vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 21 April 2013 - Saturday 27 April 2013]
[Notebook: DB 75 Reconstruction]
[page 125]
Sunday 21 April 2013
The political and social power of priestly elites vs scientific problems, the same mix as existed in Galileo's day.
. . .
The creative power represented in the transfinite computer network operates at all scales and we see it at work in the human scale in our arts and technologies (almost the same words).
[page 126]
We need a photo of the aloe vera plant that seems to mimic the process in my conscious mind. We might say that our consciousness is our personal window on divine process, and we see through that window that the divinity is ultimately the most peaceful system in existence, a wilderness governed only by variation and selection.
Cybernetics defines the limits to control which are the same as the limits to communication: if you can talk to it effectively, you can control it. Computer security is designed to ensure the independence of different accounts on the network. I can talk to you but I cannot (should not) hack you.
Modern societies suffer considerable inconvenience through the theological legacies embedded in our populations.
The speed of change is governed by the cost of change and the budget for change. In a way a significant portion of the budget (a tithe) should be devoted to research and development of better ways ti live, that is social development. This is the role of religion, our interface with the wild divinity of the Universe. Tithe - Wikipedia
WILD = COMPLETE set of states = WILDERNESS
Monday 22 April 2013
Bette Davis, Vanity Fair March 2006: Her favourite line from all her films ' "Ah'd love to kiss you bit Ah just washed my hair." '
[page 127]
Home: a stable local environment that facilitates fitness.
' "Aren't you the lucky one?" said Jim. He yawned.
' "I am for a fact," said Helmholtz. "My corner of the Universe happens to be the air around my band. I can fill it with music. Mr. Beeter, in zoology has his butterflies. Mr. Trottman, in physics, has his pendulum and tuning forks. Making sure everybody has a corner like that is almost the biggest job we teachers have." ' (The Kid Nobody Could Handle)
Story = proof = logical continuum that 'fits together', taking us from an initial point misfit boy to fit boy.
page 255:
' "Think of it this way," said Helmholtz. "Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it."'A small cry of despair came from Jim Domini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy.
' "How?" said Jim.
' "Love yourself," said Helmholtz, "and make your instrument sing about it. A-one, a-two, a-three." Down came his baton.' Vonnegut
One can compose a quite comprehensive j'accuse against the Pope, or better, against the role crafted by the Church for the person chosen to be Pope. The Pope embodies knowledge and power. He is (allegedly) the mouthpiece of God on Earth and the custodian of the Deposit of Faith. The deposit of faith is a rather nebulous entity which
[page 128]
is defined negatively by identifying heresies, that is beliefs considered by the Pope and his government to be contrary to the Deposit of Faith. At the root of this definition is the proposition that God is not the world. Here we wish to explore the scientific consequences of tits opposite, God is the World. The Universe is self sufficient and under no outside control. Denzinger, Sacred tradition - Wikipedia, Second Vatican Council
The first consequence of this hypothesis is that all experience is experience of God so that theology can become an evidence based science like all the others. Although this may seem a rather radical hypothesis, it leaves many ancient theological or metaphysical ideas intact. The first is that the Universe can be understood as pure act in the Aristotelean and Thomistic sense. We can then work our way through the Thomistic model of God anbd map it onto the mnodel of God formalized in quantum mechanics.
Vonnegut writes fictional fiction , ie fiction based on some counterfactual assumptions like telekinesis without technology and so on. Scientists are trying to write factual fiction, describing achievable trajectories through the space of being.
Your distant beauty energizes me. One can see how Aristotle thought that the heavens moved the earth as a final cause (implying that the earth could move itself toward its goal). So my energy comes from myself but it is the picture of you that releases it. We are interested in physical analogues
[page 129]
of emotional states. Aquinas applied the duality potency / act at all levels of complexity from the inanimate world through the animate to the spiritual and the eternal [pure act]. We have a tree of eternities beginning with conservation of action then energy, then momentum adding new layers of freedom and constraint to the world. In place of Aristotle's potency and act we have kinetic and potential energy. Potential energy is a property of a state. Kinetic energy is a property of a change of state, and we can establish the convention kinetic energy + potential energy = 0. Feynman, page 9-10.
