"natural theology > notes > 2017 > Sunday 19 November"

vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 19 November 2017 - Saturday 25 November 2017

[Notebook: DB 82: Life and Death]

[page 49]

Sunday 19 November 2017

The book is dragging, having much trouble with the theory of peace which is where I first went public on 2BOB in 1986. Hopefully I can resolve all this soon by winding up my resolution.

What is around the corner is not certainty but a distribution of possible events, just like a quantum observation. The present constrains the future to a degree which drops off exponentially as we go further into the future We understand this in the network model by seeing that the "input cone" to a future event increases with the passage of time as more distant event have time to come into the picture and have an influence. So (say) half an hour ago the vehicle I am going to collide with in half an hour's time was 50 kilometres away and completely out of contact from a causal point of view.

Aristotle's 4 causes: material efficient, formal, final are all messages influencing an event. Correlate with the four fields? gravitation = final (the beginning and end of all things), strong = material, efficient = electromagnetic, formal = weak. No help really, just another foursome.

[page 50]

We can only control things that we can measure (see) so observation is essential to control. When we have devised a suitable transfinite measure of peace, that is an effective and reliable measure, then we can begin to exploit this measure to bring peace to asymptotic perfection.We have a number of measures like child mortality, GNP, GDP, Gini Coefficient etc etc but the real discovery of the theory of peace will be a measure that truly represents the degree of peace in a society. This is chapter 9, given a purpose at last and chapter 10 applies this measure to the optimization of social software by entropy maximization = maximization of the meaningfulness of actualities. Gini coefficient - Wikipedia

The mating game as a transfinite Feynman diagram.

Express the mathematical and physical aspects of quantum mechanics by macroscopic examples. Facebook - Feynman.

Aquinas I, 25. ii: Sed contra 'Now everything that is immeasurable is infinite', or perhaps it can be measured by somebody with a longer tape. Aquinas Summa: I, 25, 2: Is the power of God infinite?

Monday 20 November 2017

Martin Heidegger: W. J. Korab-Karpowicz: Martin Heidegger

I think I can now perceive a decline in my mental and physical powers. Physical tasks which were once easy are now becoming difficult so I am inclined to avoid them Mental tasks seem to be

[page 51]

following a similar trajectory but at least here I am motivated to fulfill my theological destiny. The natural response to difficulty is to get help, so it seems a good idea now to go to university and get a supervisor to guide me to a coherent exposition of my idea. Without being able to attract such help, my ambition may remain forever unattainable.

Part of my problem is that there seems to be as much confidence trickery in declaring the universe divine as in the Catholic declaration that the universe is not divine. Trying to refute a dubious claim opens ones refutation to also looking like a dubious claim, which is why serial liars like President Trump do so well People seem to attach the same level of credibility to p as to not-p, at least in the abstract. Only in the concrete immediacy of life do we recognize that 'a is dead' means something very different from 'a is alive'.

In my case some of the floppiness of my story arises from my use of the transfinite numbers. This looks to be an attempt to make my case by using obscure and esoteric mathematics to create the illusion that I know something special. These numbers first appeared in my story in the 80s and became the backbone of my 2BOB lectures in 1987. But are they relevant? How do they fit into the real world? This is a question of the relationship of abstract and formal mathematics to the formal world. A theory of peace

How can mathematicians use finite texts to talk about infinite things? How does Cantor's finite treatise Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of transfinite Numbers actually contribute to the founding of transfinite numbers? Or, more generally, how do mathematicians come to be talking about infinite quantities in general, even the rather mild 'countable' infinity of the natural numbers? Cantor

Perhaps the key lies in the notion of induction. Peano defined the natural numbers using the function 'add 1' to move from any number n to its successor n+1. Peano axioms - Wikipedia

[page 52]

Peano's work suggests that the formal key to talking about infinity is a symmetrical process, in this case adding 1. The process has no natural endpoint and so can go on to infinity. At the other end of the scale we have processes like taking limits which are presumed to work no matter how small the steps we are taking. In both cases the steps taken are identical, like walking, but the do lead somewhere, to new places or greater and smaller numbers (quantities).

The development of mathematical analysis depends completely on symmetrical processes with no endpoint, what we might call continuous processes.

We build the transfinite numbers using Peano's axioms to create the natural numbers and permutation to generate more complex structures out of the set of natural numbers or subsets thereof. Using the axiom of the power set we can move from the empty set to any transfinite set.

In the abstract infinite symmetric processes like walking around the Universe are possible but not in the real world, resources ie quanta of action, are limited.

