A very thoughtful and enjoyable essay. I like your metaphor of energy and information being "two sides of a coin" but note that while a coin can be considered as representing a single bit (heads/tails) it is made up of 1023 or so atoms and its full description is lots of bits even if considered only classically; I'm not really convinced that "information" is anything at all; the ultimate reality must be identical with matter/energy, whatever stuff is there. Also you write that "the energy is apparently conserved, but the information surely is not" which is not consistent with current thinking about quantum information, as you may know, but I'm not so much a believer in the Holy Wavefunction. You lose me when you write "When we combine information, the energy carrying it tends to cancel out, creating just that static and noise we so carefully extracted the information from." Not sure what you mean by that. Also not sure I understand your critique or prescriptions for financial reform. I think capitalism would work just fine if we only tax the rich enough to fix Piketty's inequality so r=g in the long term after we run it backwards for a while (g>r).
How to Hack Human History by John Brodix Merryman
Mark,
Thank you for the thoughtful reading and response.
I realize I'm stepping into a bit of a physics minefield with that thumbnail description, but its use was to lay a foundation for how our physiological dichotomy of the central nervous and circulatory systems are biological equivalents to the functions of government and finance.
Then the other leg of this view is how energy is inherently dynamic, while information is necessarily static. Consider the words on this page; How much would civilization have advanced without this stability of patterns? How much would reality exist as we know it, without those stable patterns? There is the view opposite to yours, that only the patterns, the math, are real and presumably, especially considering the concept of blocktime, that energy is just an illusion of the geometry of spacetime.
I have to say I avoid most serious discussions of quantum information and mechanics, because they seem to have presumptions of an objective classical reality that doesn't exist, but which only they realize. Take for instance a moving car and consider the idea of position; It really doesn't have one. There is no exact location, anymore than there would be an exact location for a subatomic quantum of energy. Yet you could certainly measure features, ie. information about it, if you measure it in a small enough unit of time. I think if we were to really peel away the last hundred years of increasingly abstract formulations(more of those static forms) and try to view it with the collective wisdom from many fields, such as information theory, neurology, etc, it might fit in better than we think.
One point I keep making is that we look at time backwards. While we experience it personally as a sequence of events and so think of it as the point of the present moving from past to future, which physics distills to measures of duration for use in the geometry, the reality is it's the changing configuration turning future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the world turns. This makes time much more like temperature, than space. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. Just that with temperature, we look at the overall effect and with time we look at the particular actions, but there is no universal clock, just a composite effect of lots of actions. Faster clocks don't move into the future quicker, they recede into the past faster, as they burn/age quicker. The hare is long dead and the tortoise is still plodding along. There is also no need to assume the future must be deterministic, or the past remains probabilistic, ie, multiworlds, as probability precedes actuality. So I think there are a number of such basic conceptual errors built into the model, but no one can really step back far enough to see them, so now it's string theory and multiverses as solutions.
As for combining information, consider taking a picture and how the shutter speed determines clarity. Now if we were to leave the shutter open longer, more light would get in and so presumably more information being carried by that light, yet the effect is to wash out the picture, as the information/energy cancels out. Much of how we experience life is just that sort of editing out lots of energy and only registering those parts to make sense of what we need to know. Extracting the signal from the noise.
In Tom Ray's thread, I tried laying out a more precise description of the economic argument, which I'll paste here;
"In our capitalist economy, we treat money as a commodity, in fact one with by far the greatest overall value, given the amount of currencies, bonds, and all the other notational devices and derivatives being traded, not to mention actual commodities, like gold, whose value is largely a function of their use as a currency. Given the power of these markets, it is safe to say we have something of a tail wagging the dog situation.
What I would argue is that money is not a commodity, but a contract and if we understood it as such, it would seriously change the economic dynamic for the better. Originally what became money was specifically contracts, such as clay tablets used as receipts for stored grain in ancient Sumer, up to the gold certificates issued by the Rothschilds in 18th century Europe. They were essentially IOU's backed by a specific item. It then became convenient to trade these contracts around as though they were commodities in their own right. Then such things as futures, bonds, etc, which were backed by promises of future income, came into use. Not to mention all the innumerable devices of notational value since created.
From this commercial convenience arose the use of state currencies. Which were originally minted from precious metals and so presumably had intrinsic value, eventually became notational as well.
Now what backs the value of these notes is essentially the health, wealth and economic productivity of the state issuing them. Essentially they are a contract between the community and its members, that one can count on the overall goodwill of the community in making good on the worth of these notes. "Accepted as legal tender in all transactions."
