vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 6 April 2014 - Saturday 12 April 2014]
[page 113]
Sunday 6 April 2014
NOP [no operation] symmetry
Science kills fundamentalism. The religious absolutists maintain their power by forcing people into psychological conformity under pain of death.
Step 1: mapping Hilbert space onto computer network
Eigenvalue = phase overlap ==> probability of interaction
Eigenfunction = computer, Turing machine
Normalization: statistics the same as an information source, ∑i pi = 1 where observations are letters from the source which must be orthogonal to ensure error free communication.
Null geodesic - a NOP in the Universe. Then after no operation comes NOT, the first observable duality. Energy quanta are parametrized by frequency.
[page 114]
God is so simple that even a child could understand it: there is nothing to know but that it is and that it is the source and sink of all the fixed points (symbols, particles) in the Universe.
Power corrupts = power blinds + feedback fails.
Next to Pope Francis: an essay on cybernetics, communication, infallibility, blindness etc.
Monday 7 April 2014
Slowly creeping along a narrow ledge to the goal - we see the Hamiltonian and other operators, particularly the measurement operator as descriptions of the traffic n a network whose nodes are the eigenvectors, that is eigenfunctions, that is Turing machines, Complex numbers are used because computation is periodic. Complex conjugates are used because a complete act of computation is code / decode, ψ, ψ*
Crikey 8 April 2014: Jane Caro: 'Only emotions change behaviour, and only two of them do, hope and fear. . . . All successful marketing leverages both.
Adam Ferrier: The Advertising Effect Oxford. Ferrier
Tuesday 8 April 2014
Wednesday 9 April 2014
Corresponding to the narrow ledge image invoked above is an almost continual state of fear that I will fall off, equivalent to all this work being useless because I am on the wrong track and my ledge will come to an
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end, forcing me to retrace my steps. What keeps me going are the little insights that come quite often (and are recorded here) leading me on to further search and hopefully further insight.
Gallop, Conversation. The root of all political evil may be summed up in Margaret Thatcher's contention that there is no such thing as society. Here she was echoing Stalin's hope which was to destroy all social structures which lay between him and the individual person so he would follow the old czarist practice of murdering anybody who got in his way. Opposed to this tendency is the democratic constitutional notion that we all have equal rights and are entitled to communicate and organize freely for our own profit and safety. This idea is under renewed attack in 'democratic' police states like the US where constant individual surveillance is used to repress people. Whereas Stalin was particularly concerned with his personal power, the destructive force in this case is money. We have just seen the US Supreme court finalize its idea that money is equivalent to speech so that freedom of speech is equivalent to the freedom of the wealthy to buy political power. Stalin, Thatcher, the Koch brothers, the Communist Party of China and the Abbott liberal government are all wittingly and unwittingly devoted to destroying society for the benefit of oligarchs and plutocrats. How do we fight back? We need to reassert the existence of society and I think this is fundamentally a theological problem, Theology is the traditional theory of everything, It dominated social theory until the time of Galileo when empirical science began its ascent, The power of the Church was (and is) so great that it was (and is) able to keep theology in its prescientific infancy, based on the absolute power of the unelected allegedly infallible Pope who rules by a divine right conferred by an invisible hypothetical God. The first step toward destroying the [power of the] oligarchs and plutocrats is the
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destruction of the monarchical and absolutist tendency in theology. This step is remarkably simple. We simply need to accept that the Universe currently known to science fulfills all the roles traditionally attributed to God. A simple slogan, the Universe is divine, captures this notion. God so conceived is observable and so theology can become a real science. Additionally, all our scientific knowledge of the Universe becomes part of theology. If there is one thing that science teaches us it is that more complex structures are built from simpler ones. So we have atoms made of fundamental particles, molecules of atoms, cells of molecules, people of cells. We can understand all this in terms of communication networks, and because networks are scale free, we can see the process continuing , communities and societies and nations are made of people and the global polity is made of nations. It seems that The Conversation is taking up the question of the reform of the Labour party in some detail. It is clear that one of the powerhouses of scientific effort is scientific societies, and the power of scientific societies lies in having many eyes and minds concentrating on the particular problems proper to each discipline. This is an example of the general proposition that there is strength in numbers and that stability and maximum entropy are closely related. Further, social entropy, like communication entropy, is maximized by making all symbols (people) equiprobable. The oligarchical programme works in the opposite direction, reducing the intelligence of society to the intelligence of a few, reducing entropy and social stability in the process, Let the scientific theologians therefore extend thermodynamics, statistical mechanics [and the theory of communication] to the whole planet, including the people, and produce a paradigm for maximizing social stability parallel to the processes that create stability and defeat error in the other stable systems we observe in the Universe, and use these insights to reform the Labor Party constitution and its platform. Geoff Gallop
In quantum mechanics we do our calculations with complex
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amplitudes and then convert to probabilities by the algorithm p = |ψ|2.