Another Heretic's Tale
Tuesday 23 April 2013
FAITH is a product of INDUCTION
Point set theory seems to be the source of the delusion that a continuum can carry information density because the point model of the continuum is not a continuum but a set of points. This is clearly suggested by the quantum mechanical treatment of the continuum as a Hilbert space whose dimension is the 'power of the continuum'. A real continuum, as described by Aristotle, has overlap (ends in common) and so does not represent orthogonal points but at best confusion and entanglement, insofar as any 'point' we choose is partly another point.
CONTINUOUS (relative to an observer) = UNRESOLVED
The Holy Grail is the universal power of reproduction.
[page 130]
Platonic mathematics tends to contradict Landauer's hypothesis that information is physical by maintain that a set of measure zero can carry information. This suggests that classical continuity and measure theory are inadequate to describe the Universe and need to be replaced by the logical continuum, a narrative that maps the passage of an event (where all events are, by the duality of the fixed points of the Universe, sets of events).
Classical differential geometry describes dynamics using two orthogonal (dual) spaces (of contravariant and covariant vectors respectively = correspondingly) coupled by an invariant metric.
Conservation - continuity = non-event, nothing changes, no information . Here lies the foundation of Lonergan's error. He mistook the continuum for empirical residue, but it is fact the continuous spectrum of possibilities (ie fixed points in the action) which might later be constrained into a line spectrum of actual observations [by a potential].
In the logical Universe our dual spaces are represented by codecs and the principle of general covariance says that as long as we preserve entropy (reversibility) any string of symbols can be transformed into any other finite string of symbols and back again with computable algorithms, and, given, the codec, the meaning of the string of symbols remains the same to the sourses of the symbols.
[page 131]
The theory of gravitation is a map of a conserved flow of action (= energy) in 4-space. In 4-space quantum mechanical phases are modified both by frequency and distance, energy and momentum.
Always looking for the logical consequence sof the three great conservations, action (angular momentum, spin) energy and momentum ('spin' in the context of the Universe [?])
Symmetry (undefinedness) is the space of definition (fixation, resolution)
The longer we can observe something (ie the more instances of a quantum phenomenon) the more accurately we can measure it, and this increase in precision is linear with time δτ = h / δE
Write = pass energy to; read = accept energy fropm, the energy being the physical bearer of the information. Bearer= information carrying physical symbols, ie information + energy, the modern version of Aristotle's form + matter.
Classical matter corresponds to modern symmetry: nec quid, nec quale, nec quantum, nec aliquid eorum quibus ens determinatur [neither something, nor some sort, nor some amount, nor any other of the things by which being is determined]. Lucky these things were drilled into me when I was young so I still remember them.
I have met my holy grail in the reproductive power of my mothers and the creative power of my mind which evolved to assist me in my quest for reproduction.
[page 132]
The idea of the grail seems to be embodied in the Tantra. Tantra - WikipediaI smoke at some risk to my health because it helps me to write, ie to crystallize fixed points out of my mental flow. Now, however, as I begin to fell that I have found what I am looking for and it is all over bar the documentation and propagation, I am more inclined simply to enjoy my discovery in the lower risk (and probably less creative) environment of non smoking. Now I have the weapon I can join the war and strike a blow against the ancient monarchical rigidity of the political world which creates so much pain, like not being able to roll over in bed.
Above all we must control our unlimited reproductive power if we are to survive in peace on a limited planet, and this requires understanding not forthcoming from the celibate traditionalists of the Catholic Church.
Ocupation: theologian (heretic (member of the loyal opposition. Are the US replublicans loyal to the people?
