Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Chapter 9: A theory of peace
9.1: Problems and theories
9.2: Social Contracts
9.3: A divine world covers all possibilities
9.4: Logic: the mechanism of being
9.5: Heaven (and hell) on Earth
9.6: From Hilbert to Minkowski
9.7: General relativity
9.8: Claude Shannon: the mathematics of selection
9.9: Beating noise: complexification
9.10: Noosphere: the mind cloud
9.11: Reality and fantasy: politics
9.12: The noosphere is grounded in the biosphere
9.13: Broken symmetry creates space
9.14: Democracy: political dynamics
9.15: An evolutionary burden: the devil
9.16: Education: taming and training ourselves
9.17: Grace: superhuman freedom
9.1: Problems and theories
Darwin and Einstein are essentially in agreement on the nature and purpose of theory:
In scientific investigations it is permitted to invent any hypothesis, and if it explains various large and independent classes of facts it rises to the rank of a well-grounded theory. . . .. The principle of natural selection may be looked at as a mere hypothesis, but rendered in some degree probable by what we positively know of the variability of organic beings in a state of nature, — by what we positively know of the struggle for existence, and the consequent almost inevitable preservation of favourable variations, — and from the analogical formation of domestic races. Now this hypothesis may be tested, — and this seems to me the only fair and legitimate manner of considering the whole question, — by trying whether it explains several large and independent classes of facts; such as the geological succession of organic beings, their distribution in past and present times, and their mutual affinities and homologies. If the principle of natural selection does explain these and other large bodies of facts, it ought to be received. On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation of any one of these facts. We can only say that it has so pleased the Creator to command that the past and present inhabitants of the world should appear in a certain order and in certain areas; that He has impressed on them the most extraordinary resemblances, and has classed them in groups subordinate to groups. But by such statements we gain no new knowledge; we do not connect together facts and laws; we explain nothing.' Charles Darwin: The Variation of animals and Plants Under Domestication
A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts. Albert Einstein: Thermodynamics - Wikiquote
The hypothesis proposed here has five points:
1. the universe is divine;
2. the divinity of the universe implies that it is self sufficient, subject to no external control;
3. consequently the observed creation of the universe from an initial state of perfect simplicity is explained by the nature of divinity itself, the subject of theology;
4. peaceful human existence within the universe requires that we understand and exploit the creative power of the universe; and
5. violence in human affairs, as elsewhere in the universe, arises when the creative power is blocked and builds up the pressure necessary to break through the blockage.
The purpose of theory, as Darwin states, is to seek connections between the elements of large bodies of data. The theory of peace proposed here is intended to show the connection of these five points. As a theory of peace it is universal and serves also, in human affairs, as a theory of war and consequently provides clues to the avoidance of war.
The purpose of the theory of peace is to explore the sources of the peaceful elements of the structure of the universe, particularly following the trail from the initial singularity to peaceful human societies. Given this core trajectory, we can then identify the branches that have led to war and disaster and propose strategies to prevent their growth. In particular we wish to point out the role of false information, particularly emphasizing the role of theological errors in promoting religious war.
We arrive at the conclusion that the source of war is the attempt by ignorant and autocratic powers to stifle human creativity and that the source of peace is the diplomatic negotiation of social contracts which fully recognise the need for the space of human activity to be expanded to the maximum possible extent.
This expansion is inherently consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, constrained by the first law. Given the vast amount of solar energy falling every moment upon the earth, we conclude that the first law places very little constraint on the spiritual growth of an intelligently managed planet.
The theory proposed here has two starting points. The first, stretching back to the ancient beginnings of philosophy, science and theology, conceives of the divinity as a source of pure activity. This idea reached its apogee in Aristotle's theory of the first unmoved mover which was incorporated by Thomas Aquinas into the foundations of Christian theology. Aquinas conceived of divinity as an absolutely simple necessary being of pure activity. Aristotle; Metaphysics 1072b6 sqq.
The second is that the divine universe is built rather like an onion, in layers, each layer depending for its existence on the layer beneath it and establishing the conditions for the existence of the layer above it. This system beings with the absolutely simple initial singularity, identical to the traditional god, and, like the numbers, has no upper limit.
This structure of the universe also dictates the structure of knowledge. Einstein introduced this structure into physics where it has proved very fruitful. We begin with a symmetry. The special theory of relativity states a symmetry: every observer, working in their own inertial frame, sees the same laws of physics. We then extend this symmetry by transformations which apply it, like an algorithm, to specific instances. Lorentz transformations in the special theory of relativity enable me to compute what the laws of physics look like in an inertial frame moving relative to me. This pattern carries us from layer to layer in the universe. Starting from a particular layer, we can study how it is transformed to create the layers above it; further, we can identify the symmetries in the layer beneath it which have been transformed to create the layer we are exploring. Algorithm - Wikipedia
9.2: Social contracts
Throughout history most large human societies appear to have been ruled by violence. In world of limited resources, many people have realised that rape and pillage are the cheapest methods for a group of people to ensure their survival, reproduction and growth. Consequently the technologies of war and coercive control of populations have played a dominant role in shaping us. The genocide, with divine assistance, of the population of a promised land is central to the ancient history of Christianity. From a military point of view, Christianity remains the dominant religion on Earth, supported in turn by the empires of Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Exodus: King James Version, Margaret Macmillan: War: How Conflict Shaped Us
War is a terrible evil which reached the apogee of industrialized murder and destruction in the twentieth century. Well before these disasters, many people sought peaceful means of managing human communities. Many of these people envisaged a social structure established between willing participants in a cooperative venture modelled on the legal notion of contract. Leviathan (Hobbes Book) - Wikipedia, Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Wikipedia
Rousseau envisaged built by contract between fictitious asocial individuals. In this he is about three billion years too late, since the evolutionary solutions to the social and political problems we face began with the emergence of multicellular creatures.
Individual animals and plants comprise enormous numbers of more or less free living cells. Harmony in a cellular community arises from two facts: First, all these cells are descended from a common ancestor so that they share a common genome, and second, their descent is genetically programmed so that they differentiate into different roles. A most important role is to serve as an immune system to protect the parent organism from foreign pathogens. The evolution of immunity has followed a path very similar to the development of security systems in human communities, using intelligence to identify and eliminate threats. Immune system - Wikipedia
All my cells (which are in fact a minority within my body) share a common genome. On this foundation they work together and my immune system has clear criteria to identify strangers. We might consider the Bible and the Creeds as the genome of Christianity. They have served to bind billions of people into more or less coherent societies and identify and exclude heretics for nearly two millennia. Other religions have played similar roles. More generally, on the assumption that theologies are human theories of everything, different concepts of the nature of god are the sources large blocs of human social and political unity. Heresy - Wikipedia
From an enlightenment point of view the Christian God is now dead and we are struggling to find a new way to run things. My thought is to bring god to life again in a new form, identical to the Universe, which we all share. This is a variant on the view taken by Indigenous Australians, that the land embodies the law and is the foundation of human spirituality Sylvia Kleinert & Margo Neil (editors): The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Arts and Culture.
A standard cosmology holds that the Universe came to be within an initial singularity by a rapid evolutionary process called the big bang. I identify this initial singularity with the god of Aquinas, pure action. Pure action demands that the universe try every possibility. Consistency demands that only those systems which are internally consistent are capable of existence.
We may look on these two demands as the algorithm of creation. They are most widely understood in the the form of the theory of evolution, which runs on variation (try everything) and selection (eliminate variations that do not work). The evolutionary paradigm identifies successful reproduction as the paramount good or value. Everything existing today has a pedigree stretching unbroken through billions of years to the earliest forms. It is therefore natural to guess that an orientation toward survival is deeply ingrained in the world.
The nature red in tooth and claw view of evolution emphasises violence and conquest, but the true power that has generated the world is the cooperation and bonding created by communication. Even the simplest fundamental particles are effectively persons or sources, able to send and receive messages. This universal power has enabled the constructions of organisms like our planet and ourselves, which are, from an atomic point of view, huge and hugely complex.
The universality of our minds reflects the creative power of the universe. This is both our weakness and our strength. It is a weakness because we can dream up stupid ideas like world domination that can cause much damage before they are selected out. It is equally our strength, because we are in a position to understand how our divine world works and learn to fit in with it. From Rawls’s point of view, we need to create a just, evidence based contractual relationship with the planet upon which we are absolutely dependent for our continued existence. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
9.3: A divine world covers all possibilities
I started the development of this theory of peace in 1987 with a series of radio programs. The key idea then was that we fight for survival when when resources are scarce. From a mathematical point of view we may we consider the resources of the world to be measured by the numbers, litres, kilograms, hectares and so on. I set out to interpret Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers as showing a way to generate infinite spiritual space from a relatively finite material space. This spiritual development can then become the foundation of a virtuous circle enabling us to the share and develop our material resources more efficiently to develop our spirit even further. The physical foundation of this process is the almost unlimited quantity of solar energy bathing the Earth.
Now my idea has grown into this book. The first eight chapters have gathered many of the ideas that have come to me along the way. You can read the original lectures at A Theory of Peace. The purpose of this chapter is to put all this together into a more or less coherent story. In those days the fall of the Soviet Union kindled hope for the future. The spread of autocracy since then has been disappointing. I like to see the revised theory of peace as a spiritual vaccine against the transmission of dictatorship through the human population.
I introduced my idea as follows:
Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the whole remarkable structure of what exists. If we are to understand peace well enough to bring it within our grasp, we must understand the creative process that brings the world to be.
The source of creation we call god. In this theory of peace I assume that god is not outside the universe, as many have believed, but that that the whole universe itself is god. Since it is god, there for all of us to see, we must eventually find out how it works, and so agree on how the universe creates itself. If we can agree on this, we might find a way to agree on how to structure ourselves into a peaceful society.
My plan remains the same. Get in tune with creation. Drop the imperialists' fantasy that their dream of heaven rules.
I chose mathematics for the language of theology because a) it is the language of physics; b) it has an infinite vocabulary, the numbers, particularly the transfinite numbers, which enable us to approach the size of god; c) it has simple well known logical syntax; and d) it loses nothing in translation.