When we have alternatives, there is interference, ie addition φ = φ1 + φ2, p = |φ1 + φ2| 2.
Feynman: 'What is the machinery behind the law? No one has found any machinery behind the law. . . . No one will give you any deeper representation of the situation, We have no ideas about any more basic mechanism from which these results can be deduced.'
Thursday 10 April 2014
Quantum mechanics, insofar as it has no memory, is non-local. Place is equivalent to memory. We go round and round on a very fine pitched spiral, moving an infinitesimal distance forward at each revolution. How does this fit the idea that my mind is a network?
The probability of an event is proportional to the square of the phase overlap. Orthogonal corresponds to zero probability, parallel to a probability of 1, the probability that I continue my life from this event to the next event, given that I will live forever (a close approximation given the rate of action in 85kg of mass.) At intermediate overlap we have intermediate probability computed by the [likelihood] of an encode / decode represented by ψ, ψ*, complex conjugate of ψ is the process inverse to ψ.
All this effort to try to see behind the scenes in quantum mechanics seems to be somewhat of a waste of time and irrelevant to the theological use I wish to make of the observed world in that we only have to deal with the observed fixed points and we can build a theology on these./ Such a theory, however, is intended to explain
[page 118]
why the fixed points are where they are and this can only be done by looking at the underlying dynamics that generates them which is, so far as we now know, quantum mechanics, so looking behind the scenes becomes necessary.
The process of creation is the process of going from dynamic to fixed, unresolved to resolved, which is equivalent to going from the unresolved and uncertain future to the resolved and certain past. insofar as God is unknown and invisible, we can make no theories about it, and quantum mechanics may be as good as we get. On the other hand, insofar as God is deterministic, we can postulate deterministic processes that are cloaked by the invisibility theorem and all we can see of them is their results, the creation and annihilation of particles.
All love stories tell of strong potential toward love which are nevertheless inhibited by distance, misunderstanding etc etc but which in the end sees all the inhibitions removed and a mating take place, which is hopefully fruitful, leading to the introduction of another new and mature particles into the system. [even at the level of fundamental particles, many particle production processes (apart from spontaneous decay) are the result of the interaction of two particles.]
Friday 11 April 2014
Woke up this morning with a good idea and no fear, but now it appears partly gone. The gist of it is that the quantum of action forms the basic fixed point in the Universe from which all other fixed points flow. [Is it the image of the initial singularity?] Atomic orbitals, for instance, are all spaced by quanta of action and there must be feedback processes in the atom that work to maintain this spacing [nodes in the waves]. The energy difference between orbitals is a consequence of this spacing as are the energy differences between spin up and spin down electrons etc. More generally, we can imagine the fixed points in the Universe as a
[page 119]
result of the dynamic feedback processes that maintain their stability [ie keep the underlying digital processes in synchronization like the clock in a computer?].
Saturday 12 April 2014
Francis and cybernetics.
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Further reading
Books
Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)
Deighton, Len, Hope, HarperCollins Publishers 1996 From Publishers Weekly:
Veteran British spy Bernard Samson returns to fight further Cold War battles in this deceptively easygoing sequel to Faith (and prequel to Charity), set in 1987. ... Deighton's carefully crafted but seemingly nonchalant narration: droll, almost deadpan fits perfectly the character of Samson, a perceptive but closed-mouthed gent who is seemingly unimpressed by events like the sudden appearance of a dead body in his ex-mistress's bedroom or the bizarre theft of a severed hand. Exciting moments are handled casually, while causal conversations are given the detail expected of important ones, resulting in a version of reality that is disjointed and emotionally distanced, as a master spy's take on things may very well be. Deighton gives readers unfamiliar with Samson's troubled life plenty of background information, so newcomers as well as old series hands should take equal pleasure in this subtly intense offering by perhaps the only author other than le Carre who deserves to be known as "spymaster."'
