[ Sunday 4 September 1983 - Saturday 10 September 1983 ]
[Creation, the Metaphysics of Peace II = CMP II, DB 31]
[page 113]
. . .
[page 115]
Increase in entropy is the work of intelligence.
non-linear thermodynamics/ There comes to be a time variable in the equations, because the number of distinguishable states is a function of energy and time, ie W = E.t/h, so if S = k log W, = k log (E.t/h)
As time available for an event to be determined increases, number of determinate states increases.
. . . discussions of information theory etc assume stationary sources. We want a time varying source, and can perhaps develop it by a sort of inverse of differentiation. Take a set of sequential sources, forming a time series of development, and take a finite length of each source's output and fit it into the theory of stepwise changing sourses. The let the source lengths tend to [zero] to see what happens in the limit.
First phase of Universe: segregation of action into bits the size of Planck's quantum of action, bound dyads of +-action. Time and space born somewhere around here. These dyads are the strongest thing in the universe, carry the principle of energy conservation and only come apart in singularities.
[page 116]
Carnot: 'If, as mechanics seems to prove, thee cannot be any real creation of motive power, then there cannot be any destruction of this power either, for otherwise all the motive power of the Universe would end by being destroyed - hence there cannot be any real collision between bodies.' Source? Carnot
Entropy increased/action minimised. This seems to enclose the ideas of insight, coding and order all in one small box. . . .
[page 117]
Brillouin page 159: 'The increase in entropy corresponds to a loss of information. Brillouin.
page 160: 'entropy measures the lack of information about the actual structure of the system.' On the contrary, it measures the amount of information available from the system.
. . .
The games children play, generally working themselves through complex conflicts into complex roles within an engrossing drama, are no different from the play of a Universe which produces willow lined creeks and towering forests filled with multicoloured birds.
[page 118]
Brillouin page 182: Brillouin's analysis of Maxwell's demon seems top show that any system relying on observation cannot decrease entropy in a closed system. Carnot's law is devoted to concentrating energy, not information, and, in a sense, reversing the normal intelligent functioning of the Universe, as can easily be seen by the impression that a bulldozer makes on a rainforest.
- The arguments put forward by Brillouin are attempts in principle to violate the thermodynamic second law.
page 184: The smallest available negentropy = k (Boltzmann's constant) = 10-23 Joule per degree Kelvin. - also concerned with our relationship to microscopic phenomena not phenomenal relationship to one another. . . .
page 189: Information on a physical system is valid for only a short period, in some way proportional to 1/E, where E is the energy of the system. A refresh is therefore required after this interval, or otherwise the system will lose its structure. Rate of decay of structure and rate of refresh must be inexorably bound together.
[page 119]
Action is quantised, not necesarily frequency or energy.
Another problem [with] generalised statistical discussion is that boundary conditions are not generally thought of as providing any information, although, in a sense, they are where all the information lies.
Brillouin page 193: ν/ kT is the ratio of photon energy to molecule energy.
The action of intelligene actually, in a way, opposes the action of energy. Once again we have a balance between chance and necessity.
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page 229: Uncertainty principle: When Planck's constant is negligibly small, we get classical laws.
page 253: Classical experiments have Boltzmann constant k
Quantum experiments have Planck's constat h
page 260: Information must be paid for.
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[page 121]
If energy is conserved, total action varies directly with time. What we have to write is a function which expresses entropy as a function of time. At T0 S = 0, ie there is one particle in one state (existence)
. . .
One of the most exciting things about the Universe is the enormous amount of information it can process, given the equivalence of energy and action to information expressed by either Planck's constant or Boltzmann's constant.
Entropy remains constant despite action within microstates, ie it relates to how many are available, not what they are doing.
[page 122]
. . .
Energy /time, space/momentum have some fundamental similarity to explain their complementarity.
The 'information' in a physical system is considered to be very small because of the large value of its conventional
[page 123]
entropy. This is because structures meaningful to man are built out of billions of molecules, each of which has a number of states associated with it.
