vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 17 November 2013 - Saturday 23 November 2013]
[page 12]
Sunday 17 November 2013
The rate of evolution is proportional to selective pressure. In the case of human societies we may expect the rate of evolution of ideas to be proportional to the perceived selective pressure. We may see this in the climate debate, where the denialists, perceiving no pressure, opt for the status quo whereas at the other extreme the catastrophists seek the most rapid possible adoption of means to moderate climate change. From my point of view, one way to speed up the adoption of new theology is to emphasize the disfunctionality of the old theology in areas such as human rights and our respect for the environment. We can see the effect of selective pressure clearly in wartime, which leads to rapid development of military material and behavioural technology.
From a green point of view it may be worth emphasizing the way in which the Church denigrates the Universe, seeing it as made just for us and rendered defective by human 'sin'.
[page 13]
Since the writers of the Bible and the Fathers (sic) of the Church did their work, our knowledge of the world, and the world we know, has vastly expanded. Our scientific knowledge of the Universe is, in my book, compatible with divinity. It will take a long while for this to sink in, however, given the indoctrination we have had so far.
The overal picture seems pretty clear now: insofar as the Universe is predictable, it is digital and computable. The metric of a computation is the quantum of action, and quantum mechanics predicts frequencies in the statistical sense, that is the rate of execution fo quanta of action, ie actions ,energy = frequency = rate of action.
s most of the time, even if unconscious, thought precedes action, the process of planning an action [is] based on current state and incoming information running across the court, chasing the ball].
From a computational point of view, a continuum is an algorithm which is indifferent to the size of the numbers being processed, as in ε—δ arguments where we assume that the same process appears at all stages of the passage to the limit.
Herman Weyl Wiki: 'In these days the angel of topology and the devil of abstract algebra fight for the soul of each individual matheamatical domain. (1939b p 50). Hermann Weyl - Wikipedia
A matrix is a representation of an operator a computational process.
Monday 18 November 2013
Tuesday 19 November 2013
[page 14]
A significant proportion of the wealthy and powerful people on Earth are acting under serious theological delusions that could be fatal if not corrected in time (ABC helicopter accident). The first is that the world was made just for us, to use as we wish; the second is that we live under the watchful eye of a powerful and benevolent Father who orders everything for the best according to a plan which we do not know; the third is that the World was created perfect but defected by God as a consequence of human sin; the fourth is that we do not really die, but lie forever in an afterlife in which we are rewarded or punished for things we did in this life.
All these ideas, seen from a modern scientific perspective, are very improbable. They represent what we may see as the two year old phase of human development, where the child sees the whole world as revolving around itself. It is time for theology to break out of the paternalistic mode and take responsibility for for our own existence within a vastly larger and more powerful system, the divine Universe.
Grief is a consequence of loss. Apart from deaths in the family and the loss of close friends, my greatest loss has been a fictitious one, but no less painful for that, the loss of eternal life and heaven that came with my realization that Catholic dogma is a series of castles in the air with no substantial foundation. The whole thing is wishful thinking from start to finish, creation to apocalypse.
Wednesday 20 November 2013
To Adelaide
Next letter to Francis: can the Catholic Church be saved? Yes, but it needs new foundations and a renovation from Catholic to catholic.
Thursday 21 November 2013
Friday 22 November 2013
Saturday 23 November 2013
Two Wells. Pam in emergency, then high care, Lyell McEwen Hospital.
God: 'Father' / 'Son' is a two state system, we see the states quantum mechanically as a superposition and when we 'observe' God [which we are always doing, since all experience is experience of God] we see either the Father or the Son, the system oscillating between the two states at a rate proportional to the energy coupling them. From a digital point of view, we see a two state system as a two state memory that can have two states say 1 or 0, and when we read it we always find it in one state or another. In the traditional psychological model of the Trinity the Father reads the Son to know himself, and the Son knows himself by reading the Father. The Spirit is in effect the processor. Both the Father and the Son may be enormously complex systems, but to be modelled as a two state system all that is needed in that they be duals of one another, p and not-p connected by a metric, that is an action. Trinity - Wikipedia
Gravitation sees only energy, that is rate of action. From this point of view, gravitation only sees the spirit, the interaction between the duals that is represented by the principle of general covariance, the co- and contra-variant representations (vectors) being linked by the metric [and representing the same information].
[page 16]
We do calculations on gravitation on the assumption that continuous functions are deterministic. On the one hand we may be inclined to try to digitize gravitation on the assumption that only digital calculations are deterministic (ie error free according to Shannon); on the other hand we might assume that gravitation is truly continuous carrying no information and thus respecting the Thomistic view that God is omnino simplex, that is in effect either zero or one dimensional and having at most one isolated fixed pont, the initial singularity aka God the Father. We might then turn to quantum mechanics to explain how this system diversifies to three or four dimensions.
Three dimensions of space may be seen as three independent variables that may represent a spectrum of fixed points. Not getting very far here. Back to the old idea that 3D space is the lowest dimensionality in which all points can be joined without crossed wires. Another snippet of a model that might fit somewhere.
Working from the general to the particular (the theoretical approach) we can accept Xenophanes', Parmenides ' and Plato's idea that only invariants can be truly known, and add the Shannon idea that only digital processes can be deterministic, that is invariant. So we come to the idea that the observable, communicable and fixed elements of the Universe are digital, represented in physics by computable eigenfunctions and associated eigenvalues. Taking all this as an assumption, what then?
Back to gravitation, which is interested only in energy, that is the frequency of action, that is the rate of processing, that is the rate of communication. What can
we say? The simples possible communication is the transition from p to not-p which is characteristic of a memoryless clock, like a simple harmonic oscillator like a pendulum or a spring going from potential (not-kinetic) to kinetic (not-potential) energy and back again. p and not-p may be any level of complexity, so p may represent me, a potential, and not-p may represent me when I am dead, in effect a freely moving gas of atoms, my dual, carrying the same energy but a very different structure.
FIXED POINT = MESSAGE - OBSERVABLE = MATRIX ⊃ SET OF EIGENFUNCTIONS
Have said all this before so am I getting anywhere by permuting all the bits a pieces I have collected over a lifetime? Hoping they will all crystallize into a nice picture soon, explaining the (reasonable) effectiveness of mathematics.
General relativity uses the connection coefficients of differential geometry to couple an atlas of Minkowski spaces into a dynamics (curved) space whose curvature is a function of energy density, that is rate of action per unit 'volume'.
. . .
As far as unreasonable effectiveness goes we do not have to produce a physical theory, only establish that all
[page 18]
communication is digital, ie formal, and so both the world and mathematics can be described by a computer network. Short and sweet. A string of hypotheses justified because it is closed, ie determinism.
. . .
The idea is to compress approximately 80 volumes x 50 k words (approx 4E6 words) into a 4000 word essay.
Linearly independent; quadratically dependent.
