Notes
[Sunday 28 June 2009 - Saturday 4 July 2009]
[Notebook: DB 67 jciii]
[page 15]
Sunday 28 June 2009
The point of sale comes when both parties agree on a price. Although the seller might have wanted more and the buyer less, the difference in 'potential' between them has been bargained to zero. The agreed price
[page 16]
is a stationary point that can be written into a contract.
'Natural religion' applies at all levels of complexity (all layers of the network) and is nothing other than the binding force that creates complex structures out of simple ones.
RELIGION = EPISTEMOLOGY.
Religion is the technology of navigation in human space. We all know quite a lot about moving around in physical space, learning to roll, crawl, run, drive, fly and so on. We can draw analogies between physical space and human space. Human space is much more complex than physical space, yet physical space is the root of human space. We all move around in physical space and gradually learn through cuts, grazes and bruises that we must take care. There comes a time no matter how good your brakes, that you are going too fast to deal safely with the future and death by road accident follows.
So the essence of religion is care: survival by detecting fatal courses of action in time and avoiding them. One needs care to find the errors in the system and care to correct them. Ego, status, wealth et cetera are of no use here. What we need is a dispassionate look at the situation and evaluation of its future possibilities. Am I going slowly enough to stay on the road at this upcoming corner?
Classical physics can model and answer this sort of question, and the designers of macroscopic structures
[page 17]
rely on classical physics as the foundation of their work. The world is more complex than it looks. Within those squealing tyres are billions of billions of billions of atoms, all interacting with one another to give the overall macroscopic effect. The microscopic atomic world is described by quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics says that every observable point in physical space is not just an empty point, but a very complex dynamic system which needs a space of infinite dimensions to describe it properly. The situation among atoms and subatomic particles is exactly the same as the situation between ourselves. Each of us is a person, a point in human space, but we know that inside the physical envelope we call the body is the infinitely complex process of our own thoughts and feelings which occasionally find expression in physical movements of our bodies, body language, conversation, writing.
From an atom's point of view, a human body is bigger than a planet. Atomic diameter 10-10 metre, so human / atom, = 1010. If human = 1 metre, then 1010 humans = E10 m = E 7 km. Does this idea help?
This coincidence between atoms and humans is easily explained if we see them both as networks. At the fundamental level, networks of humans and networks of atoms are the same.
Parties: holders of mutually disjoint views on certain issues. We're not prejudiced, we just know, and enough people agree with us for us to have power.
[page 18]
Monday 29 June 2009
One might say that the poorer one is the more closely one is locked to reality. Wild animals must completely respect their environment and their behaviour is keyed closely to survival and reproduction. Wealthy humans, on the other hand, can live in a world of their own construction, with minimal regard for history, using their wealth to create their own reality which may in the long run decrease all our chances of survival, or vice versa if wealth is wisely directed into reducing the human footprint and gaining a better knowledge of realities and possibilities.
The more complex a system the more difficult it is to apprehend. No system can apprehend itself or any system more complex than itself. We deal with this problem by analysis, attempting to break complex systems into simpler systems. We can continue this process until we come to the fundamental differentiated ingredients p and not-p. The wonder of it all is that the world is analysable, and so the path to understanding is the same as the path to creation.
Heaven, as presented to me is dull survival, an escape from the good and evil dangers and excitements of survival, growth and reproduction in the real world. In a way it all comes down to bonding, which is in the abstract physical. The letters in this sentence and the words are bound together into an ordered set by the bonding of ink and paper. From a physical point of view bonds occur when the bound state has lower energy ie a lower processing rate to maintain its existence, that the two bound entities unbound and independent.
[page 19]
Science teaches us to discern the difference between ineffective magic, prayer, sacrifice and ritual and effective procedures to get what we want like irrigation, fertilization, plant breeding, cooperating and so on. Investing our capital to get maximum return can be viewed cardinally (as an interest rate) or ordinally (as an industry with all its participants and details).
We are children of god and our pedigree runs back through countless generations of evolution to the initial singularity. The initial singularity predicted by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity has the properties attributed to God by the ancient Christian writers.
This is a bit airy fairy and might not pass for science. To get into the game, we need to produce a mathematical model and fit it to the observed world. Our model is built on the simple premise that as words get longer, more words are possible. Given our alphabet, there are at most 26 one letter words, 672 two letter and a hundred million million ten letter words. Georg Cantor formalized this idea into the transfinite numbers.
