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2: Fixed point theory endows the Aquinas–Einstein singularity with a random basis for Hilbert space
Fixed point theory endows the Aquinas–Einstein singularity with Hilbert space, an abstract mathematical space. Although it may have an infinite number of dimensions, Hilbert space is much simpler and more primitive than classical Euclidean space. It has no distance or time. It is more like a space of sounds, speech or music, all structures built from waves. Since the singularity is structureless is has no self control so the its omnipotent actions are random. The Hilbert space it creates within itself will therefore be random, providing the variation necessary for creative evolution. Since it is eternal and omnipotent it can explore an unlimited space of variations. Since the world exists, it must have ultimately arrived, by trying every possibility, at the structure of the universe we now inhabit.
Following Thomas Aquinas, we assume Aquinas–Einstein singularity is omnipotent. This seems natural enough from a physical point of view since it is the source of our immense Universe. Aquinas also provides a logical definition of omniscience. We say that a god is omniscient if it can do anything that does not involve a contradiction. Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3: Is God 0mnipotent?
This idea provides us with the rationale for apophatic theology, negative theology, or the via negativa. Apophatic theology - Wikipedia
Aquinas explains in the preface to question 3 of the Summa [my translation]:
Once we have learned about something that it exists, it remains to discover the nature of their existence. Since we cannot know the nature of God, we must be satisfied with knowing what they are not. First, therefore, we must consider how God is not. . . . We can show how God is not, by removing inappropriate attributes such as composition, motion and similar attributes. Thomas Aquinas: De Ente et Essentia, Alexis Szejnoga (2013): Persian Perspective on Prima Philosophia: The influence of Avicenns's interpetation of Aristotelian ontology in the De ente et essentia of Saint Thomas Aquinas
One result of this inquiry is the conclusion that there is no distinction between the essence and existence of God, an issue that Aquinas wrote about as a young man in his essay De Ente et Essentia. This work is derived to some extent from the work of the Arabic students of Aristotle Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 4: Are essence and existence the same in God?
The need for apophatic theology arises from the ancient assumption that the creator is omniscient and created the universe according to a pre-existing plan in the divine mind, an idea derived from Plato.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (535 – 475 BCE) though that everything moves. Parmenides thought that motion is an illusion, and real reality is eternal and complete. Parmenides influenced Plato, and Plato influenced Christian theologians, so the Christian God is eternal. They do not move. Heraclitus - Wikipedia, Parmenides - Wikipedia, Plato - Wikipedia
Parmenides point of view is more theoretical. He thought that we can only have certain knowledge of things that do not change. Plato developed the idea that the structure of the world is a rather poor reflection of a set of eternal, perfect heavenly forms that shape the world and also our knowledge of the world. Theory of Forms - Wikipedia
Heraclitus and Parmenides are both talking physics, although many theologians take Parmenides view. When it comes to our own bodies and spirits, however, motion is ubiquitous. We are always on the move. Our bodies are full of complex processes, hearts beating and lungs breathing. Immensely complex microscopic metabolic processes are working non-stop to keep us alive, digesting food, killing pathogens, demolishing old and creating new cells. Nor do our minds ever stop, even when we are asleep, sometimes consciously dreaming, always silently managing the systems necessary to maintain life. While we are awake we are continually sensing our environment, our mood and feelings changing as we navigate the sea of people and events around us.
Plato proposed an invisible world of eternal forms to explain the structure of the visible world. He saw these forms as perfect, imperfectly represented in our rather defective world. When Christianity developed, the form of the good became a model of God and other forms represented the Angels. Aquinas placed Plato's forms in the mind of the Creator as they fashioned our world. Form of the Good - Wikipedia, Neoplatonism and Christianity - Wikipedia, Aquinas, Summa I, 15, 1: Are there ideas in God?
Aquinas's first proof for the existence of God follows Aristotle's argument for the unmoved mover very closely. The only difference is that Aristotle, like many of his contemporaries, thought that the world was eternal and had no need of a creator. Aquinas, on the other hand, was bound by Catholic dogma to acknowledge that the world was created by a God, other than the world. For Aristotle, the unmoved mover is part of the world, residing on the higher heavens beyond the Moon transmitting motion to Earth down through the spheres.. For Aquinas, God is completely outside the world, and differs from it very radically. Here Christianity still follows Plato, seeing the world as an imperfect reflection version of the divine heaven. The Christian God is nevertheless considered to be persent at every event in space and time, knowing everything and totally in control. Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia
Modern theory of communication and information holds that omniscience and absolute simplicity are mutually inconsistent, since information is physical and needs to be represented by physical symb0ls like this writing. Since the singularity cannot be omniscient,but is omnipotent, we turn to evolution as the source of the immensely complex structure we find all around us. The key to thr creative power of evolution, as Darwin realized is random variation, a subject he studies in considerable detail. Claude Shannon (1949): Communication in the Presence of Noise, Rolf Landauer (1991): Information is Physical, Charles Darwin (1869): The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication
In mathematics, a fixed point theorem is a result saying that a function f will have at least one fixed point (a point x for which f(x) = x), under some conditions on f that can be stated in general terms. Results of this kind are amongst the most generally useful in mathematics. The Brouwer fixed point theorem is a non-constructive result: in other words, a contradiction arises if it is false. It says that any continuous function mapping a continuous, convex closed set of points in n-dimensional Euclidean space to itself must have a fixed point, but it doesn't describe how to find the fixed point. John Casti (1996): Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia
The Aquinas–Einstein singularity is a real substantial entity and we can imagine that it can map itself onto itself in any number of ways, thereby creating fixed points within itself.
