Notes
[Sunday 24 May 2009 - Saturday 30 May 2009]
[Notebook: DB 66 Turing Field]
[page 178]
Sunday 24 May 2009
From the Bible we see that the Hebrews had a very personal relationship with the God, and had many expectations of God that were not fulfilled, yet they maintained their faith because God had led them out of Egypt into the Promised Land, a land which the great developer Moses had represented as flowing with milk and honey. [Exodus 3:8, 3:17, 13:5, 33:3 Exodus] Notwithstanding that the Promised Land was not empty. The new colonists had to fight and conquer the indigenous people in order to take possession. This is a mythological representation of the plight of every creature that takes its place in the world of the living. In its native state, life will reproduce itself to consume all the available resources. As new resources became available (farmed animals, wood, coal, oil etc) the mass of human life has increased. Not only does each of us consume about 100 times the mass of resources to live, but there are at least a hundred times as many of us as there were in those days. It has been recognised for about a century that we were approaching the limits of growth set by our ability to colonise the earth's resources for our own use. Ultimately human growth will stop and perhaps decline due to exhaustion of resources, but there is of course an alternative, to live on the sun instead of completely on the earth. This will require considerable investment in technology, but before that can happen we will need a change of attitude to ourselves and the earth which will unite us as one organism with a workable vision of its long term future. In essence this come down to population control and the freezing and reduction of our total footprint, that is the total of earth processes that we have diverted to our own use, eg water, air quality. Zero pollution, 100% recycling of matter, all energy from the sun. This seems t be a theological exercise, since it requires a vision
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of the whole system. It is also religious, since it sets certain bounds on our behaviour, which might seem to some as sacrifice -- losing the corporate jet in favour of scheduled airlines, or not travelling at all and doing business over the electromagnetic communication system (noting that we to are electromagnetic communication systems. Feynman QED Feynman)
. . .
War sanctions murder in the name of God, whoever that may be.
In the Hebrew-Christian tradition, we are expected to devote one day in seven to religion, a day of rest and (inevitably) contemplation away from the stresses of work. I am rather greedy (and consequently poor) in this line because I spend about four days a week contemplating (thankyou rain!), but see it as laying up riches for myself and my children in the form of intellectual property = capital = ordered sets to which the market attaches a cardinal: the market value of some idea (like gold mining), physically realized. so contemplation too may come under the heading of work. In general, work is the deterministic behaviour needed to keep us alive (nest building, 'earning a living'). All other activities come under play.
We do not judge ourselves by the Guinness Book of records, but by the average or median of each range. Hebrew-Christianity is founded on exceptional events, miracles of one sort or another, characterized by their rarity (like decay of an atom of U238 Uranium-238 - Wikipedia ). Natural religion has more to do with the normal everyday world. In its eyes all events are equally steps in the life of the divine (= unbounded) system.
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GOD = UNBOUNDED
'God so loved the world' [John 3:16 John] that he used the death of his own son to save it is not a good model. Since God is omnipotent and irresistible, the initial situation that 'required' this death is clearly of God's own making and need not have been so. We do not need a God who is however remotely a murderer. But we can accept the creative side of God, at least insofar as he creates things out of nothing. Practical creation, like building a car, does require death, since the system which the materials once were has to die when its physical foundations are recycled into building another system. History shows that the development of human ideas has led to many deaths as different religious groups war with one another, and the Bible treats the realities of conquest and death quite as though they are a normal part of life. In the jostling world of human expansion this is to be expected. We can imagine how many smaller religions Christianity has rendered extinct in the process of becoming the dominant world religion in terms of economic and military power.
God, as envisaged by natural religion, also creates out of nothing in the sense that the same physical substrate may carry very different amounts of form or information, as we can see when comparing a human being to the equivalent atomic constituents. In this sense humanity, in its full cultural connotation as created out of nothingr by the long evolutionary process which has organized primordial hydrogen and helium into our sun, out planet and ourselves.
The pressure to become a religious entrepreneur becomes stronger as I get older and forsee more clearly the day when I have to give up
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physical work for a living. As I have gradually demythologized and desacralized religion over my lifetime. I can now see this as a legitimate business, trading religious and theological insight for a living. This is how I started out. but saw that I could not legitimately promote the product I was being schooled to sell.
These times when I feel like writing give me the same satisfaction as building, seeing a structure first delineated on paper, and then bringing it into being as a functional element in human life, a house, a bathroom, a drainage system, etc. Like an inventor who sees a better way, I feel a need to develop and market the new way in some physical form, machine, tool, text etc.
work well / play well (there are more ways to work well than to simply work hard). There is a direct ratio between productivity and standard of living.
standard of living = f(productivity)
productivity = benefit / cost
These are ratios, although we can decide that the 'wild type' standard of living = wild type productivity = 1. We can measure the standard of living in each layer of the network underlying humanity, beginning at the physical level with energy and matter consumption. Abstractly this is to say that the standard of living of a point is equal to the four-momentum flowing through it. By the energy measure, most citizens of developed nations consume about 100 x wild consumption.
