vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 5 May 2013 - Saturday 11 May 2013]
[Notebook: DB 75 Reconstruction]
[page 114]
Sunday 5 May 2013
Wain page 256: Literary empiricism: (Johnson) ' "[Shakespeare's] persons act and speak by the influence of the general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion." ' Wain
The general direction of mass communication is from those who have something to say and the resources (publishers, air time, fame, etc) to broadcast their ideas, which resources arise from the desire of the masses to follow the prophets.
Johnson: ' "This therefore is the praise of Shakespeare that his drama is the mirror of life; that he who has mazed his imagination in following the phantasms which other writers rouse up before him, may therefore be cured of his delirious ecstasies by reading human sentiments in human language, by scenes from which a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world and a confessor predict the progress of the passions." ' Or at least reading Shakespeare may add some understanding of human nature, something at least partly created by ourselves through our communications. Like natural theology and science in general, we may say Shakespeare is grounded in reality, the ground being the canvas for the signal at each layer of the network.
Theology is a fiction subject to criticism by reality. Catholic theology exhibits clear faults like the denigration of women and its supreme act of pride (see Lucifer), that it is above criticism. Lucifer - Wikipedia
[page 160]
I have a clear critical / polemic aim, the overthrow of such papal pride. The papacy acts like Lucifer to be a bearer of ancient darkness.
' "Shakespeare's plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind, exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolic of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.' "
But, at the base of it all, quantum mechanics establishes a deterministic connection between the nature of an event (represented by a corresponding eigenfunction) and the frequency of that event (represented by the corresponding eigenvalue). The heart of technology is the control of the nature and frequency of events using the resources that nature has placed at our disposal, the events themselves building on fundamental predictabilities to gain the predictability of more complex events, like life. Controlling the supply of oxygen and / or fuel to the fire.
Wain page 269: 'All men, in the end, make impossible demands on women . . . '
page 280: Johnson: ' "a decent provision for the poor is a true
[page 161]
test of civilization.'
Wain page 290: Imlac: '. . . fictions begin to operate as realities, false opinions fasten upon the mind, and life passes in dreams of rapture or of anguish.'
page 302: 'What [Johnson] was looking for in the wilds of Scotland was what he was looking for everywhere: the truth about human life. He was perhaps the last considerable traveller to have this single minded preoccupation with mankind. Less than twenty years later the entire European sensibility had tuned itself toward the wilderness as a source of inspiration. Mountains, lakes, forests, where or not peopled with picturesque and unspoiled inhabitants, became the prayer book of a new theology.' (1773).
page 326: Johnson: ' "Power confers the ability of gratifying our desires without the consent of others. Wealth enables us to obtain the consent of other to our gratification". '
page 329 Romanticism, 1760++ Romanticism - Wikipedia
What is the difference between bribery and corruption and fair trade? Unfairness, that is secret deals.
The basic error we have to deal with is the irretrievable breakdown of a relationship, ie shard communication channel, in other words a fatal error on the channel. The Christian tradition is inclined to attribute guilt to the parties of a broken relationship on the grounds that what God as put together let no man put asunder. This is false because at our own
[page 162]
scale we are gods and must face the realities of our concrete existence, we no longer get along.
A conservation law: I only speak when I am spoken to.
Love and hate: attraction and repulsion..
Cost / benefit on God / not God. Not-God status quo cost very large, benefit 0. New god-hypothesis, cost 0, benefit no limit. Pascal's wager. Pascal's Wager - Wikipedia
Wain page 346: '. . . criticism deals with imponderables and every opinion is valid from the point of view from which it is uttered—provided always that it represents the point of view honestly and sensitively.
Success comes from tuning in to the Zeitgeist, a product of current Weltanschaaung.
page 348: 'Both in the biographical and the critical parts of the [Lives of the Poets] he never allows himself to be confined within the purely literary,. Political and moral issues inevitably arise from the reading of literature, and in every case Johnson is ready for them.'
'Milton's poetry is the supreme literary expression of the Puritan spirit, . . . ' Puritan - Wikipedia
page 349: 'One of the puritanical tenets was the illegality of all games of chance; . . . ' Big mistake.
[page 163]
' . . . Johnson's objection to the puritan regime was basically that ut was totalitarian.' Bosonic.
page 358: cicisbeo Cicisbeo - Wikipedia
Monday 6 May 2013
Data vs information. Data = {symbol}, Information = {environment (context, codec), data}
Increased motivation often increases performance. Motivation = potential, performance = kinetic. Kinetic + potential = 0 (measured by quanta of action, the fundamental units, each an image of the initial singularity, pure act, an item of data) [one may imagine potential and kinetic as inverse actions, one undoing the other, so motion removed potential, potential incites motion].
