vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 30 March 2014 - Saturday 5 April 2014]
[page 105]
Sunday 30 March 2014
[page 106]
The Drum: Heartless Bastards
Heartless bastards
If you are looking for an easy win, the best time to kick people is when they are down. This is the what a heartless bastard would do, and the Royal Commission into Institutional responses to Child Sexual Abuse has given us plenty of reason to suspect Cardinal Pell and his crew of heartless bastardry.
This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect from a Church that claims to market a religion of love. Or is it? If the Royal Commission is anything to go by, the Church is more interested in money than love. Pell scored a resounding victory for the money when his lawyers established that the “church” is an unincorporated association that cannot sue or be sued. Like the communist party of China, the Church is outside the law.
Child sexual abuse is a big issue. I was not sexually abused, but suffered the routine emotional and physical abuse that went with a Catholic education. The teachers, noting my dislike of muscular sport, dubbed me a round shouldered slob. They aso spent a lot of time emphasizing my sinfulness. I feel that I can speak freelya t last because they are all dead now.
Their efforts led me to join the Dominican Order in the hope that such an extreme act would get me to heaven. The cause of this action was that they convinced me that I was such a sinner that I had no hope otherwise. Child psychological abuse. In the Order I got a detailed look at the inner workings of Catholic theology.
Luckily the Order found me to be an unbeliever and threw me out after about five years. By then I had seen enough to realize that the whole enterprise has feet of clay standing on sand The Church is rotten to the core. Its very reason for its existence, “sin” is, scientifically, false. Its sexual deviance is just one symptom of this error.
The Church has concocted a “history of salvation” to justify its existence, Catholic theology sees us as defective persons in a defective world. Our defects are a consequence of the “Fall” described in the book of Genesis. The fall causes every born human (except the “virgin Mary”) to lack the “sanctifying grace” necessary to get into heaven. As the story goes, God sent his son Jesus of Nazareth to be cruelly murdered to placate himself for this human sin. One obtains a new supply of sanctifying grace from this “redemption” by being baptized into the Catholic Church.
All this is a political history, devised by a priestly elite to control the faithful. Despite its manifest success, this justification is purely fictional. The new Pope Francis has done a lot to improve the Church’s image, but he is powerless to change underlying doctrines and dogmas without destroying the Church.
As Pell’s activities suggest, the Church sees itself as above any human law, responding only to the divine law which it has constructed to justify its own existence.
In a recent article in the Conversation, Lawrence Torcello asks whether misinformation about climate is criminally negligent. He argues that that scientists have an ethical obligation to communicate their findings as clearly as possible to the public when such findings are relevant to public policy. One might extend the same ethical ideas to thelogians. At present theology is predominantly Catholic enterprise.
The issue of science vs religious fiction first came to a head in the time of Galileo. As we know, Galielo's scientific position won the war, but he personally lost the battle. To save his life from the Inquisition he was required to 'abjure, curse and detest' things that he had seen with his own eyes. Nevertheless he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. A clear victory for the theologians. Theology remains to this day a nest of fairly tales outside the ambit of science.
This is not necessary. There is no foundation for the Catholic God, a mysterious other outside the world revealing itself to the chosen few. From a scientific point of view the Universe as we know it fulfills all the roles given to God. It provides an explanation of everything we observe and experience. For all practical purposes the Universe is infinitely creative, both intelligent and intelligible. It made us and we must learn to live with it if we are to survive.
If this is the case, all human experience is experience of God and theology can become a real science. Since the Middle Ages, all branches of human public knowledge have gone evidence based and scientific except theology. It is time for the root science to step into line.
