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Notes

[Notebook Turkey, DB 55]

[Sunday 18 August 2002 - Saturday 24 August 2002]

[page 93]

Sunday 18 August 2002

Male provides half the ideas; woman provides half the ideas plus the implementation of same, having in some way a preemptive control of implementation which men must offset by restricting the variety of women's behaviour, ie OPPRESSION. The incompetent must oppress the competent in order to retain power. These are people operating at different levels of resolution in the overall structure. Conservation of action == spatial x temporal = constant.

Fundamentally communication between A and B means establishing a continuum (correlation [closeness, differentiability] between A and B.

Important thing about communication theory is that it applies (on the average) to a very large set of measures.

In a network there is a lot of internal processing for every overt act. The Mac, working at 300 MHz, is devoted to a 50 Hz transmission, 1000 cycles per bit. Given that these cycles are 16 bits wide, we are equivalently processing 16 kb to send one. All this, of course, relates to the deeper structure ('meaning') of the message and the work necessary to encode and check and decode messages. Similar is the relationship between the (apparently) hidden power of the qbit and the amount of information gained by a measurement, just one bit of output for a continuous process. The reduction is from the continuum to the discrete, the continuous spirit interacting with itself via digital signals (here digital means not just binary digital, but numbers to any (even transfinite?) base. What happens is that the cardinal number of its channels is always less than the cardinal number of its nodes. [is this balanced (in the sense of processing rate) by the fact that there can be many channels per node.] Every node connects to its environment by links that are abstracted into the notion of user (driver, source, etc etc, ie the spirit of the node). The power of physical theology is its ability to prove the existence of spiritual theology, the mystery

[page 97]

behind appearances (communication links). [This mystery is not an absolute mystery, like the Christian God. Rather we can study it, looking into the nodes. The nodes when magnified appear as networks, and so the process continues recursively to the initial singularity, beyond which further magnification reveals no new detail]

Physical theology: "how much freedom must we sacrifice for security". How much freedom should we trade for our security?

SECURITY = EVERYTHING WORKS PREDICTABLY

Insecurity arises from the heightened [perception of probability of failure] of vital systems which supply needs such as food, shelter, justice, communication, energy, space and so on.

Monday 19 August 2002

Hierarchy of texts [for naturaltheology.net]: notes (these); essays; textbook like exposition.

Set theory specifies a very powerful formal computer which can be used for doing mathematics. Divides into naive and axiomatic. Axiomatic set theories attempt to capture all the power of naive set theory without some of the paradoxes that can arise if we are not careful with our p's and q's. Naive set theory is the dangerous, wild, traditional version of set theory. Axiomatic set theories are relatively controlled and safe. Different sets of axioms capture different features of naive set theory and we might conjecture that it would take an infinite space of axioms to capture all the complexity that can be generated by thinking [and constructing] in terms of order and correspondence: element, membership, set.

Every axiom corresponds to a constraint on operation. Axioms of motion: action and reaction are equal and opposite. This applies as much in diplomacy as in physics.

Democracy? Power sharing implements the second law (Newton's). This is a definition of peers: both have equivalent power in the network. We divide the elements of a [transfinite] network into [transfinite] equivalence classes.

Network theory written in set theory. Please tell me.

By preparing certain systems and measuring their behaviour we ask questions of the divinity. Are you like this? (eg the structure of DNA).

[page 98]

Quantum mechanics postulates a world of perfect precision behind the random events of communication between systems which are the observables in our lives if we happen to be one of those systems. The mathematical structure is so vast as to be intractable, so we must introduce simplification and approximations to carry out most real calculations. This, we feel, is true of the real world also. The more time it spends working out an answer, the more precise the result.

Parallel processing 2 bit, 8 bit 16, 64 etc = space
sequential steps = time.

As long as they [the Roman Catholic Church] rort the system, I will rort it too, in my own little way. It all comes down to the black money question.

BLACK MONEY = DARK MATTER (Hidden processing)

What is the wave function of a neutron star? How can we entangle it with the wave functions of the human mind, ie relevant electromagnetic process to create a human, the wave function of this.

Each dimension is a designated set of (transfinite) numbers.

The dimension sets are defined by orthogonality relations:

sum x(i)x(j) = 1 (i = j), = 0 (i <> j). Basis vectors.

One must be in the network to survive. A thermodynamic node will die if starved.