It is easy to feel that making the Universe divine is a dangerous move because it will undermine the current set of religious beliefs held by the global population and tend to anarchy. To the contrary is the in the first order, a new understanding of how the world works changes nothing. Everything goes on as before, we just understand it differently. From this different understanding (a scientific thing~) will eventually flow different action (an artistic and engineering thing), which because it is based more closely on the system that has created us, should in the long run be better for us. Of course creation involves annihilation, down goes a forest to build a city, and the annihilation will cause pain and opposition, but experience shows that rational public measures based on science are generally accepted without two much of a fight because their benefits are so clear (like sewerage).
[page 164]
Theology, like science in general, can be a source of hope. The way that an initial mass of Hydrogen has elaborated itself into Earth and its inhabitants is an example of what can be done. Things are not always as bad as they seem, and a simple change (sewerage again) can make a big difference. The problem is generating the political will to make the change, eg introduce a carbon free energy system, or at least 100% recycling of the volume of carbon used for energy transport and storage.
STORAGE = TRANSPORT THROUGH TIME
We conjecture a theorem that says that the alphabet of the Universe (its fixed points) is the countably infinite set of computable functions. These assembled in various permutations and permutations of permutations give is the Universe we observe.
Tuesday 7 May 2013
The art of love covers everything really insofar as we can treat it formally as the resolution of the potential into a set of stationary points. The situation of being 'in love', ie 'in' a potential is a dynamic system whose fixed points are the consequences of being in love, having children, building houses, public government and health care and so on. Isomorphic up to complexity are the behaviour of an electron in an atom responding to the potentials of its interactions with all the other charges in the atom, ie all the channels of communication open to it where the communicants speak 'electric'.
[page 165]
We might attribute both bosonic and fermionic responses to the potential we call love. From our point of view, such potentials are given, not made. God says love your neighbour, but this may not be as easy or natural as the falling in species of love, which happens to us without intelligent design. First comes the falling in love and then the changes that one must make to deal with it, sharing the house and housework, etc.
The backsliding from Vatican II and the dominance of the papacy and curia indicate that the so called evidence for the supremacy of the Church is suspect, the Church only being able to maintain its position be suppressing the natural creativity of its members. Küng
'bound by the iron chains of curial dogmatism.'
Modernis oath: The Church does very well in characterizing my position in the formula 'si quis (natural theology) anathema sit..
Mental enslavement. Looking at the sources of Christianity and the attitude of Popes, dictators and other monsters, this is the preferred method of control, backed up with various levels of violence. One gathers that on the whole the history of education is a litany of violence, spare the rod (etc) and spoil the child, ie have to deal with a free and independent child. Illich is strongly onto this. The main tool is our instinctive need to fit in (quite important for survival) manipulated to create 'uniform'' children and pick off the outliers. The curial or bureaucratic approach, the systematic implementation of a limited formalism. Illich
[page 166]
Theology, rational scientific investment and Pascal's wager.
O'Hara Butterfield 8 Penguin page 91: '[Gloria] wanted to be like other women, now, for the time being. She didn't want to be the only one of her type in the world. She didn't want to be a marked girl, who couldn't get on with the rest of the world. O'HaraBy western standards I probably took my religion very seriously, or made out I did. Maybe I entered the monastery to hide from real life, sex, war, work, and become a eunuch and a freeloader by divine right, the divine right that the religious orders have defined for themselves under the umbrella of divine papal right.
Consent to communicate. Spiritual / carnal knowledge. To some extent the Church respects the belief that people cannot consent to carnal knowledge until a certain age. But it certainly forces 'spiritual' knowledge on people at any age without much interest in their consent.
page 195: 'So much depended on her consent, and her consent depended so much on his approach.
It may be that since the Galileo affair theology has been so discredited in the scientific mind as to stand no chance of resurrection, principally because the vast bulk of modern theology is based on the uncorroborated fictions of the Bible and related literature. To rebuild theology, we have to start from a firm foundation, not ancient fiction, but reality, the way things are which we may take to be a representation of God.
