Notes
[Sunday 6 September 2009 - Saturday 12 September 2009]
[Notebook: DB 67: jciii]
Sunday 6 September 2009
Rereading Deutsch Fabric of Reality Deutsch
The simplest communications between sets occur in the cardinal regime, sets passing units from one to another. These units may have any sort of internal structure, but we see them only as identical countable units. At the simplest level of the Universe (physical layer) these units have no internal structure and are represented by one quantum of action. Actually unstructured quanta may be imagined to be 'dark matter', identical in structure to the initial singularity.
In a Universe of pure action every letter of the alphabet is alive or active, and so moves itself, it is an agent with a certain function, which can be formally represented by an ordered set = vector. The initial singularity has action but no form: as Thomas would say, existence and essence are identical and we might say that in the initial singularity the initial symmetry has not been broken and this unbroken symmetry exists everywhere in the Universe. As Thomas (again) would say, God is ubiquitous. Christianity says that God is ubiquitous and distinct from the Universe. We say that God is ubiquitous because God is the Universe.
Probability, the theory of counting. What we are trying to understand is what we should expect our count to be under certain circumstances. If all my sheep are in a well fenced paddock (and not pregnant) I should expect their number to stay the same every time I count them. If not, I want to know why. Maybe they are not all ewes. We detect phenomena in the Universe by measuring their deviation from expectation. Structure structures expectations, so a good lurk provides rich pickings.
Deutsch page 43: tangible vs shadow photons.
Danger. There is a tick loose in the kitchen which I scratched off my back and then dropped. Search and destroy, and now I feel safe again. Why don't they just take my blood and hold the poison, like leeches? And they can be fatal to small animals and those not immune.
Deutsch page 44: Tangible photon in this Universe, shadow photon in parallel Universe.
'. . . there are many more shadow photons than tangible one. How many? Experiments cannot put an upper bound on the number but they do set a rough lower bound. In a laboratory the largest area that we would conveniently illuminate with a laser would be about a square metre, and the smallest manageable size for the holes might be about a thousandth of a millimetre. So there are about 1012 (one trillion) possible locations on the screen. Therefore there must be at least a trillion shadow photons accompanying each tangible one.'
'We have inferred the existence of seething prodigiously complicated hidden world of shadow photons. The only thing in the Universe that a shadow photon can be observed to affect is the tangible photon that it accompanies.'
Guide field ? 'Interference' = communication.
That is the phenomenon of interference. Shadow photons would go entirely unnoticed were it not for this strange phenomenon and the strange patterns of shadows by which we observe it.'
This is an interpretation (an attempt to give meaning to or model in a familiar alphabet) of the phenomena perfectly explained by the mathematical model but hard to understand. The point for me is that 'real' and 'shadow' photons communicate. The 'parallel Universe' idea may be a mistaken substantiation of the elements of a superposition.
D page 46: 'Single particle interference experiments such as I have
[page 170]
been describing show us that the multiverse exists and that it contains many counterparts to each particle in the tangible Universe. page 47 . . . thus we have reached the conclusion of a chain of reasoning that begins with strangely shaped shadows and ends up with parallel Universes.'
So that is that then.
What would Feynman think of this? He goes into a bit more detail. (Feynman Leighton Sands vol III Feynman)
Maybe Deutsch's hypothesis has merit but now he begins to act 'religiously 'rather than scientifically promoting his faith by ad hominem argument (like Dawkins).
page 47: '. . . the existence od the multiverse is still a minority view among physicists? Why?
'The answer, I regret to say does not reflect well on the majority.'
page 49: '"The possible" cannot interact with the real. Non-existent entities cannot deflect real ones from their paths. If a photon is deflected, it must have been deflected by something, and I have called that thing a "shadow photon".'
This is to seek a deterministic explanation perhaps motivated by the deterministic evolution of the wave function which describes a transfinite superposition of different entities. This is to make the elements of the superposition real and to suggest that this same function collapses differently in each Universe of the multiverse.