Each layer of a network is a set of peer personalities engaged in conversation in their peer language.
Human networks. A novel is like a Feynman diagram, tracing all the inputs to an event (person) of interest. Drabble, Radiant Drabble
'. . . it is not wrong to be happy' Drabble page 92.
Tuesday 30 June 2009
For us old hippies the Age of Aquarius dawned about fifty years ago in the sixties. We began to chant the earth is our mother,
[page 20]
we must take care of her. We might say that Charles Darwin started the trend with the theory of evolution. James Lovelock added more scientific weight to our opinions by exposing the unity of global physiology and giving it a name, Gaia. Now [we] are beginning to see that our future is uncertain unless we listen to the scientists and begin to track reality more closely.
RELIGION - NAVIGATION - THEOLOGY
The novel form allows us to track a human network, to record the actions and feelings of a connected group of people. 'Literature' is the most vague and complex modelling of which we are capable and spends most of its time considering human networks, particularly from the point of view of the mating game, but extending to the history of tribes and nations, songs about emotions and incidents, reminiscences of deeds and events at every scale relevant to humanity, in the process recording some of the evolution of humanity as it expands from a situation almost completely controlled by biological imperatives to the current position of the wealthy world, where almost any desire can receive some sort of fulfilment because old bonds have become more easily broken.
There are two things on my mind that contribute to these notes: you and theology. The Christians say love everybody, but this is not practical. I must love one person at a time, but different people at different times, time division multiplexing with periods varying from milliseconds in witty conversation to decades in childbearing relationships.
[page 21]
'You' therefore is a set of people who may be represented by a set of addresses on my network. My theology is based on human interactions: theology, we might say, is the study of human communication.
Over the years I have come to see an abstract model of all communication which I have called a transfinite network, a transfinite collection of memory locations coupled by Turing machines. The task now is to flesh this model out, to render it in terms of human experience.
Insofar as people are attracted by good news ('lost weight') and repelled by bad news (smoking gives you cancer) the best way to market a religion is to have some good news. Christianity does this in spades (?).
The good news in natural religion is that the Universe, by its unaided efforts, has got us this far from the initial singularity and there is no reason to believe that we have just as far to go in the billions of years that lie ahead of us.
EPISTEMOLOGY = TESTING (FORMAL THEORY + OBSERVATION)
Natural religion suggests that we test each new piece of human software carefully before we adopt it.
SOFTWARE = TECHNOLOGY
When we look at a computer we see billions of little lights blinking on and off, some billions of times per second, some more slowly, in the archives either on or off forever. We know (because we designed the computer ourselves) that there is meaning in all this blinking which is defined by the data and the software used to transform the date into some useful product, like
[page 22]
a prediction of stock price movements (you wish).
So the marketing department must trumpet the good news content of natural religion driven by natural theology. The good news is that resources devoted to error prevention and correction pay off exponentially. Please explain. Here follow Shannon's theorems.
Music: pleasant (relatively meaningless, easily decoded) communication.
Organizations like the ABC are already pushing natural religion by implementing the journalistic ethic oF fearless, impartial and well researched reporting.,
The Theology Company annual Report: first model developed and expansion and testing beginning.
Modern hands on individualized theology is called psychoanalysis, trying to shrink communication problems to a manageable size.
We must speak the language of the recipient to be heard. Spoken magical incantations may move people but they cannot move physical reality which speaks another language.
Natural religion reveals the force that creates the Universe. The Cantor Force, aided and abetted by Turing machines and Shannon's theorems.
Wednesday 1 July 2009
The Christian good news is premissed on the alleged Old Testament bad news, the Fall, which seems to be a product of the interface between reality as we experience it and dreams of an effort free existence, an event that might have been triggered by the arrival of agriculture, increased population and the need to work and build and defend one's fields and buildings.
A memory may be a tabula rasa, an unwritten chip, although we can expect it to be in some initial condition when it is powered up, to be changed as it is loaded with software and data. Tabula rasa - WikipediaThe essence of memory is latching, to stay where it is put until it is changed by some process outside itself. An unstable memory can change from processes within itself, and so must be refreshed by being read and rewritten at a frequency (depending on the stability of the memory) designed to keep uncommanded change to a minimum. Such a system is represented by an address (an ordered string) and the data in the memory, ordered by the addresses of each of its elements, practically, bits.