The key ingredient in my theory in those days was Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers. The idea was summarized at the end of lecture 4:
We fight because there is not enough to go around. One approach to life is that it is only possible to get more by taking it from somebody else. This is often true, but it is not necessarily true.
Our universe in infinite and creative. What I hope to show is that is possible in principle to deploy our resources to make certain that the needs of every person are met. There will then be no need to use violence to deprive one another of the necessities of life.
Georg Cantor's generation of the transfinite numbers shows how a large spaces of variation can be generated by ordering relatively small spaces of discrete elements (represented by the natural numbers).
I understood the transfinite numbers to be generated by permutation, so that each subsequent number ℵn + 1 ≈ ℵn! is the cardinal of the permutation group of all the elements of the previous number.
Then
The basic idea of counting is the notion of adding one. Since the order is generated by counting, the order must be generated by adding one. Once you know how to add one, the mathematical world is your oyster.
Now enter George Cantor. Cantor transformed the simple notion of adding one into something very much richer, the theory of transfinite numbers. Cantor's theorem can be stated very succinctly: Any symbol, even an infinite one, necessarily generates a distinct new symbol which possesses a greater degree of infinity.
This applies to any symbol. Therefore, like adding one, it is a process that has no end. Like counting, it produces an ordered sequence of symbols, since each transfinite symbol contains all the transfinite symbols which proceed it. Since the new symbol is also distinct from all the symbols that precede it, it must be greater than them. From this point of view the transfinite symbols are just like the natural numbers.
The special property of transfinite symbols is that each succeeding symbol contains all possible interpretations of the symbol preceding it. The transfinite symbols can therefore be seen as the raw material for transformation. Each transfinite symbol contains all possible transformations of the symbol before it. . . . .
Solving a problem seems to be a matter of transformation. We have a problem when we find two symbols that do not appear to fit together. The solution to the problem is to find a new space in which they do fit, that is a transformation. Sometimes it takes a long time to find the translation. Some problems have a very long history.
What Cantor has done is show that in intelligence terms, adding one is exactly the same as solving whatever problem you have before you at this very moment. Cantor's theory comprehends the two extremes of existence. At one end, it is just counting. At the other end, it is life.
Mathematics is essentially formal and static. It comes to life in the minds of mathematicians (6.3). From a mathematical point of view, computation is also formal and static, but we imagine it as a process. Turing modelled his machine on the work of a human computer working their way step by step through a problem like multiplying two big numbers. We know that there are just as many different Turing machines as there are natural numbers, ℵ0. We can establish a one-to one correspondence between the natural numbers and construct transfinite computer networks by exact analogy with the construction of permutations of natural numbers, stringing turing machines together so the output of one is the input of the next (5.8-9).
The problem we are faced with is mutual assured destruction. East and West cannot fit together. They need to learn how to communicate, which means we need a new space, a transformation. This transformation I call the theology (or theory) of peace.
Mutual assured destruction has not gone away. If anything the situation is worse since there are still thousands of nuclear weapons poised to launch on warning. Brown, Khanna & Perry: 5 Steps for the Next President to Head off a Nuclear Catastrophe
The nuclear problem cannot be solved by war. It must be solved by talk, that is diplomacy. An important class of mathematical theorems are fixed point theorems which establish that there are possible solutions to problems, even if they do not actually demonstrate the solution. They encourage us to look for the needle in the haystack by demonstrating that there is in fact a needle there. I see this theory of peace playing a similar role, showing that we can make peace on Earth, we just have to find how. The fact that something is known to be possible is a decisive step toward making the possibility a reality.
9.4: Logic: the mechanism of being
We have a strong sense of when things make sense. We use this sense to classify all the information that comes to us from both the world around us and from within ourselves. A lot of the input makes sense, and we can take a chance on accepting it uncritically. It fits our experience of normal input.
Other input is more problematic. On the road, on a misty night, I have been confused about the direction of the road. A false decision might have lead to an accident, injury, delay, expense and other evils. The only option was to slow down until I got closer and things become clear.
The test for sense is consistency. I was confused on that foggy night because elements were mutually inconsistent. There were roadworks in the vicinity and a detour. Some of the information I received seemed to say that the road curved left, some of it said that it curved right. I do not remember the details. Whatever it was the perceived inconsistency slowed me down.
Aristotle was one of the first scientists to write extensively about logic and his work, known as the Organon endures to this day. From a modern point of view, Aristotle's methods are not wrong but they have been replaced by more powerful methods, culminating in the theory of computation. Beginning with Leibniz and George Boole, logic became formalized branch of mathematics. This opened the way to the design of computing machinery based on the binary system of symbolism. Robin Smith (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Aristotle's Logic, Organon - Wikipedia, Whitehead & Russell Principia Mathematica
Modern mathematical physics is a heavy user of the continuous mathematics of differential and integral calculus. The simplest representation of the continuum is a Euclidean line whose points are indexed by the real numbers. We represent space and time by continuous variables. Even though everything we observe is particulate, from galaxies through trees to atoms, many believe that the underlying processes that explain the behaviour of discrete objects are continuous. This dichotomy became particularly acute when quantum physics led us to realise that all action in the universe is quantized. There is a minimum indivisible quantum of action whose size in spacetime is measured by Planck's quantum of action
Here we guess that we must reject the fictitious structure of mathematical continuity, and replace our ideas of geometric continuity with logical continuity. Geometrical continuity makes sense because it looks continuous. This continuity is an illusion, however, arising from the exceedingly small size of the quantum of action. Logical continuity makes better sense to us because it is our natural way of argument. Mathematically, logical continuity is embodied in both imaginary formal and actual physical computing machinery.Traditionally, physics deals with the material world and metaphysics with the psychological world. Here the introduction of logical continuity as an approach to understanding the world unites physics and psychology. The network structure of our minds, to be found in our central nervous systems, is an instance of the network structure we use to describe the world. This opens the way to thinking of the Universe as a mind. On the current hypothesis, the observable fixed points of the Universe are revelations of the mind of god. Davies: The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning
The first step in the theoretical journey from the initial singularity to the present state of the world is the mathematical theory of fixed points. Insofar as god is pure dynamism, a closed system, sufficient unto itself, we expect to find fixed points in it. These points are part of the dynamics, but they do not move. We identify these fixed points with the stable systems in the Universe. Some such systems, like myself, have limited lifetimes, others, like protons, are believed to last for ever or almost ever. Fixed point theorem - Wikipedia
Fixed point theorems are very useful in mathematics because they establish that there are solutions to certain problems, even though those solutions are still unknown. One we know that there really is a needle in the haystack, we can start to look for it with some hope of finding it. John L. Casti: Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter
The hypothesis that the Universe is divine means that everything we sense is a message from god, the Sun, the flowers, the wind, our baby's smile and their tantrums too, everything. These fixed points in the divine dynamics are things that stay still long enough for us to read them. We have been studying these things for a long time and we have a pretty good idea how at least some of them work. We know why it rains, why there are winds, how sunshine makes things grow and a lot more.
The fixed points that we observe in the Universe are the input to all knowledge, including science. We see them as revelation of God, similar to but much more comprehensive than the revelations recorded in ancient texts. The question, then, is how do they all fit together? Our first principle is that because of its dynamic unity god is self consistent. We therefore expect that everything we learn about the fixed points of the Universe will ultimately fit into one coherent picture. We still find ourselves some distance from a complete theory of everything, but we certainly know enough to do a lot of engineering and our understanding is extending to an appreciation of both global ecology and our own spirituality.All our science is a history of creation. We can only know the past, the future is conjecture. We live in an expanding Universe. The expansion and contraction of space-time are both explained by the general theory of relativity. By thinking of the Universe as a logical rather than a physical entity, we open the way to expanding the space of human psychological existence, showing that there is enough mental room for everyone. There is no need to kill people because they think differently, a key ingredient in religious persecution which has been with us from time immemorial.
9.5: Heaven (and hell) on Earth
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. . . . Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will go 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. Richard Feynman: The Character of Physical Law
The everyday world we live in in known to physicists as classical space and time. It is described by the mechanics first formulated in detail by Isaac Newton. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became clear that while classical physics describes things on the human scale, it does not really describe what is going on behind the scenes. To understand that we needed quantum theory to understand the relationship between matter and radiation. An enormous benefit of this new knowledge is that we now know how the Sun works and the intimate role that solar energy plays in the economy of Earth.
The theory of peace proposed here is derived from path the universe has followed since it began. A standard cosmology proposes that it began with a stupendous explosion, the big bang. In the fourteen billion years since then, this universe has developed islands of relatively peaceful gentleness like our planet Earth. True we have wars and cyclones, but these phenomena are as nothing compared to the big bang. We want to understand how the universe evolved from unimaginable violence to the relative peace we now enjoy. This understanding, we hope, will enable us to follow this trajectory further toward sustained and heavenly peace. Big Bang - Wikipedia
The world at all levels is moved by potential, that is possibility. Some people have dreamt of flying since time immemorial. Many no doubt claimed that this was an impossible dream and used stories like the myth of Icarus that suggest that flight is dangerous. The dreamers had evidence, however. They could always point to flying insects and birds. Icarus -Wikipedia
Much of this book is a refutation of the Christian religion that promises its believers an eternity of unlimited pleasure in an afterlife living with a blissful vision of god. Unbelievers like myself point out that when we die we die. At least the dream of flight of flight was supported by evidence. There is be no evidence for eternal life, nor any reason to think it possible. Aquinas, Summa, I II, 3, 8: Does human happiness consist in the vision of the divine essence?
We know of course that peace and happiness are possible because we experience them, at least momentarily. Happiness and pain are ultimately matters of information. From a quantum mechanical point of view the maximum density of information that the universe can carry is immense, measured roughly by one bit of information per quantum of action. This opens a new way for us to think of heaven (and hell) on Earth.
