reality. And every political history itself, under penalty of neglecting actual facts, is bound to take illusions, vanities, follies into account. There is not a more dangerous tendency in history that that of representing the
[page 162]
past as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests.'
Huisinga page 94: 'Chivalry during the Middle Ages was, on the one hand, the great source of tragic political errors, exactly as are nationalism and national pride at the present day. On the other, it tended to disguise well adjusted calculations under the appearance of generous aspirations.'
page 114: 'Here, then, in the Roman de la Rose, the sexual motif is again placed in the centre of erotic poetry, but enveloped by symbolism and mystery and presented in the guise of saintliness. It is impossible to imagine a more deliberate defiance of the Christian ideal.' de Loris
page 140: 'Ascetic meditation had in all ages dwelt on dust and worms. The treatises on the contempt of the world had long since evoked all the horrors of decomposition, but it is only towards the end of the fourteenth century that pictorial art, in its turn, seizes upon the motif.'
page 147: ' Nothing betrays more clearly the excessive fear of death felt in the Middle Ages than the popular belief, then widely spread, according to which Lazarus after his resurrection, lived in continual horror at the thought that he should have again to pass through the gates of death.'
page 151: 'Toward the end of the Middle Ages, two factors dominate religious life: the extreme saturation of the religious atmosphere, and the marked tendency of thought to embody itself in images.
Formalism. Formalism (mathematics) - Wikipedia
[page 163]
Huizinga page 151: 'Individual and social life, in all their manifestations, are imbued with conceptions of faith. There is not an object nor an action, no matter how trivial, that is not consistently correlated with Christ or salvation.
Monday 18 May 2009
Huizinga page 156: 'If, on the one hand, all details of ordinary life may be raised to a sacred level, on the other hand, all that is holy sinks to the commonplace.
This is an error based on the notion that the world is worldly and God divine, a false dichotomy.
Huizinga: 'Nothing is more characteristic in this respect that the fact of there being hardly any difference between the musical character of sacred and profane melodies.
Why should there be? Many religious sentiments are encoded in modern popular music, and most 'sacred' songs are a pack of falsehoods.
page 176: 'In addressing itself to the angel, vaguely conceived and almost formless [theologically, pure form], piety restored contact with the supernatural and with mystery.'
Tuesday 19 May 2009
Why do I do this stuff. One explanation is that I want to. This may well be an artefact of the 'supremacy of the will' doctrine which goes back to the abstraction that people can be directed by a suitable system of rewards. But we may also be driven by forces, over which we do not have complete control, motivating
[page 164]
our own nature. The need here is to avoid errors and contradictions if we are to survive. As I survey the space and time open to me (ie some 5000 year of 'Western tradition) I see much contradiction and conflict which might in principle be eliminated by global concurrence on the fundamentals of religion derived from a commonly held theology. In the sciences, the ground for common beliefs among scientists is their collective observations and theories about the world which seems to be one and consistent. In other words we seek peace and peace of mind by conforming our minds to the Universe (or divinity) that created us. True religion is supposed to reveal the mind of God as guidance to us who wish to conform to God's Will.
The distinction between will and potential in general is simply [potential's] application to the human context. We spend the whole day moving, mentally and physically, pumping blood and air, eating, thinking, doing things. We are a dynamic system which has a set of fixed points we call here personality, or more abstractly form. We might define form as the fixed points in the dynamics ie those things that stay the same through time as other things change. Physically these fundamental invariants or symmetries are energy, momentum, and action. We wish to identify these symmetries in personalities at all levels of complexity and feel that they key lies in seeing the system as a network.
Huizinga page 180: 'As for the great lords, the basic unsoundness of their life of arrogant pomp and disordered enjoyment contributed to give spasmodic character to their piety. They are devout by starts, for life is far too distracting. Charles V of France sometimes gives up the chase at the most exciting
[page 165]
moments to hear mass. Ann of Burgundy, the wife of Bedford now scandalizes the Parisians by splashing a procession by her mad riding, now leaves a court fete at midnight to attend the matins of the Celestines. She brought upon herself a premature death by visiting the sick of the Hotel Dieu.'
