vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 1 June 2014 - Saturday 7 June 2014]
Sunday 1 June 2014
Monday 2 June 2014
[page 151]
Tuesday 3 June 2014
Corruption: failure of a process, ie error. In a layered system we understand corruption in terms of layers and a first task for a technician called to deal with a sick system is to decide what layer of the network has broken down. In the case of the spiritual failure of the Church, the problem clearly lies in the theological layers, and the fundamental misconception at this level is the biggest lie ever devised by politicians, eternal life, part of the toolkit of ideas that has developed to implement monarchy, as exemplified by your role, codified in canon law. So I am saying that from a democratic point of view, your role is a spiritual fraud on the population of Earth.
From an intellectual point of view the most evil feature of the Church is that its theology is not scientific, not based on any evidence but a phantastic fiction, part of the deception needed to transfer resources to the elite.
Catholicism is a fraud on the Earth. One can understand the source of this fraud without condoning it using the theory of evolution. Might is in many ways right, although it is generally an ineffective and corrupt source of righteousness, plundering the poor to enrich to rich does guarantee survival to some extent but there are better ways, giving more stable societies through entropy maximization, that is democracy,.
[page 152]
Correcting the fraudulent trajectory of the Church is not going to be easy because it has tremendous momentum it needs a great force to deflect it, a force much greater than can be directly exerted by one individual, The generation of maximum force is a political task, a numbers game which requires a phase change which in turn requires the establishment of a new attractor and the dissipation of sufficient energy to enable the system to settle into orbit around the new attractor. Jesus served as an attractor in his day, now we wish to substitute the Sun [which serves as a representative of each one of us, an independent source of action].
Spiritual corruption is endemic in the world [we are between religions].
Any system for running the world, like a company, must be scale invariant, that is symmetrical with respect to complexity [the symmetry upon which freedom and probability are based].
The tools of monarchy: variety reduction, as in Genesis and '23' more.
The Catholic Church is a fraud on the Earth, like those companies that sell adulterated baby food to unsuspecting mothers.
Le Carre: A most Wanted Man page 341: 'A victim never forgets'. Le Carre
Wednesday 4 June 2014
McCoy: Evils perpetrated in the name of God. Also Spanish conquest of Mexico. Terence McCoy, Hickling
Thursday 5 June 2014
[page 153]
Friday 6 June 2014
to SydneyFriday 6 June 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
This is my eighth letter to you, without reply. As I have told you before, I will keep writing to you until you reply, because I know that you will reply when you finally realize the irrefutable truth of what I am trying to tell you.
My letter is a little late this month because I have spent some time in hospital having a tumour removed from my neck. Australia has an excellent public health system, and so I received quite major surgery and excellent care at the government expense. I also had some time to think more about my issues with the Church. This was partly motivated by the fact that the current government of Australia contains many Catholic cabinet ministers and is nevertheless totally devoid of Christian charity. This government has just brought down its first budget, which quite blatantly takes money from the poor to give it to the rich.
My local hospital, like hospitals throughout the country, is filled with careful and skilled workers who base their activities on scientific considerations and get good results as a consequence. This is because, in a literal sense, they are obeying God. In our divine Universe, it is science which reveals the nature of God to us and enables us to act in harmony with God, leading to successful outcomes.
In the course of my stay in an old clergyman was brought in with a broken hip. Some of his fellow church people came in a blessed him, anointed him and prayed over him for a good outcome. I was taken by the contrast between their words imploring the magical help of same ancient fictional personalities and the practical realities of modern surgery.
As I have made clear in previous letters, I am convinced that the whole Catholic ‘history of salvation’ is a fraud on humanity, simply a set of fictions dreamt up by monarchical regimes to pacify the people and guarantee the ability of the elite to live as parasites on the poor. You have done very well since your election in the public relations side of your job, but the claim that your false God determines human fate remains without foundation. Like climate change denialists and those who market adulterated baby food to unsuspecting mothers, your Church is a source of evil in the world.
A number of articles have appeared in the public media recently about your interest in the devil. Vatican Radio (11 April 2014) quotes you as saying: “We are all tempted because the law of our spiritual life, our Christian life is a struggle: a struggle. That’s because the Prince of this world, Satan, doesn’t want our holiness, he doesn’t want us to follow Christ.”