Yet when we then consider them as commodities, they become personal property and so there is no moral imperative to consider their function and no logical reason to limit their acquisition. Since they possess effective value and manufacturing them is only limited by the insistence on validity of the promises being made, there is a very strong inclination to create as much as possible and ignore the backing. The result is that the entire economy and often much of society becomes focused on the creation and acquisition of these notes, often to the detriment of the actual society and economy on which they are based.
Now if people truly understood these notes really do belong to the agency that issues them, since they hold the copyright, are responsible for guaranteeing the value and can adjust that value at will, possibly then people will start to be far more careful how much they are willing so extract value from interpersonal relations and environmental resources, in order to exchange for these notes. Also, on a more fundamental level, if it is to be understood as a contract between a society and its members, there would naturally also be leeway built into the system in case of emergencies, etc, because this would seriously reduce the need to accumulate excess. On the other side of the bargain, it would mean those who do try to hoard them, or otherwise abuse the relationship, could have the value of their store penalized. This then would encourage people to store value as goodwill, strong personal relations and a healthy environment. It would also create a smaller and more stable monetary system that would be more adapted to the efficient circulation of value around the economy and rather than being the giant tumor that it currently is.
Now I realize in the current situation, this proposal is as far fetched as any here, but given the solution to the last debt crash was to issue trillions more in credit, ignore any improprieties and water down all regulation and enforcement, it is a virtual certainty there will be a much larger and even more systematic crisis, given the effectiveness of the prior solution is likely well watered down, so there likely will be attention given to other models and theories and with the extent to which society is networked, some of these proposals will undoubtfully go viral."
I would add further that on physical terms, this current system does act like a giant value vacuum and so simply taxing the stream of notional wealth being shot out one end, as Piketty, et al suggest, does not stop and cannot repair the enormous social and environmental resources being sucked up and destroyed by the other end.
Regards,
John
John,
Indeed, the problem has many facets, and one should not ignore any of them. I think you are right when you write
"First and foremost, this situation has to be addressed in a way that can be intellectually comprehended by vast numbers of normally intelligent people, not just those with select education in any of the various facets of society. What might seem viable to scientists, or politicians, or information technologists, economists, priests, lawyers, plumbers, or what have you, may well not make sense to the broader audience. So what I see as first being necessary is to lay out a very basic description of reality that is sure to irritate those with a professional interest in its description."
This is very important. When we are all concerned, allowing elites in charge without control is dangerous. Democracy gives the power to the many; information and education are needed to give them understanding of the problems they vote for.
Best regards,
Cristi
Cristi,
Thank you. The dichotomy I argue for was a bit of a shot across the bow of the physic's community's obsession with mathematical structure as the basis, rather than just the description, so it likely won't be accepted by some people in the FQXI community, but it is an issue which does eventually have to be addressed, when Max Tegmark and company reach the limits of the multiverse as explanatory.
Time will tell, as with a lot of issues.
Regards,
John M
Dear John,
I read your paper and found some of your economic concepts to be very good for someone not expert in that field. I also found your concept of the dichotomy of energy and information pretty good.
I must admit, however that I found your description of the nature of God to be lacking. It appears that you either don't have a good understanding of what is meant by those who might say that God is an all-knowing absolute being or you have purposely chosen to use a different meaning for the word absolute than they would intend when using that term. You chose the meaning of absolute zero in an attempt to portray God as cold and distant and as zero or empty of all ability, etc. Those that believe in God would, on the other hand, intend it to mean that God is complete in himself, whole in himself, independent from all others, existing independent of all other causes, unlimited by any external power or control, pure, free from imperfection, perfect, supreme, the independent unrestricted, unlimited, and perfect being. All of the above are also meanings of the word absolute and would give a completely different understanding of God's nature. Of course, it could be that you never came in contact with any believer in God so that you could enquire of him about the meaning of absolute that he would intend if he used that phrase and never looked it up in a dictionary, but may have heard of absolute zero, so that is all you had to work with. I hope that is the case because I have found that those who purposely attempt to misinterpret other's sayings to attempt to belittle or make fun of them or their beliefs, as an attempt to discredit those beliefs so they can replace those beliefs with their own propaganda beliefs generally do so because they lack a reasonable logical argument to support their own beliefs. Your interpretation of all-knowing is also lacking. First you treat God as though he is just a man and subject to all of man's limitations. If God created the universe, he is much more than the total of all men who have ever and will ever have lived. Before he made the universe he would plan it out and in so doing he would generate all of the information concerning it and its construction. His plans could have included the complete paths and interactions of all