Since we have identified god and the universe all our experience of life is vision of god. Aquinas felt that the vision of god is pure happiness, but on the present hypothesis this is not necessarily so since we experience pain as well as pleasure. The Christian reading of reading of Genesis interprets pain as punishment for original sin. The modern understanding of pain comes from cybernetics: pain is negative feedback, a signal that something is out of order and needs correction.
The point here is that very little in the way of material resources are required to provide heaven pleasures [and hellish pains] and so by careful management we can produce pleasant and peaceful lives for ourselves with a minimum expenditure of resources thus opening immense scope for lightening our footprint on Earth.Aristotle and Aquinas saw god as an intellectual and spiritual entity. Here we take advantage of the modern understanding of quantum mechanics in terms of information transmission and communication to visualise the mechanism of the universe as mind rather than matter. Nielsen & Chuang: Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
The problem for physicists is that computational processes that drive the universe are invisible. They must work from the visible to the invisible. We guess that these processes are invisible because they are too simple to both do their thing and describe what they are doing to a bystander. The problem is the same for a theologians, particularly those who identify the the universe with god. If we are to know how god works we must know how the universe works, and if we want to know how the universe works we must understand quantum mechanics. Any viable theory of peace which is to be based on the divine nature must take quantum mechanics into account. We have discussed this at length in earlier parts of this book (5.6 sqq).
The basic vectors in Hilbert space are called rays and represent waves of energy, symbolized by kets, written |ψ>. Different basis states are distinguished by their discrete energies which correspond to discrete frequencies according to the formula E = hf. Joseph Fourier discovered that any mathematical function can be represented by a adding together waves of different frequencies, a process called superposition. We can hear superpositions. The sound of an orchestra is a superposition of all the instruments and if we listen closely we can pick out the contributions of each instrument. Fourier transform - Wikipedia
The fourier superposition of all the frequencies represented in a Hilbert space gives us the alphabet of functions from which the universe is constructed. Like a spinning die, this alphabet is invisible, but when two quantum systems meet we get a fixed point in the quantum dynamics which represents a particle or message. The quantum system of the universe is continually creating and annihilating vast numbers of particles which make the world what it is. Our own bodies are enormously complex systems of particles working together to give us life.
The exploitation of quantum theory has led to enormous progress in instrumentation, communication and the miniaturisation of all sorts of scientific, technological and everyday equipment, like smartphones. Through the development of photovoltaic cells quantum theory has also opened up a vast new source of renewable energy, which, added to wind energy (which is also a form of solar energy) is growing at an exponential rate and will very likely eliminate the need for carbon based fuels in the next few decades. This will enable us, in the nick of time, to eliminate the catastrophic temperature increase which is currently threatening all forms of life on Earth. Summer Praetorius: Dawn of the Heliocene
This development will also eliminate the capture of fossil fuel as an excuse for war. The increase in communication made possible by the quantum design of network connected and encrypted hand held electronic devices will also make the exploitation of secrecy and censorship much more difficult for the oppressive authorities whose principle aim is to imprison the human spirit in their tiny worlds under the delusion that they will profit thereby.
9.6: From Hilbert to Minkowski
The theory of peace is based on the notion that the increase in space is the source of peace, making room for everybody so that we are not led by the zero sum nature of finite resources to kill and oppress one another. By space here I do not mean just conserved resources measured in metres, hectares and litres, but all the creative resources of human life which we inherit from the universe that made us from next to nothing. The identification of the universe with god is an incentive to let our minds expand without limit.
The next step above the quantum layer of the universe is the space and time in which we live our everyday lives. Space and time are the foundation of all our communication and all the memory encoded in matter and radiation, from the cosmic background to particles of all descriptions from fundamental to stars, planets, galaxies and the unlimited forms of life.Quantum processes are the foundation of the universe. We model them mathematically using interactions between vectors in Hilbert space. We cannot see these vectors, but we understand that they control the behaviour of what we do see, particles moving and interacting in the four dimensional spacetime which we inhabit, Minkowski space. Hilbert space - Wikipedia, Minkowski space - Wikipedia
Hilbert space is a vector space analogous to the ordinary Euclidean space we live in, but with important differences.
First, a Hilbert space may have any number of dimensions, not just 3.
Second, Hilbert space uses complex numbers to represent the most salient feature of this quantum world: it is in perpetual motion. The basic quantum formula is f = E/ h where f is the frequency of the motion, which we usually imagine as a wave, E is the energy of the system of interest and h is Planck's constant. Planck's constant is a very tiny number which sets the scale for quantum events. Even the tiniest visible classical motion, like the twitch of a bacterial flagellum, involves trillions of quanta of action. A truly enormous amount of activity underlies events in our classical world.
The third feature of quantum mechanics is that it is very simple. f = E/ h is a linear function. Linear functions are the simplest there are. Quantum mechanics describes the simplest level of structure in the universe. Linearity - Wikipedia
The fourth feature of quantum mechanics is that it is symmetrical with respect to complexity. It works the same way in complex system as it does in a simple system. Hilbert space which may have any number of dimensions. What we learn about the properties of two dimensional Hilbert space applies to any space of higher dimension.
The standard approach in physics is to take space-time as given and use it as the mathematical domain for quantum theory, somehow mapping Hilbert space and and the state vectors of quantum mechanics onto space time. This approach provides no explanation of how space-time comes into existence from the initial singularity. The formation of back holes predicted by general relativity envisages the destruction of space time by a process that brings all geodesics in 4-space to an end, leaving us with no space-time but (perhaps) the infinitely dense structureless bubble of energy. One reason for this rather bizarre scenario is that it has been found impossible to develop a quantum theory of gravitation which might explain the quantum mechanical origin of space. Initial singularity - Wikipedia
The ancient theologians imagined that the one god split into three persons, the Father and the Son whose love from one another is the Holy Spirit. Here we follow the same path. The initial singularity is state of pure action like the classical god. It is an eternal entity with an unbounded potential to create. Its first step splits into quanta of the two forms of energy we call potential and kinetic. We assume these to be mirror images of one another whose sum is zero. These interact with one another rather like the potential and kinetic energy represented by a pendulum, an arrangement physicists call a harmonic oscillator. These oscillators represent a random spectrum of frequencies and energies ranging, like the natural numbers, from 1 to ℵ0. Different energies represent different basis vectors of a Hilbert space, the next layer structure in universe after the initial singularity.
At this point we have no space or momentum, only time and energy. The traditional god is said to have created the world out of nothing. Here, in contrast, we see the universe emerging within god themself. This creativity we understand to be psychological, where the universe, like the writer of a book, assembles existing words, sentences and situations into a new story. The task here is to see how we might assemble time and energy into space-time. In other words we wish to reproduce in our minds the insight that produced space-time in the mind of god. Catholic Catechism: God creates out of nothing
I understand the driving force in the mind of god to be the same as the driving force in my mind, what we might call the entropic potential, formalized in Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers. We may define space logically as the arrangement which enables the simultaneous existence of both p and not-p. Space enables an increase in the count of states, that is entropy. There can be any number of not-ps corresponding to any p. We contrast this with energy/time which requires time division multiplexing: one state must be annihilated to allow another to be created.
We understand the invisible processes of quantum theory to be made visible by communication. Two complementary quantum systems come together to momentarily halt the invisible quantum motion to give us a fixed point, an observable result, represented by particles in classical space-time.
Since the initial singularity is structureless it has no power of control. The best it can do is create random situations. It is a source of variation in the evolutionary process.
Here we introduce the cybernetic principle of requisite variety which tells us that while simple system cannot control a complex one, complex systems can control simple ones. The layered structure of the universe builds complex systems out of simple ones. These complex systems require the simple foundations to maintain their existence, and so their continued existence requires that they look after their foundations. Variety (cybernetics) - Wikipedia
This bootstrapping approach to creation applies at all levels in the the universal network. We find that human communities fail if they cannot establish and maintain a constitutional structure which motivates their members to work together for their common good.
Innovations in the future have the power to control the past. The future always has an element of uncertainty since it is at the edge of control. It can reveal new and unexpected things. Some of these things can reproduce themselves and become more permanent. The most powerful future provisions for control are the emergence of new spaces. The most important of these is classical space-time itself which acts as an operating system for the classical universe, taking care of memory and communication.
This idea may explain the metric structure of Minkowski space. In the layer of the universe where these is no space all interactions are by contact. One of the features of the layered structure is that all the features of the lower layers are preserved as symmetries in the higher layers, albeit perhaps transformed. The emergence of space honours this requirement by the appearance of null geodesics which maintain contact interactions between spatially separated domains. For instance an atom emits a photon near the origin of the universe which is observed 14 billion years later as cosmic background radiation. This photon carries a fixed quantum state across the universe for us to observe it 14 billion years later. In communication terms it acts as a lossless codec. The space-time interval between the emission and the absorption of a photon is zero.
9.7: General relativity
We are setting out to build a theory of peace on our understanding of the development of the universe. The universe may have evolved from the most tremendous and violent explosion imaginable to the relatively gentle and peaceful planet on which we live. We are searching this history for clues to promoting peace and eliminating violence.Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity opened our eyes to the true size and magnificence of the universe. It also opened our minds to the idea that the universe itself is quite large and powerful enough to play all the roles traditionally attributed to gods. If we live in god, it is no longer the mysterious other postulated by traditional religions, but open before our eyes. This gives us the opportunity to expand our minds to meet the mind of god. Universe - Wikipedia.
