On 31 Jan 2013, at 19:42, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> i don't believe in the GOD in which you don't believe in.
Then what are we arguing about? Are we arguing about science or
mathematics or philosophy, or are we just arguing about first grade
vocabulary?
Good question. You are the one criticizing the use of some word,
despite, like we do in science, the key words are redefine each time
we use them.
> but I disagree with your insistence to define God by the Abramanic
one,
I don't understand how you can disagree with the definition of a
word, especially if it's the same definition used by 99% of the
people on the planet who wish to communicate.
Today, in Occident, perhaps. the term "God" as a lasting use in
philosophy; as others have point out. In comp, it is the difference
between G and G* which relates the Platonist "god" , truth, with
arithmetic. It is tha fact, many thanks to Tarski theorem, that the
concept of arithmetical truth share the main attribute of God: like
non nameability, ineffability, roots of everything, everywhere and
everytime presence/relevance, and even more with the God of the
neoplatonists (simplicity, origin or the Noùs, origin of the souls,
origin of the illusion of matter, and why it obeys a "spurious
calculus" (Plotinus). The similarities are striking, and Plotis get
quite close to comp with its chapter on "the Numbers".
> God, in philosophy or science, denotes the ultimate explanation
You believe that your pee pee argument proves that numbers are the
ultimate explanation of everything, it doesn't prove that
It does not prove that for someone confusing "and" and "or" or first
person and third person. You should find a flaw to assess what you say
here, but you just stop doing the experience. To verify the
statistics, you have to put yourself at the place of each copies, but
for unknown reason you fail to do that simple exercise.
but even if it did that would not be "God" as the word is commonly
used.
And here you come back with your vocabulary problem. You don't believe
in the fairy tale version of christian God, and for some mysterious
reason you want throw out all notion of gods like if it was the only
one. This is like throwing genetics because some people are wrong on
it. It is not rational.
I tend to interpret this by the fact that you want the whole field of
theology being spurious, but it seems clear you have never read
neoplatonists, or just Plato and Aristotle on Gods and God.
Numbers are not a being much less the supreme being, numbers did not
will the universe into existence and numbers do not change human
destiny or the way the universe operates on a whim influenced buy
prayer.
... and you don't red me. the God notion raised by comp is NOT a
number. Arithmetical truth is NOT definable in arithmetic. I have
insist on this all along. You betray that you did not read the post,
and that your critics is based on prejudices, like your critics on
theology in general.
Numbers are not the source of all moral authority, and nobody thinks
that numbers are deserving of worship, and nobody prays to the
integers.
Indeed. Comp makes this into a blasphemy. God, in mechanism, is not a
number, at all. Nor is matter, nor is consciousness.
You could of course personally redefine the word so that "God" and
numbers are synonyms,
I could not. I have explained this in detail.
and in the extraordinarily unlikely possibility that you manage to
convinced others to adopt this new linguistic convention you would
have succeeded in explaining absolutely nothing about how the world
works, you'd have just changed English, one of about 7000 human
languages used on this planet.
And then you'd need to invent a new word for the old meaning of the
word "God" and then people like me would say "of course I believe in
God but I don't believe in Fluberblast" and then over time people
would develop a emotional attachment to the word "Fluberblast" and
insist on redefining the word and give it such a amorphous all
encompassing sloppy meaning that everybody would have to say " I
believe in Fluberblast".
Vocabulary discussion. Just to define your God, which is actually a
christian simplification of Aristotle's third God: primary matter.
At ll level, you seems to defend the Aristotelian theology/theory of
everything. Like many atheists you want us to believe that this is the
only rational option. But comp explains in detail why this can't work,
and to avoid this, you have to do confuse 1p and 3p at some point, and
we have shown you were.
>> I know exactly what it is that I don't believe in,
> Really?
Yes really.
> It looks like Santa Klaus to me.
God looks like Santa Klaus to me too, and that is exactly why
theology has no more substance to it than Santaklausology.
This is so ridiculous.
> You know that both of us does not find such existence plasuible,
or even capable of explaining anything.
Then what are we arguing about?
On the fact that machines can distinguish between many different
notion of truth: that they feel, or intuits, or observe, or prove, or
get through special experiences, etc.
Shouldn't we be arguing about concepts not how best to redefine
words so that it is possible to say "I believe in God" without being
a complete fool?
With computer science we can distinguih between truth about a machine,
and truth accessible by the machine, and this in different ways, and
it matches what mysticals and religious people described, beyond the
popular fairy tale account.
