vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 26 January 2014 - Saturday 1 February 2014]
[page 51]
Sunday 26 January 2014
I am making an effort to digitize quantum mechanics 'to the core' but this may be unnecessary to make the point of 'unreasonable effectiveness', that the Cantor symmetry connects mathematics to physics via the complexity invariance of networks. Nevertheless the invisibility theorem that hides the inner workings of the Universe is an interesting idea and it too is scale invariant, as suggested by the transparency or invisibility of the inner workings od the network prcoeses that connect two users, and the invisibility to myself of the physiological processes that underlie my visible consciousness.
Motion brings peace, forced stasis pain, so that I like to roll over
[page 52]
in bed.
Scientific theology = dynamic theology. Galileo is the father of dynamics.
The invisibility theorem gives us grounds for the privacy of lower layers vis a vis higher layers, in particular of people vis a vis governments and the internal forum vs prying priests.
We are often perverted by the organizations of which we are part because it is often necessary for survival to fit in with systems that we do not fully agree with.
Invisibility theorem applies to individual channels so a dumb carpenter who needs free hands to sign cannot explain what he/she is doing as they are doing it, whereas a person with speech can, unless holding nails in the mouth.
You are adorable. X is adorable. God is adorable. Now that the formal foundation is in place we can start deriving, advertising and explaining the consequences of the new, dynamic, realistic point of view.
Dynamic vs static: the elite go for static, the status quo
Monday 27 January 2014
Every now and then a sentence emerges fully formed from my ceaselessly moving mental sea, but unless I am in reach of a pen and paper, it sinks beneath the waves, though sometimes I get it back. So . . .
[page 53]
The spectrum of dynamics runs from eternal to infinitesimal [moments of stability], 1/the frequency of the Universe, is 1/ℵ0 which is true for all values of /ℵ0 universal or local rom 1 to the formal maximum.
The formal drives the dynamics: I now have a plan to fix the hall doors, now I just have to do it! On the other hand, the dynamics drives the formal: the limits on the dynamics available to me determine the plan I have hatched.
Galileo began the process of rebalancing the relationship between reality, politica and law. At the physical level, he based his position on an empirical investigation of dynamics, both terrestrial and celestial.
Catholics are the greatest denialists of all denying the obvious fact of death, the dynamic dual of birth.
'The Church is bound to claim that God is mysTerious becaUSe much of its doctrine about God is self contradictory, like absolute simplicity and knowledge f everything and eternIty and pure activity (dynamism).
The Vatican intellectual deficit: no new theological ideas for a thousand years or more. It is time for theology to take on the nature and structure of human society and the cancerous evils that affect it.
Politicians and almost everybody else are putting their faith in growth, but growth has to stop one day and it would be good for us to begin to explore the steady state system that we enjoy physiologically from 18 to 70.
[page 54]
I am not easy to understand. After writing millions of words I have not yet come to a clear understanding of how to express myself. The slogan 'the Universe is divine' is my root, establishing myself in direct opposition to the Church. To work my position out in detail in its historical context, I need to go through Catholic doctrine in detail, producing an anti-Denzinger. From a marketing point of view, the Church's main selling point is the eternal life of bliss in heaven. The alternative we are offering is a finite life on Earth which is subject to many ills we inherit from the history of our people. However the new theology holds the meliorist position of Christianity, that we could all make our lives very lovely if we all worked together in an appropriate and sustainable way. We have glimpses of this way in our middle class Western way of life, but [the] distribution and sustainability of the good life is still very patchy. The denial of death is the radical error of Christianity. We say of the Universe is divine death is real because no part can control the whole. Only unlimited variety can live forever and we are constrained and so subject to error. Denzinger
Quantum mechanics in a complete basis is unconstrained, the frequency system of possible states is flat (linear) [?].
The Catholic promise od an eternal life of bliss is the most fraudulent promise ever made.
Learning to get along with myself, learning about the animal I really am, not the angel mired in mud. From microcosm to macrocosm.