We have been constructing the universe in layers, beginning with the initial singularity, moving to quantum mechanics, then to flat space-time. Our next step is to follow Einstein looking for insight into the creation of the energetic and dynamic curved space-time of the whole universe. This space-time is described by the general theory of relativity. This classical theory describes the overall structure of space-time. It shows that this structure is self consistent, and given the assumptions of classical dynamics, perhaps the only possible structure for a consistent space-time. It has shown itself to date to be consistent with observation. Because it is a classical theory however, it does not explain how this system was created or how it works and it has proved impossible so far to create a quantum theory of gravitation. General relativity - Wikipedia
Einstein began his study of relativity in 1905 with a paper on the role of the speed of light in our knowledge and understanding of space-time: On the electrodynamics of moving bodies. This paper gave us the special theory of relativity which completely revises our view of space and time. Classical physics saw space and time as distinct entities, completely independent of one another. Einstein merged them into one picture which has been given a clear mathematical expression by Herman Minkowski. Albert Einstein: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies
A common everyday experience of relativity occurs in freeway traffic. No matter how fast we are all traveling, the vehicles in the next lane appear to be at rest if their speed is the same as ours. Einstein wondered what it would be like to travel alongside a light beam
Maxwell described light as an electromagnetic phenomenon and his equations showed that the properties of space require that it travels at a particular speed, c, the the speed of light. Einstein realized that that this meant that even if he was travelling beside it at the speed of light the light beam would not look stationary like the car in the next lane, but would still appear to be moving at the speed of light. This is the fundamental principle of the special theory. No matter what the speed of its source, light always appears to travel at the same speed. For special relativity, the velocity of light is a fixed local property of space-time. Walter Isaacson: The Light Beam Rider
This simple observation has profound implications for the connection between space and time. We are already quite familiar with this connection at everyday speeds. It takes time to travel through space. If you want to be in time for distant appointment, you must allow travel time. The calculation here is easy. If you have to go 4 kilometres and you can walk 4 kilometres per hour, you have to allow an hour. Near the velocity of light, however, the requirement that the velocity of light always looks the same means that the relationship between distance and time is more complex, expressed mathematically as the Lorentz transformation. Lorentz transformation - Wikipedia
The effect of the Lorentz transformation is to make times appear longer and distances appear shorter when we observe things moving at high speed relative to ourselves. The extreme effect of this transformation is that when we look at a photon (a particle of light) it appears to have no length in the direction of motion and its time is standing still.
Einstein introduced two elements into the special theory which have since become common to to many theories: a symmetry and a transformation. The symmetry of the special theory is that every observer sees the same laws of physics in their own inertial frame. The Lorentz transformation enables an observer in one frame to compute how the laws of physics will look in another frame in relative motion.
Lorentz transformations connect space and time for bodies whose motion obeys Newton's first law: A body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion continues to move in a straight line unless it is acted upon by a force. Einstein's next task was to find the transformation that connected bodies in accelerated motion. He began from two points.
The first has become known as the principal of equivalence: the effects of gravitation are identical to the effect of acceleration. The gravitational force that accelerates us toward Earth when we are falling is identical to the force we feel in a vehicle taking a corner at high speed.
The second, which Einstein called the happiest thought of his life, was the realization that in free fall we do not feel our own weight. Free fall cancels out the experience of force so that we feel as though we are in inertial motion. The inhabitants of the space station are weightless, freely falling toward Earth. They do not come down, however, because of their high orbital speed so they circle Earth at a constant distance. Free fall in a gravitational field thus provides a standpoint to observe the field. We detect the field by comparing the motion of two freely falling bodies, like the Earth and a satellite or the Earth and the Moon.
As in special relativity, the laws of physics are the same for every observer in their own inertial frame. What has changed is the transformation necessary to compare physics in in inertial frames accelerating with respect to one another because they are in a gravitational field.
Almost as soon as it was conceived Einstein was able to use his theory to solve an old astronomical problem known as the precession of the perihelion of the orbit of the planet Mercury. Tests of general relativity - Wikipedia
It took Einstein a few years to understand the gravitational transformation, but the result provided us with equations which describe the universe as a whole and form one foundation of modern cosmology. The other foundation is particle physics, beginning with fundamental particles and working from there to the construction all the material bodies in the universe including stars, planets and ourselves.
More generally, Einstein's approach to physics as a study of symmetries and transformations has now become routine, particularly in the study of fundamental particles which has preoccupied physics for most of the last century. Wolfgang Pauli, one of the first to understand the general relativity, wrote:
I consider the theory of relativity to be an example showing how a fundamental scientific discovery sometimes, even against the resistance of its creator, gives birth to further fruitful developments, following their own autonomous course. Wolfgang Pauli: Theory of Relativity
Einstein's approach to science based on symmetries and transformations, like quantum mechanics and the layered network model, applies at all scales. The foundation of all human relationships is human symmetry. We are all in principle precisely equal. Obviously this is not the case in reality. Powerful people have exploited weaker people since time immemorial, but we know in our hearts this is unfair. The cure to this unfairness is to be found in the transformations that relate people to one another. This essential transformation is found in Christianity and many other religions and social algorithms: love you neighbour as yourself; do to others as you would have them do to you. The universe works because, as physics demonstrates, the fundamental particles, atoms, planets and stars respect the symmetries and transformations that bind the universe together. The hypothesis here is that peace would result if fair symmetries and transformations were to be implemented in human space.
9.8: Claude Shannon: the mathematics of selection
The Cantor theory shows us that there is no bound to the creative power of order. Given that Cantor's proof is reliable, the existence of a largest set is self-contradictory. The size of the Cantor universe also introduces incompleteness and incomputability into mathematics. The theory of communication tells us that computability places a bound on communication, since error free communication requires computable encoding and decoding of messages. We assume that uncontrolled events are random, and so we are not surprised to find randomness and uncertainty in the world we inhabit. Cantor's paradox - Wikipedia
Evolution by natural selection picks out the individuals that can reproduce themselves from the transfinite variety of variations. Reproduction is a definite complex process which must be executed without error if it is to succeed. This requires error free communication between the subroutines which form part of the network of reproductive processes. In other words, only organisms whose life processes are (at least occasionally) complete and computable can reproduce.
Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication establishes the foundations for error free communication. Shannon proved that provided we adjust our speed of transmission, we can transmit information over a noisy channel with any degree of certainty we desire. Claude Shannon: Communication in the Presence of Noise
Shannon's work also tells us that we can construct more secure messages by combining symbols into larger symbols. Large symbols can be made more durable that their components by careful coding. If one symbol drops out, the information it was carrying can be deduced from the remaining symbols.Shannon showed that if the coding is right a message can get through with absolute certainty provided the death rate of the symbols carrying it is not one hundred per cent. Plants know this. They dispatch billions of pollen grains into the world certain that some will get through to an egg and carry on their life. The only price we must pay is that communication will be slow and expensive.
The theory of coding suggests one reason why life forms become more and more complex as evolution progresses. A complex organism is in effect a big block of code. It is therefore more efficient in its use of the communication channel that joins its past to its future. It is able to, some degree, correct its own errors.This enables it to bring down the error rate in its reproduction and so become more fit to survive. I began as a newborn baby with a relatively error free body in very good working order. Now, 75 years later, errors are beginning to set in and sometime in the next twenty or thirty years I will encounter a fatal error and die.
9.9: Beating noise: complexification
Noise is the enemy of error free communication. It arises partly because there are many uncontrolled variations possible in the world, and partly because what is a signal for one pair of sources may be noise for another, and they may interfere with one another. If the kids are playing a loud game, it may be hard for the adults to talk. There are two ways to deal with noise. One is to try to block it out; the other is to use the communication methods discussed in the previous section that prevent the errors that noise can cause. Here we are interested in the blocking approach.
The fundamental particles of the Universe are in perpetual motion. One measure of the rate of this motion is temperature. Each moving particle has a certain amount of energy. The temperature of a body is proportional to the average energy of its constituent particles. Some imagine that the Universe began as a single particle of (nearly) infinite energy, the initial singularity. Although thermodynamic temperature is the average energy of a very large number of particles, we might abuse the term a little and say that the temperature of the initial singularity might be (nearly) infinite: it may contain all the energy of the Universe.
As the number of particles in the Universe grows the energy is shared between them and the temperature of falls, the overall noise level goes down. As the temperature falls the interactions between particles become less violent. When the Universe was about 400 000 years old things became quiet enough for electrons to begin sticking to nuclei to form atoms. The Universe became transparent to light. We still see that light, now stretched by the expansion of the Universe to become the cosmic background radiation. Chronology of the universe - Wikipedia
In 1827 Robert Brown noticed that tiny particles in water followed a jerky path which he found had nothing to do with life. Atoms and molecules are very small compared to any particle of visible size, and they move very quickly. In water at room temperature, molecules move at about 600 metes per second, 2000 kilometres per hour. A single water molecule striking a Brownian particle, a hundredth of a millimetre in diameter, even at this speed, will have an imperceptible effect because the particle weights about a billion times more than the molecule. The Brownian effect lies, instead, in the fluctuations in the number and velocity of molecules hitting it from all sides. Einstein was able to use this information to compute the number and size of atoms, a result that convinced many people of their existence.
The important points is that the mass of the Brownian particle did much to 'quieten' the noise of the atoms. This same phenomenon is very important in the physiology of life. Many of the molecules of life are proteins. Protein molecules are very large, often many thousands of times larger than water molecules. By their mass they calm things down within the cell and increase the probability of metabolic reactions following the desired path. Ron Milo & Ron Philips: How big is the average protein?
Blocking noise, then, comes down to decreasing temperature and increasing mass. We increase mass by linking more particles together, forming large objects or bigger societies, both more resistant to shocks. This is the policy behind forming unions and uniting nations: another ancient truism: united we stand, divided we fall.
9.10: Noosphere: the mind cloud
Union is beneficial but it is not necessarily easy. The prerequisite to unity is a common point of view. The cells in my body can cooperate because they share the same genome and the same communication protocols. From a biological point of view, we are one species, all human, because we share the human genome. The roots of political an social divisions lie in our minds. Like our genes, our mental structures are passed from generation to generation. On the whole our genes are relatively stable, so that all members of our species are able to breed with one another. Our minds are much more fluid, however, and it is very rare for any two people to find that they share all their opinions. Here we find a radical impediments to peace which may initially derive from economic questions of sharing and survival, but tend to take on lives of their own when they extend to gender, race and religion so that a disruptive partisan spirit often arises between groups of people.
