Notes
[Sunday 21 June 2009 - Saturday 27 June 2009]
[Notebook: DB 67 jciii]
Sunday 21 June 2009
Monday 22 June 2009
[page 8]Tuesday 23 June 2009
Raizen, Science 324:1405 'The concept that information has real physical meaning was originally the start of modern information science.' Raizen
Writing is a filter: 'Is it worth writing down?' Reality is even more stringent 'is it worth trying'. We work this out in writing before we start to build.
Raizen: '. . . single photon cooling is a physical realization of Maxwell's Demon. The demon, in this case, is particularly simple and efficient: a laser beam that induces an irreversible process and scatters one photon out of the beam. Such a demon is definitely not an intelligent being, yet it does not need an active feedback loop. The fact that the information is available and can in principle be collected is enough. (Feynman on neutron scattering Feynman)
LOGICAL CONFINEMENT
Wednesday 24 June 2009
Thursday 25 June 2009
Why is the Roman Catholic Church so terrified of human reproduction? Because it is a formal entity with incomplete human embodiment? But why is it incomplete? Because it is essentially an instrument of power designed to extract wealth from many for the benefit of the few. It is an element of the 'ruling class', the collectors of taxes. What is the difference between taxes and trade? Taxes, historically, have been extracted by force without any particular return. Trade is particular, each trade the result of an agreement between the traders on the value of the item traded and the terms, conditions, guarantees of the
[page 9]
expressed or implied contract of sale. The root of democracy is the acceptance of taxation, but that there shall be no taxation without representation, that is without an input into the expenditure of the tax collected.
Power: the ability to constrain the actions of others into certain channels = certain protocols = certain algorithms. An algorithm may be a network of algorithms into which uncertainty is introduced by interruption.
When interrupted, stack your present state and attend to the interrupt.
PRIORITIZATION of INTERRUPTS - don't bother me unless someone is dying.
West, Advocate page 93: 'But for Nicholas Black the symbol had new significance: youth nailed to the cross of ignorance, superstition and poverty, half-dead and damned already, but smiling still, a drugged, ecstatic victim of time and its tyrannies.' West Which is to overlook the value of the culture by looking at it from an unsympathetic [misunderstanding] point of view.
UNSYMPATHETIC = compressing a complex situation into a inadequate basis, ie reducing the cardinality of reality.
West page 102: '[The Church's] promises are reassuring: that if one submits to the logic and the discipline, one walks naturally in the way of salvation.'
What is salvation? Real salvation. The Church delivers a certain amount of real salvation (prosperity and feeling good) through the medium of a false salvation, the posthumous pie in the sky, heaven, an unverified dividend.
[page 10]
West pp 102-103: 'The complex, terrifying relationship of Creator and Created [World and Creature] is reduced to a formula of faith and a code of manners.'
And so its bandwidth is far too small to deal with reality without Procrustean simplification.
Friday 26 June 2009
Saturday 27 June 2009
We do not have to propagate natural religion; it is here among us and explains our existence and all the creative power of the Universe through the democracy of the network. Its enemy is the isolate, the one party state, the monarchy, which constrains the creativity of the many to the control of one, variety reduction by violence. We see it these days vividly in Iran, where the theocratic monarch of the Ayatollah is murdering people in the streets for wishing to assert their independence. [No doubt he feels that this is the right thing to do, on the premiss that the old order must be preserved at the cost of murder.]
The low entropy of solar energy is a 'vestigium [footprint] of the initial singularity when the entropy of the Universe was zero, just like the Thomistic God. Thomas Aquinas
The police are to keep the peace by correcting errors in communication between individuals, not to enforce the will of the monarch. Communicants are free to choose their own protocol, and have no need to submit to a protocol enforced from above, although it may be in the global interest to share at least one common protocol, like the internet. [this common protocol is embedded in the physical word, hence out name 'physical theology'.] What we seek to eliminate is violent enforcement in any situation except those where violent enforcement must be opposed, as in defensive war, and the control of violent individuals and organizations. It is the task of promoters of natural
[page 11]
religion to point out that 'defense in depth' requires us to understand our own nature and the nature of our world, so that we can guide ourselves and our world in the ways of the world.
The root of natural religion, from an epistemological point of view is an empirical mathematical theology. (mathematical = logically [sic]). Mathematics is not just about numbers, (which are simply the alphabet of mathematics since any finite set of symbols can be mapped onto the natural numbers) but structures that can be made with numbers. Since in the real world all information is embodied physically, we may think of numbers as the lego blocks or atoms from which the Universe can be built. [mapping (mathematics) = bonding (physics, chemistry)] Of these Universes, mathematics studies those that are both logically consistent and interesting. The least interesting things are amorphous sets. The most interesting are ordered sets of operations that lead to remarkable results, like fucking or building a watch, or Pythagoras Theorem (Wiki) Pythagorean theorem - Wikipedia
Our leading example of natural religion is a computer network, open communication. We might say all oppression is prevention of communication, preventing people from coupling to sources of food or better social organization. The key to monarchy is secrecy, low variety to match the bandwidth of the monarch.
