Notes
[Sunday 12 July 2009 - Saturday 18 July 2009]
[Notebook: DB 67: jciii]
[page 42]
Sunday 12 July 2009
Butler, Magus page 66: 'The downfall of the magus when antiquity waned was directly due to the appearance of Christ. . . . Both as god-man and as hero of a mystery tale, Christ represented a limit beyond which human imagination could not
[page 43]
go in developing the magus-legend. The mould was shattered by the content and only fragments remained. Very slowly too, but none the less surely the welter of mystery religions and individual cults was absorbed into the dominant one or went underground.' Butler
Science is the new legend, recording the Universe as it is.
Butler page 67: 'In fact the canonical life of Christ seems to be blending history and ritual in somewhat the same was as Euripides' Bacchae, and reads almost like a mystery drama transposed into epic form; . . . ' Euripides
'Apart from the doctrine preached, the story thus simply and shatteringly told, with nothing wild, fantastic or terrible in its method of presentation, was destined to have the lasting effect which it produced, because of its emphasis on the tragic and terrible end. Mysterious and violent deaths have been a constant feature of magical legend; but here the actual tragedy of the dying god is depicted in a sober, telling and unforgettable way; and Christ is represented throughout as a 'man of sorrows and acquainted with grief'; the humanizing of what in the legends of Osiris and Dionysius had been divine mysteries made a reality of the sacrifice which staggered the whole world.'
. . .
Theophilus (Rutboef) Butler page 92: 'Fearful tales (offshoots of the poisoned tree of anti-Semitism) were told of [the Jews] wholesale slaughter of Christian babes, whose blood was used in horrible rites. These or similar atrocities had previously been circulated by the pagans about the Christians -- one of the many ways by which hostility to an alien cult finds its ugly vent.
[page 44]
Christianity is fully steeped in the ancient idea that human words, thoughts and feelings couple not just to other people but, via God or directly, couple to the physical world, so we have prayer, miracles, magic, transubstantiation and so on. The belief that faith can move mountains (without the intervening chain of promotion, fundraising, and the purchase and use of earthmoving equipment).
Last year on the occasion of the Papal visit the ABC kindly gave me airtime to ridicule some Roman Catholic beliefs and point out the extreme hazard of guiding our lives by ancient books from a time totally different from now. Rubbishing the old and obsolete is easy. Replacing it is difficult, but it must be done. Marx called religion the opium of the people, and many still believe him, but opium or not religion is a fact of life and cannot be lightly dismissed. The Bureau of Statistics classified religion as a subset of culture, and I will go along with that. Using a computer analogy, I say that religion is the operating system of culture.
Windows is an operating system, as is the Macos and the mother of then all, Unix. Although Windows and Mac are brands, Unix is generic. The operating system basically handles communications between a computer and the rest of the world. For a computer, the rest of the world falls into two parts, the user, often a human, and the network to which it is connected. So the operating system handles the keyboard and monitor, the memories and all the other infrastructure which enables higher level programs in the computer to do their work.
28000 people identified themselves as ministers of religion in the 2006 [Australian] census. You might say that it does not matter
[page 45]
what these people believe. But would you say this about the x% doctors identified in the census if they did not take into account the fact that the heart pumps and the blood circulates. Certainly we expect doctors to know more than the 'Masters of the Universe' who have just sent us all broke at great profit to themselves.
Butler page 94: 'The notion of a formal bond with the devil, admitted by St Augustine and other Fathers of the Church, crept into legend with the tale of a certain Proterius delivered from the consequences of such a pact by St Basil in the reign of Julian the Apostate. It swept all before it, once the legend of Theophilus had taken root. A written pact, renouncing Christianity for services to be rendered at the price of the signatory's soul and signed with his blood, became as indispensable a part of the sorcerer's equipment as the book, the wand and the circle. It gave rise to innumerable situations, to an unending series of variations upon the one pregnant theme. The wiles of the devil to obtain the bond in its proper 'legal' form; the wicked sophistries about the time and the place when it was to fall due; the guile exerted by his adversary to leave a loop-hole he might wriggle through; the frantic efforts to get possession of the document before his time was up; the frequent successful intervention of a deus or dea ex machina on his behalf; the rites prescribed for making and unmaking this unholy deed; copies of specimens; the inevitable absorption of the notion into the parallel stream of witchcraft and the disorders, not to say havoc, it created there; -- all this is a story in itself profusely illustrated by many a dismal or hair-raising occurrence on the life-histories of those medieval magicians who attained to legendary fame.
page 98: 'The one-track minds of Christians writers . . . continued to transform the legendary material about magicians into edifying stories of repentance, conversion and salvation or cautionary tales of wickedness and damnation . . . .'
