vol VII: Notes
2019
Notes
Sunday 24 November 2019 - Saturday 30 November 2019
[Notebook: DB 84 Pam's Book]
[page 22]
Sunday 24 November 2019
The structure of the universe lies in the networks and the network protocols that constitute it. What else is there? We build a network with the Boolean functions not and and. When Yahweh says I am the Lord Your God and you shall have no other Gods before me, he is invoking not-and. The Trinity, on the other hand, is three instances of both and and not, giving us a tiny network.
In the universe the content of a memory and its address are identical. Can we say that about synapses in the brain? No, the actual value of the synapse is the instantiation added as the least significant bytes of its address which is determined by the network structure which is encoded as the source and destination neurons of the connection into which the synapse is embedded. How does this relate to the tangent Minkowski space in the universal differentiable manifold? How do we understand the brain as a quantum differentiable manifold, each synapse acting as a connection in the manifold.
What we need now is a digital take on a piece of QED, ie the emission and absorption of a photon by a hydrogen atom. From a computational point of view each such event is characterized by a quantum of action, that is a halted computation. From a physical point of view the trick is to compute the energy exchange associated with this computation [which calculation is done by the universe itself, and physicists try to create a model which will give the same answer].
[page 23]
The old Bohr model, beefed up with de Broglie's insight, gives us s first approximation to the energy differences between electron states separated by one or more quanta of orbital angular momentum. To do this we need Planck's constant, electron and proton charge, electrical force law, and electron mass, a pretty disparate set of constants which we imagine might have been set very [early and] exactly by natural selection. In what order? Maybe begin with Planck's constant, time frequency and energy, all of whose values depend on our system of units. Carl R. Nave, Georgia State University: Hyperphysics
Popper Open Society 1945, 3rd ed 1957. Popper: The Open Society and its Enemies (volume 1) : The Spell of Plato
page 1: This book . . . attempts to show that this civilization has not fully recovered from the shock of its birth—the transition from tribal or 'closed' society, with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man [sic].
page 2: 'Historicism': 'Is it within the power of any social science to make sweeping historical prophecies?'
page 3: 'This is a question of the method of the social sciences . . . A careful examination of this question has led me to the conviction that such sweeping historical prophecies are entirely beyond the scope of scientific method.' Except perhaps the prediction that the entropy of society will increases in line with the overall direction of the universe.
page 5: It seems that one has first to be disturbed by the identity of the Platonic theory of justice with the theory and practice of modern totalitarianism, before one can feel how urgent it is to interpret these matters. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
[page 23]
page 7: The Spell of Plato
Plato: 'The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader." [Popper uses this quote without noting that it appears in a military context] Plato: Laws 12.942a
page 8: Chosen people: chosen race, chosen class - Aryan, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle.
Fixed point (mathematics) - Wikipediapage 11: Heraclitus → change, introduced process versus matter. Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle seeking stasis in change: fixed point theory. Fixed point (mathematics) - Wikipedia
page 14: process, algorithm, ratio, λογος
page 16: 'Heraclitus' dynamics of nature in general and especially of social life confirms the view that his philosophy was inspired by the social and political disturbances he had experienced. For he declares that strife or war is the dynamic as well as the creative principle of all change and especially of all the differences between men. Daniel W Graham (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Heraclitus
page 18: Plato: Born in Peloponnesian War so all social change is corruption, decay, degeneration, but after lowest point things improve. Plato - Wikipedia
page 21: So let's stop degeneration by devising an arrested state → eternal forms.
page 22: Plato as a social engineer. Popper wants to distinguish 'piecemeal' from 'utopian' social engineering.
page 25: Forms or ideas: the perfect beings
[page 25]
page 26: Timaeus: 'We must conceive three types of things: first those which undergo generation; secondly those in which generation takes place; and thirdly the model. Model = father; generator = mother; generated = child. Donald Zeyl & Barbara Sattler (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Plato Timaeus
page 27: gods ⇆ forms.
page 28: Parmenides: Knowledge of eternal things. John Palmer (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Parmenides
page 30: Plato and the Socratic Method Socratic method - Wikipedia
page 31: Methodological essentialism - essence of sensible things to be found in forms
page 32: versus methodological nominalism. Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Nominalism in Metaphysics
page 34: 'It is the totalitarian tendency of Plato's political philosophy which I shall try to analyze and criticize.'
page 35: Plato first social scientist — his speculative setting is the theory of forms versus universal flux and decay.
blah blah blah . . .
