Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 12:29:18AM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Stephen, I don't know of this woman's account is anything like Bruno's experience or not. I believe she still experiences a stream of consciousness, but her visual sense is devoid of movement. She experiences only static frames: One patient, LM, described pouring a cup of tea or coffee difficult because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier.[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia#cite_note-LM-4 She did not know when to stop pouring, because she could not perceive the movement of the fluid rising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia Jason This wouldn't contradict TIME, which only says that percieved psychological time should be a timescale (a mathematical term). Discrete time, such as that reported by LM above is still a valid timescale. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: victims of faith
Hi Alberto G. Corona So you may have the blind faith that there is no God. And attack those that do. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 15:50:53 Subject: Re: victims of faith So you have a very strong belief: That almost all but a few enlightened people like you in the History of humanity are a bunch of silly idiots. This sense of superiority, combined with a voluntary repression of doubt certainly can susbstitute any lack of absolute meaning of life at least for some years. 2012/9/9 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com: On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: What I find curious about atheists is that because one can prove neither that there is a god or not, both theism and atheism must rely on faith-- that their position is true. I can't prove God doesn't exist but I can prove He's silly. And I can neither prove nor disprove that a china teapot is in orbit around the planet Uranus, but I can prove the idea is dumb. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ?
Hi Craig Weinberg Thanks. Then I don't support the John Birch Society. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 10:30:51 Subject: Re: Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On Sunday, September 9, 2012 7:25:57 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I really don't know much about the John Birch Society, The John Birch Society has its roots in the 1950s when it opposed the U.S.? affirming the human rights principles of the United Nations. It was used as a grassroots corollary to McCarthyism, insisting that imagined Communists were standing behind every light pole, ready to end the world as we know it. It still sees itself as fighting Communism, as well as the New World Order (whatever that is!), big government, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, wealth redistribution and more. You are not likely to hear the John Birch Society using epithets or spewing base language; its values are more carefully hidden behind flag-waving and obscure and irrelevant legal principles. Its words are cloaked in concern for the direction of the nation. John Birchers opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, saying it violates the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and overstepped the rights of individual states to enact laws regarding civil rights. On its website, the John Birch Society complains that President Obama - the man who got fawning media treatment for no reason, was elected with a thin resume and exalted without even being a king - has now been given the Noble Peace Prize. The John Birch Society also opposes health care reform, gun control, public schools and a host of other progressive causes. The Right-wing watch group, Public Research Associates, notes: (T)he Birch society pioneered the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric White racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism rather than relying on the White supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII. Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism. Because it is more libertarian than openly racist, anti-Semitic and sexist, the John Birch Society is often not characterized as a hate group like the Ku Klux Klan or the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), at least as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center. One way the John Birch Society escapes that designation is because it receives support from prominent politicians and elected officials. Birchers work hard to mask the anti-human rights beliefs that underlie their opinions. (from http://archive.truthout.org/topstories/112909ms1) but googling it up, find that it was once falsely accused of being racist, no doubt due to over-zealous liberal hatred of conservatism. The KKK was very racist. As far as I know it's mostly dead. Good. Huh? Hate groups are huge. The KKK is pretty small (about 100 chapters and 5000 members from the estimate I just saw), but there are many more Aryan groups, growing fast. As has been pointed out - not all conservatives are racists, but clearly the overwhelming majority (perhaps all?) racists are conservative. There are no liberals in any hate groups. A greater sin, IMHO is political correctness, supported by Al-qaeda, which is sending America down the toilet. If you don't see that, no amount of explaining on my part will enlighten you. Political correctness certainly can be irritating, but it is also important to protect groups who are vulnerable from threats that escalate violence. Anti-American/Anti-Western terrorism around the world is certainly a threat, but not really a significant one for American citizens. Certainly nothing on the order of the response, which has amounted to open surveillance and unrestrained powers of control over the population. There is a far, far greater chance of being struck by lightning than being affected by terrorism: A companion piece in the Wall Street Journal lays out the statistics. Since 2000, the odds of you dying as a result of a terrorist act aboard a commercial American airliner is 1 in 25 million. The odds of getting struck by lightning: 1 in 500,000. http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/dailyrft/2010/01/odds_of_dying_in_terrorist_attack_on_airline_1_in_25_million_struck_by_lightning_1_in_50.php Political correctness has not frozen wages for 35 years. Political correctness has not outsourced millions of jobs. Political correctness doesn't evade paying taxes in offshore accounts and lobbying for tax cuts for the rich. It didn't deregulate the banking industry and make billions of dollars disappear into a few people's pockets. These are the things that threaten America. Political correctness? What? Rush Limbaugh is being
What must the perceiver be like?
Hi Craig Weinberg I think that the perceiver must be a lot like the creator in terms of its not being an endless regress of homunculi. There has to be either a stopping point or an entrance to the nonphysical from the physical, the unextended from the extended. Platonia's All is such an entity. Another might be the limit in terms of size of what a substance is. For you can't seem to get any smaller than Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which would be a stopping point. Leibniz speaks in terms of reflectors. Elsewhere, perhaps in Leibniz, the perceiver is characterized as being a unity, a whole, a point of focus. It must also be very wideband, to take in much at one glance. And allow info coming in from many directrions and angles at once. Maxwell's Demon also seems to be at least part of a candidate. And I have guessed that intelligence itself must be the perceiver. C'mon materialists, knock yourselves out ! Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 13:27:09 Subject: Re: Alice and Wittgenstein: Materialism, Functionalism, and Comp Hi Roger, In my view, the I is how any particular subjective experience refers to itself. I agree, you can't have consciousness without the I orientation, although the ability to conceive of oneself may not be necessary for consciousness. Consciousness requires only an experience of being, not necessarily an understanding of the experience of being or self or I. You could say that the term 'consciousness' refers specifically to self-awareness though, and I think it's ok to define the word that way. I'm more interested in the hard problem - so not human consciousness in particular but the faintest hint of awareness or sense as opposed to completely non-experiential unconsciousness. Craig On Saturday, September 8, 2012 10:56:51 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I seem to be a voice crying in the wilderness. So be it, but... When you say Here I present , how or where does the I fit into your philosophy ? You cannot have thinking or consciousness or intelligence or perception withut it. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/8/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-08, 09:10:48 Subject: Alice and Wittgenstein: Materialism, Functionalism, and Comp Here I present another metaphor to encapsulate by view of the relation between consciousness, information, and physicality by demonstrating the inadequacy of functionalist, computationalist, and materialist models and how they paint over the hard problem of consciousness with a choice of two flavors of the easy problem. I came up with this thought exercise in response to this lecture: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/05/zoe-drayson-the-autonomy-of-the-mental-and-the-personalsubpersonal-distinction/ Consider Alice in Wonderland Let's say that Alice is trying to decide whether she can describe herself in terms of being composed of the syntax of the letters, words, and sentences of the story from which she emerges, or whether she is composed of the bleached and pressed wood pulp and ink that are considered page parts of the whole book. The former I would say corresponds to the functionalist view of Alice as roles and realizers, while the materialist view of Alice corresponds to the mereological parts and wholes. To extend the metaphor to computationalism I would make the distinction between functionalism and computationalism as the difference between the string of English words being equivalent to the story of Alice (functionalism) and the same thing but with the capacity for the string of words to translate themselves into any language. Materialism = pages in a book, Functionalism = English words in sentences (literature), Computationalism / Digital Functionalism = Amazon Kindle that translates literature into any language (customized literature). Although this distinction between comp and functionalism does, I think, make comp superior to either functionalism or materialism, it is still ultimately the wrong approach as it takes the story and characters for granted as an unexplained precipitate of linguistic roles and grammatical realizers. This is Searle, etc. The symbol grounding problem. In this respect, comp and functionalism are equivalent - both wrong in the same way and in the way that is orthogonal/perpendicular to the way that materialism is the wrong approach. What must be understood about consciousness, and about Alice, is that nothing means anything without the possibility of perception and participation to begin with in the universe. There is, to my way of thinking,
Re: Re: The All
Hi Evgenii, In the mirror example, the res extensa would be that part of the phenomenon that is in spacetime (the brain, the physical part, which is extended) and the res cogitans wojld be that part that is nonphysical, being outside of spacetime (the mind, being inextended). My own suggestion is that the nonphysical part is simply universal intelligence, Platonia, the All, the Supremem monad. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 13:53:09 Subject: Re: The All On Saturday, September 8, 2012 9:12:38 AM UTC-4, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 08.09.2012 14:37 Stephen P. King said the following: On 9/8/2012 6:51 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 08.09.2012 12:37 Stephen P. King said the following: On 9/8/2012 3:50 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: Say I see my image behind the mirror (I have written behind instead of in the mirror just to better describe my experience). How could you describe this phenomenon by means of res cogitans and res extensa? Evgenii -- http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2012/05/brain-and-world.html Hi Evgenii, I would not, and neither Pratt, use the notion of substance as did Descartes. Pratt explains himself well: http://boole.stanford.edu/pub/ratmech.pdf ... The duality between mind in body is defined in terms of the relation that is known in mathematics to exist between Boolean algebras and certain topological spaces. Pratt presents a step-wise variational calculus to model both body -body and mind-mind interactions. How would Pratt describe the phenomenon of the image behind the mirror in his representation? Evgenii Hi Evgenii, The image in the mirror is a simple transformation of coordinates, but Pratt is not considering that aspect. I would say that the image in the mirror is a visual illusion created presumably by the brain. Don't you agree? Then it is exactly a relationship between mental and physical states but not in the form of ideas but rather images. Evgenii I think that the image is in the mirror to the same extent that it is in our retina and our mind. They are all indications of the specular extension of sense through matter. It happens to be in an optical to visual sense but the same principle occurs going from tactile to acoustic to aural. You can see and feel the woofer of a speaker vibrating and you can feel that in your ear as well as hear sound through your ears and through the speaker. This is what the universe is made of. Not primitive matter or information bur experiential propagation. It is and it isn't a Platonic ideal manifesting in different forms. It is and it isn't different causes and effects of physical substance. What it ultimately has to be though, is an experience of both the ideal and material relating to each other or the ideal and material diverging from the neutral monism of sense. In the material sense, photons from the silvered glass reflect into our eye (really a stretch when applied to images...Classical optics at least is technically useful, but both photons and 'rays' I think are figurative abstractions rather than concretely physical independent structures) In the ideal sense, computational coordinates are transposed and decoded by the computational processes of the brain. (doesn't explain the mechanism of, or possibility for any visual experience, as verified by blindsight), In the multisense sense, both of the former are true and untrue in their own way, but only to serve the purpose of their native human level of significance - the anthropological layer in which our primary experiences take place, with human bodies and natural environments; where we see through our own eyes the world that we relate to directly and the reflections of images in surfaces are part of that gestalt embodiment. What we see is human visual experience, and we can use reflective materials as opportunities to extend that sensitivity prosthetically. Craig Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/ic3Z1_VtIW8J. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at
Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ?