How does this work in nature? How is stable structure generated 'from nothing', or more correctly, from 'pure act', which is relatively nothing in that it cannot be differentiated, it has no distinct points or parts, the Classical God, omnino simplex. Aquinas 20 This god does not need memory, simply is, eternally. This is the archetypal formal construct which we might represent to be the empty set, ie a set whose cardinal is zero? one? There is one god. There are zero gods. Although we can see nothing in the empty set, mystical ancients have consistently claimed
[page 24]
that God knows all, guides all, controls all. It seems to blatantly contradict the principle of requisite variety (that a text be as complex as the situation it represents, hence the length of novels) for a being with no structure to control a Universe with apparently unlimited structure existing in unlimited spacetime. Physically, our question is how did the pointlike initial singularity become the world we see? Why and how complexification? Pierre Teillhard de Chardin - Wikipedia
The open source software model for religion. First we write a kernel and a specification to give everybody guidance and then open it to development and testing. A piece of software is the hypothesis that maps input to output - a work processor converts keystrokes into a coherent whole (coherentish, ie mostly non-self contradictory insofar as the activities of one do not annul the activities of another (as in war) but their activities become complementary, creating a diversified but unified economy). The market does this theoretically by allocating resources but some of the competition between agents is destructive, destructive testing we might say. If things break too easily, we must learn how to strengthen them until they become stable, ie no decay modes.
STABLE SOFTWARE = STABLE NUCLEUS (ie all possible events are dealt with, either as normal functioning or error, to be detected and corrected (overflow, divide by zero, etc, hardware failures, corruption of text)).
'[Brian's old typewriter] sounds like someone drilling the road,' said Otto.
'Writing is the same as drilling the road,' said Brian. 'And I
[page 25]
like to know I am doing it.' Drabble page 235.
The basic task is to dynamize the old guard by replacing them with a creative rather than a conservative ethic, though both are necessary and ultimately deserve equal emphasis. What we want is a society that is dynamically stable, able to move with its environment without falling over. This requires a certain amount of skill which is eventually learned and becomes embedded in nearly every one of is, learn to walk, learn to talk, learn to learn, learn to love, etc.
Thursday 2 July 2009
The fundamental theorem of theology = fundamental theorem of creation = the bootstrap theorem: because error correcting power grows exponentially with the length of strings of symbols, while the error frequency per string grows linearly with the number of symbols. Prove this formally in the transfinite network, using a non-constructive proof so that it applies to all levels of complexity with equal force.
Religion is the art of bonding - god is love, they say.
As we write more and more characters in a string (like this) we increase both the size of the space of possibility and the specification of a point in that space 'simultaneously.
RELIGION = CREATION (the technology of creation)
Friday 3 July 2009
Each applied religion develops an explanatory context
[page 26]
and a code of behaviour explained and justified by this context. The explanatory context is often developed in the form of a drama starring a number of personalities, gods, 'beings', angels and so on. All of these are implementations of natural religion, in which the Universe explains itself and provides us with some guidance about the consequences of our actions, ie the coupling between past and future whose extremities in Xianity are the creation and the recreated world at the end of it all.
We model god as a transfinite extension of the finite theory of computer networks, that is sets of memories and processors. The transfinite computer network is the context in which we prove the 'spontaneous creation' (spontaneous symmetry breaking) theorem.
So: broad outline of religion and theology in history.
One can be objective about physical science because we are talking about something other than ourselves, whereas theology is about ourselves and so prone to uncontrollable nonlinearities anciently described as 'odium theologicum', and manifest in the exile, torture or execution of 'heretics'. Odium theologicum - Wikipedia The role of religion is clearly signalled by the belief that such punishments are for the common good and the people who inflict them are not murderers but loyal servants of the body politic, or at least of the monarch (pope, ayatollah, king, dictator etc).
The idea of a personal living god seems to be an attempt to sanitize the monarchy which given a certain level
[page 27]
of communication bandwidth might be the optimal solution. The monarchy is also a way of avoiding recursion, since the chain of responsibility stops with the monarch, who is self empowered to do anything by claiming coupling to the Supreme Monarch, God. It happens that every system, insofar as it is one, can be represented by a monarch, the embodiment of the protocol that enables the elements of the system to communicate and so be one.
We do not need excellence or excellences to run the world, just competence, honesty and curiosity. Competence and curiosity to deal with routine and not so routine matters and honesty to keep interested parties informed about what you are doing, full and continuous disclosure, me might say, of mistakes, cost overruns and other errors as well as tasks successfully executed.