Each new transfinite layer is a new entropy scale. So, we ask, what is the entropy/information content of human being, ie what is the size of the space of humans, ie how many different humans are possible. Given say 1 gig of genome, we can say 4 to the billionth [and a very small proportion of these genomes would be viable humans]. But this does not take into account all the tacit information [capital] necessary to decode the genome.

[page 53]

The branching of the evolutionary is cut down to size by selection so that only a fraction of the children of each generation go on to reproduce by executing a faultless sequence of reproductive moves.

Empty set = ∅ = nop [no operation] = eternity

In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. That is us. We are divine, at our best merciful and compassionate, at our worst cold and vicious.

Tuesday 21 November 2017

Lost in space

Human nature is a mystery that logic alone cannot elucidate: it contains incomputable elements.

Wednesday 22 November 2017

Whatever the explanation might be peace exists and I exist, however briefly. We cannot fight the standard explanation that near the beginning huge numbers of simple particles were created and subsequently bonded into larger entities like atoms, stars and people. My problem has always been to explain how there can be so many elementary particles, what differentiates them and gives them identity. The answer seems to be in the software idea that an electron is a certain algorithm in the overall process and every instance of an electron is an instance of that algorithm and the same goes for all other particles. Part of this explanation is that a computer that executes an algorithm is a network, so the execution of

[page 54]

myself is the execution of a network which comprises [many instances of each of] a countable infinity of different algorithms which I see as the eigenfunctions of quantum mechanics. This is effect an application of the philosophical idea of sufficient cause. Why are there two electrons rather than just one? Or as some would say, why are there existents rather than nothing? The effort always is to find a consistent and convincing explanation for the known facts. So we would like to see all the electrons as leaves on a tree. The other explanation is that it would be inconsistent for electrons (and all other fixed points in the universe) not to exist. From these points of view, the psychological explanation of the universe seems most profitable, ie it is a giant mind whose fixed points are logical algorithms which we see as computers. We imagine some form of natural selection taking place here separating out the most efficient algorithms. High energy physics experiments give us a large number of particles whose day to day role (ie probability of execution) is very low, so we find most of the work being done by low energy versions of quarks, baryons, leptons and so on. The elicitation of low probability particles in high energy events tends to show that anything is possible if enough energy is present. Principle of sufficient reason - Wikipedia, Roy Sorensen: Nothingness

It seems easy to write and read things that one cannot understand. The network model seems to me to be both universal and fruitful but I have been so brought up on the materialistic versions of the world that the psycho-logical network approach is still rather foreign to me although it is very much our natural way of speaking in human relationships. The divine world does not see the distinction between matter and form [in god essence and existence are identical] so clearly it sees everything as actions or events whose content is network logic, partly deterministic when we are concerned with an isolated

[page 55]

machine, rather indeterministic when we have machines talking to one another and interrupting one another at random points in their cycles, something that we see in the dynamic superposition of quantum mechanics. Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 4: Are essence and existence the same in God?

Can we say that electrons (and other particles) are individuated by space-time? I exist here and now.

Love one another. What is it to be one? What do we mean when we say that God is one and nevertheless a trinity? From my point of view oneness begins with the eternal omnino simplex and when it differentiates into a network of fixed points all the messages pass through the divine physical layers, so the unity is maintained because all the messages ultimately go through the same channel. Such message carriers are the bosons of the world. So when it comes to electrons and electrically charged particles the unity is maintained by photons [gluons?]. When it comes to human love the messages are transfinitely more complex, carried by ordered sets of bosons, photons and phonons. Human love goes through the heart, the divine element, represented iconographically in Catholicism by the sacred heart of Jesus. This may be the central power of Christianity, the appropriation of a stylized form of love carefully stripped of the erotic [and represented by a garish anatomical images]. Sacred Heart - Wikipedia

The multiplicity of electron is created by photons and vice versa, positive and negative charges created simultaneously so net charge remains zero [noting that from any observer's point of view, photons exist outside space and time]. Similarly with potential and kinetic energy, maintaining the eternal act all the time, most generally, all events result on the transformation of one form of p and not-p into a new form, eg q and not-q, always maintaining the symmetry x + not-x = 0. Fundamentally we create the universe through conservation of nothing ness, as we say simplicity and eternity, no space, no time.

General relativity is rooted in a metric free differentiable manifold which can be expanded and contracted without limit, but this s a continuous approximation to the digital creation and annihilation of discrete particles by the growth and pruning

[page 56]

of networks.

