vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 19 May 2013 - Saturday 25 May 2013]
[Notebook: DB 75 Reconstruction]
[page 193]
Sunday 19 May 2013
Trying to divorce love from sensuality (as the Church does) is to stifle creativity, the first concern of dictatorial monarchs. We can only fully criticize the errors of the Church by comparing it to a hypothetical Church build on a theology which is consistent with reality rather than consistent with the self perpetuation of the elites who rule through monarchs.
Processing presence; sitting together, with the new dog that has come to stay for a while, nuzzling me so that it is hard to write.
The Acts of the Apostles: the promotion (propagation) of Christianity. The Acts may serve as a model for the propagation of natural theology. We want to convert the Church as Saul was converted, by seeing the light. Luke
Encouragement of the Holy Spirit: emotional and logical convistion gradually leading to conversion. What we need to do to grow the business is to convert people to our way of thinking, our product. Natural theology is self referential in that the theory of creation explains the source (origin) of the theory of creation.
[page 194]
Natural Theology is pure theory
A New Theology is popularization, marketing, polemic.
Monday 20 May 2013
Intelligent design = planning (based on past experience and modelling of whatever it is, building a house, winning an election, etc, ie implementing algorithms known or believed to work.
EPISTEMOLOGY - the interface between faith and knowledge. A New Theology - start with Parmenides.
Love establishes an equipotential so that motion needs no input of energy. Equipotential = satisfaction of potential = no outstanding needs for input or error correction. So the tension of seeking a mate is relaxed by the organization of a mate and gives may to the new tension involved in maintaining the relationship with the mate. So an electron mates with a proton by the exchange of photons.
One might say that my adolescence was perturbed by a fairly extreme version of Catholic sexual morality. It might be said that I ws terrified of sex because it is so attractive and because the Church associated it predominantly with an eternity of torture in the fires of hell. The Passionist Fathers used to use all their theatrical talents to convince is of the horrors of hell, on the principle that only terror could prevent people from enjoying themselves. The fundamental principle was that only self control will get you to heaven. I
[page 195]
have since learnt that their denial of self extends to the denial of reality, substituting instead their own fanciful and self deluding 'history of salvation'. We need salvation because of original since This is false. There is pain in the world not because of sin but because every system need to know when it is getting close to the edge of its envelope and needs to pull back a little for safety's sake,. ie to reduce the probability of error.My theology is built from my own experience, and we share theologies by sharing experiences, beginning with physics and working our way up the ladder of complexity to our own species and the communities we form. To be one of these communities [we[ must share protocols. It is relatively easy to convert people to the value of physics and chemistry in the engineering of our environment. We are also engineering the biological world and, at the top of the tree (for us), we are engineering our own consciousness of existing through the ideas (like Christianity) that we share with one another. Our fundamental problem is that many of these ideas are mutually incompatible. The only way to decide what is right and wrong is to understand how the divine Universe works, in other words to agree on a model of our condition. Not some ancient 'history of salvation, but the true scientific story of everything, theology a verified dreamtime.
We can make moral judgements about the many apparent errors we see in our lives, but it is just as important to correct errors as to find out who (if anybody) is to blame, whether it was a matter of corruption or ignorance.
[page 196]
Christie: Elephants ' ". . . they can face truth without dismay. They can face it with that brave acceptance that you have to have in life if life is to be any good to you . . ." ' page 235 c9 ad finem. Christie
Tuesday 21 May 2013
Yandell page 146: Gleason: ' "I don't know how others may have been thinking about the fifth [Hilbert] problem, but I nevber doubted the result. Without such faith I would never have been able to keep focused on the problem." ' Yandell
More fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding].
A New Theology [chapter] 1 Epistemology: Faith seeking understanding [and if successful, strengthening the faith].
A key feature of humanity is our mental plasticity. Each of us is born into a human milieu [culture] which supports us in our infancy and old age, and to which we can contribute while we are in our prime. For this system to work, each newborn must learn all the languages and other codes that she or he requires to communicate effectively and profitably with the physical and social environment. At first our acceptance of this input may be relatively uncritical, since in the normal course of infancy the people around us can be pretty much trusted to have our best interests at heart. There are always a few exceptions. Until we begin to think critically about our world, all this knowledge [information] is taken on faith. I speak English and my faith in the language is reinforced every time I have a satisfactoy conversdation in that language. I also speak the language of building materials and can convince them to shape themselves into a
[page 197]
house. Physical language, but nevertheless many layers above the absolute simplicity of the initial singularity.