Navigating is space vs navigating in unix. In unix one's local inertial frame is the directory in which one resides which is indicated by the prompt. From there one can move oneself around to other directories, and from there look at the rest of the accessible structure. The number of paths out of a given place may be many, up to the parent directory or down to any one of its children, children's children etc. In space there are only three orthogonal 'children' to any location, up-down, left-right, and front-back. All motions in space can be modelled by concatenating quanta of motion in these six directions in three dimensions. This looks a bit like a node in a binary tree which has one trunk and two branches. In a sufficiently abstract system trunk and branches may be indistinguishable and so three symmetric 'dimensions', ie degrees of freedom.
Huizinga page 190: 'The great figure of Denis the Carthusian no more escaped suspicion and raillery than the miracle-worker Louis XI. The slander and abuse of the world pursued him all his life. The mental attitude of the fifteenth century toward the highest religious manifestations of the age is made up equally of enthusiasm and distrust.' As it should be, since the religion not only gave people a common picture of the world to enable them to cooperate, survive and thrive, but this picture was also predominantly bullshit based on false (and self serving) concepts of God and the World.
[page 166]
The Christian story is a rather crude dramatization of the axiom 'love your neighbour as yourself' expressed in terms of the violent, monarchical and retaliatory age in which it developed.
I believe that religion based on ancient texts is obsolete. The first universities were religious foundations, designed to lead to the study of theology then at the pinnacle of human understanding. The fundamentals of this theology were laid down in the Bible as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church and their successors, and mandated by councils and popes. As the Middle Ages waned, people began to see the world not as the deformed place of trial preached by Christianity, but as real and reliable. This view may have been difficult to sustain in the chaos of Medieval Europe, but it has become our best hope for bettering our lot. The reliable results obtained and repeated by the global scientific industry attest to the vast amount of reliable information encoded in our world One can no longer imagine that this is the world God created deformed by Original Sin. Instead, the us imagine that the world is itself God. How can this be?
The whole Christian business plan revolved around its claim to be the exclusive channel of communication with God. From a technical point of view, the first thing Christianity needs to do to enhance its credibility is to establish that God exists.
Violent communication simplifies, it is simpler. Peaceful communication complexifies. But in some circumstances one or other of these extremes may not be possible.
[page 167]
Huizinga page 199: 'The Breton, Alain de la Roche, a Dominican born about 1428, is a very typical representative of this religious imagery, both ultra-concrete and ultra-fantastic. He was the zealous promoter of the use of the rosary, with a view to which he founded the Universal Brotherhood of the Psalter of Our Lady. The description of his numerous visions is characterized at the same time by an excess of sexual imagination and by the absence of all genuine emotion. The passionate tone, which in the grand mystics, makes these too sensuous images of hunger and thirst, of blood and voluptuousness, bearable, is altogether lacking. The symbolism of spiritual love has become with him a mere mechanical process. It is the decadence of the medieval spirit. . . .
'Now whereas the celestial symbolism of Alain de la Roche seems artificial, his infernal visions are characterized by a hideous actuality. He sees the animals that represent the various sins equipped with horrible genitals, and emitting torrents of fire which obscure the earth with their smoke. He sees the prostitute of apostasy giving birth to apostates, now devouring them and vomiting them forth, now kissing them and patting them like a mother.'
I am an apostate, forced to it and proud of it!
'Alain de la Roche forms the link between the placid and gentle pietism of the 'devotio moderna' and the darkest horror produced by the medieval spirit on the wane: the detestation of witchcraft at that time fully developed into a fatally consistent system of theological zeal and judicial severity.'
Huizinga page 202: 'In God nothing is empty of sense: nihil vacuum
[page 168]
neque sine signo apud Deum' St Iranaeus
Huizinga page 203: 'From the causal point of view, symbolism appears as a short circuit of thought. Instead of looking for the relation between two things by following the hidden detours of their causal connections, thought makes a leap and discovers their relation, not on a connection of cause and effect, but in the connection of signification or finality.'
Both Adam Smith and quantum mechanics see a world guided by a very loose rein, akin to asymptotic freedom, which nevertheless sets absolute bounds on behaviour (there are no free quarks outside a larger particle. Smith, Dirac
Problem of universals is solved by symmetry. We are all made from the same alphabet. Problem of universals - Wikipedia
Huizinga page 206: 'The world, objectionable in itself, became acceptable by its symbolic purport.'