Op ed: On loyal opposition, as opposed to revolutionary opposition, change of government by force or guile.
Doing nothing is the fundamental default position, rest energy.
Relativity is transparent to the form of energy.
The biggest revolution in science has been the tacit reconception of the ancient duality of matter and form. In the old picture matter is massive, needing to be motivated
[page 133]
by some agent. Now matter has become energy, the universal active symmetry to be moulded by form, whose fundamental representation is quantum mechanics.
The most general representation of a set of codecs is the permutation (symmetric) group.
The Universe is driven locally. Anything that can communicate needs energy. It is no longer passive but everywhere infused with the flow of divine action, actus purus.
Chrissy Amphlett: Its a fine line between pleasure and pain Divinyls - Chrissy Amphlett
We can say the same thing over and over again, but each time it is different because it is in a new environment, and this is true of every event in the Universe starting with the simplest [observable event], a transition from one state to another in a two state system.
So the uniting symmetry of this whole story is what I call Cantor symmetry. Cantor put his finger on it, the identical process of generating new transfinite numbers which holds at every level of complexity. The fundamental physical representation of this process is quantum measurement / observation / communication. From the complexity invariant standpoint of the Cantor symmetry, the collapse of the wave function and the human act of insight are identical events in a logical continuum, each is a quantum of action which may be measured by smaller quanta of action. Cantor, page 109.
At one end of the Cantor symmetry is God as absolute simplicity, ie 1, and at the other end God as the
[page 134]
ultimate complexification of the world represented by the transfinite numbers. The Platonic version of the transfinite numbers is cut down to the real version by the limits imposed on communication by the confluence of the five theorems (?). Cantor: no limit to the number of symbols but Gödel more symbols than logic can handle. Turing, more symbols than can be reduced to a generating process. Brouwer: existence of fixed points. Shannon: limits on the rate of transformation of symbols, ie coding / decoding.
FUCKING = TRADING (fertility and fertilization).
Everything is encoded in physical hardware and all processes are physical processes which are given meaning by their position in the dynamic process (computation) of which they are part.
It is only one bit, not-God to God, but one of the most fertile changes ever made in human society, as we can see from the developments that have occurred since the scientific method reached its current form and its findings founded the technologies we now enjoy.
God is other: a mystery; no evidence for God's will except that composed by people promoting themselves as authentic bearers of the truth; ie open the way for unfair self serving elites.
God is same: an everyday familiar; everything evidence based, no limit on conjecture and fantasies but only act on those that accurately map reality, ie are evidence based; all processes can be observed
[page 135]
\and evaluated (selected) and those the world tends to select have maximum entropy and stability, almost a tautology. You cannot (and need not) go outside the complete set of states.
One can accept that the Universe is a digital system of symbols distinguished by their personal properties (which correspond to some properties of their environment) and their address on space and time.
West: Ambassador: ' "The root of human distress, Mr Amberley, is a sense of alienation from the natural order of the Universe. The effect of satori is an illumination of the mind so that the nature of the self and the Universe is finally clear, and the sense of true relationship or one-ness is restored." ' Whereas the RCC likes to claim that we are strangers in a strange land waiting to go home to God. West, page 5.
West page 6: '. . . the practice of Zen belonged to the purely natural order.'
Wednesday 24 April 2013
The first scientific problem, recognised by the ancients, is the duality between motion and stillness. A tentative solution came with the invention of calculus, treating motion as a dense sequence of stillnesses.
The enormous institutional momentum of the Roman Catholic Church which has over two thousand years established itself as a global imperial religion
[page 136]
operating under a single monarch, the Pope. The Pope claims monopolies on both political and theological power throughout the World, and possibly the Universe. From the scientific point of view [this] carries no weight except insofar as it is based on a consistent and well tested model of reality. Collins
Begin a list of radical theologians; of faculties of theology. Tad Delay, Globethics and World Council of Churches
In their childbearing years social and biological pressures (potentials) place women in a very vulnerable position with respect to men. An important scial factor in this may be the breakup of the tribe, so that mothers no longer had the support of a large extended family in rearing their offspring and instead became dependant on a single partner for support.