As we explained in chapter 5, bonding is established and maintained by communication. Communication is made possible by a shared protocol or language. Theology is, or should be, the universal protocol, the social equivalent of gravitation. In the earlier chapters of this book we have modelled the construction of the world from the classical god of absolute simplicity to the enormously complex world we inhabit. We have done this layer by layer starting with the fundamental particles and working toward a vision of the whole. This model is founded on the mathematical theory that predicts the existence of fixed points in bounded dynamic systems. We understand the Universe to be bounded by consistency. Actual contradictions cannot exist. They are naturally annihilated
From the point of view of human society, and therefore of peace and prosperity, the most important part of this model is what we call the human layer and the layers that are formed from humanity, that is the social and political layers that bind groups of people together. Our actions are determined by our thoughts, and our thoughts are largely determined by our interactions with other people, beginning from conception with our parents and then from the wider community that we encounter after birth. Our minds gradually develop as elements of a network of minds. We are most influenced by the people closest to us, but in the modern highly connected world we are conscious of and influenced by events all over the planet.
The word noosphere was coined by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to refer to the collective mental state of humanity. From this point of view, it embraces everything that everybody on the planet has learnt from birth and all that they are thinking. Much of this information is stored in human minds, but the noosphere also has 'external memory', the art, literature, technology and all the other physical products of human imagination that have existed with us since our species began. Here we are interested in the relationship between physical space-time and the mental space-time that we each occupy in our local subnetwork of the noosphere. Noosphere - Wikipedia, Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man
The noosphere encompasses a wide range of mentalities, from the relatively dictatorial murderers who would happily destroy everything and everybody if they see some benefit in it for themselves, to those more common and normal people who see that harmonious cooperation holds the best promise for us all. It is fortunate that such people are in the majority, but their task is often not easy. It is the purpose of the theory of peace to find a strong theoretical foundation for cooperative ideas and behaviour.
Our universe in infinite and creative. What I hope to show is that is possible in principle to deploy our resources to make certain that the needs of every person are met. There will then be no need to use violence to deprive one another of the necessities of life.
We live in space and time, but we also live in our minds and our minds are constantly in touch with one another through all our available means from communication from speech to sex to fighting. We call the set of all living systems the biosphere. The biosphere embraces not only living things, but the 'geosphere', the Earth system that sustains them using (mostly) energy from the Sun.
A very important important property of mind is that individual minds can blend seamlessly. They say a camel is an animal designed by a committee. This is not so, but the point of the joke is that committees cannot get things together. This is false, as you will know if you have been on a good committee. When the communication is good, a committee works as one mind, like a good football team or a healthy person.
This property has its dangers - it makes us easy for us to be carried away. A good football team is good if they work as one mind, but we are not so well off when we are confronted by conspiratorial ideologies which rely on false concepts about the nature of the world, or baseless fictions about what other people are thinking and planning. People who believe that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is not coupled to global temperature for instance, or those who hold women to be inferior.
From my point of view, the worst of common fictions is the notion that women are inferior. This seems to be closely coupled to sexual and domestic violence. This may not be a majority view in the community, but it remains the official magisterial teaching of the Roman Catholic Church as we have noted in a number of places. Des Cahill and Peter Wilkinson: Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: An Interpretative Review of the Literature and Public Inquiry Reports, John Paul II (1994): Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 22 May 1994: On the priestly ordination of women
It is not very clear why the Church has been deficient in sexual matters since its inception. The roots of this problem probably lie in the theological, religious and social traditions that it inherited from its Mediterranean environment. The ancient traditions of stoicism and asceticism fused in the mysticism of the 'Desert Fathers' who contributed much to the moral development of Christianity. My best guess is that it is rooted in the misunderstanding of pain and the doctrine that to please god we should cripple our humanity with the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. This constraint seems to be a consequence of the doctrine that we are all born sinners. Although the mystical doctrines of baptism and redemption are imagined to have solved this problem the more practical politicians of the inquisition and its successors know that we are just as bad as we ever were and should therefore torture our fallen nature into submission. The story of the Fall in Genesis probably did much to establish the view that women are the root of all evil. Stoicism - Wikipedia, Asceticism - Wikipedia, Desert Fathers - Wikipedia
9.11: Reality and fantasy: Politics
The transfinite network provides us with a picture of the enormous variety of structures which we and the world can imagine. The whole of our art and culture depends upon our mental ability to imitate this divine creativity, but we must be careful with it. We have seen the dangers of implementing the dreams of a Hitler, a Stalin or a Trump. By now you will realise that I see danger in the dreams of the Fathers of the Catholic Church. These dreams were first recorded in the Bible and then greatly elaborated in the hundreds of books collected in the Patrologia. Jacques Paul Migne: Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Graeca, Jacques-Paul Migne: Patrologia Latina Database
The basis of the theory of peace is that castles built on air will eventually collapse. To be stable a system must have roots leading in an unbroken line to god and the initial singularity. We give meaning to this idea by elaborating the layered structure of the Universe from initial creation to the present. Yuval Levin: Taking the Long Way
What is real? A difficult question. Recently we have seen a spate of 'reality' shows on television whose main premise seems to be putting people in difficult situations and watching them react, suffer, enjoy, fail or succeed. Like most of televisual literature this demonstrates that the most interesting thing for most us is watching other people. From fake wrestling to genuine football games, what we like to see is people competing under some sort of pressure. Drama is our favourite cultural food. Lochlan Morrissey: Alternative facts do exist: beliefs, lies and politics
As we have seen with the work of Cantor and mathematicians in general, there is no limit to imagination, even within the bounds of consistency. When we allow for inconsistency as well, as we see in most television programs, the limits are even more limitless and we mostly suspend disbelief, although critical viewers may pick out flaws and the show runners might lose viewers if things get to weird. The makers of science fiction films often strive for a bit of scientific authenticity, but it is hard to get a good plot going without stretching reality at least a little. On the other hand, truth can be stranger than fiction. Although the truth may be highly improbable, it is never completely inconsistent. Over the last few centuries theoretical physicists have had to stretch their imaginations to the limit to keep up with the realities exposed by the experimentalists.
Reality bites. Reality works. Fantasy is fun, but when it comes to serious matters like health, economics, politics, human rights, murder and violence, we need to keep well within the boundaries of reality. Where are these boundaries? We learn a lot about them as children, hurting ourselves, breaking things, making our parents and teachers angry and so on. As life becomes more complex we have to think more carefully about what we do.
Politicians become politicians because they wish to guide the body politic, partly for their own good, possibly for the good of others. They campaign using promises. A common generic political promise is 'when I am elected, I will reduce taxes and improve government services'. Some people might believe this, but others will realize that while reduced taxes limit government spending improved services cost more so the promise is essentially self contradictory. This is a matter of simple arithmetic, but a large industry of lobbyists and spin doctors has grown up over the centuries to spoonfeed such falsehoods from the voting public.
Our dreams and fantasies are grounded by experience and the science that reveals how the world really works. It is no accident that silencing the scientists is high on the agenda of those who wish to deceive us. The essential answer to the problem of peace is natural law which we here equate to divine law. Natural laws, like the laws of physics, are not made by human beings, they are inherent in reality, and must be found. As Canute demonstrated, royal authority is not respected by tides or any other natural law. King Canute and the waves - Wikipedia, John Schwartz: Exxon Misled the Public on Climate Change
Natural laws are the boundaries of the Universe and to transgress them is to step outside the Universe into nothing. The boundaries are themselves nothing. A conservation law tells us that nothing happens. When you balance the books, you final act is to arrive at two numbers which are exactly the same.
Natural laws are the widest possible boundaries. Any authoritarian law, insofar as it is not natural, is an artificial restriction on the nature of the universe. The creative power of the Universe is such that no matter how strong the authority, such an artificial restriction will eventually be broken.
The natural law approach to peace says this: there are certain laws that guarantee peace, where by peace we mean the structure of the Universe. We know some of them, but not all. We know, for instance, that if you do not eat you will die.
Even though we do not know all the natural laws, they are there, like rocks in the ocean. They are self-enforcing, and act whether we are aware of them or not. As we get to know them, one by one, we can exploit them to establish new technologies to make life on earth easier.
What good is such a theory, since will people disobey it anyway?
The advantage, I claim, is that the theory expresses the language of nature. People will disobey it, they can disobey it. Uncontrolled situations allow this. But the conservation laws of the Universe say that eventually the books must be balanced.
One sees this bias in the amount of spiteful comment made on the internet by people hiding behind network anonymity. This, and the total history of human conflict shows us that if we are to have peace, we must work toward complete symmetry in our communications with one another. This is encapsulated on the ancient maxim: Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Christianity, my starting point for identifying the Universe and the divinity, exhorts us to love one another. Loving one another in practice means giving one another space. As we have noted, space contains not just my movements from a to b but all the ensemble of processes that make my life possible: food, shelter, reproduction, friendship and cooperation. New Commandment - Wikipedia
Loving one another is not easy and this is where the creation of space in the noosphere becomes the foundation for peace, by enabling us to keep a respectable distance from one another, depend upon the circumstances of our interaction. As time goes by we are becoming more aware of human rights, of human equality, of the often hidden evils of domestic violence, rape, slavery, sexual harassment and all the other evils engendered by people exploiting their power over others. An important input to peace is the determination of an educated, democratic and practical population to keep their politicians under control. Valerie Dobiesz and Julia Brooks: Its not just O'Reilley and Weinstein: Sexual violence is a 'global pandemic'
9.12: The noosphere is grounded in the biosphere
You might think you can fly, you may be convinced of it under the influence of some drug, but when you jump off the cliff you will soon see that you were wrong. Reality bites again, just as it does when I hit my finger with a hammer or drop a brick on my toe, or run into a truck.
The real world makes itself felt when we run up against it. In the case of a motor vehicle hitting a tree, the results are almost instantaneous. On the other hand, at the level of national government, a bad policy may take a long time to reveal itself. Wealthy people have promoted the economic creed that if we let the rich get richer their spending and investment will make the poor rich too. Centuries of experience tell us that this does not happen. The trickle down fantasy does not correspond to reality. The rich naturally hang on to their wealth. Trickle-down economics - Wikipedia
Instead, we need to remove the barriers between the rich and the powerful and the poor and powerless. A well managed democracy is the key to this removal, but we know that although the enrolment and voting may be perfect, straight truth is rather less important in political campaigns than the fantastic visions projected by the candidates. Large amounts of money enable candidates to buy campaign workers, advertising and spin. Huge amounts of money can often buy an election through the sheer weight of lies and propaganda. We see this process working vividly all around the world.
