Notes
[Sunday 30 August 2009 - Saturday 5 September 2009]
[Notebook: DB 67: jciii]
[page 149]
Sunday 30 August 2009
Dawkins page 233 quote Hauser: 'Driving [constraining] our moral judgements is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with
[page 150]
language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of consciousness.' Dawkins
Dawkins page 236: 'The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these [moral] judgements. This seems compatible with the view which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good - or evil.'
The point being, of course, that we use the word God to point to the Universe of ideas and structures that lead to this morality. In today's terms, not Yahweh but NATURE = UNITY, CONSISTENCY.
Yahweh is a paper God: we learn about Him from a Book. Bible, JonesNature, on the other hand, is right here with me in the motions of my mind, my pen, the molecules in my fire, the feelings at my heart.
We are good for our own good, and bad for our own good as well, if we think we can get away with it, ie the good is better for us that the actual and potential bad. What do good and bad mean anyway? In system terms, good = error free (cyclic, continuous) functioning; bad = error, requiring (at some level) a restart. After a fatal system error, we must restart the whole machine by cutting off its action (killing it) and turning its action back on again, booting up, rapidly evolving from a hardware structure in meaningless states to a hardware structure carrying an ordered set of states that define an overall process[page 151]
made up of thousands of smaller processes (kept in LIBRARIES)
The Darwinian process occurs at all levels of the network.
An electron does not know its role in an atom any more that any person has a more than local knowledge of their role in society. No cloning suggests that it is impossible to see oneself as others see one.
Dawkins page 229 quoting H L Mencken: 'People say we need religion, when what they really mean is that we need police.'
GOD == THE LAW This is the formal, legalist, Platonic God who seems to have a tendency to take over and stifle the dynamic God of life. Dawkins is a formalist who seems to overlook the fact that a complex dynamic system is one, and therefore simple.
. . .
Divine law = human law that is consistent with the Divinity.
The high church preacher Dawkins page 230: 'Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral that the kind of false morality that vanished as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or a imaginary one in heaven.'
I was certainly constrained in my youth by the doctrine that God saw (and foresaw) every move. Now I know that God does see every move because I am part of God, but Gödel and Turing tell us that God's foresight is limited.
[page 152]
Protocols are established by two way communication, and a fair protocol gives both communicants equal power to change the memory of the other. Our every action invites a response from the Universe (which includes the neighbours) and so we must tailor our actions to evoke responses favourable to ourselves. A nation is established by communication between government and people, and the unity of the government ultimately imposes moral constraints on both the government and people to achieve fair non-violent communication.
God is the unity of the whole, ie the simplicity of the whole
In a nutshell, the Universe maps onto itself, therefore it has fixed points, which we call messages. We can observe these fixed points in the Universe and by combining them all as messages learn something about the dynamics behind the fixed points.
The fixed points are formal. So the fixed points of the Universe are the initial singularity and the Schrödinger equation. Gravitational singularity - Wikipedia Schrödinger equation - Wikipedia This is just the beginning. A transfinite number of fixed points are consistent with dynamic unity.
We see how processes can be assembled in Turing's paper where he gradually built his Turing machine from a typewriter (output = input) to a universal Turing machine capable of making any computable transformation between input and output, and finally showing that there are things a computer cannot do.
Dawkins page 232: quoting Robert Hinde: '[Moral philosophers] agree that 'moral precepts', while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be defensible by reason. P and NP. Hard to derive, easy to justify. P = NP problem - Wikipedia
[page 153]
After the war comes the reconciliation.
The selfish gene vs the selfish phenotype. The genes form a potential that moulds the phenotype. Those genes persist which have successful phenotypes; those phenotypes are successful that have effective genes.
PARALLEL SELECTION = selection on many traits at once, ie all the traits that go to make an organism 'universal' in its environment, that is having the means to meet any challenge.
Rasmussen & Williams Gaussian processes for Machine Learning Rasmussen & Williams
3D, 4D SPACE, SPACETIME ARE 'FEATURE SPACES'.
. . .
Each peer layer in the network operates at constant entropy per symbol. Each layer of the network may be tagged with a cardinal, giving its entropy per symbol, which is the cardinal of the number of symbols in the set.
ENTROPY per SYMBOL = MEMORY PER SYMBOL
Lila Gatlin: the chemical bonds in DNA in no way constrain the order of the base pairs. GatlinWe have a 'flat' information channel, a gauge invariance.
Insofar as a matrix represents the transformation between two vectors, we might see its information content as twice that of a vector. If the vectors are incompressible (ie not continuous) this might be an equality, but a continuous transformation can be compressed to
[page 154]
a simple algorithm. [if both vectors are in the same basis, the matrix can be diagonalized, and its information content would appear to be the same as either vector.]
