Deistic Ontology

Photo by Robynne Hu on Unsplash

Imagine the headlines:

• Powerful alien discovered!
• Alien has superpowers--knows what you’re up to!
• You are being judged!

Don’t you think every government, military and R&D facility would be on the case, working up threat analyses on this powerful, moralistic entity?

Apparently not. Yet we have to take this Being seriously. Deny its existence and the Great Religions are simply men and women in frocks expressing pointless rituals: an OCD epidemic.

And as for their followers …

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If God is real, what would our research programme conclude? Omniscient, omnipotent and moralistic: it’s a tough specification, pretty much full-on agency, a fully-realised intentional system.

Agents are conceptualised within AI as four-vectors: [Perceptions, Beliefs, Goals, Actions]. The corresponding agent-algebra tells you that perceptions combine with prior beliefs and goals to generate plans consisting of actions. In the process, beliefs and goals get updated. It’s more complex but this basic model is good enough for Government work.

Where do an agent’s goals come from? Ultimately from homeostasis requirements. The agent is designed to survive (in biology its genes are): as Woody Allen said, “80 percent of life is showing up.”

The non-trivial agent confronts a challenging environment which knocks it away from its enduring, homeostatic ambitions--it gets hungry or thirsty; it’s threatened, damaged or needs to find a mate. In its situated context homeostasis determines goals and plans … and demands their execution to restore the agent to its set-point.

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How do we apply this model to God?

For omniscience and omnipotence, God’s sensor and effector apparatuses must span all of spacetime. God’s beliefs should be accurate--but complete and effective sensory coverage should address that, other (processing) things being equal.

But what are God’s goals?

It seems parochial that a Cosmic God should be motivated by the needs or welfare of the puny beings of Sol Planet Three at Big-Bang + 13.8 billion years. I think we need a more universal homeostasis requirement, something more Spinozan.

God is concerned with preserving the harmony of the universe.

A requirement for homeostasis is only interesting if there is a threat to it. At the level of the universe--harmoniously regulated by the laws of physics--God becomes non-trivial, non-superfluous only if there is a threat to those very laws. Perhaps in the bifurcating projections of the universe's state-vector in Hilbert space--where our universe shimmers in possibilities--there are pathological outcomes which threaten the very fabric, the very integrity of the entire cosmos.

Catalysed false-vacuum decay.

Just as the coldest place in the universe is on planet Earth, perhaps the greatest threat to our universe’s stability is also here?

Imagine God as a deep neural net with inputs and outputs at each point in spacetime: past, present and future. The neural net resides in an orthogonal set of spatial dimensions and has a developmental trajectory in a second time dimension. Its understanding of the present state of all reality is its collection of input-vectors in superposition. Each input-vector corresponds to a possible world weighted by its amplitude.

The feedback loop in second-time is from possible worlds and their amplitudes through the God-net with its evolving weight-matrices through to spacetime actions through to revised amplitudes. The intent is to ensure that possible worlds representing pathological excursions constitute a set of measure zero.

Who or what is giving God grief? People who want supernatural actions--either to help their own cause or to bring fire and brimstone down on their opponents. Praying over the millennia hasn’t had much effect but high-energy physics?

It is possible to frighten God: perhaps in productive ways.

If you knew there was a well-funded, competent adversary-team with access to unimaginably high energy-densities sufficient to trigger a bubble nucleation event, what would you do? If you were a state with an intelligence agency and resources, that is.

Could we go beyond threats against the Deity. Could we converse with it -- is God a second-order intentional system? What should we say? Is God even a conscious entity? Is God classical or a quantum entity, could God be in a superposition of mental states?

So that's the setting (as requested). Now over to Adam to devise the characters, plot and narrative.

COVID-19 dynamics: simple coronavirus models

1. From deaths to current number of infections

The deaths reported in a country are usually the cumulative deaths so far. By the time someone has died though (they caught the infection a while ago) the infection has since increased. Here's a model which takes both these facts into account.

Assumptions

(1) lethality rate is 2%;
(2) average time to die after infection is one week (conservative assumption);
(3) numbers doubling time is 7 days (during the early, exponential phase of the infection).

Note that in a sequence which doubles, the latest figure is half the total so far. Thus 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. The current figure, sixteen, is approximately half the total of thirty one.

Example:a country which reports 16 deaths so far - also [n deaths].