Fear of the Lord is a false virtue. We interpret 'Lord' as a relative term referring to a higher layer than ours, and imagine that the Lord's entropy is so great that it can accept the complete set of states of its servants, except those it perceives as detrimental to its own power. Provided that Lord is benevolent (ie entropy maximizing) the servants have nothing to feat, the consistent and effective rule of law diminishes fear in proportion to its effectiveness. The opposite is a lawless lord, ie a warlord, who holds everyone's life and livelihood in the palm of its hand.
West page 67: ' ". . . there is no right and wrong in politics. Only the expedient and the possible.
Peace: absence of fear.
[pager 137]
West page 76: 'Identity! That was the word!. That was the key to the whole human problem. Unless a man understood, however dimly, what he was and how he was linked with his fellows and with the cosmos, he could not survive.'
The information carried by a point is equal to the entropy of the space in which we find the point, so each of us in the divine milieu carries the form of God.
I cannot make you happy, but am happy when you are part of my environment, an element of my vision of `God.
Maybe admit the sampling theorem to form a sextet. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia
As is gradually becoming apparent, the Catholic Church has become involved in a global moral failure by trying to cover up the sexual crimes of its agents. This moral failure is rooted in a theological failure, the Church's belief that from a practical point of view the Church owns God and so stands above all human knowledge, justice and power.
We are suggesting a one bit change in the theological foundation of the Western world.
West page 94: 'I have been a diplomat long enough to know that often, the best way to solve a problem is to create a crisis which then precipitates its own solution as a thunderstorm sends down rain to clear the turgid air.' A return to basics to restore consistency.
[page 138]
The hypothesis that God is not the Universe lies at the heart of thousands of years of Western theological tradition. Since this God is invisible to us, the Churches rely on the Bible and tradition to explain the nature of God. From a scientific point of view, such documents carry no weight except insofar as they are an accurate map of experience.
Testing an hypothesis is no easy matter and may cost hundreds, thousands or even millions of person days to achieve. Consider the Higgs boson. We can measure our collective faith in an hypothesis by the amount of money we are prepared to expend on testing it. From a scientific point of view, the Catholic theological hypothesis that God is not the Universe is an untested hypothesis because it is untestable. To hold it, then, is a matter of faith alone. Here we want to explore the alternative theological hypothesis, that God and the Universe are the same thing.
A large proportion of current theology is 'confessional'. Such theologies take as their data the beliefs of a certain religion and seek to understands these data. Faith seeking understanding. Such theology is considered non-scientific, since it it based only on secondary sources, not on data arising directly from the observation of sources, the world. Most such theologies explicitly or tacitly place God outside the observable Universe and so inaccessible to science.
[page 139]
Logical space (quantum mechanics) emerges from metric space (relativity) [via fixed point theorems]
Agarwal, Mehan and O'Regan, Fixed Point Theory Agarwal, Meehan & O'Regan
Thursday 25 April 2013
For approximately two millennia the Catholic Church and its various parent and child organizations have controlled the Western theological agenda. Common to all this family of theologies is the hypothesis that God, the subject of theology, is absolutely other than the World, which this God created. As a consequence the traditional God is a mysterious being known only through revelation created and curated by the Christian Churches. Since we can have no direct experience of this God traditional theology cannot be a science.
Helen Waddell Peter Abelard Waddell
page 29: Gilles ' "Marriage to me is a compromise with the flesh. . . . the very root of marriage, to me, is satisfaction of the lust of the flesh: and the Church declares that the ascetic has chosen the more excellent way. . . . " ' How wrong.