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Everett III, Hugh, and Bryce S Dewitt, Neill Graham (editors), The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 1973 Jacket: 'A novel interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed in brief form by Hugh Everett in 1957, forms the nucleus around which this book has developed. The volume contains Dr Everett's short paper from 1957, "'Relativge State' formulation of quantum mechanics" and a far longer exposition of his interpretation entitled "The Theory of the Universal Wave Function" never before published. In addition other papers by Wheeler, DeWitt, Graham, Cooper and van Vechten provide further discussion of the same theme. Together they constitute virtually the entire world output of scholarly commentary on the Everett interpretation.'
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Exodus, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to the Pentateuch: 'Exodus is occupied with two primary themes: The Deliverance from Egypt ... and the Sinaitic Covenant. A secondry theme, the journey through the wilderness, connects the two. Moses leads the liberated Israelites to Sinai where God's incommunicable name, 'Yahweh', had been revealed to him. Against the background of a majestic theophany, God concludes an alliance with the people and proclaims his laws. ...'
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Ferrier, Adam, The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour, OUT ANZ 2014 'In The Advertising Effect, respected advertising insider, Adam Ferrier, reveals the ten techniques used by some of the best-known brands across the globe. These techniques are grounded in psychological theory with award winning real world examples and explore how the most effective way to change behaviour is through action rather than the conventional advertising practices (emotional or rational persuasion).
This is the ultimate insider's guide, to the ultimate behaviour change industry - advertising.
Readership: The Advertising Effect is a new text for advertising students, graduates and new professionals that explains why some of advertising's most successful techniques are influential, and how these can applied to change consumer behaviour.'
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Feynman, Richard P, and Robert B Leighton et al, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 1) : Mainly Mechanics, Radiation and Heat, Addison Wesley 1963 Foreword: 'This book is based on a course of lectures in introductory physics given by Prof. R P Feynman at the California Institute of Technology during the academic year 1961-62. ... The lectures constitute a major part of a fundamental revision of the introductory course, carried out over a four year period. ... The need for a basic revision arose both from the rapid development of physics in recent decades and from the fact that entering freshmen have shown a stewady incrase in mathematical ability as a result of improvements in high school mathematical course content.'
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Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: superstrings, hidden dimensions and the quest for the ultimate theory, W W Norton and Company 1999 Jacket: 'Brian Greene has come forth with a beautifully crafted account of string theory - a theory that appears to be a most promising way station to an ultimate theory of everything. His book gives a clear, simple, yet masterful account that makes a complex theory very accessible to nonscientists but is also a delightful read for the professional.' David M Lee
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Newton, Isaac, and Julia Budenz, I. Bernard Cohen, Anne Whitman (Translators), The Principia : Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, University of California Press 1999 This completely new translation, the first in 270 years, is based on the third (1726) edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. ... The illuminating Guide to the Principia by I. Bernard Cohen, along with his and Anne Whitman's translation, will make this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students.
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Westfall, Richard S, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge University Press 1983 Jacket: 'The richly detailed biography captures both the personal life and the scientific career of Isaac Newton, presenting a fully rounded picture of Newton the man, the scientist, the philosopher, the theologian and the public figure. Professor Westfall treats all aspects of Newton's career, but the account centers on a full description of Newton's achievements in science. Thus the core of the book describes the development of the calculus, the experimentation that altered the direction of the science of optics, and expecially the investigations in celestial dynamics that led to the law of universal gravitation.'
