vol VII: Notes
2017
Notes
Sunday 1 October 2017 - Saturday 7 October 2017
[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]
[page 1]
Sunday 1 October 2017
Teilhard Traveller page 80: 'I have certainly grown older, even in the last three years—even in the last eighteen months. Ideas no longer bubble up inside me with the same exuberance, the same perennial intoxication as before. In a man's life such exuberance, such fertility of mind, can last only a limited period.' I am of the use it or lose it school, and want to keep bubbling till I make the century.page 82: 'What a colossal thing the world is for religion to assimilate. Travelling through these exotic peoples this strikes me more than last time : you feel that you come up everywhere against water tight bulkheads between minds, and you have to dive deep down to the absolute depths if you want to make contact with souls and to 'convert'. 'Conversion' seems to be a very difficult problem to understand.' And he too probably needed conversion out of the Catholic Church which would only be possible if he reconceived his God.
page 85: 'There is a vast quantity of goodness and beauty outside the Church which will come to fruition, no doubt, only in Christ.' Such arrogant rubbish.
page 89: 'I had never appreciated until now how terribly China suffered from the scourge of militarism. Bands of soldiers disorganise and destroy every single thing and the warlords think of nothing but carving out loot for themselves, without a thought for improving the country.'
page 91: Le Milieu Divin Teilhard de Chardin: The Divine Milieu
page 107: 'The mystique of destruction is indeed an odd and complex thing.'
page 109: 'mystical vibration is inseparable from scientific vibration and calls as urgently for expression.'
page 124: 'The world must have God, but our concept of God must be as extended as the dimensions of the world are extended.'
[page 2]
Teilhard page 13: 'I have ben struck by the difficulty of making certain universal lines of thought intelligible to men who have never been Christians, or who have escaped any deep-reaching Christian influence: for Christianity emerges as the only spiritual current capable of developing in souls the sense of the Absolute and the Universal, conceived above all as personal, in other words the true mystical sense.'
page 138 n. '. . . I have quite definitely taken a step forward in my awareness of being now on the downward slope of life.'
page 155: ' . . . what an absurd thing life is, looked at superficially: so absurd that you feel yourself forced back on stubborn desperate faith in the reality and survival of the spirit. Otherwise—were there no such thing as the spirit I mean —we should be idiots not to call off the whole human effort.'
page 260: 'The past has revealed to me how the future is built and preoccupation with the future tends to sweep everything else aside. It is precisely that I may be able to speak with authority about the future that it is essential to me to establish myself more firmly than before as a specialist on the past.' [a scientist can only be a specialist in the past, all evidence is history]
page 170: 'As a purpose in my life science (to which I owe so much) seems to me to be less and less worthwhile. For a long time my chief interest in life has been in some sort of effort towards a plainer disclosing of God in the world.' Which scientific theology would do if he was not blocked by Catholic dogma, a potential stymied. 'Its a more killing task but its my only true vocation and nothing can turn me from it.'
We have maintained such peace as we have at the cost of raping the earth. Now we have to take advantage of this peace and the knowledge and technology that accompany it to take our foot off the planet's neck and learn to live a more spiritual life while restoring out habitat.
[page 3]
page 171: '. . . a wonderful fortnight in Central India in a setting of jungle and heavy green growth, in countryside teeming with life, since there is hardly anything a Hindu will kill.'
The evolutionary burden. There was a time when almost every male was trained as a warrior. There was a time (and frequently remains) when women had to be exploited as breeders to bring more warriors into the world contributing to the survival of the group. At a certain stage of human evolution this is the inevitable thing to do and those who did not do it effectively lost themselves to their neighbours. The beginning of peace, and the pressure on the planet, began with farming, all the means we use to turn the resources of the earth to support growing numbers, ranging from herding animals to clearing forests, mining and all the other activities that divert natural resources to humanity. We tamed nature to use it. The resulting peace has enabled us to develop all sorts of science and technology, much of it devoted to military violence because peace is yet very far from global, so that there are those who would find it easier to live by rape and plunder than by production. The weapons are to protect the production. So we are primed for a new stage, happening now, when borders become porous to information, value, production and trade and military conquest becomes senseless because you would be shooting yourself in the foot wrecking part of your own supply chain. The warlords of the earth do not take this into account and so continue in their old ways, but the force is against them. We have a bigger fear now, our collective survival and the newest evil to be overcome is our impact on our habitat. We face the naive belief, held by many, that they are protected by their gods who will look after them no matter what we do. But the real god is the universe and the universe is no respecter of persons. If you do not fit in you are selected out.
The motto of the Dominicans, veritas might have been defensible in Aristotelian times but no longer. We know better. The story of the creation and the fall and the whole story built on this episode is false. Mythology is a means of thought control. The only thought control can come from reality. Physicists have found that the problem is not thought control but thought expansion for the world is a lot
[page 4]
weirder than we think because it creates itself.