'In this way all individual suffering is but a shadow of divine suffering.' Pain is just an error message suggesting a need for correction, at all system levels.
page 207: 'Religious symbolism offered one cultural advantage more. To the letter of the formulated dogma, rigid and explicit in itself, the flowering imagery of symbols formed, as it were, a musical accompaniment, which by its perfect harmony, allowed the mind to transcend the deficiencies of logical expression.'
'Symbolism opened up all the wealth of religious conceptions to art . . . '
[page 169]
Huizinga page 210: 'A Church cleansed of the evils [errors] that stain [restrict] it.'
Wednesday 20 May 2009
Thursday 21 May 2009
Huizinga page 215: 'If the medieval mind wants to know the nature or the reason of a thing, it neither looks into it, to analyze its structure, nor behind it, to inquire into its origin, but looks up to heaven, where it shines as an idea.'
Patti Smith: 'Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine'. Gloria Patti Smith
Theology looks at the world sub specie aeternitatis. ie formally, like mathematics. In this context, 'sins' lose their moral, symbolic, emotional etc overtones and instead appear as errors or contradictions of the system. Formalism lies at the root of both justice and science.
Nothing exists, ie communicates with the rest of the world, without energy, the rate of communication in quanta per time, that is actions or completed processs per unit time. So my theology does not exist to anybody but me until it is propagated, and I will propagate when I think it is propaganda [Latin 'requiring to be propagated'] (...?). Then will I become a theological activist, seeking publicity for my views and legitimizing my activity by seeing it simply as a product in the religion market which I wish to trade for a living.
Perspective: I want to float an idea. I am of the opinion that religions based on ancient texts are obsolete. I arrived at this point of view by considering religion in the context of human evolution and survival.
[page 170]
It is the fundamental truism of evolutionary theory . . . that what we see around is is what works. . . . The ones that did not survive and reproduce are not here. I feel that this holds for all organisms, since they are all alive. Even atoms have a rich interior life and talk to one another using a vocabulary with a countably infinite number of letters. Religion is with us. The bureau of statistics tells us that there are about 28000 workers in the religion industry in Australia, 0.3% of the work force. Australian Bureau of Statistics We might assume that turnover in the religion industry is proportional to employment, making it worth about 0.3% of the GDP, ie about $2.5 billion. . . .
The jury is the empirical foundation of the justice system and it is mediated by a judge whose task is to see that the proper protocols of communication between the two sides of the case and the jury is maintained.
Deus in adjutorium meum intende. The heart of the Jesus story is that God became one of us. The natural conclusion is that since Jesus was God, we all are. This idea has some favourable consequences. First, if the human world is divine, so is the rest of the Universe that spawned us. Second, we are not defective products of original sin, but personalities of God. Third, God is no longer a mysterious being outside the Universe whose will must be communicated to us by a priestly aristocracy, but is here before our eyes, it is us. Every human thought, feeling and observation is material for theology. No longer must we rely for our knowledge and experience of God on obscure ancient texts, many of which appear to have been written by grumpy old men who fashioned God in their own image, a child murderer.
Many of the technical problems are developing a natural
[page 171]
theology are beyond me so all I can do is to present a vision to involve others to deal with the devilish detail and take the idea through to a successfully deployed technology.
My basic dilemma: If God is the totality of being, how can the World be separate from It?
Agatha: a network of messages whose meaning is intentionally obscure but becomes obvious at the denouement. Elephants Christie
The coal of fire (Isaiah?) Isaiah [Then one of the seraphs flew to me, hlding a live coal which he had taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. With this he touched my mouth and said: 'See now, this has touched your lips, your sin is taken away, your iniquity is purged'. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying: 'Whom shall I send? Who will be our messenger?' I answered, 'Here I am, send me.' 6:6-9]
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Friday 22 May 2009
Huizinga page 224: '"All creatures" -- says Eckhart -- "are mere nothing. I do not say that they are little or ought; they are nothing. That which has no entity is not. All creatures have no being, for their being depends on the presence of God." Intensive mysticism signifies return to pre-intellectual mental life. All that is culture is obliterated and annulled.
ie MYSTICISM = ESCAPISM. The world is not real; we don't belong.
