Notes
[Sunday 19 July 2009 - Saturday 25 July 2009]
[Notebook: DB 67: jciii]
Sunday 19 July 2009
Monday 20 July 2009
Tuesday 21 July 2009
[page 53]
Wednesday 22 July 2009
Once the divine Universe seemed too good to be true, and it remains remotely (to me) possible that it is so. On the other hand, it makes god infinitely more interesting since now we no longer have a black and white dichotomy of good God and evil Satan, but such good and evil as we experience are aspects of the same system and, like everything else, relative to the beholder. The ancient Christian hypothesis that God could eliminate evil if He wished, that it is our own fault, a consequence of the fall, and that it is sent to try us is replaced by the
[page 54]
cybernetic notion that evil is reactive feedback, an error signal to tell us that we are off the track and corrective action is necessary. No longer should we see it virtuous to suffer in silence, but rather virtue lies in speaking out and recruiting others to study the pain, and find and if possible correct its source. My friend has just rung with a list of faults detected by the registration check on her van. Each can be corrected by replacing a worn part. Other errors, like cancer, may not be so easy to deal with, but the principle remains the same, evils are not punishments but error that arise in complex systems subject to many endogenous and exogenous inputs.
From a physical point of view (Landauer) formalism (= meaningful data) is the element of the Universe which is invariant with respect to time. Landauer These invariances are described as symmetries or stationary states. Energy is conserved, the stationary states of atoms and molecules can be measured and computed with high (and apparently unlimited, if you are patient enough) precision. The collection of models of the world we use to do this is quantum electrodynamics.
MARKET = WILDERNESS
Do bindings (contracts) create the particles bound (contractors)? In Law? In reality? The four fields give four classes of binding, that is four channels of communication.
Let it be: the only requirement for peace among peers is error free communication of value, which can be achieved at the physical level of abstraction by money which we might take top be a potential and we should be able to formulate an economic
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conservation law parallel to the conservation of energy, the algebraic sum of potential and kinetic energy. To do this we need to establish a conservative field in the space of monetized value. Money is potential work which can be actualized by using it to pay workers. The aim of work is to physiclly embody information in a way that promotes fitness in some space.
WILDERNESS = UNCONSTRAINED SPACE
Every bounded space is constrained by mapping onto itself to have stationary points which are not constraints in the normative sense but simply the logical consequences of mapping oneself to oneself, that is the permutation of a set. Each peer layer of a network is in some sense closed, so that stationary communication protocols evolve within it.
There is a large set of invariances in a permutation, since we see the process being carried out one step at a time, swapping two elements at a time, all the other elements remaining stationary. The field of the nucleus, coupled to the properties of electrons, creates a structure of stationary states, the elements of which are occupied with varying frequencies by actual electrons, ie the state becomes 'excited'. What does this mean in computational terms? We do not observe stationary state, only transitions between stationary states. From these transitions, using quantum mechanics and measured values of various parameters like Planck's constant, the electronic charge or the velocity of light, we calculate the values of these stationary states to very high precision. We do this calculation using a huge set of Feynman diagrams, each one of which is a snapshot of some relevant portion of the universal quantum network.
[page 56]
We divide the world into potential and kinetic energy but unite the two concepts in the Lagrangian, and we have found that extremalizing Lagrangians leads to useful models of the workings of the world in both classical dynamics and quantum mechanics. Lagrangian - WikipediaThe concept uniting these two fields is action and we hypothesize that the minimum quantum of action is the minimum packet or message that can be exchanged in the Universe. We presume that the electronic structure of atoms arists from electrons talking to one another (exchanging photons) in the potential created by the nucleus. We find then that the stationary states are nodes in an infinite dimensional wave space whose properties are defined by quantum mechanics. In computing terms we see this wave space as a system of memories and Turing machines which are themselves defined by the states of certain (memory) addresses.
Map Thomas and quantum field theory onto the transfinite network and the job is done.
Mathematics: the art of mapping.
A novel is a record of a certain time series of communications that leads us to understand something about the motivations and powers of the personalities involved. [analogous to a Feynman diagram, a snippet of the universal network of human communication]
Gravity is weak because the couplings are improbable because there is no constraint on them.
Thursday 23 July 2009
Wherever we look 'time is of the essence' and we associate increases in fitness with increases in productivity (driven in the human
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world by increased energy consumption and increases in skill which produce more product for a given input of worker's time). [since action is the time integral of the Lagrangian, less time = less action]
Li and Vederas Science 325:162 'Current extinction rates for natural species of higher plants are estimated to be a factor of 100 to 1000 over the background.' (Brower) Li & Vederas
The product we are after is 'beatitudo' or happiness, that Aquinas attributes to the vision of god, which is supposed to be all pleasure and no pain. Aquinas 593The natural theology view of the vision of god is somewhat different and is simply the sum of a lifetime of experience which admits the range from the limit of pain to the limit of pleasure (we might say the least upper bounds of pain and pleasure which are loosely coupled to death and reproduction).
Much of the pain in the world is the result of personal actions like violence, slavery, imprisonment, and deliberate deprivation of the goods of life. All these could in principle be removed by changes in human behaviour. Our fundamental pleasures are sensual, as are our fundamental interactions with the natural god and it points to the 'normativity' of the Church that it takes a prohibitive view of sensual pleasure. . . .
The production of beatitude/happiness. One may of course be happy in the presence of pain or work; the higher layer ['reason'] overcoming the errors of a lower layer ['sensuality']. A sense of humour unimpaired by the pain of a broken leg.
Real life beatitude. Bliss lies toward the higher layers of the human network where the errors of the lower layers have been corrected or bypassed.
[page 58]
We can trust people who act in their own interest insofar as their behaviour may be more predictable that those who purport to act in the interests of other ('altruists') although behavioural and communication games may operate on many levels.
GAME = PROCESS.
We get remarkable insight into the nature and activities of the Greek gods in poems like the Iliad. Plato depersonalized the gods into forms, still elements that controlled the sublunary world but much less capricious.
Friday 24 July 2009
Winter Deighton. A national death spiral driven by partisan interests, Hitler, Mugabe, Stalin etc. Deighton
Saturday 25 July 2009
Quid est hoc quod est esse; quid est hoc quod est humanum esse? Humanity is an instance of a SOURCE.
Democracy: the open source development of social software. Computer networks are finite isomorphs of the transfinite universal network.
A theological entrepreneur. Entrepreneur - Wikipedia
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