Another principal approach to perverting the democratic process is the establishment of a a secret system to protect the regime comprising spies, informants, murderers, wiretappers, together with corrupt police, lawyers, courts, and all the other machinery of the police state. Although we are inclined to associate this mechanism with autocratic regimes, all governments use them to some extent under the guise of national security, protecting their status from exposure and revision.
Autocratic regimes are essentially the enemies of their people. History suggests that their principal aim is to make their regimes 'coup proof' so that they they continue to enjoy political power and the positive feedback of wealth and more power that their behaviour provides.
The key to fixing the defects in government lies in human rights. We are all identically human, a condition we call human symmetry. Complete symmetry means complete fairness, a perfectly level playing field so that no human being is disadvantaged by the system of government, or any part of it. This means that we are all equal before the law, that there are no privileges (private laws) that give unfair advantage to certain groups (like rich white males) and that everybody has equal access to justice.
Modern democratic societies claim to live under the rule of law. This rule has two principles: first that we are all equal before the law. This rule is supplemented with a precautionary principle: the presumption of innocence. Guilt, in a criminal matter, requires proofs that exclude reasonable doubt. The second is the law be established by the consent of the people. This rule also comes with a precautionary principle: legislation that clearly flies in the face of reality must be excluded. This is usually achieved by a parliament of elected representatives who formulate and debate potential new laws and take advice from experts on matters of fact. The members of parliament can lose their seats in elections if the laws they develop displease a sufficient proportion of the population.
We also recognize the existence of natural law. Dropped objects fall down. If we cannot breathe and eat we die. The traditional belief is that these laws were established by the creator who designed and constructed the Universe in a manner described in Genesis. As we have explained, this idea is still substantially true. The principal difference from Genesis is that creation has worked by evolution and the present state of the Universe has taken fourteen billion years to be realized.
It is the task of science to ground the noosphere in the biosphere. We grow up in a mental environment which contains large amounts of fiction. It is not easy to distinguish fiction from reality: it must be tested, and this is the task of empirical science. What I am trying to do is build a model which will help us to understand the world. The stability of our structures comes from the fixed points in the materials and designs we use. We all need to know the reality of the world if we are to live wisely.
The universe is dynamic, but many people are wary of change, so that when the scientists tell us that something is happening, there will be some who lack the courage to face reality and want to deny the scientific findings. Many of those who profit from the status quo are also prepared to invest heavily in denial. Clare Foran: Donald Trump and the Triumph of Climate-Change Denial
We must overcome this resistance, however, if we are to survive. It is clear now that we are not just another species, but that we have a very significant input into the dynamics of the biosphere we depend upon for our existence. It is very clear that we must reduce our footprint on Earth. It is in our interest to preserve the systems upon which we rely for our existence.
13: Broken symmetry creates space
The more space we have to live, the easier it is for us to get along. This is true in physical space and economic space, but its most important venue is the mental space in which we all live, the noosphere. A large proportion of the disputes in the world are not so much about physical issues like food, shelter, mates and property but about ideas, opinions and feelings.
Symmetries enable us to understand many things through one idea. Up to a point, if you have seen one horse, you have seen them all. On the other hand, every horse is different. In the physical world 'horse symmetry' is broken by this difference. Human symmetry has the same property. We are all equally human, but we are all different. From a formal point of view we are all different points in human space and our differences make the space bigger.
The meaning of a point in a space depends strongly on the size of the space. From this idea we can conclude that allowing people the freedom to be themselves makes us all richer and more meaningful.
If we respect our human symmetry there is plenty of room for discussion about different ideas. In many cases, however, human communities will ostracise or kill people who do not share similar views. This is particularly common in corporate entities like political parties, businesses and religions. If you are not one of us, you are out. This company only admits company people.
This was my experience wth the Catholic Church. I was found not to be a believer, so I had to go. I got off lightly really, only losing my job and my way of life. It took me a few decades to reconstruct, but I am happy now. In more extreme situations where a corporation is desperate to maintain its ideological purity it may be prepared to kill heretics in order to encourage believers. Autocratic governments, gangs and religious extremists still follow this prescription. Christian churches have given up on overt murder, but there are still many other ways to disempower people.
The problem in noetic space, therefore, appears to be extremism, whose principal principle seems to be that people who are different in race, gender or belief must die or at least be thrown out. Here we have a case of a higher level destroying elements of the level beneath it, ultimately to its own detriment. This has been a feature of the more extreme groups for as long as we have written records. One of the first steps in the expansion of noetic space is to eliminate killing and revenge killing.
We are all different, and we all have different desires and needs. To maintain peace, we need to be tolerant of one another. The creativity of the world (which includes our minds) means that there can be as many different views on any subject as there are people. Space is a venue for both diversity and tolerance. In the simple area of mechanical engineering, we need tolerance in bearings, gears and and other parts so that that they can move relative to one another. In computing machinery, we need tolerance in voltages to prevent error, so we establish a big gap between voltages that represent 0 and voltages that represent 1. High population densities emphasize the difficulties of getting along with one another. We overcome these difficulties by putting ourselves in relatively soundproof 'apartments' on the principle that good fences make good neighbours. Logic level - Wikipedia
Here we are working on the assumption that the world is god. This means that natural law is the same as divine law. From this point of view, the Universe does not need a creator outside, it is itself a manifestation of nature of god. In Chapter 3 we summarized what we know about the origins of the world we live in now.
We have modelled this process of emergence of the world from god using a layered computer network. Beginning with the absolutely simple god of pure action, layer after layer of fixed points emerge, each layer building on the layer beneath it and curating this layer in order to maintain its own existence.
The fundamental symmetry in the divine universe is the divinity itself, whose dynamic simplicity does not change. It is effectively eternal. We associate the emergence of fixed points with the breaking of symmetries. The first break in the divine symmetry appears to be the transition from pure act to the duality of energy and time. The process associated with energy and time is quantum mechanics, which we can see as the software of the second layer in the universal network.
The observable Universe is in effect mathematics incarnate. But mathematics in the flesh cannot be just the hard edged perfection that we find in formal mathematical monographs. Mathematics in its physical realisation must obey all of its own theorems otherwise it would be inconsistent. It must respect Gödel's theory, which says that there are some decisions that cannot be made in principle because there is not enough data, and Turing's theory, which says that there are some decisions which can never be made in practice because there is not enough computing power. From the very hardness of mathematics springs an equal softness. People hold out the hope that quantum computation will cure these problems, but it is obvious that quantum computations in nature leaves a lot of uncertainty.
Jesus of Nazareth ushered in an era of human development by pointing out that there is but one human symmetry: we are all neighbours. We can identify neighbourhood with consistency, hate with inconsistency. We have now delved deep enough into the foundations of mathematics and physics, sciences founded on consistency, to see what he was talking about from a new perspective. We are all neighbours.
Our species is defined by human DNA. This is the formal foundation of human symmetry and equality. The practical foundation is that we can reproduce ourselves and there are no biological constraints on our interbreeding. This symmetry is associated with the conservation of humanity. We have already noticed that conservation laws are nested. Conservation of humanity embraces all the conservation laws that go to make up humanity.
This fact immediately writes all the symmetries of nature into our understanding of ourselves. It also tells us that if we want to conserve ourselves, we have to conserve all those things which support us, plants, animals, air, ocean and sunlight. We will only fully understand humanity if we see that all human beings are elements of the human symmetry group, and all places in the group are filled by human beings.
First, human beings are equal. We all partake identically in the symmetry defined by the human group. The elements of a group all participate in the full life of the group. If any element is missing, the integrity of the group is destroyed and the group symmetry demands that it be replaced.
Second, we are all free. The only restraint that a group structure puts on its elements is that when they interact with one another, the result is also in the group. This means that the group law ays that we may all communicate with one another in any way that is human, and the result will be human. This means that while we are all the same, we are also all different, independent and free to act in our own way. The only actions that are forbidden are those that takes us outside human symmetry by killing and violence.
Complete human symmetry is just another expression of the observation that the universe embraces all consistent possibilities. Human symmetry expresses the whole of human possibility. Any restriction on this possibility is unnatural, and will eventually lead to violence.
14: Democracy: political dynamics
Autocratic regimes are essentially enemies of their people. Their principal task of an autocracy is to make itself 'coup proof ', using propaganda to control the population and picking off the dissidents. This task must be performed successfully if the autocrats are to maintain the positive flow of money and power that they extract from their population, who are effectively slaves. Autocrats think in terms of stability, their stability. They need their thousand year reich because it is not safe to get off the tiger.
Motion is essential to peace and the control of pain. Like the best of academic investigations, you can make this observation at work or even in bed. If we lie still in one position for too long it becomes uncomfortable, and we roll over. We do this throughout our sleep, often unconsciously. Apart from anything else, this movement maintains the flow of our blood to all parts of our body. We get pins and needles and go numb is the supply is shut down for too long.
The essence of democracy is enable the population, the true source of power, to control the use the executive power in their community. It provides for political motion, an interplay between the population and the executive which modifies the behaviour of both. It also serves as an occupational health an safety measure for the ruling class. In monarchies, the succession often involves civil war and murder. An election is a non violent way to achieve a peaceful succession.
Motion requires tolerance. This is a most important discovery of quantum mechanics: the world can only be consistent if there is uncertainty. The uncertainty lies in the logical leaps that are taken in a computing process. In physics the uncertainty is measured by Planck' quantum of action. In democracy, the uncertainty is represented by the individual votes in elections.
We discussed the ubiquity of language in Chapter 2. The emphasis there was on the universality of language. The Universe is a huge network whose sources speak to one another in a countable infinity of different languages. We noted there that a language is defined by the algorithms used to encode and decode the signals which carry the symbols used by languages. We assume that all readable information is encoded physically.