. . .
How does entropy increase? What is the physical mechanism of increase in numbers of states?
page 125]
Physics: if it is not observable, chuck it, This is a good idea in the long run, but we need every crutch we can get in the meantime..
Increase in entropy requires differentiation of states.
Brillouin page 305: Time and distance degrade information, so a continual refresh is needed. it should be possible to calculate this for the electron in a hydrogen atom and see what rate of communication between electron and proton is necessary to keep the electron bound.
. . .
The laws of classical mechanics represent a mathematical idealisation and should not be assumed to corespond to the real laws of nature.
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[page 126]
. . .
Information is required to define each particle in the context of the whole Universe, given that an electron belonging to a hydrogen atom, left to itself, would occupy the whole Universe.
Brillouin page 316: The natural evolution of the system corresponds to a progressive loss of information - ie refresh is required to maintain stable structures - dynamic memory eg.
One assumes that a particle will eventually occupy the whole Universe unless it is constrained.
I think the time has come in our consciousness to realise something which our preconscious forebears had come to understand in their unconscious state of intelligence. Listen to the Goons. They are the humans of the future. They are the people with a sense of humour, a built in metaview. Nothing to them is serious. The possibilities of life are so enormously amazing that nothing to them can possibly be a dead end. The multiconnectedness of the Universe is so amazing that there is a new dimension out of where we are at every time. That
[page 127]
is the meaning of space. It is the the very basic, none, 1, 2, 3 ways out. After 1, 2, 3, 4, many. But thee is always a way out. Time, it is the growing dimension. Adding new space dimensions every second, deiversifying beyond the static basic three. The starting point, into the infinite. Is it marijuana which takes us into the space where the Goons live. Can there be anything more cosmic than a Goon show . . . ? It is much more meaningful than any piece of music, which in its turn is so much more important than rational discourse. Humour, that is pure play, pure fantasy, that's where we are really at. And yet, we cannot see it. The impact of consciousness was devastating on the human psyche. It drove us analytic, introspective, into ourselves, blown out by the multitude of phenomena that we saw that we lost the ability to see other things as they were, to remember that that's where we were.
This episode of the science program has to be one hour long. In order to give you the basis for this lecture, I had to play you the Goon show upon which my thesis is based. For ten years I have felt that this is the key to the english, that race which has led the last few hundred
[page 128]
years of the march into consciousness. Is it nationalism? It is just the quality of the language, with its enormous richness of thieving words and mangling them into pseudoscientific greek, making them up, borrowing them, stealing and compounding. This is the boundless fountain of creativity which has characterised every moment of the development of the Universe. We must dig a pudding pit and line it with custard so that the pudding cannot climb out. There is absolutely no basis for this sort of madness to be found in any sort of inert, deterministic Universe. The gliding grace of the soaring bird is not the work of blind chance, it is guided chance, chance guided in the end by the rule that the Universe must be consistent if it is to survive. That is why the fish glides so gracefully through the water, why so many human activities and s tructures are so repulsive, because they are inconsistent with the survival of the race, of the species, and so they will eventually go, made invalid by the very rule that guarantees the beauty and harmony of the Universe, because to be out of harmony is ultimately to be crushed by the inexorable workings of the principle of contradiction or consistency. The whole thing might
[page 129]
look a bit stark, put this way, but the consistency of these statements is made easier to see if one appreciates the lengths of time involved. It is a pain, at the speed of consciousness, to wait a quater of an hour. Yet the Universe spends one hudred million years developing and testing a species. An idea that grows and evolved by gentle steps of a generation, a procedure that the human mind does with its ideas in lenths of a second. The Universe does not mind. It is part of its immense spectrum of times ranging from billionths of billionths of a second to billions of billions of years (stability of proton). The one bit of information is associated with such tenuous energy that it takes at least 1031 years to become effective. C R Nave
Those humans who can mate at a glance. Cast aside the long slow connotations of childbearing, but take on the joyous release of deep pleasurable communication. The age of intelligence is careful, it is solid, it has to be. It has learnt the advantages of efficiency, even a small improvement in efficiency will lead to survival eventually, and so intleligence came to be, because it could best manipulate the world efficiently for it, and has therefore [contributed] to the wondrously successful (and
[page 130]
devastating) human species. There are those who believe that your dreams cannot come true. They are the intelligent, the religious. They invent a god who is perfectly efficient, who is terminally optimised in every possible parameter. The rate of progress and the rate of communication are inherently time oriented, as action is something to do with time. So a game that children can create and play and conclude in an hour takes adults days, weeks, years and species and geological formations millions or billions of years and subatomic particles an infinitely shorter time. For each fast game is a component of a slower game, even as each slow game is that much richer and woder taking in everything from the whole Universe down to the tiniest component. There is a complexity cone as well as a light cone.
