vol VII: Notes
1999
Notes
[Notebook BOOK 4/5/94]
[Sunday 16 May 1999 - Saturday 22 May 1999]
[page 291]
Sunday 16 May 1999
The fundamental insight is that the Universe is both intelligent and intelligible. This position
[page 292]
is repugnant to the position urged by Lonergan and his intellectual ancestors.
Laugh/cry. These can be done sequentially laugh/cry/laugh/cry or simultaneously, entering a state which is a superposition of laughing and crying.
The position offered here also has a long history which I will not dwell on, since it is simply the inverse of that given above, so that holding both these positions simultaneously is equivalent to holding no position at all.
The relationship of position and counter position eloquently detailed by Lonergan gives us the inkling of a model to explain the phenomena of quantum mechanics
coherence position/counterposition
decoherence.
I share Lonergan's repugnance, but find that we must move on. The proposition we must
[page 293]
deal with is matter cannot be intelligent and we proceed through models of both matter and intelligence.
1 If Intelligence is a property of network, and
2 A network is a computing device and
3 A computing device can be constructed from matter
The Universe can be intelligent.
We take the hypotheses one by one, beginning with three.
Once again, this little passage looks as though it is enough to totally change the world.
What did Archimedes do? He formed a small set of concepts (density, buoyancy, weight, adulteration etc) which correspond to something real in the world, and then used these concepts to
The assertion of empirical residue is rejected by the Michaelson-Morley experiment (an example of inverse insight).
. . .
[page 294]
. . .
Network cannot be deterministic because signals may come in from beyond the event horizon of a given processor.
Cummins (Mind) p 129 Looming.
CHANGE TECHNOLOGY to MIND for a smoother transition from cybernetics to theology. Mind corresponds to economy, the implementation of the products of mind to increase human fitness.
Monday 17 May 1999
Insight via drugs. A very religious thing. What Lonergan refers to is the coming in to
[page 295]
consciousness of insight, prompting the eureka.
Flexibility increases the amount of time a task takes but reduces the physical action necessary. Replacing physics by thought. Integrated logistics. So. This is more the way of the hunter gatherer rather than the farmer?
Pain, shortness of life etc need to be dealt with. As in the old religion they must first of all be accepted. There is no cure for death except for a clear understanding of its historical necessity and acceptance of this. On the other hand, in lieu of false positives such as grace, heaven and eternal life we have genuine improvements of the human lot by the application of mind, that is the source of technology.
All knowledge is ultimately sought for its product, the pleasure, wealth, safety, health etc that it brings. So the mind is inherently ordained to action, ie action in the survival states and, in the case of animals, the dominance hierarchy.
Mind, that is technology to turn natural forces to our own enjoyment. Thus the
[page 296]
turbine that we place in a waterfall takes the energy of falling water and delivers it to us through the electricity grid.
PARALLEL PROCESSING (network) <=> SUPERPOSITION
The 'mere matter of fact' of a looming object is given meaning by the nature of the object itself and the visual processing system that generates the fact in a subject.
NATURE =\{INPUT,OUTPUT\} (of a black box)
The unrestricted desire to know (derived from Thomas' idea that the vision of god is the adequate actualization of intellectual potential) seems to be a bit of special pleading, since most people seem to be happy to know what they need to know and be entertained the rest of the time.
On the other hand, survival seems to dictate a comprehensive awareness if relevant elements of a creature's environment, and since we have occupied all habitats, everything has
[page 297]
become relevant and it helps to know everything, as this exercise suggests.
Behind this (MA) thesis lies the common sense view that it is obvious that we are part of the world and that the world can account for itself. This is FAITH. The notion that the whole think is a fuckup is absurd.
The mental exploration of mind is rather like the piscine investigation of water. It is hard to see where the subject begins and ends because it suffuses the whole environment. We cope by invoking formalism, that is language.
Cummins: Human beings are sensitive to frequencies and what we seek to do is reduce the frequency of subjectively bad (loss making) events and increase the frequency of subjectively good events. Through this window we can see money as the measure of frequency E =, $n, where $ corresponds to h [Planck's constant].
We denumenize being, language, action etc etc by formalizing them, that is by taking them apart, naming the parts, and hypothesizing the way the parts interact when the thing is a going
[page 298]
concern.
Inverse insight and space. Consider the monitor. Every resolved point on the screen has an address (or set of addresses, physical and logical) Consider the transformations necessary to make an abstract operating system into a graphic user interface.
Quantum mechanics gives no empirical residue. Physics Today 3/99 A8. Rolf Landauer, Charles Bennett, Isaac Chuang, IBM research labs. www.ibm.com.research
My whole story might be wrong and the Xian one right. The practical outcome of this debate will ultimately be seen in the market in the relative value people put on the two points of view and their embodiments.
. . .
[page 299]
. . .
The entropy of data is not measured by itself, but by the space of which it is an element. As soon as we censor the space, we reduce the information content of every point in it.
Coding and censorship. FTP protocol allows anything to be sent. Links can be set up outside the net - phone/mail.