sub-energy, energy, and matter particles from the beginning of the universe to its end. This would give him complete knowledge of all things that would ever happen in the universe. Man might have to eliminate all that is meaningless because of his limited perspective of the universe, but since God generated it completely, he would positively know all things concerning it. He would not have to worry about any noise to eliminate. As an example, there are a multitude of possible ingredients that could be included in a recipe and those included could need to be added in certain ways and orders in order for the resulting meal to come out right. Someone who sees the meal, but does not know the recipe might have to try many things and eliminate all that don't work until he finally has eliminated all things that don't go in the recipe to finally get it right, but if you create the recipe, you know what goes into it and how to add all of those things in the way that makes it to come out right. You don't even have to consider all of the other possible ingredients that are not part of the recipe (the noise). To actually know the complete recipe of how to make the universe would be a good thing for one who could contain it all without it being overwhelming to him. If he could design and build the universe, he could also contain its information. Moreover, if your concept that too much information overloads the circuits on which information depends in man, then as man increases in knowledge he would be moving toward the condition of being absolute all-knowing and the end of that pursuit would be attaining a state of knowing nothing. If man started with no knowledge and will end with no knowledge, but has presently gained some knowledge, then the process would likely start at zero, increase to some maximum amount of attained knowledge and then decrease to zero again. It would in that case be best for man to stop trying to gain any more knowledge at the maximum knowledge point to avoid losing it all. The problem is that man might not be able to determine when that point is reached, so he might lose most of it before he noticed that it was being lost. Maybe according to your theory man should immediately stop trying to gain any more knowledge in case that midpoint has already been passed. Wow, I didn't realize how easy it is to generate nonsensical theories. Of course, I guess it is easier if you start with nonsensical premises. The real answer to the problem that you mention for man is that each person does not have to know and understand all of the information that has been obtained by man. When you have many people, each one can specialize in one area of knowledge and go deep into that narrow part of the total knowledge pie. The larger the number of people, the larger can be the total amount of obtained knowledge. Also, bigger and more powerful machines can store all of the information and retrieve the needed parts of it for man when it is required. This may not be as esthetically pleasing to a man as it would be to be able to personally know all of the obtained information, but the society as a whole can still function well and courses in basic structuring can be made available to any that desire to take them and then they can proceed to more advanced levels in areas of their interest, so it's not that bad. There would also be the need for information combiners that would have less detailed understandings of the small specialized areas, but would be able to combine information from many of them for specific purposes, etc.
I do like your understanding that the physical need to deal with adversity is a source of character and spiritual growth or strength. You understand at least part of the reason that God allows people to suffer. I find it amazing that so many people in this world make themselves suffer greatly for many years just to try to win an Olympic medal or some other small unimportant thing in the overall scheme of things and then ask why an all-powerful and all-good God would allow people to suffer adversity, when he uses it to prepare them for eternal life in him.
There are other things that could be mentioned also, but this comment is getting large, so I will stop here.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
Paul,
What you describe I would call an ideal, not an absolute, but you are free to ascribe whatever meaning you wish to words. In my view, absolute has to account for all, not just the good. The noise as well as the signal.
I did not in fact describe God as anything, but simply pointed out some of the conceptual issues of an absolute deity. Personally I see and tried to express a bottom up spirituality, in which it is the source of our sense of being, not any particular form, ideal or otherwise. My personal perspective on the spiritual realm, is that it is every bit as complex and deep as its biological manifestations, if not far more so. So I do not pretend to plumb the depths, just to try to make some sense of what rises to the surface.
Regards,
John
I still don't know after reading your essay how we can hack human history, John. You make a lot broad assertions about a wide range of complex philosophical and political issues, but I wasn't sure what it all added up to. Reforming the legislative process in the US certainly might be a good idea, but I don't know how dramatically it would affect the course of human history. In any case, good luck in the contest.
Best,
Robert de Neufville
Robert,
Necessarily the question and the parameters of the contest does require packing a lot of context into a short piece. As I said, the essay is the abstract. The point of it, the turn in the road, which you seemed to have missed, is that we need to start treating money as a contract, not a commodity. Necessarily this does require some appreciation for how society treats contracts, versus how it treats commodities, as well as some appreciation for how the financial world operates, but since delving into the nature of these would require far more development, I hoped most readers would have some appreciation for the situation. You may wish to read Stefan Weckbach's entry for some context on the effects of how finance operates as a giant vacuum. As it has been described, as everything from an octopus in the twenties, to a giant vampire squid today, sticking its tentacles into every aspect of life and the economy.