[page 167]
Wednesday 8 May 2013
Locke Two Treatises page 6: '§. 3. In this last age a generation of men has sprung up amongst us, that would flatter princes with an opinion, that they have a divine right of absolute power, . . . ' ie the power to kill at will. Locke
You ask for Australian theology. My experience is that theology is a closed shop, a confessional exercise based on faith. The established religions no longer do much torturing and burning, but the Catholic Church has frequently demonstrated that it will take away the livelihood and silence any deviant from the established dogma who falls within its power. My first experience of this shock was when I was asked to leave the Order of ~preachers for exploring the idea proposed here, that God and the Universe are one and so we can learn how o love in the Universe by listening to the Universe, not some coterie of powerful old men who have arrogated to themselves a divine right to dogmatize. No I am free of all that an old age pensioner supported by the Australian people, free to develop and propagate a new scientific theology fit to attract the attention and consent of all who take ther experiences of this life seriously.
From a moral point fo view the Roman Catholic Church is now totally discredited by its global cover-up of the crimes of its clergy and it can only redeem itself by getting real in the sense understood by modern society. This trend requires the policy in all fields to be based as much as possible on evidence. Consequently theology, the keystone of the sciences, can no longer base itself on ancient fiction but must face
[page 168]
the World, that is face God.The transfinite computer network is the wave function of the Univere, or more formally the set (in spacetime) of the fixed points in the divine dynamics.
Locke page 7: 'Adam was an absolute monarch and so are all princes ever since.'
page 8: 'Adam and the patriarchs has absolute power of life and death. . . .' Kings are above the laws.
Natural selection (which works at all levels of the network, our choices are our contribution to natural selection) can sometimes lead to arms races that are of no practical benefit to the competing parties. From the meliorist point of view, arms races and consequent wars are to be deprecated, they are from the point of view of a more optimal system, errors. One can only declare an event an error from the point of view of some working system.
It works; it lives; it starts, all measures of success. These days we are deeply involved with coding machines to perform comleex operations without error.
Claudius and his bureaucracy, Graves 82 sqq. Graves
The most unconscious thing I do is write. Once it starts it flows, but not for very long. A single message at a time, a word, a sentence, a paragraph
[page 169]
intended to fix some glimpse of the divinity, an element of the beatific vision, which does not come tota simul as Aquinas may have thought, but as a string of events, physical and mental.
< p> Claudius' militocracy.Why build an empire? trade, security.
The fire and the river: energetic sets of random events.
Thursday 9 May 2013
Metanoia is a very long process. It has taken me fifty years to begin to feel comfortable in a divine Universe, and looking back, I am somewhat doubtful about my childhood commitment to Catholic belief although I was good at looking pious, served as an altar boy and eventually decided to join the clergy. When I consider my own experience, I can see how long it is going to take to establish theology as a scientific discipline. On the other hand, we have Newton's law a = F / m which tells us that things change faster when the pressure for change is greater. To generate this pressure we must couple the advantages of science as a way of processing the data of theology to bring out its meaning. The practical pressure for us us the technological problems raised by our impact on the planet.
Op Ed: Who is your God? Alcohol —> AVO, cannabinoids not-AVO
[page 170]
Graves page 168: Herod: ' "For myself I contemplate no military triumphs. Peace and security are all that I ask." '
Our fundamental problem arises from the observation that information is physical, so that the storage and transfer of information, the basic functions of a living network, require matter and energy to execute, and as the set of human information grows, so does the diversion of matter and energy from the planetary metabolism , and the pollution of the environment with the by-products of our activities, like carbon dioxide. The first task for theology is to develop a survival plan for the Earth and its inhabitants. Our survival for a very long time is guaranteed by the durability of the Sun if we play our cards right. Our choice of play is influenced by both science and politics, but science takes precedence insofar as misunderstanding of the nature of the world can lead to political blunders like promoting coal as a suitable fuel.
Love = potential. God is love = God is (among other things) the potential driving the world.
What is a potential? A possibility. I love her is much motivated by the need to have children in order to counteract the consequences of death, itself the consequence of accumulated error in a complex system.
Our management of the world is closely tied to our management of ourselves.
The strength of the link between 'market' and 'true' value of a symbol is parametrized by the correlation
[page 171]
between the two values, perceived (market) value and cost / benefit of acquisition.
The most valuable intellectual property (form, design, fixed point) on Earth is the proposition GOD = UNIVERSE, from which we can model the requirements for human survival, effectively eternal life for the human species, at least as long as the Sun stays within survivable limits.
The range of human activities covers the spectrum from lethal combat to making love, ie breaking and making bonds.
The battle between science and the Pope is not yet over. Galileo lost, so that theology has retained its pristine flavour of ancient fantasy. The time has come for science to stop sidestepping the issue and begin to prepare for the final battle, dismissing our various cults of personality from all political and religious dialogue. It does not matter what the saints said or say, what we want is a peaceful global community in which everyone is treated fairly and there are no chosen people at any scale.
