On Fri, Aug 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Define "God" > The God I don't believe in is a omniscient omnipotent being who created the universe. If you define God, as so many fans of the word but not the idea do, as "a force greater than myself" then I am a devout believer because I believe in gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong nuclear force. I believe in bulldozers too. > "theology" > The study of something that does not exist. > and "crackpot idea". > Examples work better than definitions in this case, in most cases actually. There are 3 types: 1) A minor crackpot is someone who works very hard on a problem and produces absolutely nothing of value, and there is little or no hope of him or anybody else doing better in the immediate future. Part of genius is knowing what problems have the potential to be solved with existing intellectual tools and which do not. In 1859 Darwin realized there was no hope of him figuring out how life started, but if he worked very hard he might figure out the origin of species. And he did, and he left the origin of life to later generations, Darwin knew that if he tried in his day he'd just be spinning his wheels. This type of crackpot is the most interesting and in some ways is almost heroic, but at the end of the day they are just wasting their time. You might even say that Einstein turned into this sort of crackpot during the last 20 years of his life with his doomed attempts to develop a unified field theory uniting electromagnetism and gravity, if he had died in 1935 instead of 1955 physics would have been changed very little despite the herculean amount of work he put in during those two decades. 2) A mid-level crackpot is someone who advocates ideas that have already been proven wrong. 3) The least interesting crackpot is the major crackpot, he advocates "ideas" that are so bad they are not even wrong. > There is no recipe for intelligence. > Prove that and you will have made a major advance in the field. > Only for domain competence. > OK, so give me a recipe for a competent mind in the domain of understanding how biology works, or meteorology, or how to write funny jokes. > Intelligence can "diagonalize" again all recipes. > I don't see how the diagonal argument can work if you include things like induction, statistical laws, and if X and Y then PROBABLY Z. I don't know the recipe for intelligence but I am certain these things are some of the ingredients. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