Regards,
John
Another point, which I presume you missed, is the opportunity to affect this change, the fork in the road, so to speak, will be the up coming financial crisis.
Dear John,
Of course, as you say, you can make your own private definition of a word, but I have found that it is usually best to invent a new word or phrase if you need to communicate some new concept rather than trying to apply a new meaning to an existing word because it is less confusing to readers who may from their past experience think that you mean one of the existing meanings of that word and thereby misunderstand what you are saying. You seem to be using the word absolute to represent all things and only all things. You also seem to believe that all things somehow cancel each other out to basically equal zero or nothing. In fact, if you look at the definition of the word absolute you see that it mainly implies the maximum extreme condition of something, not necessarily all things. You are right that zero is a maximum extreme of real quantity with infinity at the other extreme end. Of course, if you weigh and balance out zero with infinity as you describe to be needed in your paper, it doesn't seem that zero would necessarily be the balance point between the two opposite or conflicting extremes.
To be fair, you do mention the universal state of the absolute and say that it would be a condition of overwhelmingly basic simplicity. Of course, we live in the absolute universe, we should, therefore, live in this state or condition of absolute simplicity that you mention where all conflicts are balanced out, there is neither good nor bad, up or down, inside or outside, etc. In reality things don't work that way though. If in the universe all up's and all down's balanced and canceled out as you seem to be saying, we would not see any up's or down's in the universe, but that is not what we see. You might say that all of them cancel each other out on a complete universal scale, but don't at the small scale that we can observe, but the full universal absolute knowledge of all up's and down's would not just include knowledge of the universal balance, it would also include knowledge of all of the individual up's and down's and the details of each one of them such as their locations in the universe and how far up or down they are, etc. The true absolute being would not only know the absolute generalization of all things, he would also know all of the details of each and every thing in existence from the smallest to the largest. After all, he would need to know all of these things in order to be able to come to the absolute conclusion that they really do balance out (that is if they really do). The universal absolute being would, therefore, not only need to know all of the balance points between the extremes of every type and the extremes of each and every thing, he would also have to know the state or condition(s) of each and every type or thing that generates those balance points. This would also all be necessary for him to be able to create the universe in the first place. Every detail about everything at all scales of all variables would have to be known including how they all relate to and interact with each other. Contrary to your belief that he would know nothing, he would actually have to know all the details of all things in order to have been able to have created the universe.
It looks to me that you began with the assumption that God does not exist in the form of an intelligent being that could plan, design, and create the universe without any real logical reason for taking that position. Once that belief is established it becomes necessary to somehow explain how the universe came into being as it is. The current problem with this concept is that observational information shows that the universe did not always exist, but had a beginning or creation and will also have an end. Various cyclical theories have been proposed, but the question remains as to what caused the beginning of the first cycle and since the end of one cycle destroys all information from that cycle, it is not possible from within any given cycle to prove that any other cycles have ever existed. Thus, it can only be considered an unprovable hypothesis or a blind faith belief. There is the problem of how the universe was generated from nothing and if something existed before it, what was it and what created that thing? Again that information is not accessible and, therefore, only another unprovable hypothesis. Moreover, it does not make much sense to believe that all of the complexity of structure that is present in the universe just happened by probability because that probability would have needed to be great enough to start from nothing and generate all things in existence at least within about the 14.5 billion years or so that man currently believes to have passed from the beginning of the universe. The size of the universe and the limited speed of light can make it difficult to envision how some complex structures could have been generated. One example is that since its formation the earth could have only made about 35 revolutions around the galaxy. Even if it and the galaxy had been formed immediately 14.5 billion years ago, it could have only made about 115 revolutions around the galaxy. This means that all of the complex structure of the outer parts of galaxies would have to have been formed in very few revolutions of the galaxy around its center.