We all need an enemy to lean on. The devil provides a convenient scapegoat for those, like the Church, who prefer not to admit responsibility for their evil deeds. You will not be surprised to hear that the existence of Satan is just another feature of the tissue of falsehood that the Church has built to justify its existence.
From the statements that newspaper reports have attributed to you, it seems clear that you have completely misunderstood the nature of evil and error and its role in the evolution of the divine world. The remainder of this letter is devoted to a model of evil based on the notion that the Universe is divine.
The Catholic belief is that the world could have been made perfect and evil free, and that this was indeed the case immediately after creation until God trashed his work as a consequence of the Fall. The real situation appears to be far more subtle, and depends on the fact that there is no ‘absolute evil’, but that an evil is a relative event. There is no evil from the point of view of a physical bullet ploughing through my body, but from the point of view of my body, it is quite likely that systems essential to my continued life are being destroyed, and so for me being shot is an evil event.
The Catholic ‘history of salvation’ begins with the ‘Fall’. The first people, tempted by Satan disguised as a snake, ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. For this transgression, God allegedly destroyed the systematic harmony of his new creation and condemned humanity to work, pain and death.
From my point of view, this was just an act of stupid petulance. When we read the ancient books of the Bible, we see many examples of such foolishness, no doubt a typical form of behaviour of the absolute monarchs and warlords of the day recorded by the scribes who wrote the Bible. Such behaviour remains quite typical of dictators today today as we can see by looking at North Korea and the dozens of similar regimes based on the fantastic dreams of absolute monarchs and warlords
Of course, we do not need Satan to explain this behaviour. The people who disobeyed God could easily have been motivated by natural curiosity. Anybody who has had children (which excludes all your celibate theologians) is fully aware of the infinite natural curiosity with which we are born. It is a paramount priority of absolutist regimes like the Catholic Church to stamp our such curiosity as soon as possible. Natural curiosity, as the theory of evolution plainly tells us, is necessary for survival. It is natural curiosity that has brought us from bacteria to our present state of knowledge and complexity.
The original sin was a failure to bow to authority, something which an absolute monarch like yourself cannot allow. Today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s massacre of curious people in Tienanmen Square, and reminds us of the thousands of people massacred by the Catholic Church over the ages for looking at and thinking about the world in ways not approved by the authorities.
Since authorities always depend on the suppression the natural divinity of the world for their continuous existence, they are always unstable, uncertain and violent. The most violent entity in the world today is the so called Christian United States, which traditionally kills hundreds of people for every one of its own that dies at the hands of the enemies it has gone out of its way to create for itself.
Ultimately, the Catholic regime of enforced conformity will die. The rapid improvements in social communication which mark our era are proving impossible for absolutists to repress. Unfortunately for you (and fortunately for the rest of us poor underdogs) respect for the ruling class is dying. The reason for this is simple. On the whole the powerful look after themselves at the expense of the poor, using the time honoured tools of murder, secret police, false doctrines, propaganda and so on.
There is a countervailing force, the true God. The God of the Catholic Church is a false God, a fictitious personality created in the image of its creators. This false God is conceived to be invisible, mysterious and completely beyond human understanding. The whole reason for the existence of the Catholic Church revolves around its claim to be the only reliable channel of communication between this God and humanity.
In ancient times his idea found expression in the notion of the divine right of kings. In the Christian tradition, this idea seems to have been invented by Moses, who claimed that he had had a special meeting with the God who gave him the Law to pass on to his people, particularly the ten commandments. As we now know, this law is simply ancient wisdom. The attribution of this wisdom to a particular God is simply a skillful marketing. Such wisdom is really the common heritage of all humankind, and is in no way the private property of an organization like the Catholic Church, which has appropriated the notion of God for its own benefit.
As I have pointed out before, the real God is identical with the Universe. We are tightly coupled to God by being part of God. We do not need Popes and kings and sacred books to tell us about God, we can see for ourselves. All science is the study of God. The special feature of theology is that it is the study of the whole of God, and not just some particular aspect like astronomy or geology.
Everything that happens is part of God, including the explosion in communication brought about by the internet. Apart from revealing how many stupid and bigoted people there are in the world, the internet and other media are exposing the activities of the ruling elites to much more pubic scrutiny.