Friday 26 April 2013
A love story constrained on the grid of Christian belief: '. . . what would it have been like then to waken in the morning? Would she have seemed to
[page 140]
herself as foul as the dead street and the dead river?'
Back to medieval times again, where the root of the trouble was, the detailed codification of false belief. Subservience of women.
Teetering on the brink of love, a binary decision, to mate or not to mate, the woman's choice often bent by rape of pestering.
A sound theology is essential to public mental and physical health since, as the theory of everything, it describes the space of life in which we move to that we may guide our trajectory through the field of life.
Waddell page 66: Proportionate being: 'She [Heloise] had found her God. In him she lived and moved and had her being.
All fixed point theory takes place in continuous space because in discrete space there is nothing to say, the fixed points being in place by definition rather than as a property of a mapping.
Our approach is consistent with the modern view that all information about the Universe is available within the Universe itself and there is no need to look outside for explanation, for there is nothing there. We might say that outside the Universe there is nothing dynamically equivalent to symmetry, a featureless continuum given features by fixed point theory.
[page 141]
Control = inhibiting potentials, as chastity is a control on love.
Waddell page 82: Gilles: 'It is hard to forgive one's god for becoming flesh.'
Saturday 27 April 2013
How does a new idea gain traction? Here, as everywhere, we have an evolutionary process. A new idea is like a new gene, and it will propagate if it increases the probability for its phenotypes to reproduce, ie repeat it. In the academic sphere we have a literature which serves the function of seeds, broadcasting the new texts to mind in which [they] may grow and, through the writings (speech etc) of such minds reproduce itself, to be implanted in further minds and so on. Literature id very like a virus, unable to reproduce itself directly but able to redirect the function of a living mind to reproduce it. In this context, the Church is like a gardener, pulling up the phenotypes ot does not want to reproduce and encouraging the ones it does. Judging by the internet statistics for my site, perhaps one person a day takes a serious interest in my site, and every now and then the traffic to a particular page increases, suggesting that readers are communicating with one another.
Jesus cast himself as a shepherd. Perhaps it is good to take a broader view and pose as a farmer, embracing plants and animals, ie (in effect) all 'life'.
Christianity is an attempt to evade death and uses eternal life as the sexy part of its marketing strategy. What can
[page 142]
natural religion offer and deliver? First a theoretical treatment of the causes of death, opening the way to research into how it might be avoided but nevertheless showing that it is an inevitable consequence of the unbounded creativity of the Universe. Death is a consequence of a fatal error, and from a general point of view, an error is just an act of creation a fork in the life sustaining process.
< p> Salute, love: wish life and health. Hate: wish sickness and death. (The farmer's role. 'playing God'. We play God all the time because we are, locally, Gods.'Critically evaluate' ie check for errors, an essential skill for those who would succeed in the long run. One of the chief concerns of the Old Testament is that bad things happen to 'good' people and good things happen to bad people(see Waddell). This is a consequence of a) stochastisity and b) erroneous definitions of good and bad embedded in the theological context of the Old Testament.
Religion (and therefore theology) are public health issues. At present the world suffers considerable disability from the clash of mutually inconsistent theologies and religions. We can expect an evidence based theology to evolve toward a unified view of its subject as the other sciences do, to our mutual benefit.
Despite its shaky foundations, the Catholic Church works. Its hardware, the human mind, has sufficient variety to accept its dogma, but from a practical point of view its real power lies in the community it creates,
[page 143]
as we see in the long conversations the faithful have outside the Church after mass, none of which has very much to do with theology and religion, but are founded on the feeling that everyone present is one of us. It makes us feel safe and good to be among friends.. The Church has also created as legion of enemies, the demons, fixed in evil whose one desire is to lead us away from the Church by leading us into sin, their biggest score being apostasy and heresy, the rejection of the (fake) salvation that the Church offers. A complete emotional containment reinforced with a fear of isolation, loss of livlihood (me) and in the bad old days, painful torture, incarceration and death.