THERMODYNAMIC = HARDWARE

We kill thoughts by killing their hardware.

[page 99]

Personal experience is the data of theology, and the challenge of theology is to give meaning to feelings. I was brought up in the atmosphere of social corruption now being revealed in the Church which is a direct consequence of all its more powerful officials being required to take a vow of chastity. The result is that these people although sexually mature in the biological sense, have no sexual culture because they have denied it to themselves [maybe duped by teachers, community]. This is not a neutral decision but has the pathological consequence of juvenilizing many if not most who take such vows and lead those who need, to seek sexual fulfillment with people their own emotional age, ie children. The theological model gives us a way of understanding and correcting these failures. Here we come against the intellectual depravity of the Church, rooted in the notion that it has the gift of absolute truth. John Paul II. Since the propensity to require chastity is the consequence of a certain set of theological propositions.

The essential evil is a) to define sex as evil; and b) to define all feelings of warmth and closeness as sex.

The refusal to say sorry [by the Australian Prime Minister] shows complete ignorance of the distinction between role and [natural] person. How does this apply to the Church?

Lonergan says this [ie asserts the empirical residue] about space and time because he has no idea of the true interior complexity of the real line revealed by set theory and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics and four space have the same mathematical structure? Lonergan.

How do the pieces of mathematics fit together? Like a network. There is the literature (edges) and the nodes (persons)

I stand by my essays [for the Australian Catholic University]. They are hypothetical as essays must be, but given their hypotheses, they show a way forward. An essay is not a research paper.

. . .

[page 100]

I wished to go to the ACU for the purpose of 'coming out' on the intellectual depravity side of the Church. As I might have expected, I met the same cover up as before, so now I am in a morally justifiable position to go public. You should reply to my argument if you can. A convincing refutation would be a blessing to me as well as toward you. I can settle into a sedentary old age enjoying myself ungoaded by the need to comment on the problems I see around me, believing instead in some weird combination of sin, virtue and divine providence.

Sins are worse as they go deeper into the hardware, murder, rape, starvation, . . . Or is it the other way round? Both. Silencing dissident opinion is a species of murder.

Dershowitz: Reversal of Fortune. Dershowitz.

Academic trial and judgment: I paid good money to get a hearing and was merely stonewalled.

Delusion can lead to disaster: religious delusions.

The paramount local qualities are consistency and its opposite, nonconsistency or inconsistency. Logically, consistency can be reduced to a series of yes-no decisions. When generalized to the continuum we can see consistency in terms of fit. This bearing fits this shaft, this building fits this environment, this creature fits this niche, this religion fits the human spirit.

There is a class of religions which claim that the religion is given and human nature must be trimmed to fit it. The archetype of this position in the Roman Catholic Church which claims that the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience provide a route to human perfection. The effect of this position is to deprecate most of the instincts of survival which we have inherited from our billions of years of biological forebears.

[page 101]

Like the French Revolutionaries, the Nazis and many other organizations the Church claims a new start in history from which some conclude that it is appropriate to obliterate the past by genocide or lesser terrors such as forced reeducation or targeted assassination. We see this in washing rituals. Though your soul be as black as night, God can was it as white as snow. Maybe, but it is not so easy, since a survival oriented path through complex sets of circumstances is not always clear, and even the best path may lead to sudden death.

Contrast to the Roman Catholic Church a religion that sets out to keep itself consistent with the consensus of scientific opinion about the nature of human existence and the goals we should seek to establish a maximum harmony with and minimum harm to our environment.

Galileo and the split between theology and science. Want of a theory. Mental half life of a theological position is about ten years, and positions densely overlap to form a continuum from one identified (written down) position to another. So the waves of literature. 63-5, 87-8. 1995 . . .

The construction of a religion is a technology similar to the construction of a literature, an organization or a building. In all cases we need to assemble the correct elements in the correct order, like laying bricks or etching chips or writing this. An entity is defined by an organized set of physical entities.

Tuesday 20 August 2002
Wednesday 21 August 2002
Thursday 22 August 2002
Friday 23 August 2002
Saturday 24 August 2002

 

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Concordat Watch

Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty


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Further reading

Books

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Dershowitz, Alan, and Sally Peters (editor), Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case, Pocket Books 1990  
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Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' 
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Links
John Paul II Fides et Ratio: On the relationship between faith and reason. para 2: 'The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, through the Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).' back

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