In the digital universe, metric is rate of action (in general relativity, the energy)

In a way we might think of the observables (fixed points) being on the surface of God and the actin beneath the surface something a bit like the holographic universe. At every point we can follow the observables back down to the interior of God which is ultimately structureless action. I wonder what sort of picture of God Aristotle and Aquinas had in mind.

Plough on and keep creating. I wish.

Thursday 23 November 2017

There are many computable things in my day, lie the date and the time and the force of gravity and many random events like the next time a bird will fly into my house. We understand this in the network as a result of a message sent from outside the local machine over which it has no control due to space-time separation which is in effect a lack of bandwidth.

. . .

Prothero: God is Not One at least as seen by many religious believers. Prothero: God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter

Electrons are a symmetry (algorithm) made distinct (a broken symmetry) by their spacetime location [address, like a memory address]. Does the number of electrons increase as space expands? Not likely, but those not bound to the same structure might get further apart.

Friday 24 November 2017

[page 57]

Gerson on social change. Michael Gerson: Scary, judgmental old men

Saturday 25 November 2017

A symmetry is an algorithm like a differential equation and a 'broken symmetry' an application of that algorithm, like the infinite spectrum of solutions of a wave equation. Each of these solutions can itself be seen as a symmetry which can be broken by another layer of solutions. How does this work? In the hierarchy of function spaces define in the Cantor universe by layer after layer of permutation (?).

We begin by thinking of the layered hierarchy of function spaces. We may see a gas (a la Boltzmann) corresponding to the second layer with cardinal ℵ₁ so that the entropy is countably infinite, since ℵ₀ = log ℵ₁. Then we go up through the alephs until we come to the layer corresponding to a human person. By this means of counting, a person is very much more complex than a gas. We can then apply a renormalization to bring the numbers down to a countable number of atoms in my body but this does not destroy the layered structure, which serves to bring out my true complexity of order while bringing the actual counts of atoms, cells etc down to concrete reality. This seems to be getting closer to the idea I want while it is still a long shot. Cercignani: Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms, Renormalization - Wikipedia

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Aristotle, and (translated by W S Hett), On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath (translated by W S Hett) , Harvard University Press (USA) ; William Heinemann Ltd (UK) 1975 'What the mind thinks must be in it in the same sense as letters are on a tablet which bears no actual writing; this is just what happens in the case of the mind.' page 169 (Book III, chapter 4, 429b32)
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Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.'
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Cercignani, Carlo, Ludwig Boltzmann: The Man Who Trusted Atoms, Oxford University Press, USA 2006 'Cercignani provides a stimulating biography of a great scientist. Boltzmann's greatness is difficult to state, but the fact that the author is still actively engaged in research into some of the finer, as yet unresolved issues provoked by Boltzmann's work is a measure of just how far ahead of his time Boltzmann was. It is also tragic to read of Boltzmann's persecution by his contemporaries, the energeticists, who regarded atoms as a convenient hypothesis, but not as having a definite existence. Boltzmann felt that atoms were real and this motivated much of his research. How Boltzmann would have laughed if he could have seen present-day scanning tunnelling microscopy images, which resolve the atomic structure at surfaces! If only all scientists would learn from Boltzmann's life story that it is bad for science to persecute someone whose views you do not share but cannot disprove. One surprising fact I learned from this book was how research into thermodynamics and statistical mechanics led to the beginnings of quantum theory (such as Planck's distribution law, and Einstein's theory of specific heat). Lecture notes by Boltzmann also seem to have influenced Einstein's construction of special relativity. Cercignani's familiarity with Boltzmann's work at the research level will probably set this above other biographies of Boltzmann for a very long time to come.' Dr David J Bottomley
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Christie, Agatha, The Body in the Library: A Miss Marple Mystery, Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers 2006 Amazon Spotlight Review: 'Miss Marple makes her second appearance in this novel. Her dear friends, Col. and Mrs. Bantry, have the unpleasant experience of having the body of a rather cheap-looking blonde found in their library. The unidentified corpse does not appear to be at all the type of person the Bantrys would associate with, and tongues begin wagging in the village. The search to identify the body involves many interesting characters: Ruby Keene, a professional dancer who has been reported missing; Josephine Turner, her cousin; Raymond Starr, exhibition dancer and tennis pro; and Conway Jefferson, a man confined to a wheelchair as the result of an accident that killed his wife and children. Mr. Jefferson was rumored to have been quite taken with the exotic Ruby. Add to this mix the Bantrys next door neighbor, Basil Blake, who is a "party animal" and been known to consort with film stars and others of loose reputations, according to the gossip-mongers in the village. The professional detectives are baffled and it is our shy and quiet Miss Marple who solves the case because of her past experiences and observations of how people act, particularly young girls.' Antoinette Klein
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Hussey, E L, " Heraclitus of Ephesus" in Ted Honderich The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford University Press 1995
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding'
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Prothero, Stephen, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter, HarperOne 2010 'Introduction: . . . The world's religious rivals do converge when it comes to ethics, but they diverge sharply on doctrine, ritual, mythology, experience and law. These differences may not matter to mystics of philosophers of religion, but they matter to ordinary religious people.'
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Shaffer, Peter, Equus: A Play, Penguin (Non-Classics) 1984 Amazon Spotlight Review: 'Ostensibly the story of a doctor-patient relationship, Equus is just as limited by the therapist's suite as is Casablanca limited by the walls of Rick's Cafe. The genuis of Shaffer is that he manages to create characters so indelible and unforgettable that they leap out of the read page just as much or more as they do out of the performed page. Put another way, even without Burton in the cinema or Hopkins on Broadway, his Dr. Dysart connects with you. You can easily find yourself joining Dysart as he commences his therapy with Alan Strang. The who, what, when and where are quickly covered as we and Dysart learn that Strang's "presenting problem" is the fact he's just blinded six horses. The why consumes the virtual remainder of the play as we join Dysart in peeling down the oniony layers of Strang's psychosis. Ever the honest observer, Dysart readily admits the plain simple fact of human observational error. His problem -- our problem -- is that our ability to interact and help others is inherently limited by our own myopia. We can only see what we can only see. Fortunately, Dysart understands the problematic nature of probing someone else's consciousness...." J Buford
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Veltman, Martinus, Diagrammatica: The Path to the Feynman Rules, Cambridge University Press 1994 Jacket: 'This book provides an easily accessible introduction to quantum field theory via Feynman rules and calculations in particle physics. The aim is to make clear what the physical foundations of present-day field theory are, to clarify the physical content of Feynman rules, and to outline their domain of applicability. ... The book includes valuable appendices that review some essential mathematics, including complex spaces, matrices, the CBH equation, traces and dimensional regularization. ...'
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Links

