vol 7: Notes
2004
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: Transfinite field theory DB 56]
[Sunday 27 June 2004 - Saturday 3 July 2004]
[page 120]
Sunday 27 June 2004
NETWORK - TRADE
The earth will never achieve dead tranquillity (equilibrium) while the sun shines,
Perhaps our real problem with Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc is that they are personality cults, reducing the entropy and fitness of humanity by concentrating on a symbol and fashioning all things in its image. We are for maximizing human variety, so that everyone gets an equal such of the sauce bottle [niche]. Through the theology company I want to add my own spirit to the theological and religious mix. Is this an acceptable desire of a manifestation of unacceptable ego? Does it matter. I am
[page 121]
motivated and enjoying. I m enjoying the journey, discovering enough excitement at every turn to keep me going. The best part of it is that I am travelling now unencumbered by the dead historical weight of the Roman Catholic Church, my nominal enemy and launching pad.
The organization is paramount? The individual is paramount? The organization is only paramount insofar as it serves the individual. The abstract must respect the concrete, or it is in error. One exception destroys an abstraction. It is not meet that one die for the good of the whole unless it is clear that that one dies expressly to save more than one of his or her own choice. What we want to do, however, is to create an environment where it is not necessary for some to die to save others. This is a restriction caused by corruption, the confusion of symbols.
What would I do if I was not sitting here in front of the fire watching the sun come up reading a spy story (Deighton, Billion Dollar) and worrying about the state of the world? Deighton Be out playing? Building my house? Sleeping? Activity it is built into me as sure as the sun shines, and the pleasure of life comes from action, whatever it is. The circles of care and joy spread from myself to my families and to the whole world. (What upsets me is people doing sub-optimal things (by my standards) at all levels. My level of upset is related to my level of tolerance. Perfectly tolerant = perfectly tranquil. Perfectly intolerant = driven from moment to moment. The least action principle finds an optimum somewhere in the interior of tolerant - intolerant.
Energy is eternal delight. Ethics enters when the question of sharing the energy arises.
To answer the question, we need a picture of the system and a way of detecting and correcting errors in the system.
[page 122]
So each religion posits an ideal and a set of errors and demands the discipline necessary to correct the errors. Often the proposed system is wrong. Often it is a system designed to protect one section of the community at the expense of another, particularly in the battle of the sexes. So a large number of women in the world are still slaves in a system that leaves men free. The Roman Catholic Church is the archetype of this, denying any real religious role to women.
Most of the old religions treat 'matter' as trash. We want to emphasize that it is divine and that every little bit should be cared for, left untouched if possible and recycled if used (ie we take it 'out' of the global system for our own purposes and then reintroduce is thoughtfully, in a readily metabolisable form, when we have finished.
There are some who ask 'quid est hoc quod est esse' [what is this which is to be] Aquinas, somewhere and others just accept it. Perhaps they don't ask the question because they know the answer. Such as answer is provided by a stable (and so relatively uncritical) society with a credible religion. The critic sees, however, that the answer provided by many a religion is empty fiction: there is a system in charge. It knows all the answers. We are a tiny part of it. Be content and do what you have to do. What a critic has to do, having found a weak spot in the status quo is to repair the weakness or fall into some sort of despair that all is doomed. The answer to this is that observation shows that not all is doomed and the world is a wonderful reality, even though birth and death exist and death may be seen as doom is we accept that things die from some sort of necessity, and that each death makes room for a new life. The struggle against death that is made (temporarily) successful by exploiting the power of cooperation is what has made us what we are, since those things that live co so from a desire and ability to live that is absent in many possible entities that do not survive. Ultimately death arises (might we hypothesize) because the nature of the universe is such that possibilities are of necessity (Cantor) greater than realities, and so any reality will eventually be confronted with the possibility of
[page 123]
disintegration and consequent annihilation. Physics studies thus constrained level of being, whose constraints provide the alphabet for the spiritual world emanating from (and to) the physical world.
Harmonic oscillator - creation and annihilation.