God, if you want, is the ultimate truth which remains when you lost
your faith in the primary physical reality. if you want.
> I use the term God, as it was used with that large and vague
meaning for a millenium before it becomes a political tool of
manipulation.
The common meaning of God a millennium ago was NOT the amorphous
philosophical blob you're talking about,
Arithmetical truth is not an amorphous blob. The God discussed by the
greeks was close to it. It comes from Pythagoras, and the
neoplatonists makes are responsible for a revival of the Pythagorean
thread. The numbers have always play a role in theology. for the
greeks, mathematics was the best inspiration for theology.
it meant the same thing it meant 5 millennium before that, a being
who's existence was as concrete as that of your wife or children.
Then we should not use the word "earth" to describe a our spheric
planet, which has been thought to be falt by a majority for a long
time. The meaning of words evolve. It is pretty ridiculous to throw
out a concept because of a word.
God meant a being in which it was a good idea to sacrifice virgins
to. To my knowledge nobody has ever sacrificed virgins to the
integers, although I admit there is a story (probably apocryphal)
about Pythagoras killing a man for leaking the proof that the square
root of 2 could not be expressed as a fraction.
> But if you don't like that term I will use "ONE" with discussing
with you,
Like the word "God" the ASCII sequence "ONE" already has a meaning
in the English language, the first positive integer. If you've
discovered a new concept that nobody has ever found before then you
shouldn't use a word that already has a meaning or you will cause
needless confusion, you're going to have to invent a new word for
it, let's call it "Fluberblast".
It is frequent that a word has different meaning. The fact that you
reject "one" which is the quite standard term in neoplatonism shows
how much to have bad faith on such question. Good, I will stick on
"God", which is indeed much more general. keep in mind that with comp,
the question is god (arithmetical truth) can be personal is an open
problem in math.
> as you take the vocabulary too much seriously, imo.
Me?! You're the one who has such a strong emotional attachment to
one particular word in the vocabulary "God" that you insist on using
it where it does not belong!
I just propose to use another word, and you criticize it!
Sorry but you are the one who seems to get nervous on the vocabulary.
You want God being only the Christian God, worst, the american
creationist version of the christian god (despite I have never found
once christian ever believing in it).
> I search a TOE. Concentrate on the understanding, not the
vocabulary.
No you do not. If you really meant that you wouldn't be torturing
the meanings of words just to make it reasonable to say "I believe
in God".
Well, I am not an atheist.
What do you believe in?
> Do you believe in a primary physical universe? Are you physicalist?
Well I'm not sure what you mean but I think that everything which
exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; but that's
not very restrictive because some physical properties, such as
gravity, are infinite in extent. Intelligent behavior is also a
physical property and if Darwin was correct then consciousness MUST
be a byproduct of that.
OK. So you are physicalist, but then you have to say "no" to the
digitalist doctor. You believe that the human body is not a
machine ... or you will have o confuse 1p and 3p like indeed most
atheists do, to save the notion of primary matter, or physicalism.
>> a world that was intelligently designed
>We both have agreed that this does not make any sense, at least as
an explanation.
Then what are we arguing about?
I don't know. You are the one annoy by the use of a term.
>> a world that was intelligently designed would look very different
from one that was not, therefore deciding between the 2 hypothesis
is a scientific question that can be resolved just like any other.
> Not really with comp.
I don't give a shit about "comp"
I guess that explains many things about your posts. You don't read,
you don't do the reasoning, eventually you believe that you have cut
with your religious education, but you did not. You defend the
Aristotle theology, and condemn the Platonist one, exactly like the
most fundamentalist christians.
but I do know that Evolution never figured out how to make a wheel
large enough to see without a microscope, it never made a supersonic
bird as heavy as an elephant, or an animal powered by a nuclear
reactor, or even one that could move its head by 360 degrees. Even
the stupidest camera designer would put the wires that connect to
the light sensitive chip below the chip not above it so they'd
interfere with the light, but that's where the blood vessels that
support the retina in the human eye are. The vagus nerve connects
the brain to the larynx, in a giraffe the two organs are less than
a foot apart but the vagus nerve is more than 15 feet long, it runs
all the way down the neck and then double backs and goes back up the
neck to the larynx; no human designer much less a infinitely
intelligent one would be that stupid.
No problem with that, except that evolution theory is based on comp,
so eventually you must understand that the physical laws also have an
origin and did evolve (in a non physical reality, the arithmetical one
or Turing equivalent).
