Notes
[Notebook: DB 61 Warm]
[Sunday 29 July 2007 - Saturday 28 July 2007]
[page 109]
Sunday 29 July 2007
The Lord's day. A good Dominican studies four hours per day. Dominicans I have certainly kept that up, and the poverty, although chastity and obedience have been very desultory. The target is a long way off, although it no longer feels so weird to say the Universe is divine. Certainly I have seen enough of quantum mechanics and relativity to believe that it is big enough to merit the description and creative and complex enough too.
Quantum mechanics works with the directions and angles of vectors in infinite dimensional Hilbert space.
BIOLOGY - ENTROPY
[page 127]
Error correction by mass : protein (large body, small active sites to suit relatively small molecules O2 H2O, sugars, alcohols, amino aids etc.)
Davies page 6: The uncertainty principle arises from the uncertainty in counting waves and determining frequencies. Davies
The world is full of glamour, excitement, spin and pure bullshit, but these are just the flowering of a set of fundamentals. The getting of wisdom is to learn not to deny the flowers, as idealists, Puritans and Fundamentalists often do, but to see through the gloss to the fundamentals. Surowiecki New Yorker 23 July 2007 page 25. Surwiecki
Individuals and societies (= sets of correlated individuals) that ignore the fundamentals are pretty much doomed to crash. (Collapse, Guns Germs ad Steel) Diamond
Trouble is caused by the sudden release of stored energy. Some technologies (like steam boilers) require large amounts of stored energy. Engineers must then make certain that it is not released explosively and can be released safely if necessary (by safety valves etc)) Where energy builds up by unnecessary constraint, the only safe way to deal with it is by gradual release. In the human sphere this means increasing the bandwidth of communication. Dalrymple
[page 128]
BIOLOGY THERMODYNAMICS --> STATISTICAL MECHANICS
Another layer of resolution.
. . .
The superposition is a trial (the rolling dice) and the particle emitted (ie observed) is the outcome.
Everett III p 144 OBSERVATION ==> MEMORY Everett III
Maybe quantum mechanics does not conserve entropy, it conserves probability, that is it conserves energy in that the local Universe always executes ℵ0 operations per time interval. When we come to statistical mechanics and biology, we are concerned with the conservation of entropy, that is the application of knowledge to the transfinite Hilbert spaces of quantum mechanics, so inventing the Hilbert oscillator which takes us from the simple harmonic Universe of black body radiation to the complex Universe of life.
Christianity is based on a monstrous falsehood: the non-reality of death. This is possibly true of most of the ancient religions, where immortality is often replaced by reincarnation, ie having children.
About / caveat lector
Dinner is beyond gorgeous. But lust must be controlled by
[page 129]
my limited need and capacity for nutrition. Just one more little bite!
Monday 30 July 2007
de Witt page 158 'von Neumann's catastrophe of infinite regression. de Witt
Continuous functions may become discontinuous at certain points, like tan(pi/2).
If we go public, at least we are dealing predominantly with sophisticated investors, unlike some churches who take money of their customers on the basis of impossible promises.
Tuesday 31 July 2007
Phys? superposition. Wave mechanics and stringed instruments. Fourier integrals and representations of complex [= high entropy] function.
Superposition = local addition = local arithmetic.
A server can be considered as a superposition of all the files that it can serve, and if we look at our internet statistics, we can read off the a posteriori probability that a given file will be served. [files can sometimes be served by computational expansion of a compressed 'kernel' rather like the expansion of a differential equation into all its solutions].
SUPERPOSITION <==> SPACE
[page 130]
Periodic functions = random / ordered.
random: = incomputable (no data, no algorithm)
ordered = computable [on an ordered domain]
The mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics are built on eighteenth and nineteen century efforts to model waves with periodic functions. One of the greatest discoveries was that the periodic functions are solutions to a differential equation known as the wave equation. Wave equation - Wikipedia Further, a complex wave can be modelled by a superposition of simple waves, the idea behind Fourier analysis. Fourier analysis - Wikipedia
From a physicist's point of view, the sound of an orchestra is represented by the function of time which models the pressure on a listener's eardrum. A skilled listener can pick out he various instruments, notes and overtones, the simple ingredients that go into the overall mix.
Those particles which annihilate upon interaction can be said to have no capital. This is the realm of physics [ie physical layer of Universe], creation and annihilation as such, without reference to the permanent structure of the which these actions are a part. It all comes down to frequency of creation an annihilation, 10 -x to 10 x seconds -1.
Each high entropy wave is built from a superposition of eigenfrequencies with probabilities (squared amplitudes) p giving H(wave) = -SUMi pi log pi.
[page 131]
That physicists are desperate men is shown by their continuing to work on theories that contradict one another by giant factors.
Life - anything with mass?
Wednesday 1 August 2007
Biology: from global to local.
Physics is ubiquitous; life is localized, point like in effect, in 3-space, or linelike in 4-space.
We want to model the Universe with a layered software network built on a physical layer. The physical layer is universal but it is already a layered system, the layers parametrized by the 'energy scale'. The maximum of this scale is the energy of the big bang and the minimum is asymptotic to zero (we assume here).
Different phenomena occur at different scales by a process which physicists call symmetry breaking (which some call 'complexification').
Bonding is essential to life, explained by quantum mechanics as a quest for lower energy.