[page 55]
The Catholic doctrine on birth control and abortion has long been a crime against humanity based on a false concept of human dignity: the Church wants us to be dignified slaves, human within the constraints imposed by the Church as constraints on entry into heaven.
The evolution of human civility is based on the epistemological principle that the world is divine ie we must take nature, divine nature and human nature as given and plan our strategies accordingly. Ikegami
So we develop the new theology in opposition to the old theology, step by step.
Francis letter 5: Denial of death. Letter 4 Galileo and dynamics. [In the end letter four dealt with death since dynamics involves creation and annihilation.]
So we get down to cases, first death, then reproduction. [communication, write erase, write].
We attribute the modern breakdown of morality to the Church because they are such blatant liars and hypocrites. Just as violence permeates a country from violent rulers, dishonesty permeates the world from dishonest rulers, since we all have to fit in with the ruler [and are inclined to follow its example].
Neuenschwander: 'Formal definition of a functional: A functional J is a mapping from a set of functions [orderings] to the real numbers. The domain of the mapping is the set of twice differentiable functions [x(t)] on the closed interval [a, b]. The mapping is given by
J = ∫ ab L(t, xμ, ẋμ)dt
where ẋμ = dxμ/dt. The function L(t, xμ, ẋμ) is called[page 55]
the Lagrangian of the functional. Notice that L may depend explicitly on the independent variable t, the dependent variable and the first derivative of the latter'. (page 20) Neuenschwander
As civilization advances the rate of violence decreases (this is a definition of civilization and violence). At any given time it is difficult for many to deviate from the norm so when murder, rape and domestic violence are normalized it is difficult to break away from them.
Assume that the action integral counts how many operations are necessary to complete the task.
Tuesday 28 January 2014
China's success as a capitalist country suggests that capitalism and democracy are orthogonal.
Wednesday 29 January 2014
We can understand human freedom from the layered network point of view. My life and my activity depend on all the physical, economic and social networks that underlie my conscious existence right down to the initial singularity and all these lower networks must respect my personal sovereignty and keep me alive as long as I do not deliberately damage them. Higher layers, like the Government must also respect my personal sovereignty, particularly through free democratic control of their actions. The efforts by Putin to control the Ukraine and tell the people there who they can and cannot trade with appear to be a violation of these network protocols. [In a nutshell, perhaps, higher layers must maintain the integrity of the lower layers upon which they depend for their existence.] Higgins Andrew Higgins
[page 57]
Thursday 30 January 2014
The God that invented (created] sex cannot be all bad, though we must bear in mind that it invented rape, murder and war also.
Mathematics divides into continuous and discrete [echoing the division between geometry and arithmetic]. There is a broken symmetry here which becomes obvious when we consider that language is a discrete phenomenon. All linguistic objects like this sentence are strings or multidimensional orderings of discrete symbols, here letters of the alphabet in my handwriting and the space and a few punctuation marks to constrain the rhythm. So we begin with the hypothesis that all language is discrete.
The reason for this discreteness is provided by communication theory. The aim of communication is to transmit a true copy of a set of data from one point in spacetime to another.
Friday 31 January 2014
January letter to Francis posed yesterday, dealing with Galileo, denial of death, creation and annihilation.. . .
Dear Pope Francis,
This is my fourth letter to you. So far I have had no reply. This may be just bureaucratic inefficiency or a belief in your system that a reply is not necessary. Perhaps somebody thinks ‘this correspondent is not worth the trouble of a reply.’ Your public relations department, however, has led me to believe that you do replay to your correspondents.
I am an Australian and when I write to the Australian Government I get a reply and I expect the same from the Church. As I have pointed out to you before, I am a baptized catholic, marked indelibly as a member of your flock. I expect better treatment. Although I feel that this dialogue is best conducted ‘in house’ if I fail to get a hearing, the only course I can take is to go public.
I ultimately hope to convince you that it is essential for your survival to take notice of me, since ultimately the truth will out and those denying the truth will lose support.
