vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Sunday 28 July 2013 - Saturday 3 August 2013]
[Notebook: DB 76 Liberation]
[page 118]
Sunday 28 July 2013
. . .
Monday 29 July 2013
Solnit / Al Jazeera / Snowden Rebecca Solnit
Waiting for the non-conscious work to be done
Tuesday 30 July 2013
[page 119]
Prigogine page 66 gives special role t the observer: 'this is in line with the general philosophy already mentioned that irreversibiliy is not in nature but in us . in the present case it is the perceiving subject engaged in an act of observation who decides that a transition between a pure state and a mixture occurs.' Very anthropocentric (and traditional) as if every process in the Universe were not capable of observing every other [each 'force' is a communication protocol, all particles communicate gravitationally, and the rest use one or other of strong, weak and electromagnetic]. Prigogine
'It is easy to criticize this point of view, but again how do we introduce irreversibility into a "reversible" world?
page 69: 'We would like to associate elementary particles with defined properties in spite of their interactions.' Ie we would like to say that interaction has no effect, which is to say the interaction has no effect, which is meaninglessish!
'. . . in the representation in which the Hamiltonian is diagonal the objects are well defined and there are no interactions; in other representations the objects are not well defined.' Which is as it should be.
Increase in entropy is equivalent to the emergence of new fixed points in the dynamics. Why does this happen? 'Permutational bootstrapping'?
Prigogine page 81: 'Boltzmann's order principle': Pi = exp(-Ei / kT)
page 83: self sustaining (cyclic) processes select themselves out of 'molecular disorder' so the entropy of the selected process is not so much low as equal to the entropy of the space from which it is selected.
[page 120]
Prigogine page 86: Onsager reciprocity relations Onsager reciprocity relations - Wikipedia
At equilibrium we have reversible processes going on at zero net rate. Far from equilibrium, processes tending to equilibrium are faster than processes leading away from equilibrium.
Wednesday 31 July 2013
Why do we need monotheism? 'O what a tangled web we weave / when first [and always] we practice to deceive.' Anyone who has ever told a lie is aware of how complex it is to maintain the truth of the lie under close examination, since there is usually considerable evidence to the truth that has to be explained away. One can get a masterclass in deception from artistic works like Yes (Prime) Minister produced byt he BBC. Walter Scott, Eddington
Deceit is not necessarily deliberate, but may be a matter of ignorance. We are pretty much agreed that there is one God (or, for atheists, one not-God) but there are many different opinions about what God is and wants, and it does not see that they can all be right.
The truth seeking nature of networks.
Thursday 1 August 2013
Networks seek truth by bringing states into contact with one another, leading to annihilation if states are contradictory and reinforcement if they are consistent. We see this beautifully illustrated in the two slit experiment and all other quantum events.
The scientific network arrives at truth by 'muddling
[page 121]
through', by trying all the NP possibilities and finding a few P confirmations.
GOD = COMMONS
The divine surveillance and control system invented by the Church far outshines anything conceived by the national security agency and the united states government. the three proposiions a) i am inclined to evil; b) bad deeds lead to Hell; and [c)] God sees everything, blighted my life throughout my formative years and it is this evil which I mean to correct so too many more people do not feel the pain of control by an exploitative elite.
The Theology Company is slowly preparing to come out, and it is here to stay. Its role is not to take possession of God, as its rival the Roman Catholic Church has done, but to reveal God to everyone (and possibly collect ome income on the strength of this revelation). Its goal is apocalypse now. The distinction between Catholicism and natural religion is very clearly illustrated by the difference between John's Book of Revelation and modern science: vivid and bizarre imagination vs reliable truth.
The formal theoretical difference between the Roman Catholic Church and the Theology Company is just one bit: they say Universe ≠ God, we say Universe = God. TTC is the dual of the RCC? meaning? In the sense that p and not-p are duals. From a logical point of view (p and not-p) = 0, whereas from the pint of view of the ficed points in the Universe p + not-p is the whole. Whatever, TTC can define itself by contrast with the RCC.
[page 122]
Prigogine page 66: '. . . how do we introduce irreversibility into a reversible world.' Prigogine is essentially using the mathematics of differential equations to investigate the fixed points of the world, as we do in quantum mechanics. The mathematical existence of fixed points goes deeper that its instantiations in differential equations. So we can begin with the hypothesis that we should begin with the fixed points and work from them to an understanding of equilibrium, entropy and disequilibrium rather than the other way around. The fixed points of a dynamical system communicate it to us, messages defined by eigenfunctions.
A matrix defines the traffic between various elements of a vector [nodes of a network]. In quantum mechanics all vectors rotate at a constant angular velocity determined by the energy associated with the vector, so that the components of the vector are constrained by the fact that the vector is of constant length regardless of its orientations in some basis.
Normalization explains evolutionary competition, since it says in effect that the total cake to be shared is 1, where by a share we mean a fraction of the 'airtime', a probability.