Theology is the scientific element of religion. Religion, in turn, guides our behaviour. As we see the world and ourselves, so we act. The Catholic Church sees us as sheep, to be treated with disdain. Anyone who questions it is an enemy. Modern civil society sees us as sovereign individuals with inalienable rights, not to be pushed around by the arbitrary dictates of popes, bishops priests or anybody else
The Church does a lot of good work but its foundations have failed. One can imagine that exercises like our Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will gradually spread to the more Catholic and less liberal parts of the world. The Church is in for about fifty years of very bad and very expensive publicity. The only way to redeem itself, I think, it to accept that its claim to absolute sovereignty over humanity is obsolete.
Before I became an old age pensioner, one of my day jobs was restumping old (and sometimes beautiful) houses. Now I have time to work on the Church.
Mt 19:24 camel, eye needle.
Marx in Holmes, The Conversation: '(Humans) make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare n the brain of the living.' David Holmes: Karl Marx and climate change
A train of thought while driving home, the analogy between the energy levels of an atom and gear changes. Ideally a gearbox conserves energy by making torque vary inversely as speed, high torque, low speed. In an atom energy is not conserved (from the atom's point of view) because a change of orbit is associated with the exchange of energy with the environment via a photon. Very little in common except their discrete nature bonded by conservation of energy in a gearbox, conservation of action between an atom and its environment.
An essay on the divinity of money: original and revised versions. Also an essay on the errors to which the monetary systems are prone, non-conservation of value = action. Action flows in quanta, but the flow never stops, it is the flow of atoms = quanta of action.
Next letter to Francis: financial management in my life and the life of the Church. It is religion that guarantees the truth of the market.
[page 107]
There are two parallel values in human life, romance and money. Romance is the key to reproduction, Money is the key to financing the survival of the children. Juggling the family finances and juggling the national finances are the same problem at different scales. Theology and banking, we need to implelent symmetries in our systems analogous to the symmertries in natural (physical) systems [because symmetries help toward efficient processing via unchanging algorithms].
Theology provides a reference frame for humanity. They are duals, intertwined molluscs.
How does the dynamic world interface with the logical world? Via the silicon chip, a system which maps between physics and logic.
Our assumption that God and the World are identical means that our model of god must be the same as our mode of the world, both being representatives of the theory of everything.
The tabloid newspapers may be the ultimate moral arbiters for many people guided by their praise and outrage.
Quantum mechanics predicts the nature and frequency of the traffic on the quantum network. Two systems cannot communicate unless they share a basis. Zurek. This may take a while to organize, determining the frequency of communication. Wojciech Hubert Zurek
The right wing want to simplify the society down to their own simple business plans while the left knows (?) that maximum entropy is the path to stability.
Complex points: a whole novel is a point in novel space, the point carries as much data as a whole written novel. The novel is the dual of the point in novel space. The Universe is a point in transfinite space (Local - finite space).
Monday 31 March 2014
Desire (that is potential) is great but it is not sufficient for action, One must also have a consistent path to follow to implement the desire, and the search for such a path is like the search for insight, something that has more to do with experience and chance than pressure and potential. The endless wait for the lucky break, like the search mor MH370. The practical thing is to try to narrow the search by dreaming up constraints, like the computability of the predictable features of the Universe.
Monday 31 March 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
This is my sixth letter to you, without reply. As I have told you before, I will keep writing to you until you reply, because I know that you will reply when you finally realize the irrefutable truth of what I am trying to tell you.
What I am trying to tell you is that there is no evidence for the Catholic hypothesis that God is a mysterious entity entirely distinct from the Universe. Blind faith in this hypothesis is no longer good enough in the modern world since it is not supported by credible evidence. Each of these letters is a restatement of that fact.
The change I wish to make to Catholic dogma is minimal - in information theoretical terms just 1 bit. I wish to change the sentence God is not the Universe to God is the Universe. Since these two propositions are contradictory, the logical principle of the excluded middle tells us that only one of them can be right.
For scientists faith only carries the weight of an hypothesis to be tested. The content faith can very easily be false if it is imparted by teachers ignorant of the truth. I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the Catholic faith by nuns, brothers and priests long before I had developed any notion of critically filtering the things I was told. The ‘faith’ became part of my mental structure, deeply embedded in my memory, and I can imagine that I would believe those things to this day if my life had taken a different course.