One cannot judge without understanding: Aristotle, Aquinas, Lonergan and just about everybody else except those who feel that reality is unintelligible, either because there is nothing there to understand, or perhaps because there is too much to understand. Aristotle: Metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica, Lonergan: Insight
The Christian story, lie all its contemporaries, sets out to explain the human condition and how to deal with it. Although it forms a good basis for social cohesion, it is politically and scientifically in error, a system of infallible monarchy.
Wednesday 22 May 2013
Kolmogorov: Probability, symmetry - no memory, no reason for heads rather than tails. Kolmogorov
Yandell page 385: Hilbert's sixth problem: axiomatization of physics is 'unsolved'.
Is mathematics a science? Yes, the data are the literature itself, and a formal mathematical proof establishes the relationship between an hypothesis and a conclusion using a string of symbols that are logically connected, so establishing a logical continuum between the hypotheses and conclusions.
Thursday 23 May 2013
The creative side of the natural theology project appears to have come to a temporary halt and the
[page 198]
time has come to work on documentation and propagation, as it makes its way from a hobby to a job. This job is to communicate my ideas across the spectrum from learned discourse to practical politics, the problems hopefully bringing in the funding for the learning. An early political task is to attract investors but it is hard to see what one can offer them in return for their support; how is the Theology Company to earn a living? The answers would seem to be publication of ideas for money and consultancy for wealthy organizations with theological or religious problems [also grants for 'pure' research]. Perhaps the first step is to return to academia and get a postgraduate scholarship at Newcastle University. First of all apply for the Australian Theology award. Australia was in many ways blessed by being populated with the victims of unjust laws and political refuges insofar as these people were somewhat free of the ancient political certainties of European history and so able to take a creative approach to founding a new nation under very unfamiliar circumstances. Here after a few hundred years of gestation, we have the seed of an entirely new approach to theology which has the power to embrace the whole human race on the foundation of the observed unity of our experience of the world.
Friday 24 May 2013
Science 340:483 van de Waal: 'Conformity to local behavioural norms reflects the pervading role of culture in human life.' van de Waal, Brogeaud & Whiten
Science 340:485: Allen: '. . . culture, broadly defined as shared behaviour propagated by social learning.' Allen et al
[page 199]
Science 340:431 CIFAR Global call for ideas. Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
The Roman Catholic Church is the archetype of organizations where administrative fiat overrides reasonable investigation. The issue came to a crisis is the days of Galileo, and the Church won. Galileo recanted and spent the rest of his life under house arrest,. I now feel that it is time for reasonable investigators to overthrow the power of the administrators and bring theology, at last, under the wing of science.As physics invokes models of the physical world, so theologians make models of God, the power or whatever that make things the way they are.
Network layers parametrized by Cantor's transfinite numbers. Each new layer embracing all the permutations of the operations supported by the layer beneath it. This structure is a step in the direction of the solution of Hilbert's sixth problem. An axiomatization of physics along the lines imagined by Hilbert creates a system that looks a bit like the transifinite numbers.
Some of my work is built from glass, concrete, steel etc and some it, like this , of words.
So much for the political side of things. Now to the science. For theology to be a science, its subject, God, must be observable. This requires that we reverse the Christian hypothesis that God is absolutely other than the Universe and assume as our founding fiction, that God and the Universe are identical. This idea requires testing, and
[page 200]
to test it we need to develop a model that fits both a reasonable conception of God and the world of experience.
I am packaging information, permuting my observations in an idiosyncratic way.
Galileo lost, and since then we have had to manage with two often incompatible truths, one based on contemporary observation, the other on ancient texts and traditions. There is continual friction between these truths in the political sphere which we could do without if we could just unify the truth, and experience has shown that the most efficient way to do this is based on the assumption that the Universe is consistent to that we see sciences like physics and biology become asymptotic to unity as their findings slowly become effectively irrefutable (eg we must eat to live).
TO DB 76 LIBERATION
[page 1] from DB 75 Reconstruction.Mortimer, Rumpole Married Lady, page 123: ' "Lawyers and tarts," I told her, and I meant it, "are the two oldest professions in the world. And we always aim to please." '
CIFAR, [Canadian Institute for Advanced Research] I presume is independent of political or religious control and so can consider this proposal on its merits rather than its implication.