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Papers
| Aebersold, Ruedi, "Constellations in a cellular universe", Nature, 422, 6928, 13 March 2003, page . 'We must agree now on strategies to search the proteome'. back |
| Datta, Sandeep Robert, et al, "The Drosophila pheromone cVA activates a sexually dimorphic neural circuit. ", Nature, 452, 7186, 27 March 2008, page 473-477. Abstract: 'Courtship is an innate sexually dimorphic behaviour that can be observed in naive animals without previous learning or experience, suggesting that the neural circuits that mediate this behaviour are developmentally programmed. In Drosophila, courtship involves a complex yet stereotyped array of dimorphic behaviours that are regulated by FruM, a male-specific isoform of the fruitless gene. FruM is expressed in about 2,000 neurons in the fly brain, including three subpopulations of olfactory sensory neurons and projection neurons (PNs). One set of Fru+ olfactory neurons expresses the odorant receptor Or67d and responds to the male-specific pheromone cis-vaccenyl acetate (cVA)6, 7, 8, 9, 10. These neurons converge on the DA1 glomerulus in the antennal lobe. In males, activation of Or67d+ neurons by cVA inhibits courtship of other males, whereas in females their activation promotes receptivity to other males. These observations pose the question of how a single pheromone acting through the same set of sensory neurons can elicit different behaviours in male and female flies. Anatomical or functional dimorphisms in this neural circuit might be responsible for the dimorphic behaviour. We therefore developed a neural tracing procedure that employs two-photon laser scanning microscopy to activate the photoactivatable green fluorescent protein. Here we show, using this technique, that the projections from the DA1 glomerulus to the protocerebrum are sexually dimorphic. We observe a male-specific axonal arbor in the lateral horn whose elaboration requires the expression of the transcription factor FruM in DA1 projection neurons and other Fru+ cells. The observation that cVA activates a sexually dimorphic circuit in the protocerebrum suggests a mechanism by which a single pheromone can elicit different behaviours in males and in females.'. back |
| Fehr, Ernst, Bettina Rockenback, "Detrimental effects of sanctions on human altruism", Nature, 422, 6928, 13 March 2003, page 137-140. The existence of cooperation and social order among genetically unrelated individuals is a fundamental problem in the behavioural sciences. The prevailing approaches in biology and economics view cooperation exclusively as self-interested behaviour - unrelated individuals cooperate only if they face economic rewards or sanctions rendering cooperation a self-interestyed choice. Whether economic incentives are perceived as just or legitimate does not matter in these theories. Fairness-based altruism is, however, a powerful source of human cooperation. Here we show experimentally that the prevailing self-interest approach has serious shortcomings because it overlooks negative effects of sanctions on human altruism. Sanctions revealing selfish or greedy intentions destroy altruistic cooperation almost completely, whereas sactions perceived as fair leave altruism intact. These finding challenge proximate and ultimate theories of human cooperation that neglect the distinction between fair and unfair sanctions, and they are probably relevant in all domains in which voluntary compliance matters - in relations between spouses, the education of children, in business relations and organisations as well as markets. . back |
Links
| Black hole thermodynamics - Wikipedia, Black hole thermodynamics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In physics, black hole thermodynamics is the area of study that seeks to reconcile the laws of thermodynamics with the existence of black hole event horizons. Much as the study of the statistical mechanics of black body radiation led to the advent of the theory of quantum mechanics, the effort to understand the statistical mechanics of black holes has had a deep impact upon the understanding of quantum gravity, leading to the formulation of the holographic principle.' back |
| C L Bennett et al, First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Maps and Basic Results, Abstract: We present full sky microwave maps in five frequency bands ... from the WMAP [Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe] first year sky survey. ... A best fit cosmological model to the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background] and other measures of large scale structure works remarkably well with only a few parameters. The age of the best-fit universe is t0 13.7 +- 0.2 Gyr old. ... " back |
| Geoff Gallop, The Australian Labor party and the pitfalls of the politics of avoidance, 'The problems the ALP needs to address are twofold. The first are organisational and managerial and the second are ideological and political. The first takes us to its constitution and the second to its platform and policies. . . .
The current system that virtually excludes all but a few union-based factional leaders and their supporters isn’t bad because the people involved are inherently bad – they aren’t – but because it defies democratic and managerial logic. . . . back |
| John Burnet, John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy: chapter IV, Parmenides of Elea: 85: The Poem, back |
| William Rowan Hamilton, General Method in Dynamics, 'Hamilton's first paper on dynamics is entitled `On a General Method in Dynamics; by which the Study of the Motions of all free Systems of attracting or repelling Points is reduced to the Search and Differentiation of one central Relation, or characteristic Function'. This was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (part II for 1834, pp. 247-308).
This paper is available in the following formats: Plain TeX DVI PostScript PDF'
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| William Rowan Hamilton, On a general method of expressing the paths of light and of the planets by the coefficients of a characteristic function., 'William R. Hamilton contributed an article entitled On a General Method of expressing the Paths of Light and of the Planets by the Coefficients of a Characteristic Function to the November issue of the Dublin University Review and Quarterly Magazine in 1833. The article commences with a history of the study of optics, and of the use of variational principles in this science. Hamilton then introduces his characteristic function, and explains how it can be employed in the study of mathematical optics. He concludes the article with a brief discussion of an analogous characteristic function in dynamics, applying his theory to the case of a comet moving in a parabola about the sun.' back |
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