In the meantime my imaginary dialogue with you helps me clarify my point of view and bring into stronger relief the defects in the Church. Ultimately these letters (and perhaps your replies) may form the backbone of a book
I commend you on your public relations work liberalize Catholic attitudes to fellow humans, but I note that you are holding fast to traditional Catholic beliefs like the inferiority of women and the sinfulness of the world.
These, and many other Catholic positions, are false, that is they do not conform to reality. Their falseness also render’s false you predecessor John Paul II’s claim that the Church possesses ‘the gift of ultimate truth about human life’ (Fides et ratio paragraph 2)
My aim is to show both the falsity and of the Church’s position and to open a theological route to its correction.
I like to see myself standing on Galileo's shoulders. Galileo and his contemporaries began the scientific revolution, but this revolution remains incomplete because the political and economic power of the Church has stifled the development of theology, effectively keeping it in its medieval infancy.
The ‘Galileo affair’ revolved essentially around an epistemological question: can the authority of the Church override human experience? Galileo became convinced by the phases of Venus that this planet must revolve around the Sun. The observed relationships of Venus and Earth then implied that the Earth also revolves around the Sun.
The Church, basing itself on an interpretation a few verses in the Book of Joshua (10:12-13), found that Galileo’s position approximated to heresy, proscibed his works and placed him under house arrest until the end of his life. Galileo himself was required to ‘abjure, curse and detest’ his heliocentric opinion.
Galileo lost his battle with the Church, but, as we can see in the modern world, scientific epistemology is well on the way to winning the war. The epicentre of denial of reality remains the Catholic Church. Of all its errors, the greatest is the denial of death.
The denial of death, in the face of all the evidence, is absolutely necessary for the Church. The only thing the Church really has to offer the faithful is its false promise of an eternity of bliss in heaven to those who obey it, and an eternity of pain in hell for those who do not.
I know how the Church captured me. I was indoctrinated with Catholic beliefs and culture from birth. This cycle of indoctrination has continued for thousands of years, and is common to all societies. Such ancient cultural beliefs and practices are so deeply embedded that it is very difficult to detect and criticize them. Until my critical faculties began to flower in my early twenties, it all seemed to make sense. It caused me considerable pain later on to abandon these beliefs, particularly the belief in heaven.
I quite selfishly went to great lengths to assure my salvation, including joining a medieval religious order, the Dominicans. Here I was exposed to the genius of Aquinas, and (unofficially) to his modern day commentator, the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan. It was Lonergan’s book Insight which finally opened my eyes and led me to realize that the Catholic claim that God is a mysterious other has no foundation.
Lonergan sets out to update Aquinas’ proofs that God is other than the world. He writes:
. . . the five ways in which Aquinas proves the existence of God are so many particular cases of the general statement that the proportionate Universe is incompletely intelligible and that complete intelligibility is demanded (Insight, page 678).The proportionate Universe contains proportionate being. Proportionate being may be defined as whatever is known by human experience, intelligent grasp, reasonable affirmation. (page 391).
Lonergan claims that the proportionate Universe is incompletely intelligible because it contains empirical residue. The empirical residue . . . consists of positive empirical data, . . . is to be denied any immanent intelligibility of its own . . . . (25-26)
Lonergan approaches the empirical residue through inverse insight:
. . . while direct insight meets the spontaneous effort of intelligence to understand, inverse insight responds to a more subtle and critical attitude that distinguishes different degrees or levels or kinds of intelligibility. While direct insight grasps the point, or see the solution, or comes to know the reason, inverse insight apprehends that in some fashion the point is that there is no point . . . the conceptual formulation of an inverse insight affirms empirical elements only to deny an expected intelligibility. (page 19)An example of an inverse insight is Newton' s conceptualization and formulation of the first law of motion: . . . a body continues in its existing state of uniform motion in a straight line unless that state is changed by an external force. Newton's discovery is to be contrasted to the common view (developed from situations where friction is operative) that continued motion requires the continual application of force.