It all can be detected in the language, from the simple photons of the Universe, with only one degree of freedom (perhaps 2) frequency and polarisation, to the immense richness of speech and music, and to a lesser extent graphic arts and visual phenomena in general. They are the way we communicate with the Universe. We communicate with each other by sound. Music is the food of love. The route to
[page 131]
consciousness is from the visual to the audio a path I am on, a path along which the intolerably beautiful daughter of the universe was beckoning me. I want her now, I want her replacement but not yet. There is still understanding to be got from the present situation.
I have been in this society now ten years and spent most of the time as a devil's advocate, while exploring the Universe to discern the foundations of this new form of vision that was coming to me on the way out of religion into captialist democratic freedom, into the land of the newborn. The reign of intelligence has reached its peak on this planet in the west and its new direction is coming plain. The world of material needs has been conquered and now only needs conscious direction. The dangerous and difficult innovative process is over, where chaos needed to reign in the depredations of the conquerors of forests and the working man. We can now harness this brilliant technology under the yoke of our consciousness and concentrate on something else. Thus we have the common agricultural policy a new stability on which to build.
[page 132]
By standing back from phenomena one drags onself off the geodesic, and thus experiences the tidal accelerations, not in free fall. Life could not evolve in free fall, or perhaps it did evolve in free fall but could only find the problems to develop in the highly diversified environment of a gravitationally driven planet. If there was no gravity, what phenomena would be left?
. . .
When we try to imagine life on a more technologically advanced planet than ours, we are apt to emphasise the technology. They all carry on like a lot of lobotomised computer operators, having stupid high tech wars with one another, and the pensioned off film stars that rule us think in the same star wars terms. But we cannot laugh it off. They have the means to destroy us, and we have to talk them away from their billions gradually and show them another way of living on this planet. Evolutionarily stable strategy, but as we have seen above, there is a way out of every impasse along the time dimension. Given time and effort, everything can
[page 133]
be worked out.
The other principal insight of this view of the world as intelligent (apart from uncertainty, creativity and selection) is the time dimension. For entropy and complexity do not see time. So that the selection that takes place in time has nothing to do with the immeidate entropy. The counting of states is done simultaneously, that is outside time. When we start to discuss the time evolution of entropy, we are stepping outside the mathematical assumptions of the thermodynamics of entropy. This is a time when the process to the limit has [failed]. The function is not in fact continuous and the notions of integration and differentiation are not applicable to the creative process which gives rise to the thermodynamic concept of entropy. The blindness of classical physics has missed one of the most radical properties of the whole system. Prigogine is working toward it. Nicolis, Prigogine
Entropy always increases. I'll bet you have heard that, and if you are a power station engineer or a designer of internal combustion engines, or anybody who leads large amounts of mechanical energy and has to pay for the
[page 134]
oil or coal to get it, I'll bet that that fact often keeps you awake at night. Entropy always increases. Entropy is another word for disorder. Disorder always increases. The heat death of the Universe, the worst thing that could happen. The forces of light and economy and efficiency and intelligence wage a continual battle against the universal tendency to disorder, dont they? But perhaps thermodynamics has made a terrible mistake. Perhaps the increase in entropy is not the work of the forces of darkness, but the proof that the very Universe is intelligent.
