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vol VII: Notes

1999

Notes

[Notebook DB 52A Mathesis]

[Sunday 10 October 1999 - Saturday 16 October 1999]

[page 25]

Sunday 10 October 1999

Verbum Lonergan

Lonergan page viii: fundamental breakthrough in Lonergan's thought. Lonergan: Verbum: Word and idea in Aquinas

[page 26]

Photon is like a virus, with no internal processing = no rest mass

Shotgun sequencing: thousands of sentences (fragments) in these [note]books might eventually be assembled into a representation of my nootype. Shotgun sequencing - Wikipedia

Practical epistemology: avoiding injury from a power saw, over a lifetime career, say 100 cuts per day, 200 days per year, 40 year career = about 1 million injury free events.

As a foundation, we have the transparent, essentially simple and self-documenting structure of the www.

Lonergan page 222: intelligible procession

page 223: 'since we cannot understand at will . . . '

page 223: Thomas adverted to the act of understanding.'

[page 27]

Lonmergan page 227: 'ex operibus eorum cognoscites eos.' [from their operations you know them]

My first few readings of Lonergan revealed a person half in and half out of the Roman Catholic deposit of faith, rather like the membrane piercing proteins in the cell wall that serve to transport matter and information in and out of the cell.

Modularity of the mind. You can lose a whole function. The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Fodor, Sacks

Morality goes with wealth goes with degrees of freedom.

Life is an abstract concept that exists independently of its material substrate.

Death is the ultimate painkiller.

. . .

The basic epistemological tool is the closure - null cybernetic loop. Cybernetics - Wikipedia

. . .

[page 29]

. . .

WHOLTE / DUALITY / TRINITY - We look at the fundamental particles of physics and ask if this is a set of tools that can span the whole of being. Each level of explanation has a cardinal number of components. As the components become dmaller their specification becomes smaller. The total specification (physical entropy) in some sense remains constant while meaning is added by ordering, that is position sensistivity.

. . .

One holds the line by hlding on to nature.

. . .

[page 31]

. . .

Salvation exists in life moment to moment with health and safety, growth, reproduction and then through the mind until the happy death that may be bought ith mental discipline and drugs for the pain (if any).

The saviour is the power to solve all the problems standing in the way of continued life, eg a mating leading to grandchildren.

. . .

Hiding from reality = SCOTOSIS: conserving processing resources relative to threat.

[page 32]

. . .

To se religion purely as spirituality is to mistake the aura for the substance, Religion lies at the interface between matter and spirit, both defining and being defined by the dichotomy.

Sequence f interpersonal events may escalate to murder or proceed peacefully at an even and productive (= salvific) pace.

ACTION - SALVATION - CYBERNETICS

[page 33]

Position of salvation by faith alone completely misses the point. The genotype reproduces itself by supervising the construction of an efective phenotype.

For the definition of matter is surely a form: nec quid, nec quale, nec quantum, nec aliquid eorum quibus ens determinatur.

One may retreat from this sort of conundrum into mysticism, but this does not put bread on the tabe, so we are led to deal with the question in the practical manner developed by formalist mathematics, The beauty of formalism is that both argument and evidence in on the page, since the arguments are about properties of symbols and symbols are easily represented as marks on aper.

. . .

Heaven on earth? and for whom?

[page 34]

Pivotal figure in the transformation from magical to effective was Descartes and his bulls eye, viewing for himself one step in an animal's sensory perception of its environment. Gary Ayton

. . .

We should take note of robust correlations, eg seat belts.

. . .

[page 35]

EXPLANATION = WORKING

On differentiating between dream and reality.

a) network is a cloning machine
b) reality cannot be cloned, but form of reality can.

Monday 11 October 1999
Tuesday 12 October 1999
Wednesday 13 October 1999
Thursday 14 October 1999
Friday 15 October 1999

Still Xology: Genesis: the Fall is an artefact of the origin of consciousness. Jaynes. Jaynes

Women are suppressed because the church takes temptation to be a sin.

Christianity becomes a Paschalian long shot!

Jaynes page 286: Xianty is a means of neutralizing consciousness by putting the responsibility for personal responsiblility back to god.