Like our brains, the Universe is an information processing system.
COMPLEXITY is a FORMALIST measure.
The fundamental scientific problem is how to talk formally about dynamics. Newton showed us how to do with with continua (calculus) and Darwin with digital systems (genetics).
It is wrong to think that entropy grows spontaneously and without limit. It has to be created by the [error free definition of fixed points, ie messages].
Gatlin wrote about the statistics (information) of life at a time when there was no chance of reading a living genome. Now we can read the statistics of physical events without being able to read their actual meaningful sequence.
Monday 31 August 2009
The entropy of natural languages is considerably less than the maximum. We attribute this, following Shannon, to the redundancy necessary to combat error, and insofar as the Universe is a communication network, we expect to see it everywhere beginning with the quantization of physical communication.
God is the boundary condition on the Universe, because it is one, it is self-consistent. Boundary conditions for any machine are fixed 'outside' the machine,
[page 155]
as my genotype was fixed outside (before) me. The boundary conditions for each event are its remembered past.
Gatlin pages 108-9 quoting Polanyi (1967): 'the principle of boundary control Polanyi Seen first in quantum mechanics through boundary conditions on 'wave equations'. The static boundaries of quantum dynamics are the eigenfunctions of the relevant operator. the system, operates 'inside' these boundaries. In this sense the past contains the future.
Dawkins missed the holism of 4-space where we miust see God as the whole of space-time, looking on the outside like the initial singularity, on the inside like this life. We are all 'in' this life.
ZEN is the antidote to the FORMALIST ERROR. Suzuki
The first recorded example of the formalist error appears in the work of Parmenides who outlawed dynamics because it was not consistent with formalism.
Formalism, explains itself by Cantor's theorem and fixed point theorems. Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia, Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia
Polanyi: The Tacit Dimension Polanyi
The task of the Academy is to reduce the living world to static text which can then be stored and shared over time and space. Dead = formal; no longer dynamic, although the structure is there, the action has stopped flowing for some reason [structural defect?].
[page 156]
Energy is a flow of action. We might call energy without form pure act, as Thomas did.
Sitting here in front of the fire in my blissful state I am the beneficiary of ten billion or so years of evolution.
Kin selection: we are all kin, descended from the initial singularity.
Does the structure come from the bliss or the bliss from the structure? The structure arises because each layer of the Universe is closed by the layers above it which put constraints upon it to make it an error free foundation for their own activity. A significant bit needs to control the bits within it if it is to maintain its existence.
There is safety in numbers means in numbers of friends. There is danger in numbers of enemies. This means that people try to get in with plenty of others, so we see the rise of nations and federations.
Tuesday 1 September 2009
Warm sunshine is the physical foundation of bliss. The Sun is our local God, the local source of low entropy energy that maintains the structure on Earth = Gaia. The Earth takes in as much energy from the sun as it radiates, this is the conservation of energy. But while energy arrives at Earth at a temperature of about 6000K, it leaves at about 300 K, so, since S [entropy]= dQ/T [ie flow of energy / temperature of flow], the entropy out is twenty times the entropy in. All this extra outgoing entropy is created by processes on the Earth.
Agatha Carribean Chapter 22: 'She had a lot of
[page 157]
confused and contradictory ideas in her head and if there was one thing Miss Marple did not like it was to have confused and contradictory ideas.' Christie They have to be rotated into harmony, and it is guaranteed that they can so be because the world itself is not confused and contradictory, so insofar as they truly represent the world, her ideas can be rotated to a point of view from which they are no longer confused and contradictory. In quantum mechanical terms, they can be diagonalized, ie given a consistent orthogonal basis.
Dawkins: A major source of my epistemological position is the work of Agatha Christie.
Quantum mechanics and relativity work in Roman numerals - there is no exponential gearing arising from bonding and order.
Descartes clear and distinct ideas = orthogonal ideas. Meditations on First Philosophy - Wikipedia
PERMUTATION = ROTATION - CONTINUOUS / LOGICAL [continuous = algorithmically compressible]
Wednesday 2 September 2009
Fixed or stationary point = halted computer, ie computer doing nothing repeatedly waiting for its output to be read and a new process to be initiated with more data.