The two driving forces - potentials - energy and entropy. Energy is the driver, entropy is the guide [or attractor].
The evolutionary burden: the devil. Politics (temptation) vs justice (reality). We have learnt that very little of what Mr Trump says is true. Whether he is lying or dreaming is not for us to judge, but his misunderstanding of reality [is dangerous] and will hopefully be controlled. Unfortunately he is not the only one deluded in the community. There are many people who base their behaviour on the mythology that violence is the way. The effect, used by Stalin and others to reduce a liquid society to a gas, a dust of isolated individuals who can be liquidated at will and without justice.
Teilhard, page 171: ' [1935] As individuals, Indians are charming, but taken as a whole the country seems to be just as incapable of self government as China or Malaya [thousands of years old].
Catholicism was sown in me but it died when I saw its inconsistency. The decisive event in [that] phase of my life was being asked to leave the order and having my vows annulled. A relief but a shock. I went home to mum and hung around the house for what seemed like a year.
Teilhard page 172: 'The more I get around the world the more I find that Geneva (of which I am at heart a great supporter), numbers of liberal Catholics and especially my colleagues the 'Missiologues', are making a grave mistake in recognising the equality of the races in the face of all the biological evidence. Universalism is not democracy (= egalitarianism).' So we are not really one species ?
Government - prevent outbreaks of violence by controlling the population either by violence or distributed wealth.
[page 5]
Teilhard page 174: 'I do indeed believe that I have never before seen my vocation so clearly and so stripped of non-essentials — to personalise the world in God.'
page 178: The only way of making life bearable again is to love and adore that which, beneath everything, animates and directs it.'
page 179: 'Human Front' Sauvons l'humanité'
page 182: 'The gift of the heart instead of the prostration of the body, communion transcending sacrifice, and God-love finally attained only through Love: therein lie the psychological foundation of Christian love.'
page 188: 'It seems to me more important to create a new concept of human activity that to plunge into the feverish intoxication of a political drive which already has its leaders and will never lack followers.'
page 193: 'I am working steadily on the first chapter of [the phenomenon of] Man, a page or two a day.'
page 239: 'This [war] has cut clean across my life, but I have a better grasp of certain central points, and to these I wish to devote all that is left of me in life.'
page 242: Bruno de Solages on Teilhard: ' "Has he not already done magnificent work in correcting the theory of evolution from within in snatching the weapon from the hand of the materialist and turning it against him, and so offering the theologian a theory of the universe both evolutionary and uncompromisingly spiritual." '
page 264: '3. To pursue, as a completely private venture, my effort to re-think Christology and Christianity in terms of a humanity in process of biological convergence.' Deracialization ?
page 293: A.M.D.G - as if humans could add to the glory of god.
[page 6]
Teilhard page 298: International Geophysical Year International Geophysical Year - Wikipedia
page 306: Le Milieu Divin: 'The only subject ultimately capable of mystical transfiguration in the whole group of mankind forming a simple body and a single soul in charity,'
Monday 2 October 2017
In general we may say that each phase of cultural and technological development stars of as a zero sum game and then it led to a more peaceful life by becoming a positive sum game, the replacement of war by business.
The transfinite network introduces a new way of counting entropy based on order. Order is attractive because it creates entropy as in the Cantor universe. Is this true? Still not very clear to me. The key may be in the Boltzmann calculation of complexions which assumes identifiable particles and permutations [and gets pretty close to the classical answer for entropy].
Coyne and Matthers: Introduction page 5: 'Cultural inputs in the form of belief systems, norms, ideology and identity clearly play a role in the prevention or onset of war, and therefore require deeper study.' Coyne & Mathers: The Handbook of the Political Economy of War
Tuesday 3 October 2017
Wednesday 4 October 2017
The network model gives us a way to understand violence. A fatal error in layer n+1 pushes the system back to layer n to rebuild itself. Layer n has lower entropy, higher energy per state and lacks the complexity to accomodate all the states that previously existed in layer n+1, so it acts in a 'Procrustean' manner on the elements of layer n+1. Procrustes - Wikipedia
[page 7]
Coyne page 16: 'The study of the causes of war in political science has traditionally been dominated by "realist" theories, a family of theories that assume that sovereign states (or other territorially defined groups) act rationally to advance their security, power and wealth in an anarchic international system defined by the absence of legitimate authority to regulate disputes and enforce agreements.'
page 22: 'A substantial amount of empirical research demonstrates that democracies rarely if ever go to war with each other.'
page 29: 'This admittedly brief survey of some of the leading causes of interstate war, while reinforcing the view that international relations theorists are as divided as ever as to what the causes of war are and how best to study those causes, suggests some points of convergence.'