Tuesday 18 May 1999
Wednesday 19 May 1999
Antimatter, causality and empirical residue in Goddard (ed) 1998 p 54. Goddard
[page 300]
Mind (as in mind the baby) is the seat of watching, calculating and controlling. It is the link between input and output of the cybernetic loop.
Jerry Fodor: Modularity of Mind Fodor
The seat of art/source
Action only requires adequate knowledge, not perfect knowledge. Time is often of the essence.
Quantum mechanics --> Empirical residue. Phase is not observable (this could be a candidate for empirical residue) but as soon as we introduce meaning (eg relative phase) the effects of phase become observable.
Thursday 20 May 1999
I am becoming security conscious about my writing, as I did about my house a few years ago and installed a sprinkler system. Is this a good sign?
Love is a phenomenon, and therefore a proper
[page 301]
input to science. We can study its outward manifestations as we watch people pairing up, perhaps having children, building houses and empires, enjoying themselves. But we have an added dimension. Personal experience. We feel things as well as see them. With atoms, bacteria or elephants we can only see that they are doing. Their feelings are beyond us.
. . .
GOD = SOURCE
Insight: Ordering of a set of inputs.
Friday 21 May 1999
Seeking to model insight. Depression comes when the model is not forthcoming. We seek insight into
[page 302]
insight. The close relationship between knower and known is the product of evolution.
Intellect as black box. Images in, understanding out.
Insight into insight is recursive.
In the modern jargon insight is the study of communication and control in the animal and the machine.
SENSE- -> PROCESSOR- -> ACTION
Evolution of mind.
People migrate to the city because it has a lower level of uncertainty, energy on tap etc. SERVICES/OUTSOURCING
MIND
At out level of complexity, information is embodied in things, like sound waves, silicon chips of neurons. But there must be a level at which the embodiment of information is the thing, and at this level, information
[page 303]
is purely formal unrestricted by things other than itself.
Does this remove the depression. It has very little to do with the original problem, it is not even a new idea, but it is a new and very expressive form of words. Insight reduces a problem to operational parameters.
KNOWLEDGE INSIGHT ACTION
Insight mediates between data and action.
sum (sigma) = SUPERPOSITION
Saturday 22 May 1999
Obviously it is just as difficult to prove the existence of empirical residue as to prove its non-existence, since we are saying that here is unintelligible data.
We must divorce 'inverse insight' from empirical residue. Every 'head on' insight implies an inverse insight as we detect just what is relevant
[page 305]
to a particular situation and what is not.
The term inverse insight is meaningless. It should mean II-1 = 1, say. Insight into the inverse, perhaps.
Inverse of machine infinity = machine epsilon.
Empirical residue is another manifestation of the rationalist program to discount experience.: here we have experiences with no intellectual content, and therefore experiences of non-being.
Empirical residue = materia prima. It seems necessary that for ancients to explain the world they had to imagine an unexplainable substrate.
The invention of symbolic computing machines finally abolished any fears that matter was not capable of sustaining spiritual functions. We need here to make a mathematical model of spirit, ie pure formalism.
SPIRIT = FORMALISM
[page 305]
The ancients already had the data to reach this conclusion, had they but seen it. It is clear that we, as spiritual entities, can communicate some of our deepest thoughts and feeling to one another (something forbidden in the monastic isolation of the teaching system) through physical media such as speech, eye contact and skin to skin contact. In other words, spiritual entities can be encoded in a physical substrate.
At the same time as mathematics was moving toward the computer, physics was making the first steps toward realizing that the world is in effect a computer.
Every insight is build on a lattice of previous insights (the past light cone), and every event in the Universe is isomorphic to an insight.
INSIGHT = FUNCTION (Many/One)
The mathematical object I choose to model insight is the function. A function is a set theoretical mapping with the special
[page 306]
property that it maps one or more elements of its domain into one element of its range, that is it is (generally) a many -> one mapping.
The function of insight appears to be to unite many data in one explanation. For the moment this correspondence between the experience of insight and the formal function is enough. The model is developed further below.
The domain and range of a function may be any finite or infinite sets. Here we note a remark, by Georg Cantor the founder of set theory, who said that the concepts of an ordered set anything thinkable.
RELIGION
Christianity is a religious fiction (artifact) like a legal fiction.
[page 307]
Some assume that the faculty of intelligence arises not from the physical body shaped by evolution but is something superadded. This is not relevant to the MA because we also allow introspective knowledge.
We write mathematical descriptions of the domains and ranges of functions using the language of set theory.
Our first model of function is simply numerical. A function makes many into one. It maps parallel into serial.
Points worth noting:
1 CARDINAL Domains and ranges transfinite.
2 ORDINAL For any abstract function to be defined, the elements of domain and range must have unique names.
3 Functions implemented by computer. May be classified by the type of machine necessary to implement them.
4 A suitable representation of all this is therefore transfinite permutation group.
(These four points may? be brought into correspondence with the features of insight listen by Lonergan).
5 No particular function, but one to be found, the model.