More importantly and much harder to justify is that all of the complexity of life on this planet would have to have first begun and then to have generated all existing life forms and all forms that once existed, but have now gone extinct within 4.5 billion years, which is the belief of how old this planet is. No one knows how the first creature could have been formed without being created by an intelligent being since the universe other than living creatures, which would not have existed before the first living creature was formed, actively works to destroy complex high potential energy structures such as DNA and large Protein based molecular machines, etc. necessary to produce even simple living creatures. The probability that all of the complex structures necessary to even build a simple living creature would first be all formed in one place and then somehow be joined together in such a way as to produce a living creature before any were destroyed by entropy is just too small to be a practical belief. The biggest problem with explaining the complexity of life is that if one assumes that it is due to evolution caused by transcription errors during DNA copying with the good results being selected by natural selection, and a probability time between each positive change is chosen that is short enough so that all different living creatures could have been developed by the present time, we should be seeing major evolutionary changes taking place all around us in most current living creatures. This is because in the beginning there would have been only one creature of one type and positive changes would have to be often enough with the relatively small number of creatures that would exist in early times to produce adequate good changes to generate new types of creatures. As the number of different creatures and the number of each type of living creature increased in the earth, the rate of evolution would increase because the larger number of creatures would generate a larger number of good transcription errors. With the great multitude of many types of living creatures today (including 7 billion of man) we should be seeing large numbers of changes each year, but that doesn't happen. A good demonstration example of this principal is atomic decay. If you look at an atom that has a 1 billion year half-life, you could expect to wait 1 billion years to have a good chance to see it decay, but if you look at 1 billion such atoms at once, you could have a good chance of seeing one atom decay per year. I have found that often only one side of a problem or a solution to a problem is looked at. Usually it is the side that supports a desired belief, but often there is another side that can show that what looks good when only looked at from the preferred side can be seen to not be practical when one looks at the whole picture. Of course, those who strongly desire to believe that there is no intelligent God who created the universe (usually because they desire to be god themselves) are still free to believe it against all probability by blind faith. I can have compassion for them because I once was an agnostic for about 22 years. My desire to know the truth about the universe compelled me to change that belief as new scientific information became available that showed it to be just too improbable that it could have arrived at its current complex, but stable state by chance happenings. The thing that finally caused me to believe in an intelligent God was that after I gained access to scientific information that no man on this planet knew about, I opened up and read some of the Christian scriptures and found that it had been recorded in the scriptures more than 2 thousand years ago. The scriptures could not have been made by man because much of the observational data that would allow some of those concepts to be thought of and developed has only come to be available to man in about the last 100 years and some is still not observationally available to man except that it is recorded in the scriptures.
For your information, a temperature of absolute zero is not actually a state of no energy or action whatsoever as you have in your paper. It is the point at which there is no molecular motion for all practical purposes, but electrons are still moving around in the molecules' atoms (generally at their lowest energy levels) and still even going between atoms in the molecules to maintain the chemical bonds. The motions of the particles in the nucleus are still taking place and all the motions in the matter particles are still continuing. Sub-energy flow motions are also still taking place. So you can see that many actions are still going on at absolute zero. Matter can even radiate energy photons and matter particles at absolute zero. If you lower a sample of fissionable matter to absolute zero, atoms in it will still decay into lighter atoms and radiate energy photons and/or matter particles in the process. Motion is the true basic energy and as you can see there is still much motion present at absolute zero. I hope this is of help to you.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
Paul,
It's late and admittedly I haven't read this with as much attention as you have put into it and it all seems basically reasonable and logical and we can debate whether an absolute state is molecularly still, or subatomically still, but what matters to me is direction. It's a fairly elemental state and complexity does seem to emerge from it in terms of opposing forces, positive and negative charge. The fluctuations on the heart monitor, so to speak.
Where we seem to have the conflict would be the nature of God,
"It looks to me that you began with the assumption that God does not exist in the form of an intelligent being that could plan, design, and create the universe without any real logical reason for taking that position."
It really isn't my position that "God does not exist in the form of an intelligent being that could plan, design, and create the universe without any real logical reason for taking that position."
That could well be some essentially subjective aspect of such an absolute element of being. Even the Christian deity is a trinity. My point is that such purpose requires some sense of focus and intention and there is always a larger context from which such content is distilled. The noise out of which this signal is drawn. You go back to the Greeks and Zeus was born of Chaos. Frankly you can have whatever understanding of God you wish. I certainly was a basic monotheist, up until my mid thirties. Then one day I just had this great yawning sense that any such essence would be so far beyond any reality I could comprehend, it left me disoriented and I couldn't shake it. Eventually it took me three days to really come to terms with it and I remember standing there grazing this horse when my wife came out from the barn to tell me my father had died. You might say I took it as an omen that there was something far beyond my sense of being that was showing me some perception of the abyss. If you can explain it away and bring that old sense of inclusive nature back, hey, sounds good to me, but I've traveled a long road since then and it doesn't seem likely.
Regards,
John
John, my conscious fellow traveler on spaceship Gaia. Welcome back with your irrepressible spirit of kindness and wholeness. As usual your essay deserved a ten(10).
