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vol VII: Notes

1999

Notes

[Notebook BOOK 4/5/94]

[Sunday 4 April 1999 - Saturday 10 April 1999]

Sunday 4 April 1999

. . .

[page 231]

. . .

Monday 5 April 1999

. . .

Software is the root of peace.
a) accounting is the foundation of justice.

. . .

BLOB MODEL

[page 233]

. . .

SOFTWARE games of life.

The vacuum is the random motion that makes structure. Structure arises when the vacuum is filtered through mathematics, or perhaps more simply, when two vacuums are joined. So the life of a cell depends upon the ceaseless jiggling of its molecules. The energy of the jiggle is determined by the temperature. The velocity of the particles depends upon their mass. Molecular energy and temperature are connected by Boltzmann's constant (channel, symmetry)

[page 234]

The vacuum in a cell is the heat energy of its components. But as well as a sea of energy (heat) we have a directed flow of energy which relates not to the position of the molecules relative to one another, but to the internal structure of the molecules, what we call chemical energy.

ATP conformal changes, Chaperones.

It requires the whole panoply of the Cantor Universe to describe the inner structure of the geometric line.

Concepts of force = influence (data communication)

muscle concrete
Newton intellectual
Quantum Mechanics ordinal
Transfinite Network cardinal

Cybernetics is the central science of life. It has taken me ten years from the time I first thought this, while driving around Australia [ref: ] till now, when things

[page 235]

seem to be falling together in the environment which the net makes possible. The complexity of the story is measured by the number of links it knows. A pure communication carries representation of numbers.

The internet is our leading model: we know that we can send any information over the net, its just a matter of discovering and agreeing on a standard for encoding and decoding this information in a communally accessible manner. McLuhan told us that the medium is the message. McLuhan So the protocol is the part of the medium that packs the message for transport at the input and unpacks it at the other end. It takes a hardware channel and configures it for communication common to networks of machines keeping some act together and to human beings communicating audio-visually. The most intense use of this medium seems to be related to our reproductive needs and feelings. The potential driving this bandwidth into being is obviously great. Whether this is pathological or not is a matter of debate. McLuhan

[page 236]

Morality. We would like to create a firewall between sensory input and behaviour, but they are intimately linked.

Moral spectrum + moral direction ie moral potential. Social engineering comes down to creating the milieu for peace and prosperity. Insofar as this is coincident with the extremalization of action, we know that peace and prosperity are the result of minimizing action ie getting the desired (needed) result with minimum commotion.

RELIGION - ACTION

The shell of the site seems to be reaching a stable structure = cardinal + ordinal number. But which ordinal out of the aleph(n) possibilities gets a guernsey? This seems to be the place of natural selection for it is impossible in principle to determine the future from the present because the future is more complex than the present. The Universe is an ordinal number growing according to Cantor's theorem. The point about

[page 237]

complexity is that the complexity of a point (which has not structure) is equal to the entropy of the space of which it is a point.

These little shocks of insight are quite exhausting in the sense that work is required to bring them into being.

A moral ideal is equivalent to a level of entropy that can only be brought about by flattening the wealth curve. So we look for a calculation which delivers an argument in favour of a certain ideal wealth curve mated to some sort of assumptions about the distribution of human attributes. What does it mean, to minimize action in a human society? This is the question which arises from the notion that religion is the technology of peace.

Ethics/Culture -> communication. Minimum action = noise free communication.

Ye fundamental theorem of religion? How do

[page 238]

we get things noise free? Error correcting code.

This carries an overhead in bandwidth that must be paid for out of the profits of perfection (= grace). This bandwidth overhead is the price of security = reliable communication between sovereign entities (ie black boxes).

In society this is social security and the fundamental argument for globally taxing cashflows and distributing it back to human individuals. This thing is intuitively the core of the natural religion project, in other words we introduce a law of conservation of humanity, human group etc.

Having reached a consensus at the most abstract and general level, we then have to work our way back down to the practical life whence these questions arose.

Love: Jesus by their fruits and good Samaritan, so not entirely unspeakable.

[page 239]

Marx: 'classes' = political antagonisms. But these are not mass things, but matters for arbitration with every individual in every situation, on the merits without foolish intrusion of ill judged principles/shibboleths.

We increase bandwidth by overcoming prejudice, ie widening the protocol, ie increasing the size of the network. Business does this, and here quite clearly bandwidth = wealth ie rate of feedback = precision of guidance, so wealth = precision of guidance = ability to avoid reefs (= disease, accident, famine etc).

The killer application: algorithm for human navigation: ie algorithm for scale invariant navigation. Bandwidth must be available at all peer levels.

The minimization of action replaces physical movement with noetic movement.

Conservation of energy = quantity of energy is eternal = 0.

[page 240]

So the feeling of progress and hope, ie the feeling that at last I have found words to tell you this has been made possible by the web. A book is necessarily a linear thing, and one must attempt to construct an ordered exposition beginning from the beginning and working toward the end. I cannot yet do that, but I can set up a nest of links, so gathering together all the ingredients to be ordered into the book. On the other hand there is an order of construction.

Possibilities start off very remote (the butterfly wing) and gradually, by some sort of brownian realisation, come to fruition. This 'explains' quantum mechanics.

Physics (the interpretative step)

. . .

We model the world as a network of communicating processes, that is

[page 241]

as a parallel computation. Here we begin fitting this model to the world as we know it, beginning with physics.

It is almost unthinkable now that quantum mechanics and relativity are seriously false descriptions of the world. By fitting these theories into the model we can show a relationship between them, strengthening all three.

QM sees the world as a gigantic structure of states and transitions between states. A state is a possibility which may or may not be occupied., that is open to observation. This description fits us as well as the tiny particles where quantum mechanical explanations are usually to be found. As a human being I have a wide range of emotional states, happiness, anger, sadness tension etc etc etc. I actually am happy, sad etc etc only part of the time. My feelings may also be a superposition of a number of states.

Each industry takes care of a certain area of human needs and desires.

Tuesday 6 April 1999
Wednesday 7 April 1999
Thursday 8 April 1999
Friday 9 April 1999
Saturday 10 April 1999

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Books
McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, Gingko Press; 2005 Editorial Reviews Amazon.com 'The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.'  
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Links
C L Bennett et al, First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Maps and Basic Results, Abstract: We present full sky microwave maps in five frequency bands ... from the WMAP [Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe] first year sky survey. ... A best fit cosmological model to the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background] and other measures of large scale structure works remarkably well with only a few parameters. The age of the best-fit universe is t0 13.7 +- 0.2 Gyr old. ... " back

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