The scientific method is a cybernetic approach to knowledge, continually testing theory against practice to detect deviations of the theory from reality and if possible correct them. This is not always easy, and every now and then the error becomes large enough to force a major rethink of the
[page 158]
theory to detect whether it is incorrigibly wrong or an be tweaked to fit the data. We reached this point by the end of the nineteenth century in physics, and gradually changed over to quantum mechanics, keeping as much of the classical theory as possible. We have reached a similar point in theology and religion, where theological divisions and religious wars are making it very difficult to deal with the global problems we face. We have a plethora of religions, none of which has a very good grip on reality, yet nevertheless insisting that they are true and often vowing to kill the infidels, whoever they may be. My guess, being of Christian origin, is that more people have been killed by Christianity as it has forced its way around the world than any other coalition of Churches.
The Pope was just a hook to hang a rave on. This time we leave him out of it and look at the global religious picture. To see religion, we need to know what we are looking for. There are a lot of surface indicators, like buildings, rituals, festivals, schools and so on, but like an iceberg the most important role of religion, being so ubiquitous, is almost invisible. I would like to say that religion is the set of communication protocols through which a group of unrelated people bind themselves into a functioning unit.
War is a direct consequence of this definition, as is peace. Malthus and Darwin put their fingers on the contradictory effects of religion. Resources are limited, reproduction is unlimited, so the propensity to reproduce runs up against the carrying capacity of the environment and conflict enters the scene quite naturally. If there is not enough to go round and I want some I must take it from sombody, so we are always looking for lebensraum. Thomas Robert Malthus - Wikipedia, Charles Darwin - Wikipedia
[page 159]
Fifty thousand years ago there were probably only a million humans on the planet, about the same number as any other big mammals like lions and goats. About that time we seem to have become notably more capable and began the long period of exponential growth that has brought us to the present. Klein
Here we see the other side of religion. While religiously bound groups are in mortal conflict with other groups who also want to expand, within the group power is nurtured by social security, by cooperation and by communication through which we become aware of our own and others' needs, problems and pleasures.
By fostering knowledge and cooperation, the religions have enabled us to gain the knowledge and power to exploit the Earth in a manner [never] dreamt of before. With the aid of the sun, fire and animal energy, each of us rich people consumes about a hundred times as much energy [as we did when we were wild] and there are not one million but six thousand million of us. Judged by energy alone, our footprint on the planet is about half a million times bigger that it was fifty thousand years ago, and we are near, or even beyond the limit to growth.
This situation makes the nature and role of future religion clear. The first step, a theoretical step is to realize that the Universe is divine. When we say God we mean the Universe that created is and will recycle us when we die.
If we assume that the Universe is divine, theology can become a proper science. This might be a bit hard to take by traditional theologians who have put their faith in Faith, but I
[page 160]
. . . can't see any evidence against. We can conjecture and refute in empirical, mathematical theology, just as easily as we can in the traditional variety.
One cannot have a well defined not-p without a well defined p.
The sequence of states in a real computer, defined by a clock period and a memory address, are stationary points in the dynamics of a real computer just as classical bindings are stationary points in human physiological chemistry. Coulson
Have faith in oneself, the evidence for the Faith is how I feel about the faith. [relying on built in epistemology, like built in immune system]
Within the paradigm (protocol) one can speak the language of the protocol, and much can be left unsaid as part of common knowledge (Kauffman Kauffman). To change the paradigm, however, one must define or redefine the whole language changing the meaning of everything to fit the new picture. So the classical momentum, product of mass and velocity became the quantum mechanical variety, the processing rate represented by a certain particle moving in space relative to other particles.
So we see a paradigm change as a rotation, a change of bases at constant entropy, represented by a unitary transformation.
Thursday 3 September 2009
How do I feel. My feeling is the top level of my control
[page 161]
system, being a superposition of my response to my internal and external environment. Traditionally feeling is supposed to be monitored by reason, and Catholic moralists in the past have been inclined to the view that acting on irrational feeling is sinful. Since our feeling mechanism, evolved long ago and may have some genetic basis, it is true that feeling may lead to error, and so we spend a lot of time training our children to supplement their feelings with a rational view of their situation, particularly when it comes to doing unpleasant things to achieve complex goals, like getting up to go to school or eating vegetables. The same goes for the community as a whole when faced by dangers and opportunities that played no role in out genetic and cultural evolutionary past. Clearly the most pleasant way to do things is to learn to love the actions that we must necessarily perform to achieve personal and collective salvation by learning the rational [foundation] for such actions, rather than having them forced upon us as moral precepts with little basis in reality.
Solar energy provides a fixed point by which we can navigate to the ultimate design of human social energy metabolism.
The direction of a nation involves changes in national feeling.
The maintenance of peace involves the deprecation of 'militancy' which in turn requires a higher bandwidth of social communication to enable everybody's concerns to enter the debate and that such powers as might be should use increasing bandwidth of communication as their method of peacemaking. Regimes not working for peace need change, in this scenario.
