On 28 Nov 2013, at 17:01, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 8:36 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
>> the Christian God who is the most unpleasant character in all
of fiction.
> It really depends on which Christians, which can be very different
from one culture to another.
I know some people who call themselves Christian but who are
nevertheless very nice people, but that can only happen because they
don't take their religion as seriously as some, most Muslims for
example.
I don't think so. I think they are spiritual enough to distinguish the
possible truth and anything written in any text any time.
They remain Christian, because they believe the "testaments" reflect
the faith that they can have, which in that domain is typically first
person non communicable.
Instead they go through the Bible and embrace the stuff they regard
as moral, like being kind to your fellow human beings,
Which actually is a problem of some of those text. "it is good to be
kind with the other fellow", but this is perhaps only going without
saying.
Machine's theology contains many true proposition, which becomes wrong
when asserted. That explains the difficulty of the subject. It is
full of many traps, so to get a propositional formal theology is very
nice (G*).
and ignoring the stuff they regard as immoral, like God engaging in
genocide in the Old Testament and Jesus approving of eternal
damnation in the New Testament. The Bible is such a big chaotic mess
of contradictory moral advice that no matter what your personal
views of ethics are you can be certain to find a passage in that
book that you like; and that tells me that morality has nothing to
do with religion in general or the Bible in particular.
Sure. the bible is to theology, what alchemy is to chemistry.
Something quite respectable but we should not be taken literally.
> I use God for any transcendental reality,
What's the difference between reality and transcendental reality?
You are reading this post right now. That's reality. Transcendental
reality is the big picture explaining that' reality, and that you
search for, in case you are interested in the fundamental questions.
There must be a difference, otherwise if you told be "I believe in
God" I would have received no new information about you that I
didn't already have because I already knew that anyone smart enough
to walk and chew gum at the same time believes in reality.
Universal (and non universal) machines will easily believes in a
reality. OK.
But Löbian machine (which are just universal machine capable of
proving their own universality, in some technical sense), get easily
confronted with the belief in some transcendental reality (one might
not go out of the mathematical reality, a priori).
> which implies some experience, and some faith
Yes I understand all that, I know that faith is required to believe
in God,
Like faith is required to believe that "what you see" is the real
primitive thing, and is well defined and explains all things and
experiences.
but what I don't understand is why that is supposed to be a virtue.
I don't believe in the "assumed" physical universe. Nor do I
disbelieve in it. I am agnostic on that "God".
But thanks to the discovery of the universal machine I have few doubt
that I can prove to you (if patient enough) the existence of all the
computations in the arithmetical reality. (I might know that already).
>> For some reason that I don't fully understand you just want to
make the following sound with your mouth "I believe in God" and it
doesn't matter what the sound means.
> You can replace the term "God" by the term "Reality" or "Truth
That is true, you can replace the term "God" by the term "Reality"
or "Truth,, but you don't. And the reason you don't is not profound
and has absolutely nothing to do with mathematics or philosophy; you
don't because for some mysterious reason you've fallen in love with
the sound your mouth makes when it pronounces the word "G-O-D".
There is no other reason.
The reason are given by the resemblance between the discourse of the
machine looking at herself (formalized by the logic G and G*, in the
ideally correct machine case) and the discourse the mystics and the
founders of "modern theology" (which died 1500 years ago).
You might read my paper on Plotinus.
The common part of the best theologian, in all traditions, have a non
negligible common part with Plotinus and the Löbian correct machines.
> The problem is that most people take a reality fro granted,
Well I take the reality of reality for granted, but you almost make
that sound like a bad thing.
Above consciousness here and now, you can only be a believer, and it
is not bad only if you can change your belief with new information.
But some people identify themselves with their beliefs, making them
making bad trip with honest scientific theology.
When someone identify itself with some belief, it takes the doubt
(which is a necessity in science) of the belief like a threat on their
identity, and so can't evolve on the subject. It is often the case for
the "transcendental reality", making the subject hot.
> but in the comp theory that is probably a sort of illusion.
A illusion is a perfectly real subjective phenomenon,
I agree. But we must distinguish the reality of the illusion, and the
reality true or false) of the content of the illusion.
and the above beautifully illustrates what I mean when I say that I
have no idea what in hell your homemade word "comp" means even
though you've been talking about it for years.
It is the hypothesis that the brain can be emulated by a computer.
Comp is for computationalism, and it is only a digital version of
Descartes' Mechanism.
It is the assumption I am doing, and I show that such assumption
reduces the mind-body problem into a belief-in-bodies problem in
arithmetic.
I illustrate that comp makes it possible to use theoretical computer
science to translate a problem in philosophy/theology into a problem
in arithmetic. I show also a method to handle that problem.
Don't confuse comp (the theory), and the consequences (theorems)
derived in that theory.
Bruno
John K Clark
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