On 30 Aug 2011, at 13:11, benjayk wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Not sure I understand. "God" does not "need" we believe in It.
Right, so it makes sense to not believe in it.
That does not follow.
And I am not sure it makes sense to not believe in it, except when
you
give it a name.
(But then it means just that you don't believe in &é%$€##. It does
not mean that you don't believe (more or less consciously) in the one
which has no name.)
I have to correct myself. Indeed it makes no sense to not believe in
it. If
God is what is right here and now and obviously so, of couse it
makes little
sense to not believe in it. It makes "minimal" sense.
I can agree. (I could add nuances too, but I will not).
Bruno Marchal wrote:
They can't believe because the argument is good, they can just
believe it if it comes solely from authority.
Not on the fundamental matter. If they do that they will be victim of
bandits, manipulators, prohibionists and they will become slave.
This does not mean that they cannot trust some experts, and some
other
people, by some sort of personal judgment and reputation, but not
really in the fundamental matter.
They have no choice, because they don't have the strength to rely on
themselves. Of course ultimately they will have to go beyond that.
OK.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
I am talking in general. In the human affairs, all general statements
admit many exception. Don't take me too much seriously.
Just saying that in the fundamental inquiry, dogma are problematic.
In science (when working well) there is no dogma, nor any ontological
commitment. There are only ontological requirements in hypothetical
theories.
Honestly, I begin to question that. We can be dogmatic on goodness,
Not sure about that. It is the error of many "religion". It is the
error of the prohibitionists. It is the error of those who pretend to
know what is good for you. Some doctors in some region of the world
does that error almost systematically too.
I think.
Just because we have the need to believe in it,
Either you are lucky enough to meet some "good" thing, and you believe
in goodness.
Or you are so unlucky you never meet something good (which might be
logically impossible, but let us forget this here), in which case I
doubt any dogma can help.
otherwise science makes no
sense. Why do science if the world is screwed anyway?
You know the koan of the zen master who, for escaping bandits, fall
from a cliff, but remains hanged two seconds, and see a blueberry,
and ... eat it, and enjoy it, just before falling and dying.
We can do science for many reason, for the personal fun, but also to
provide some help to unscrew the world a little bit.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
That can happen too, but does not contradict what you were saying.
It is important to keep this in mind in real life. I have seen
people
dying form disease, mainly because their friends made them guilty
of
it. They think : "If you are sick, you must have done something
wrong". But this is a wishful thinking to appease their own fear of
the disease. This is a rare thing which I don't follow in some
buddhist school: that if something bad happen to you, it is due
to an
error you have made in some preview life. But this eliminate too
much
contingencies a priori. They may be right, or they may be wrong.
I am
just very *agnostic* on this. With comp, we cannot avoid a part of
contingency, like the WM duplication already illustrates.
OK. I am not at all saying that we suffer for doing wrong. Sometimes
we do,
but more often than not, we don't, and the worst suffering usually
occurs
when you did nothing wrong. I am more saying that we might suffer
for a
purpose, and in a way to help us develop, not due to contingencies.
Even with 'biology', 1-suffering has a 3-purpose: the maintenance of
life and survival.
Just that I take the idea that suffering have some grand purpose,
like
in some religion, a bit dangerous, because it "justifies" the
existence of suffering, and it leads to a critic of happiness. This
generates unnecessary guiltiness.
But it has some obvious grand purpose. Suffering wants to get
better. The
only way to most quickly ever increasing bliss (let's just postulate
this is
the goal) is to maximally desperately want to get better.
That might be a path, but I don't see why it is the only one. With the
right mindset, anything can be a path.
Guilt is okay. It motivates us to do more effort.
When the guilt comes from genuine self-reference, and not from dogma,
or moral manipulation.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Bruno Marchal wrote:
Somehow they really don't want them to
exist.
Which is of course still a form of wishful thinking. To take desire
for reality.
Yes. True spirituality means a lot of responsibility. It means you
will
never be able to escape the inner demons... Even if you happen to
die
without suffering much during your life.
And you say you are optimistic ?
Yes. If you merge with the inner demons (as opposed to escaping
them), they
become a great joy, because they motivate (force) you to want to get
better.
This seems just problematic as long as we have not enough strength
to easily
incoporate them.
People have to understand this by themselves. About what I could say
both the plant and the LUMs suggest cautiousness.
With the LUMs, I could just say that we enter in the open problems land.
Bruno Marchal wrote:
But really it is both, the heart cannot confront all the pain at
once, so it needs to hide painful truth sometimes, until we can face
it.
OK.
The problem relies only when the hiding will just make the pain
higher
later, as it is often the case in deny and delusion with respect to
our more probable history.
Yeah, no way around the pain, ultimately. It will come to you,
whether you
want it or not.
How do you know that?
Could that be meaningful addressed to people recovering or handling
pains?
I am not sure I follow you. It is not just non-communicable (non
provable) but it might even be false.
Be it for the baby, the child, the adult, the aging people, sane or
sick, pain is not a fatality and personally I promote the harm
reduction technic, or even an harm reduction spirit. It is coherent
with the machines' theology, where truth, good, knowledge are
undefinable, and somehow remains the private properties of the soul.
Such things should not even mentioned in a public contract.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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