vol VII: Notes
2015
Notes
[Sunday 11 January 2015 - Saturday 17 January 2015]
[Notebook: DB 78: Catholicism 2.0]
Sunday 11 January 2015
[page 81]
Monday 12 January 2015
Robb, M: page 3: 'M lived in a time of bureaucratic power, thought police and fearful conformism in which arselickers and time-servers flourished and original minds were ferociously punished or condemned to silence.' Robb
page 4: 'The record of daily life during the counter reformation in Italy was essentially the criminal record.
page 7: The Church's ideologues had laboriously set up and were rigorously policing a system of decorum in painting, which dictated what was and what wasn't acceptable in art, It was all set out by cardinal Paleotti in 1584, when M was a boy apprentice painter.
The world is a software system designed by evolutionary software engineering, ie an implementation f recursive function theory.
Tuesday 13 January 2015
Wednesday 14 January 2015
Letter to Francis:
Wednesday 14 January 2015
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
Last September, after writing to you for many months and getting no reply, I gave up on you. From my point of view, the church had added to its blatant moral failings by once again failing to do its pastoral duty to a stressed baptized member. I never expected a personal reply, but assumed that your sprawling bureaucracy was large enough to at least acknowledge my letters.
Now, after I have seen you in action on issues like breast feeding mothers and climate change, I can see that you are inclined toward evidence based positions. Your publicised attempts to rescue the Church from its extremist and fundamentalist past have moved me to resume my efforts to explain what must be done to bring the Church into the pale of contemporary humanity and consistent reality.
In my previous letters I have pointed out to you at length my reasons for claiming that the Church worships a false God of its own creation. The nature and properties of this God have no evidential foundation. They are purely political, designed to bolster the notion of the divine right of monarchs, of which you are the oldest and most powerful on Earth.
Absolute monarchy is obsolete, as are fictitious beliefs promoted by authorities with the power to harm non-believers. The Catholic Church must become scientific and democratic. The first definitive step in this direction is to abandon the hypothesis that God is other than the Universe and explore the far richer idea that God and the Universe are identical.
This radical revision of Catholic theology is not optional. Many of the terrorists of the world appear to believe that they are acting at the behest of a similar imaginary God. The Catholic and Christian Churches have been major sponsors of terrorism at least since the time of Constantine. The Christian nations of the world, particular the US and Britain, continue large scale extra-judicial killing of non-Christians to this day. Within my lifetime (just turned 70) the Christian nations nation have been responsible for the slaughter of millions of non-believers.
Given this history there is little doubt that the Church is the archetypical terrorist organization and the source of much of the ‘blowback’ that we now experience from imitators.
Apart from terrorism based on indiscriminate murder and torture, the Church has also been responsible for terrorising billions of children with threats of hell fire. My experience at the hands of the Marist Brothers and the Missionaries of the Sacred heart was terrorism. They spend endless hours trying to convince me to obey their injunctions using graphic threats of the eternal pains of hell. To feel terrorised is to be terrorised. Unfortunately the Church, true to its origins in imperial Rome, remains a paradigm for repressive regimes everywhere.
This Church can only be reformed by radical surgery. This amounts to changing just one bit in the hypothetical foundation upon which the Church is built: let us change the proposition God is not the Universe to God is the Universe. Once this change is made all else follows. Evidence based theology will evolve asymptotically to reality as the other sciences are doing.
The principal objection to this new hypothesis is that God is absolutely simple and the Universe is exceedingly complex. Ancient proofs for the existence of God are based on the idea that fixed points are inconsistent with motion. This idea is falsified by the mathematical theory of fixed points. There is no contradiction involved in a pure dynamic system (actus purus) having the fixed points which make the divine Universe look complex to us.
Some might feel that this revision of theology will lead to anarchy, but the opposite is more probable. The Universe is one, divine and true. If we learn to follow it scientifically, we also, as individuals, will become one, divine and true. These traits will help us to guide our democratic states to good outcomes. We can only be secure if we learn to fit in with God. We can only fit in with God if we know it. If the Universe is divine all science is part of theology. Theology resumes its traditional role as the theory of everything.
An evidence based theology, like any other science, requires no magisterium. It is guided by the reality that it studies. Because the world is one and that scientific method leads us to the truth, historically fragmented sciences like physics, chemistry and biology have gradually converged worldwide on a unified understanding of their subjects. There are disagreements at the fringes, but the central doctrines are believed to closely reflect the world as it is, and have proven their worth through the technologies that they make possible.
One of the most difficult tricks in the political repertoire is to get an absolute monarchy to lay down its arms and nurture the transformation of its kingdom to a democracy. The argument for this is very simple. The entropy of a democracy is greater than the entropy of a monarchy, and equilibrium (peace) corresponds to the state of highest entropy. Statistically, monarchies are doomed.
