Less than Nine Billion names of God - or maybe a few more

Sound track for today - Sequentiea:Gregorian Chant/K.Ruhland

An interesting co-incidence at the weekend - though for all you Jungians out there, that is all it is.

I am trying to wade through Foucault's Pendulum again and within a few pages of the start, the main character has to access his colleague's computer (Called 'ABU' or at least running a program of that name). He surmises that the password must be one of the anagrams of the Italian version of "YHWH" ("YAWEH") and he sets out to produce a list of all the anagrams. The book even has a program listing in BASIC which will produce all anagrams of a four letter word ("YHWH" I presume). Anyway the Italian version of "YHWH" has 700 odd anagrams. The password is NOT one of these and I will not tell you what it is just in case you are mad enough to try and read this very arch book. However, the discussion of the problem did include the possibility of all the possible names of "YHWH" and the supposition that detailing all of them would result in the end of the Universe. It actually went on to say that the logical end of this was that you would need to produce all possible Anagrams of the entire text of the "Torah". To produce this in any meaningful way using the best of current technology would take far longer than the Universe has existed or will exist. However, as technology improves, we will eventually create a program and a machine which could carry out such a task within a meaningful timescale. Our forward movement will hasten our own end.

Of course, all this is rubbish, but our own advancement does damage our environment and will hasten our end or at least bring forward the moment when we have to leave this planet/Solar system. The real point of this entry is to highlight the repetition of various theories between cultures. Of course, both the writers of "The Nine Billion Names of God" and "Foucault's Pendulum" are White, Western and, I think, Christian, at least by Birth so has the idea simply arisen spontaneously in both? It reminds me of something I spotted at the "Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology and World Archaeology" at Oxford.




This houses a huge collection of artefacts from every culture - it is the archetypal museum - no buttons - no sound - just stuff and lots of it. The collection is organised by function - not the culture of origin and therefore you will see a collection of Bow Lathes one of which is Ancient Egyptian and one that is Romany 20th Century (Jacob Bronowski mentions having seen one of the latter being used in the 1940s in "The Ascent of Man" - a book which deserves an entire entry if not an entire web-site). We re-invent things independently - Newton and Leibnitz invented calculus at the same time; nature continually re-invents things through evolution. Things which are "right" deserve repeating.

I am sure that a Neural net designed to learn some property shows this repetition infinitely - is it not some iterative re-invention of the "Correct" response, a sort of integration of learning? Could we not then extend this to evolution and say that "the survival of the fittest" is not just a random chance every so often, but a continuous process of working towards some ideal state. That makes me think of the idea of "Nirvana". Maybe Evolution is destined to result in some ideal organism. Of course some would argue that we are it but can you really say that about us? I suspect the reality is that the current "Top Organism" is just that at the time it exists rather than for the whole of history. Why are humans top? Why is any one religion the "right" one? Why is any one nation "Top Nation"? Nirvana will always retreat unless you do not want to get to it. You must catch it unawares out of the corner of your eye.

I have asked many more questions than I have answered today. Come back another time for a page of answers though not necessarily to these questions or indeed any questions that have yet been asked.