Hi Craig Weinberg Liberals aren't necessarily racists, but most are those obsessed with racial issues, and a few even worse, the race-baiters. If I criticise the president, I am called a racist. Not true by a long shot. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are good examples of race-baiters. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 14:21:30 Subject: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On Sunday, September 9, 2012 1:41:37 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Craig, Why are we even considering the thoughts of paranoids? Are they in control of our daily lives? Hi Stephen, I agree, I was responding to what Roger said about liberals: ironically and paradoxically they see the world in terms of race. Conservatives attempt to live by facts. I never saw racism in what what I wrote until you brought the subject up. which sounded to me like 'conservatives aren't racist, liberals are', which - although conservative thought has some admirable virtues, I can say without hesitation that tolerance for racial and gender diversity is not one of them. That's why I brought up JBS and KKK, to show the absurdity of that claim, since the most racist hate groups are known to be political right wing extremists and not left wing extremists. Personally I don't know of any left wing extremist groups in this country - not that there aren't any but even self-proclaimed anarchists seem to stay out of trouble. In other parts of the world, there are certainly left-wing violent extremists but I don't guess that they are racially motivated in particular (unless maybe the distribution of wealth and power falls along racial lines in their area). What are the left wing presences in the US? Farmers markets? Small organizations that try to help people get birth control or protect people from being poisoned by industry? To my mind, while I can understand why liberals would be criticized as whiny, weak, and impractical, I think conservatives who do not understand why they are criticized as racist, anti-intellectual bullies are in deep denial or just sheltered from other viewpoints. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/lM3is6k4vVUJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ?
Hi Craig Weinberg Not that I am against cleaning up the environment, but I am not obsessed with the idea. Integrating with Nature is also a main principle of the Communist Manifesto. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Craig Weinberg Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 16:23:54 Subject: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On Sunday, September 9, 2012 2:58:32 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/9/2012 2:21 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Sunday, September 9, 2012 1:41:37 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Craig, Why are we even considering the thoughts of paranoids? Are they in control of our daily lives? Hi Stephen, I agree, I was responding to what Roger said about liberals: ironically and paradoxically they see the world in terms of race. Conservatives attempt to live by facts. I never saw racism in what what I wrote until you brought the subject up. which sounded to me like 'conservatives aren't racist, liberals are', which - although conservative thought has some admirable virtues, I can say without hesitation that tolerance for racial and gender diversity is not one of them. That's why I brought up JBS and KKK, to show the absurdity of that claim, since the most racist hate groups are known to be political right wing extremists and not left wing extremists. HI Craig, The contest of recrimination is not winnable, but let's try for the sake of the discussion. Personally I don't know of any left wing extremist groups in this country - not that there aren't any but even self-proclaimed anarchists seem to stay out of trouble. I guess that you have never heard of 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_First! 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front I had heard of Earth First but not much. Yeah, I think it's fair to call them left wing eco-terrorists. Unfortunately the way they are going about it, using arson and destruction will only serve to discredit their cause and provide a ready excuse for stepping up surveillance and security operations around the world. I don't think that mainstream liberals are aware or support groups like this though generally. Contrary to the overwhelming drift to the right by conservatives, groups like these have not seemed to influence the politics of the mainstream (Democrats can't really even be called liberals, more like fiscal conservatives who are socially moderate). 3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace What do they do that is bad? Do they threaten innocent people? Maybe they are over-zealous and unrealistic about ecological priorities but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the global machine they are up against. From what I see it looks like they mainly are concerned with protecting human beings in general: http://yqyq.net/81737-Istoriya_i_dostizheniya_Greenpeace.html Certainly they are not racists or bullies of innocent people. 4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society SDS lasted from 1960-1969, so it hasn't been relevant for almost 50 years. I had a professor who was in SDS. Extremely nice and gentle guy. He said he had a metal plate in his skull from the FBI. His class was on revolutionary movements, talked about SDS, the IWW and labor unions. He seemed to have a mature and reasonable perspective on the 60s need more? sure. my point was about racism though. Are there any groups of white racists who are liberal? In other parts of the world, there are certainly left-wing violent extremists but I don't guess that they are racially motivated in particular (unless maybe the distribution of wealth and power falls along racial lines in their area). What are the left wing presences in the US? Farmers markets? Small organizations that try to help people get birth control or protect people from being poisoned by industry? It might be helpful if you laid out for us the definition of the terms that you are using. What exactly is left-wing and right-wing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_politics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_politics Why can't we just get along? The left wing are those who see themselves as being the people who want to just get along or, if politically active, oppose those who prevent us from getting along. Left wing means tolerance, which means a certain degree of intolerance of intolerance. That's where it gets dicey. I'm not sure who the right wing thinks they are. Patriots? Grownups who don't like to see people get anything without paying a price? Not sure. To my mind, while I can understand why liberals would be criticized as whiny, weak, and impractical, I think conservatives who do not understand why they are criticized as racist, anti-intellectual bullies are in deep denial or just sheltered from
Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
On 9/10/2012 1:29 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Stephen, I don't know of this woman's account is anything like Bruno's experience or not. I believe she still experiences a stream of consciousness, but her visual sense is devoid of movement. She experiences only static frames: One patient, LM, described pouring a cup of tea or coffee difficult because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier.^[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia#cite_note-LM-4 She did not know when to stop pouring, because she could not perceive the movement of the fluid rising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia Jason i Jason, Isn't that exactly what I described? If you instantly forget what you experience, and yet the act of experiencing moves on... What is that like? On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 11:34 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net mailto:stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/10/2012 12:28 AM, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 07:24:02AM -0400, Stephen P. King wrote: Dear Bruno, Could you explain a bit more what the experience of being conscious in a completely atemporal mode was like? Where you aware of any kind of change in your environment? Was one's internal narrative (of external events) silent? I have always suspected that subjective time might be a result of self-consciousness but have not had any way of discussing the idea coherently. If we stipulate that subjective time is a form of noticing that one is noticing changes (a second order aspect) in one's environment, then this would fall into being a result of self-consciousness (which is obviously a second order effect at least to me). I have debated this idea before on this List with Russell Standish but we didn't seem to reach any definite conclusion. Your proposition is basically what my TIME postulate is all about. What Bruno is suggesting is that the smoking of certain plants induces a conscious state that contradicts TIME. I'm not prepared at this stage to follow in his footsteps, so have to simply take his observations (and of others in the Salvia forum) on face value. I do not know how TIME may be modified to reconcile it with this observation, yet remain in place for the deduction of quantum mechanics. Cheers Hi Russell, Perhaps what happens under these conditions is that the second order aspect is not measured and thus not observed. This would have the effect of making the passage of event into a continuous flow where we don't feel that change is happening at all. It would be like watching a clock and not noticing difference from the past positions of the hands; one would just be continuously in the moment of the position at the time. This would indicate an action of short term memory. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
Hi Russell Standish My experience of meditation or even sleeping is that as you go into that state, in which consciousness diminishes, (subjective) time passes faster and faster, until at the deepest level, time passes instantly. Instant passage of time might be construed by some to be atemporal. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Russell Standish Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-10, 03:10:51 Subject: Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 12:29:18AM -0500, Jason Resch wrote: Stephen, I don't know of this woman's account is anything like Bruno's experience or not. I believe she still experiences a stream of consciousness, but her visual sense is devoid of movement. She experiences only static frames: One patient, LM, described pouring a cup of tea or coffee difficult because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier.[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia#cite_note-LM-4 She did not know when to stop pouring, because she could not perceive the movement of the fluid rising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia Jason This wouldn't contradict TIME, which only says that percieved psychological time should be a timescale (a mathematical term). Discrete time, such as that reported by LM above is still a valid timescale. Cheers -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
My limited support for the atheists
Hi Stathis Papaioannou I believe that the real reason that atheists attack religion is that they fear its possible political power to condemn you and order your obedience. I think they have a somewhat reasonable case, so I advocate legal separation of church and state, although I don't personally see any harm in thanking God for anything or putting up a christmas display. My church is totally opposed to such strict separation, so we agree. A more dangerous case that I would support the athests in is against Sharia Law. Of course most muslims are not militants or terrorists, but those that are are dangerous and violent enemies of freeedom and democracy. Why ? I heard one fundamentalist muslim terrorist in interview say that Islam cannot survive without state support. So I welcome all atheist opoosition at least to Sharia. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stathis Papaioannou Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-10, 01:14:16 Subject: Re: victims of faith On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 5:50 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: So you have a very strong belief: That almost all but a few enlightened people like you in the History of humanity are a bunch of silly idiots. Actually, almost everyone in the history of humanity has thought that 99.99% of all religions are silly, and that they were fortuitously born into the 0.01% that wasn't. Atheists take it a bit further and think that 100% of all religions are silly. Agnostics, if they are consistent, say that it is possible that the archangel gabriel dictated the Quran to Muhammad just as it is possible that Santa Claus and his helpers construct toys for the world's children at the North Pole. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Where do life's choices come from ?
