vol VII: Notes
1999
Notes
[Notebook DB 52A Mathesis]
[Sunday 26 December 1999 - Saturday 1 January 2000]
[page 153]
Sunday 26 December 1999
Oxford English Dictionary is a biography of each word in the language - descent with modification.
Theology:
→ Hermeneutics
→ Text
→ Linguistics
cv Mathematics
Symmetry
Defined doctrine: what is definition?
The meaning of a message lies in how it was encoded: Message = text = encoding
[page 208]
Encoding = symmetry between transmitter and receiver [invertible function].
All particles talk trough gravity and such talk is always attractive. We understand nothing about the universe The particles emitted by the big bang are all moving ballistically, under the action of their own interactions.
Natural progression in physical science from matter to information, The scientific method may be seen as a consequence of the fact that all information is embodied, that is physically represented.
Matrix of dots.
Information is spiritual. So physical representation of information is the modern expression of the ancient relationship between matter and form or matter and spirit.
Plato → Aristotle.
One hopes that the definitive expression of
[page 209]
cybernetic soteriology . . .
The data of theology are human feelings.
Christian theology was once grounded.
Action mediates between potential and kinetic energy (how does this work in harmonic oscillator?) so Maupertuis minimizes L = ∫ dt(KE - PE)
My difference with the church is encapsulated in an element of the difference between Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, forms existed separate from matter. The Platonic forms became paradigms for pure spirits, the doyen of whom is the greatest God. For the ancient version of well ordering was that every set has a greatest member which called first>, the cause of all the lesser elements. The modern version of the principle is just the [opposite].
[page 210]
Transmission of idea = text + encoding.
Not the greatest shall be first but the least shall be first. Now the previous sentence is a piece of text, and having been written can be encoded in many other forms, such as sound, light, stone or the abstract representations of matter we call qubits.
At the theological level of interpretation, one's personality becomes an essential ingredient in the dialogue.
Dialogue is simply represented byt he mathematics of communication.
The central Catholic administration seems to me to be isomorphic to the wealthy slave owning imperial bureaucracy from which is has developed.
Chrsitianity broke the nexus between Church and state, but the nexus remained.
[page 211]
Nexus ≡ correlation.
Theory of communication.
dialogue
Theology and communication.
. . .
Modern scholarship leaves no doubt that Jesus was a very political figure (Thiering). We can read endless meanings into scripture, but the central interest must be be in what the writers were trying to put across to their readers. All comes down to interpretation of text. Thiering
The Church also. The politics of ecumenism. World is fascinated by the politics of ecumenism, particularly that church politics is just as messy as any other politics, throwing some doubt on claims that a Church may be a divine organization pure as the driven snow bringing light and enlightenment to the masses.
This is indicated by the vast sea of doubt that has appeared in the core of Christianity since the Reformation.
[page 212]
Plato had two layers of being which were his forms and the world, the forms real, the world a shadow play on the back of a cave. Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia
all information is physically represented. This is the genius of Agatha Christie type stories. Poirot, Miss Marple, Battle and the rest piece together a history bloodstains, fingerprints and the often unreliable words and behaviour of s set of suspects.
Science approaches the world as a text to be deciphered. As Plto saw, the world is a text if it has stable elements that can be read. It is also dynamic, and here everybody until the birth of quantum mechanics faced an intractable problem.
Aristotle attacked the problem by postulating an symmetry between the before and after states of a change which he called hyle [υλη], Greek for matter. This symmetry did not extend to the whole universe however, because he though the heavens were of a different substance entirely and could not understand how matter
[page 213]
could yield his experience of conscious knowledge and so made the human soul at least partly matter free.
The recent history of theology, recounted by Avis, seems to indicate that we are retracing some of the steps taken by the Greeks: Schleiermacher.
They believed in an afterlife, or some of them, or perhaps the dead just lived on in memory.
All information is materially represented, Plato 100% wrong? Aristotle half right. Science fully right.
Quantum mechanics has many wonders, one of which is superposition, In the mathematical description of a state, many different elements, each of which is not the others, coexist. That is, at this level of truth, both p and not-p are true with a probability adding up to 1.
Monday 27 December 1999
Tuesday 28December 1999
Christianity is based on the belief that we live
[page 214]
on after death. There is no basis for this, One cannot imagine a jury acquitting a murder on the basis that he had not killed his victim, merely moved his life to a new venue.
Distinction between mathematical object per se and coordinate (spatial) representation of same necessary for computation.
