vol VII: Notes
1999
Notes
[Notebook BOOK DB 50 4/5/94]
[Sunday 21 March to Saturday 27 March 1999]
[page 209]
Sunday 21 March 1999
All this is beginning to hum a little.
The mould growing in the corner and the spider's web floating through the air are parts of my world and my research.
Language deals with the whole representation bit, while model deals with the actual structure of the model proposed here and method deals with getting models right and into useful and usable form.
Life (00) is the empirical basis of all this,
Physics(03) applies the model to inanimate life.
Biology (04) introduces language (genetics and cell signalling) to physics to give us life.
Cybernetics (05) formalizes (models) the structures seen in physics and biology, teaching us how to achieve perfection on a noisy channel.
Technology (06) applies cybernetics in its full generality to design and construct new organs of life.
Make Frontier logo clickable. Add currency converter. Check Nature click through
Where is the borderline between doing it oneself and paying someone else to do it? Religion: some paid, some personal.
Churches work by donation and so place themselves outside corporate regulations. Psychology does not teach communication, but clears the channel of communication.
Theology (07) Explores and generalizes the structure of human mindspace.
Love (08) The generalised potential that drives life.
Religion (09) Begins to implement mindspace theory to improve the human condition, ie 'save' humanity.
Culture (10) The codes used to share models in mind space.
Politics (11) The communal allocation of resources to the maintenance of the community.
[page 211]
Economics (12) The measurement and modelling of goods with a view to increasing our wealth of goods.
Design (13) The search for and documentation of consistent routes through the pace of possibility from a to be.
Work (14) The physical realisation of designs to give a new functioning organ of life.
Heaven(15) The end result of a perfectly functioning society. Perfection is possible because we can correct errors.
Saints have tried to reach perfection by the hardware route, ie by becoming an error free system, but this is not necessary since error correcting protocols can deal with noise and maintain perfect fidelity on top of noise.
. . .
Error tolerance = benevolence. From costs of error prevention and error correction, we can
The essence of work is to break design down into independent units that can be manufactured separately.
[page 212]
Sinking ship
The fundamental cybernetic problem is to handle shocks. If predictable, the mechanism can be put in place where necessary. If not predictable safety measures can be put in place permanently.
SHOCK - by definition unpredictable.
NEURON = FUNCTION (many inputs, one output)
Monday 22 March 1999
In the end the methodological criterion is does it work? Does this religion bring peace to the whole world? Does this dishwasher wash dishes? This is the SURVIVAL TEST
Theory is also subject on this list - does it help to produce things (eg nuclear weapons) that work?
Lonergan Verbum xiii "idea for Plato was like Descartes equation of a circle."
[page 213]
Last night the inklings of depression (is any of this going anywhere) This morning the old bliss we are heading toward another dawn and I feel fine.
. . .
I think of religion as shareware, that is code that facilitates some human activity, and the problems of religion as the problems of software design. In this context, one may think of god as the force that decides whether or not things will work, whatever they are. God judges, because errors lead to failure, or even disaster. God gives grace, because when things work it is wonderful.
We know a lot about how to make things work.
[page 214]
Limits to technology: Turing Machine = bandwidth
Buy Lonergan: Gratia operans. Lonergan
Tuesday 23 March 1999
We are intensely interested in eachothers inner lives and feelings, and the protocols to communicate this information. NOVEL has done much to develop this.
[page 215]
. . .
burden NIH definition (N398:180 18 Mar 1999) any aspect of a regulation (proposed software) that could be made more efficient without defeating its purpose [efficiency = productivity = benefit/cost] Wadman
. . .
Wednesday 24 March 1999
Thursday 25 March 1999
Religion develops and downloads the software for human life. As Aristotle notes, we are born as unwritten slates (unwritten memory) and slowly acquire an operating system through the interaction of our native intelligence with our environment, first learning the spoken and kinetic languages of our culture and then, through school, learning to read and write and arithmetize so as to access and add to the written (including sculpted, painted etc etc) archives of our community.
[page 216]
then drunk, evening lost.
Friday 26 March 1999
A network (eg neural network) is a repository of knowledge/information/data (eg RAM)
Religion deals with matters that are secret, sacred or dangerous. Theology supports religion by trying to understand these matters more clearly and devise strategies for dealing with them.
We are a conscious form of life, able to reflect publicly on our interior experience. These religious categories may very well be an expression of the forces that mould biological evolutions. First there is the secret: the fluctuations of probability that appear to affect all events and cannot be known in advance, if at all.
Then the sacred: those elements of the living system in which we swim that we dare not tamper with, or at least treat with serious respect, like sex, death, plutonium and communication.
[page 217]
The dangerous is the violation of the sacred. It is dangerous if sexuality becomes a commodity rather than a divinely instilled channel of communication.
It is dangerous to take too narrow a view of anything, because a narrow view increases the probability of overlooking important elements of reality.
This sort of stuff is a bit passionate. We start of ultracool, constructing a framework, beginning with transfinite space, adding computers and links (symmetries) into it and we have a system big enough to comprehend the components of the world we inhabit. Slowly building passion.
USING A SYSTEM = ESTABLISHING I/O
Dark matter: communicates with the rest of the Universe only through gravitation. Massive (and with angular momentum?) but with nothing else.
I learnt theology in latin. I am now truing to translate it into english augmented with scientific jargon and the mathematical and communal language
[page 218]
of computing machinery, physical or theoretical
FORM + PHYSICAL PROCESSOR = PASSION
Any functioning religion must deliver a positive doctrine of sex.
What is the passion: how do we put the world on a smoothly functioning basis. The sort of job management consultants take on. Here we take management to mean control and the computational modelling of control is the subject of mathematics.
One can only control a system one understands, so the control of the human world means knowledge of the human world. For a control theory to get a grip on such knowledge, it must be able to be expressed in the form of a computable model, which the controller uses both to collect data and to simulate the outcome of variations of the present system to see if there is a better way of doing things.
[page 219]
By law, we code ourselves. Software analogy.
. . .
GENETIC SOFTWARE
Life is something that moves itself, that is an engine driving a machine.
In order to maximize pleasure we like to disconnect the effect (eg obesity) from the act and any accompanying pain (eg eating).
This model. It is the zero tolerance model so favoured by those who know nothing of the theory of communication networks. A more sensible model realizes that a network properly organized can perform its function despite an error. Networks may be designed to achieve near perfection at a given level of error. In other words, there is non-zero tolerance.
The entropy of an individual address is measured by the size of the address space of which it is a member. The entropy of
[page 220]
all the members of an address space varies as the number of addresses (n) and the entropy of the space just established (log n), and we say H(n) = n log n.