[page 46]
Butler page 101 quoting Domenico Comparetti Vergil in the Middle Ages Benecke, London 1908 page 326: '. . . there never was a time in the world's history in which women were more grossly insulted, most shamefully reviled or more basely defamed than they were in the Middle Ages . . . . The number of anecdotes, trivial or obscene, that drag women in the dirt is simply infinite.' Comparetti
Vita Merlini Geoffrey of Monmouth, 1148. Geoffrey of Monmouth
Who made all this? God. Tell me about Him. Cannot, it is a mystery.
Despite many flaws of execution, the Christian message love God, love your neighbour has worked, as we can see by the dangerous wealth of the Christian nations headed by the United States.
Gilles de Rais. Bluebeard of Orleans Gilles de Rais - Wikipedia
MYTH = MODEL (dramatic, fictional, mathematical, political)
Butler page 125: 'Luther's two authentic references to Faust in his Table-talk also show that if the humanists did their best to deflate the magicians' claims, the Reformed clergy helped to confirm the, and it was the mythopoetic tendency and not the rational opposition that finally won the day.
Monday 13 July 2009
We see a spectrum running from myth to science. and that in fact the mythopoetic power of the imagination is an essential ingredient of science, Popper's
[page 47]
conjecture. Such conjecture has bred the corpus of wonderful stories like the Bible which educate, amuse and enthrall us. Literary critics may seek the original sources of these stories, trace their evolution and propagation in existing ancient sources and comment on their quality, but we do not ask if they are true. From a scientific point of view, myths are models and there are an infinity of them, of which some have been selected to survive (like the stories in the Bible, or the Iliad) and many more that we have never heard of to die, or never been born.
To conjecture, Popper adds refutation. Popper We now enter the realm of truth. By truth we mean conformity to reality. Do witches really fly on broomsticks and devils have cloven hooves? Here science broke from the mythological tradition and began to look for its starting points [not] in literary sources (to be retold in contemporary language) but in the world itself. Galileo summed up the new position, and came into conflict with the powers that be. Galileo Galilei - Wikipedia
The Roman Catholic Church appropriated the set of myths collected in the Bible. But unlike the literary critics, who have judged it as a great little library, the Church developed this set of myths into an administration which claimed to be the agent on earth of the mythological god. This decision led to close attention being paid to the Christian god, a process which began to transform the myth into the very logical and persuasive model of God presented in the Summa. This was the beginning of science. But while Galileo died and his successors carried on his work in an exponentially growing network [the institutional weight of the Church froze theology in its medieval mould].
To spread a network must attract investment just as a cancer must attract blood vessels. National Cancer Institute
[page 48]
Science adds quality control to myth, and it is here that I part from the Roman Catholic Church:it is bound as an institution with a certain economic base, business plan and product to assert that its model of the world is true, not because it fits our observation, but because it is the Word of God.
So natural theology renders the Church obsolete by communicating directly with God, our Divine Milieu (Teillhard de Chardin)
Behind every great fortune is a great crime (?). [The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed. Honore de Balzac] The biggest fortune and the greatest crime both correspond to the Roman Catholic Church. Blacken the opposition. Did they know where they were going when they set out? What did Jesus think he was doing? Probably nothing like what turned out. Like all the rest of us, he was dealing with something which upset him.
We are driven by discomfort. I am seeking an answer to my discomfort, which I associate with the chasm between the belief systems which drive most global political discussions and reality.
Minimize action, maximize thinking time? It is no use going on thinking once you have found the optimum solution Then just do it. First build the factory, then make the product (we presume that it is already sold, ie something that meets a real need).
Natural religion has made us what we are but by becoming conscious of this we can construct a vision which helps us criticize existing techniques and devise better ones. Once we are aware of the conditions of creation, we can guide it toward maximum entropy and stability.
[page 49]
By being in love (hate, pain, bliss etc) we have direct experience of the emotion upon which we build understanding by seeing how it fits into the rest of our lives. Self love is the abstract driver of all we do, THEOS, LOGOS, PNEUMA. Three elements of a model, two fermions and a boson.