Thursday 2 August 2007
This tale all started when I read Insight, an attempt to rephrase many of the [psychological insights of the perennial
[page 132]
philosophy. Lonergan
How much evidence do we need? It depends how much risk we want to take. Different people have different ideas about this. Some like riding motorcycles over canyons. Others are afraid to go outside their circle of guards. This tradeoff is know to biology as the k - r spectrum of reproductive strategies - profligate with little chance of success, careful and controlled with correspondingly higher chances of success. r/K selection theory - Wikipedia All this worked out by cardinal number of various subspaces of a universal space, ie topology, what we might call 'meaningless cardinality'.
Classical statistics defines flat probabilistic space - the probabilities of complex events given that there is no control. Probability axioms - Wikipedia In other words all degrees of freedom are independent. This flat space enables us to detect the 'curvature' introduced by quantum mechanics. By entanglement, particles that have communicated are more correlated than complete independence predicts.
BELL'S INEQUALITIES Bell Quantum entanglement - Wikipedia
One makes the transition from hatred ('smash capitalism') to understanding and hopefully the development of paths to improved systems.
Democracy is built around the renormalization group, gradually decreasing the resolution until we see the whole system in one pixel, so to speak. Renormalization group - Wikipedia
[page 133]
One hopes of course, to use the network model to explain the various excellent features of Christianity and to also explain and guard against the errors common to authoritarian religions which tend to be maintained by vested interests.
We are all of course vested in our own interest, but there are symmetries of interest where working in common yields results unavailable to any individual (except perhaps an effectively absolute dictator which can probably be proven not to exist).
'Enlightened self interest' ie a knowledge of how the system works. There is much truth in the Roman Catholic Story but its foundation is false.
'The enlightenment project has failed' (?)
The standard explanation : the low entropy energy form the sun brings the entropy of the system down enough for us to exist. What do we say now :
What I can do is put up a gutter which leads water from the sloping corrugated iron roof to the rainwater [tank]. Despite the enormous complexity of the Universe water inevitably runs downhill.
Christie, Parker Pyne: Manipulating the odds by causality. Christie
Consciousness makes us phenomena to ourselves, that is in effect messages from ourselves to ourselves.
Building structures with a pen and an alphabet of words.
[page 134]
Saturday 4 August 2007
We are riding a number of tigers that have got bigger since we climbed on.
8 Love: God is love, initial singularity, energy is eternal delight. This is a model of something unspeakable, whose existence we have to accept because we are here, and when we look back we look down a long corridor of time whose beginning seems to be a point.
Decoding visual problems and decoding intellectual problems [have] many symmetries, all those things which are symmetrical with respect to complexity, ie all the things that are common to every layer of processing. We flit from layer to layer with such facility that we hardly notice the change because our existence is built on all these layers of software, executed by the single cosmic processor.
Love: the paradigm of love must be liberated from ancient ownership.
Culture : all culture are peers. Developing culture from power. Religion:
The initial singularity is the initial degeneracy. The Cantor Universe is a model of how many distinct states there would be of this degeneracy (symmetry) was fully broken.
[page 135]
abc, acb, the a state is a symmetry of the other two, a symmetrical context that nevertheless gives the ordering of a and b a meaning by establishing a background space to name them from b near a, c further from a. There is no way to distinguish the permutations xab, xba etc until x itself has a context, ie a higher layer.
In the symmetric network each higher layer serves as a space to give meaning to the layer beneath it.
Maybe my intellectual power has just lasted long enough to sort my own head out and now I can fade happily into oblivion. But first, because I like it so much, I want to get it all down before I die. Not so much the new understanding of physics but the possibilities that I see for peace in the creation of large new and self extending spaces of human spiritual development which will in turn [lead to even greater developments]
I am my own user, and have a best partial control of myself. Throughout history, people have also tried to use (ie control) other people by stick or carrot. Sticks are de facto unjust, and some carrots may be so too if the carrot supplier has undue power. We would like to see the human use of human beings deprecated however, so that we all eventually interact as peers, freely contracted to one another. Our need to continual input, however, gives excessive power t those who control essential resources, . . . so resource sharing must also be part of justice.
For any peer layer heaven (god) is all the layers higher and earth is all the layers lower. Not good but vaguely right.
[136]
Entanglement is a resource because it lowers entropy, ie establishes correlation. The initial singularity is 100% correlated with itself and has zero entropy. It is to be detected as an element of every event (god is everywhere and all the time)
ACTION = VOLUME OF SPACETIME
Natural religion is the biggest (and perhaps last) step in making ourselves less special, just a part of the divinity like everyone else. All this was not made just for is. We came into existence because we were both possible and sufficiently probable, and we will go out of existence of our probability drops to zero, impossibility.
With consciousness comes criticism. What or who can be trusted? The foundation of trust is common purpose, common meaning, common view of the world. Here comes the difficulty, however, because information requiring encoding and decoding travels slowly. peace and control come from headroom, the bandwidth in the control system to keep ahead of events, to follow the ball the move the bat so as to achieve a safe sweet impact.
Hitting balls and hitting economic and political targets are the same process at different scales of complexity.
Physicists scale in energy; theologians in complexity
LOVE : FREEDOM : MINIMIZING ERROR
[page 137]
As a parent I maximize my children's chances of success, ie favourable outcomes from their endeavours.
The effect of corruption in a process is to move it away from best practice by unnecessary symmetry breaking, ie nepotism, bribes etc. LEVEL PLAYING FIELD = BUSINESS SYMMETRY.
The bank of earth : the human ground state. people may remain in their ground states or acquire sufficient energy to get themselves into excited states.
The ratio between energy and action in an event depends on the potential guiding the event.
Phys 12: why like this ; de Maupertuis, action, fitness, evolution.
Energy is easy to measure to quanta of energy (eg photons) may be used as symbols for communication, parametrized (like musical notes) by frequency.