I have already explained to you how the weakness of Bernard Lonergan’s argument for the transcendence of God led me to the notion that God is not so much transcendent as the actual environment in which we live and breathe and have our being. This seemed to me to be an enormous simplification of theology. Instead of having to understand God at a distance through the dim and ancient eyes of the Bible and the Church we could see God directly.
I was then unaware of the massive moral failings of the Church that have since become manifest. The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has in the last week revealed the vicious attack that the Church, in the person of Cardinal George Pell, made on a victim of abuse. It was revealed that Pell’s lawyers were able to establish that the Catholic Church in New South Wales is an unincorporated association which can neither be sue or be sued. This decision protects the Church’s billions from being paid our in compensation to its victims.
We may guess that these discoveries are just the tip of the iceberg of the Church’s crimes against humanity. One can imagine that exercises like our Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will gradually spread to the more Catholic and less liberal parts of the world. The Church is in for about fifty years of very bad and very expensive publicity. The only way to redeem itself, I think, it to accept that its claim to absolute sovereignty over humanity is obsolete.
The Church endorses the words of Isaiah 1:18: Come now, and let us reason together, Says the LORD, "Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool. Such automatic and magical redemption is not to be expected in the modern world, however. The Church has blighted millions of lives, and it can expect extinction if it is not prepared to make restitution and radically reform,
It seems clear to me that the Church’s moral faults, particularly its sexual deviance, are a direct consequence of its intellectual faults. It seems clear that the Roman Catholic inherited more than its God Yahweh from the Jewish community. It also inherited a solid tradition of chutzpah. Somehow in the early days the Church decided that it existed and ruled by divine right. On its assumption that Jesus, alone among humans, was divine, it established its own fundamental justification in the New Testament:
‘But what about you [Peter]?’ he asked, ‘Who do you say I am”? Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven."This is the Church's mandate by which it appointed itself God's sole representative on Earth.I learnt all about this in Apologetics classes in the Dominicans. Clearly, none of it has any evidential foundation. It is all made up, a collective effort like most of the old texts that have emerged from oral traditions. Using this idea the Church was able, in the course of a thousand years, bring itself to the point where it more or less ruled Europe.
Its key to success was to assume the prophetic role that had worked so well in Old Testament times. The early authors of the Church invented a super prophet, Jesus of Nazareth who was God himself, not merely a messenger speaking on behalf of head office.
The Church started small but entrained many of the finest thinkers and politicians in the world. These people could see that the business plan was good and happily added their mite to the growing history of salvation. Then, at the beginning the the fourth century some brilliant marketing mind developed the legend of in hoc signo vinces which became associated with the conversion of Constantine. At this point the Church and the Roman Empire went into business together. The empire has faded, but the Church survives, bringing an ancient Roman bureaucracy and its modes of thought into the twenty first century.
The great power that has accrued to the Church over two millennia has been its downfall. Uncontrolled power corrupts, and the Church has committed the sins of Lucifer, pride and hubris. For at least a thousand years it has considered itself above the law, mandated by God to hide its crimes in the darkness of secret archives. Much of this material is sure to leak out in the foreseeable future.
While I was in the Order of preachers, I naively voiced my opinion that theology could become a real science at last, and was ejected, as I have previously explained. Now that I see that the Church is dead on its feet, facing years of recriminations as its crimes come to light. It is a hollow and sickening shell of all that it has claimed to be.
Of course, some of the perverse psychology that glorifies martyrdom may blind the church to this conclusion. Some might like to quote Mt 5:10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." This is not relevant, however. The Church is being pursued for the evil that it has done, not for its hypocritical righteousness. It is more probable that Jesus, meeting the modern Church, would repeat his condemnation of the Scribes and Parisees (the Curia): "You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”
Although its foundations are rotten, the Church has done good work in its time and is a significant repository of human history, art and culture. It is worth saving but it must clearly reject its ancient mythological claims to divine sovereignty and recognise that it is a human institution like any other that has been corrupted by excessive power.