Hi Stephen P. King God is not in time or space and so knows all of eternity and all actions. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 13:05:30 Subject: Re: Where do life's choices come from ? On 9/9/2012 6:20 AM, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Jason Resch Where do the choices come from ? Seemingly from each individual monad. But these choices, at least in Leibniz's universe, have already been decided in the pre-established harmony. Dear Roger, Could you explain to us in detail how there is a state of affairs that has already been decided in the pre-established harmony How can something be decided if that the action required to make the decision cannot occur? As I have posted previously, the concept of a PEH requires the equivalent to computing a solution to an NP-hard problem in order to be said to be available for such things as what we see in your statement here. One cannot have a solution to a problem before one actually finds it. Since these choices have to be harmonious with the rest of the universe, in some sense they would be of limited freedom overall, although more than one solution might be possible to maintain harmony. Yes, there are infinitely many possible solutions. To discover which is the best we must compare them all to each other with one single standard of measure. Perhaps one solution would be optimal, i don't know. The choice would at the same time appear to be entirely free to the individual. Choice exists simply because there is no a priori measurement of the objects that the individual is considering. Objects are not fixed and determined ab initio, they cannot be! Probability theory might have a better answer than I have provided. This suggest that perhaps QM could answer the question Another solution might simply be the greatest good for the greatest number. I agree, but only one quality or quantity can be greatest in that condition. There cannot be multiple greatest goods for many. Consider the distribution of 1 pound of bread to 100 people. To be fair, each will only get 1/100 of a pound. This entire discussion is laboring under an error; the error of thinking that resources are fixed from the beginning. It is a naive view of the world that assume that the world is made up of fixed quantities of substances that can be distributed equally to all. The world does not work that way. Resources are products that result from processes, they are not fixes substances. If we need more of a product, we must increase the processes that generate them. It we need less of something, decrease the production. We cannot think in terms of static models to understand this and failure to use dynamic modeling is the most common sourse of problems in our world. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/9/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: The All
Hi Stephen P. King Robots would respond to an image as they are programmed to respond. Like mindless puppets. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Stephen P. King Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 13:45:50 Subject: Re: The All On 9/9/2012 12:27 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 08.09.2012 23:19 Stephen P. King said the following: On 9/8/2012 2:12 PM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote: On 08.09.2012 19:32 Stephen P. King said the following: .. Hi Evgenii, I will try to explain. An idea is an abstract image, IMHO. For example, consider all possible objects that have some thing that could be recognized as being red. We form an equivalence class from this with the equivalence relation red. Thus Red is the equivalence relation on the equivalence class of all possible objects that have some thing that could be recognized as being red. This should hold for *any* abstract and shows a fundamental relationship between the concrete and the abstract. Category theory offers a wonderful set of tools to analyze these kind of concepts. Sorry, I do not understand how the 3D visual world that I observe is formed based on this theory. Evgenii Dear Evgenii, You are asking me to explain to you in English the way the relevant part of your brain generates the particular subjective experience associated with the image one has of oneself in a mirror. I cannot do ?his right now and maybe never, it may be impossible to explain in English. We might have to use other language that does not have the inherent logical ambiguities and rules built into it. Do you mean that although you cannot express it in English, you could implement it in some hardware+software? By the way, a quote from You are not a Gadget: The point of the project is to find a way of making software that rejects the idea of the protocol. Instead, each software module must use emergent generic pattern-recognition techniques?imilar to the ones I described earlier, which can recognize faces ? to connect with other modules. Phenotropic computing could potentially result in a kind of software that is less tangled and unpredictable, since there wouldn't be protocol errors if there weren't any protocols. Could you use your technology to develop such a thing? Evgenii Hi Evgenii, ?? How would a robot that has visual sensors respond to a mirror in its path? -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Sep 2012, at 16:08, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Sep 2012, at 14:22, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Sep 2012, at 13:31, benjayk wrote: Quantum effects beyond individual brains (suggested by psi) can't be computed as well: No matter what I compute in my brain, this doesn't entangle it with other brains since computation is classical. The UD emulates all quantum computer, as they do not violate Church Thesis. I am not talking about quantum computers, which are not entangled with their surroundings. I am talking about systems that are entangled to other systems. This is just lowering the comp level of substitution. It does not change the reasoning, thanks to the use of the notion of generalized brain. It does, because you can't simulate indefinite entanglement. No matter how many entangled systems you simulate, you are always missing the entanglement of this combined system to another (which may be as crucial as the system itself, because it may lead to a very different unfoldment of events). To use this argument, you need to postulate that the physical universe exists and is describe by a quantum garden of Eden, that is a infinite quantum pattern, and that *you* are that pattern. In that case, you are just working in a different theory than the comp theory, and are out of the scope of my expertize. But then develop your theory. Nope. I am not saying that is the case (though I do believe that such entanglement exists), I am just saying that COMP does not exclude that possibility. Whether or not some digital substitution exists, what is required to correctly implement it (which also is part of yourself) may itself be not be emulable in the sense that your reasoning requires. I remind you, COMP does not say we are digital, it says that a correctly implemented digital substitution may substitute my current brain/body. It does not say that this can't require some non-digital component (you are still getting an artificial brain/body). benjayk -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Simple-proof-that-our-intelligence-transcends-that-of-computers-tp34330236p34413398.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Simple proof that our intelligence transcends that of computers
Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Sep 2012, at 15:47, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: even though the paper actually doesn't even begin to adress the question. Which question? The paper mainly just formulate a question, shows how comp makes it possible to translate the question in math, and show that the general shape of the possible solution is more close to Plato than to Aristotle. The problem is that the paper is taking the most fundamental issue for granted, Absolutely not. I am open that UDA could lead to a refutation of comp, either purely logical, or by the possible testing it implies. My opinion on the truth or falsity of comp is private, and to be honest, varying. You want me to be more than what I am. A logician. Not a philosopher. It is simply not my job. OK, but if you are solely a logician, you should concern yourself with logical proofs. You don't even define the assumption of your paper in a (theoretically speaking) logical way and your proof contains many philosophical reasonings. Especially step 8, which is criticial in your reasoning. It uses occams razor (which is philosophical, and not necessarily valid in any mathematical or logical context), you use appeals to absurdity (with regards to aribtrary inner experience being associated to null physical activity), you use additional philosophical assumptions (you assume materialist mechanism cannot mean that physical computations are not *exactly* like abstract digital computations, just enough to make a practically digital substitution possible),... So take my criticism to mean that your proof is simply not what you present it as, somehow being beyond philsophy (which is always on some shaky ground). This is what I perceive as slightly dishonest, because it allows you retract from the actual point by demanding to be given a precise refutation or a specific error (as required in logic or math). But your paper is philosophical, and here this logic does not apply. If you'd admit that I am perfectly happy with your paper. It does show something, just not rigorously and not necessarily and not for everyone (some may rightfully disagree with your reasoning due to philosophical reasons which can't be proven or be precisely stated). If someone believes that physics behaves perfectly like abstract computations would and if he doesn't want to invoke some very mysterious form of matter (which does not rely on how it behaves and also not on how it feels or is perceived to be) to sidestep the problem, yes, than your paper may indeed show that this does not make much sense. Unfortunately most materialist do actually believe (perhaps unconsciously) in some very mysterious and strange (and IMO meaningless) kind of matter, so they won't be convinced by your paper. Bruno Marchal wrote: (kinda digital, digital at some level are not enough for a strict reasoning). You also say that a 1p view can be recovered by incompleteness, but actually you always present *abstractions* of points of view, not the point of view. What could that mean? How could any theory present a point of view? I think you are confusing level. You could as well mock the quantum analysis of the hydrogen atom as ridiculous because the theory cannot react with real oxygen. That's the point. A theory cannot conceivably present and acutal point of view. But then your theory just derives something which you call point of view, which in fact may have little to do at all with the actual point of view. QM does not claim to show how a hydrogen atom leads to a real reaction of oxygen, it just describes it. To make it coherent, you would have to weaken your statement to we can derive some description of points of view, or we can show how some description of points of view emerge from arithmetics, which I will happily agree with. However, this would destroy your main point that arithmetics and its point of view is enough as the ontology / epistemology (we need the *actual* point of view). Bruno Marchal wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: How am I supposed to argue with that? There is no point of studying Gödel if we have a false assumption about what the proof even is about. It is never, at no point, about numbers as axiomatic systems. It is just about what we can express with them on a meta-level. On the contrary. The whole Gödel's thing relies on the fact that the meta-level can be embedded at the level. Feferman fundamental papers extending Gödel is arithmetization of metamathematics. It is the main point: the meta can be done at the lower level. Machines can refer to themselves in the 3p way, and by using the Theatetus' definition we get a notion of 1p which provides some light on the 1//3 issue. But Gödel does not show this. The meta-level can only be embedded at that level on the *meta-level*. This is just false. Sorry, I meant on *a* meta-level (not the meta-level that can be embedded, obviously). If
Physicist Derives Laws of Thermodynamics For Life Itself
FYI -- Forwarded message -- From: richard ruquist yann...@yahoo.com Date: Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 11:10 AM Subject: Fw: the physics arXiv blog To: yann...@gmail.com yann...@gmail.com - Forwarded Message - *From:* Technology Review Feed - arXiv blog ho...@arxivblog.com *To:* yann...@yahoo.com *Sent:* Monday, September 10, 2012 8:18 AM *Subject:* the physics arXiv blog the physics arXiv blog http://www.technologyreview.com/ http://fusion.google.com/add?source=atgsfeedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/arXivblog -- Physicist Derives Laws of Thermodynamics For Life Itselfhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/arXivblog/~3/JNA_TA926FU/click.phdo?utm_source=feedburnerutm_medium=email Posted: 10 Sep 2012 03:58 AM PDT The laws of thermodynamics must apply to self-replicating systems. Now one physicist has worked out how Here's an interesting thought experiment. Imagine a box filled with a variety of atoms and molecules in proportions roughly equivalent to the composition of the prebiotic soup in which life thrives. How likely is it that these molecules will arrange themselves into fully-fledged living thing, a bacterium, for example? That's a tough question but Jeremy England at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge has worked out how to calculate an answer, at least in theory. His results make for fascinating reading. Part of the problem here is that life itself is hard to define. But England has a way round this. His idea is to examine every combination of states that are possible in this box and to consult an omniscient microbiologist about whether each state represents a bacterium or not. In that way, it ought to be possible, at least in principle, to gain an idea of the statistical physics involved. Next, he asks the microbiologist to take another look at the box after a period that is roughly equivalent to the time it takes for bacteria to divide. The question then is how likely is it that there will be two bacteria in the box. Once again, the omniscient microbiologist could look at every possible state of the box and say whether or not self replication has taken place. If the box contains two bacterium, it's possible to work how much entropy has been created in the process and how much heat used. England throws in some basic laws of thermodynamics and in this way builds a statistical physics model of self replication, a model that is analogous to the laws that govern the statistical behaviour of any set of particles in a box. By way of comparison, he also looks at the statistics that govern the reverse process--the spontaneous decomposition of the bacteria into carbon dioxide, hydrogen and so on. This sets an important bound on what is thermodynamically possible in this system: in effect, England derives the second law of thermodynamics for the system. From this he works out various 'laws' such as the minimum amount of heat that a single round of cell division ought to produce. Finally, he puts some numbers into his model, including figures such as the life time of peptide bonds in biological systems, to find out how much heat complex systems like E. coli bacteria ought to produce when they replicate. It turns out that E. coli bacteria are remarkably efficient replicators. The organism can convert chemical energy into a new copy of itself so efficiently that if it were to produce even half as much heat it would be pushing the limits of what is thermodynamically possible! he says. He does a similar calculation for the replication of RNA and DNA molecules. This suggests that in terms of thermodynamics, replication is much easier for RNA than DNA. That's an interesting result given that many biologists have suggested that the first self-replicating systems in Earth's pre-biotic soup must have been based on RNA rather than DNA In the past, biologists have studied the catalytic properties of RNA that are crucial for living cells and noted that DNA does not share these properties. So the thinking is that RNA must have come first in the replicating timeline, with DNA evolving later as life became more complex . England's work backs up this idea but for completely different reasons--RNA is thermodynamically better at self replication. A fascinating result. The work has an important limitation, however. It fails to tackle the definition of nature of life and instead defers the problem to an omniscient microbiologist who, it is assumed, can always provide an answer. There is a tantalising hint that England's approach could one day solve this problem. By exploring the role of statistical physics in more detail, it maybe possible to define life in terms of precise thermodynamic limits. Which is why it'll be worth watching where England takes his idea next. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1209.1179: Statistical Physics of Self-Replication http://ads.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=a24376ca8ff37cbac25882041e051cf3p=1
