vol VII: Notes
2017
Notes
Sunday 23 April 2017 - Saturday 29 April 2017
[Notebook: DB 81: Scientific theology]
[page 1]
Sunday 23 April 2017
Trump has radicalized science and scientists and they are on the march against the fake news cooked up by people in power. One of the planet's greatest sources of power is the Gospel or Good News preached by Christianity. It is also fake news, based on an ancient misconception of the nature of God. In a nutshell, traditional religions make their gods invisible so that they can say what they like about them and no one is in a position to collect visible evidence to test their assertions, by definition.
The truth is that the Universe as we are coming to know it fulfills all the roles traditionally attributed to God and so can fittingly be called divine. If the Universe is divine, we can see all experience as experience of God, that is divine revelation. If this is so, theology can become a genuine modern science based on evidence. Since theology is the traditional theory of everything, we can see that it embodies all the sciences which study different aspects of the divine whole.
Then deal with the objections, properties of the traditional God.
a) consistent
b) actual - dynamic
c) simplicity
d) fixed points
Op ed submission to Washington Post
Scientific theology
Trump has radicalized scientists and they are on the march against the fake news cooked up by people in power. One of the planet's greatest sources of power is the Gospel or Good News preached by Christianity. It is also fake news, based on an ancient misconception of the nature of God. In a nutshell, traditional religions make their gods invisible so that they can say what they like about them and no one is in a position to collect visible evidence to test their assertions, by definition. Fake news - Wikipedia, The gospel - Wikipedia
The truth is that the Universe, as we are coming to know it, fulfills all the roles traditionally attributed to God and so can fittingly be called divine. If the Universe is divine, we can see all experience as experience of God, that is divine revelation. If this is so, theology can become a genuine modern science based on evidence. Since theology is the traditional theory of everything, we can see that it embodies all the sciences which study different aspects of the divine whole.
Such a radical revision of the foundations of Western Christianity may meet some opposition. From a scientific point of view, the propositions 'the Universe is divine' and 'the Universe is not divine' are equally hypotheses for testing, and we shall not concern ourselves here with refuting traditional religious politics.
We still face a serious theoretical obstacle if we want to make the 'material' world divine. Almost all the mystics and theologians of ancient times have held that God is completely simple, pure act, pure being, something that could be approached only by the purely empty mind created by a lifetime of training. Yet we are proposing this world of countless complexities as a vision of the absolutely simple divinity.
The formal answer to this conundrum may lie in mathematical fixed point theories. We often use mathematical structures to model the world. The whole of our trade, banking and engineering industry could not proceed without the help if arithmetic. More generally we describe the world with mathematical functions that mimic the behaviour of the world. Galileo found that the velocity of a falling object depended on how long it has been falling, and physicists use thousands of other functions to describe other features of the observable world.
A function maps one set of symbols onto another. We may model model motion by mapping a certain set of points onto itself, so that here becomes there and so on. Mathematics shows that under certain conditions such mappings are logically bound to have a point which is unchanged by the mapping, f(x) = x. So mathematically we should expect to find fixed points in a Universe of pure action pictured as mapping itself onto itself, because there is, by definition, nothing outside to map to.
So we have two enabling conditions for the establishment of scientific theology: 1. Set aside the ancient beliefs and open our minds to new possibility; and 2. Mathematical fixed point theory shows is that the existence of fixed points is consistent with a God of pure dynamism. The fixed points are not outside the life of the Universe (like the Christian God) but part of the dynamics. We, insofar as we live, are fixed points in the human subset of divine space, parts of God.
This hypothesis flies in the face of much tradition. The traditional model of God represents a being utterly unlike the world we experience. From a scientific view, this simply suggests that the model needs fixing. Natural theology will begin to find acceptance when it can produce a model of God that is consistent with the world of experience and provides a new interpretation of the ancient models. We have seen a similar process often in so called scientific revolutions.
The Papacy depends for its power on the hypothesis that the Universe is not divine. Canon Law says that the Pope ‘enjoys supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he can always freely exercise’. In other words, the Pope is the epitome of dictators. Experience shows that dictators do not give up power easily.
Natural theology and the corresponding religions are embedded in the world and are slowly entering our consciousness through science, democracy and the rule of law. We might hope that the Pope eventually accepts the fate awaiting all dictators and becomes a constitutional monarch whose powers are defined by a scientific and democratic Church.
