"natural theology > notes > 2016 > Sunday 25 December"

vol VII: Notes

2016

Notes

Sunday 25 December 2016 - Saturday 31 December 2016

[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]

Sunday 25 December 2016

Monday 26 December 2016

[page 280]

Tuesday 27 December 2016

Should we question our desires? The Catholic Church says yes, because most of them are bad due to our fallen nature and must not be fulfilled at the expense of losing one's immortal soul. A deep tale, incredible in the light of modern evolution, which sees every tendency as most likely contributing to fitness and offspring, a tautological benefit of natural selection. By natural selection operating on every component of a system it is shaped into a coherent whole because incoherent courses of action are self defeating.

Trying to tell it like it is, as I experience it now, minimally modified by previous socially guided experience. Society often leads us to behaviour which is unprofitable to ourselves but profitable to others who control us through various social constraints, laws and traditions etc.

Wednesday 28 December 2016

Science is work. In the early days it was principally pursued by people of independent means, like William Herschel, who had the lesure and connections, personal and financial, to devote their energy to understanding the world. A lot of scientific effort was also sponsored by the Catholic Church, the bulk of whose intelligentsia took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience [and] worked for nothing, had no involvement in child raising and did as they were told. This had the unfortunate side effect that creative thought was branded heresy and the creators [were]

[page 281]

at one extreme tortured and burnt to death; at the other they were expelled from their orders and left to fend for themselves. Their work entrenched Catholic dogma so that it remains the most powerful political fiction on the planet. It is becoming more apparent all the time that this fiction is false and very dangerous to human society. The root of this evil is the fiction that we are all sinners, In the hands of 'authorities' this fiction has the effect of fragmenting society into the good and saved and the evil and unsaved. The aim of the Church is to save everyone using its invisible magical means that are built on the mental states of the faithful. William Herschel - Wikipedia

Nakashima: America vs Russia, round 2, going straight for the hearts and minds by information rather than nuclear force. Ellen Nakashima

Parallel processes: coupled (computable) uncoupled (incomputable). The boundary of computability [communication] is the velocity of light.

My desire to write is principally to sort myself out, as as I watch what I write I try to judge whether I believe it or not, ie that it is credible. I have been trying to push myself to a universal perspective for a long time and I have settled on pure act as my starting point, taking it for granted that a modern interpretation of the quantum of action is identical to the medieval interpretation used by Aquinas and the ancient point of view of Aristotle. We can look at the term quantum of action as a tautology, insofar as action is quantized by its completeness, containing its own boundaries, the edges of consistency.

[page 282]

The basic action is reproduction [copying] as we see in the Trinity in the procession of the Word and the [Holy Spirit]. Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1: Is there procession in God?

Thursday 29 December

Humanity: from wild animal to civilized community. What did Freud think? What do we think these days. From the Catholic point of view, being a wild animal is a sin? The state of original sin to be corrected by grace flowing through the Church / churches /communities. Civilization and Its Discontents - Wikipedia

Friday 30 December 2016

Weiring a book is like gardening. The great thing about gardening is that most things happen by themselves [driven by the Sun] as long as the gardener creates the right ecosystem light/shade, wet/dry, fertile/infertile and so on, planting, watering, controlling competition etc,. Being There

Saturday 31 December 2016

On my way from wild animal to tame element in a society that provides everything I want without the need to hunt or fight. Is this the ideal? Higher layers secure themselves by respecting the 'rights' of lower layers, generally by operating at much lower energies so the lower layers do not feel the operation of the lower layer: can a hydrogen atom tell if it is in interstellar space or my heart? Inside the Sun it is different.

[page 283]

This book is an attempt to realize my theology in a relatively coherent, intelligible and complex essay. This means synthesizing and documenting the steps along the the way, a narrative is the log of a journey, the metadata which refers to the personal experiences of the traveller.

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.

Please click here to buy a copy of this book and support this project

Ballard, Dana H, Geoffrey E Hinton, Terence J Sejnowski, "Parallel visual computation", Nature, 306, 5938, 3 November 1983, page 21. Review Article: "The funtional abilities and parallel architecture of the human visual system are a rich source of ideas about visual processing. Any visual task that we can perform quickly and effortlessly is likely to have a computational solution using a parallel algorithm. Recently, several such parallel algorithms have been found that exploit information implicit in an image to compute intrinsic properties of surfaces, such as surface orientation, reflectance and depth. These algorithms require a computational architecture that has similarities to that of visual cortex in primates.". back

Links

Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1, Is there procession in God?, 'As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God.' back