In a liberal democracy, the media's most essential function is to serve the public interest. This includes providing information so that the public can make informed decisions. In order to do so, journalists must decide what is in the public interest and why.
In a democracy of well educated and informed people, the navigation of the ship of state would enjoy the collective wisdom of the whole population working cooperatively. The chances of getting things right are very much higher than we find in a society that is guided by the knowledge and personality of a single monarch who is probably hostile the people as a consequence of their pursuit of personal power.
15: An evolutionary burden: the devil
Here we take the view that the quantum of action is real and to be defined logically rather than topologically (6.5). This hypothesis is built from just three axioms:
1. god (the universe) is pure action (entelecheia)
2. pure action is fertile without bound
3. the universe is locally consistent.
To make senes of these axioms we need to put them in some context, the computer network model developed in chapter 5. Pretty everyone agrees that god is infinite, and we now know that the universe is very big. The context we choose to model this vision is a transfinite computer network.
Since we understand god to be everything, subject to no outside constraint, we assume that the only limit on god is internal consistency. Since the divine universe that we see is extended in space and time, we can strengthen to constraint to local consistency. This is also the limit we place on formal mathematics. This limit is marked by the theorems of Gödel and Turing.
From the model point of view, to go outside them is to go into contradiction and nothingness, that is into error and possible evil, a breakdown of peace. By peace we mean here the whole of the World, that is God. The key to peace, from this point of view, is to stay inside the bounds of consistency.
Here we immediately run into trouble. If god is locally consistent with itself we would expect all the parts of god which include us, to be consistent with one another. We might guess that this would rule out wars, natural disasters, and catastrophic cosmological events like the explosion of stars to form supernovas. In the language of classical theology, how do we deal with the problem of evil?
The Scholastics were inclined to define evil as nothing, simply the absence of good, not really a thing in itself. Experience suggests that its much realer than that. This might explain why our forebears usually invented an evil being of some sort or another to explain the bad side of life. The Catholic Church says God lets it happen because he made his creation free, free to be good and bad. The Church takes the view that we are all born guilty, potential allies of Satan. This idea seems completely wrong and its origins seem clear, at least to me. The rules are made by the ruling class. What the ruling class wants is a passive class of workers to make their lives comfortable. By declaring us all to be sinners, they entitle themselves to the right to control us. Catholic Catechism: I §388: Where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more
Classical theology imagines an impassible boundary between the good, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal and loving divinity and the world we inhabit, damaged by sin and full of evil just waiting to happen. My mentor, Thomas Aquinas, finds the root of all sin in pride, the first sin of all. He quotes Isidore of Seville, who says: A man is said to be proud, because he wishes to appear above (super) what he really is. This is the sin attributed to the first of the Angels, Lucifer (Light Bearer) who got above himself and was cast out of Heaven by God. Aquinas, Summa: Is pride the first sin of all.
For Aquinas, a member of the ruling class, the essence of the sin of pride is to have aspirations above one's station. This is what Lucifer did, and Thomas manages to argue that pride was the reason that the first people disobeyed God. The rulers cannot commit the sin of pride because they are already on the top of the heap, there is no station above them. None of this makes much sense in a world ruled by a clear declaration of human rights. In a society that fully implements human rights, there are no high and low stations to be either proud or humble about. We can instead be proud of good things that we have done. Pride is no longer so much a sin as a source of social solidarity.Since this explanation of evil makes little sense, so we turn to the network model for an answer. We have described the Universe as a layered network beginning with the absolute simplicity of the classical God and building up to the enormous complexity of the world we inhabit. Each layer in this system is more complex than the layer upon which it is built. The cybernetic principle of requisite variety tells us that simple systems cannot control complex ones. If lower layers are to be controlled, they must be controlled by the layers above them. Evil and breaches of the peace arise when lower layers get out of control, either because are no layers above them, or the layers above have become corrupt and lost control. We see this happen for instance in failed nations, where the government becomes infected with a criminal element and governs not for the nation but for itself.
We conduct war by using elements of high energy physical layers to destroy low energy physical layers. An ancient and straightforward way to kill someone is to use an edged weapon to cut a major arteries to cause fatal blood loss. A subtler approach is to use poison to disrupt essential metabolism. Since the invention of explosives destroying people by simply blowing them apart or by cutting them up with bullets and shell fragments has become common. In domestic situations strangulation is common. I all cases of deliberate killing and accidental death and injury the evil arises from the uncontrolled behaviour of lower layers with respect to higher layers.
In all these cases the agent causing the evil is acting naturally. A bullet ploughing through a brain is just doing what bullets do. A speeding vehicle naturally smashes the body when it collides with a pedestrian.
The fact that we are all made of food provides a further illustration of this picture of evil. Although more primitive organisms like bacteria and plants can live on simple chemicals and sunlight, most of them, in the process of evolution, have developed means of obtaining necessary resources by taking them from other organisms, often killing their sources in the process. This becomes a very obvious strategy in the case of animals like ourselves which are often carnivorous. In almost all cases, life is a mixture of good and evil. For the predator successful acquisition of resources is good. For the victim of predation, it is bad.
16: Education: taming and training ourselves
War is an exceedingly wasteful approach to predation. Very rarely do we eat what we kill and in this era of high explosives military conquest is very likely to destroy most of the resources of the captured territory. My father, a doctor was greatly upset by seeing that the starving enemy against whom he was fighting sometimes cannabilized allied casualties. Cannibalism is no longer acceptable practice, even in war.
Nevertheless the Catholic Church takes the words of Jesus spoken at the last supper literally:
And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many. (Mark 14:22-24 KJV)The Catholic Catechism maintains that By the consecration the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ is brought about. Under the consecrated species of bread and wine Christ himself, living and glorious, is present in a true, real, and substantial manner: his Body and his Blood, with his soul and his divinity. (§ 1413) Catholic Catechism: The Sacrament of the Eucharist, Sacrosanctum concilium: Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy: 47 sqq. The Most Sacred Mystery of the Eucharist
This dogma raises a serious metaphysical problem. If we are to believe that the body if Jesus is substantially present in bread, we must accept that the connection between substance and accidents in arbitrary. In other words, we cannot learn about reality from the accidental appearances of things. This rejection of the integrity of the world is characteristic of many belief systems that maintain that they have special access to a real world which lies hidden behind the world of appearances.
This obvious error, like the notion that we live eternally or that the gruesome death of Jesus somehow saved us from original sin. These ideas are typical of the delusions that various priesthoods have preached for millennia in order to gain and maintain political power. They constitute a fundamental, entrenched and institutionalised crime against humanity which is built on propagating false hopes of salvation, and begin with the indoctrination of young children (as I once was) in the falsehoods implicit in traditional religion.
Another radical falsehood, of extreme utility to warmongers, is the notion that we can win immediate eternal salvation by martyrdom, that is by sacrificing our lives for belief. This brings us to the central question of this essay. Why, if modern war is so unprofitable and destructive, do the religious establishments of nations maintain that murdering people from other nations is a noble and fitting occupation for young people?
The answer, it seems, lies in the extraordinary versatility of human imagination. This is both our greatest power and our greatest danger.
Aquinas, as we have seen, places the root of all human sin in pride. Priesthoods use pride as a tool to delude young people to take up arms against others who have been designated as evil. In the days, many of these groups of warlords and quasi military formations are described as terrorists, but terrorist doctrine goes much deeper than that, into the hierarchies of the established imperial nations. This system us in effect an self fulfilling property. As long as our rulers (whoever we may be) can convince us that those others are going to come and rape our women and pillage our property, they have a political platform to go to war. The same goes for all the 'other sides' who play the roles of fictitious enemies in political debate.
With this diagnosis, we may ask ourselves how can we saves ourselves from these massive delusions? The answer of course, is to use the scientific method to track reality. The universe has been constructed by exhaustive trial and error over 14 billion year. It is divine and can be trusted.
The major benefit of peace is that it enables us to accumulate the capital goods necessary to increase our productivity and quality of life. Peaceful political developments have enabled us to develop all sorts of science and technology. This is the business motivation for peace which benefits everybody except those who see profit in war.
Unfortunately much of our productivity remains devoted to military violence because peace is yet very far from global. In his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned against the vicious circle he called the military industrial complex. Propaganda from the military establishment is widespread and still succeeds in marketing itself as a noble occupation:
Military hierarchy, cohesion and strong morale can being their own dangers. In October 1843 an officer spoke to a group of his men: 'Most of you will know what it is like when s hundred corpses lie together, when there are five hundred or when there are a thousand. And to have seen this through — apart from exceptional cases of human weakness — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.' The speaker was Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's devoted lieutenant and the head of the Nazis' own military, the Schutzstaffel or SS, which was responsible for their worst atrocities. Military-industrial complex - Wikipedia, Margaret Macmillan: War: How Conflict Shaped Us, pp 160-161 (link above)
We cannot underestimate the power of political propaganda. Despite President Trump's recent overwhelming loss in the US presidential election, a survey by the Washington Post found that only about 12% of Congressional Republicans were prepared to acknowledge Trump's loss. Paul Kane & Scott Clement: Just 27 congressional Republicans acknowledge Biden's win, Washington Post survey finds
The warlords of the Earth will continue in their old ways as long as there is money to be made, but the force is against them. We have a bigger fear now, our collective survival. The newest evil to be overcome is our impact on our habitat. We face the naive belief, held by many, that they are protected by benevolent gods who will look after us no matter what we do. But the real god is the Universe and the Universe is no great respecter of persons. If you do not fit in you are selected out.
We are trying to see a clear mathematical model of the advantages of cooperation over solipsism, fascism, monarchy and all other manifestations of thought control which tend to reduce the variety and adaptability of the community. We seek the adoption of a church broad enough to represent the full symmetry of humanity. This symmetry is reduced by every act of violence, every error of sexism and racism in the application of human rights.
We think of cooperation as harmonious human interaction. It need not be altruistic. Most cooperatives and corporations are designed to provide an income, if not a fortune, to their members. As Adam Smith noted, one of the effects of cooperation is specialization. Tasks are broken down into units and the units assigned to those best able to execute them.