Almost as soon as I read Lonergan, I became fixed on the idea that the proper framework to understand the world was established by the mathematical theories of computation and communication. A couple of readings later, I saw that Lonergan's empirical residue was model dependent: it does not correspond to anything in reality. This has turned out to be the most important discovery of my life.
Lonergan' s misunderstanding is at least as old as Parmenides: he mistakes an abstraction for reality. In an abstract way it is true, as Lonergan says . . . that (1) particular places and particular times differ as a matter of fact, and (2) there is no immanent intelligibility to be grasped by direct insight into that fact.
The physical models which we use to summarize the relationships of events in the Universe are formal constructs which were never meant to imply that there is no intelligibility in the dynamic relationships of real events such as the impact of a particular hammer on a particular nail at a particular time in the construction of a particular house. Einstein' s general theory of relativity does not require the existence of space and time independent of events.
I can see no reason to believe that the world is not completely intelligible. It just happens that neither Lonergan nor any other person understands it in its entirety. If the attempt to prove that God is other than the Universe falls down there is no reason to believe that the Universe is not divine. Nor is there any reason to believe that there is a real distinction between the entities symbolised by matter and spirit, sense and intellect or soul and body. These distinctions are simply elements of a model used to elucidate a seamless divine world.
The layered network model which I have proposed in previous letters sees the structureless initial singularity as formally identical to the classical omnino simplex God proposed by Aquinas. Since God is a living God, and, as Aquinas says, the life of God is motion from actuality to actuality, we can apply fixed point theory to show that the existence of static structure in the Universe is consistent with the simplicity of God. The ancients thought that motion and stillness are opposed. Fixed point theory tells us that under certain conditions stillness (ie fixed points) is a necessary feature of motion.
It may be objected that one cannot apply mathematics to God. I can see no force in this objection, since mathematics is simply the study of consistent symbolic systems, and we expect the fixed points of God to be consistent with one another since they are united by the underlying divine dynamics.
Galileo was effectively the father of modern dynamics, correcting many of the misconceptions developed by the ancients. Among these is the idea that heavier bodies fall faster than light bodies, and that motion is an inferior form of being to stillness.
Since Galileo’s time, the study of dynamics has made immense progress, beginning with Newton’s laws of motion and culminating in the development of modern generalizations like Hamilton’s principle to give us the Standard Model in physics, which explains much of the dynamics of the Universe. The standard model has yet to incorporate gravitation, however.
Modern physics works in the tradition of de Maupertuis, Lagrange and Hamilton who proceed on the assumption that, at least physically, this is the best of all possible worlds. I agree wholeheartedly with this approach, since I take the world itself to be divine. My problem is to convince you and the Church that this is indeed the case.
My approach is consistent with the ancient theological method known as the via negativa, ie to prove that the Universe is divine by showing that the proposition the Universe is not divine is inconsistent with experience. This flies in the face of the traditional view that the Universe is just one of the many possible worlds that God could have created.
My starting point is Aquinas’ proofs for the distinction between God and the Universe characterized by Lonergan (quoted above) as so many particular cases of the general statement that the proportionate Universe is incompletely intelligible and that complete intelligibility is demanded.
Lonergan's claim for incomplete intelligibility assumes that the unintelligible features of the world are in some way constrained from outside, in other words that the world is a puppet of a higher power which accounts for the empirical features that are to be denied intelligibility.
The point of view is refuted by quantum mechanics, specifically quantum computation. From a mathematical and logical point of view, the most powerful form of explanation, that is the most powerful generator of connections between hypotheses and conclusions, is the Turing machine. Turing machines deal with formal concepts, that is imaginary eternal entities deprived of energy, that is motion. Such formalisms may be understood as fixed points in the divinity and derive their truth value from the underlying divine dynamics
Turing machines are not creative, however, but deterministic. God, on the other hand, is the creator, whether different from or identical to the Universe. The transfinite network model of the fixed points in the divinity outlined previous explains how this is possible.