Wishing your well and good health,
Leo KoGuan
Leo,
Thank you very much!
I read your essay and the Dao certainly contains much wisdom, but I don't think its essence of balance can be used to propagate complete freedom from want. I think it is much better to use it to understand why we want and how these desires give us purpose, meaning and direction. If we could simply have whatever we wanted, then it would all lose meaning and value. I think what we need is knowledge that everything is its own price. To have we have to give and then there can be balance. Expansion and contraction. Up and down. Black and white. Good and bad. Pleasure and pain. All are to be understood as part of life.
Regards,
John
John,
It's nice after all this time to find something we agree on. I won't pick any nits. Good luck in the competition!
Best,
Tom
Thanks, Tom. Best of luck as well.
It is certainly a different sort of question.
Regards,
John
Dear John,
Thank you for your essay. Your section on God, and signal and noise, reminded me of something I wrote awhile ago for one of my blogs: http://www.truthabouttheone.com/2010.10.01_arch.html (Noise, Signal and the Existence of God) I hope you will find it interesting, and I invite your comments.
About money. Clearly the debt overhang is screwing with the modern economy. But what is it? It is the wealthy's claim on the rest of us. And as long as we accede to it, we, and they, are screwed.
Money is often confused as being a store of value. While to an individual it may by, (it makes sense for an individual to save,) to a society it has no value. It is useless, and that is its value! (This is why fiat currency is more useful than a currency based on precious metal.) It is just keeping score. Thus, while an individual can save money for the future, it is pointless for a society to do so. (Except perhaps as demand on another society, as eg China and the US. ) It can only save resources, and that by conservation or capitalizing in them ( eg soil preservation, replanting forests, renewable energy, etc.)
The problem (as I think you mention) is the oversupply of (real) capital, which must produce a surplus to maintain itself. This would be OK were humanity to have an infinite planet. It does not. Therefore there is a point where real capital cannot grow at the same rate as financial capital. This is Thomas Piketty's thesis, although, from what I understand, he merely predicts gloom, (the rise of oligarchy, and the descent of the rest of us,) and not doom.
Best of luck,
Charles Gregory St Pierre
Dear John,
Sorry to hear about your loss of your father when you were earlier in life than happens to many. Was your monotheist background Christian or some other? Was your father's the same as yours? We both share something that I have found to be very common among those who either leave or distance themselves from God. It usually happens due to some traumatic or very negative experience. In my case I went to a parochial school that taught about God, but did not actually have the students read the scriptures. As a result I had been told that if I had a need, I should pray to God and he would help me. I assumed that meant he would give me what I asked for. I was only about 9 or 10 years old at that time, so I didn't think to try to read the scriptures by myself. When my parents got separated it was a very traumatic experience to me, so I prayed to God and asked him to bring them back together again. They actually did come back together for about a year during which my youngest brother was born, but then they got divorced, and even though I asked God to bring them together again he didn't do it. This caused me to doubt whether he existed or not. Looking back it seems like it would have been best to go to the scriptures and read them for evidence of God's existence, but that did not come to my mind at that time. Instead I went to science because I had always wanted to know how the world worked and I thought that I could look for evidence of God's existence there. In science it was the time of the steady state universe belief and living cells were considered to be bags containing protoplasm and cytoplasm and some strange unknown life force. If the universe always existed and life was that simple, it seemed that evolution (which was then as is now the popular belief of how all living creatures came into existence) made sense, so I tended to believe it.
As science advanced over the years and it became apparent that the universe had a beginning and was, therefore, created and living creatures were extremely complicated in structure, evolution made much less sense. During that time I gained access to scientific information that was not known by man that explains things like the causes for the various outcomes that are generated by matter particle interactions and explains the specific cause for the specific probability that each outcome will occur as it does, etc. This required that the universe would be structured in certain ways. By that time there had been adequate advancement in particle physics so that when I looked to see if that structure was evident I found that the available observational data supported that structure as existing. I found it interesting that man had completely ignored it.