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The key to human advancement is to get the same perceived standard of living using fewer and fewer resources per capita. We can then explore the implications of this principle for our whole built environment, that is for all physical realizations of the processes that bring us peace, pleasure and contentment. Clearly a significant section of perceived standard of living is determined by ones attitude to one's actual environment, whether it is a happy marriage or a world of tension from which one would like to escape if the cost were not too high.
Do we need central heating or warmer clothing?
Agatha Elephants: "'You enjoy life altogether, don't you?' "Yes, I do. I suppose its the feeling that one never knows what might be going to happen next.' 'Yet that feeling,' said Mrs Rosentelle, 'is just what makes so many people never stop worrying!'" Christie
. . .
Blissful, with a tinge of worries that are all under control.
worry = f(probability of failure = error)
A moment in the continual mental dynamics. An equivalent question: what should / could I do now / next? Dishes, cooking, cleaning, writing . . .
Christie page 230: 'It is easier to hate where you have loved than to be indifferent where you have loved.'
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From a practical point of view, the root error of Christianity is denial of death, a concept closely related to the nature of 'spiritual' beings and its extension to the human 'soul'. It is of the essence of Natural religion to accept the obvious reality of death and birth, as quantum field theory has it creation and annihilation: the emission and reception of messages at different points in universal space-time.
Job: Israel's love of God was (is) substantially unrequited. They are still fighting for their existence and assumed righteousness against a rising tide of world opinion.
From a practical point of view, god is the way things are. To be successful, our actions must conform to the way things are. Generally, entry into fantasyland, trying to bypass reality by magic and dreams leads to tears. No matter what governments may promise or hope for they, and we, are ultimately in the lap of god so defined. As the cards fall, so goes the farm. A volcano one day, an earthquake the next, a hyperspace freeway, are all out of our control and must simply be accepted as realities and dealt with in the best way possible. Which is generally by mutual assistance, the undamaged parts of the network bypassing and repairing the damaged. Within this matrix of the way things are, we nevertheless have a broad range of options to modify the course of events without making fatal errors like driving under the influence of performance impairing drugs.
Being entrusted with the word of god is a key to power, the foundation of theocratic societies like the Roman Catholic Church and its spawn.
The way things are is very dynamic, but we can sometimes
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see stationary patterns within it, and these stationary patterns, like rock foundations, are what we use to build technology and what nature has used to build us.
God says I am the way things are. Clearly, although we often have much in common the way things are for each of us is different. We all have our own gods, which are our own reflection in the structure of the Universe. This reflexivity is established by the quantum theory of observation and its logical extension (which is?) the layered network built on quantum mechanics, that is (we hope, hypothesize) the theory of communication, which is the way things are for communication.
Power comes from knowing the stationary points in the system, the reliable (through time) features of the Universe. We may put these features on a spectrum ranging from eternal to ephemeral. Sciences like theology and mathematics are concerned with eternal 'truths', ie things that do not change, like Pythagoras' theorem.
I keep up a running critique of the Roman Catholic Church to help comvince myself that the theological hypotheses and religious models I have to offer are at least not worse than theirs.
Political campaign (Primary Colors) Klein Intellectual campaign? All bullshit and no substance <==> all substance and no bullshit.
Tuesday 26 May 2009
'The world is full of gods.' God is what is, the way things
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are. A vast network of persons (sources, as in the Bible) each with its pwn personality (nature) all living together in a world of their own making by love (creation) and war (annihilation).
Clark: The Christians say the world is just for us, made by God to show off his goodness to another intelligent and wilful being, us. Not so. The world is by and for us all, from atoms to nations and beyond, in both directions.
We are all 'children of god' in the software sense, given that the Universe is God and we are all descended from it, inheriting the processes that help to make us what we are.
One feels sorry for the martyrs who have been conned by bullshit stories from their elders. The establishment of a ruling class ruling on the backs of the population has led to a flight from reality, to castles in the air, and to dreams inconsistent with reality, in the old language, 'against god's will'.
I am who I am - What did the original writer mean? [Exodus 3:14 Exodus, K J Cronin
POLITICS - How to we spend the money? No taxation without representation.
Wednesday 27 May 2009
Hans Kung The Church Kung
Churches are institutions that purport to manage our dealings with God, that is the way things are.
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Kung page 5: 'Rather than talking about an ideal Church situated in the abstract celestial spheres of theological thoery, we shall consider the real church as it exists in our world, and in human history.'