West page 266: '"I'll release you from service after the execution, Meyer. If you take my advice you'll cut loose and go away for a while. You're not made for this sort of thing."
"I know," said Aldo Meyer in a dead voice. "I don't believe enough -- either way . . . . "'
FAITH = PROTOCOL must be dynamic, evolving to facilitate
[page 12]
the peaceful interaction of users. Faiths like catholicism, communism, fascism that exclude other faiths and feel free to execute 'heretics' are in error and must be corrected to allow for the growth of variety.I am beginning to feel oppressed by all the labouring and trade work I do but see them still as gaining the resources (money and fitness) to live with a bit or surplus to devote to revealing natural religion and by fair trade live off these revelations. Can we call this intellectual property: yes insofar as it is the common property of us all, no insofar as it is private property, which requires invention and can be protected (personified, [appropriated] by patent, copyright or trade mark.
West page 269: 'Blaise Meredith had read the writings of a hundred saints, and all their agonies, all their revelations, all their passionate outpourings had for him all the familiarity of an old acquaintance.'
'They conformed to the same belief, a basic pattern of penance and devotion, to the same progression from purgatory to illumination, from illumination to a direct union with the Almighty in an act of prayer. It was the conformity he was looking for now, as each of the examiners and assessors would look for it, in each of the processes that must follow the first presentation of the evidence at the Bishop's court.'
The Roman Catholic Church believes that conformity to its protocols leads to heaven and asserts that the Saints, by outstanding conformity, have indeed received the payoff that it promises to its members. It is all bullshit, of course. We are born in direct union with the almighty, and stay that way all our lives, even if some have blinded us to this vision for their own benefit.
[page 13]
West (page 269 continued): 'To the biographer, to the dramatist, to the preacher, the personality of the man is important. His quirks and oddities and individual genius are the things that linked him to the commonality of men and made them . . . lean to him as patron and exemplar. But to the Church itself, to the delving theologians and inquisitors who represented it, the importance lay in his character as a Christian -- his conformity to the prototype which was Christ.'
'Christ' is a constraint of the Roman Catholic Church, a conflation of ancient Greek virtue and Hebrew tendency to sacrifice life for a cause.
SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS = MATHEMATICALLY Sub specie aeternitatis - Wikipedia
Natural religion is the real religion and the politically motivated religions both capture its essence and caricature it in a way which makes them say that they are inconsistent with one another and so entitled to kill 'pagans' and 'heretics'.
The 'finger (hand, will etc) of God', is nature so the Bible presents a model of nature (God) which has guided many.
. . .
I love writing this stuff, but can I be bothered to do something about it? Need I be bothered? Insofar as it might provide a living in my old age, yes, and I must motivate myself as I motivate myself in the mornings to go crawling and slithering around under old houses repairing their foundations and plumbing. So do it.
Theology = the history of religion, both informative and
[page 14]
normative, basing the future technology on past experience.
Science: Is theology a science?
There was a time about a thousand years ago when theology was the doyen of the sciences. At that time the methods of theology and the other learned professions were very similar, heavily weighted toward the exegesis of venerated texts and light on experience and modelling. Toward the end of the Middle Ages a more practical approach to knowledge evolved and some intellectuals began to get their hands dirty.
Theology remained the exception to this development so that now when the sciences are heavily reliant on experiment and mathematical modelling, the majority of theologians still appear to take their data from books and entertain hypotheses that are thousands of years old.
I guess that there are two reasons for this. First, theology and religion are of such deep and wide application in human affairs that we might expect them to be very conservative and to evolve slowly. Second, the majority of theologians in the world are employed by the Roman Catholic Church which enforces strict guidelines defining permissible hypotheses and sources of evidence. Whereas a few centuries ago one could lose one's life for dissenting from the Church, now one will merely become unemployed. This is, nevertheless, a strong disincentive to heterodoxy.
The Church maintains that God and the World are absolutely different entities, the World having been created by God along lines dictated by the accounts of creation in the book of Genesis.
[page 15]
The potentially rational explanation for this difference is to be found in proofs for the existence of God, such as the famous five ways of Thomas. These proofs all follow the same general lines: the world exists but cannot explain its existence, therefore we invoke God as the explanation.
The dichotomy between God and the World is the Church's raison d'etre. It claims to be the sole channel between ourselves and God, and believes that if its adherents conform to its beliefs they will be rewarded with an eternity of pleasure looking at God. Naturally the Church, like any organism designed to survive, resists any diminution of this role.
Proofs for the existence of God are model dependent. We compare a model of the world with a model of God and find them incompatible. The foundation of Thomas' first way is the hypothesis that nothing can move itself, so that everything that moves must be moved by another. Following Aristotle, Thomas sees that this implies the existence of an unmoved mover that moves everything but is moved by nothing. This, says Thomas, is what we call God.
The alternative hypothesis, that the Universe accounts for its own existence just as well as the traditional God, is the subject of this paper. The first step is to exhibit a mathematical model which fits both God and The World.
Manifesto of the Communist Party Feuer (ed) Doubleday, 1959. Marx & Engels
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