Thomas a Kempis: The Imitation of Jesus Christ. a KempisHuizinga page 225: 'The specific forms of thought of an epoch should not be studied as they reveal themselves in theological and philosophical speculations, or in the conceptions of creeds, but also in practical wisdom and everyday life. We may even say that the true character of the spirit of an age is better revealed in its model of regarding and expressing
[page 172]
trivial and commonplace things than in the high [?] manifestations of philosophy and science.'
In a divine world, nothing is 'high' or 'low', it is all part of the system.
Huizinga page 228: 'In the Middle Ages everyone liked to base a serious argument on a text, so as to give it foundation.'
Prayer has power only insofar as it is coupled to a hearer capable of executing the operation prayed for. In most cases, this is probably the person praying him or her self.
Malleus Maleficarum 1487. Henry Institoris & Jacob Springer Summis desiderantes -- Innocent VIII 1484. Kramer & Sprengler, Summis desiderantes affectibus - WikipediaHuizinga page 248: 'Burgundo-French culture of the expiring Middle Ages tends to oust beauty by magnificence. . . . The flamboyant style of architecture is like the postlude of an organist who cannot conclude. It decomposes all the formal elements endlessly; it interlaces all the details; there is not a line which has not its counterline. The form develops at the expense of the idea, the ornament grows rank, hiding all the lines and all the surfaces. A horror vacui reigns, always a symptom of artistic decline.'
If this is true, we may associate complex art with a low noise environment where there is sufficient complexity to generate complex forms. Per contra, violence tends to simplify art by putting up the energy to information ratio, so that only loud things are perceived. As the noise level increases, the distance between messages must be increase to keep them from being confused
[page 173]
so that deterministic communication can be maintained albeit at a slower rate unless the energy available for communication is increased.
Huizinga (continued): 'Decoration and ornament no longer serve to heighten the natural beauty of a thing; . . . ' Did they ever? Depends on the eye. The natural eye sees that nature cannot be improved (as a process) although we can act to minimize the errors that nature is prone to (which accumulate as ageing), requiring nature to be dynamic, forever born anew.
When we talk abut 'the whole' we necessarily include ourselves as parts of thereof, and so self reference and its attendant [possibilities and] problems enter the field. Hofstadter We cannot deal effectively with the whole, since we do not have the bandwidth, so we must be content with living locally, extrapolating (as Einstein did) from local frames of reference to obtain a very abstract (simple) view of the whole. The equation of general relativity is simplicity itself until we start to look into the detail and the algebra becomes seriously complex. Nevertheless, this equation, in its simplicity represents an invariant feature of the Universe, that the stress energy tensor controls the curvature of space [and vice-versa] -- more local energy means more local curvature, reaching a singularity in black holes.
Huizinga page 248 (continued): 'No epoch ever witnesses such extravagance of fashion as that extending from 1350 to 1480. Here we can observe the unhampered expansion of the aesthetic sense of the time.'
Driven by the rules of the competition, like F1 cars. Formula One car - Wikipedia
Huizinga page 251: 'In [the Medieval religious festivals] worship and rejoicing in common were always the expression of sublime thought which lent them a grace and dignity that even the excesses of their frequently burlesque details could not affect.'
[page 174]
As Aristotle, Thomas and many others noted, the knower and the known are duals that form a unity, but what they may not have noticed [is] that there are an infinity of knowers dual to an infinity of knowns. The idea is expressed in quantum mechanics by the relationship between the observing operator and the eigenvalues observed. Zurek
Huizinga page 301: 'We are constantly disillusioned [by the failure of inspiration] by most of the fifteenth century poets . . . [page 303] The motifs are occasionally of incomparable grandeur and suggestive force but the development remains most feeble. The theme of Pierre Michault in his Danse aux Aveugles was masterly, the everlasting dance of the human race about the thrones of the three blind deities, Love, Fortune and Death. He only succeeded in working it up into very mediocre poetry.'
But it is a start in the slow development of our ability to perceive our nature through our feelings as the tension of life draws us into more intimate relationships with one another, giving wider common emotional 'protocols' which are based in our evolutionary history. [even though our range of experiences is limited, they still form a universal set of operations in the Turing sense?] Universal Turing Machine - Wikipedia]
It comes to to me now and then a feeling of how far the Catholic Church carried me away from reality, and the wonderful new view of reality this has led me to, the divine Universe. We see it as evil because our minds have been corrupted by a self serving priesthood, but as its power wanes, there is a choice for all of us to see that we and the world are divine, and to ponder the consequences.