Re: The poverty of computers
John, What would you say is the reason for: 1. The anthropological universality of spiritual concepts 2. That religious-philosophical development is universal pre-requisite for the emergence of science, ie. science never emerges ab initio from a culture devoid of a history of religious thought. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/kDEJ-RBWb3QJ. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
No program can determine its hardware. This is a consequence of the Church Turing thesis. The particular machine at the lowest level has no bearing (from the program's perspective). If that is true, we can show that CT must be false, because we *can* define a meta-program that has access to (part of) its own hardware (which still is intuitively computable - we can even implement it on a computer). It's false, the program *can't* know that the hardware it has access to is the *real* hardware and not a simulated hardware. The program has only access to hardware through IO, and it can't tell (as never ever) from that interface if what's outside is the *real* outside or simulated outside. \quote Yes that is true. If anything it is true because the hardware is not even clearly determined at the base level (quantum uncertainty). I should have expressed myself more accurately and written hardware or relative 'hardware'. We can define a (meta-)programs that have access to their hardware in the sense of knowing what they are running on relative to some notion of hardware. They cannot be emulated using universal turing machines (in general - in specific instances, where the hardware is fixed on the right level, they might be). They can be simulated, though, but in this case the simulation may be incorrect in the given context and we have to put it into the right context to see what it is actually emulating (not the meta-program itself, just its behaviour relative to some other context). We can also define an infinite hierarchy of meta-meta--programs (n metas) to show that there is no universal notion of computation at all. There is always a notion of computation that is more powerful than the current one, because it can reflect more deeply upon its own hardware. See my post concerning meta-programs for further details. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Why-the-Church-Turing-thesis--tp34348236p34413719.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
2012/9/10 benjayk benjamin.jaku...@googlemail.com No program can determine its hardware. This is a consequence of the Church Turing thesis. The particular machine at the lowest level has no bearing (from the program's perspective). If that is true, we can show that CT must be false, because we *can* define a meta-program that has access to (part of) its own hardware (which still is intuitively computable - we can even implement it on a computer). It's false, the program *can't* know that the hardware it has access to is the *real* hardware and not a simulated hardware. The program has only access to hardware through IO, and it can't tell (as never ever) from that interface if what's outside is the *real* outside or simulated outside. \quote Yes that is true. If anything it is true because the hardware is not even clearly determined at the base level (quantum uncertainty). I should have expressed myself more accurately and written hardware or relative 'hardware'. We can define a (meta-)programs that have access to their hardware in the sense of knowing what they are running on relative to some notion of hardware. They cannot be emulated using universal turing machines Then it's not a program if it can't run on a universal turing machine. (in general - in specific instances, where the hardware is fixed on the right level, they might be). They can be simulated, though, but in this case the simulation may be incorrect in the given context and we have to put it into the right context to see what it is actually emulating (not the meta-program itself, just its behaviour relative to some other context). We can also define an infinite hierarchy of meta-meta--programs (n metas) to show that there is no universal notion of computation at all. There is always a notion of computation that is more powerful than the current one, because it can reflect more deeply upon its own hardware. See my post concerning meta-programs for further details. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Why-the-Church-Turing-thesis--tp34348236p34413719.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
On Sep 10, 2012, at 6:23 AM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/10/2012 1:29 AM, Jason Resch wrote: Stephen, I don't know of this woman's account is anything like Bruno's experience or not. I believe she still experiences a stream of consciousness, but her visual sense is devoid of movement. She experiences only static frames: One patient, LM, described pouring a cup of tea or coffee difficult because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a glacier.[5] She did not know when to stop pouring, because she could not perceive the movement of the fluid rising. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia Jason i Jason, Isn't that exactly what I described? If you instantly forget what you experience, and yet the act of experiencing moves on... What is that like? It may be. Whatever adds the perception of motion is something extra the brain is doing, so it could be a second order comparison of one state against previous states, as you suggested. Jason On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 11:34 PM, Stephen P. King stephe...@charter.net wrote: On 9/10/2012 12:28 AM, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 07:24:02AM -0400, Stephen P. King wrote: Dear Bruno, Could you explain a bit more what the experience of being conscious in a completely atemporal mode was like? Where you aware of any kind of change in your environment? Was one's internal narrative (of external events) silent? I have always suspected that subjective time might be a result of self-consciousness but have not had any way of discussing the idea coherently. If we stipulate that subjective time is a form of noticing that one is noticing changes (a second order aspect) in one's environment, then this would fall into being a result of self-consciousness (which is obviously a second order effect at least to me). I have debated this idea before on this List with Russell Standish but we didn't seem to reach any definite conclusion. Your proposition is basically what my TIME postulate is all about. What Bruno is suggesting is that the smoking of certain plants induces a conscious state that contradicts TIME. I'm not prepared at this stage to follow in his footsteps, so have to simply take his observations (and of others in the Salvia forum) on face value. I do not know how TIME may be modified to reconcile it with this observation, yet remain in place for the deduction of quantum mechanics. Cheers Hi Russell, Perhaps what happens under these conditions is that the second order aspect is not measured and thus not observed. This would have the effect of making the passage of event into a continuous flow where we don't feel that change is happening at all. It would be like watching a clock and not noticing difference from the past positions of the hands; one would just be continuously in the moment of the position at the time. This would indicate an action of short term memory. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Why the Church-Turing thesis?
On 9/10/2012 11:40 AM, benjayk wrote: No program can determine its hardware. This is a consequence of the Church Turing thesis. The particular machine at the lowest level has no bearing (from the program's perspective). If that is true, we can show that CT must be false, because we *can* define a meta-program that has access to (part of) its own hardware (which still is intuitively computable - we can even implement it on a computer). It's false, the program *can't* know that the hardware it has access to is the *real* hardware and not a simulated hardware. The program has only access to hardware through IO, and it can't tell (as never ever) from that interface if what's outside is the *real* outside or simulated outside. \quote Yes that is true. If anything it is true because the hardware is not even clearly determined at the base level (quantum uncertainty). I should have expressed myself more accurately and written hardware or relative 'hardware'. We can define a (meta-)programs that have access to their hardware in the sense of knowing what they are running on relative to some notion of hardware. They cannot be emulated using universal turing machines (in general - in specific instances, where the hardware is fixed on the right level, they might be). They can be simulated, though, but in this case the simulation may be incorrect in the given context and we have to put it into the right context to see what it is actually emulating (not the meta-program itself, just its behaviour relative to some other context). We can also define an infinite hierarchy of meta-meta--programs (n metas) to show that there is no universal notion of computation at all. There is always a notion of computation that is more powerful than the current one, because it can reflect more deeply upon its own hardware. See my post concerning meta-programs for further details. Dear benjayk, Is there any means by which the resource requirements paly a role for a single program? No, because of this indeterminacy (the 1p indeterminacy) as Bruno has explained well. But while this is true, if you consider multiple computations that are accessing shared resources things are not so clear. I wish that some thought might be given to the problem of concurrency. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: fairness and sustainability
Hi Roger, On 09 Sep 2012, at 12:48, Roger Clough wrote: Marchal Hi Bruno By sin or evil I mean intentionally diminishing the life of others. OK. If you doubt that that is not the way of the world, you must not watch the news. I never doubt that, alas. Evil is not an abstract word, it is very real, and it lives to whatever extent in each of us. In two very different ways. In fantasy, with consent, and in act without consent. The good can and will never triumph on the bad, but it can reduce the harm. The extent of evil in you is not the problem, the sin is in the evil act that actually augment the harm of others. The evil is in all on us, you are right. But this does not make all person a sinner. You became a sinner only if you actually sin (diminish the life of others), intentionally, or not, I am not sure but with some degree or responsibility, relatively to different realities. The better you know the evil in you, the less surprising it is in unexpected circumstances, making easier the self-control. Some believe that thinking bad things is already a sin. But you have to think on bad things to say that, so it is a bit self-defeating. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/9/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-08, 13:54:23 Subject: Re: fairness and sustainability On 08 Sep 2012, at 16:41, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Indeed, we are all sinners. Hi Roger, Saying this can only dilute the responsibility and helps the sinners. I am not sure at all we are all sinners, unless you are using a so weak sense that it is making every baby already sinning. I am not sure about the notion of sin. It looks too much like an easy way to explain suffering, and it makes many people feeling guilty for no reason that they can see, and sometimes it can act as a self-prophecy: given that I have already sin why not sin again? I think that there is only one sin: hurting others without legitimate concern. And most people don't sin, I think, Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/8/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-08, 08:37:30 Subject: Re: fairness and sustainability On 08 Sep 2012, at 12:35, Roger Clough wrote: Hi John Mikes Here's the dilemma: Unfortunately, any system -- with the exception of the oil-rich countries (where fairness would seem to be hard to define) -- that is completely fair is unsustainable. Capitalism, like it or not, is the only known way to increase a country's wealth. Fairness decreases a country's capacity to grow. Darwin would agree. Cuba and the former soviet union and now europe are good examples. They all failed in trying to be completely fair or are in the process of failing. I think that capitalism + democracy is the most fair system. Today, unfortunately, capitalism has been perverted by minorities which build money on fears, lies and catastrophes, and that is very bad. They are clever, and have succeeded in mixing the black and non black money, so that the middle class and the banking systems have become hostages. Those liars are transforming the planet economy into a a pyramidal con. Lying is part of nature, like cancers and diseases. Defending ourselves against liars is part of nature too. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/8/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: John Mikes Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-07, 14:44:26 Subject: Re: There is no such thing as cause and effect Brent, I believe there is a difference between (adj) 'fair' or 'unjust' and the (noun) 'fairness', or 'consciousness'. While the nouns (IMO)燼re not adequately identified the adverbs refer to the applied system of correspondence. E.g.: Fair to the unjust system. (I don't think we may use the opposite: unjust to a 'fair' system in our discussion). As I tried to explain in another post: the 'rich' consume MORE of the country-supplied services than the not-so-rich and pay less taxes (unfair and unjust). Certain big corporations also pay 'less' than the system would require (in all fairness - proverbially said) ordinarily. Semantix, OOH! John M On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 4:18 PM, meekerdb meeke...@verizon.net wrote: On 9/4/2012 1:12 PM, John Mikes wrote: It is a 'trap' to falsify the adequate taxing of the 'rich' as a leftist attempt to distributing richness. It does not include more than a requirement for THEM to pay their FAIR share - maybe more than the not-so-rich layers (e.g. higher use of
Re: The poverty of computers