[page 171]
Feynman says observation destroys interference, insofar as if we find out which hole the photon went through we destroy the interference pattern and get a classical distribution of photon impact points on the screen (cf Deutsch page 50)
We weaken the multiverse explanation by providing more plausible alternatives.
D page 50: '"observation destroys interference" is very misleading in three ways. First, it suggests some sort of psychokinetic effect of the conscious 'observer' on basic physical phenomena.'
The observer does not have to be conscious. Particles observe one another (Zurek Zurek
page 51: 'The quantum theory of parallel Universes is not the problem, it is the solution. It is not some troublesome optional interpretation emerging from arcane theoretical considerations. It is the explanation -- the only one that is tenable -- of a remarkable and counter-intuitive reality.'
ie that possibilities are real in the sense that they have a probability. We understand distributions of probabilities by symmetries like the sides of a coin or the faces of a die. Only one face shows at a time, and if we make enough trials, their frequencies tend to equality, that is maximum entropy, because there is no effective control over the outcome of each trial. Quantum mechanics introduces control of trials through interference, so that a photon constrained by a structure will follow some paths more probably than others just as water is more likely to flow through a hole than an impervious barrier.
[page 172]
D page 52: 'Tangibility is relative to a given observer.'
How is this decided if the reals and the tangibles of a given particle are in communication?
D page 53: 'When I introduced tangible and shadow photons I apparently distinguished them by saying that we can see the former but not the latter. But who are we? While I was writing that hosts of shadow Davids were writing it too. They too drew a distinction between tangible and shadow photons; but the photons they called "shadow" include the ones I call "tangible", and the photons they call "tangible" are among those I call "shadow".
'Not one of these copies of n object have any privileged position in he explanation of shadows that I have just outlines, neither do they have a privileged position in the full mathematical explanation provided by quantum theory.'
Is the formalism of quantum theory true? It is a continuous deterministic formulation of probabilities that fits a Universe that is always in some concrete state, which tells us quite clearly that the future is not determined by the past. D says everything happens -- no normalization. Seems more likely that one thing happens with a certain probability that is to be explained by the meaning of the event, like the letter probability in this text.
D page 59: 'It is hard to know where to begin in criticizing the inductivist conception of science -- it is so profoundly false in so many different ways.'
[page 173]
D page 61: 'What then is the pattern of scientific reasoning and discovery?
Popper. How do we distinguish induction from theory creation. Looks like D is fighting a paper tiger here. Popper
page 68: Evolution of theories
page 69: 'Objective knowledge' : all knowledge from quantum mechanics up is relative to the observer - how does this affect me (the appearance of a tiger in the woods). 'Niche' and 'entity' are duals.
'We never draw inferences from observation alone' (?) Every observation is the result of a vast amount of model driven processing, the model being either genetically encoded or learnt. D suffers from the belief that the Universe is not intelligent but deterministic. Science is just a tiny formalized corner of the universal process of transformation which is happening throughout the local present.
D page 85: D's criterion of reality: 'If something can kick back it exists'
. . .
Financial crisis: trust went out of the system because too many people were abusing trust and they did this because the system
[page 174]
is so opaque that they can hide what they are doing. The system will become stable when we have a financial God that can see all and the only thing with adequate bandwidth to see the whole system is probably the system itself,So we put every transaction on the public record. We protect privacy by excluding small transactions, ie those within a few standard deviations of the global mean personal turnover, The richer you are (and the more able to manipulate the system) the more exposed you become. This is the opposite of the total sovereign secrecy and total exposure of the subjects. Divinity of money An essay on the divinity of money
Deutsch, like Plato, the Jews, the Christians ans heaps of others are all looking for far out explanations of the world something behind the scenes that makes it act as it does. How we become fixed in this way is hard to tell but it has a lot to do with writing, in Deutsch's case particularly mathematics. The function space idea certainly works, but the concept that continuity is equivalent to infinite entropy density may be mistaken and the world, instead of running on a vastly complex invisible background of fields in fact works by the communication of individuals with one another by the exchange of messages. All the operations of a Turing machine, all the operations of mathematics may be seen as the making and breaking of bonds, that is connections or entanglements between distinct entities that establish correlations between them, like the spatial motions of the two atoms in a hydrogen molecule.