Friday 10 May 2013
Graves page 373: ' "I no no sound so laughable and sad, / as an old man weeping for his wife gone bad." ' Maybe this is God's problem, all alone in heaven, hated by Lucifer (apparently) [and of course an experience of the old men who created God's story in the first place].
A lot of people like to think that they are responsible
[page 172]
for their own success, but they could not have done it without the grace of their environment, their dual in the space of the Universe.
What happens when we differentiate the alephs? What does C∞ mean in the transfinite network?
I will build a castle of conjecture, in the air until it is grounded by observation.
You can't control it until you can predict it, ie know how it works, how it transforms its inputs.
To the Holy Office, I wish to suggest that it is almost certain that the Catholic Church worships a false God. / Policy.
Bonding by communication. First one has to get their attention with the most radical possible heresy, merging God and the World and rendering the dogmatic foundation of the church obsolete wile keeping its social structure. A change of the common belief (rotation of axes) leaves the information content of the message invariant. God is the way things are [no matter how we look at them]. We are agents, changing the way things are for our own benefit, sub-Gods.
Communication destroys orthogonality, the two become one by sharing a basis in their tensor product space, mixing degrees of freedom within the constraint of normalization. Pythagoras theorem therefore says something about communication, but what? IOt is expressed in metric space and shows us
[page 173]
how to rotate axes since it contains the essence of trigonometry, the right angled triangle, ie triangle with two orthogonal sides and one joining them x2 + y2 = r2
They called me Brother Anthony but the name never really meant anything to me, a false identity, as though I was in the Order under false pretences, hiding.
Saturday 11 May 2013
Change 'analysis' to 'continuity' and contrast geometrical and logical continuity.
I am surrounded by situations that need my attention, like dirty dishes, dirty clothes and unfinished houses. Each of these attracts me or motivates me to work, which is an organized process designed (on the basis of long experience) to produce clean clothes and dishes and completed houses. As each such task is completed it loses its attraction which gradually builds up again as dishes and clothes are dirtied and buildings require repair or extension. What if I do not do these things? the system eventually comes to a halt with nothing to eat off, nothing to wear and nowhere to live, back to a 'state of nature'. We create and maintain our habitat by industry and maximise our productivity (toward some shared goal) by trading and socialization, ie the network defines the nodes as it defines itself. I am specializing myself into the space of theology in the hope of creating something which I can trade for a livelihood for myself and my children. Ie I am trying to find / create a niche for myself.
[page 174]
Locke: Of the Beginning of Political Societies.
FREEDOM = ORTHOGONALITY
INDUSTRY = binding initially orthogonal systems into logically connected systems by communication / correlation / cooperation.
NEW FREEDOM - The output of industry (which occupies some fraction of our time subjected to limits on our freedom, ie being 'at work'.) gives us greater freedom in our free time, ie lets us go snorkelling with our industrially created snorkelling equipment, moving in a new space.
Much of my pleasure is in work, that is in imposing my ideas on my environment., whether in the form, or writing, masonry, woodwork or steel work. And as each thing (the final casue) is finished, I relax for a while eat, sleep and be happy, meanwhile contemplatiung the next job on the list. Check the website stats and guess hor many people are receiving my message.
Invest the action; enjoy the result. These are fitness oriented activities.
The Catholic version of 'fides quaerens intellectum' assumes that the fides is true and says that is the case even if we can find no understanding, perhaps due to apparent contradictions, and must declare certain articles of faith mysteries. Science, on the other hand, tests its articles of faith against observable reality and discards those which asre either internally inconsistent or inconsistent with observation.
[page 175]
Do we keep jciii? Maybe not, it is not neutral enough for a universal theology, the only sort that lives up to its name, since God is everything.
Hamid Fundamentalist page 85: 'I felt I was entering in New York the very same social class that my family was falling out of in Lahore.' Hamid
I think the breakdown of my childhood religious certainties (I'm pretty sure it was fear of hell that led me to the monastery) left me with an open field and a fairly clearly formed idea (How Universal How Universal is the Universe?) that the world is divine. The rest of my theological life has been spent in exploring and expanding this hypothesis and comparing it to my experience of life. All of life's experiences are events which range in complexity from the reception of a photon to building a family.
Hamid page 98: 'focus on the fundamentals'.
I fel that I have a long way to go, even though I think I have a publishable morsel now, but I will not know the way to a conclusion (a halt) until I have found it. A process is a journey with a beginning and an end.
page 116: 'maximum productivity'.
page 256: '. . . I knew . . . that finance was a primary means by which the American empire exercised its power.'
[page 176]
Tomonaga: 'space quantization of angular momentum' page 2. Tomonaga