Creation and annihilation differ in form and frequency. The ultimate barrier against death is reproduction, that is communication, the raison d'etre of the universe. I die but my family does not. My family may die out, but the human race will live. The human race may dies out, but there will still be life. Bit what of the heat death of the universe? Will all the nuclear fuel be burned out? Do black holes recycle cold gas into living stars? Energy is conserved, and what proportion of energy is to be represented by mass and what part by motion?
MASS - is a quality of a set and measures all the potential and kinetic energy in the set. Now we look into the set and try to partition it into kinetic and potential. Some things are changing and some are staying the same. This is happening over a whole spectrum of frequencies from aleph(0) to 1 (or 0), the age of the universe (or eternity).
So we say the same as all religions: it is obvious that we are here, and reasonable to lean to live with it. We are here through the fitness of complex systems and we will increase our own fitness by allowing our system maximum complexity. The theoretical foundation of this complexity is human symmetry as broken by the environment and the experience of each of us. We are also individuated not by matter but by concrete formal detain, ie we differ as angels do in the Cantor universe.
The observable world, like observable mathematics, like all
[page 124]
communication is quantized, ie alphabetic.
NETWORK ETHICS
CONCRETE == RANDOM == ENCRYPTED
The partition into moving and still is relative, but it is the foundation of science. We capture events on widely different tome scales in our literature. We assume that the literature will last forever, but we know that the ideas and observations contained in the literature [ will be subject to revision] as people see questions raised between the world and the existing literature and try to answer them by further observation and communication. Each scientist is a translator (sense organ) in the body scientific which encodes its observations into the messages that travel through the scientific network. Certain nodes of the network, by considering the inputs of many other nodes as their data, can extract symmetries from these bodies of data, ie discover the alphabet in which they are written, a first stage to decoding them.
From NAND (not the same truth value) we can build the whole propositional world. Also Sheffer stroke?) see Wikipedia
Spy novels: human relationships where organisations (and loyalties) clash, All novels tense (high stress/energy) relationships. Soap opera: ridiculously stressed and simplified.
We are certainly with the Buddhas on harm minimization and wouldn't mind betting that the idea is isomorphic to least action. One can see the big picture for us. All solar; all recycles; nature left unscarred by our networks - where they have to be physical, let them be underground, in general reduce our footprint of energy and entropy drain on the biosphere and become a physically closed system. We can even adjust our albedos to fit in with the natural neighbourhood. High rises and tunnels, like termites. And we excite ourselves by experiencing nature (including ourselves) under minimum stress.
[page 125]
STRESS REDUCES ENTROPY/ HOW?
Reduces information, which is not exactly the same thing. A stresses individual may not read its environment so accurately, so reducing the information it derives from the environment of (by assumption) constant entropy.
The reversible Carnot cycle conserves entropy and energy. The same amount of entropy is taken from the hot reservoir [as] is transferred to the cold reservoir. To conserve energy, some energy must be removed associated with zero entropy, ie mechanical work [infinite temperature]
Uncertainty - reversibility - cardinal equivalence. But quantum mechanics allows for generate (not observably different) states.
Revolutionaries have a binary view of human conditions, before and after the revolution. The actual revolution is a process of many steps, however, and it is better if it is done in an 'engineered' manner rather than by violence. To engineers, however, we need a physics that points out invariant features of the world to serve as foundations for our engineered structure. In a quantum (symbolic) universe, arithmetic, in the form of communication and coding theory, can tell is a lot about how to manage change while maintaining security,
In quantum mechanics, possibilities are represented by complex numbers and observables by real numbers? why? Different laws of arithmetic for complex and real numbers. Complex numbers are two dimensional, so that all the information contained in them can be represented by an angle or a point on a circle.
Points on a circle are reals. What are angles? Are they quantized, ie naturals? This would suggest mapping spin, angle and number.