Democratic transitions have occurred with varying levels of success and failure over the last century. You have a chance to initiate a textbook example of this transition in the Church. If you can get your periti in the Pontifical Academy of Science and elsewhere to look seriously at my previous letters to you, they may see a way forward for a failed Church. Exploitation of this way might give you a chance to become a true vicar of Christ on Earth, that is a saviour, by helping to bring our ailing human systems into line with global reality.
As an absolute monarch you have the power not only to abdicate your crowns, but to abolish the monarchy itself.
Yours sincerely,
[page 82]
Turning political: Lobbying the Pope and the church administration, privately and publicly with (I hope) peer reviewed backup, ie universe divine in Zygon.
Powerful people are inclined to lie when they feel their power threatened by the truth, and their lies are greatly facilitated by the secrecy that surrounds power. God, the ultimate power is ultimately secret, completely beyond our ken, so they say.
All observables are orgasmic, ie climactic, that is they halt since they are the results of computable functions.
Papal metanoia needs a reason [because the present Papal state of mind is abhorrent]
Thursday 15 January 2015
I am one action (my life) comprising some 1053 quanta of action. As above so below. The same holds for the whole Universe whose lifetime is equivalent to ℵo actions, ie ℵo executions of one or other of the ℵo possible Turing machines.
Letters to the Pope. 2013 . . .
The Universe is divine: repent and believe in the one true God. A new history of salvation : www . . .
Sun Tzu: 'The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.' Tzu: The Art of War
Here we are concerned with evidence based theology freed from political control.
[page 83]
Art, science and politics. Politics and science are both arts. We need science to understand both art and politics, Nothing much happens however, until the politicians decide to spend money on science, and this only happens when scientists learn the political art of bringing money their way. An endless golden braid. Robb, M: ' ". . . the painters then in Rome were taken by the newness of [M's work] and the young ones in particular all descended on him and hailed him alone as the only imitator of life. Looking on his works as miracles there vied with eachother in following him . . . ignored their studies and teachers and everyone easily found in the streets and piazzas his own master and models to copy from life. The ease of it attracted others, and only the old painters broken in to the old practices remained stunned by this new study of life.' . Natural theology, data recording.
Friday 16 January 2015
Caravaggio (and may other artists) revolutionised art by new fiction (hypothesis) about how to look at things. The general trend in human development has been from 2-year-old self-centredness where we count ourselves as the centre of the Universe, God's chosen, to the realization that we are both divine and very small. I am a single act, my lifetime comprising a huge number of acts (see above) and God is in effect the same at the scale free level of resolution,
Transfinite improbability: an event in layer n has a prior probability 1/ℵn.
I want to finish universe_divine but on the other hand improvements are still coming to light so prudence dictates patience
[page 84]
(and relaxation while I have a bit of a holiday).
Robb, page 389: 'The will to control M's personal fate determined Borghese's moves on M from now on.'
ideological fundamentalism vs realistic fundamentalism [= physics]
unverified fiction vs verified fiction.
Caravaggio: The Roman Catholic Church misunderstanding of pain.
Long ago, when I first got mangled by the Catholic Church, I decided in the back of my mind that it had to be destroyed. Since then I have realized that the superstructure is not bad but the foundations are rotten. We can repair the foundations by replacing the fictions that the Church has developed to justify its existence with fictions that conform to reality. This 1 bit change at the root from God is not to God is the Universe, and we are off.
Commuting observables form a communication link.
If the Universe is digital to the core we get rid of the cosmic constant problem and a lot of other problems that arise because we think a real continuum has a real infinity of points, which it does not: it carries zero information from a logical point of view.
[page 85]
Hell and the H-bomb coalesced in my younger days and rounded out the picture of horror that I faced. It seemed to me essential to develop ideas powerful enough to crush the horrors and the hypothesis that the Universe is divine is the fundamental insight that makes this powerful weapon capable of practical implementation.
Saturday 17 January 2015
Theories of evolution tend to emphasize the competitive aspect at the expense of the cooperative. How can we measure their relative importance? One way would be to compare the number of support workers (cooperators) to the number of competitors [for an event like the olympics]. More generally, the total number of workers supporting competitors vs the total number of competitors [in a nation]. The emphasis on competition suits the Christian history of salvation by emphasizing the downside of life on Earth when compared to the eternal bliss on offer in heaven, ie unlimited cooperation fostered by the vision of God (DNA) shared by all the blessed.
Capitalism turns cash flows into fixed capital and vic versa. It is an example of oscillation between potential and kinetic energy.
Potential is an actual part of God.
The fixed point contain the same information as the entropy of the dynamics, since the fixed point is a point in the space and the dynamics and the information content of a point is equal to the entropy of the space it occupies [ie in which it defines a position].
,p. Feynman's path integral superposes all possible 'paths' by which a systen may pass from state A to state B and selects out the paths of stationary [ie cooperative] action. The number of paths over which
[page 86]
we integrate is a high order of infinity based on the points et notion that continuous mathematics applies to quantum mechanics. The alternative is that the chosen path is one of the countable number of paths (like atomic transitions) that involve an integral number of quanta of action, that is steps of computation.