And so to Ahmed What is Islam (from 22 July 2016 Notes 14 July 2016, Shahab Ahmed: What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic
page 5: '. . . I seek to tell the reader what Islam has actually been as a matter of human fact in history.'
page 6: 'It is precisely the correspondence and coherence between Islam as a theoretical object or analytic category and Islam as a real historical phenomenon that is considerably and crucially lacking in present conceptualizations of the term Islam/Islamic.'
Given that the world is itself divine, a scientific theology embraces all the
[page 26]
ideas, concepts, practices, contradictions and ways of life to be found in the whole universe, physical, biological, human, psychological etc etc.
page 8: Pew: The World's Muslims: Unity and Diversity. Pew Research Center: Religion and Pubic Life
page 19: Ibn Sina = Avicenna 'the man who effectively defined God for Muslims'. Dimitri Gutas (Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Ibn Sina [Avicenna]
page 22: 'Frankly stated the ultimate goal of the Sufi is to rise through the hierarchy of truth to the Real-Truth God—in the process becoming freed from the prescriptions and proscriptions of the law which, upon arrival at the Real-Truth, are nullified.
Monday 25 November 2019
Ahmed: Six questions for Islam.
page 10: Q 1: What is Islamic about Islamic philosophy?
page 11: Is Ibn Sina, Avicenna an Islamic philosopher?
page 18: Ibn Sina conceptualized God as the Sole Necessary Existent upon W/which all other existents are necessarily contingent.
page 19: Q2: Is the Sufi claim that those who experience the Real-Truth are above Islamic law and ritual practice an Islamic or an un-Islamic claim?
page 21: The conceptual vocabulary of Sufism became an
[page 27]
ingrained part of the idiom of the speech of Muslim and especially of poetry—which was quite simply the most important and valued form of social communication among Muslims in the major languages of their historical self-expression, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Urdu.'
page 22: 'The frankly stated ultimate goal of the Sufi is to rise through the hierarchy of truth to the Real-Truth of God—in the process becoming freed from the prescriptions and proscriptions of the law which, upon at the real-Truth, are nullified.'
A bit of self -rewarding entitlement reminiscent of the divine right of kings but established by intellectual delusion rather than military violence. Given the simplicity of God, the Real-Truth lies at the bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge rather than near the top.
page 26: Question 3: 'Both the Philosophy of Illumination and the Unity of Existence thought-paradigms in the history of societies of Muslims are grounded in a hierarchical vision of the cosmos and thus in a hierarchical vision of mankind; both blur, in their respective emanationist iterations of the relationship between the Divinity and the material world, the boundary between Divine transcendence and Divine immanence, and therefore flirt incorrigibly with pantheism and relativism. Are these Islamic ideas?'
I would hope so, since they are on the way to my vision of the Real-Truth of God, that God is identical with the "material world". What we are saying here is a step toward cognitive cosmology, psycho-physics or physical theology as developed by the Theology Company.
[page 28]
page 32: Question 4: 'The most widely circulated and read book of poetry in Islamic history, the Divan of Haviz, takes as its definitive themes the ambiguous exploration of wine-drinking and often (homo-erotic) love, as well as a disparaging attitude to observant ritual piety. Is that canonical work and the ethos it epitomises Islamic?'
'The Divan of Haviz consists of about five hundred ghazals in Persian, the Ghazal being a poem written in rhyming couplets in the voice of a lover on the theme of loving an impossibly beautiful and habitually unobtainable beloved.'
Sounds very similar to courtly love described by C S Lewis in The Allegory of Love. Clive S. Lewis; The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition
The Balkans to Bengal complex (map page 74).
page 34: Haviz: 'The Tongue of the Unseen'.
As a prefatory inscription in a royally commissioned scholarly edition of the Divan of Hafiz prepared in Herat in 1501 proclaims:
This treasure house of meaning devoid of imperfection
Is the impress from that Book of No Doubt [Qur'an]
Famous in the world the emanation of the Holy Spirit
Spoken upon the tongues as the "Tongue of the Unseen".
Holy Spirit = "Spirit of the Blessed" is identified by the Qur'an as the agent of divine revelation to Muhammad (and thus generally construed as the Angel Jibril / Gabriel).
