John,
I have cut your last post in two, because they bear on different
topics. I renamed the thread accordingly.
On 04 Mar 2012, at 18:52, John Clark wrote:
> Nobody use the hypothesis that the brain is a machine in their
everyday life.
I do and do not find it difficult in any way, but then I believe in
comp.
You don't do that. You don't ask yourself at each instant if you would
survive with a digital brain.
I think that higher mammals have empathy, and are not solipsist, but
have no idea of comp.
I guess you are saying that "nature" uses comp, and I mainly agree
with that, but this is either an hypothesis, or something derivable in
some theory.
In fundamental inquiries, it is quite helpful to be agnostic on
everything, except your own consciousness.
> If tomorrow comp is refuted, you will not feel a difference.
Yes I would, I'd start to seriously contemplate the very real
possibility that I am the only conscious being in the universe, and
I doubt if madness would lie very far beyond that.
You keep saying this, but non-comp has nothing to do with solipsism.
Here is a simple logical counter-example. take any dualist theory in
which *all* humans have a non mechanical soul responsible for their
consciousness. This is logically conceivable (because you have agree
that we cannot prove comp). In that (admittedly weird situation)
solipsism is false (all humans are conscious) and mechanism is false
(the soul is non mechanical).
This is a logical counter-example to dissociate non-comp from solipsism.
>> But that's another problem, you're giving the word "God" and the
people who think the word is sacred far more respect than they
deserve.
> Yes, but it is the good kind of respect.
Respect is a perfectly valid emotion but so is contempt, you can't
say one is superior to the other only that depending on
circumstances one is more appropriate than the other. As religion,
in addition to being untrue, has brought more misery to the world
than any other single thing I don't believe you can say that the
major failing of the human race is that it hasn't shown religion
enough respect.
You confuse religion/theology, with what some humans have done with it.
> You did agree that we might define GOD by whatever is responsible
of our existence.
For the third time I did *NOT* agree to that, it is necessary but
NOT sufficient!
I was not given to you a complete definition of "god". Like often in
applied science we use partial axiomatization, and then generalize the
concept. It is the key of the axiomatic thinking.
Concerning God, such generalisation makes sense, because the initial
greek concept was already very general (it was the notion of the
truth that we are searching).
God needs to be a person.
In some tradition, and it is a mystery why you stick on those
tradition, given that you criticize them so vigorously.
If you start making up your own personal definitions for common
words you're not going to be able to communicate with anyone.
I don't submit often papers, for personal reason, but *serious*
scientists have never shown to have any problem with the reasoning I
proposed (unlike some materialist philosopher who criticize it for
personal conviction reason).
In Brussels the work has been rejected as being too much simple to
be a PhD thesis (+ a philosopher's critics who said he lost the line
of the proof). I mean, if you do the work, you will understand it.
I have introduced the term "theology" to prevent the too much easy
"critics", done by many, that what I was doing is ... theology. So I
prefer to vindicate, it, and if you read my Plotinus paper, you can
see that comp provides an arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus
theological world view. But even just with UDA, it is already a
theology in the sense it concerns a possibility of "reincarnation of a
soul/1-person" through re-implementation of program/number.
It concerns also notions of afterlife and immortality, the reason why
we are here. I use the term God, in a large sense which is agnostic on
what might be derived later. OK, there are few chance that the correct
machine will believe that God is a white old bearded man, but that is
only a popular human community view of God, criticized even by most
european christians.
The other reason, which I explain in detail in the long french text,
is that each time a God is named and eliminated, people replace it by
another God. In particular, some physicist have hard to conceive that
the physical universe might not have an ontological primary existence,
which means that they are not aware that the ontological primary
universe is, from a scientific pov, an hypothesis, not a fact. Then,
taking into account we have not yet solve the mind-body problem, we
must be aware of what are facts, and what is assumed, and be super-
cautious in our statements.
It is easy to make a subject taboo during 1500 years and then to judge
that the subject is meaningless, from what has been produced in the
"taboo time".
The greek theologians discussed it for a millenium, before, politics
if not gangsters simplifies it, and misused it to keep and develop
control and power.
But by mocking those who try, at least, to do theology with some
rigor, like studying the difference between what is true about
machines, and what they can justify---as I do notably, then you are
playing with them.
John Mikes said something deep on atheism, which is that it is a
position consisting in inventing a God to disbelieve in it. And
indeed, atheists defends the Christians, or Abrahamic, conception of
God for critisizing it, and then, some, like Richard Dawkins presents
science as if it was a sort of alternative, which makes science into
pseudo-science, and that fuels the argument for any superchery.
But in science, we don't know. We propose theories, only.
if you agree with Gödel's formalization of Saint-Anselmus' definition
of God, and with the idea that the modal logic S5 is the correct
alethic one, then God is a logical necessity. Most people, including
me, does not take this as serious theology, but still as serious
argument that we can progress rationally in that field (and that was
Gödel's point).
Now, comp has some consequence which are arguably theological, at
least from the machine povs.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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