Autoeroticism was my original sin and my theological career has proceeded from there, finally coming to see myself my body and its pleasures and pains as divine and in no way a sinful source of evil as the Catholic Church taught me. [Now it has become (rather late in life) the physical embodiment of my divine consciousness]
[page 2]
Monday 24 April 2017
One of the principal inducers of randomness in the transfinite network is the connections made by each particle which are in may cases under limited control [ie already somewhat random]. You will only meet your future patner if you connect with them and these connections are guided to some extent by context, eg the local public houses.
Every theologian begins with their own experience. In the network model my life history is a sequence of permutations constrained by the environment in which I find myself.
Sensual communication with myself.
These days the Pope does not so much imprison, torture and kill his enemies as proscribe their works and take their jobs away from them because his main task is to incarcerate the minds of his flock using the walls built by the magisterium, the integrated thought of a lot of old powerful white men with imperial tendencies.
Populism: Ultimately a failure of education to integrate our more animal instincts into the prevailing social contract. We join societies when the benefit outweighs the cost. If the government is non-responsive to the real needs of the people, the cost goes up and the benefit goes down [until we reach the point of revolution]. I am well placed socioeconomically, owning a house and a car and living comfortably on an old age pension, although I hope my real working life is just beginning.
Tuesday 25 April 2017
Fogelsong page 2: 'As they thought about changing Russia, many Americans were influenced by ideas rooted in the religious
[page 3]
traditions of the United States. In particular Americans exhibited a duty to spread their creed, a belief that a benighted foreign people yearned for the enlightenment they could bring, a belief in the possibility of inducing a sudden conversion from the old way of life, a belief that religion is central to the virtue or depravity and progress or backwardness of societies, a belief in a single ultimate destiny for humanity, and a belief that opposition to the dissemination of their gospel is evil.' Fogelsong: The American Mission and the "Evil Empire"
page 6: . . . more enduringly than any other country, Russia can be seen as a object of the American mission and the opposite of American virtues.
page 7: . . . a movement for a "free Russia" developed in the United States in the last two decades of the [19th] century.'
Wednesday 26 April 2017
Becoming more aware of the critical importance of religion in international relations where we have a 4-way split between Muslim, Christian, Orthodox and Communist. These tensions and many more exist within nations, leading to a number of civil wars. Scientific theological and religious unity forms the only basis for reconciliation, beginning from one species and human rights. Camilleri Joseph Camilleri: The US, Russia and China: a twisted tale of personal ego, profound mistrust and foolish nationalism
A Church, and instantiation of religion, is a cooperative political unity, a set of people who lok our for eachother, formally and informally.
Some times I do not want to touch the bok,others it seems a necessary and valuable contribution to the human noosphere and well worth doing for the payoff at the end For me this line of thought has been a big investment in intellectual
[page 4]
property and sometimes I look forward to the harvest. At other times I just enjoy the work because it does seem to be getting somewhere, an interesting journey pushed along by the attempt to write the travelogue.
If every experience is experience of God, pop culture is part of religion for many people.
In research and development one is continually on the lookout for good ideas. With design finalized we go into production and there the standard is uniformity, repeating the same thing again and again.
Thursday 27 April
The Trumps want remove the regulations that make the business world confirm to the needs of the planet and the human spirit, reducing all value to market assigned quantities of money. The fact that the creative divine Universe move in the opposite direction must be the central part of the book.Evil is in some way finite in that it is the failure of an existing computable system through lack of resources, that is an etror free physical representation of the good failed by the evil. The process of evolution tends in general to increase the good / evil ratio by selecting for more optimal exploitation of resources in each generation.
We are all in some way seeking enlightenment, the key to successful living, The great religions each embody a vision of this, Christianity opts for love, Buddhism opts for insight.
[page 5]
Olcott: 'Q 107: How does [a Buddha] proceed? A. Throughout that birth and every succeeding one he strives to subdue his passions, to gain wisdom by experience and to develop his higher faculties. He this becomes by degrees wiser, nobler in character, and stronger in virtue, until finally, after numberless re-births, he reaches the state which he can become Perfected, Enlightened, All-wise, the ideal Teacher of the human race.' Olcott: The Buddhist Catechism , Henry Steel Olcott - Wikipedia
You wish.'114 Q. When our Bodhisattva became Buddha, what did he see was the cause of human misery? Tell me in one word. A. Ignorance (Avidya).'
'117 Q. And what is that which is most valuable? A. To know the whole secret of man's existence and destiny, so that we may estimate at no more than their actual value this life and its relations, so that we may live in a way to ensure the greatest happiness and the least suffering for our fellow men and ourselves [women?].'