The Australian Royal Commission is an evidence based exercise, seeking to hear as exactly as possible the experience of people who have been abused by servants of the Church, and, in the subsequent cover-up, by the Church itself. Although it is being conducted by secular authorities, this inquiry is a step toward reforming the Church. Similar inquiries are being conducted around the world, and their conclusions are quite similar: the Church’s ancient ideas of absolute monarchical governance have failed the people who trusted it and placed their faith in it.
Two courses are open to the Church. The first, mentioned by Cardinal Pell in his appearance before the Royal Commission, is that "The attitude of some people in the Vatican was that if accusations were being made against priests, they were being made exclusively or at least predominantly by enemies of the church to make trouble, and therefore they should be dealt with sceptically." This attitude reminds me of the characterization of the Church as the ‘church militant’, embodied in the hymn 'Faith of our fathers ' which was a favourite in my childhood:
Faith of our fathers, living still, In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword; Oh, how our hearts beat high with joy Whene’er we hear that glorious Word!
As I have noted before, Pope John Paul II's claim (Fides et Ratio) that "From the moment when, through the Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is 'the way, and the truth, and the life'. " is not supported by the evidence,
Religion is the art of peace, and to every art there corresponds a science. Engineers rely on physics, doctors on biology and religion is construed according to principles developed by theology. Since reliable art must be based on reliable science, we have no choice but to enable theology to embrace the scientific method if we are to reconstruct a viable Church.
Karl Popper set out the rudiments of scientific method, which he summed up in the terms conjecture and refutation. First one collects data and tries to guess an explanation. One of the first explicit examples of this in human history is the effort by astronomers to explain the motions of the heavens. The Greek system of celestial spheres was an early conjecture. Then the refutation. As observational precision increased, it became harder and harder to match the observed heavenly motions to the model.
Kepler, using the best available observations of the day, realized that the planets moved in elliptical, rather than circular orbits, giving new degrees of freedom to the model, enabling it to more closely resemble the heavens. Newton went further, inventing calculus to found the mathematics of motion, and the process reached its apogee in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This predicts heavenly motions accurate to the best available measurement precision, often better than parts per trillion.
The whole raison d’etre of the Church is that God is invisible and the Church is the only channel to salvation: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The basic marketing pitch is ‘believe what we tell you (and contribute some value) and you will be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven, enjoying the vision of God which is better than anything you could ever imagine’. At least that’s what I heard as a child.
I feel that I came through the Catholic experience relatively unscathed, but the obvious psychological damage done to the abused ones has led me to think again. I was not sexually abused but I was beaten quite a bit right up to my last years in a Catholic school. Then the Church still embraced the ancient claim to violence embodied in the phrase 'spare the rod and spoil the child'.
Because I had a comprehensive tertiary theological education, I am in the fortunate position of being able to see the the history of Catholic theology over the last three thousand years. For me I think that the hard times are now over and I am now in a position to rebuild theology. This may take a long time, but it is essential work if the Church is not to continue being a dead weight on the human spirit with its unfounded notion that we are all rendered sinful by some ancient mythological disobedience to God.
The molested ones are finally getting a hearing and this may pave the way for the mentally molested ones. Here it seems more appropriate to say forgive them for they know not what they do. They were indoctrinated at the end of a 2000 year string of indoctrinations and so totally immersed in the system that they could not see out of it. The Christian story is a closed system, creation to apocalypse, whereas the real world is a set of events open to the future.
We are faced by two propositions, God is not the universe (the Catholic position) an God is the Universe, favoured here. Since these propositions contradict one another, only one can be right, so we can prove one true by proving the other false.
This power of the Church is rooted in its doctrine of the Fall. There is no scientific evidence for this at all. So far as we can see, humanity has evolved gradually on Earth in a continuous series of steps stretching back through the origin of the Solar system to the origin of the Universe.