R H Robins - A Short History of Linguistics 3rd ed Longmans 1990 Robins
Robins page 53: 'The intellectual background of Greece and Judaea, and the political unity and freedom of intercourse provided by the Roman stability were the conditions in which Christianity arose and spread, to become in the fourth century A.D. the state religion of the Roman Empire.'
page 54: Vergil, Aneid 6, 851-3: 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento (hae tibi erunt artes) pacisque imponere morem, parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.'
[page 215]
For rctical purposes the structure of life is induced by finiteness.
A sentence (Λογος) has truth value.
Linking social and personal value.
Robins page 63: Classical Christianity the era from 400 to 14xx, when Church was one and dominant.
page 65: potestas of a figura with a nomen is the actual sound uttered when it is read
Meanings expressed in different languages may be incommensurate.
What is theology? Symbolism and resolution.
We delete manner from the world (no cloning) and deal only with essence and existence. Structure and communication.
The fundamental task is to eliminate war and suicide
Christianity is an ungrounded virtual reality which
[page 219]
needs grounding.
Wednesday 29 December 1999
Avis: The avoidance of science in theology us the avoidance of reality, of grounding, of a link to the whole. It is a temporary corruption, because ungrounded entities cannot last.
Idoru William Gibson, Penguin Gibson
'Once agin Gibson finds new and compelling ways to couch the SF question first asked by Philip K Dick: What is reality? And who is human?'
Avis: this book suffers the same problem as all of Christian theology and scholarship: it is an exploration of an ungrounded virtual world,
Death liberates us all to live. The illusion of eternity is anti-life!
A closed system is one based on an irrevocable acceptance of a particular hypothesis or fiction.
[page 219]
The long running distinction between theology and science is to be mapped onto the distinction between relativity and quantum mechanics. And what is this? Quantum mechanics is based on two way communication . . .
I began to see something after I left the order. I enjoyed my time there, particularly my intellectual interaction with my teachers. Also I had lots of friends there [despite] the monastic proscription of special friendships. I used to go back to see them and for a few years things were animated as before, then glazed over, Before this, as it became clear that my situation was precarious were long discussions with various people about what I should do, and the basic tenor was submit. Even at that time, submission seemed dishonest, since it required asserting my assent to something I did not believe. Eventually I discovered Popper's books on the Open Society and its Enemies that heled me to understand what was going on in Plato's mind, It sharpened my view of the tribal / civilised transition in human history. I began to see the Catholic Church as a tribal thing, a rigid male monarchy stretching back
[page 220]
to time immemorial where everyone had a place, mostly serving the hierarchy.
The Church had corporatized an exciting mixture of tribe and empire. It did this by abstracting the structure of a tribe from the ties of blood that create the structure of the natural tribe.
Ditch tribe use family Members of a family are familiar; there is a high probability of communication between them.
We abstract from the content of messages and look only at their volume and topology.
Robins page 84: 'Speculative grammar was the product of the integration of the grammatical descriptions of Latin as formulated By Priscian and Donatus into the system of scholastic philosophy. Scholasticism - Wikipedia, Priscian - Wikipedia
Scholastic philosophy began in a time when the field was open, but became closed, to be reopened by science.
[page 221]
Thought Reform and te Psychology of Totalism [Lifton] Lifton
We al come to theology bearing our own experience of life as data.
Quantum mechanics : reference to the other
General Relativity: reference to self (infinitely fine grained)
Theology as a theory of normative feeling. If one did not have normative feeling, one could be beaten until one did.
Not a direct expression of feeling, but through a proxy called god.
Excommunication, and its contrary, ecumenism, both arise from the very unchristian notion of judging some people worthy of membership and others not in whatever group, us, the sacred ones, them etc etc.
Christian theology must be reopened - Schleiermacher: Reformation = freedom of conscience.
[page 222]
. . .
There is an isomorph of the general theory of relativity as a subroutine in the program of every process in the universe. It is not invoked often, we know, because the gravitational force, ie gravitational correlation of entities, is weak.
What I wish to introduce here seems to me to be the linguistic equivalent of the differential and integral equations to central to physics.
The relationship between god and the world is inclusion, not exclusion. We are in god, not outside it, here god means the whole.
We come to theology bringing ourselves as the dat to be explained. It is for this reason that theology deals with the fundamental questions of self, birth, death, mating, housing, social position etc etc.
[page 223]
Our biology is a 'defined doctrine' within the meaning of the act.
Quantisation is an essential feature of our communication with the other. Continuity in communication with self, because I am always here with myself.
Coveting the gifts of consciousness.
They know about safe sex and they are learning about truth and falsity, honesty and deception in the area in which it is most important, human relationships.