BONDING == COMMUNICATION (how?)
Bonding occurs when particles can decrease their total energy or increase their total entropy by entering a bound state. If we
[page 176]
think of the energy of a particle as the rate of action required to maintain its integrity, bonding means that that the rate of action in a bound pair is less than the rate of action in the two elements unbound .
Coulson Valence 'In one sense . . . he description of the bonds in any molecule is simply the description of the electron distribution in it.' Coulson
In the book we begin with the human network and work down to the initial singularity. In the attempted papers so far we have begun with the initial singularity and worked up to te current Universe. Both analysis ans synthesis help us to understand, the one by detecting alphabets, the other by understanding actual syntax, ie actual ordering of alphabetic elements.
Coulson page 4: '. . . Ernshaw's theorem of electrostatics, which states that no system of charges can be in stable equilibrium while at rest. The stability of an atom or molecule must be a dynamic and not a static one.'
It is dynamics that 'holds the forms together' and so any particle with form has action --> energy --> rest mass.
MASS <==> FORM
Coulson page 6: 'quantum conditions ('phase integrals')' : halted process correspond to phase 0 mod 2 pi.
page 8: '. . . the theory of valence is essentially a theory of the calculation of the energy of a molecule.
Monday 7 September 2009
[page 176]
Deutsch page 97: '. . . science and other forms of knowledge are made possible by a special self-similarity property of the physical world. Yet it was not physicists who first recognized and studied this property: it was mathematicians and computer theorists, and they called it the universality of computation.'
Another god out of a box. What of the long history of form and universals, stretching back at least to Plato?
D's 'virtual reality' means all layers of the system above the bottom physical layer, that is all layers in which symbols have a meaning other than themselves. (pp 98 - 121). However, he seems to confine it to humans and computers: 'Biologically speaking, the virtual reality rendering of their environment is the characteristic means by which human beings survive, In other words it is the reason why human beings exist. The ecological niche that human beings occupy depends on virtual reality as directly and as absolutely as the ecological niche that koala bears occupy depends on eucalyptus leaves.' page 121.
D page 132: '. . . quantum computer can perform computations 0f which no (human) mathematician will ever, even in principle, be capable.' (?)
page 134: '. . . the computing power of abstract machines has no beaing on what is computable in reality.'
page 135: 'The Turing principle: It is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible physical environment.' Including itself? Could be an infinite regress (progress) here.
[page 177]
What we seem to have is a one-to-one correspondence between the machine ans the whole of physical reality including itself, so we must be dealing with an infinite set, and maybe Russels paradox: Is the machine a member of itself?
'The laws of physics, by conforming to the Turing principle, make it physically possible for those same laws to become known to physical objects, Thus the laws of physics may be said to mandate their own comprehensibility.' (?)
If so, why restrict knowledge to humans?
D page 142: '. . . there is one [theory opposed to my position] --namely common sense -- which reason requires that we refute in detail wherever it seems to conflict with what I am asserting.' We survive by common sense!
A necessary activity for those (like Christians) who propose weird invisible explanations for the way things are.
Back to the Initial Identity (helps to think in jargon) INITIAL SINGULARITY == GOD, where we are talking about the formal relationship between gravitation as understood by Einstein and God as understood by Thomas. The content of all messages is formal but the transmission of the message is an act differentiated from all other acts by its form. A flow of act is a flow of form, in fact a computation., Although this flow is logically continuous it is not deterministic because the Universe is not a member of itself which can be controlled, it just is, and the only constraint on its structure is consistency which can be expressed formally and is guaranteed by the unity of the Universe. It is one process of which we are at most aware of an infinitesimal subroutine, by examining the routines available to us, we can form conjectures about the whole by applying computer network
[page 178]
theory and the invariance of the local structure of networks with respect to complexity. As Newton said, we can see the Universe in a grain of sand because the process in the grain of sand is isomorphic to process in the whole Universe in the sense that it is computable. Transfinite systems are computable using meaning / correspondence, as we do in english where I point to the Universe with the simple symbol Universe standing for all that is.