This evolutionary sequence is compatible with the notion that the Universe is divine. From a purely formal point of view, there can be no distinction between the God developed by Aquinas a being of pure act and total simplicity and the initial singularity predicted (through the work of Hawking and Ellis) by general relativity to be the starting point of the Universe.
Although Aquinas, following Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle saw the complex world as totally unlike the totally simple God, the non-constructive mathematical proof of fixed points theorems like that of Brouwer shows us that there is no inconsistency between Aquinas conception of God and our modern conception of the Universe.
You will note that I have been copying these letters to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. These people, like you have lacked the energy and the politeness to reply to me. No doubt, like the Vatican Curia embattled by accusations of child sexual abuse, they see me as an enemy of the Chuch, to be treated with disdain.
Like Royal Commissions of the past, this Commission, having detailed the full extent of the evil which it has been commissioned to study, will turn to recommending steps to prevent their recurrence. Clearly a very important recommendation will be to make the Church responsive to civil law and to ensure that the Church becomes a citizen of the real world, able to sue and be sued.
At this point, the false doctrines upon which the Church is founded will become an issue. When this time comes, it is my intention to submit these letters to the Commission, and I invite you to pre-empt their effect by accepting that I have made some valid points.
Pell has left Australia to take up a post close to you with his tail between his legs, his reputation in ruins. He has, however, begun to make restitution for the damage done by the Church in series of apologies to its victims, and he has conceded that things could have been done differently.
You are the most absolute of absolute monarchs, and it is in your power to take the Church in a new direction, conforming it to the divinity of reality, You will be opposed, of course, by ancient bureaucratic forces trying to maintain their position and power, but I believe you can plead the necessity of the basing the Church on reality rather than mythology if it is to survive.
The Theology Company stands ever ready to assist you should you so desire.
Yours sincerely,
copies:
President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
The Editor, L'Osservatore Romano 00120 Vatican City.
The Editor, National Catholic Reporter,
The Editor, The Tablet,
Tuesday 1 April 2014
The uncertainty of insight and the uncertainty of quantum mechanics are two instances of the same phenomenon. The quantum mechanical uncertainty has two dimensions: when an event will happen (eg emission of a photon) and one dimension of certainty. The frequency of the photon is exactly determined by the orbital structure of the atom and the actual transition that occurs, . . . .
Wednesday 2 April 2014
Undifferentiated pleasure, unawareness of self, in the
[page 109]
invisible (non-conscious) mode, ie when the invisibility theorem is fully operative. We can parametrize invisibility by layers. Hardware and software engineers can see all (as do molecular biologists), but users have very limited consciousness of that makes them go, knowledge essential to emergencies of all sorts. Where does it emerge from and how to we deal with it. Troubleshooting requires intimate knowledge of the system.
Reneweconomy: tracking the next industrial revolution. The theological foundation of sustainable living, Reneweconomy
The formalism, the representation of God that we can observe carries the potential that drives the world. While the local kinetic features of the Universe have a finite lifetime, the static features may last forever, like the conservation of angular momentum, energy and momentum presupposes some sort of conserved flow of each of these observables, that is the symmetry defining each of them. We understand these symmetries in the logical world as conservation of complete computations, conservation in time of the rate of action with respect to time, and the conservation of the rate of action [with respect to space].
Time is very often of the essence. I am filling the sink to do the dishes,.Have I got time to go up to the shed and find something before the sink overflows? Probably not, since I am well aware that if I go to the shed I am quite likely to get carried away by one of the jobs waiting there and forget all about the sink, coming back to a flood.
Thursday 3 April 2014
[page 110]
Friday 4 April 2014
As secretary I am the centre of the fixed organization in the Trust, maintaining the proper version of the input and output to the Trust, transforming them in conformity with various laws and regulations.