The basic argument must be metaphysical, starting with cognition. From here we go through the warious sciences, statistical mechanics, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, biology, psychology, and back to human understanding. This cycle is both necessary and sufficient to lay the foundations for a discussion of human history, politics, sociology, and to lay down some guidelines for the future.
Sheldrake: A New Science of Life. Sheldrake
[page 135]
Time is the free dimension, capable of in fact flowering into an infinity of dimensions. Action continues through time. Information is a function of time. This has got to be important. On this view, time can stand still, but it cannot go backwards.
Brillouin page 319: Famous theorem of von Neumann with reference to the completeness of quantum mechanics.
page 320: 'Conclusions ... 4. 'The natural evolutionof a system coresponds to a loss of information and hence an increase in entropy. [an increase in entropy is compatible with an increase in information, since more possibilities give rise to more information when determined]
page 321: Entropy loss becomes enormous when distances are small, because of high frequencies needed to determine such distances.
page 322: Very high energies needed in accelerators to measure very small distances.
page 325: Dirac: the instantaneous velocity of electrons is c, while the average velocity remains finite and is zero for an electron at rest [Zitterbewegung] Zitterbewegung - Wikipedia
[page 136]
Human equality as a principle establishes that the experimenter must needs give as much information about himself as he gets from his human subjects. Most of them could not give a stuff about the lives of the anthropologists who care to study them.
Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, even if one becomes an atheist. The religious temperament is one which fights for ideas in a way that some people fight for money or athletic records.
The whole Universe is based on the great germinal tautology, randomisation and selection. Not-being and being, the principle of contradiction in act.
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[page 138]
Philippa Pullar Consuming Passions. Pullar.
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[page 141]
There is a strong presumption of unhappiness in our lives. In converation after conversation, if I say I am happy, people resist the idea to the death and try again and again to prove to me that my life is difficult and sad. The bourgeoisie love to suffer, love to think that they are suffering, so as to go to a better place in heaven. Fear of freedom, fear of love, the work ethic, these are the things that destroy our world. What sort of person can get on a bulldozer and knock down a forest of trees, push them into heaps and burn them so that a few scrufy cattle may graze on the steep rocky pasture thus exposed? What is wrong with the pursuit of pleasure - not the selfish pleasures of destruction, but the simple human pleasures of conversation and music, movement and exploration, speed and exhiliaration. Why are all these things so commercialised? Because we have made ourselves slaves to work and the money it brings, and the only justification available for such stupidity is to be able to buy good things. But the best things in life are free, and money cannot buy you love.
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[page 143]
. . .
This book, I feel, is a meeting of strange bedfellows., but strange bedfellows, I feel, are the very spice of life, as any practitioner of mathematical genetics can tell you. My two principal tests are Insight, by BJF Lonergan and Consuming Passions by Philippa Pullar, leavened by the thoughts of hundreds of other authors and my own experience and reflection. It is written in the pursuit of intellectual pleasure, and I fully hope that it will bring similar joy to its readers. Lonergan.
Pullar page 148: 'There was more genius per head of population in the eighteenth century than ever before and ever since. It was a century of freedom, brilliance, great welath against poverty, reckless spending and self indulgence . . . '
Order comes before diversity as its natural precursor. Entropy always increases.
page 150: A wave of sadism.
page 151: Roast goose alive. . . .
page 155: The founder of Caius College spent his last days living on human milk.
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[page 146]
. . .
Me: 'Life is just a desperate struggle by the planet to reach equilibrium [from which it is driven by solar radiation].
[page 147]
To me Lonergan is the greatst of the medievals, the Einstein of Scholasticism, the last great classicist. He caught a blinding glimpse of the intelligence of the Universe, but like Einstein, faith in a god pulled him away. He could not believe what he saw and condemned himelf to sterility.