Notes
[Notebook: DB 57 Language]
[Sunday 3 July 2005 - Saturday 9 July 2005]
[page 170]
Sunday 3 July 2005
The environment of an entity is both essential to its continued existence and a threat to its existence. Associated with the perception (discovery) of a resource are all the emotions attached to 'gaining' and 'losing', births and deaths being the most extreme gains and losses. Births and deaths occur at every scale from quantum events through the planetary scale to the galactic and beyond.
We may measure complexity in different ways, either simply by the physical energy involved, or in a complex way by considering the depth of nesting underpinning an entity. Depending on the point of view, the sun is bigger than me or I am bigger than the sun.
The transfinite cardinal of a set is a union of these two measures, since the higher cardinals can only come into existence by exploiting the ordering of the lower cardinals. The degree of possible ordering is a function of the error rate, but error correcting codes allow complexity to grow transfinitely - prove this, the core of the peace theorem.
[Noted added at transcription: 'For complex structures to be copied accurately from random inputs, some mechanism for error correction is required; here error correction is defined as a process in which a linear increase in resources leads to an exponential decrease in error rate.' Griffith et al]
Quantum fault tolerant computing. Nielsen and Chuang
The work of life is to maintain sufficient order (control) to live. Once things get too far out of control
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life collapses, eg Mughul Empire, British Raj. James
The ;household; is the fundamental unit of human order, defined like any set by its elements, and 'keeping the household in order' is the fundamental task, ie 'domestic economy'. This work may be done exclusively by the householders themselves, or by employees, salaried or enslaved.
James page 147: 'In defeat, Bajit Rao had at last understood the mystery of why the British were conquering India. They could always rely on the active collaboration of thousands of Indians, who for a variety of reasons, were willing to cooperate with those who seemed destined to become their new masters.'
VIRTUE <--> INTEGRITY <--> CONSISTENCY <--> ERROR FREE <--> INCORRUPT
James page 154: '"sound and correct principles of religion and government"'
A religion, by controlling the environment, can make the 'darker' side of human nature (murder, rape, pillage, slavery etc) unnecessary.
page 156: sahib = master.
It is not the people but the system which must be changed because the lifetime of the typical system is much shorter than our evolutionary history, and our minds are to some extent bound to this history. We can also change our minds and embrace new systems of belief and action. Our leading example of this is the technological evolution which began a few centuries ago in Europe, particularly Britain, which has radically influenced everything in our lives from
[page 172]
warfare to health care.
Natural systems evolve toward maximum sustainable entropy (aka minimum energy, extremal action etc), which is equivalent to wilderness.
MAXIMUM SUSTAINABLE ENTROPY = FREEDOM
The freedom of the powerful classes is underpinned by the 'slavery of the masses'. This limits the total entropy of the system (which occurs when everyone is on the same 'equipotential'.
The human world is then a communicating parallel process (ie a network [of peers]) instead of a hierarchical tree.
How do we calculate the entropy of a network?
it is a function of bandwidth and meaning (ie peer level)
o the bit that starts the nuclear holocaust has more meaning than the one that adds a touch of pink to one pixel in the image of a rose.
Monday 4 July 2005
Tuesday 5 July 2005
Wednesday 6 July 2005
Thursday 7 July 2005
Friday 8 July 2005
Saturday 9 July 2005
This story began with war of the most extreme kind MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction] In the meantime I have realized the meaning of invariance with respect to complexity, so as to include was at the personal level.
It is one thing to have an ideal, another thing to implement it without (or with minimal) violence. The
[page 173]
general way is propagation from some point.
NONVIOLENT CHANGE (Ghandi's based on belief in an afterlife and so without foundation in reality.
The cycle of violence.
Two approaches to a network, as a user and as a maintenance worker. Maintenance = assuring the continued efficiency of a system, more generally preventing the efficiency of the system from decreasing [by correcting errors as they occur]
MAINTENANCE --> CONTROL
(control is not necessarily maintenance, cf Nazi system etc etc)
Each controller works on an abstract model of the system it is controlling. So a thermostat may make its decisions on the basis of the motions of a bimetallic strip.
The controller will be effective insofar as the abstractions served up to it are true representations of the real system, and if the commands it issues are expanded into effective action. In the case of the controller of a nation, this abstraction is developed b the intelligence functions of the national public service and the realization of its decisions by the executive functions of this service.
ROYAL COMMISSION = 'LOCALLY SUPREME CONTROLLER (INTELLIGENCE_)' provides information and the relevant 'service' execution. So we apply cybernetics at all levels of complexity. Cybernetics tells us what we can and cannot do, given certain resources.
[page 174]
War (and everything else) is a product of the internal states of the belligerents (participants) and the consequent structure of their interactions with one another. Another tautology. Can something more than tautology grow from a network of tautologies - yes because the possibilities [permutations] in a network grow exponentially with its size - POSSIBILITIES = ENTROPY
GOD is the environment of every entity in the Universe: entity = subsystem of the Universe U contains E.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica 8:1168: 'Human factors engineering is used to designate equally a body of knowledge, and a process and a profession' = ergonomics
Every measurement has a meaning defined by the context in which it is made. Every measurement is an act of communication between one system and another which enables the measurer to place some constraint on its picture of the state of the system (entity) measured.
Entities are represented by strings of code, ie a serial string of measurements yielding elements of the alphabet of the code.
Another fleering glimpse. Something to do with k vs r selection. To survive one must have a surviving child to replace every death. This can be achieved by having many children with a low probability of survival or a few with a high probability.
Bootstrapping: having sufficient error protection to implement error protection.
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A moment corrupted by principle. Should I fall in love with you? No, it is forbidden by my religion. A totally abiotic and even antibiotic situation.
All measurements are communications and you must therefore obey the laws of communication and networks.
The probability of loss by theft is a function of the ratio of 'impregnability' to 'wealth'.