With the help of computers and the internet, a whistleblower like Edward Snowden has been able to rock the secret foundations of the most powerful nations on Earth. The Church is experiencing similar scrutiny as people aware of its criminal coverup of child sexual abuse and its arocious treatement of ‘fallen women’ are beginning to speak. No doubt the Church has been covering up the abuse of children (and just about everybody else) for thousands of years, but it is now becoming common knowledge. This is the work of the real God. Pomp and authority are losing their power, and reality is starting to assert itself.
I have already pointed out to you the role of cybernetics in keeping complex systems working properly. Because the world is so complex, and anything can happen, any attempt to constrain the behaviour of the system is subject to failure, what cybernetics calls error, what the Church calls sin.
For me, the fundamental failure of the Church is its rejection of reality based science in favour of unverified fiction. The most obvious institutional evidence of this failure is that the Pontifical Academy of Science does not appear to count theology among the sciences. This is because the Catholic Church cannot simultaneously admit theology as a real science and justify its own existence. Its whole reason for existence is based on the idea that its God is invisible, and not therefore the subject of science but only of blind faith.
If the Church were to admit that the Universe is itself divine, so that all human experience is experience of God and the foundation for real scientific theology, it would be tantamount to declaring that, at least from a theological point of view, there is no reason for the Church. One cannot deny that the Church does perform an important social role in many areas, but this role is also severely tainted by the Church’s theological errors.
I read in the press today that you encouraging married couples to have children rather than pets, partly to avoid the loneliness of old age. This advice suggests two lines of failed policy: why do you deny reproductive opportunities to all your priests, condemning them to practical ignorance of the most precious creative powers of humanity? And why do you ignore the enormous population pressure that is currently damaging the Earth? A scientific theology, based on a proper understanding of the divine Universe, would avoid these silly mistakes.
Let us return to deeper theological questions. As I have pointed out previously, the ancient idea that the a God of pure activity and absolute simplicity is incompatible with the visible Universe of pure activity and very considerable complexity is mistaken. Mathematical fixed point theory and quantum mechanics between them show that it is quite possible to have a system of pure activity which also has fixed states of constant energy. I sincerely hope that there are mathematicians and physicists at the Pontifical Academy who can explain this to you better than I can.
Parmenides approached this question about 2500 years ago and concluded that we could only have certain knowledge of the world if there were invariant structures lying behind the ceaseless activity that we observe. Unfortunately, without the benefit of fixed point theory, he could not understand that the invariant structures are simply part of the ceaseless activity, and that there is no inconsistency between them. This mistake came down through Plato to the intellectual founders of Christian doctrine and has remained to deceive us ever since.
From the mathematical point of view, creation does not mean the creation of something new outside God (which is logically impossible anyway, since God is the fulness of being), but the establishment of new fixed points in the divine dynamics. We can see this process in the evolution of the Universe. The general theory of relativity suggests that the Universe started off an an initial singularity, a point of pure activity and no structure, indistinguishable from the model of God perfected by Aquinas in the Summa.
The complexification of God already began in Christianity with the development of the Trinity. At present the Trinity is limited to three persons for purely fictional reasons based on the interpretation of a few sentences in the New Testament. Scholastic theology also finds this idea compatible with the psychological models of the Trinity developed by Augustine and Aquinas, that allow for one soul (the Father) with two powers, intellect (the Word of God) and will, (the Spirit of God). There is no reason for limiting the Trinity to three personalities, however, and observation of the fixed points in our Universe suggest that we could just as well imagine the complexification of God into a system of transfinite fixed points such as we now observe.
As I have written to you before, I see the best way to model this creative process is to model it as the growth of a transfinitely layered communication network analogous to the growth of finite networks like the internet. This is compatible with the ancient theological ideas of the Trinity. The Word of God is also conceived as Imago, God’s image of itself through which it knows itself, a communication process, analogous to human consciousness by which we know ourselves. The Third person of the Trinity is conceived as the realization of the love between Father and Son, also a communication process.
Finite engineered networks are built in layers. The lowest layer is the physical layer, the physical symbols in which information is embodied, like the physical letters of the alphabet used to encode instances of the Bible. All information is encoded physically. This modern view contrasts with the ancient view that structureless entities like angels could encode information. The highest layer of such a network comprises the users of the network, people like you and me who communicate through the network. Between these two layers are other layers concerned with error correction, addressing and various transformations of the transmitted information between forms intelligible to users and forms best suited to physical transmission.