Human relations consultancy. Theology is the theory of management consultancy for the church.
The inventor's purpose is to get the idea into the literature by first understanding and assaying the idea, and then by helping to express it in the chosen language.
The big remix.
The experience I offer as a theological datum
[page 224]
Once cannot be simultaneously all inclusive and normative . . . without formulating the norms widely enough to be all inclusive. The 'bottom up' principle ≡ the combinatorial principle.
Heracleitus → Parmenides → Socrates → Plato → Aristotle → Aquinas → Galileo → Newton → Cantor → Einstein → Deutsch and heaps of others.
Robins page 84: Scholasticism: peace . Aristotle
Mao tortures Pope in the flesh of their servants.
page 85: 'During the Arab occupation of Spain, Toledo in particular was a centre for the translation of Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin.
The teaching of Thomas was decisive in making him the dominant philosopher in medieval Christian thought.[page 225]
Move from documentation of language to theory of features [invariants].
free: signification: meaning meaning connotation intension 1
Fixed: supposition instance reference denotation entension 0
foraml - stand for its referent, sex
material - tands for itself, 'sex'
'. . . a theory of language set within the philosophy of the times.'
Theory of language = software engineering.
The best software is designed by descent with modification = object oriented programming.
This book does not mention hermeneutics in the index. Is it in the text? not before 85!
1150: 'Peter Helios wrote a commentary on Priscian in which he sought philospohical explanations for the rules of grammar laid down by him.
ie Explain the structure of language?
Language is definition of process, process pf process . . .
page 86: '. . . thereafter the role of philosopher in grammar was considered a major one.'
Reformers threw off instiutional accumulations to
[page 226]
the text . . .
We begin the search for the universal grammar which was to broaden from a question for the grammar of human language to the grammar of communication in general.
Flattening" language flattens and unflattens [projects up and down the scale of dimension / complexity]
Unity of grammar ≡ unity of geometry [symmetry of language]
Every word points to a class (symmetry) which is why we encounter the same words over and over again, Each is a point in a dimension uised to define a point in a string of words like this, Each sentence asserts the existence of a point in language space, the space { logos }.
Logic works in the moment.
Aristotle is alive is T/F now. At the
[page 227]
stationary moment of each clock pulse, a consistent machine is in a consistent state.
Robins page 87: 'A word includes in itself its sound as it were its matter and its meaning as its form.'
page 88: 'In essence, the grammar of Priscian and Donatus was presented as an accurate reflection of the constitution of reality and the powers of the human mind.'
Modistic system : reality: modus essendi.
. . .
The system will always win because we are indoctrinated by the system [symmetry with respect to complexity gives us a way out]
The Soviet delusion was some sort of rerun of the Christian delusion.
[page 228]
Life must go on. The new system must be built before the old system can be shut down.
Christianity is no longer grounded in reality but in an institution that stands for most things that are erroneous in corporate life.
Solitary - corporate - solitary
Silent - communicative - silent
Thursday 30 December 1999
Friday 31 December 1999
Life constrained by three bodies of information:
ie genome / genotype
menome / menotype
environment.
Linguistics.
Renaissance started in Italy in 14th century
Reformation stated in Germany in 16th century.
Linguistic interest in classics and bible
Bible replace Papacy and priesthood as source of authority.
Luther 95 These 1517. 1492 Columbus. 1453 fall of Constantinople.
Robins page 114: at last a proper theoretical framework for dealing with language change.
- fixed dynamics of articulatory mechanisms vs changing needs of human expression.
page 139: language universals.
. . .
Punctuated equilibrium: We are looking at a transition which began with agriculture and will end when humanity is one organism in harmony with the planet.
page 148: 'interplay or european and american scholarship.'
page 14(: 1786 Sir William Jones linked Sanscrit with Latin, Greek and Germanic languages at Royal Asiatic Society.
[page 230]
'The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is a wonderful structure more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, that could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philosopher could examine all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic have the same origin with the Sanskrit.'
See eg C F Hockett, Language 41 (165) 185-204.
Robins page 150: Vedic period 1200-1000 bc.
page 151: 'The preservation without alteration of linguistic material handed down through the generation by oral trnsmission is an artificial process, and attempt to halt what s everywhere the natural outcome of linguistic continuity.
The whole observable process (propositionm slef assertion) of the universe is the λογος, the word of god, and may be modelled as a function on the Cantor Universe.
[page 231]
Defined doctrine is an element of the environment and a feature of a cooperation, If you want to be in the corporationm you have to fit the definition otherwise the immune system will get you.
Corporation - Immunity
Defined Doctrine = a text in the most general [sense].