On 09 Sep 2012, at 19:12, Jason Resch wrote: Hinduism: By understanding the Self, all this universe is known. — Upanishads Can hardly be more close to comp, where indeed physics is a branch of machine self-reference logic. Yoga: God dwells within you as you. That is the eastern Inner God, or neoplatonist third God, and the notion of first person fits that role quite well, as I try to illustrate in the Plotinus paper. Islam: He who knows himself knows his lord. — Muhammad Ditto. Confucianism: Heaven, earth and human are of one body. Taoists are closer to the comp truth than Confucianists, who bring back the physicalism in the divine picture. Zen Buddhism: Look within, you are the Buddha. Christianity: The Kingdom of God is within you. Hmm... The problem is that christianity has exiled or burn alive those who look too much in the internal kingdom, and they will insist that you confess to the local authorities. But Christianity is a human thing, and it has not completely kill its original spiritual motivation. Mathematician like to generalize definition, making 0, 1, and 2 numbers, where the initial intuition of number was numerous. In a similar vein, it is all normal to provide a general definition of theology, as the search of the truth, including the irrational or unjustifiable (non provable) one, like I am conscious, or I will survive the Doctor technological reincarnation of me, or I am consistent, or there is something real, or there is a primary physical universe, or there is an afterlife, or there is no afterlife, etc. Then the math, or just logic, shows that machine's theology is closer to Platonism, mysticism and the eastern conception of God, than the Aristotelian physicalist one which bet that reality is wysiwig. Since there are religions that adhere to ideas for God which I cannot reject, the only solution is to reject atheism, and declare what one does or does not believe in on a case by case basis. As I believe in Platonism, it is very difficult for me to find something I do not believe exists, in some sense, or somewhere, so where I draw the line is on things which are self-inconsistent. For example, am omniscient+omnipotent god, can it forget? If so is it still omniscient, if not is it still omnipotent? It is easy to show the inconsistency for some ideas of God, and thus reject them, but this is less easy for other notions of God. And the same for Matter or any metaphysical notion. All concepts evolves when tackled scientifically. Only fundamentalists sticks on invariant definition. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The sin of NDAA
On 09 Sep 2012, at 13:08, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal My feeling at the moment is to compare the sin of NDAA with that of collateral damage, and war itself, and fall back on the doctrine of just warfare. I would have still be open to that idea one year ago. But Obama did not kept his promise to decriminalize pot, to not let the feds interfere with the state on this, to at least try to refrain the war on drug, and to finish the war on terror. Not only Obama did not do that, but he has tried, through the NDAA, to make into an indefinite law what Bush succeeds to justify as warfare. I could have thought it was just a typo mistake, but Obama's administration has refuse any change to the language in the NDAA(*). So, it looks to me more as the events leading to the third reich in Germany, where the worst get power through democracy. Obama has convinced me in one night that the war on terror is as fake as the war on drugs. Now I think it is just the usual fear selling business, and they are planning the catastrophes selling. Although I have mocked the idea that 9/11 is an inside job, despite building seven, I dod not expect Obama signing a text which contains the usual dictator trick, which consists in abandoning the human right for a fuzzy category of the population, and allowing the military to overturn the laws and the constitution, and this after the war. That is not the sin of collateral damage, that is the sin of terrorism, simply. Obama could have said more simply that the terrorist have won. Al Qaeda looks more and more like a CIA construct, as frightening that might seem. The human right have to be applied to every one, or they are no more human rights. If suspects of whatever have no more rights, you are no more living in a democracy but in a tyranny. If the media were able to do their job, Obama would already be detained in a jail for attempt of coup d'etat. I have supported him, but I do think now that both the republicans and democrats have just zero power, and are the puppets of international mafia. 5 years of alcohol prohibition has given Al Capone, and I'm afraid we are seeing the result of 75 years of prohibition of cannabis. It was a Trojan Horse for the international criminality and terrorism. I am less terrorized by bombs than by laws allowing detention without trial for people being only suspected. If you abandon an atom of liberty for an atom of security, you lose both. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/9/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-08, 14:16:31 Subject: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On 08 Sep 2012, at 15:33, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal OK, I see, you think I judge the abilities of people by the color of their skin. So you call me a racist. I was thinking only you might judge someone by the constitution of its body. You don't answer the question: can your daughter marry a man which body is 100% machine? You might be a liberal, because ironically and paradoxically they see the world in terms of race. Conservatives attempt to live by facts. I never saw racism in what what I wrote until you brought the subject up. I don't mean to offend you with this talk of politics. Conservatives are not perfect either. Sure. I tend to be rather conservative, in principle. I think that today the liberal/conservative division makes no sense. The division is more bastards/ victim of bastards, like Romney and Obama against Ron Paul, Gary Johnson or Norman Solomon, or those who understand that the human rights apply to everybody and those who does not, or between the fear sellers and the constitutionalists. The republicans betrayed themselves by not attacking Obama on the NDAA notes. Thanks to the existence of a many years long drug and food prohibition I am hardly astonished. As long as prohibition continue, there are no politics, only well- disguised form of mafias, which are succeeding to get the whole financial system into hostage. The individual human is in danger. Bruno Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/8/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Bruno Marchal Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-08, 04:46:38 Subject: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On 07 Sep 2012, at 15:00, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Bruno Marchal Racism ? How's that implied ? Do you accept that your daughter marry a man who has undergone an artificial brain transplant? But I do agree that perception and Cs are not understandable with materialistic concepts at least as they are commonly used. Instead they are what the mind can sense, OK. as a sixth sense. Hmm...
Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
On 10 Sep 2012, at 06:28, Russell Standish wrote: On Fri, Sep 07, 2012 at 07:24:02AM -0400, Stephen P. King wrote: Dear Bruno, Could you explain a bit more what the experience of being conscious in a completely atemporal mode was like? Where you aware of any kind of change in your environment? Was one's internal narrative (of external events) silent? I have always suspected that subjective time might be a result of self-consciousness but have not had any way of discussing the idea coherently. If we stipulate that subjective time is a form of noticing that one is noticing changes (a second order aspect) in one's environment, then this would fall into being a result of self-consciousness (which is obviously a second order effect at least to me). I have debated this idea before on this List with Russell Standish but we didn't seem to reach any definite conclusion. Your proposition is basically what my TIME postulate is all about. What Bruno is suggesting is that the smoking of certain plants induces a conscious state that contradicts TIME. I'm not prepared at this stage to follow in his footsteps, so have to simply take his observations (and of others in the Salvia forum) on face value. I do not know how TIME may be modified to reconcile it with this observation, yet remain in place for the deduction of quantum mechanics. OK. But with comp, such a time might be either the steps of the UD in arithmetic, or anything implied from the 0, 1, 2, 3, ... static ordering. This is similar to the block idea in physics, except that it is a block mindscape instaed of a block physical-universe. Such structure are infinite and third person describable. But the going out of time in the salvia reports are first person apprehension of no time, and that is admittedly very weird, even for an hallucination. It might even contradict comp. This wouldn't contradict TIME, which only says that percieved psychological time should be a timescale (a mathematical term). Discrete time, such as that reported by LM above is still a valid timescale. Yes, that is the reason why we don't need more that the order on the natural number, defined by x y iff Ez(x+z = y). Of course, the going out of time does not play any role, in what is derived from comp. Just a data, which might one day lead to a refutation of comp, unless we find a way to make sense of it. It needs perhaps, as I am suggesting since recently the fact that consciousness can apply to the universal non Löbian machine, in a highly disconnected way. The experience out of time might be a generalization of the LM case, but it is hard to know, as when you are there, nothing is static, as static still refer to time. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On 10 Sep 2012, at 16:57, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Sep 2012, at 16:08, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Sep 2012, at 14:22, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Sep 2012, at 13:31, benjayk wrote: Quantum effects beyond individual brains (suggested by psi) can't be computed as well: No matter what I compute in my brain, this doesn't entangle it with other brains since computation is classical. The UD emulates all quantum computer, as they do not violate Church Thesis. I am not talking about quantum computers, which are not entangled with their surroundings. I am talking about systems that are entangled to other systems. This is just lowering the comp level of substitution. It does not change the reasoning, thanks to the use of the notion of generalized brain. It does, because you can't simulate indefinite entanglement. No matter how many entangled systems you simulate, you are always missing the entanglement of this combined system to another (which may be as crucial as the system itself, because it may lead to a very different unfoldment of events). To use this argument, you need to postulate that the physical universe exists and is describe by a quantum garden of Eden, that is a infinite quantum pattern, and that *you* are that pattern. In that case, you are just working in a different theory than the comp theory, and are out of the scope of my expertize. But then develop your theory. Nope. I am not saying that is the case (though I do believe that such entanglement exists), I am just saying that COMP does not exclude that possibility. ? Comp exclude infinite Eden. Whether or not some digital substitution exists, what is required to correctly implement it (which also is part of yourself) may itself be not be emulable in the sense that your reasoning requires. Indeed, it can't. I remind you, COMP does not say we are digital, it says that a correctly implemented digital substitution may substitute my current brain/body. OK. It does not say that this can't require some non-digital component (you are still getting an artificial brain/body). Indeed, that is a consequence of comp. Bruno benjayk -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/Simple-proof-that-our-intelligence-transcends-that-of-computers-tp34330236p34413398.html Sent from the Everything List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: I think we agree that closed mindedness, in all its forms, in something we to be avoided. It's good to be open minded, but not so open minded all your brains fall out. I believe in moderation in everything, including moderation. the devout atheists, may make a habit out of rejecting all ideas that have little or no evidence I certainly hope so! As a devout atheist that is the creed I adhere to. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
Roger, I agree with John here. Except that his point is more agnostic than atheist. A better question to John would be: explain where consciousness and universes come from, or what is your big picture. John is mute on this, but his stucking on step 3 illustrates that he might be a religious believer in a material universe, or in physicalism. Perhaps. To be clear on atheism, I use modal logic (informally). if Bx means I believe in x, and if g means (god exists) A believer is characterized by Bg An atheist by B ~g An agnostic by ~Bg ~B~g But you can replace g by m (primitive matter), and be atheist with respect of matter, etc. Someone who say that he does not believe in God, usually take for granted other sort of God, that is they make a science, like physics, which is irreproachable by itself, into an explanation of everything, which is just another religion or pseudo religion, if not assumed clearly. I advocate that we can do theology as seriously as physics by making clear the assumptions. Like with comp which appears to be closer to Bg than to Bm. But g might be itself no more than arithmetical truth, or even a tiny part of it. Bruno On 10 Sep 2012, at 18:27, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: If you are an atheist, prove that God does not exist. If you can't, you are a hypocrite in attacking those that do believe that God exists. You haven't a leg to stand on. A fool disbelieves only in the things he can prove not to exist, the wise man also disbelieves in things that are silly. A china teapot orbiting the planet Uranus is silly, and so is God. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: My limited support for the atheists
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou I believe that the real reason that atheists attack religion is that they fear its possible political power to condemn you and order your obedience. I think they have a somewhat reasonable case, so I advocate legal separation of church and state, although I don't personally see any harm in thanking God for anything or putting up a christmas display. My church is totally opposed to such strict separation, so we agree. A more dangerous case that I would support the athests in is against Sharia Law. Of course most muslims are not militants or terrorists, but those that are are dangerous and violent enemies of freeedom and democracy. Why ? I heard one fundamentalist muslim terrorist in interview say that Islam cannot survive without state support. So I welcome all atheist opoosition at least to Sharia. Smoking causes cancer. Smokers may not like this, but it doesn't mean it's not true. God wants you to fly planes into building in his name. You may not like this, but it doesn't mean it's not true. My primary problem with religion is that it is not true. Whether a matter of fact is true or not is independent of whether I like it. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: My limited support for the atheists