'Everyone feels trapped; its our way of rationalizing our
[page 126]
leaden lot in the face of our golden potential. Deighton page 244
The procedure envisaged in Cantor;s work that takes us from aleph(n) to aleph(n+1) involves forming the aleph(n+1) [permutations of a string of distinct symbols aleph(n) long. This involves writing aleph(n+1) copies of each of the aleph(n) elements in our starting alphabet. The axiom of replacement says these can be any set of objects isomorphic to the elements of an ordered set whose cardinal is aleph(n). The inverse of this process requires recovering the alphabet using the axiom of choice to repeatedly pick one letter of the alphabet from each of the numbers in aleph(n+1)
We cannot logically utter attempted names of god such as 'the set of all sets'. Let us just call it the whole and agree that we can use various series (like the transfinite numbers) to approach the whole but no written expression can actually express the whole (since every written expression, is willy nilly, part of the whole.
Skolem (1922) in van Heijenoort p 200. van Heijenoort
van Heijenoort page 203: 'If the axioms are consistent, there exists a domain B in which the axioms hold and whose elements can by enumerated by means of the positive finite integers.
Lowenheim's theorem: 'If a first order proposition is satisfied in any domain at all, it is already satisfied in denumerable infinite domains.'
' ... he must take a detour, so to speak, through the nondenumerable.
' ... success is necessary; here too it is the highest tribunal to which everyone submits.' Hilbert in van Heijenoort page 370.
[page 127]
Shall we say that the system aleph(n) can only be interpreted and judged in the system aleph(n+1), and so every insight + judgment = act of knowledge involves a relationship between sets of distinct transfinite cardinality.
Monday 28 June 2004
Tuesday 29 June 2004
Wednesday 30 June 2004
A book day, no plumbing etc.
Maybe. If words do not come, then my preferred option is to go on building my new 'factory' downstairs.
Two tendencies: 1 lower temperature at constant entropy: Carnot
change
2 change entropy at constant temperature?
In the universe as we know it entropy is increasing (they say) while temperature (average temperature, average photon energy etc) is falling (they say, it seems true)
Entropy = k log (states), so increase = more states. At constant temperature (given the equipartition theorem and classical physics) each state has a certain energy, so more energy is needed to increase entropy at constant temperature. If energy is to be conserved, we need to break high energy states into many low energy states, less energy per state lower temperature etc, as observed. On the other hand we can increase entropy at constant energy per state by putting more energy in.
Einstein faced this sort of problem with the specific heats of metals at low temperature.
It is different working for others than working for oneself. Working for oneself is immediate and in a sense immanent motion. Working for another requires a public declaration of quality and value, that the work is
[page 128]
worth what is paid for it, not more or less. At the same time, in the broader community there is a price/quality competition going on between different buyers and sellers of all the differently specified forms of work. Working for oneself produces no cashflow but helps to maintain life (like cooking and cleaning) and to build capital in the form of tools and reserves. My quest is for a certain 'intellectual capital' or intellectual property', a certain good idea (work, product) which can propagate itself through the community by encouraging people to copy it, in other words, and 'open source' idea.
Here the questions of quality and market arise. My strategy is simply to keep working to sculpt my best interface to the world of the web. While the personal site will remain and grow more complex because it is a log produced through time, the corporate site should focus on simplification and presentation of the ideas developed in the background. In time we need to attract 'beta-testers- and others to see of the model of divine action does indeed confer added fitness on those who use it to guide their lives.
A key idea is that taking quantum field theory as a model, we can safely reduce the amount of control (oppression) that come human corporations (groupings) exert on their members. In other words, noetic space is much bigger than the old controlling religions imagine, so big that there is room for s all. Each of us is a unique 'letter' in the alphabet of human communication. This system reaches its maximum entropy and stability when we all become peers.
Human mental entropy arises by differentiating 'degenerate' states in the human mind just as loading a program into a computer whose states are all 1s increases its entropy and the information carried in a fixed state of the computer. But how do we reconcile entropy increase with the quantum idea that the universe is reversible and unitary, in other words (in terms of states) the entropy of the universe must stay the same. [perhaps time has a role here]
[page 129]
Agatha Destination page 93: 'Its not a new world you want to create. Its destroying the old one that you will enjoy.'
Ultimately, the function of parliament is to decide how to spend the money raised by taxes. We may assume that all tax money ultimately ends up as somebody's wages, so the job of parliament is to decide who to pay to do what. Personal life has the same feature, although here the expendable is personal energy arising ultimately from the circumstance that the sun shines on our planet.