Brian Feeney, Turnbull's report card on urbn transport prjects reveals narrow economic focus, 'Until recently, it was generally accepted that urban transport and land development needed to be planned in an integrated way, having regard to what city future was desired. Transport infrastructure investment would then help to achieve that city future. While city planning was once a “tool for correcting and avoiding market failure”’, it is now much more about promoting economic growth by providing certainty for the development industry and reducing regulation.' back

Ellen Nakashima, Obama administration is close to announcing measures to punish Russia for election interference., 'The Obama administration is close to announcing a series of measures to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, including economic sanctions and diplomatic censure, according to U.S. officials. The administration is still finalizing the details, which are also expected to include covert action that likely will involve cyber operations, the officials said. An announcement on the public elements of the response could come as early as this week.' back

George C Edwards III, Can Trump persuade Americans to support his agenda? Its not likely., 'Earlier this year, the Pew Research Center found that 45 percent of Republicans said that Democratic policies were not only wrong but “threaten the nation.” Forty-one percent of Democrats viewed GOP policies in equally stark terms.' back

Gideon Levy, Opinion //UN Resolution Is a Breath of Hope in a Sea of Darkness and Depair, 'On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to establish a Jewish state (alongside an Arab state) in the Land of Israel. Sixty-nine years later, on December 23, 2016, the UN Security Council voted to try to save it. Resolution 2334 that was approved Friday is a gust of good news, a breath of hope in the sea of darkness and despair of recent years.' back

Civilization and Its Discontents - Wikipedia, Civilization and Its Discontents - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In this seminal book, Sigmund Freud enumerates what he sees as the fundamental tensions between civilization and the individual. The primary friction, he asserts, stems from the individual's quest for instinctive freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts.' back

The Wealth of Nations - Wikipedia, The Wealth of Nations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, generally referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations, is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, it is a reflection on economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and argues that free market economies are more productive and beneficial to their societies. The book is a fundamental work in classical economics.' back

Miklos Haraszti, I watched a populist leader rise in my country. That's why I'm genuinely worried for America, 'Hungary, my country, has in the past half-decade morphed from an exemplary post-Cold War democracy into a populist autocracy. Here are a few eerie parallels that have made it easy for Hungarians to put Donald Trump on their political map: Prime Minister Viktor Orban has depicted migrants as rapists, job-stealers, terrorists and “poison” for the nation, and built a vast fence along Hungary’s southern border. The popularity of his nativist agitation has allowed him to easily debunk as unpatriotic or partisan any resistance to his self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which he said he modeled after “successful states” such as Russia and Turkey. back

Philip Wen, China striggles to suppress debate around Lei Yang case and police brutality, 'The Communist Party, while espousing a strengthened focus on rule of law in China under President Xi Jinping, has had to contend with higher expectations from China's ever-expanding middle class as living and education standards rise. . . . "This shows the rise of people's awareness of the law," another prominent lawyer, Li Xiaolin, said. "Indeed this [awareness] is the most significant progress of the rule of law in recent years." ' back

Ruth Eglash, After U.N. resolution on settlements, Israeli's say the worst is yet to come, 'JERUSALEM — Israeli officials fear that a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal and a barrier to peace could be the start of a wave of international declarations against the country.' back

Sam Biddle, Here's the public evidence Russia hackd the DNC - Its not enough, 'There are some good reasons to believe Russians had something to do with the breaches into email accounts belonging to members of the Democratic party, which proved varyingly embarrassing or disruptive for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But “good” doesn’t necessarily mean good enough to indict Russia’s head of state for sabotaging our democracy.' back

Samuel G. Freedman, 'Church Millitant' Theology Is put to New, and Politicized, Use, back

Stanley L. Cohen, Israel's never-ending crimes: It's not just settlements, 'In point of fact, from its arrogant perch, Israel has not just committed unspeakable acts of genocide but done so with absolute transparency as if to say to the rest of the world: there we did it, and we are well beyond the reach of international law. Make no mistake about it, the sum total of Israel's efforts these past 68 years is nothing short of the deliberate infliction upon Palestinians, as a cognizable group, conditions of life and death calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.' back

Steven L Hall, Why the CIA won't want togo public with evidence of Russian hacking., 'There are systems in place, in other words, to ensure good intelligence is shared securely within the government. There are not many systems in place that are designed to read the public in.' back

William Herschel - Wikipedia, William Herschel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Frederick William Herschel, KH, FRS (15 November 1738 – 25 August 1822) was a British astronomer and composer of German origin, and brother of fellow astronomer Caroline Herschel, with whom he worked. Born in the Electorate of Hanover, Herschel followed his father into the Military Band of Hanover, before migrating to Great Britain in 1757 at the age of nineteen.' back