Religion has had a hard time for the last few centuries. The new 'secular' approach to communal living picked the eyes out of religion, leaving the shells of weirdness we see today where modern methods of marketing are used to peddle absurd ideas about human existence. Now that secular religion is well established, the time seems ripe to take a new look at God.
The great theologians of the past have all looked at God from the outside. Here we would like to look inside God.
Tuesday 8 September 2009
Evolution: esse = phenotype; essentia = genotype.
In the beginning esse = essentia, genotype = phenotype. This corresponds to the ancient model of God.
Once these things are written they are safe, and once it is all transcribed into the computer, searchable. The output of my mind is a series of snapshots, each of which is a proposition or a sentence, Although each snapshot is very
[page 179]
simple (a point in message space) all the snapshots fit together, and in some way fit my life (65 years and counting) so they are like stars in my mental Universe, points of accumulation, stationary points. My ultimate aim is to weave these points nto a narrative that interests people other than myself and so induces a phase change in the space of individual human Universes. What the transfinite network is telling us (via the theory of functions, founded on set theory) is that every process, however complex, is a point in a suitably complex space. The transfinite numbers give is an absolute scale of entropy against which o measure the physical (= observed) Universe.
Theological Studies: A New Look at God.
God lies at the absolute zero of the entropy scale: Omnino simplex.
Re Dawkins: Although you may laugh at it the ancients has a very sophisticated model of God whose roots are to be found in Aristotle's book which we call Metaphysics, but which he called Theology.
Deutsch page 176: '[The] gene based understanding of life -- regarding organisms as part of the environment of genes -- has implicitly been the basis of biology since Darwin, but was overlooked until at least the 1960s and not fully understood until Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982).'
Deutsch and Dawkins both speak about order and form without seeing to notice it, perhaps because they are scientifically reductionist and do not make explicit the fact that the order of the letters is more important than the nature of the letters, whose only formal
[page 180]
requirement is a distinct identity or address. The nature of a point is encoded by its address in the corresponding space.
1. God - a history of God, brief and heavily nuanced to my purpose.
2. Space (form) = points, meaning, communication, stationarity, prediction, navigation, information, entropy.
3. Time (action)
4. Creation (trinity)
5. Life (Heaven & Hell)
Deutsch page 178: "It is simply not true that life is insignificant in its physical effects, nor is it theoretically derivative.'
Do genes alone specify life? What about the dynamical systems passed on to the daughters in cell division? Life must be inherited as a going concern one of whose activities is to execute its genes under general overall control of input from the creature's environment. Deutsch and Dawkins both emphasize the formal genetic view to the detriment of the active dynamic view. The important feature of the tree of life, what makes evolution possible, is that it is dynamically unbroken right back to the beginning.
Deutsch page 179: 'Genes embody knowledge about their niches, ie they are fixed points in the dynamics of life space. So we may say Einstein's equation G = T is a fixed point in the dynamics od he Universe, The meaning of G = T is carried by the 4-space of which it is a stationary point.
D page 180: '. . . the degree of adaptation of a replicator is defined as the degree to which it contributes causally to its own replication . . . '
'[In the human environment] the shape of a gemstone contributes
[page 181]
causally to its own survival' Or demise. A stone in human hands is very unlikely to reach the geological age of its undiscovered mate in the ground.
Our view of the world since the medieval theologians started proving the existence of God by showing that despite its obvious existence, the world cannot possibly be Divine because it cannot explain its own existence. God, by definition exists since they assume it is the nature of God to exist. God, in other words, is no accident. It has to be to explain our existence, so we are led to think that we are no accident either, but part of god;s plan. Since those days we have moved from potency and act into quantum mechanics, which, as I see it, conceives of the world as pure action, just like the medieval God of Thomas, Just saying the same thing again and again in different words, slowly bootstrapping myself towards understanding and believing (I think beginning to act upon) the hypothesis that the Universe is God.
