vol 7: Notes
2005
8 May
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Notes
[Notebook: DB 58 Bringing god home]
[Sunday 18 September 2005 - Saturday 24 September 2005]
[page 8]
Sunday 18 September 2005
Usually I only write here when the urge to write is strong. But as Agatha says, one is a professional writer when one writes whether one likes it or not, just as a bricklayer lays bricks day after day and a clerk clerks. From this point of view, this is an amateur work, but with professional intent, in that I hope that my individual jottings will in the end become a 'whole genome shotgun' picture of a coherent foundation for belief, from which such foundation may possibly be extracted and exhibited, ie find a model that fits experience, with all its ups and downs.
INSIGHT - a random event.
Monday 19 September 2005
Tuesday 20 September 2005
My story starts with a bit of apocryphal hagiography. Somewhere in the last fifty years I have read that young Thomas Aquinas, in his bath, asked his nurse 'quid est hoc quad est esse?' literally 'what is this which is to be?' in other words, what is the meaning of life.
Like Thomas, i was brought up in the Judaeo-Christian tradition which situates human life n a cosmic drama which begins with creation and continues through Fall and Redemption to an Apocalyptic end where the good are rewarded and the bad punished. As a piece of fiction, the Christian story has certainly stood the test of time. but is it true? How can we decide?
Let me say that a story rings true if it fits my experience. So, for instance, pornographic love stories where people meet and fuck happily ever after do not reflect my experience of
[page 9[
real love affairs with real people. There is much more to life than sex, and the complex interactions of independent desires can easily lead to conflict. The Bible resonates strongly with our experience. Aspects (at least) of the world seem to have been created by an intelligent agent. Thee is plenty of rape, murder, genocide, revolution, judicial torture, reward and punishment in the Bible and there is some hope that everything will turn out right in the end (though you should have a look at the Book of Job).
But there are problems with the Christian story. Why, if God made everything so good, did we go bad? Another serpent? No, obviously we were led astray by curiosity. Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and pissed God off. This reveals God as rather a small minded fool, being upset when the work of his own hands acts as it was (presumably) designed to act.
God also revealed a nasty vicious streak when his creatures set out to learn more. The flaws in the Bible tend to reveal its deeper purpose. it is a political document designed to increase the power of the owners of the document.
Wednesday 21 September 2005
Thursday 22 September 2005
Friday 23 September 2005
Saturday 24 September 2005
PEACE == UNITY
CONFLICT = DISCONNECTED DIVERSITY
One of the deep philosophical questions that has been with us from time immemorial is the distinction between peaceful and violent diversity. How can an entity be both one and ,many and yet keep the peace? We have two historical approaches to choose from: one, the Pax Romana, peace maintained by the threat of violence;
[page 10]
and the other we will dub the 'pax recursiva' because it feeds upon itself to generate more complex levels of peace. The Romana on the other hand, tends to decrease diversity because naive security forces see all difference as danger and so act in the belief that decreasing difference will increase security.
The recursiva, on the other hand, recognizes that a countable (ie infinitesimal) fraction of differences are indeed dangerous and need to be constrained in some way. Epidemic disease states fall into the category of dangerous differences as do policies which are not firmly coupled to the environment in which they operate.
Quantum mechanics is our guide to metaphysics.
Quantum mechanics lives in 'transfinite function space' and partitions that space into functions that appear to be realize din our universe and those which cannot. In general we say that any function can be realized which can be represented by a unitary operator, a function which performs allowed transformations between allowed states. The eigenvalue equation : we are saying that a complex process (multiplying by a matrix) is equivalent to a simple operation (multiplication by a scalar)
QM, as with sex, the beauty does not really show until you get down to the exciting interlocking details.
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Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
