Le 20-janv.-06, à 16:04, John M wrote (in part):
thanks for your approval to my post on 'belief'. To this one, however, I think you mix up "evidence" with "assumption". The beautiful sunshine is "assumed" to be God's gift for us, it is a 1st person idea if we like it, or find it burning, to assign it as a gift or a curse. It is our "perception of reality" anyway. I stand with my Popperian example - which you did not address in my post - about 'proof and falsification'.
I did elsewhere. Also I think we could have perhaps some vocabulary problems. I agree that some believer in God does assume that a beautiful sunshine is a God's gift to us. Here I was more alluding to Plato's view of God as "the Good", and I was talking about someone who makes such a personal experience of beauty, in front of that sunshine, that he takes it as a, personal or first person for sure, experience of the Good/God/whatever (sort of mystical experience if you want). Of course it is not a proof (as in pure math), nor an evidence in the Popper sense of confirmation. Nor can a reconstitution of oneself during a teleportation be a proof of comp, nor can quantum suicide provides any proof that QM, or Everett, or comp are true. First Person Knowledge is just incorrigible and unfalsifiable, and as such unscientific. Science is concerned only with third person discourses, or, arguably, with first person plural discourses (the one which I defined explicitly through duplication of populations of individuals).
Now I don't think it is really important to be so precise in the beginning. At some point I will be obliged to say many counter-intuitive propositions and explain how in some important cases first person truth can indirectly lead to 100% falsifiable third person propositions, but it is not easy to explain. Well, I wouldn' t have believe myself a large part of what I want to explain if that wouldn't have been confirmed by the Lobian interview. Nevertheless, I am realizing now that many "rational mystics" (including the Neoplatonist pagan theologians) are closer to the lobian machine than I would have thought before reading Plotinus. I am still searching more confirmation because if this is confirmed (I have some criteria) it would put some new light on the discussion.
I will try to sum up this in a new thread on Plotinus (and neoplatonism, more generally). At some point I will explain how I am getting (apparently) an arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus, and on some part of Plato's Parmenides. My work would make Plotinus theory of matter 100% experimentally testable.
Of course there is nothing miraculous that honest introspector converge toward the lobian discourse, given that this is the discourse of the self-referential correct machine.
I don't know if that relation with Plotinus will help me selling my stuff, but this is another problem (for a future different thread). What some Christian theologians dismissed in Plato, they will dismiss it in any TOE.
Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