No linear heaven, but cyclic spiral of reincarnation [seen in the evolution of 'the genome of the Universe'].
'119 Q. Name the four Noble Truths. A. 1. The miseries of evolutionary existence resulting in births and deaths, life after life. 2. The cause productive of misery, which is selfish desire, ever renewed . . . 3. The destruction of that desire . . . . 4. The means of obtaining this destruction of desire.'
So what of the desire to become Buddha [which seems to involve a lot of self-imposed hardship]?
Am I satisfied with what I am doing? Yes, all my desires are being met at an adequate rate as I work toward expressing my dream: the transfinite computer network is the backbone of my buddha.
[page 6]
Benefit outweighs the cost. Value is equivalent to mass which is equivalent to rate of internal processing in actions per second equals energy. Democracy by mass = count = entropy.
Reproduction - copying. As Aristotle would have it, putting a form into some new matter, the principle of individuation. When did individuation begin in the evolution of the Universe? Does individuation create matter or does matter create individuation, or are they a pair of duals that taken together are something new made out of nothing, like potential and kinetic energy? What we see emerging are fixed points in the dynamics. An individual is a fixed point.
We complexify by copying and individualizing the copies to work in parallel as elements of a more complex system.
The important feature of the transfinite computer network is the hierarchical (position dependent) counting of entropy, beginning with simple thermydynamic entropy and increasing asymptotically to the entropy of God / the Universe.
We recognize the complexity of the system by banning bad behaviour (which is relatively finite and self-defeating) rather than trying to specify perfecion (buddahood).
Friday 28 April 2017
Soak the sticky dishes in water and let those eternally moving molecules gradually break down the clotted food and reveal the steel or ceramic surface beneath. Minute details of God.
Tense before dawn: what do I have to do today? Relaxed
[page 7]
now I am up and making progress, ie executing chores.
A nation is not a business but a personality. Do kinetic and potential energy have different personalities? They are algebraic duals, insofar as KE -PE = 0, the stationary point of the Lagrangian of a conservative system. Lagrangian mechanics - Wikipedia
Saturday 29 April 2017
The lost feature of quantum mechanics. It was on the tip of my fingers as I moved to a new paragraph and now it is lost in the labyrinth of my mind. It was, I think, that quantum mechanics enables us to describe the nature of the traffic on the universal network and the frequency of that traffic.
Many world hypothesis is buit on the same tacit assumption that underlies the Catholic idea that an absolutely simple God can contain a transfinite set of formal detail about the whole of the past, present and future without any marks to define information, A mark is a computed conclusion, one of the fixed points yielded by a quantum mechanical model of a physical system like the precise energies of the photons emitted and absorbed by an stom.
Network model gives us a new entropy scale: fermion, boson, classical = observable, with no limit on classical (systematic) complexity.
The network nature of the Universe is reflected in the use of Feynman diagrams in quantum field theory. To get a precise estimate of any physical value, we have to evaluate an ever expanding network of contributory processes, and ultimately we might have to consider the entre universe, although influences (communications) are localized by the finite velocity of light.
[page 8]
On the internet, enthusiastically propagating my as yet obscure vision of the world.
The beauty of invested wealth is that we obtain in income with no actual work by renting our wealth to others who do the work, which may be renting out their rented worth to others who . . . who finally do the actual work that yields the return on the money.
[page 9]
[page 10]
The dual of symmetry with respect to complexity is the scale of entropy or complexity inherent in the layered structure of the network. These features are complementary in the quantum mechanical sense [like distance and momentum or energy and time]. If we concentrate on the symmetry we have no detail and complete simplicity. If we concentrate on the detail, we completely lose sight of the symmetry. The hierarchy of addressing gives logical processes [control] over transfinite subsets of the network by addressing them as a countable unit [as my conscious mind controls my unconscious transfinite body All control requires countability].
The attempt to apply it gradually brings out more features of the transfinite network and the match between the world and the model is enriched by this process of exploration and discovery, a form of abstract geography. Dope from my own garden facilitated the above insights.
Note from 12 January 2016: Next step: spin / statistics theorem. This related to addition of amplitudes with same or 180 degree phase. How do we understand this in computational terms. Spin ½ reverses, because it takes 2 steps to progress 360 degrees.
Feynman on 2 state systems: Most of the quantum mechanical understanding to be found in this book has been derived, or misderived, from Feynman.
Another forgotten thought!