In an open system, genius will out, predominantly for the public good, since there is little kudos to be gained by being an evil genius, particularly if you do not have the power to do evil, ie induce errors into other people's lives.
Creation: Einstein on Brownian motion. Annus Mirabilis papers - Wikipedia
The difficulties of love are present in all connections or bondings, which might take a while to reach their full strength, or fail. So the tuning dialogue between two modems. Digital subscriber line - Wikipedia
Natural religion operates at every level of the Universe, but the term 'religion' seems reserved for human behaviour. So what do we call the force that unites all thing in communication? Natural bonding, 'product space', love, natural love, desire. Every term has a spectrum from formal to dynamic, like
[page 28]
a linear set closed at one end and open at the other, an ordered set that contains its own minimum element but has no maximum, like the natural numbers. On the other hand, although it does not contain its upper bound, it has as its least upper bound the next transfinite cardinal.
Cantor's principle of finitism: we work from finite constructive networks to transfinite natural networks. Hallett
Ikegame: Bonds of Civility Ikegami
Saturday 4 July 2009
Drabble, Radiant page 390: "'But don't you believe in evil?' Shirley said . . .
Liz reflected . . . 'No,' she said after a while. 'And I don't believe in good either. I believe in suffering and the alleviation of suffering. I believe in pleasure. And I believe in death. I think belief in evil has caused immense suffering. I don't see the point of suffering. I'd like to do away with it.'
'I don't follow you," said Shirley.
"I'm not sure I follow myself,' said Liz.'
McKeown Disease McKeown
page 22: 'It is not the slow cultural genetic adjustment nor the smooth and reversible functional accommodation but the swift intelligent cultural adaptation which has permitted the [Kalahari] Bushmen to cope with the rigours of his environment. It is remarkable that even in a pre-neolithic economy like that of the Bushmen, culture predominates over biological considerations in ensuring survival'. (Tobias)
[page 29]
Time is of the essence in survival so our rate of data collection, processing and responsive action must be at least as great as the rate of change of the environment.
For survival d(culture) / d(environment) must be at least 1. We see such a situation looming for the whole human / gaia interface, something popularized as climate change , but something involving all aspects of the impacts of our environment on us, and vice versa. At a minimum we must keep the global physiology upon which we depend functioning; at a maximum we should push our impact asymptotically to zero by occupying naturally barren areas, 100% recycling of materials and an energy system based directly on thermonuclear reactions, for all practical purposes, the sun.
Instead of natural religion we need natural culture. This avoids all mention of religion, a far too entrenched and controversial area. Although there is money to be made and fun to be had in confronting the old religions, it is best to lubricate the current trend toward natural culture by giving it a more sound theological framework. As culture contains religion, so theology contains the knowledge base of culture. However, we must call a spade a spade and a religion a religion.
Can theology be a science? The short answer is yes, if god is observable. Traditional theology holds that God is invisible. The purpose of this article is to propose the alternative.
We follow here the model of God proposed by Thomas in his Summa Theologiae written [between 1265 and 1274. Summa Theologica - Wikipedia
Much of the work lies in defining a suitable terminology,
[page 30]
blending theology and mathematical rather than dramatic models. A dramatic model is one driven by human [humanoid] forces, many of which we share with the other animals, since the dynamics of nutrition, protection and reproduction are pretty much the same for everybody. Bacteria have the same problems as us at their scale, and they only survive if they can deal with their problems.
So we can say that theology and religion take care of the epistemological (testing) function in our culture. What do we believe? On what grounds? Only when doubt enters are such questions asked, and we can imagine that many groups kept the same belief systems for hundreds of generations, but how could anyone know, in the absence of written records (since human memory evolves with the telling).DECAY <==> ERROR. Insofar as the proton does not decay the process that keeps it in existence is error free. Abstractly we think of a proton as a set of memory addresses and a set of messages between these addresses, transforming their contents.
The evolution of a traded good may begin as one person's idea, grow to a private, then a public company, and finally graduate to becoming an institution, something considered essential to the smooth running of the system.
Systems management must distinguish between public and private accounts. In string terms, the least significant (or most significant) [bits] are private and the rest public or vice-versa
[page 31]
(it all depends which way we read finite strings). Corruption is the uncontrolled flow of public goods into private pockets, ie privatization of public systems.
The ruling class project God in their own image, or at least their own imagination, creative, omniscient, omnipresent, eternal and so on.
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