The set of Turing machines is equinumerous with the set of natural numbers. As Cantor generated the higher transfinite numbers by ordering the natural numbers, we can produce more complex processes by ordering Turing machines, so that the output of one becomes the input of the next.
This ordering cannot be determined by the Turing machines themselves any more than the letters of the alphabet can order themselves to spell words. The ordering must arise either at random, or by the action of a higher layer in the network. From this formal point of view, the future is uncertain This lays the foundation for evolution, since the possibilities are usually of a higher order of infinity than the actualities.
This layered network approach suggests an answer to the P versus NP problem: the future is almost always incomputable, but given the actual outcome of any initial conditions, we can compute 'backwards' to see how that outcome relates to the initial conditions. This suggests that Lonergan's empirical residue is not existent. Every event in the Universe, including ourselves has a meaning that derives from its descent from the initial singualrity, which we here equate to the classical model of God. In other words, the future is uncertain (as we experience) but the past, insofar as it exists in the present, is certain.
Christian theologians, following the ancient Greeks, laid the foundation of this idea with the doctrine of the Trinity. God, while remaining actually and dynamically one, nevertheless has fixed points which we call the Father, the Son and the Spirit. The theory advanced here is that the emergence of fixed points in the divinity (which we call creativity) does not stop with the Trinity but continues without end in an expansion that can be mathematically modelled by the transfinite numbers.
While some of the fixed points in the Universe appear to be permanent, the mathematical model and the evolutionary process both indicate that many are temporary, that is they are both created and annihilated. Our basic theory of the Universe, quantum field theory, is devoted to modelling the rates of creation and annihilation of the particles which form the physical layer of the Universe.
These particles unite to form more complex entities like myself, which are also subject to creation and annihilation. So I see my life as a fixed point in the divinity. I was created 70 years ago and will be annihilated within the next thirty or forty years after enjoying a long and interesting existence as part of the life of God.
Here we see an answer to the problem of reconciling the eternity of God with the life of God. The Church believes that many of it doctrines, derived from its supposed special relationship to God, are eternal. This belief is inherent in the doctrine of infallibility defined by the First Vatican Council.
The model of God proposed here allows for us to understand not only personal death, but the death of doctrines that no longer represent a true fixed point in the divine dynamics. On this basis, the Church is therefore free to revise its theological beliefs and move toward a vision of God based on reality.
If the Universe is Divine, all human experience is experience of God and theology can became a real science. We can study divine dynamics in a manner analogous to Galileo’s pioneering studies of physical dynamics. This will bring the Church further into the modern world of evidence based policy making, which appears already to be a feature of you Papacy.
At present Catholic theology papers over its logical inconsistencies by the claim that God is a mystery beyond human ken. This is to me simply an example of the ancient practice, still very common, particularly under in totalitarian regimes, of elites maintaining their power by secrecy and violence. Such elites (of which the Church is the prime example) claim that they know things that the rest of us don't, and give themselves the right to murder anybody who does not accept their point of view.
Galileo wisely recanted to save his life. Fortunately those days are past in the Catholic Church, and the most violent sanction available to it is to deprive those who disagree with of it a living. This happened to me when I was expelled from the Dominican Order. I have lived in relative poverty since then, developing the ideas outlined here which will eventually lead to the reform of the Church that attacked me.
If the Church is every to become universal and fit into the modern civilized world, it must abjure, curse and detest its ancient false opinions and found itself on the divine reality that we all experience.
Yours sincerely,
copies:
President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Cardinal George Pell,
Next rewrite of 'unreasonable' can be much shortened by going straight to language, quantization and communication (see 30/1) and from there through transfinite network and fixed points isomorphism between mathematics and fixed points of all processes in the Universe.
Saturday 1 February 2014
[page 58]
Tony Abbott and his political confreres seem to be driven by ideology (ie misunderstanding if history) rather than reality (scientific [= evidence based] understanding of history.
fqxi.org 2014: 'How should humanity steer the future", closing 18 April 2014
