vol 7: Notes
2005
Sunday 19 June
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: DB 57 Language]
[Sunday 19 June 2005 - Saturday 25 June 2005]
[page 162]
Sunday 19 June 2005
Monday 20 June 2005
Tuesday 21 June 2005
Wednesday 22 June 2005
Thursday 23 June 2005
Friday 24 June 2005
The key practical insight of natural religion is that the world is not dead inert matter associated with the dark side but a divinely intelligent system which creates us and to which we must pay the respect due to god if we are to survive.The key word in the paragraph above is 'intelligent', a bone of contention. How are we to understand intelligent, ie what is the intelligent view of intelligence? This is an old philosophical and scientific problem which I first came to grips with while reading and rereading Lonergan's Insight. Lonergan Insight is a twentieth century restatement of a line of thought running from ancient Greece through medieval Christian Europe to the present, still carrying considerable weight in Christian scholarship. This tradition maintains a distinction between 'matter' and 'spirit', and holds that 'intellect' is a purely spiritual function distinct from our 'material' senses that collect information from our environment and feed it to
[page 163]
the intellect which discerns the meaning of the data.
In contrast, we may found a natural view of intelligence on the theories of communication and computation, applying them first to quantum theory and then to a general understanding of all process, which includes 'acts of intelligence'
Search and discovery. The tale of the lost (carefully hidden?) car key. Either I dropped it somewhere in the grass (and it is effectively gone forever) or I carefully (but unconsciously) put it somewhere (and one day may find out where.
INTELLIGENCE = EVOLUTION = RANDOMIZATION --> MEMORY --> SELECTION
Our natural hypothesis is that intelligent design and evolution are identical. The classical Western god is omnipotent and omniscient, and so can instantly find and implement perfect designs. Because the world seems imperfect, Christian storytellers have invented the Fall to explain how God's perfect creation became imperfect.
Dawkins has popularized the general functioning of evolution and shown how the appearance of intelligence can be achieved by the interplay of [limited] randomization and selection. Dawkins
Question 1: Is the 'stochasticism' real or just a lack of knowledge of the system? Let us say that it is real, motivated by Goedel's finding that no system is [can be] big enough to fully constrain itself.
[page 164]
The Poirot approach to searching : use the available evidence and logic to constrain the search space as tightly as possible, so reducing the physical task to a minimum - minimum action lies somewhere between spending too much time looking and too much time thinking.
Heisenberg's principle of justice/judgment/retribution/control - we can only deal with observables. What is not observed is the internal forum, the evolution of the universal function.
Dynamics = nature and frequency of communication.
Natural justice = observation/evidence based
EVIDENCE = ACTION
The world is a complex of little wheels [Feynman's arrows. Feynman]
Newtonian justice : action/reaction
Can we say that 4-space is a consequence of quantum mechanics and not vice versa?
The Roman Catholic intrusion into the internal forum is the epitome of psychological terrorism
A world of spin = recursive process (maybe with 'complexification index' 0, so that recurrences are identical (symmetrical)).
...
[page 165]
The 'forbidden fruit' approach to social control.
The layers of a network are orthogonal in that they place no constraints on each other so that the letters themselves exercise no control over the spelling or words.
States described (partly) by positions in spacetime - The Hilbert space of the natural line.
'The world is a network of spins' (?) Feynman III A-13
Stern-Gerlach observation 'experimental fact' Feynman III A-16
'Don't daydream' - mind control ('pay attention' (for what?))
Sharing/bonding/lower energy. Can we see this quantum mechanical fact as a feature of a network, and scale invariant, so that we can speculate that cooperative sharing reduces the workload (per individual) of a system and so enables us to produce the same quality of life with less work (energy)?
Saturday 25 June 2005
Books
| Dawkins, Richard, Climbing Mount Improbable, W. W. Norton & Company 1997 Amazon editorial review: 'How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants"--a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.' Amazon back |
| Feynman, Richard P et al, and , The Feynman Lectures on Physics (volume 3) : Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley 1970 Foreword: 'This set of lectures tries to elucidate from the beginning those features of quantum mechanics which are the most basic and the most general. ... In each instance the ideas are introduced together with a detailed discussion of some specific examples - to try to make the physical ideas as real as possible.' Matthew Sands Amazon back |
| Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Qunatum electrodynamics - or QED for short - is the 'strange theory' that explains how light and electrons interact. Thanks to Richard Feynmann and his colleagues, it is also one of the rare parts of physics that is known for sure, a theory that has stood the test of time. ... In this beautifully lucid set of lectures he provides a definitive introduction to QED.' Amazon back |
| 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' Amazon 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
Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