All the processes in the Universe, no matter how large or complex, are rooted in quantum actions which are themselves measures by the quantum of action and form the hardware layer of the Universe. As in engineered networks, most processes in the network are transparent or invisible to the user. So, although I consciously use my body to communicate with my peers, I am ignorant of the enormously complex process, seen from the quantum level, which is behind my consciously observable activity, this writing for instance.
And we assume that the set of quantum process is countable, like the set of Turing machines, so we can map one onto another and liken sequences of Turing machines to permutations of natural numbers.
Saturday 25 May 2013
The Christians say God is invisible to us and we only see its self revelation. We can agree with this position on physical grounds. We do not see the isolated quantum
[page 2]
system until it reveals itself by observable events.
CIFAR LOI complete:
CIFAR Global Call Letter of Intent
1. An hypothesis
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 Universe. As a consequence the traditional God is a mysterious being known only through the revelation created and curated within the Christian Churches. Since we can have no direct experience of this God traditional theology cannot be a science. I wish suggest the alternative hypothesis, that God and the Universe are identical. This opens the way for scientific theology. For if the Universe is divine, we can expect all our experience to be experience of God, that is, in classical theological terms, revelation.
This hypothesis faces two difficulties.
The first, is the institutionalized power of the established theologies. The Roman Catholic Church is the archetype of those organizations in which administrative fiat overrides reasonable investigation. The issue came to a crisis is the days of Galileo. Although science went its own way, the Church retained control of theology.
I feel that it is now time for reasonable investigators to challenge the power of the administrators and bring theology under the wing of science. One presumes that CIFAR is independent of political or religious control and so can consider this proposal on its merits.
The second difficulty is the ancient theoretical problem that led to the dichotomy between God and the World in the first place. This problem was identified by Parmenides: how can we have certain knowledge of a changing world? Since he could not reconcile motion and eternity, he proposed to separate the eternal features of the world from the ephemeral. This idea was taken up by Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle’s proposed unmoved mover became, in the hands of Aquinas, the foundation of the standard Christian model of God (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article3).
This hypothesis requires testing. To test it we need to develop a model that fits both a reasonable conception of God and the world of experience. Mathematics and theology agree that the whole, whatever it may be, is self consistent. So we grant mathematical existence to consistent systems and deny it to those which result in inconsistency. We propose that real existence follows the same rule. God is great, but not so great as to be inconsistent with itself.
Mathematical fixed point theory provides an alternative answer to Parmenides’ problem. Insofar as the Universe is dynamic and closed it maps onto itself. Under broad conditions, mathematical consistency requires that this mapping has fixed points. Instead of motion and stillness being contraries, this theory implies that the fixed points of the Universe are part of the dynamics. Fixed point theory could erase the ancient dichotomy between God and the World.
To take this further, we may model the Universe as a computer network whose address space is represented by Cantor’s transfinite numbers. The computers have the power of Turing machines, and we imagine the computable functions which they represent are the eigenfunctions of observables. The cardinal of the set of natural numbers, aleph(0) is equivalent to the cardinal of the set of computers, and I guess that this may be the same as the cardinal of the set of eigenfunctions and their corresponding eigenvalues.
Like engineered networks, this network is layered, the layers being parametrized by the transfinite numbers. The hardware layer, described by quantum mechanics, emits and absorbs the fixed points (particles) which carry information around the network. We imagine each each higher layer embracing all the permutations of the operations supported by the layer beneath it, so generating layers corresponding to the cardinals aleph(1), aleph(2) etc. We expect that one of these alephs will correspond to the human layer (homosphere?) that we occupy.
We may, for instance, imagine the mathematical literatures as a fixed point in the dynamics of the mathematical community.
The mathematical theory of communication explains quantization. Shannon’s strategy to defeat error is to make the points representing messages so far apart in message space that there is negligible probability of confusion. This is in effect quantization. The theory of computation explains the processes that go on behind the quantized observations.
2. Consequences of the truth this hypothesis
Although he was right, Galileo lost. Science ultimately flourished but the Church was able to force him to recant and placed him under house arrest for life. The Church has also been able to prevent theology from becoming contaminated with scientific method right up to the present day. As a consequence, we have had to manage with two often incompatible truths, one based on contemporary observation, the other on ancient texts and traditions.