page 34: Jackson and Morelli: '. . . with war to occur with rational actors, at least one of the sides involved has to expect that the gains from the conflict will outweigh the costs incurred. . . . Second there has to be a failure in bargaining, so that for some reason there is an inability to reach a mutually advantageous and enforceable agreement.
page 72: Hardie, Johnson and Tierney: 'In many situations humans are not rational decision makers. Instead our judgements and decisions are dramatically inflenced by a variety of psychological biases, and by physiological states of emotion, stress and other biochemical phenomena (such as hormones).'
page 78: 'Overconfidence has long been identified as a cause of war.'
page 80: 'cognitive dissonance' Cognitive dissonance - Wikipedia
[page 8]
Joes page 100: 'the ballot box is the coffin of insurgency'
page 106: '. . . arguably the most necessary weapon in the counterinsurgent arsenal is rectitude, especially toward civilians and prisoners . . . Bad conduct creates guerrillas; right conduct saves counterinsurgent lives.'
The theory of peace establishes a consistent theoretical foundation for rectitude.
Yakovlev page 121: 'A multidisciplinary literature revies reveals that torture continues to be a widely used method of information gathering, intimidation and coercion despite its questionable effectivenes and numerous treaties that prohibit it.
Shughart page 128: 'As a unique personality type, the representative terrorist does not exist: "there never was such a person." '
page 137: 'As a matter of fact, when the quality of a nation's economic institutions are controlled for, perceived ethnic tensions no longer explain transnational terrorism's countries of origin. . . ..'
'Offering stronger protections for private property rights which promote incentives for starting businesses and interacting peacefully with others, may prevent ethnic differences from spilling over into ethnic violence and transnational terrorist activity.'
page 141: 'Suicide terrorism . . . poses the gravest challenge to the rational-actor model. One explanation is that it works. . . ..'
'Suicide terrorists transfer wealth to their parents, their siblings, and their children, if any.' Greater love has no person than to give their life for the beloved. . . . John 15:13
'Terrorists' regard for the welfare of their family members helps explain why it is Israel's policy to destroy the houses of suicide attackers.'
[page 9]
A feature of the world: everything has a price perhaps because all information is physical. The heavenly dreams of pure spirits, angels and the divinity that live without consumption, without paying, are just dreams, not true because they are too good to be true [in the model, we might equate physical with computable, so we see one of the limits on reality as computability, computation is the price].
Thursday 5 October 2017
Emotion / passion and reason / logic relate in a way similar to heat / mechanical energy. The Carnot cycle extracts zero entropy mechanical energy from a hot source and passes the entropy to a cold source.
It is the task of science to ground the noosphere in the biosphere. We grow up in a mental environment which contains large amounts of fiction, and it is not easy to distinguish fiction from reality: it must be tested, and this is the task of empirical science. What I am trying to to is build a model which will help us to understand the world. I am a builder, so I imagine structures in 3D so I can see how to make them. The stability of my structures comes from the fixed points in the materials and designs that I use. We all need to know the reality of the world if we are to live wisely. We need to transfer the source of power in politics from money to knowledge: power comes from knowing the world, as our technological developments show.
All the time observing and trying to model the fixed points in the divine dynamics given the enormous amount of information we have about the life of the spheres, hydro-, atmos-, bio-, noo- etc. Biosphere - Wikipedia
All I have got to go on is my own trust in myself really and to use that as a fixed point to guide me in the face of disagreement.
[page 10]
On the whole we see politicians being less responsive to reality than the citizens. The politicians live in a cocoon of wealth and power which restricts both their knowledge and their action so they get stuck in old fashioned ideas like electricity must be generated in big power stations and the way to deal with insurgency among the people is secret police methods and violence rather than righteousness and honest regulation. Many politicians are in the grip of money so they are blinded to the facts like more guns means more death and injury by guns. America is on a runaway death spiral into fear.
Friday 6 October 2017
Noyes: H. Pierre Noyes: Bit-String Physics: A Finite and Discrete Approach to Natural Philosophy
RECTITUDE / ORTHOGONALITY / INDIVIDUALITY / LOGICITY
A website, like a particle detector, is a set of clickable bins.
Back in the days when I was advocating for solar energy I felt confidence in my work because it was well supported with physical and financial data. The theological problem is much more difficult, but I am getting confidence there too, perhaps by sheer weight of saying the same thing to myself again and again.
Coyne page 154: Poutvaaara and Wagener: 'The military success of the Prussian and Napoleonic conscripted armies inspired many countries to adopt universal conscription, and the industrialised high intensity mass wars of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
[page 11]
only possible because military service made available millions of young men as soldiers.'