Let us assume that fixed point theory enables the Aquinas–Einstein singularity to establish a random set of basis states of Hilbert space, an abstract mathematical space, within itself. . Hilbert space is similar to the familiar classical four dimensional space and and time in which we live and move. Although it may have an infinite number of dimensions, Hilbert space is much simpler than classical space. It has no distance or time. It is more like a space of sounds, speech or music, all things that are made of waves. The wave nature of Hilbert space is described by the periodic complex numbers. John von Neumann (2018): The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Complex number - Wikipedia
Once we have the ingredients of Hilbert space in the initial singularity, the mechanism of quantum mechanics becomes inevitable. Each basis state may be understood as a formal wave, a kinematic object, a vector, moved by the initial singularity which plays the role of Aristotle’s unmoved mover moving Plato;s forms about. Since there is no space and time at this stage of evolution, the vectors in Hilbert space can add to one another. This process is known as superposition, and as Louis de Broglie realized, we can create stationary eigenvectors by adding waves of different frequencies. Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia
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Notes and references
Further readingBooks
Casti (1996), John L, Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, John Wiley and Sons 1996 Preface: '[this book] is intended to tell the general reader about mathematics by showcasing five of the finest achievements of the mathematician's art in this [20th] century.' p ix. Treats the Minimax theorem (game theory), the Brouwer Fixed-Point theorem (topology), Morse's theorem (singularity theory), the Halting theorem (theory of computation) and the Simplex method (optimisation theory).
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von Neumann (2018), John, and Nicholas A. Wheeler (editor), Robert T Beyer (translator), The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press 2018 ' Quantum mechanics was still in its infancy in 1932 when the young John von Neumann, who would go on to become one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, published Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics--a revolutionary book that for the first time provided a rigorous mathematical framework for the new science. Robert Beyer's 1955 English translation, which von Neumann reviewed and approved, is cited more frequently today than ever before. But its many treasures and insights were too often obscured by the limitations of the way the text and equations were set on the page. In this new edition of this classic work, mathematical physicist Nicholas Wheeler has completely reset the book in TeX, making the text and equations far easier to read. He has also corrected a handful of typographic errors, revised some sentences for clarity and readability, provided an index for the first time, and added prefatory remarks drawn from the writings of Léon Van Hove and Freeman Dyson. The result brings new life to an essential work in theoretical physics and mathematics.'
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Links
Alexis Szejnoga (2013), Persian Perspective on Prima Philosophia: The influence of Avicenns's interpetation of Aristotelian ontology in the De ente et essentia of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Chapter 1: The wider context of the De ente et essentia
In this chapter, we will take a look at the context in which the De ente et essentia was written. The first part will focus on historical-philosophical aspects, treating topics like the renewed interest in Aristotelian philosophy, the attention being paid to translations of Arabian works
on theology and philosophy, notably of Avicenna and Averroës, and to two philosophicalt reatises, the Fons vitae and the Liber de causis, which were at the time wrongly attributed to Aristotle and an unknown Christian theologian. In addition, we will look at some
bibliographical details of the De ente et essentia: an approximation of the period in which it was written, the rationale behind its structure, a summary of its intent and scope, and its reception among medieval and modern philosophy.' back |
Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia, Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Plato's allegory of the cave is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a, Book VII) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates and is narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the Sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e).' back |
Apophatic theology - Wikipedia, Apophatic theology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Apophatic theology (from Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι - apophēmi, "to deny")—also known as negative theology or via negativa (Latin for "negative way")—is a theology that attempts to describe God, the Divine Good, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God. It stands in contrast with cataphatic theology.' back |
Aquinas, Summa I, 15, 1, Are there ideas in God?, ' . . . in other agents (the form of the thing to be made pre-exists) according to intelligible being, as in those that act by the intellect; and thus the likeness of a house pre-exists in the mind of the builder. And this may be called the idea of the house, since the builder intends to build his house like to the form conceived in his mind. As then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by His intellect, as will appear later, there must exist in the divine mind a form to the likeness of which the world was made. And in this the notion of an idea consists.' back |
Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3, Is God omnipotent?, '. . . God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely; which is the second way of saying a thing is possible. For a thing is said to be possible or impossible absolutely, according to the relation in which the very terms stand to one another, possible if the predicate is not incompatible with the subject, as that Socrates sits; and absolutely impossible when the predicate is altogether incompatible with the subject, as, for instance, that a man is a donkey.' back |
Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 4, Are essence and existence the same in God?, ' I answer that, God is not only His own essence, as shown in the preceding article, but also His own existence. This may be shown in several ways.
First, whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused either by the constituent principles of that essence (like a property that necessarily accompanies the species — as the faculty of laughing is proper to a man — and is caused by the constituent principles of the species), or by some exterior agent — as heat is caused in water by fire. Therefore, if the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles.
Now it is impossible for a thing's existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God; because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence.' back |
Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Among hundreds of fixed-point theorems] Brouwer's is particularly well known, due in part to its use across numerous fields of mathematics. In its original field, this result is one of the key theorems characterizing the topology of Euclidean spaces, along with the Jordan curve theorem, the hairy ball theorem, the invariance of dimension and the Borsuk–Ulam theorem. This gives it a place among the fundamental theorems of topology.' back |
Charles Darwin (1869), The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, ' '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.' back |
Claude Shannon (1949), Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE, vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back |
Complex number - Wikipedia, Complex number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'A complex number is a number that can be expressed in the form a + bi, where a. and b are real numbers and is the imaginary unit, which satisfies the equation i2 = −1. In this expression, a is the real part and b is the imaginary part of the complex number. Complex numbers extend the concept of the one-dimensional number line to the two-dimensional complex plane (also called Argand plane) by using the horizontal axis for the real part and the vertical axis for the imaginary part.' back |
Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia, Eigenvalues and eigenvectors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In linear algebra, an eigenvector or characteristic vector of a linear transformation is a nonzero vector that changes at most by a scalar factor when that linear transformation is applied to it. The corresponding eigenvalue, often denoted by λ, is the factor by which the eigenvector is scaled.
Geometrically, an eigenvector, corresponding to a real nonzero eigenvalue, points in a direction in which it is stretched by the transformation and the eigenvalue is the factor by which it is stretched. If the eigenvalue is negative, the direction is reversed. Loosely speaking, in a multidimensional vector space, the eigenvector is not rotated.' back |
Heraclitus - Wikipedia, Heraclitus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Heraclitus of Ephesus (Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος)Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. . . .
Heraclitus is famous for his insistence on ever-present change in the universe, as stated in his famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same river twice" (see panta rhei, below). He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down are one and the same", all existing entities being characterized by pairs of contrary properties. His cryptic utterance that "all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos" (literally, "word", "reason", or "account") has been the subject of numerous interpretations.'
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Neoplatonism and Christianity - Wikipedia, Neoplatonism and Christianity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Neoplatonism was a major influence on Christian theology throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in the West due to St. Augustine of Hippo, who was influenced by the early Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, and the works of the Christian writer Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, who was influenced by later Neoplatonists, such as Proclus and Damascius.' back |
Parmenides - Wikipedia, Parmenides - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Parmenides of Elea (early 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy, his only known work is a poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. In it, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In the Way of Truth, he explained how reality is one; change is impossible; and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In the Way of Opinion, he explained the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful. These thoughts strongly influenced Plato, and through him, the whole of western philosophy.' back |
Plato - Wikipedia, Plato - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Plato (c. 427 – 348 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a top thinker in Philosophy. Plato founded the Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism. The philosopher was an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy. He was a system-builder. He also raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy.' back |
Rolf Landauer (1991), Information is physicaL, Abstract
Information is inevitably tied to a physical representation and therefore to restrictions and possibilities related to the laws of physics and the parts available in the universe. Quantum mechanical superpositions of information bearing states can be used, and the real utility of that needs to be understood. Quantum parallelism in computation is one possibility and will be assessed pessimistically. The energy dissipation requirements of computation, of measurement and of the communications link are discussed. The insights gained from the analysis of computation has caused a reappraisal of the perceived wisdom in the other two fields. A concluding section speculates about the nature of the laws of physics, which are algorithms for
the handling of information, and must be executable in our real physical universe.' back |
Theory of Forms - Wikipedia, Theory of Forms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract (but substantial) forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form or idea is often capitalized. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only true objects of study that can provide us with genuine knowledge; thus even apart from the very controversial status of the theory, Plato's own views are much in doubt. Plato spoke of Forms in formulating a possible solution to the problem of universals.' back |
Thomas Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia, Latin text of one of Thomas Aquinas early works.
Textum a L. Baur Monasterii Westfalorum 1933 editum
emendatum a J. Koch ac translatum in taenias magneticas a Roberto Busa SJ. denuo recognovit Enrique Alarcón atque instruxit<
[69871] De ente et essentia, pr.
Quia parvus error in principio magnus est in fine, secundum philosophum in I caeli et mundi, ens autem et essentia sunt quae primo intellectu concipiuntur, ut dicit Avicenna in principio suae metaphysicae, ideo ne ex eorum ignorantia errare contingat, ad horum difficultatem aperiendam dicendum est quid nomine essentiae et entis significetur et quomodo in diversis inveniatur et quomodo se habeat ad intentiones logicas, scilicet genus, speciem et differentiam. Quia vero ex compositis simplicium cognitionem accipere debemus et ex posterioribus in priora devenire, ut, a facilioribus incipientes, convenientior fiat disciplina, ideo ex significatione entis ad significationem essentiae procedendum est.
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Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, lit. 'that which moves without being moved' or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause) or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek: Λ) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae. ' back |
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