The number of fixed points in a process may be constant, grow or diminish. Constant means constant entropy and so thermodynamically and computationally reversible. The entropy of an isolated system is believed to grow toa maximum that is associated with equilibrium. Decrease in entropy is not observed in nature [The rate of creation of fixed points almost aways exceeds the rate of annihilation?] Entropy is a count, and how we count things can change the entropy. So we see each layer of the transfinite network
[page 123]
having higher entropy because it has more degrees of freedom, all the permutations of the alphabet of the layer beneath it. So we se the world increasing its entropy through the ordering of its elements. Very murky areas this, to me. Entropy is a feature of te digital (particulate) world. The continuum has zero entropy (from an algorithmic point of view.
Worshiping at the tabernacle of fire.
Markov process has no memory, like quantum proesses, whose transition probabilities are governed by 'overlap integrals' [ie dot products].
' ORDER <=> BONDING
Instead of casting our fiction with the lives of anthropomorphic characters er have a mathematically defined network that can describe the interactions of any characters.
Friday 2 August 2013
EQUILIBRIUM = CONTROL
We can image static equilibrium in which macroscopic variables remain constant while microscopic variables are constantly changing and dynamic equilibrium where macroscopic variables are changing to reach some macroscopic invariant like the relationship between a moving vehicle and a winding road, a process controlled by the drier observing its position ond acting to maintain a constant lateral position in its lane. This is a cybernetic matter which receives little explicit attention in Prigogine's work.
[page 124]
A traditional view of holiness is that it is achieved by running away from the fallen, broken and evil world to get closer to God. Natural holiness, on the other hand, sees itself as the result of people becoming engaged with the divine world which embraces everything, but especially, form our point of view, all the members of our species, our fellow humans. At present all our worst problems are in the real of human relationships as mediated through nations, religions and other corporations.
As I get deeper into this project my distance from the establishment seems to increase. In a way I have always been as far from the Catholic Church as it is possible to go since I deny its fundamental hypothesis, that God is completely other and the Church controls the only channel of communication with God. The Church has stolen, or at least sequestered, God. Clearly God has to be returned to the commons by recognising that the Universe and allt he sources of communication in it, is divine. This implies that the observable Universe is in effect God's body, which has implications for physics In this picture, the Universe is not something created with very specific initial conditions,but is the creator itself, subject to no initial conditions, I have spent a lot of time trying to reconcile the ancient model of God with the Universe I experience and learn about through science. The foundation of this reconciliation has become, for me, mathematical fixed point theory and I see the observable world as the fixed ponts in the divine dynamics. This seems to fit well with quantum mechanics, which imagines a purely dynamic 'vacuum' in which particles are created and annihilated, that is fixed points come and go.
This approach seems to bring me into conflict with the
[page 125]
'philosophy' of quantum mechanics: 'Once the wave function is known at the intial time, we can, according to quantum mechanics calculate its value at all times both in the past and the future.' (Prigogine 131-2). The wave function is held to be deterministic,. We then postulate a loose (uncertain) coupling between the wave function and the nature and frequency of the event which we observe, the statistics of which are asymptotic to that predicted by the ave function in the limit of an unlimited number of observations. But what if the wave function is not deterministic and the uncertainty lies in the fact that true communication requires digitization and digitization implies logical perfection but limited resolution, itself the source of uncertainty. So my theological ansatz seems to demand a revision of physics, and I think this is where I am currently hung up.
I am gradually increasing the entropy af information content of this site by writing more and more., that is recording more of the fixed points that appear in my mental dynamics relevant to this project., every symbol adding a dimension to the space in which this text is a specific point.
We are mostly blind to our religious prejudices because we have been immersed in the since birth, and they are a bit like water to a fish or air to us, so ubiquitous that they are only seen in exceptional circumstances like storms or drowning.
'Emotional labour'. Sociologist Arbe Hockschild refers to it as the work involved in managing our feelings and how we express them'. Senthorum Raj Grinder / Guardian. Emotional labor - Wikipedia, Senthorum Raj
Laura Esquivel Swift as Desire: a beautiful artistic representation of the network model of God's interface with
[page 126]
the world. Esquivel
Saturday 3 August 2013
The whole of Catholic morality is in effect [a specification for the] emotional labour trying to control our natural humanity to conform to an ancient theoretical ideal. The extremity of this discipline are the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a symbolic renunciation designed to move us away from the natural world toward an imagined spirituality. As a by-product (or perhaps the main product) the elite are provided with a free, skilled and literate workforce to propagate their model of society.
The judgement of God operates at all scales: which way an electron will jump, which way a nation or a star will jump. If you do not strike a match properly it does not work. If there is an error or defect, the engine will not start [bonum ex integro, malum ex quacumque causa — good from the whole, bad from whatever fault]. Angelo Campodonico
Prigogine translated into cybernetics: the interplay of positive (self-catalytic) and negative (self controlling) feedbacks.