On the whole, destruction is easier than construction and for many people more emotionally satisfying. We see this at work in political revolutions. Revolutionaries rarely seem to have a workable plan for government after the revolution. Instead, they concentrate on destroying the existing regime hoping that something better will miraculously emerge when they have the power. Generally, however, when they get power they turn into a violent and disorganized rabble which fails the people that trusted them.
Democratic polities have replaced violent revolutions with elections, but we see a similar process. For many, winning an election is simply a cheaper and less violent way of establishing an oligarchy. Hopelessly incompetent governments like that run at present by Donald Trump in the US and his partner Vladimir Putin in Russia can only destroy things, not build them. After their term of office the country will be much worse off than when they began. Their election promises are not fulfilled simply because they did not have the means or intention of fulfilling them.
The cost of violence is at least the cost of repair, not to mention the death and grief that follow, whether the violence arises from a natural force like a cyclone, volcano or earthquake, or a human force like an army, or a government that destroys trust in a community.
Every game has rules and no sport can last if the rules are not clear and fairly applied. It is necessary to have provision for whistle blowing and investigators to investigate alleged breaches of the rules. These are the defined part of the game which define its structure. If you step outside the rules you are not playing the game. You are doing something else. The rules can be written down in a book and enforced by umpires, referees and boards of control.
The other part of the game is the play. Play is the interpretation of the rules. Although the rules are a finite, their interpretation is infinite, and so play within the rules is infinite. It is a free exploration of the space defined by the rules. How we actually explore that space is not and cannot be defined by the rules. They can only tell us when we are out of bounds.
There are times when the rules seem silly and the game becomes boring and repetitious. Then there are moments when the magic sets in and the game becomes something else. These are the moments we play for, but we cannot force them to happen. They are the goals, but they are not effectively attainable. They lie in the realm of the infinite and uncertain.
The magic moments are not effectively attainable, but we can approach them by increasing their probability. On the one hand there is natural ability, something definite that you can be born with. On the other hand there is training and education.
Evil marks the boundaries of our Universe. Trying to break the boundaries brings an automatic penalty: evil. The law of gravity is the prototype of this. It is a very gentle law, most of the time. In many physical systems, the forces due to gravity are tiny compared to the other physical forces operating. On the other hand, falling from a great height is usually fatal.
We explore this link because it is the central invariant axis of the theory of peace presented here. Competition and conflict are built into a system which evolves by natural selection. As Malthus realized, given the reproductive power of living things, population will increase until there are not enough resources to go round. Some must then miss out. For them it is a rational strategy to fight and die in the hope of gaining the resources for survival rather than to passively accept starvation.
This reality is abhorrent to many of us, so instead of limiting our reproduction to fit the available resources, we have developed the technologies to turn more and more of the world's resources to our own use.
Evolution inevitably involves competition of organism against organism. We envisage working toward a world in habited by one global organism, humanity, united through the our common genes, our common dependence on the planet, our common goal of survival. This organisms seeks to lead a divine life on earth by applying applying the best available technology to every single individual, supressing the pride of warlords, dictators, businessmen and all powers that rule contrary to the true nature of the word.
One of the principal features of the classical god is providence. This god is understood to be both omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent toward us. Further, it is eternal, and is so understood to be able to see the whole of space-time in one glance. There are, therefore, no unforeseen consequences for god. Our situation lies somewhere between that of microorganisms and this divinity.
The path to peaceful survival is to learn from science to create technology to explore the alternatives to destroying the Earth's natural capital that makes our lives possible. The mathematical theory suggests that the possibilities of the future are transfinite with respect to the present. We can never explore them all, and so there are some possible structures we will never find. On the other hand we will may hope that we an learn from the past that it is always possible to find consistent structure in the future. A consistent past cannot lead to a dead end in the future.
We are making the discovery that the material world is the spiritual world. Evolution toward complexity is driven by networking and sharing, the two fundamental functions in any cooperative network.
17: Grace: human organism and superhuman freedom
We are apt to envy the fortunes of the rich and famous, but often they pay a price. They have a security problem which constrains their freedom because there are many people who would like to take what they have. I am an an older white heavily built male living in a relatively peaceful city. I can walk around a night with no fear, but I regularly read of young women being stalked, raped and murdered and many are imprisoned by the fear of this possibility. Youth and beauty are not the only coveted treasures, so we see the landscape dotted with gated communities, security guards, banks, fortresses, prisons, women's refuges, police stations, hospitals and all the other social mechanisms that play the role of our social immune system, identifying and neutralizing predators on peace and freedom.
A central theme of this book is derived from the mathematical theory of information: The meaning of a particular symbol in a space of symbols is measured by the number of symbols in the space. We think of a symbol here not so much as a thing but as an event or operation. In this light, we may think of each of our own lives as a symbol, an event in a space of humanity.
We measure freedom by entropy or variety. Variety is a count of states or symbols. The idea is that the more states a system may occupy, the more freedom it has. So in physics, we speak of degrees of freedom. What is the difference between your shoulder and your elbow? Your shoulder can move your whole arm in two dimensions, up and down, forward and backward, and any combinations of the two. Your elbow, on the other hand, can only move in one dimension bent or straight. The shoulder has more degrees of freedom than the elbow. A similar relationship exists between hips and knees. Each of these degrees of freedom has an infinity of positions.
We may think of the transfinite numbers as a ladder of freedom. We start with the natural numbers which are said to be countably infinite.We can count them, 1, 2, 3, . . . but there is no last number. We can always add another one. Cantor realized, however, that it make sense to talk about the set or collection of all the natural numbers. Since there is no greatest natural number the cardinal of this set cannot be any particular natural number. Instead he invented a new name for this cardinal, ℵ0. We may think of ℵ0 as a symmetry. It is the cardinal of any instance of a set of natural numbers. It embodies, in effect, the freedom implicit in counting.
Cantor found that beyond the infinity of the natural numbers, there is an unlimited spectrum of large infinities, which may be understood to represent even larger degrees of freedom. Here, however, we come to a difficulty. Is a human being freer than a gas? At first sight we are not. In a gas every molecule can move in every direction at any of a wide range of velocities and its position is not fixed, as we learn when we smell scent wafting through still air. The scent molecules, which are moving at close to the speed of sound and bouncing off the air molecules billions of times per second, can nevertheless make their way across a room in less than a minute.
On the other hand, the molecules in my body are specifically localized within my skin, and apart from blood, air and water, most of them are fairly closely confined within their respective cells and tissues. There is no way that one of my toes and its constituent molecules float across a room. Yet I feel that I am freer than air. What needs to be adjusted is our way of counting, and the transfinite network shows us how to do it. The key, as Cantor found, is order.
The Catholic Church believes that both we and our universe are damaged by original sin. Although Jesus was sacrificed by his Father to appease himself for this human crime and the debt is considered to be paid off, the tangible results of our redemption are delayed. Good individuals are believed to go to heaven when they die, and the bad to Hell, but the restoration of the whole system is yet to come 'at the end of time'. Many believe that will be soon and like to interpret current events as pointing to the Apocalypse but the scientific view is that the Earth and the solar system have billions of years of stable life ahead of them, a time so long that it is effectively irrelevant to the present. Catholic Catechism §599 sq. Christ's redemptive death in God's plan of salvation, Timeline of the far future - Wikipedia
From the Church's point of view, the current but invisible effect of Jesus' sacrifice is the availability of grace. Grace is, in the first instance, conferred by baptism which forgives all sin, including original sin, and makes the baptized person a member of the Church. I was baptized, and therefore have standing in the Church. Catholic Catechism §1996: II Grace, Catholic Catechism §1263: The grace of baptism
The picture of grace implicit in the hypothesis developed here differs radically from that proposed by the Catholic Church. First, if the Universe is divine, we are all in god, parts of god and from that point of view in no need of any extra infusion of divinity. There is no evidence for the Fall, and original sin, if anything, is simply a vestige of our evolutionary past. To be branded a sinner is bad for one's self esteem and induces feelings of social ostracism and helplessness, particularly, as in the case of original sin, when the accusation is manifestly unjust, visiting the sins of the parents on the children. On the whole we have adapted to our new 'civilized' way of life, but we retain the imprint of evolution: we will do anything to necessary to survive and reproduce and are quite capable of taking whatever uncivilized short cuts that we think we can get away with.
The social structures of welfare on the one hand and punishment for crime on the other, serve to guide us away from such behaviour. Wars, famine, and other social breakdowns nevertheless reveal what we are capable of and we are constantly reminded of this by theatre, literature, film, and the daily media accounts of atrocities. Christianity imagines an inherently good god and an inherently bad devil, but in fact, as many other cultures realize, good and bad are both elements of the divine.
What does grace mean in the divine world? In the Christian world, grace means a completely unmerited gift from god. It is the same in the divine world. In the broadest sense, it is the gift of existence, which is comes to us, initially, without any activity on our part. Like all forms of life we are conceived and born with no conscious effort, although the whole process of coming to be has evolved in the divine universe over billions of years.
There comes a time in life, however, when, unless we are remarkably privileged, we have to begin to contribute to our own lives by some form of work. In the beginning this contribution may be simply feeding and grooming ourselves, but as we get older we need to find a useful role in the overall system. Such a role gives meaning to our lives and provides us with an income. It is work. Every creature must work for a living.
Many people in the Christian world have been misled by the Book of Genesis. God's punishment of the first people implies that work and pain are punishment for human curiosity. This not so, The structure of the world is created and maintained by work, made possible by the Sun. Pain tells us when we are on the wrong track and need to change course. There is much pain in the world, but it can be dealt with by carefully designed work, the subject of the last chapter of this book.
The principal dividend of peace is freedom. In a free society I can express the full potential of my life, provided only that I do not directly or indirectly deprive other people of their their freedom. This is grace. In the early days of human life our freedom was curtailed by all the evils that flesh is heir to: poverty, starvation, disease, and death. A well designed welfare state can do much to remove these evils. As part of a cooperative community, we receive the grace of increased freedom.