[page 29]
page 36: '. . . the definitive conceptual, experiential and expressive register of the Hafizian ghazal— which Shayegin has called "the humanitas" of Islam—is ambiguity . . . and ambivalence. . . ..'
'The socially pervasive language of the ghazal, a language in which people thought about and fashioned their experience of the self and in which they spoke to each other about the individual and collective self, is this language that expresses, not merely a theoretical tension between legal and non-legal norms—but the very ethos of lived reality comprising a plurality of evidently contradictory meanings of life.'
As we feel when we confront the divine world we inhabit, like the god of the Old Testament, a tough and often inaccessible lover.
page 45: Amir Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (1254-1338):
The work of the lover is the work of the heart:
Whose meanings are beyond belief [din] and unbelief [kufr]
page 46; Question 5: 'It might be argued that literary works of fiction and imagination are not an expression of Islam but of culture—at best of "Islamic culture"—and thus unlike works or law or theology or Qur'anic exegesis, are not to be taken as constitutive elements in conceptualising Islam.
'. . . is there such a thing as "Islamic art", and if there is, what is actually Islamic about it?'
page 48: What about objects associated with alcohol, and images:
[page 30]
The most grievously tormented people amongst the denizens of Hell on the day of Resurrection will be the makers of images.
He who makes an image . . . will be punished by God on the Day of Resurrection until he breathes life into it—which he will not be able to do.
page 49: Sharaf al-Din al Nawawi (1234-1278) 'The authorities of our school and others hold that the making of a picture of any living thing is strictly forbidden and that is one of the great sins . . ..
page 52: sed contra '. . . the historical production of figural images took place under the financial and custodial patronage of the rulers of states and their associated political and cultural elites . . . in which artists were held in high social esteem and where miniature paintings were sold as luxury goods in a roaring trade across the Islamic world . . ..
page 56: How so? ''Figural art is a means to attain the meanings of the "zenith of ascending degrees".
page 57: 'Here it would appear that the self-same language of the texts of Muhammadan Revelation is read in two hermeneutic trajectories that are so divergent as to produce two contrary values: one trajectory reads the text to categorically prohibit the image; another takes the text to celebrate the image.'Question 6: that of wine.
[page 32]
Consumption of wine made from grapes is prohibited by all schools of Islamic law, which forbid the consumption of intoxicating liquids on the basis of a verse of the Qur'an. "Wine and games of chance are stone-idols, and divining arrows are an abomination from the works of Satan: shun it that you might do good works." 5:92
"The prohibition of wine . . . is one of the distinctive marks of the Muslim world . . ."
page 58: 'However an equally distinctive mark of the history of Muslims has been a widely held and constantly reiterated alternative evaluation of wine in non legal discourses where wine and the consumption thereof are invested with a positive meaning expressive of higher, indeed rarified value . . . '
page 61: 'Ibn Sina, who — when apparently not engaged in the problem of defining God — routinely drank wine in good company.'
page 109: My goal is precisely to formulate a conceptualization of Islam as a theoretical object that, by identfying the coherent dynamic of internal contradiction, enables us to comprehend the integrity and identity of the historical and human phenomenon at play.' See Also Dalrymple on the Mughals. William Dalrymple: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company
Tuesday 25 November 2019
So I turn back to physical theology and the Bohr model.
[page 32]
From page 23: We need a few equations and a few constants to work out the Bohr model: Planck-Einstein, de Broglie, Maxwell, Newton, mass of electron, planck's constant, [electric constant, electron charge].
Quite a complex story, which we can break into two parts: the actual values of the physical constants like e, mass of e, planck's constant, the velocity of light and the electric and magnetic constants; and the fundamental relationships between these constants and the space and time variables defining the structure of the atom. These fundamental relationships we can take to be computable, but where do the constant's come from? An ideal physical theory would (I like to think) define all these values in terms of logical relationships that define th basic structure of the universe. We would like the gravitational constant and Boltzmann's constant to come out of there too, but how do we start? My hunch is that we somehow equate the quantum of action with the logical operation not, but then what?
What am I? A conscious sample of the universe trying to work out how I fit in. I don't exactly feel at home even though I have now got a pretty good grip on the last 14 billion years of my history, but am a bit uncertain of the future, which looks pretty lush, but I really want a bit of intellectual excitement, but it is not easy to find.