We look for invariant features of the past that we can project to the future to narrow the search for the means of survival and so increase our fitness.
Thursday 1 July 2004
Friday 2 July 2004
Dialog: the world proceeds by question and answer. How are we going to get a feed today? Maybe the mullet are running.
Saturday 3 July 2004
Put simply, Lonergan has followed the ancient track that the human mind is unique and that its functioning, as experiences, gives us an insight into the nature of the world. We fundamentally accept that position with a couple of caveats. First, although each human mind is unique in its embodiment, there is a fundamental symmetry between the functioning of the human mind and every other process that utters a word (action, observable) in the world. The quantum mechanic may think of the world as a process comprising the diagonalization of matrices and the collapse of wave functions, that us the choice of one eigenvalue to be expressed to the world by the creation or annihilation of various particles. I am trying to
[page 130]
see structure on the current state also (ie find a basis for it in orthogonal concepts) and express it as words in a certain basis (English +)
This model allows us to say something m,ore about insight than simply that it is a mysterious bit of magic, a splinter of the divine light, because, with our knowledge of physics, symbolic systems and networks, we can break macroscopic processes in the universe into smaller and smaller subprocesses, until ultimately we come to the smallest physically observed process, that associated with one quantum of action. We understand such quantum processes, (and sets of such processes) using the mathematics of quantum mechanics, which tells us that we must use infinite dimensional complex spaces as the environment in which to study even actions so small that they are measured by one quantum of 'output'. So insight is a structure of insights. We model all insights by terminating processes (the insight event being the termination) arising from a lot of hidden processing that we model with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians and variational principles. Pursuing this idea far enough, I hope, will yield the sought after isomorphism (invariant with respect to complexity) with quantum field theory..
Fitness; fit: 'There's nothing so bad as not belonging.' Agatha, Ordeal, page 121. Christie
Christie pp 123-125: force, truth, lies, deception, belief, credibility ...
'You must talk about it; I don't want to talk about it.
page 124:'You've got to tell the truth. You've got to trust me' 'I don't understand what you mean' said Hester.
WORK: actions calculated to increase fitness.
'they toil not neither do they spin'.
[page 131]
Matthew 6: 26-30: 'Look at the birds in the sky, they do not sew or reap or gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they are. Can any of you, for all of his worrying, add one single cubit to his span of life? And why worry about clothing? Think of the flowers growing in the fields; they never have to work or spin; yet I assure you that not even Solomon in all of his regalia was robed like one of these. Now if that is how God clothes the grass in the field which is there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow, will he not much more look after you, you men of little faith ... ' Matthew
A lot of misunderstanding about work here. Both the birds and the grass have to work like us to live. Perhaps an idle ruling class (or one which does not distinguish work from play) might overlook the importance of work driven by solar information, the the existence of the biosphere. Most of the time we cannot work with absolute certainty, but our security and physical happiness is increased by storing up headroom (fat, silos) so as to carry us through the lean periods and fluctuations.
Luke 12:22. Luke
Trust in providence. But god helps those who help themselves, thus the rise in complexity which we call the origin of life.
Nirvana: happy in one's own mind. Maybe this happiness is the beatific vision. Same concept, different words: one with all = see god. But happy with work also, and not seeking a state where everything is done for one.
Buddhism seems to teach that we must lose the Self to obtain the All. (Humphreys page 129) We take the view that one can have both Self and All because All contains Self, self is an element of the all and the starting point in any route to All, or points in the all.
[page 132]
Humphreys page 129: Zen: All is god and there is no god. OK in set theory, god contains x, but god is not a set (named discrete entity within a larger entity). For all x, x is an element of god.
The teacher, the teaching and he followers are all humans. In the modern version (science) the teacher is nature.god, the teaching is derived from god, and we are all followers because we cannot step outside such laws and symmetries as nature may have.
page 132: Sir Charles Eliot: 'The great practical achievement of the Buddha was to found a religious order which has lasted to the present day. It is chiefly to this institution that the permanence of his religion is due.