Alain Badiou - Wikipedia, Alain Badiou - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity.' back

Aquinas Summa: I, 25, 2, Is the power of God infinite?, 'I answer that, As stated above, active power exists in God according to the measure in which He is actual. Now His existence is infinite, inasmuch as it is not limited by anything that receives it, as is clear from what has been said, when we discussed the infinity of the divine essence. Wherefore, it is necessary that the active power in God should be infinite. back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 4, Are essence and existence are the same in God?, 'I answer that, God is not only His own essence, as shown in the preceding article, but also His own existence. This may be shown in several ways. First, whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused either by the constituent principles of that essence (like a property that necessarily accompanies the species--as the faculty of laughing is proper to a man--and is caused by the constituent principles of the species), or by some exterior agent--as heat is caused in water by fire. Therefore, if the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles. Now it is impossible for a thing's existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God; because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence.' back

Caillan Davenport, Guide to the Classics: Suetonius's The Twenve Caesars explores vice and virtue in ancient Rome, back

Gini coefficient - Wikipedia, Gini coefficient - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Gini coefficient measures the inequality among values of a frequency distribution (for example, levels of income). A Gini coefficient of zero expresses perfect equality, where all values are the same (for example, where everyone has the same income). A Gini coefficient of 1 (or 100%) expresses maximal inequality among values (e.g., for a large number of people, where only one person has all the income or consumption, and all others have none, the Gini coefficient will be very nearly one).' back

Jackie Dent, An American Spy Base Hidden in Australia'a Outback, 'From the base, known as the Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, the United States controls satellites that gather information used to pinpoint airstrikes around the world and target nuclear weapons, among other military and intelligence tasks, according to experts and leaked National Security Agency documents. As a result, the facility, dotted with satellite dishes and isolated in the desert, has become a magnet for Australian antiwar protesters. Over the past two weeks, Ms. Pestorius and five other Christian demonstrators were convicted in two separate trials of breaching the site’s security perimeter last year. They could face seven years in prison.' back