[page 33]
Timing is everything, ie phase
Bohr's pseudoclassical attempt to describe the electronic mechanism of the hydrogen atom is rather messy and does not cover all the data, so it had the effect of redoubling the effort to understand what is really going in, and I think it was Heisenberg as much as anybody who cracked the case. Werner Heisenberg
Wednesday 27 November 2019
Thursday 28 November 2019
Every event in the electronic structure of an atom involves a quantum of action but the energy involved ranges from 10 eV, about 1016 Hz, down to 1 MHz, ie a factor of 109 smaller. How do we account for this? It is due to the operative potential differences, and where do these come from? We calculate them using physical constants, like those listed above for the Bohr model. So we think potentials and constants are closely related and have something to do with symmetries, fixed points or algorithms.
Friday 29 November 2019
Garnaut: Superpower Garnaut: Super-Power: Australia's Low Carbon Opportunitypage 3: 'The Adams and Eves of Mesopotamia had not eaten of the tree of scientific knowledge and they did not know what they did.
But we do. The tragedy of the Murray-Darling is a consequence of denial and of knowledge not being applied to public policy.'
[page 34]
Does the past force us into the future by increasing entropy, or does increased entropy drag us into the future, and is entropy the dynamic potential that drives the world by the growth of space and structure out of time and energy? Energy is reversible and conserved. Entropy is not necessarily so.
The big question is What is the source of potential? Is the answer in the paragraph above? Or what? Why did the big bang go of? We might say Cantor's theorem.
We need to distinguish between the world of pure formal mathematics where there is no limit to the entropy of symbols and processes happen (or do not happen) instantaneously, and the world of reality which is constrained by space-time to a limited number of symbols and a limited processing rate [which means that space-time is both a structure and a constraint on pure action and pure energy].
Only processes operating at constant entropy like quantum mechanics, are reversible, and only reversible until unitarity is broken by observation [which involves the creation of particles and an increase in the entropy of the universe, which is in effect the creation of space]. This would seem to suggest that there is in some way no definitive potential in quantum mechanics, which may be why we can only compute the probabilities of irreversible outcomes, not the exact outcomes themselves.]
How are we to understand the entropic potential, and its gradient, the entropic force, at the quantum mechanical level as gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak [forces / fields] [field requires the existence of space, as do particles, and so we have the birth of quantum field theory coinciding with the emergence of special relativity and inertial 4-space?]
[page 35]
Gibbs free energy: G(p, T) = H - TS = U + pV - TS: p = pressure, T = temperature, H = enthalpy, U = internal energy, V = volume, S = entropy. Gibbs free energy - Wikipedia, Enthalpy - Wikipedia, Entropy - Wikipedia
Here we are dealing with thermodynamic entropy, but we are looking for something closer to the mathematical root, thinking in term of the attraction of numerical spaces, and what I like best of all are the transfinite numbers which from the entropic point of view carry us irresistibly toward the future, ℵn being entropically infinitely more powerful than ℵn − 1. Ludwig Boltzmann - Wikipedia, Transfinite numbers - Wikipedia
Frequency depends on how quickly things happen, ranging from picoseconds to gigayears. Things cannot happen until all the prerequisites are in place, ie all the steps in the computation are complete and the process halts [and the product goes out the factory door].
Saturday 30 November
In a quantum mechanical sort of way my mind is reversible until it is 'made up' and I act on my thought [ie create a 'particle']
I am a spark of God, a flash in the spirit of the world.
There is nothing so liberating as a false accusation insofar as it shows me that I am nothing like some people think I am and so cut free of that false history as I have been cut free of the false history of sin that the Catholic Church imposed on me.
Gradually working my way toward coupling the spiritual side of the divine universe to the electrification of society by renewable energy
[page 36]
a la Garnaut. Also Squires Betty Squires: Doctors Created Vibrators After Growing Tired of Masturbating "Hysterical' Women
We might claim that most of the disasters which we have brought upon ourselves over the millennia have been due to false ideology and I would be inclined to define [false] ideology as any belief that flies in the face of known fact. We can make a long list of such ideological disasters from the idea that some varieties of human beings are superior to others to the notion that we do not really die, that we can influence the evolution of nature by prayer and we do not need to take care of our planet because it is all in the hands of a benevolent God.