Saturday 16 October 1999

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Fodor, Jerry A, The Modularity of Mind , MIT Press 1983 Jacket: 'This monograph synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory. Fopdor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organisation underlying biologically coherent behaviours. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of facultu psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates fetures not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artifical intelligence.' Prof. Alvin Liberman, Yale University, 
Amazon   back
Jaynes, Julian, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Mariner Books 2000 Jacket: 'At the heart of this book is the revolutionary idea that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but is a learned process brought into being out of an earlier hallucinatory mentality by cataclysm and catastrophe only 3000 years ago and still developing.' 
Amazon   back
Lonergan, Bernard J F, and Robert M. Doran, Frederick E. Crowe (eds), Verbum : Word and Idea in Aquinas (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan volume 2) , University of Toronto Press 1997 Jacket: 'Verbum is a product of Lonergan's eleven years of study of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The work is considered by many to be a breakthrough in the history of Lonergan's theology ... . Here he interprets aspects in the writing of Aquinas relevant to trinitarian theory and, as in most of Lonergan's work, one of the principal aims is to assist the reader in the search to understand the workings of the human mind.' 
Amazon   back
Pétrement, Simone, and Raymond Rosenthal (translator), Simone Weil: A Life, Schocken 1988 Jacket: 'A French Jew who broke with Judaism and wavered on the edge of Roman Catholicism, the daughter of a respected physician, the sister of one of the century's greatest mathematicians, Simone Weil devoted her life to the search for truth and God amid the poverty and misery of the poor.

Since her death in 1943 at the age of thirty-four, Simone Weil has become a person of legend. T S Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler and Robert Coles spoke of her as the saint of the twentieth century who lived the contradictions of our era more intensely and continuously than anyone else.' 
Amazon   back

Sacks, Oliver, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; and Other Clinical Tales, Touchstone 1998 'Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.' 
Amazon   back
Papers
Landauer, Rolf, "Information is a physical entity", Physica A, 263, 1, 1 February 1999, page 63-7. 'This paper, associated with a broader conference talk on the fundamental physical limits of information handling, emphasizes the aspects still least appreciated. Information is not an abstract entity but exists only through a physical representation, thus tying it to all the restrictions and possibilities of our real physical universe. The mathematician's vision of an unlimited sequence of totally reliable operations is unlikely to be implementable in this real universe. Speculative remarks about the possible impact of that, on the ultimate nature of the laws of physics are included.'. back
Landauer, Rolf, "The Physical Nature of Information", Physica A, 217, 4-5, 15 July 1996, page 188-93. 'Information is inevitably tied to a physical representation and therefore to restrictions and possibilities related to the laws of physics and the parts available in the universe. Quantum mechanical superpositions of information bearing states can be used, and the real utility of that needs to be understood. Quantum parallelism in computation is one possibility and will be assessed pessimistically. The energy dissipation requirements of computation, of measurement and of the communications link are discussed. The insights gained from the analysis of computation has caused a reappraisal of the perceived wisdom in the other two fields. A concluding section speculates about the nature of the laws of physics, which are algorithms for the handling of information, and must be executable in our real physical universe.'. back
Landauer, Rolf, "Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process", IBM Journal of Research and Development, 5, 3, 1961, page 183-191. 'Abstract: It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. This logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility and requires a minimal heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. This dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. '. back
Links
Bombich Software, Carbon Copy Cloner, 'Spinning for years at 75MPH, your hard drive's catastrophic crash could really hinder your productivity. Use CCC to make a bootable backup of your digital life today!' back
Cybernetics - Wikipedia, Cybernetics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is relevant to the study of systems, such as mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop; that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in that system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change, originally referred to as a "circular causal" relationship.' back
Gary Ayton, Electromagnetic radiation and optics - a istorical account, 'Rene Descartes (-1676): used a bull's eye to prove the eye worked like a camera obscura 1st to write that Alhazen's rule that angle of reflected ray is same as incident ray. theorised Snell's law at same time that Snell developed it using experimentation' back
Landauer, Irreversibility and Heat Generation in the Computing Process, Rolf Landauer: Abstract: 'It is argued that computing machines inevitably involve devices which perform logical functions that do not have a single-valued inverse. The logical irreversibility is associated with physical irreversibility, and requires a minimum heat generation, per machine cycle, typically of the order of kT for each irreversible function. The dissipation serves the purpose of standardizing signals and making them independent of their exact logical history. Two simple, but representative, models of bistable devices are subjected to a more detailed analysis of switching kinetics to yield the relationship between speed and energy dissipation, and to estimate the effects of errors induced by thermal fluctuations. back
Pascal's Wager - Wikipedia, Pascal's Wager - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Pascal's Wager (also known as Pascal's Gamble) is an argument in apologetic philosophy which was devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, Blaise Pascal. It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or does not exist. Given the possibility that God actually does exist and assuming the infinite gain or loss associated with belief in God or with unbelief, a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.).' back
Shotgun sequencing - Wikipedia, Shotgun sequencing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopdia, 'In genetics, shotgun sequencing, also known as shotgun cloning, is a method used for sequencing long DNA strands. It is named by analogy with the rapidly expanding, quasi-random firing pattern of a shotgun.
In shotgun sequencing,[1][2] DNA is broken up randomly into numerous small segments, which are sequenced using the chain termination method to obtain reads. Multiple overlapping reads for the target DNA are obtained by performing several rounds of this fragmentation and sequencing. Computer programs then use the overlapping ends of different reads to assemble them into a continuous sequence.' back

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