On 10 Sep 2012, at 19:22, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi Stathis Papaioannou I believe that the real reason that atheists attack religion is that they fear its possible political power to condemn you and order your obedience. I think they have a somewhat reasonable case, so I advocate legal separation of church and state, although I don't personally see any harm in thanking God for anything or putting up a christmas display. My church is totally opposed to such strict separation, so we agree. A more dangerous case that I would support the athests in is against Sharia Law. Of course most muslims are not militants or terrorists, but those that are are dangerous and violent enemies of freeedom and democracy. Why ? I heard one fundamentalist muslim terrorist in interview say that Islam cannot survive without state support. So I welcome all atheist opoosition at least to Sharia. Smoking causes cancer. Smoking tobacco. Yes. Evidences are strong. Smokers may not like this, but it doesn't mean it's not true. God wants you to fly planes into building in his name. You may not like this, but it doesn't mean it's not true. My primary problem with religion is that it is not true. Whether a matter of fact is true or not is independent of whether I like it. My primary problem with religion is the poverty or non validity of argument, notably based on text or per authority, instead of personal inquiry. But this concerns only the naive fairy tales approaches. Like saying that Jesus is the literal son of God because I know a man who knows a man who knows a man ... a man who said that he saw him walking on water. Given the many evidences that humans can be deluded, or can misunderstand other humans, sticking on such argument, is bad for the teaching of being skeptical and rational, and if someone can really be convinced by such arguments, he can also be convinced on any inconsistencies, and this can lead to shoa, rwanda and prohibition, that is a lot of unnecessary suffering. We cannot know the truth, at least in any public way, but we can judge the argument. In the human science, I think rigor is a moral duty, but today no one want to hear that, as it makes the manipulations and the selling of crap more difficult. Bruno -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en . http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: I think God is a white man with a beard is a more intelligent statement than God is truth because its actually saying something, it's something that happens not to be true but at least its saying something, while God is truth is not saying anything, it's just silly wordplay. No, it is not. I already know what the word truth means so when you say God means truth you aren't telling me anything of philosophical or mathematical or scientific interest, you're just giving me a synonym. But when you say God has a beard you're actually saying something, you're saying something about God; it happens to be something that is not true but at least its saying something. If I believed in God I would feel that I knew a little more about the being who created me and the universe, but no matter how deeply I believed I couldn't do anything with God is truth. If you are so worry about fairy tails notion of God, why are you limiting the meaning of God to such fairy tale notion. Because that's what the word God means, without those fairy tail notions it would no longer be God, at least not in the English language. Everybody on this list seems to want to mutate the meaning of the word God into something more reasonable so you wouldn't have to be a idiot to say the words I believe in God. Well that certainly can be done, make the word God mean truth for example, but I don't see the point, we already have a perfectly good word for that, truth. But if you should succeed in this ridiculous quest then we're going to need to invent a new word to replace the old meaning of the word God, let me suggest Klogknee, then I'll be able to tell people I do believe in God but I don't believe in Klogknee. you are the one preventing theology to come back to seriousness Come back? When was theology ever serious? some people have made the physical universe into a sort of authoritative God Unlike God physical reality can smack you right on the head, in fact it seems to have habit of doing so, thus when physics says that bridge is not strong enough to hold your weight it would be wise to listen to what that authority is saying. this not only does not explain where it comes from but prevent progress both on the origin of the universe and on the mind-body problem. And the God theory does not help one teeny tiny bit in explaining any of that. You're saying that the Brahman is the truth and the truth is the Brahman, well OK but other than being able to say that its Brahman that 2+2=4 what have I gained from learning that? A foreseen of the fact that if 2+2=4 is a scientific statement, the following is not: 1+1=2 is true. This plays a key role in the comp theory of consciousness. Well duh! The fact that 2+2=4 plays a key role in EVERYTHING and anybody with half a brain knew that long before being told that the Brahman is truth and truth is the Brahman, this new information is of zero utility to me. It becomes clearer and clearer for me that your avoidance of going from step 3 to step 4 might come from your religious atheistic beliefs. Maybe but I'm not sure because I've long since forgotten what step 3 or 4 is, or even step 2. All I remember is you claimed to have discovered some new type of indeterminacy that was fundamentally different from regular run of the mill indeterminacy and it never made any sense to me. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
that is not fair. 99.99 believed in God or in gods They differ in the details. Atheists are a minority. In a deeper sense, atheists do believe in gods. problably modern atheism is one the most basic, new and thus, primitive religions, as I will show here: Seeing the development of religion where religion is repressed, unrepressed atheism develops into personality cult, which is probably the most basic religion. personality cult fanatics typically belive without any doubt that his leader, for example Stalin or Kim I Sung can write hundred of books per year about any scientific matter In industrialized countries this form of primitive religion appears in the rock star cult (bands of cult) in the ideologies, the political leadership cult, the cult to famous atheistic scientists or their precursors. There are articles about the false mitifications, not by lay people but by scientist about the life of Darwin for example that moves to laugh http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/09/darwin.myths To summarize, religion is part of human nature. it involves the mitification or idealization of people that act as super-egos (in the psychoanalitical sense) or as models of behaviour for the believer. This is part of any healty socialization. The process of sentimental attachment of a comunity ever involves the asumption of some myths. For sure a nation is a form of primitive religion where the life of the founders and their mytical history are part of the beliefs. such religion is mixed in a politeistic way with other attachment to football teams or rock groups that act as minor divinities, and usually there is a superior level of civilizational religion, above the nation, where the person identifies itself with a broader comunity, such is ecologism, christianism, socialism where Al Gore, Christ or Marx act as divinities. The fact that these myths are based on real, historical people or in too long dead people with no guaranteed historicity does not matter. The only difference is that new religions have new myths and due to the fact that they have no history, they conform to the most pure form of religion, where the psychological process of mythopoiesis is observable in action today. If the mytification goes from generation to generation (if the faith is sucessful) then the mytified historical figures become pure myths so they become gods. The most pure form of belief is the one where the believer does not know that he believe. The knowledge of belief is a sophisticated or civlized way of belief, that only exist where civilizatons are mixed. We all believe things that are idealizations, falsifications or mytifications. But not all myths are equal and not all myths have to be false. There is a social capital involved in every belief: A myth explains the reality in some way, but also is inherently good if it make people act in common for common goals that are good for all. This is independent from the objective truth. By intuition men can gasp how good a myth is for him and for his fellows (that may be explained by a social capital instinct, from which the mythopoiesis, the production of myths feed from). Good and Truthful become synonyms in the mind of the man that seek a menaning, a reason to live with others. And the man that don´t seek meaning, either is in crisis or someone else has chosen his myhths to believe for him time ago. 2012/9/10 Stathis Papaioannou stath...@gmail.com: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 5:50 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: So you have a very strong belief: That almost all but a few enlightened people like you in the History of humanity are a bunch of silly idiots. Actually, almost everyone in the history of humanity has thought that 99.99% of all religions are silly, and that they were fortuitously born into the 0.01% that wasn't. Atheists take it a bit further and think that 100% of all religions are silly. Agnostics, if they are consistent, say that it is possible that the archangel gabriel dictated the Quran to Muhammad just as it is possible that Santa Claus and his helpers construct toys for the world's children at the North Pole. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: victims of faith
not at all. My answer is to the John's comment, not to yours 2012/9/10 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net: Hi Alberto G. Corona So you may have the blind faith that there is no God. And attack those that do. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 15:50:53 Subject: Re: victims of faith So you have a very strong belief: That almost all but a few enlightened people like you in the History of humanity are a bunch of silly idiots. This sense of superiority, combined with a voluntary repression of doubt certainly can susbstitute any lack of absolute meaning of life at least for some years. 2012/9/9 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com: On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: What I find curious about atheists is that because one can prove neither that there is a god or not, both theism and atheism must rely on faith-- that their position is true. I can't prove God doesn't exist but I can prove He's silly. And I can neither prove nor disprove that a china teapot is in orbit around the planet Uranus, but I can prove the idea is dumb. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: What would you say is the reason for: 1. The anthropological universality of spiritual concepts The fear of death. 2. That religious-philosophical development is universal pre-requisite for the emergence of science, ie. science never emerges ab initio from a culture devoid of a history of religious thought. I wouldn't call it thought but no culture is devoid of a history of religion and I have a theory as to why. In general it would be a Evolutionary advantage for children to listen to and believe what adults, particularly parents, have to say; don't eat those berries they will kill you, don't swim in that river there are crocodiles, etc. Most people may not be born with innate religious feelings and visions but some are, and they teach their children that belief. And when those children grow up they in turn teach their children that belief too, that's why religious belief has a strong geographical pattern. So the root cause is that most people have a tendency (which started out as a advantage) to believe into adulthood whatever they were told as children. And so screwy religious ideas that start small propagate and become huge. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A better question to John would be: explain where consciousness and universes come from Paraphrasing Mark Twain: Drawing on my fine command of the English language I stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said I don't know.** Someone who say that he does not believe in God, usually take for granted other sort of God, that is they make a science, like physics, Science can't explain everything but it beats something like religion which can't explain anything. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: victims of faith
This paper of an evolutionist scientific denounces the mytification of Darwin, the spread of false claims that enhance his figure and even the creation of a physical temple around these myths. http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep055269.pdf Victims of faith are we all, and also beneficiaries, because the need of myths to worship is part of our social nature. 2012/9/10 Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com: not at all. My answer is to the John's comment, not to yours 2012/9/10 Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net: Hi Alberto G. Corona So you may have the blind faith that there is no God. And attack those that do. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - From: Alberto G. Corona Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-09-09, 15:50:53 Subject: Re: victims of faith So you have a very strong belief: That almost all but a few enlightened people like you in the History of humanity are a bunch of silly idiots. This sense of superiority, combined with a voluntary repression of doubt certainly can susbstitute any lack of absolute meaning of life at least for some years. 2012/9/9 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com: On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 7:30 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: What I find curious about atheists is that because one can prove neither that there is a god or not, both theism and atheism must rely on faith-- that their position is true. I can't prove God doesn't exist but I can prove He's silly. And I can neither prove nor disprove that a china teapot is in orbit around the planet Uranus, but I can prove the idea is dumb. 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 everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On 9/10/2012 12:30 PM, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012, Craig Weinberg whatsons...@gmail.com mailto:whatsons...@gmail.com wrote: What would you say is the reason for: 1. The anthropological universality of spiritual concepts The fear of death. 2. That religious-philosophical development is universal pre-requisite for the emergence of science, ie. science never emerges ab initio from a culture devoid of a history of religious thought. I wouldn't call it thought but no culture is devoid of a history of religion and I have a theory as to why. In general it would be a Evolutionary advantage for children to listen to and believe what adults, particularly parents, have to say; don't eat those berries they will kill you, don't swim in that river there are crocodiles, etc. Most people may not be born with innate religious feelings and visions but some are, and they teach their children that belief. And when those children grow up they in turn teach their children that belief too, that's why religious belief has a strong geographical pattern. So the root cause is that most people have a tendency (which started out as a advantage) to believe into adulthood whatever they were told as children. And so screwy religious ideas that start small propagate and become huge. And there are two slim but excellent books about this propagation: The Religion Virus by Craig James and The God Virus by Darrel Ray. Despite their similarity of title and subject matter they are different and complementary explications. James considers social and political factors, Ray personal psychology. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: The poverty of computers
On 9/10/2012 12:45 PM, John Clark wrote: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: A better question to John would be: explain where consciousness and universes come from Paraphrasing Mark Twain: Drawing on my fine command of the English language I stood up, looked him straight in the eye, and said I don't know.// Someone who say that he does not believe in God, usually take for granted other sort of God, that is they make a science, like physics, Science can't explain everything but it beats something like religion which can't explain anything. Or, looked at another way, can explain anything and hence fails to explain at all. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/10/2012 12:50 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: This paper of an evolutionist scientific denounces the mytification of Darwin, the spread of false claims that enhance his figure and even the creation of a physical temple around these myths. http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep055269.pdf So when will be treated to papers by Christians de-mythifying Jesus and papers by Muslims de-mythifying Muhammed? Maybe science and religion really are different. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Two reasons why computers IMHO cannot exhibit intelligence