Not so natural religion. Science is a global enterprise carried out by millions of individuals and institutions. It is unified by the unity of the world it studies. The permanence of natural religion lies in the permanent need of people (and all entities) to achieve their survival by fitting into (submitting) to the world as we find it. We must do this to survive, even if we are bent on changing the world.
page 171: '... the Kegon philosophy of 'unimpeded interdiffusion [transfinite network?] of Absolute Reality and each individual 'thing' is the last work in human thought.' (!)
page 179 Zen: 'Zen is the apotheosis of Buddhism'
page 180: 'Here is a man's (sic) religion, and he climbs best who carries the lightest load.'
Further reading
Books
| Christie, Agatha, Destination Unknown, Collins for the Crime Club; Greenway edition 1977 Amazon editorial review: 'When a number of leading scientists disappear, concern grows within the intelligence services. Are they being kidnapped? Blackmailed? Brainwashed? One woman appears to hold the key to the mystery. But she is found dead.' Amazon back |
| Christie, Agatha, Ordeal by Innocence, Bantam Books 1987 Amazon book description: 'Book Description Mrs. Argyle, benevolent tyrant and mother of five, is murdered with a poker. Her son Jacko is convicted of the crime but dies in prison. Two years later, Dr. Arthur Calgary comes forward to clear Jacko, but the Argyle family is not pleased. If Jacko didn't commit the crime, who did? Suspense mounts as the family realizes that exonerating Jacko means fingering one of them.' Amazon back |
| Deighton, Len, Hope, HarperCollins Publishers 1996 From Publishers Weekly: Veteran British spy Bernard Samson returns to fight further Cold War battles in this deceptively easygoing sequel to Faith (and prequel to Charity), set in 1987. ... Deighton's carefully crafted but seemingly nonchalant narration: droll, almost deadpan fits perfectly the character of Samson, a perceptive but closed-mouthed gent who is seemingly unimpressed by events like the sudden appearance of a dead body in his ex-mistress's bedroom or the bizarre theft of a severed hand. Exciting moments are handled casually, while causal conversations are given the detail expected of important ones, resulting in a version of reality that is disjointed and emotionally distanced, as a master spy's take on things may very well be. Deighton gives readers unfamiliar with Samson's troubled life plenty of background information, so newcomers as well as old series hands should take equal pleasure in this subtly intense offering by perhaps the only author other than le Carre who deserves to be known as "spymaster."' Amazon back |
| Humphreys, Christmas, Buddhism, 1991 Amazon back |
| Luke, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 'The third gospel's distinguishing quality is due to the attractive personality of its author, which shines through all his work. Luke is at once a most gifted writer and a man of marked sensibility. ... The originality of Luke is not in his key ideas (they are identical with those of Mark and Matthew) but in his religious mentality which, apart from slight traces of Paul's influence, is ovewhelmingly distinctive of Luke's personal temperament. Luke, in Dante's phrase, is the Amazon back |
| Matthew, and Alexander Jones (editor), in The Jerusalem Bible, Darton Longman and Todd 1966 Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels: '[Matthew is] a dramatic account in seven acts of the coming of the kingdom of heaven. 1. The preparation of the kingdom in the person of the child-Messiah. ... 2. the formal proclamation of the charter of the Kingdom ... i.e. the Sermon on the Mount ... 3. The preaching of the kingdom by missionaries ... 4. The obstacles that the kingdom will meet from men ... 5. Its embryonic existence ... 6. The crisis ... which is to prepare the way for the definitive coming of the kingdom ... 7. The coming itself ... through the Passion and resurrection.' (12) Amazon back |
| van Heijenoort, Jean, From Frege to Goedel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic 1979 - 1931. , iUniverse.com 1999 Amazon book description: 'Collected here in one volume are some thirty-six high quality translations into English of the most important foreign-language works in mathematical logic, as well as articles and letters by Whitehead, Russell, Norbert Weiner and Post...This book is, in effect, the record of an important chapter in the history of thought. No serious student of logic or foundations of mathematics will want to be without it.' Amazon back |
Links
| Wikipedia Sheffer Stroke 'The Sheffer stroke, also known as the NAND (Not AND) operation, is a logical operator with the following meaning: p NAND q is true if and only if not both p and q are true.' back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
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Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
