It does seem that we've come to some agreement on the meaning of the word. It seems basically centered around Nick's original usage: faith is a kind of short circuit for justification. Steve's "faith" only short circuits a little bit, whereas his "Faith" short circuits a lot. The same could be said of Russ'.
We could think of this in terms of compressibility where faith is less compressible than Faith. But I think Robert's point is somehow crucial because it gets at what I want. The idea that faith implies something about acting in the face of uncertainty. When we take something on [F|f]aith, we're implying that the truth or falsity of the thing we're taking on [f|F]aith has an impact on the outcome, whereas a mere belief can have no impact on outcome. This includes ends justified indeterminates like "I'll kill you because I have faith that God wants me to kill you." Even though we may never determine the truth or falsity of their article of faith, if that person later came to believe the negation, guilt or repentance is the different consequence. This sounds like the beginning of a measure we might use to distinguish faith from other types of thoughts. Some thoughts might be "no-ops" whereas some have an effect. Even if we factor out all the subjectivity, intention, consciousness hoo-ha, we might be able to say something like: incompressible processes (all shortcuts that can be taken have been taken -- i.e. Faith) are less expressive (or flexible, or adaptable) than compressible processes. This might match up with other measures being used in neuroscience and/or psychology. We might also be able to apply some graph theory in the sense that some actions in a causal network will be more like cut points than others. If a graph has high connectivity, the uncertainty surrounding any given action matters much less than that surrounding something on the critical path. I know that, personally, I'd be much more likely to invoke and talk about "faith" when considering a cut-point action as opposed to one that had plenty of low-hanging fruit alternatives. -- glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