To do this we have to penetrate beyond the spin, music, and incense to see what the Church really does in terms of its effects on human life.
The key to stillness is requisite variety, the information necessary to constrain the probability of an event permanently to 1. So the probability that the energy of a closed system remains x is 1.
L Ron Hubbard founded a church based on science fiction. Scientology - Wikipedia It would be more profitable to base a church on science fact, a natural religion. The aim of science is to discover the way things are, that is in our language, to discover more and more about God. Theology should (formally) be the union of all the other sciences, since it is concerned with the whole system and how we fit in.
Kung page 5: 'The real Church is first and foremost a happening. a fact, an historical event. The real essence of the real Church is expressed in historical forms.'
HISTORICAL = PHYSICALLY (OBSERVABLY) EMBODIED (Landauer) Rolf Landauer
The Church is a subset of the World (a set (Universe) of events), ie a complex process. The Church is a process amidst the
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multiple processes of the human world.
Kung page 6: 'The essence of the Church is . . . always to be found in its historical form, and the historical form must always be understood in the light opf and with reference to the essence.'
'historical form' = physical representation.
The unity of the Church is founded in human symmetry (much emphasized by Jesus by the equivalence of 'neighbour' and 'self') rather than the centralized authority of the pope. The dogmatic and authoritarian nature of the church is necessary since its doctrines have very little to do with reality ['institutionalized myth']
Kung page 10: 'Gregory VII . . . [confronted] the traditional rights of the monarchy and nobility with a renewed and centralized canon law, defining an hierarchical Church which claims to be independent of the regnum and a pope who is 'prince of the kingdoms of the world', maintaining that the pope has priestly sovereignty over political authorities and can dismiss kings and emperors without being answerable to anyone.
Thursday 28 May 2009
Friday 29 May 2009
More rain! Depressing. But as long as the sun shines, we will have the energy to go on.
Memory: a state which stays the same until changed. Tautology. States are memories, and they are changed by action. [The rate of change is energy]
Relentless sun and relentless rain are both boring / depressing.
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A person, a dynamic state of many dynamic [states] needs to be free to explore its state space in order to be comfortable so that it can move away from 'bad' error states. At the most abstract CHANGE OF STATE = ACTION Life = {action}
I propose that God and the World are identical. I can see a look of horror on many faces, and I sympathize. It has taken me forty years to transform from a believing Dominican monk to my present view, which the technicians call pantheism: As Thales of Miletus said, I think the world is full of gods.Thales - Wikipedia
So what is god? The Catholics have a well stablished model of God, developed over thousands of years, which serves as the standard in our society: God created the World; he is invisible, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and all the rest.
It is commonly assumed that we all seek a state of bliss where we do not have to work and there are no dangers, accidents, disease, or other evils in our lives, a state known as heaven. Some seek it through meditation and austerity. I tried that myself. Other experience it in everyday life, when we are in states that do not notice the passage of time. A common state for me when I am working on something that does not require much attention, like doing the dishes, or my full attention, like writing this or doing something new (which this is).
Getting a bright idea to work is no easy matter. This
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is because the bright idea is one of the many possible paths through time, and for it to work, every undesirable branch must be foreseen and specifically included.
The Theology Company: The product: understanding of our place in the world as a foundation for designing our actions. The Theology Company
HEALTH <--> ERROR
Religion is health care
. . .
Saturday 30 May 2009
If the Universe is divine, the text based religions are obsolete and it is time to develop religions based on contemporary experience as well as ancient memories.
. . .
'Performance anxiety': most of the tension in my life arises because there is so much to do and not enough energy / time to do it. This translates into the physical idea that I am on a steep potential, subject therefore to stress-energy which generates in me the tendency to work all day and be worn out in the evening. Presumably much of this behaviour and feeling dates back to my hunter-gatherer ancestors who probably found that in hard times they had to hunt and gather until
they were exhausted and still go hungry. Hunger is the least of my worries these days. My motivation seems to be to accumulate enough wealth to stop working for a year or two and concentrate on the theological and religious work that has gone on in the background for most of my life. Given such wealth (which I can only hope to acquire from the stock market until the religion business takes off) . . .
The Theology Company: Our product is inspiration.
The old age religions are bad, but the new age does not seem much better, concentrating also on gurus and sages and postulating all sorts of magical and occult powers controlling the world and our lives. Natural religion is very much more wysiwig, what you see is what you get. The catch is in the seeing, for experience is a product of both seer and seen; The Christian sees Christianity, as the Buddhist sees Buddhism and the scientific community tries to see reality. It does this through a dynamic critical communication process between scientists and the World and scientists and one another.
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