Jessica Rosenworcel, I'm on the FCC. Please stop is from killing net neutrality, 'Wiping out net neutrality would have big consequences. Without it, your broadband provider could carve internet access into fast and slow lanes, favoring the traffic of online platforms that have made special payments and consigning all others to a bumpy road. Your provider would have the power to choose which voices online to amplify and which to censor. The move could affect everything online, including the connections we make and the communities we create.' back

Jonathan Jones, Cézanne unmasked; the shattering portraits that blew Picasso and the Paris avant garde away, 'Cézanne not only anticipates Picasso but also Proust and Joyce as he meditates on the nature of the self. We are not continuous beings, his portraits suggest. We are mysteries to ourselves and others, divided and fragmentary behind our masks. He is the true inventor both of modern art and the modern soul.' back

Martin Sharpe, Alexander Dugin, Eurasianism and the American Election, back

Michael Gerson, Scary, judgmental old men, 'We are seeing an example of how social change often (and increasingly) takes place. Advocates of a cause can push for a long time with little apparent effect. Then, in a historical blink, what seemed incredible becomes inevitable.' back

Mona Eltahawy, Muslim Women, Caught Betwen Islamophobes and 'Our Men', 'The hard place is a community within our own faith that is all too eager to defend Muslim men against all accusations. Mr. Ramadan’s defenders have dismissed the complaints against him as a “Zionist conspiracy” and an Islamophobic attempt to destroy a Muslim scholar. Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our “community” accuse us of “making our men look bad” and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes. back

Peano axioms - Wikipedia, Peano axioms - Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematical logic, the Peano axioms, also known as the Dedekind–Peano axioms or the Peano postulates, are a set of axioms for the natural numbers presented by the 19th century Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano. These axioms have been used nearly unchanged in a number of metamathematical investigations, including research into fundamental questions of whether number theory is consistent and complete.' back

Principle of sufficient reason - Wikipedia, Principle of sufficient reason - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The principle of sufficient reason states that everything must have a reason or a cause. The modern formulation of the principle is usually attributed to Gottfried Leibniz, although the idea was conceived of and utilized by various philosophers who preceded him, including Anaximander, Parmenides, Archimedes, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas, and Spinoza. Some philosophers have associated the principle of sufficient reason with "ex nihilo nihil fit". Hamilton identified the laws of inference modus ponens with the "law of Sufficient Reason, or of Reason and Consequent" and modus tollens with its contrapositive expression.' back

Renormalization - Wikipedia, Renormalization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In quantum field theory, the statistical mechanics of fields, and the theory of self-similar geometric structures, renormalization is any of a collection of techniques used to treat infinities arising in calculated quantities.' back

Robyn J Whitaker, Conservative Chrstians need to stamp out clergy wife abuse - starting with ending endemic sexism, 'On Wednesday night, viewers around the nation were likely shocked by the story of clergy wives’ abuse on the ABC’s 7.30. . . . Unfortunately, I was not shocked to hear these women’s stories. I’ve sat in groups at conservative Christian conferences where male-headship is taught, and where women discussed giving up their jobs when they married because God demanded nothing but full submission to serving their prospective husband’s careers, desires and ambitions.' back

Roy Sorensen, Nothingness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), 'Since metaphysics is the study of what exists, one might expect metaphysicians to have little to say about the limit case in which nothing exists. But ever since Parmenides in the fifth century BCE, there has been rich commentary on whether an empty world is possible, whether there are vacuums, and about the nature of privations and negation.' back

Sacred Heart - Wikipedia, Sacred Heart - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The devotion to the Sacred Heart (also known as the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Sacratissimum Cor Iesu in Latin) is one of the most widely practiced and well-known Roman Catholic devotions, taking Jesus Christ's physical heart as the representation of his divine love for humanity.' back

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, How algorithms are pushing the tech giats into the danger zone, 'What all these failures have in common is that they didn’t have to happen. They only occur because Facebook invests far more time and energy in building algorithmically controlled features meant to drive user engagement, or give more control to advertisers, than it does thinking about the social and cultural implications of making it easy for 2 billion people to share content.' [Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher is published by Norton] back

The Telegraph, World's most populated cities throughout history, 'Judging the size of a city's population more than 2,000 years later is a tricky business. Different sources give diferent estimates, so for the sake of simplicity we've used just one: Tertius Chandler's Four Thousand Yeas of Urban Growth: An Historical Census, published in 1987' back

W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, Martin Heidegger (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy), 'Martin Heidegger is widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century, while remaining one of the most controversial.' back

Ziggy Switowski, Uranium Mining, Processing and Nuclear Energy - Oportunities for Australia - Draft 2006, back