On 9/10/2012 7:57 AM, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 08 Sep 2012, at 16:08, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 07 Sep 2012, at 14:22, benjayk wrote: Bruno Marchal wrote: On 06 Sep 2012, at 13:31, benjayk wrote: Quantum effects beyond individual brains (suggested by psi) can't be computed as well: No matter what I compute in my brain, this doesn't entangle it with other brains since computation is classical. The UD emulates all quantum computer, as they do not violate Church Thesis. I am not talking about quantum computers, which are not entangled with their surroundings. I am talking about systems that are entangled to other systems. This is just lowering the comp level of substitution. It does not change the reasoning, thanks to the use of the notion of generalized brain. It does, because you can't simulate indefinite entanglement. No matter how many entangled systems you simulate, you are always missing the entanglement of this combined system to another (which may be as crucial as the system itself, because it may lead to a very different unfoldment of events). To use this argument, you need to postulate that the physical universe exists and is describe by a quantum garden of Eden, that is a infinite quantum pattern, and that *you* are that pattern. In that case, you are just working in a different theory than the comp theory, and are out of the scope of my expertize. But then develop your theory. Nope. I am not saying that is the case (though I do believe that such entanglement exists), I am just saying that COMP does not exclude that possibility. Whether or not some digital substitution exists, what is required to correctly implement it (which also is part of yourself) may itself be not be emulable in the sense that your reasoning requires. I remind you, COMP does not say we are digital, it says that a correctly implemented digital substitution may substitute my current brain/body. It does not say that this can't require some non-digital component (you are still getting an artificial brain/body). I think this is why Bruno sometimes allows that the level of substitution may not only be low (molecular, quantum,...) but also extensive: local Earth envrionment, galaxy, universe,... But when you consider extensive 'substitution' it just turns into saying the universe is computable. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
Having obfuscated the meaning of God as much as possible, let's see if we can also fuzz-up the meaning of believe in - because, above all, we really really want to be able to say We believe in God. and we want to be able to say You really believe in God. and if you think you don't it is just because you don't know the real secret meaning of believe in and God. Brent On 9/10/2012 12:17 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: that is not fair. 99.99 believed in God or in gods They differ in the details. Atheists are a minority. In a deeper sense, atheists do believe in gods. problably modern atheism is one the most basic, new and thus, primitive religions, as I will show here: Seeing the development of religion where religion is repressed, unrepressed atheism develops into personality cult, which is probably the most basic religion. personality cult fanatics typically belive without any doubt that his leader, for example Stalin or Kim I Sung can write hundred of books per year about any scientific matter In industrialized countries this form of primitive religion appears in the rock star cult (bands of cult) in the ideologies, the political leadership cult, the cult to famous atheistic scientists or their precursors. There are articles about the false mitifications, not by lay people but by scientist about the life of Darwin for example that moves to laugh http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/09/darwin.myths To summarize, religion is part of human nature. it involves the mitification or idealization of people that act as super-egos (in the psychoanalitical sense) or as models of behaviour for the believer. This is part of any healty socialization. The process of sentimental attachment of a comunity ever involves the asumption of some myths. For sure a nation is a form of primitive religion where the life of the founders and their mytical history are part of the beliefs. such religion is mixed in a politeistic way with other attachment to football teams or rock groups that act as minor divinities, and usually there is a superior level of civilizational religion, above the nation, where the person identifies itself with a broader comunity, such is ecologism, christianism, socialism where Al Gore, Christ or Marx act as divinities. The fact that these myths are based on real, historical people or in too long dead people with no guaranteed historicity does not matter. The only difference is that new religions have new myths and due to the fact that they have no history, they conform to the most pure form of religion, where the psychological process of mythopoiesis is observable in action today. If the mytification goes from generation to generation (if the faith is sucessful) then the mytified historical figures become pure myths so they become gods. The most pure form of belief is the one where the believer does not know that he believe. The knowledge of belief is a sophisticated or civlized way of belief, that only exist where civilizatons are mixed. We all believe things that are idealizations, falsifications or mytifications. But not all myths are equal and not all myths have to be false. There is a social capital involved in every belief: A myth explains the reality in some way, but also is inherently good if it make people act in common for common goals that are good for all. This is independent from the objective truth. By intuition men can gasp how good a myth is for him and for his fellows (that may be explained by a social capital instinct, from which the mythopoiesis, the production of myths feed from). Good and Truthful become synonyms in the mind of the man that seek a menaning, a reason to live with others. And the man that don´t seek meaning, either is in crisis or someone else has chosen his myhths to believe for him time ago. 2012/9/10 Stathis Papaioannoustath...@gmail.com: On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 5:50 AM, Alberto G. Coronaagocor...@gmail.com wrote: So you have a very strong belief: That almost all but a few enlightened people like you in the History of humanity are a bunch of silly idiots. Actually, almost everyone in the history of humanity has thought that 99.99% of all religions are silly, and that they were fortuitously born into the 0.01% that wasn't. Atheists take it a bit further and think that 100% of all religions are silly. Agnostics, if they are consistent, say that it is possible that the archangel gabriel dictated the Quran to Muhammad just as it is possible that Santa Claus and his helpers construct toys for the world's children at the North Pole. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message
Re: Re: The poverty of computers
John C, you have been urged: *If you are an atheist, prove that God does not exist.* *I am not an atheist, an atheist needs a god dy deny, the concept does not fit into my worldview, but that is besode the point. What is more relevant:* years ago on another list I received a similar outburst - more politely than Roger's - and replied: Wrong position. I do not have to PROVE a negative, if the positive is questionable. Prove the 'existence' of god FROM OUTSIDE THE BOX (no dreams, no ancient teachings, no feelings, no faith, no assumptions/presumptions or questionable written sources (like a Bible?) including such supposition) and THEN I will prove you wrong. End of discussion. The person left the list. John Mikes On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 7:31 AM, Roger Clough rclo...@verizon.net wrote: Hi John Clark If you are an atheist, prove that God does not exist. If you can't, you are a hypocrite in attacking those that do believe that God exists. You haven't a leg to stand on. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com *Receiver:* everything-list everything-list@googlegroups.com *Time:* 2012-09-09, 10:37:05 *Subject:* Re: The poverty of computers On Sat, Sep 8, 2012� Jason Resch jasonre...@gmail.com wrote: You call yourself an atheist, I do, but that's only because I also have the rather old fashioned belief that words should mean something. which means you reject every notion of God, of any religion, does it not? Apparently not. If we live in a world where words mean whatever Jason Resch wants them to mean then I'm not sure if I'm a atheist or not. However I do know that the idea of a omnipotent omniscient being who created the universe is brain dead dumb. And I do know that I have never heard any religion express a single deep idea that a scientist or mathematician hadn't explained first and done so much much better. You tell me if that's good enough to make me a atheist or not. you cannot simply reject the weakest idea, ignore the stronger ones, That is just about the most ridiculous statement I have ever heard in my life! The key to wisdom is to reject weak ideas and embrace strong ones regardless of where they originated. rejecting the idea of Santa Clause won't make you an atheist I am a Santa Clause atheist and you are a Thor atheist, and in fact you are a atheist for nearly all of the thousands and thousands of Gods that the Human race has created over the centuries, I just go one God further than you do. In my post, I showed that the notion of God as eternal, immutable, unlimited, self-existent truth appears in many religions. Do you reject this concept of God? No, I don't reject that true things are true, and I don't reject that a being that was eternal and knew everything that was true would have superpowers, and I don't reject that Superman in the comics had X ray vision or that Harry Potter was good at magic. Perhaps you find this sort of� fantasy role-playing philosophically enlightening but I don't. I have studied some of the beliefs of other religions. So have I and I've concluded that to a first approximation one religious franchise is about as idiotic as another. I am showing the common themes: self-existent and cause of existence Just saying that God caused Himself to exist without even giving a hint as to how He managed to accomplish that interesting task is as vacuous as saying the Universe cause itself to exist with no attempt at a explanation of how it works. The following sentence has identical informational content: in the beginning was stuff, and the stuff was with stuff, and stuff was stuff. Funny ASCII characters do not make things more profound. Logos is not a meaningless term, Logos has more meanings than you can shake a stick at, none of them profound; Logos can mean a reason or a speech or a word or a opinion or a wish or a cause or a account or a explanation or many other things; when religion says in the beginning there was logos it means stuff; but I do admit that logos sounds cooler than stuff and is more impressive to the rubes. and therefore the above expresses a meaningful idea about the notion of god, Yes, the sentence at the beginning of stuff there was stuff is not only meaningful it is also without question true, its just not very deep. Oh well, you got 2 out of 3. which is almost word-for-word identical to Keppler's quote below. If God is geometry like Kepler thought then I'm not a atheist. If God is an ashtray then I'm not a atheist either. mathematics is a form of theologh. OK two can play this silly word game, theology is the study of the gastrointestinal tract. Only a fool would say truth does not exist so with that definition God certainly exists. Ahh,
Re: Re: being conscious in a completely atemporal mode
On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 07:45:04AM -0400, Roger Clough wrote: Hi Russell Standish My experience of meditation or even sleeping is that as you go into that state, in which consciousness diminishes, (subjective) time passes faster and faster, until at the deepest level, time passes instantly. Instant passage of time might be construed by some to be atemporal. Instant passage of time strikes me as a discontinuity. Just like when you're asleep (and not dreaming). But timescales do not need to be continuous sets, so this doesn't pose a problem for TIME. IIUC, the experience of Salvia is rather different, but then I can't speak from experience. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 5:17 AM, Alberto G. Corona agocor...@gmail.com wrote: that is not fair. 99.99 believed in God or in gods They differ in the details. Atheists are a minority. In a deeper sense, atheists do believe in gods. problably modern atheism is one the most basic, new and thus, primitive religions, as I will show here: Seeing the development of religion where religion is repressed, unrepressed atheism develops into personality cult, which is probably the most basic religion. personality cult fanatics typically belive without any doubt that his leader, for example Stalin or Kim I Sung can write hundred of books per year about any scientific matter In industrialized countries this form of primitive religion appears in the rock star cult (bands of cult) in the ideologies, the political leadership cult, the cult to famous atheistic scientists or their precursors. There are articles about the false mitifications, not by lay people but by scientist about the life of Darwin for example that moves to laugh http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/feb/09/darwin.myths To summarize, religion is part of human nature. it involves the mitification or idealization of people that act as super-egos (in the psychoanalitical sense) or as models of behaviour for the believer. This is part of any healty socialization. The process of sentimental attachment of a comunity ever involves the asumption of some myths. For sure a nation is a form of primitive religion where the life of the founders and their mytical history are part of the beliefs. such religion is mixed in a politeistic way with other attachment to football teams or rock groups that act as minor divinities, and usually there is a superior level of civilizational religion, above the nation, where the person identifies itself with a broader comunity, such is ecologism, christianism, socialism where Al Gore, Christ or Marx act as divinities. The fact that these myths are based on real, historical people or in too long dead people with no guaranteed historicity does not matter. The only difference is that new religions have new myths and due to the fact that they have no history, they conform to the most pure form of religion, where the psychological process of mythopoiesis is observable in action today. If the mytification goes from generation to generation (if the faith is sucessful) then the mytified historical figures become pure myths so they become gods. The most pure form of belief is the one where the believer does not know that he believe. The knowledge of belief is a sophisticated or civlized way of belief, that only exist where civilizatons are mixed. We all believe things that are idealizations, falsifications or mytifications. But not all myths are equal and not all myths have to be false. There is a social capital involved in every belief: A myth explains the reality in some way, but also is inherently good if it make people act in common for common goals that are good for all. This is independent from the objective truth. By intuition men can gasp how good a myth is for him and for his fellows (that may be explained by a social capital instinct, from which the mythopoiesis, the production of myths feed from). Good and Truthful become synonyms in the mind of the man that seek a menaning, a reason to live with others. And the man that don´t seek meaning, either is in crisis or someone else has chosen his myhths to believe for him time ago. Let me be specific about what I dispute. I dispute the factual claims made by religions. For example: - Athena sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus when Hephaestus struck it with an ax to relieve a headache; - Yahweh dictated the ten commandments to Moses; - Ganesha is an elephant headed god who promotes good luck; - You go to Heaven when you die if you accept that Jesus is God and repent your sins. If you remove the factual claims then you are left with statements that may be inspiring, poetic, vacuous or nonsensical, but not true or false. For example: - Athena sprang from Zeus' head because in mythology she represents wisdom; - The ten commandments are a good basis for morality; - Worshiping Ganesha gives Hindus comfort and hope; - Jesus taught the importance of forgiveness. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: victims of faith
On 9/10/2012 12:50 PM, Alberto G. Corona wrote: This paper of an evolutionist scientific denounces the mytification of Darwin, the spread of false claims that enhance his figure and even the creation of a physical temple around these myths. http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep055269.pdf So when will be treated to papers by Christians de-mythifying Jesus and papers by Muslims de-mythifying Muhammed? Maybe science and religion really are different. Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ?