1. Deaths (overall) = 16  [n]

2. Deaths in the latest iteration = 8  [n/2]
   - assume the 8 people caught it 7 days ago=1 iteration.

3. Infected cases 7 days ago = 50 * number now dead @ 2% lethality
    infected = 50 * 8 = 400   [25n]

5. Number infected now (twice as many) = 800  [50n].

So when you hear on the news that so many people are reported dead in some country, multiply by 50 to get the current number of cases.

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2. The pattern of number of cases

If the infection was spreading in a closely-coupled population with no obvious barriers then the number of cases would increase as the logistics curve at the top of the page above. But countries are engaged in lockdown. This means that the logistics curve will apply inside the quarantine area - perhaps with a smaller R0 if people self-quarantine at home - but that spread outside will be impeded.

However, this is a hard virus to lockdown completely given asymptomatic transmission. So it's quite likely that - with a delay - new cities and regions will be infected ... and then locked down.

This gives a waviness modulating the global logistics curve. The global curve is a series of mini-logistics-curves glued together. It makes the overall pandemic a more protracted affair, which obviously helps in terms of public health logistics, but it's unlikely to stop the virus in its tracks.

It also creates periodic illusions that 'the infection is levelling off'.

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3. The case of Iran

Iran's Shia theocracy is culturally not like the West, or indeed China. I wonder whether their current policy is not so much incompetence as a simple resignation to letting the virus just run to completion.

The reactionary theocrats running Iran may believe that their middle-class opponents are more likely to suffer as a consequences of the pandemic (the conservative rural multitudes will just soak it up) plus they are mostly surrounded by enemies: Israel, Arabs and Sunnis. What's not to like about being a country-level superspreader?

This would be interesting if true: Covid-19 as implicit biological warfare.

COVID-19: should we be worried? Yes

Dr Neil Ferguson of Imperial college seems the go-to guy:

"Our estimates – while subject to much uncertainty due to the limited data currently available – suggest that the impact of the unfolding epidemic may be comparable to the major influenza pandemics of the 20th century,” he said. [Daily Telegraph].

I heard him on PM yesterday evening. He reckons 60-70% of the UK population will eventually get it, of whom 1% will die; big error bars for the next three weeks. Given asymptomatic transmission with R0 2-3 it can't be kept out or contained within the UK over any extended period. Especially when it goes exponential in countries outside of China.

From Le Monde: (Practise your French) :

"selon une modélisation, un groupe de trois Etats se situe dans le trio de tête des pays les plus menacés par une arrivée du virus : l’Egypte, l’Algérie et l’Afrique du Sud. Ils sont suivis d’un second groupe constitué, lui, du Nigeria et de l’Ethiopie."

Lots of links between China and Africa. Public health screening and treatment not brilliant in the latter.

UK risks: (i) breakdowns in the supply chain May/June when the pandemic really takes hold here; (ii) personal incapacity and/or need to self-quarantine.

What can you do? 

- Shop now for cans of soup, long-life milk, dried fruits and cereals, sanitary items; face-masks (they won't look so ridiculous soon).

- Check out your camping cooker.

- Petrol in the car - don't forget the car can charge mobile phones.

Buy stuff you'll be able to consume after the pandemic so you're not wasting money.

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The Mormons famously have a survivalist level of supplies, c. six months. But 2-4 weeks should do it - you can always go half-rations.

I always think the best time to panic-buy is before other people realise they have to.

Note

Best estimate of case doubling time at present seems to be 7 days. If, by the end of February, there were 16 invisible cases in the UK, time to one million is (sixteen doublings) = 16 weeks = four months.

It won't seem a major problem here before Easter is my prediction (note big error bars!).

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Update (13/2/20): I today cancelled our June holiday in Crete. The call-centre operative seemed unsurprised when I mentioned COVID-19. We have, however, been hit by a stinging cancellation fee, the entire deposit, 20% of the overall cost.

I'm thinking this summer is going to be disastrous for the holiday companies and for travel insurers.

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Update: If you have a VPN into the UK it is educational to watch this:

"Hannah Fry leads a nationwide experiment to help plan for the next deadly flu pandemic, which could happen at any time. How many will it kill? What can we do about it?"

The BBC/Cambridge model parameters are basically spot-on for Covid-19 (R₀=1.8; lethality=2%).

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Update (14/2/20): My brother wrote to me and observed:

"I would take issue with one of your precautions: Don’t waste time and (increasingly large amounts of) money on surgical (or most other types of) masks. Even the better ones have an interweave gap some three times larger than the virus and invariably get damp, increasing the stickability.

Leave your eyes, nose and mouth open to the world, just don’t touch them without washing/gelling hands (as frequently as possible)."

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