Natural love songs Berndt
The tough militaristic realpoliticians are concerned to eliminate error without a viable model of what an error free system looks like, maximum freedom, not maximum control.
Tuesday 14 July 2009
Quid est hoc quod est esse? To be is to communicate.
I am tense but there is no pressure from outside, just a litle debt which does not threaten my existence. For a long time I have felt that I am sitting on a treasure, but all my efforts to express it have so far failed to catch fire. The result is that I am forced to patience, a legend in my own mind where the treasure is buried but still after two-thirds of my lifetime lacking the resources to bring it to light. But hope springs as long as the sun shines, and I am encouraged that every day brings me a little closer to the revelation of my dream. My motivation remains undimmed even though I had thought for decades that success was just around the corner. Perhaps I shall die unrequited, but I think (hope) not. The long and lonely road will lead me, I hope, to the success I crave. I am working as fast as I can, but experience shows that it is a long road and I cannot afford to go into [serious] debt yet to get to the finish. I am still too timid to
[page 50]
come out, which suggests that my resident mental epistemologist still thinks I am not yet finished, but I will have to wait until the reason for this decision enters my consciousness, coming in from where it is now being processed / explored / mapped.
CONSCIOUSNESS - RECURSION
A system can only correct its own errors if it understands itself in some way. So it can only say what am I doing here? Am I doing it well, or are there better ways. At one end we have to deal with the day to day and longer term issues of survival, at the other end, the sky is the limit, and the more efficiently we cater for our physical needs, the more scope there is for imagination, ie leisure. The devil finds work for idle hands; idle minds too. And since it is not the devil but imagination, we need to control some physical actions (like murder and over-consumption) to maintain the integrity of the system while not practising thought control, as the Catholic Church would have us do, banishing delicious 'dirty' thoughts from our minds.
Whether it is true or not, I feel that I have found what I am looking for, but this has been true since I wrote 'How Universal' [How Universal is the Universe?]. The target was there, and all that has happened since is that is has gradually acquired flesh in that it slowly becomes clearer that the sexy nature of the Universe is described by quantum mechanics and network theory, two statements of the same truth, one cardinal, the other ordinal. The ordinal sets devised by quantum field theory have the cardinal numbers counted buy experimental physicists. 'Have the cardinal numbers'? Predict the cardinal numbers?
[page 51]
Wednesday 15 July 2009
One of the more depressing features of the Classical God is that He has no sense of humour, being able to see the punch line of every joke long before it is uttered (so I was told by a Religion teacher).
. . .
Thursday 16 July 2009
Friday 17 July 2009
[page 52]
All's fair in love and war because these lie beyond the boundaries of love and war. Fairness requires some sort of contraction of the space of human actions to the space of 'fair' human actions. One neither fairly kill someone or end a relationship. These things are beyond our control, although we might like them to be controlled, particularly war. War we might say is a response either to greed, wanting more than one's fair share, and perceived injustice, fighting to get a fair share. This suggests that war will be eliminated globally when we have established a global system of fair sharing through some sort of rule based trading which might turn out to be isomorphic to quantum mechanics.
We apply the model to politics and use it to predict that insofar as democracy increases human entropy, democratic society can deliver better quality of life that monarchical societies, because they have higher bandwidth enabling them to be more compliant with their environment.
A requiem for the pope, an apostolic monarch.
APOSTOLIC = ANCIENT (long pedigree, leading back to god) Apostolic succession - Wikipedia
So if the Universe is divine it is also democratic, since we can all trace our pedigree back to God.
The ancient God, built in the image of the people who wrote about him has served to help us over the origin of consciousness and the growing awareness that we are on our own just like every species on the planet. For us, God is a Wilderness [wilderness = maximum entropy, minimum constraint].
[page 53]
An obituary for the Pope? An obituary for the Papacy.
Microbial chemical communication network. Mlot, Science 324:1637. Mlot
Natural theology studies natural religion which is an ubiquitous feature of the world so that the data of natural religion are everywhere. By making natural religion conscious of itself, natural theology also contributes to the development of natural religious technology whose heart is the nature of networks, communication between local processes.
We like to do uncertain things too, where the probability of success may be much less than one, and a favourable trial correspondingly interesting because rare.
'Gambling with capital.'
We would like to enhance the art of religion as much as science and rational design have enhanced the art of war, taking it from local to global and massively destructive.