> If your were willing to study step 4 [...]
That's not going to happen, there was far far too much pee pee in
the first 3 steps.
Show them. You did not convince anybody, I think. You are using vulgar
expression like if that was a valid way to avoid an argument. That's
hardly impressive.
> You elude my simple question. What do you mean by "grand concept"?
A concept that is grand. You really should buy a good dictionary.
You mean "key", "fundamental", I guess.
>> The evidence very strongly indicates that mind is what the brain
does if that's what you mean.
> So you do assume the existence of a primitive or primitively
material brain?
I don't know because I don't know what a "primitively material
brain" is supposed to be.
It means that the TOE assumes the existence of a conceptually
irreducible notion of matter. We have to assume it at the start. But
with comp, matter is derived from something non physical (but still
mathematical).
> Are such brain Turing emulable?
Yes.
OK. That's comp.
But then you are put in contradiction. The contradiction appears in
step 3 indeed: you believe that you are able to 100% predict where you
will uniquely (as you grant) feel to be after a self-duplication,
making all your copies refuting you.
> If yes, how do you predict the first person feeling of a person
doing a physical measurement?
I can't with certainty predict if someone is going to do a physical
measurement because of quantum randomness and because their brain is
too complicated.
The quantum is not relevant. The hypothesis is that the brain is
Turing emulable. Turing emulability is defined in arithmetic, not in
quantum physics.
You start from physicalism, and this explains probably your
difficulties on this subject.
You must be able, at least, to conceive that physicalism can be wrong
to progress on this subject.
> You might study some book on the mind-body problem.
Why would that be a good use of my time? What evidence is there that
they know more about it than I do, or that they know anything at all
about it?
You have to read them a little bit before judging them, I think.
Especially that the literature is vast, and is quite variate in amount
of clarity and rigor.
The mind-body problem is about consciousness and it's also called
the "hard problem", if the authors of those books were good enough
to have something worthwhile to say about it they should have
already solved the "easy problem" of intelligence and be
trillionaires. But they are not trillionaires because as I've said
before, being a hard problem theorist is far far far easier than
being a easy problem theorist. Don't worry about why things are
conscious till you've figured out why things are smart.
<sigh>
This means that you are not interested in the mind-body problem, but
that is part of the "everything" type of quest, which is the main
theme of this list.
> we have not yet solve the problem.
There may not even be a problem to solve, after saying that
consciousness is what data feels like when it is being processed
there may not be anything more that can be said on the subject; what
cannot be spoken about must be passed over in silence.
That's a theorem in comp, but it does not concern the mind body
relation, but God and the theological things. We can assume comp and
derive consequences.
You have a religion, and seem to be unaware of this, and unable to
question it, making it into pseudo-religion and pseudo-science.
Evolution have programmed us to believe, or to take very seriously our
environment, and this has perhaps leads us from time to time in the
belief of metaphysical naturalism, but science is, notably, a tool for
taking distance with such belief.
We still call our planet Earth, despite we have change it from a plane
to a sphere. Likewise, after Thomas, some Christians (among the
theologians) have stopped to believe that God can be both omniscient
and omnipotent. It is natural that "Earth" and "God", as concept, can
evolve.
Well, as long as you believe that you can predict an "and" (M and W)
for your most probable continuations, in the WM-duplication
experience, I guess I will not been able to make you see how physics
has to be reduced into number theory, once we postulate the comp thesis.
I will no more defend the use of the term "God", I will just refer to
the translation of Plotinus view of "everything" in arithmetic as
described in my Plotinus paper (where I use "one" instead of "god" of
course).
In science we use all the terms in axiomatic, or semi-axiomatic (in
the applied science), which is the standard tool for avoiding boring
vocabulary distinction.
It was a pleasure for me that you confirm, with so much insistence, my
feeling that vindicating atheists defend the same Gods ("god" and
"primary matter") as the Aristotelians. John Mike made a similar
argument.
I say this, because some people believe that comp is actually very
much atheistic, given that a computationalist has to reject *all*
Aristotelian gods, not just the demiurge, also the primary matter (see
the definition above). But I prefer to follow the Platonist
terminology, because they made clear that mysticism can fit completely
with rationalism, and I think this is helpful to understand the point
that computationalism is a vaccine against the widespread reductionist
conceptions of the human soul. It helps also to understand the
mystical roots of mathematics and science.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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