That brings me to the second thing we share. I have noticed that the age range of 30 to 35 seems to be a period when people either leave or come to God in larger numbers than at other ages, at least in my experience. I was about 33 years old when I decided one night that it would be interesting to read some of the scriptures to see if they made any sense. I opened them to the last book because I had found that the end of a book often gives a good idea of what the book is about. I read the book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ and to my surprise the structure of the universe that I had found to be necessary to explain things was already recorded in the scriptures. Next I started to read them from the beginning and found the same thing in the beginning of the book of Genesis. I could have considered it just a coincidence, but it looked too much like God had slowly prepared me over the years and gave me the information just at the time that the experimental observational data was there to support it and then he led me to open and read the scriptures just at the right time when I had gained and confirmed the information that would allow me to see and understand these things to show me that he exists and has the power and ability to make all these things work together with perfect timing. That plus the fact that the scriptures had been written over 2 thousand years earlier proved to me that they could not have been created by man because at that time man had none of the scientific information to allow anyone to be able to know of these structural details of the universe. Since then as I have read the complete scriptures, I have found much other information about things in this world and our lives in it about which science has only recently found the confirmation of their positive aspects, such as the use of olive oil, which has been recently found to have a good cholesterol balance of HDL to LDL compared to most of the oils that are currently most used by man for food production. Another example is the mention that in the beginning man was given to eat the fruits of tress and their nuts and again recent scientific findings show many benefits of eating these foods, etc. God tells us how we should live our lives in respect to him and others and recent scientific findings have shown that those who follow these ways tend to live longer, healthier, and happier lives than those who don't.
Although all of these things and others make for many confirmations that the scriptures were not created by man because man did not possess the supporting information at the time they were written, what I find most interesting is that in them God tells us why he made the universe and what part we have in his creation. It turns out that God is a Spirit and he is making a body for himself to live in. He made this creation to be the place where he is making his body. It is his body manufacturing plant, so to speak. His body is to fulfill all that he desires of it and is being made to last without end, so it is important to him that it be made to be perfect in all aspects. We have been given by him the ability to choose one of two possible overall choices that determines our place in his creation. We can either chose him in the way that he has provided for us to do in which case we are made to be members or parts of his body or choose someone or something else in which case he uses those who make this choice as part of the machinery he uses to produce his body members. Of course, once his body members have all been made, he will have no more need or use for this creation or the machinery that is part of it that was used to produce that body, so all of his motion that he used to make it will be reclaimed by him and it will thus be destroyed in the process. His body members, on the other hand, will be transferred to a new and better permanent creation and he will eternally live in them there.
Most other religions that I have looked at treat God as an impersonal and usually unintelligent force, as a vindictive dictator for whom man must continually sacrifice, or as a weak and desperate being who created us only so he could become man's servant or slave to give man anything that he desires and expects nothing from man in return. I find these concepts of God unrealistic and based on man's weaknesses and imperfections. Those who believe in a force type of God usually think that man will somehow learn to use that force and that man will essentially then become God. These people actually think of the one who created the universe as something less than a man to be controlled and used by man. Those who think of God as an evil dictator also think of God as if he was just a man and they realize that if a man had the power to create the universe and them, he would surely use that power to mistreat those under him in power. Those who think of God as their servant also desire to Be God themselves. They desire to completely reverse the relationship that God as our creator actually deserves. Only in the Christian scriptures is God shown to be an intelligent being who made this universe and us in it for his own reasonable and rational purpose, but his purpose shows that he loves man enough to create him and take the long period of time with man that is necessary to prepare him to become his perfect eternal body. Although it is not a perfect image because we are not perfect, the closest image that we have to this is the relationship that our spirit has with our own body. Our spirit generates all of our intents or purposes that we desire to fulfill. It will generally not have an intent that would be harmful to our body, but those that will be good for and pleasurable to both our spirit and our body. When our body members have needs they either send out signals to other body parts to directly fulfill them or send them out to our spirit through our soul which generates thoughts that our spirit can understand and then our spirit generates an intent to fulfill that need and sends it to our soul where thoughts are generated that our body members can understand. These thoughts are sent to our body members that can generate that which is necessary to fulfill the needs and those that can transport that which is needed to the member(s) that need it. Those body members then take care of the need. The body members give to each other according to the needs of each part and according to the thoughts sent to them by the soul. The soul sits in the middle as the mediator between the body and the spirit. It translates the messages from the body and sends the result to the spirit and it translates the messages from the spirit and sends them to the body. This is an image in the world that God has given us of our relationship with him. God is the Spirit, Christ Jesus is the mediator between God and man and man is his body. The reason that we are not perfect images of God is that in this world where God is teaching us how we are to behave so that we can all live together without end and not destroy one another and so that our lives can be joyful and fulfilling for all of us and also for God, he gives us examples of what happens when we behave contrary to what he teaches us. We, therefor, have examples like cancer, etc. that show what happens when body members either don't do what they need to do or try to take more than they need for themselves at the expense of other members, etc. He also gives us examples of what it would be like if he were to not love us as he does and instead would treat us badly or destroy us, such as body mutilations and suicide, etc. These examples generally are not pleasant to us, but are necessary in this life so we can see and learn why God asks us to do the things that he does and so we can fully realize just how bad the result would be if we don't do according to his will, since his will is what will work to allow us all to have life and have it more abundantly in continual love for one another without end in the world to come after this world is destroyed. This is just a short summary and there is so much to understand and I would like to keep going, but I don't want to give too much at a time because I have found in my life that if I receive too much all at once, I tend to lose concentration and then miss much of what is given, so I will stop for now. If there are any special questions or things that you need answered let me know and I will try to answer them. I don't claim to know everything myself yet though.