The world suffers considerable disability from the clash of mutually inconsistent theologies and religions. Because they lived and wrote in almost complete isolation from one another, the authors of our ancient religious traditions took very different views of the human condition.
Studies in comparative religion find many points of agreement among the world’s religions, however. We may guess that these are based on our common biological descent and our common planetary environment. The present hypothesis takes this idea further. By tying theology to the unity of the Universe through scientific method, we can expect to unify theology just as the other sciences have been unified by their critical search for models that fit experience.
The global unity of the sciences owes much to their mathematical foundations. Mathematics is the one human language that loses nothing in translation. In addition, viewed as a language, mathematics provides us with an unbounded set of words (symbols, numbers), and places no bounds except consistency on syntax and grammar, enabling it to represent forms that are beyond the comprehension of our natural languages.
Most religions postulate an invisible power working behind the scenes. Quantum mechanics takes a similar position. We imagine continuous wave functions evolving deterministically and interpret them, through the Born rule, as giving the probabilities of sets of events. These events (which we identify with halted computers) are the fixed points identified by the eigenvalue equation. In other words, quantum mechanics is a tool to identify and count the traffic on various legs of the universal network.
Whereas traditional religions often hold that God is far from our world and has revealed itself once for all, the present hypothesis envisages continuous real time revelation of the underlying process in every message that is passed in the network. As in an engineered network, the lower layers are invisible to the user. Although invisible, they are accessible to intelligence, like the energy equation dψ/dy = Eψ, where E may be an operator of any finite or transfinite dimension.
3. Some personal history
The data of theology (the theory of everything) are all human experiences.
I was born into a Catholic milieu in a small Australian town and educated by nuns and brothers,. I entered a the Catholic Order of Preachers and after a few years of study began to feel that the hypothesis that God and the Universe are identical is at least as probable as the Catholic hypothesis that they are absolutely different (http://www.naturaltheology.net/History/howUniversal1967.html). This idea is not acceptable to the Church and I was asked to leave.
In the intervening forty years, I have developed this idea somewhat, and feel strongly that it is now ready for serious consideration by a the scientific community. Anselm defined theology as fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Science begins with faith. We have so much faith in the existence of the Higgs boson, for instance, that we have spent spent net worth of small nations trying to find it. I hope the idea presented here may be worth a few dollars.
Above the human layer are further layers, like couples, families, clans, tribes, nations and so on. Each of these exists in the product space of its human elements and are beyond the variety and control of any individual within them, as the words cannot control the sentence, even though they are not perfectly orthogonal so some are partially entangled with others.
Continuum - 100% identity = 100% correlation = no entropy.LOI may be first page of TTC,
Dasgupta and Ehrlich, Science 340, 324-8. Dasgupta & Ehrlich
Precision engineering: working toward the realization of mathematically defined Platonic forms in physical form.
The principal evil of Catholicism is the denial of the reality of motion which started with the likes of Parmenides and Zeno. These people were not aware that knowledge is dynamic communication and that is can remain true as long as it changes as fast as the known. Here we have general covariance, on invariant metric being expressed in an infinity of different [pairs of dual] bases. Dancing round a maypole. An invariant relationship expressed in an infinity of different ways. John Palmer - Parmenides, General covariance - Wikipedia
[page 3]
From Montesquieu and many other sources we learn that fear of death or torture is the principal motivation to obedience in monarchical [and totalitarian] societies. In [my] own tradition we need only look at the activities of Henry VIII and his contemporaries. This fear seems to have been the principal selling pint for the Christian Churches whose hero, Jesus (also, like his successor the pope, conceived as a monarch) rose from the dead after his execution and bequeathed eternal life to us all. So even today many young (and some old) people sacrifice their lives for a cause in the belief that they could find themselves in a heaven of bliss. I certainly believed thus would happen to me if I was killed in the Vietnam war, but not strongly, enough, perhaps to go to that war. Insofar as this belief does not conform to reality, this is very deceptive advertising, and, like the coverups of crimes of sexual violence, points to the fundamental failings of the Church, Like any monarchy, the Church claims that it can say anything and enforce people on the pain of death to conform their minds to its words.