The detailed layers of the network are invisible to the users. A similar situation holds in our own face to face communication, which involves the use of billions of neurons, muscle fibres and transducers to convert thoughts in our minds into spoken sounds and back as information passes between the speakers.
When we look at the fixed points of the Universe we see a similar layered structure, beginning with the simplest subatomic particles and building up to relatively gigantic entities such as ourselves, the Earth, the Solar System, our Galaxy and the billions of other galazies that occupy the Universe, which is the ultimate user of the whole system which is effectively identical to itself.
Once a network is designed and built, it needs to be maintained, which comes down to finding and correcting errors caused by noise, wear and obsolescence. We experience this in our own bodies, which begin (in most cases) as pristine systems working almost perfectly and then in our final years begin to fail as our built in error correcting and maintenance systems can no longer keep up with the rate and complexity of the failures that occur within our physiology.
The layering of engineered networks makes them much easier to design and troubleshoot by separating functions from one another. In a well maintained network, one can be reasonably certain that only one thing will go wrong at a time. Sometimes there will be two simultaneous faults which complicates diagnosis, but as long as the system is reasonably well designed fixing it is usually not too difficult. We find the same in our own bodies. Most diseases in a well maintained body can be traced to a single organ and a single cause, making diagnosis and cure relatively easy. In an old and deteriorating body, on the other hand, we can expect the accumulation of multiple failures until we reach a situation when the whole system goes down, ie death.
As far as we can see, death is common to all entities in the Universe. The Catholic denial of death, like the Catholic assertion of original sin, are among the two most fanciful and fraudulent assertions made by the Church. There is no evidence for either, they are simply a political tool used by yourself and your organization to control people, thus ensuring your own wealth and splendour. No one could possibly believe that the Catholic Church has become such a globally wealthy and powerful entity by serving the poor.
The Church has managed to deceive many billions of people over thousands of years and has acquired tremendous political momentum as a result. How can it be turned around? If you can overcome your lifetime of indoctrination and take all my ideas to heart, can you turn it around? Here are faced with a political problem, rather similar to the political problem associated with the widespread denial of human induced climate change by those who have a vested interest in the status quo.
The driving force in the climate debate is science, a combination of evidence and modelling. The Church also must become subject to science if it is to survive. From the network point of view, the Catholic Church is a sub-network of the Universal network. Although it looks big from our point of view, embracing billions of people over thousands of years, it is infinitesimal in the context of a Universe 14 billion years old and perhaps 100 billion light years in ‘diameter’ containing trillions of trillions of stars and probably billions of life supporting planets.
The Church, like all sub-networks of the Universe, shares the same physical layer as every other network. The same laws of physics apply to Catholic communications as to every other communication. Any claim by the Church to have some sort of non-physical communication with God or the Universe therefore has no foundation in reality.
The Church is a not only a sub-network of the Universe, but it is also a sub-network of the Solar system and of Earth, sharing the resources made available to us by these systems and their history. The Solar system is about five billion years old, and life on Earth, including the human race, evolved under the influence of low entropy energy from the Sun. From a practical point of view, the Sun is our local God within the larger context of the divine Universe.
Unlike the imaginary Gods of the ancient religions, the Sun really creates and sustains us. For a long time we have been burning the fossil and evolutionary capital laid down by solar energy over the last few billion years, but it is slowly becoming obvious to us that we must join the main trend, get a our energy from the Sun and learn to treat the Earth as the source of our lives. It is important for any reasonable religion that has the future of humanity at heart to understand this fact and make its followers aware of it.
The evolution of life is reflected in the structures of each living creature, which is a layered network acting as a node within the larger network of its environment. We share metabolic pathways with tiny primitive organisms that evolved billions of years ago. Single cells bonded to multicellular networks and the roles within these networks gradually differentiated to give the complex system of organs and processes which informs our lives.
Networks can grow in two ways. The first is to add new users. An internet service provider does this when a new user buys an account and logs on. The other way is to add new layers of connectivity. Thus we can imagine single celled organisms developing the communication protocols necessary to become multicellular organisms.