Coyne page 167: 'Von Thuenen (1875) reasoned that the scandalous misperception in military recruitment in those times was to view human life as a commodity and not as a capital good.'
page 209 Parsa: 'My own analysis of the collective actions of major classes and collectives in the revolutions in Iran, Nicaragua and the Philippines does not support the exaggerated ideological explanations of revolutions.'
page 218 Kinsella: 'During the cold war that followed World War II . . . The arms business ceased to be solely a business; it also became an instrument of foreign policy and geopolitical competition.'
page 275 Weede: 'One may dare to day that capitalism promoted peace.' Perhaps because war destroys capital.
page 276: 'The export of democracy is unlikely to appeal to autocrats in power. That is why a policy of democritization easily degenerates into a crusade, or another war to end wars. The US waged such wars from World War I to the most recent Iraq war. By contrast, capitalism is exportable because it provides a model for emulation.'
page 277 'By resistance to protectionism Western nations may simultaneously strengthen their own economies, improve the lot of the poot in the developing world, and contribute to the avoidance of conflict and war.'
page 359 Morrison and White: 'After all, sovereign states cannot rely on
[page 12]
protection via supranational regimes since the very notion of sovereignty denies the possibility of a higher authority.'
Coyne page 499 Dempster and Isaacs: 'It is our contention that the true intentions of participants in a peace agreement are accurately and quickly reflected in the behaviour of long term financial asset prices.'
We say that the universe is consistent, but this needs some qualification. What we can say is that elements in contact must be consistent but those out side one another's light cones need not be. This is a meaningless statement really because both consistency and inconsistency are judged by contact, ie communication and if there is no contact the question of consistency cannot be determined, it is uncertain.
This might have something to do with spin and statistics, the differentiation of fermions and bosons. Fermions must communicate through bosons because they are incapable of direct contact through the exclusion principle. We think of this in terms of space, but (I think) the realty is worked out by logic, that is computation. A computation is an act of logic [something mechanical and deterministic].
Saturday 7 October 2017
Many people have great pain arising from false ideas which are in effect a mental disease. Perhaps
[page 13]
the most important function of the theory of peace is to provide a foundation for the cure of such diseases. Lochlan Morrissey: Alternative facts do exist: beliefs, lies and politics
To get the result you must put the energy in, some goes to take away the entropy and the zero entropy mechanical energy becomes available to do the processing necessary to achieve the desired end — in my case write the book. Mechanical energy is zero entropy, and therefore no uncertainty.
Noyes page 2: '. . . the fact that the numbers of entities calculated for the third and fourth levels of the combinatorial hierarchy correspond closely to the two dimensionless numbers which characterise the two long range macroscopic forces observed in nature (electromagnetism and gravitation) is probably something more than a coincidence is a main objective of this book.'
Strong feeling and I wonder why?
Something is happening. Noyes seems to be a dream come true insofar as he too is talking about a world 'digital to the core' speaking as a physicist rather than a would be theologian.
So we model mechanical work with a Turing machines, a zero entropy deterministic string of logical operations.
Finite = computable.
Time does not have a direction for energy, but it does for entropy.
Entropy is a measure of symmetry: How many possible states [permutations] do you have?
[page 14]
What is a logical operation? The execution of a truth function which we associate physically with a quantum of action.
Noyes page 1: 'Why a simple mathematical algorithm should have anything to do with two of the fundamental dimensionless constants of modern physics remains unexplained to this day.'
page 2: 'How can a mathematical argument arrive at an integer approximation to dimensionless combinations of numbers which, individually, have to be determined empirically? But partway through the seminar I was struck by the thought that my question might have a partial answer if the dimensionless integers themselves had a direct physical interpretation.
page 4: 'What I have ended up doing is to try to understand in my own terms why a finite and discrete approach to the foundations of physics might make sense.'
page 5: '. . . [Dyson's] contention that tools rather than ideas are usually the driving force behind scientific revolutions. . . . digital computers actually provide an intellectual background for thinking about the finite and discrete events that lie a the core of quantum mechanics, and which differs profoundly from the immersion in continuum mechanics that most older theorists like myself took for granted.'
page 39: 'For me, the idea of an undifferentiated continuum, the common goal of many mystical traditions, also called Nirvana, is the antithesis of rational thought — although I am
[page 15]
quite prepared to admit that efforts to gain that goal might be a rational activity.'
Noyes page 67: Bastin, Noyes, Amson and Kilminster: 'As everybody knows, quantum theory has maintained that there is a distinct class of things in the universe called measurements or observations and that different rules apply to these from those that apply to interactions where the acquisition of knowledge is not involved.' "observation metaphysic"
'two different Schnurs [strings] generate a new Schnur, which is again different.' = "discrimination"
page 71: 'Fixed Past, Uncertain Future' ie halted process, live process.