Hi Roger, It's ok not to be obsessed with cleaning up the environment, but why be intolerant of people who are? Same with people who spend a lot of time talking in public about issues of racial discrimination. If you are going to speak and act on behalf of millions of people who are not speaking and acting, it is understandable that you might also be the type of person who is strongly motivated. What you don't seem to appreciate is that being able to not have to think about race is a luxury that non-whites do not have. That doesn't mean you have to make the world fair for everyone, but the least that we who have that luxury could do is acknowledge that we have that privilege. Have you ever considered what it would be like for you in a world with an alternate history? Where the Cherokee Nation developed guns and steel before the Europeans and colonized it using Siberian slaves instead? You could listen to descendants of those invaders and slavers discuss how the whining of pink people, their scapegoats and victims for centuries in a hostile land, is really not their cup of tea. Craig On Monday, September 10, 2012 7:19:44 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg Not that I am against cleaning up the environment, but I am not obsessed with the idea. Integrating with Nature is also a main principle of the Communist Manifesto. Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net javascript: 9/10/2012 Leibniz would say, If there's no God, we'd have to invent him so that everything could function. - Receiving the following content - *From:* Craig Weinberg javascript: *Receiver:* everything-list javascript: *Time:* 2012-09-09, 16:23:54 *Subject:* Re: Racism ? How's that implied ? On Sunday, September 9, 2012 2:58:32 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: On 9/9/2012 2:21 PM, Craig Weinberg wrote: On Sunday, September 9, 2012 1:41:37 PM UTC-4, Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Craig, Why are we even considering the thoughts of paranoids? Are they in control of our daily lives? Hi Stephen, I agree, I was responding to what Roger said about liberals: ironically and paradoxically they see the world in terms of race. Conservatives attempt to live by facts. I never saw racism in what what I wrote until you brought the subject up. which sounded to me like 'conservatives aren't racist, liberals are', which - although conservative thought has some admirable virtues, I can say without hesitation that tolerance for racial and gender diversity is not one of them. That's why I brought up JBS and KKK, to show the absurdity of that claim, since the most racist hate groups are known to be political right wing extremists and not left wing extremists. HI Craig, The contest of recrimination is not winnable, but let's try for the sake of the discussion. Personally I don't know of any left wing extremist groups in this country - not that there aren't any but even self-proclaimed anarchists seem to stay out of trouble. I guess that you have never heard of 1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_First! 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Liberation_Front I had heard of Earth First but not much. Yeah, I think it's fair to call them left wing eco-terrorists. Unfortunately the way they are going about it, using arson and destruction will only serve to discredit their cause and provide a ready excuse for stepping up surveillance and security operations around the world. I don't think that mainstream liberals are aware or support groups like this though generally. Contrary to the overwhelming drift to the right by conservatives, groups like these have not seemed to influence the politics of the mainstream (Democrats can't really even be called liberals, more like fiscal conservatives who are socially moderate). 3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace What do they do that is bad? Do they threaten innocent people? Maybe they are over-zealous and unrealistic about ecological priorities but it's a drop in the bucket compared to the global machine they are up against. From what I see it looks like they mainly are concerned with protecting human beings in general: http://yqyq.net/81737-Istoriya_i_dostizheniya_Greenpeace.html Certainly they are not racists or bullies of innocent people. 4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_a_Democratic_Society SDS lasted from 1960-1969, so it hasn't been relevant for almost 50 years. I had a professor who was in SDS. Extremely nice and gentle guy. He said he had a metal plate in his skull from the FBI. His class was on revolutionary movements, talked about SDS, the IWW and labor unions. He seemed to have a mature and reasonable perspective on the 60s need more? sure. my point was about racism though. Are there any groups of white racists who are liberal? In other parts of the world, there are certainly
Re: Re: Re: Racism ? How's that implied ?
John, Oh I agree, that statistics like that aren't reliable in a scientific sense, but I think it is worthwhile to put it in perspective. Having to take our shoes off in airports forever for no real reason is not a rational response to the actual threat of terrorism. Craig On Sunday, September 9, 2012 5:16:41 PM UTC-4, JohnM wrote: Craig: I am not against you, or your opinion in general, but PLEASE: forget about those probability figures. That 1:25million or so chance can be realized right here and right now - as the next case and believe me: if that negligible of all odds happens to you, you will find it MORE than acceptable. JM On Sun, Sep 9, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Craig Weinberg whats...@gmail.comjavascript: wrote: On Sunday, September 9, 2012 7:25:57 AM UTC-4, rclough wrote: Hi Craig Weinberg I really don't know much about the John Birch Society, The John Birch Society has its roots in the 1950s when* it opposed the U.S.’s affirming the human rights principles of the United Nations*. It was used as a grassroots corollary to McCarthyism, insisting that imagined Communists were standing behind every light pole, ready to end the world as we know it. It still sees itself as fighting Communism, as well as the New World Order (whatever that is!), big government, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, wealth redistribution and more. You are not likely to hear the John Birch Society using epithets or spewing base language; its values are more carefully hidden behind flag-waving and obscure and irrelevant legal principles. Its words are cloaked in concern for the direction of the nation. John Birchers *opposed the **1964 Civil Rights Act*,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Civil_Rights_Actsaying it violates the Tenth Amendmenthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitutionto the United States Constitution and overstepped the rights of individual states to enact laws regarding civil rights.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rightsOn its website, the John Birch Society complains thathttp://www.jbs.org/jbs-news-feed/5476-obama-gets-what-thats-right-the-nobel-peace-prizePresident Obama - the man who got fawning media treatment for no reason, was elected with a thin resume and exalted without even being a king - has now been given the Noble Peace Prize. The John Birch Society also opposes health care reform, gun control, public schools and a host of other progressive causes. The Right-wing watch group, Public Research Associates,http://www.publiceye.org/tooclose/jbs.htmlnotes: (T)he Birch society *pioneered the encoding of implicit cultural forms of ethnocentric White racism and Christian nationalist antisemitism* rather than relying on the White supremacist biological determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right prior to WWII. Throughout its existence, however, the Society has promoted open homophobia and sexism. Because it is more libertarian than openly racist, anti-Semitic and sexist, the John Birch Society is often not characterized as a hate group like the Ku Klux Klan http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/type.jsp?DT=7or the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR),http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=846at least as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intpro.jsp One way the John Birch Society escapes that designation is because it receives support http://watch.pair.com/jbs-cnp.html from prominent politicians and elected officials. Birchers work hard to mask the anti-human rights beliefs that underlie their opinions. (from http://archive.truthout.org/topstories/112909ms1) but googling it up, find that it was once falsely accused of being racist, no doubt due to over-zealous liberal hatred of conservatism. The KKK was very racist. As far as I know it's mostly dead. Good. Huh? Hate groups are huge. The KKK is pretty small (about 100 chapters and 5000 members from the estimate I just saw), but there are many more Aryan groups, growing fast. As has been pointed out - not all conservatives are racists, but clearly the overwhelming majority (perhaps all?) racists are conservative. There are no liberals in any hate groups. A greater sin, IMHO is political correctness, supported by Al-qaeda, which is sending America down the toilet. If you don't see that, no amount of explaining on my part will enlighten you. Political correctness certainly can be irritating, but it is also important to protect groups who are vulnerable from threats that escalate violence. Anti-American/Anti-Western terrorism around the world is certainly a threat, but not really a significant one for American citizens. Certainly nothing on the order of the response, which has amounted to open surveillance and unrestrained powers of control over the
Re: Racism ? How's that implied ?
On 9/11/2012 12:44 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote: John, Oh I agree, that statistics like that aren't reliable in a scientific sense, but I think it is worthwhile to put it in perspective. Having to take our shoes off in airports forever for no real reason is not a rational response to the actual threat of terrorism. Craig Surprisingly, it does give people the sense that something is being done about it and thus they acquiesce. Demented and Sad. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvLdOE1e5Do Humans are, sadly, herd animals. -- Onward! Stephen http://webpages.charter.net/stephenk1/Outlaw/Outlaw.html -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