Popularizers of science both exalt and debunk humanity. On the one hand they attribute superior power and intelligence to us (including themselves) and on the other [they say] that we are one species on a planet near one star of countless billions, and there is nothing very special about that.
Although mathematics is based on correspondences and transformations (ie meanings) we see very little about meaning in Dawkins and Deutsch, perhaps because they are trying to avoid the final cause, attributing any sort of purpose to the doings of the world, since such an idea smells of God, fart gas to an atheist.
[page 182]
Wednesday 9 September 2009
Deutsch page 181: '. . . an entity is adapted to its niche of it embodies knowledge that casuses the niche to keep that knowledge in existence.
Memory eliminates error: if I remember to take the broom with me when I go upstairs to clean I prevent the error of the broom not being available when I 'call' it to execute the next step in the cleaning process and I am obliged to come down to the kitchen again to get it. Having been sidetracked into writing this (am 'interrupt' that came into my consciousness) I may yet forget it again, but probably not after all this reinforcement of the purpose of my original mission to correct an error which if it had not occurred, this paragraph would probably never have been written. Back to work!
This book (a new view) is written from the point of view of a builder. I have been building houses all my life and I want to show you how to build God and lead you toward the discovery that is at the hear of my new (retirement) job.
A lover or an opponent is the most engrossing form of embodied information in our experience.
A new description is a new linguistic representation of the stationary points in a dynamic situation, like the Bagavad Gita, a representation, like the Bible, which has so attracted readers and listeners that it has been reproduced in a large number of copies.
[page 183][
The idea that God is utterly other than the Universe has been established for about three thousand years and so may take a while to turn around.
Thursday 10 September 2009
Friday 11 September 2009
Another look at God
1. God - act - form - essence - existence - dynamics, unity / simplicity
2. Cybernetics - method - model - mathematics - conjecture - refutation
3. Creation - quantum mechanics - communication - definiteness vs error - space
4. Technology - stationarity - language - art - meaning - religion
5. Sustainability - the five billion year perspective
6. Ethics, politics, government, work and want / freedom and necessity
7. Some ecological principles: a) solar energy; b) material recycling; c) increasing entropy/information, ie increased pleasure to consumption ratio.
Enough
Every paragraph headed a la Rasmusssen and Williams. Rasmussen & Williams
Influence of big events. The Black Swan. The actual size of an event is a product of frequency x imp[act, ie time frequency (energy) x space frequency (number of people affected) (momentum). Taleb
Deutsch page 202: D seems fixed on what seems like a deterministic ensemble of 'multiverses' to explain both probability and meaning in our copy of the Universe. Seems easier to accept the postulate of probability theory, that there are formal symmetries that endow
[page 184]
certain sets of outcomes with equiprobability and that there are bonds (correlations() in the Universe that give meaning to the constituent particles. So the identical nucleaic acid sequence sin a genome (page 188) are differentiated by one being coding and the other non-coding, or decoded in a different way in the overall animal system, a matter of correlation and meaning.
Deutsch takes a deterministic approach and assumes that the 'multiverse' is fully deterministic at all times,, and randomness is just an appearance in our version of the Universe, We would prefer the view that in the beginning the Universe is indeterminate and determination comes through creation.
page 211: 'In quantum physics, no discontinuous change is necessary --even though all measurable quantities are discrete. It works as follows."
Another multiverse explanation, based on a continuum of multiverses.
Maybe like Cantor constructing a continuum of numbers ℵ1 by permuting ℵ0 discrete natural integers?
Seems D cannot face creation or annihilation so he follows the quantum mechanics of an isolated system and assumes that everything is reversible so there is nio annihilation or forgetting, However, given the ℵ1 possibilites of arranging ℵ0 symbols, we imagine that one arrangement must be annihilated in order to create another,
Every process proceeds by discrete logical steps, each equivalent to the transmission of a message, all isomorphic from the collapse
[page 185]
of the wave function to an act of human intelligence, he appearance of an actionable structure in the mind, whether it is a sentence to be written down or a plan to kill the mother-in-law. There is no data in a continuum.