It is pretty standard practice for religious authorities to declare themselves absolute, claiming to be under the control of an absolute God (ultimately of their own invention). This position is no longer feasible when we take the hypothetical point of view that the fixed points in the Universe are divine revelation.
Real change in the Universe, corresponding to acceleration, is the change of algorithm. An algorithm is a symmetry, a formal system that undergoes n change as it directs the change of something else. Acceleration, gravitation, curved space, os a space of closely related algorithms.
Saturday 5 April 2014
We have spent a long time talking in mathematical / metamathematical terms and invoking the via negativa and non-constructive proof. We have come to the point where we consider eigenfunctions as the algorithms of the world, and having had this idea, the next step is to produce a few actual algorithms. The basic algorithm , which creates clocks, is not-p, which emits a string of symbols each of which becomes an input to the operator , thus emerging inverted. This machine is
[page 111]
closed, a not-p feeding on ps which emerge as not-ps to go around again and come back out as ps. [depending on the complexity of the system in which this operator is operating, there may be a transfinite number of not-ps for every p] So not-p is the algorithm of a two state system. Then we move up to three state, and begin to think of more complex sequences of operations which can be brought into correspondence with the permutations of the group of three. We may think of the actual algorithms we encounter as a selected subset of the whole permutation group of sequences of two operatons which we might call swap to the left and swap to the right. Because of the group structure, swap to the right is the inverse of swap to the left, or something like this - we have to bring in the three conserved flows, action energy and momentum.What we are doing is the opposite of Feynman, who devised quantum Hamiltonians to implement logical functions, We must now move in the reverse direction and explore the space of logical representations of hamiltonians, which logical representations will be networks employing the communication frequencies bwtween the elements of two state vectors, taken pairwie. In the quantum realm we assume that all the frequencies are referred to the time it takes to execute the relvant operations, Since the matheamtical computation of computation times depends on the frequency of the underlying events of computation.
My big problem was how to get from the Platonic world of Christian theology to the real world of love and war, reproduction and death, pain and pleasure and so on.
Quantum mechanics builds more complex algorithms out of not-p by timing, and we understand this by understanding not-p as a wave of probability [represented by complex functions] first going one way and then the other, from 100% not-p to 100% p and back again, the behaviour of
[page 112]
a coin that swaps its faces at random, yet in the long run halts half heads, half tails. So the superposition principle of quantum mechanics is implements by the mathematical algorithm add normalized complex numbers, meaning add angles, which (in normalized space) is the term by term addition of the complex coefficients of the interacting vectors. How do we understand this as a logical process? [By understanding superposition as the sequential, rather than simultaneous implementation of a set of states which may be considered as stored at different points in a network, to be accessed when needed]
We represent the moment of a logical [operation] as a dirac delta in the time domain whose integral is 1 = h
Space introduces memory and delay, both of which can influence timing, so space introduces the option of controlled timing, to enable certain subsets of the random events that underly quantum mechanics to controlled sequences that serve as more complex algorithms [and fixed points] in the universal process. At first the only available delay is function of the velocity of light, but then more complex algorithms could be used to introduce delay by preserving a state (memory) at a fixed distance from the point of the event, so we have things like atomic orbitals.Get this defined more sharply by going through Zee and developing a letter to Zee that explains how I have tried to meed his challene.
All we really need to know for the implementation of the discrete paradigm is [that] Cantor's theorem shows that there is no limit to the complexity of such a scheme and so it can be placed into correspondence with any observed structure in the Universe, no matter how complex. The power of Turing machines allows us to make any computable transformations we like in this system and this is sufficient for science, which confines itself to elucidating predictable (determined) behaviours of the Universe.
[page 113]
Thatcher says there is no such thing as society.
F. A. Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty Hayek
Thatcher Wikiquote: 'They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people and people must look to themselves first. . . . ' Margaret Thatcher
This idea falls prey to the fact that society does exist in the divine dynamics and we see stationary points all around us in the network communications that give us a kinematic view of a dynamic society.