Sincerely,
Paul B.
Charles,
That is why I emphasize the need to think of it as a contract, rather than a commodity. Not only people, but obviously society as a whole is guided by basic conceptual models and it behooves the banks and the government for people to think of money as some form of real value, rather than just one side of a promise. Sort of like it behooves the fisherman, for the fish to think the worm is tasty.
It is they who are creating this opportunity for real change, since it is they who are sacrificing the strength of the currency to save a bunch of over-leveraged banks.
These are their strings of control. Even security forces need a relatively stable form of exchange in order to function. It is as though they were shortchanging the structural integrity of a sky scraper in order to make the penthouse more extravagant.
I do feel this is not simply a matter of hubris on the part of a few, but the culmination of some deep cultural issues, of which what I wrote only begins to scrape the surface.
John,
Not quite what I expected from you, a nice original approach, though I don't think you overdid the 'ruffling of feathers' at all. And I don't recall a single mention of time!
I agree the recent crisis has been a salutary reminder of what 'money' actually is and isn't. I think it was a lesson people wont forget for possibly many months! Are thing, and bankers and politicians, really going to fundamentally change. I fear not. I think we need to look elsewhere for that quantum leap into the 21st century. Then when we HAVE caught up we can do another one! - but I agree, it's whether it's in the right direction that matters.
I did greatly enjoy the read as a lovely change from idealist subject matter and theorising. Needless to say I shall afford it the consummate remuneration contract, but avoiding empty promisory notes.
I hope mine is suitably pitched for you as you were my 'ideal' target audience in making QM causal and understandable. Your comment; "While we progress linearly, nature responds non-linearly." is profound and at it's heart. Few realise the import of the emergent unifying of classic and quantum physics. We've been in an ever deepening theoretical rut for ~100 years. But of course It'll be ignored, again.
There is not one branch of science that won't benefit massively from the ensuing improved understanding of nature and the universe. And ZERO walls and guns! Did you read the new Cyclic evolution paper; applying the same simple mechanism. If not then perhaps after the eye aching essay reading.
Very best wishes. Hold on to your C of G while she bucks.
Peter
Paul,
Why do you tell me I'm 'leaving God,' just because I view it from a somewhat different perspective?
You seem to have some very basic boxes and if someone doesn't fit in one, then they must be in the other.
I do come from a very old Christian tradition and personally I view your description of God as a bit of a cul de sac version. Its comfortable and comforting, but is really just centered around itself. Personally I grew up as a younger child in a large farm family and learned at an early age that I wasn't the center of anything. The idea of praying to God for anything never occurred to me because if he was in charge of everything, he didn't need to worry about me and since I had a brain, I could certainly figure out what I had to do. Growing up it seemed whenever I tried figuring out anything, it would invariably happen in some way directly opposed to my desires, so I found it worked best to tune out my own ego, after a fair amount of rebellion as a child, and just go with the flow.
To me, life is not about objects, individuals, entities, etc, but more about processes. The nodes and the network might be two sides of the coin, but the network interests me more. So, like animals, I tend to think as a function of energies, electricity, direction, velocity, interactions, rhythms. Words, concepts, models, etc. are just abstractions of these and mostly serve to process them in a broader sense. So to me, any entity is simply the connection between its content and its context. I ride a horse as though it were a tool for feeling the ground and the ground as feedback of the horse. My mind does not exist in its own bubble, with what is outside obscured by what I project, because what's outside can get me hurt and I want to see as clearly as possible.
Which all goes to say that I don't see my views as naive, or misinformed and that some television preacher version of religion is going to save me, if I just buy the plastic Jesus. There is good and there is bad and they go in cycles. We all want to have just the good, but it's only part of the puzzle and cannot exist alone.
Regards,
John