About two hundred thousand years ago the Earth’s tree of evolution developed our species, Homo sapiens. Among our many features is a large central nervous system, a complex network of hundreds of billions of neurons, that endows us with an ability to communicate much more complex ideas than the species that preceded us. A consequence of this development was our ability to evolves complex languages and cultures and, like single celled creatures of old, bind ourselves into larger groups such as families, tribes and nations.
One consequence of this ability was the development of networks embodying collective consciousness of our origin and purpose like that reflected in the Bible. The sources of this structure, then as now, was something akin to scientific method: observation, imaginative interpretation of observation, testing of these images in practice and further repetition of the process. A few thousand years before the the birth of Christ, a further product of human ingenuity was writing. Extant fragments of ancient texts have given us some insight into the way our ancestors thought. Their curiosity and imagination inhabited their world with powers, Gods, that in some way ruled over human behaviour. The survival of Biblical texts have guaranteed that the old testament God Yahweh is a very well known example of this development.
Knowledge evolves, but it is not a purely formal thing, it is embodied in the physical world, so that the evolution of knowledge is closely bound to practical politics and technology. Although we may think of nature as ‘red in tooth and claw’ and see the theory of evolution as pointing a very bleak picture of human existence, another powerful force driving evolution is the power of cooperation. It is the power of cooperation that led to the development of multicellular creatures and societies comprising millions of people which, if properly managed, can lead to the delivery of a far higher standard of living to everyone involved than they can achieve alone. The power of cooperation can deliver its benefits, even of the grounds of cooperation are temporary or violent. So we see the totalitarian regime in China delivering spectacular economic growth while continuing to deprive people of their human rights.
The Catholic Church has gained its ascendancy in a similar way. Even though its ancient ideas about the nature of God and the world are no longer seen to be consistent with reality, it has nevertheless, thorough its fundamental law ‘love (communicate with) your neighbour’ helped us to cooperate enough to bring many to a high level of physical and cultural wellbeing. The historical downside of this development has been the sectarian notion that ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’ coupled with notions such as slavery is ok, women and people of colour are sub-human, and that people have no rights vis a vis the monarch.
In the past, when global communication was almost non-existent and meetings of different cultures were rare, the fact that there were many different religions of Earth was not a serious source of trouble. That situation has changed. Although the Catholic church is a large organization is nevertheless one among many. Its notion that it is the one true religion is a delusion, as the existence of many other religions attests.
The cure for this sectarianism is quite simple: theologians must recognise that we are all inhabitants of the one divine world, and by studying that world carefully, arrive as a true shared vision of God.
The Papacy see itself as a leader, commander and layer down of the law. This is a notion dating from its origin in the days of monarchs, empires and warlords. But one cannot lead God. God is omnipotent and we disobey it at our peril. Miss a nail and hit your finger,you feel the pain. This pain is not punishment, it is part of the cybernetic properties of our existence that guarantees our continued life by leading us to avoid danger and correct error.
The Papacy, like all the rest of us, must become a follower, and to be a follower one must study the nuances of the leader. God is the leader. The Universe is the Leader. The Earth is the leader. The natural dictates of our environment must all be respected and followed, or as night follows day, trouble will eventually ensue. The Chinese model of dictated capitalism works to a degree, but it carries the seeds of its own destruction by denying the rights of the human foundation upon which it is built. The Church has the same defect.
One of the principal troubles in the modern world remains war, and one of the principal sources of war is friction at the boundaries of different theological groups like Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Hindus, and so on. Although we can agree that all religions are essentially the same, protocols for making peace with God, religions are differentiated and in conflict because they have different ideas about what is God.
The scientific answer to this, as I repeat endlessly, is to assume simply that God is what is, study it by science, and eventually come to a consensus about what God is and what God wants. The transfinite network model of God used here is proposed as a framework for a mathematically and socially acceptable formal representation of God, that is as a backbone for a scientific mathematical theology. The advantage of the mathematical approach is well understood in science. Not only is mathematics is the one language that is not lost in translation, but it has a transfinite vocabularly large enough to embrace anything we would like to talk about.
Yours sincerely,
copies:
President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
The Editor, L'Osservatore Romano,
The Editor, National Catholic Reporter,
The Editor, The Tablet,
Saturday 17 June 2014
Tom Jefferson's funeral.
