John,
On 18 Feb 2012, at 22:54, John Mikes wrote:
A bit from 'outside the box':
the 'religious' ideas emerged from the 'awe' how very ancient apes
looked at the world. It went through innumerable changes to reach a
tribe with writing skills and the Bible was established saving
positive attitudes of the Super Naturals (whatever THEY were) as
'Good Lord' FOR ME. (Some polytheistics also included vile
characteristics, but never mind that). In Mono (or almost mono) it
is MY GOD who I ask to destroy MY enemies - and HeSheIt does it.
My enemy, however asks (the same?) God to destroy ME and HIS GOOD
LORD does just that.
Over the past 5000+ years the 5000+th version of such Scriptures
still attracts faithful.
Surprisingly well educated and reasonably smart people still take
such hearsay for basic knowledge.
YES. The reason is probably that we are still under 1500 years of
making the field taboo.
(it is normal, for making it taboo permits easily the control of
majorities by minorities. It makes social sense).
As we got smarter,
That's what *we* think. I'm not sure of that. (But that's another
topic). We do accumulate discoveries and tools, though.
the main questions concentrated on Creation and Teleology. With all
the mental training we underwent we still have no better image than
the bearded old man in a white nightgown?
Fairy tales for adults.
I propose a different image:
The World (Everything) is an Infinite Complexity.
I would prefer, with Plotinus, Utter Simplicity.
I can argue that comp just gives that. God is arithmetical truth, and
that is really the Pythagorean Simplicity. It is almost magically
simple, for the concept can be understood by everyone (except perhaps
philosophers).
Yet, it rejoins your idea of Infinite Complexity, because this is how
the simple arithmetical truth can only appear from the point of view
of the number or machine living inside it.
Never mind how it occurred, it is WAY beyond our mental capabilities
even to imagine it.
Right. (Well I can't know that, but it is meta-right, which I will
define by "implied by comp").
I will use the prefix "meta-" to mean "implied by the comp hypothesis".
Some features transpired into human minds (=mental functions we
apply by our tool - the brain) and Homo rounded it up continually
into a MODEL of the TOTAL, explaining ALL questionable features from
WITHIN it.
And then you have the bombs. The universal numbers, which makes
arithmetical truth beyond the grasp of our (machine) theories. We meta-
discover that we, the machines, can only scratch the surface of even
"just" arithmetical truth. Creative bombs, not destructive bombs, but
they put mess by adding complexity by their attempts to understand.
It will still take time before the humans stop trying to name the ONE.
Indeed.
The 'Infinite Complexity' includes more and we have no access to the
'beyond our model' features, nor how they (their relations?) may be
'organized', - BUT there is an easy way: we imagine it in OUR ways,
i.e. anthropocentrically as 'processing topics'. (They may be
completely different, relations of aspects, or even descriptions
beyond our present vocabulary.)
The irrationalists do this, or anyone pretending to know the truth.
Such 'imaging' (?) makes the debate about 'name' or 'idea' of 'G-O-
D' baseless and superfluous.
The comp GOD, that is arithmetical truth, is not nameable by the
machine, and it is a key feature of their theology.
The comp theology is consistent by remaining scientific. It does not
assert any truth, but consequences of a very strong hypothesis: comp.
There are some idioms in the discussion I don't care about:
'Random' - if such exists, we have no physical (or other observed)
order to establish.
Comp implies first person randomness, by the many embedding of the
iterated self-duplications in arithmetic, more easily seen in the UD
(The tiny Sigma_1 part of arithmetic).
'Evolution': every change occurs within the feasibility of the
'givens' - some survive, some don't.
This is relative, it might be that some survive here, some survive
else where. We don't know, but comp, like QM, are everything-type of
theories, with the indexical actualisation of all possibilities
(relative arithmetical consistencies), so it favors the idea that "not
surviving" might not be a realist first person option. Despite the
third person appearances, which makes indeed making believe to some
machine that they evolve.
Occasional snapshots of our science don't even detect the completely
unsuccessful.
'Free Will': cousin of 'random', we, as products of the Infinite
Complexity have circumstances to live within and cannot even
'decide' outside the givens. Some such decisions are conscious, some
are not.
Etc.
I really enjoyed the dicussion
Me to :)
Best,
Bruno
John Mikes
On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 1:35 PM, John Clark <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
> It's not trying to explain how God did it though, it gets around
that by collapsing all whats and hows into a single overarching Who
and Why.
Exactly, religion takes everything we don't understand and puts it
into a box, it then writes "God" on a label and sticks it on the box
and decrees that the problem is now solved. This is progress? If the
physicists at CERN announced that all life including human life was
created by the Klogknee Field but didn't even attempt to explain how
it had done this miraculous thing would you be satisfied? I wouldn't
be.
When Charles Darwin wrote his book in 1859 he didn't just say
Evolution is the key to understanding life he explained how, he
explained how it could lead to the origin of species; and that's why
he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and that is the
difference between science and religion.
> The mechanemorphic model is certainly a tremendous improvement
over the anthropmorphic but it is still half wrong. [...] The
biggest problem for me with the God idea is that it is arbitrarily
humanoid.
I don't dislike the God theory because of anthropomorphism, although
I'm not a big fan of long white beards myself I feel than any being
should have a right to facial hair if He fancies that sort of thing.
The reason I dislike the God theory is that it explains absolutely
nothing.
> If we were to take the worldview of mechanism literally, we would
have no idea who we were, nor would we care.
I don't know what this means.
> I don't see that it would be a problem for God to make physics
Great, so how did He do it? I'm all ears!
> I can make a castle out of sand, so God can make a universe out of
physics
I don't know about you but I can explain how I made a castle out of
sand, so why can't God do what I can. If' you're puzzled how
something as marvelous and complex as X came to be and someone tells
you that Y made it but cannot even begin to explain how it did so
and also cannot explain how Y came to be in the first place then
that "explanation" has not really rendered you any the wiser. It's
often said that science can't explain everything and that's true,
but religion can't explain ANYTHING.
> I don't see that the universe has any particular preference for
simplicity over complexity, it seems to make good use of both.
Yes but explanations do have a preference for simplicity over
complexity; that's what a explanation is, describing something we
don't understand in terms of something we do understand.
> You must understand that spirituality is an anthropological
universal: we have never, ever come
in contact with any culture which does not have spiritual concepts.
And what things have all those millenniums of spirituality produced?
1) Lots and lots of fancy tombs built with backbreaking effort by
people who would have preferred to be doing something else.
2) Some good paintings.
3) Poetry that nobody reads if they're not teaching or taking a
class in it.
4) Ridiculous philosophy.
5) Lots and lots of cadavers manufactured in bloody holy wars.
> This cannot be brushed aside
I think I just did.
> randomness becomes another name for God.
Yet another example of someone willing to abandon the idea of God
but not the 3 letter word "G-O-D".
> Causality magically appears from randomness. Why?
I don't know, but I do know that given enough time even
astronomically unlikely things will happen, in fact they will happen
a infinite number of times if infinity is at your disposal.
John K Clark
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