vol 7: Notes
2003
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: TURKEY DB 55]
[ Sunday 8 June 2003 - Saturday 14 June 2003]
Sunday 8 June 2003
Monday 9 June 2003
Tuesday 10 June 2003
Wednesday 11 June 2003
Thursday 12 June 2003
[page 320]
Friday 13 June 2003
A long period of building, early mornings and nights.
Religion is the outermost or highest level of the social control system, corresponding to the self in human individuals, the 'self' of society. Damasio
[page 321]
We say that religions the technology of peace and the outermost loop of the social cybernetic system. The problem is reconciling the two is to find out how religion must act to keep the peace, what parameters it should be measuring and optimizing to achieve the goal of peace. Part of this problem is to decide what peace itself it. We will think of it as a social state in which each person contributes to the commonwealth in such a manner as not to need or to make violence. In keeping with the via negativa, we define peace by the absence of its opposite, not-peace. Not-peace can take various forms induced by war, starvation, disease, lack of housing, lack of dignity, lack of information, fear of violence form the powerful etc.
Our religion says act in accordance with nature (Tao, Needham, page 68). Needham Roman Catholic Church says act in accordance with God, adding that a) only the RCC has a true channel to God's nature and desires, and b) nature and God are in conflict. We take the Taoist view, that Nature == God.
Not 'refrain from action' but refrain from action contrary to Nature.
Materialists see the world as constructed of little parts like Lego blocks. We like the 'part' idea, but our parts are networks. Just as one can make a big block by combining small blocks, so big networks can be made of small networks: like the term 'block' network is scale invariant. While blocks are inert, however, networks are dynamics, continually rearranging blocks (packets) of information whose meaning depends upon how [and where] they are encoded and decoded. All this can be realized by observable physical entities but the deeper meaning behind their activities, while just as real, is more obscure and hard to gasp. It is the spirit of the world represented in physics by the wave function of the world.
[page 322]
Transfinite network models whole world, matter plus spirit.
Lonergan's schemes of recurrence are a restatement of the Darwinian idea that given limited material resources, those things are most common which are able to reproduce themselves, that is collect enough resources to create a child. Those parents which have more children increase the prevalence of similar organisms. We can measure the distance between organisms by counting differences (at the genetic or some other (eg anatomical) [level]). The process of natural selection tends to make a potential continuum of species concentrate into a set of points (species) which are clearly similar, interfertile and quite distinct from other species. Is this a general consequence of coding, fidelity, survival and the E-theorem? One seems to be slowly coming round in a big circle, coming back to the communication based argument for survival and conservation (Value).
Value grows with complexity, This might make us thing that less complex organisms are less valuable than the more complex. When we look at the whole, however, we see only one thing of unique value, which value is shared by every element of the whole. We can assign two values to each entity - a comparative one relative to other entities and an 'absolute' value relative to the whole. So while we are all God's children, some of us are better at some things than others and so more in demand in the relevant market, and so valued higher.
Saturday 14 June 2003
Books
| Damasio, Antonio R, The Feeling of What Happens : Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness , Harcourt Brace 1999 Jacket: 'In a radical departure from current views on consciousness, Damasio contends that explaining how we make mental images or attend to those images will not suffice to elucidate the mystery. A satisfactory hypothesis for the making of consciousness must explain how the sense of self comes to mind. Damasio suggests that the sense of self doe snot depend on memory or on reasoning or even less on language. [it] depends, he argues, on the brain's ability to protray the living organism in the act of relating to an object. That ability, in turn, is a consequence of the brain's involvement in the process of regulating life. The sense of self began as yet another device aimed an ensuring survival.' Amazon back |
| Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China (Volume 2) History of Scientific Thought, Cambridge UP 1956 Amazon back |
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Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