Saturday 23 May 2009
[page 175]
The technology of the epoch provides its people with potential metaphors for the less visible parts of the world. Water pipes and drains help us to understand our circulatory systems and other networks that exist in our bodies and our society. It may not be be entirely accidental that the dawning understanding about the heart and circulatory system arises about the same time as it was realized that the public health in cities could be greatly improved by a clean water supply and effective means of removing biologically active waste material like faeces. The advent of cities also led us to see the communications of a city as analogues [of] the networks of communication in our bodies. Lovelock saw that this physiological view of reality could be applied to the whole planet, so that we can conceive of the planet as a personality, Gaia, whose behaviour is controlled by a complex physiological interplay of many complex elements, like plants, animals, rivers etc all interacting with one another in layered intermeshing networks. Lovelock
COUPLING CONSTANT (a, b) = probability of a and b exchaning a message.
Roman de la Rose 'Breviary of the Aristocracy" Huizinga page 334.
Huizinga page 335: 'Now by an inward repining, the mind, after having been so long conversant with the forms of Antiquity, began to grasp its spirit. The incomparable simpleness and purity of the ancient culture, its exactitude of expression, its easy and natural thought and strong interest in men [sic] and life -- all this began to dawn on men's minds. Europe, having lived in the shadow of Antiquity, lived in its sunshine once more.'
Poetic. But true?
[page 176]
Crombie II:228: '. . . Harvey's originality, no less than Galileo's, sprang from his ability to see familiar facts from an entirely novel point of view.' Crombie
John Aubrey on Harvey, Crombie page 239: 'he is the only man, perhaps, that ever lived to see his owne doctrine established in his life time.'
'[Harvey's] treatise provided a model of method. After him abstract discussion of such questions as the nature of life or of 'innate heat' gradually gave way to the empirical investigation of how the body worked.'
Do the same for theology: how god works.
Crombie page 243: '[Descartes'] contribution was to grasp and assert one big theoretical idea: that the body is a machine, and that all its operations could be explained by the same principles and law as apply in the inanimate world.' Never mind that he was wrong about the details.
Same for theology again, where the machine becomes a network of Turing machines.
Crombie page 314: 'For Aristotelian philosophy there was strictly speaking no mind body problem since the soul, the animus [anima?] of the scholastics, which included the mind . . . was the 'form' of the human being and determined the nature of the psycho-physical unity just as the form of an inanimate body determined its nature [is its nature, an ordered set?]. The problem arose with the mechanistic conception of the body. Joseph Glanvill wrote rhetorically in The Vanity of Dogmatizing "How the purer spirit is united to this Clod, is a knot too hard for fallen humanity to unty."'
[page 177]
Layered network model untys it!
Cartesian mechanics, Galilean mechanics, Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, logical mechanics (the mechanics of a computer network).
Crombie page 316: '. . . the whole development of philosophy in relation to science, and of the philosophy of science, since the 17th century is properly intelligible only within the wider context of the beliefs, especially the theological beliefs, of the period. . . .
'For example Descartes, acting with unquestionable sincerity, kept a sharp eye on the doctrine of transubstantiation when developing his theory of matter and of material change. Transubstantiation - Wikipedia When he heard of Galileo's condemnation on the strength of certain Scriptural texts, he was prepared, with perhaps less unquestionable sincerity, to change his whole philosophy.'
Crombie page 333: 'Ever since the Greeks took the decisive step in cosmology of looking for explanations deductively connected with the means of prediction, the step by which they established the European scientific tradition as distinct from Babylonian astronomy in which there was a total logical disjunction between the highly developed technological projections and the myths that did service for explanations, the problems of finding criteria for distinguishing true explanations from false has been a pre-eminent question in the growth of science.'
page 335: 'It is through the development of [the] pragmatic policy of taking each case separately on its merits, of refusing to be bound by its own constructions [as Catholic theology is] that the history of the Scientific Revolution throws its most significant light, not only on the nature of science itself, but also on all those other aspects of modern European thought that have arisen from an attitude taken to its methods and conclusions (1959 - 1979)
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