vol 7: Notes
1999
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This site is part of the natural religion project The natural religion project A new theology A commentary on the Summa The theology company
Notes
[Sunday 17 January 1999 - Saturday 23 January 1999}
[Notebook BOOK DB 50]
[page 138]
Sunday 17 January 1999
. . .
Religion is the art of navigation through life.
[page 139]
Monday 18 January 1999
Formalism is the medium through which we communicate the messages of life.
Syntax PAINT
semantics PAINTING
The marriage of medium and message a la Hofstadter - they are equal partners and this should lead us to minimum action,
. . .
Hofstadter Le Ton Beau . . . Hofstadter
Formalism: Goedel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter
Tuesday 19 January 1999
Wednesday 20 January 1999
Thursday 21 January 1999
The Catholic Church takes people's money and their lives on the strength of promises that it hasn't the slightest possibility of keeping. On mature consideration, it is certainly the biggest rip off I have ever encountered. What I want
[page 140]
from a church is certainly the level of accountability and responsibility that I expect from a government or a big corporation close to the heart of human health and happiness like a drug company.
Roman Catholic Church say one billion members contributing $100 per year, = $100 billion revenue, say $1 trillion capital.
Since I left the Roman Catholic Church I have spent most of my time with hippies, junkies, drug dealers and other disenfranchised people. Everywhere I see the tragic consequences of mindfucking doled out by the priests, nuns and brothers of yesteryear, at the behest of their masters in black, white and crimson.
The authoritarian nature of the Church disenfranchises most of its stakeholders. At least boys, of they lick enough arses, can weasel their way into some of the better jobs in the Church, but women are pretty much nonentities in the Roman Catholic Church Weltanschauung.
This book, as you can see, is driven by volcanic anger, but, I hope, like a volcano,
[page 141]
it will increase fertility wherever it falls.
There is a point I want to make absolutely clear from the outset is that although I rail against the cardinals, bishops, the priests and the nuns, the brothers and all the worthy faithful who backed them up, this sleazy mess was not the result of original sin or any other failing. All these people are my friends. The trouble lay in the corrupting force of an inappropriate corporate entity which has evolved in an era of disease, privation, starvation and all the other stresses of animal existence in a survival situation and which is totally inappropriate for the human existence which we have created. We are all in this mess together.
The key to survival is compliance. I call something compliant if it can faithfully follow the movement of something else. A good dancer or a good fucker is compliant, harmonizing with the music or the partner.
[page 142]
Compliance in technical terms is tantamount to high bandwidth, the ability to process incoming information and devise a response.
Bandwidth is thus measured by effective processing speed. That society will be most compliant to its environment that can most efficiently devise appropriate responses to environmental change. Bandwidth is first of all a simple physical measure. The bandwidth of a physical process is measured in operations per second. The hypothetical chip that runs through this story does a billion operations per second. Each operation takes in 64 bits of data from a 64 bit (n gig) memory space.
Drugs: The state or the church does not have to decide whether we will take drugs. We will do it for ourselves. We do it now, despite all the risks of infection and harassment from the forces of law and order, or the underworld that prohibition fertilizes in the drug scene.
[page 143]
Of course alcohol, caffeine. nicotine, valium etc are legal drugs, so the hypocrisy is manifest, particularly because there are of comparable 'hardness' to the list of prohibited drugs.
We take drugs because we like the effect. Legality enables us to take our drugs in an informed and optimally safe way. Illegality is the recipe for disaster, because the corporation fictitiously usurps the right of each of us to guide our own lives.
We are all corrupted by corrupt systems. We come to the multiplier effect of intelligent parallelism, ie we all work together. We have a lot to learn about programming processes to work together efficiently on a large problem.
My life's work is to channel my volcanic energy into a clear and concise exposition of the forces that set me off and the environment into which I am exploding.
[page 144]
I hardly understand a word of what I am talking about but I know that there are people out there that do.
. . .
The best models for parallel processing are human communities
Roman Catholic Church is like a triathlon or a tennis match. We all get together to stress the shit out of one another in order to feel the excitement. Of course everybody is entitled to limit their own stress and find a level that suits them.
[page 145]
governance - justice
religion - compliance
Friday 22 January 1999
Saturday 23 January 1999
Feynman diagrams are sentences written in the alphabet of particles
a) electron a--> b
b) photon a--> b
c) electron emits / absorbs photon Feynman
We use machines, we do not compete with them.
How do we reconcile the manifest multiplicity and variability of the universe with the notion of one simple eternal god?
1. Dynamics - equality of motion and stillness
2. Relatio Aquinas 165
3. In particular, how do we deal with time and evolution?
a) old theology is wrong
b) it is right but needs transformation.
How do we understand evolution: a dual hierarchy of invariants.
Atoms change very rapidly along the
[page 147]
same tracks. Organisms change slowly along variable tracks.
At the quantum mechanical level no past and future? Particle/antiparticle.
Further reading
Books
| Feynman, Richard, QED: The Strange Story of Light and Matter, Princeton UP 1988 Jacket: 'Quantum 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 |
| Hofstadter, Douglas R, Goedel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Basic/Harvester 1979 An illustrated essay on the philosophy of mathematics. Formal systems, recursion, self reference and meaning explored with a dazzling array of examples in music, dialogue, text and graphics. Amazon back |
| Hofstadter, Douglas R, Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, Basic Books, HarperCollins Publishers Inc 1997 Amazon: 'In the fall of 1537, a child was confined to bed for some time. The French poet Clément Marot wrote her a get-well poem, 28 lines long, each line a scant three syllables. In the mid-1980s, the outrageously gifted Douglas R. Hofstadter- il miglior fabbro of Godel, Escher, Bach - first attempted to translate this "sweet, old, small elegant French poem into English." He was later to challenge friends, relations, and colleagues to do the same. The results were exceptional, and are now contained in Le Ton Beau De Marot, a sunny exploration of scholarly and linguistic play and love's infinity. Less sunny, however, is the tragedy that hangs over Hofstadter's book, the sudden death of his wife, Carol, from a brain tumor. (Her translation is among the book's finest.) Amazon back |
| Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Future of Man (translated by Norman Denny) , Borgo Pr ess 1994 Amazon product description: 'Pierre Teilhard De Chardin was one of the most distinguished thinkers and scientists of our time. He fits into no familiar category for he was at once a biologist and a paleontologist of world renown, and also a Jesuit priest. He applied his whole life, his tremendous intellect and his great spiritual faith to building a philosophy that would reconcile Christian theology with the scientific theory of evolution, to relate the facts of religious experience to those of natural science. The Phenomenon of Man, the first of his writings to appear in America, Pierre Teilhard's most important book and contains the quintessence of his thought. When published in France it was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year.' Amazon back |
| Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins 1965 Sir Julian Huxley, Introduction: 'We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of the Phenomenon of Man.' Amazon back |
Links
| Aquinas 165 Summa I, 28, 1: Are there real relations in God? 'Reply to Objection 4. Relations which result from the mental operation alone in the objects understood are logical relations only, inasmuch as reason observes them as existing between two objects perceived by the mind. Those relations, however, which follow the operation of the intellect, and which exist between the word intellectually proceeding and the source whence it proceeds, are not logical relations only, but are real relations; inasmuch as the intellect and the reason are real things, and are really related to that which proceeds from them intelligibly; as a corporeal thing is related to that which proceeds from it corporeally. Thus paternity and filiation are real relations in God.' back |
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