Scientific Faith: Science and "nothing but-ism"
Scientists commonly assume that if you develop
a theory and make a mesasurement that
produces the expected result, the
reason for that result is "nothing-but" your theory.
Right ? Maybe, maybe not. Two completely
different theories can predict the same result.
I suspect the same is also true in mathematics.
And even logicians can get into debates.
The situation gets much worse in the so-called
human sciences because in the first case
you cannot tell if what you found is a cause
or an effect. Or perhaps something you overlooked
actually caused it. Humans and society are
infinitely complex.
Economics and politics are perhaps the most
delusive, especially considering the complexity of
an economy and that changes can take years to show
up. Hence the never-ending debate over whether Keynes
was right or wrong.
I leave you with this: Very little is certain in this contingent
world. And those that say you are certainly wrong
are perhaps unknowingly bully you.
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net
9/14/2012
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: 2012-09-13, 10:36:30
Subject: Re: a creator must know what he is doing (must have intelligence).
Hi Roger,
On 13 Sep 2012, at 12:36, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
But those mechanims are just mechanisms.
You are just doing the "just" fallacy.
A variant of the "nothing but" fallacy.
They do not know what they do,
We do have serious evidence that some mechanism, actually most of them, when
above a treshold of complexity (Turing sigma_1 completeness, universality, more
exactly L bianity) might be able to know (something obeying the S4 logic) when
looking inward.
They can look inward by the second recursion theorem of Kleene, that is through
the use of the Dx = xx syntactical trick (plausibly already done by the double
RNA strings at the molecular level I think).
There is already a sense for not taking them as zombie. (philosophical
zombie)
that knowing
combined with choice of what to do being
another description of intelligence, which is what
makes a creator greater than his creations.
You are limiting the power of God. With comp, God has not all power, but
He/She/It *can* at least create something/someone more powerful than
He/She/It-Self.
At his God exam, God was asked to chose between two problems:
- to make a stone so heavy that he can't lift it up.
- to make a creature more powerful than itself.
Basically that is what happens in Neoplatonism with:
GOD ==> NOUS ==> SOUL ==> MATTER (sensible + intelligible)
In arithmetic, the machine looking inward suggests a "toy theology", if you
want:
TRUTH ==> PROVABILITY ==> KNOWER ==> MATTER (sensible + intelligible)
Although it is more like
PROVABILITY MATTER
(sensible + intelligible)
TRUTH ==> PROVABILITY ==> KNOWER ==> MATTER (sensible + intelligible)
as the machine distinguishes the provable and non provable but true parts of
those discourses. It is useful to get the difference of discourse between
quanta and qualia.
Bruno
----- Receiving the following content -----
From: Bruno Marchal
Receiver: everything-list
Time: 2012-09-12, 13:07:32
Subject: Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
On 12 Sep 2012, at 14:00, Roger Clough wrote:
Hi Bruno Marchal
Any creator has to be greater than his creations.
Why?
The Universal Dovetailer, is smaller than what it does, and what it created.
The Mandelbrot program is very small, but it "creates" the most complex object,
full or subtle mixing of order and randomness.
The complexity of the universal machine gives a threshold above which objects
have more complex behavior than their description, somehow.
It is a surprising, but known phenomenon (by logicians and computer scientist)
that arithmetic, despite very simple elementary beings (0, and its successors),
and laws operating on them, addition and multiplication, is full of complex
mathematical processes, unsolvable or very hard problems, etc. Just think about
the distribution of the prime numbers, or inform yourself. In arithmetic, above
universality, the creators are all overwhelmed by their creation. They can even
lost themselves in them.
This can be also compared to Plotinus, where the ONE is fundamentally simple,
and can't help itself not letting emanating from itself, the NOUS, Plato
"universal intelligence", which put order on Platonia, but also makes some
mess, and then the inner god, the universal soul, does not help, and it can
hurt.
If we ant keep the fundamental principle on God, like being responsible for our
existence, being unameable, then with comp there is a God, but It is not
omnipotent, nor omniscient, apparently. Divine knowledge is a body freezer.
The point is that God cannot be used as an explanation of whay we are here, if
it is more complex than its creation. I agree with the others on this.
It might be that the price to pay for any relative potence is a selective
amnesia and/or consciousness differentiation, like in self-multiplication
(amoeba, WM-duplication, etc.).
I like to quote Sri Aurobindo here:
What, you ask, was the beginning of it all?
And it is this ...
Existence that multiplied itself
For sheer delight of being
And plunged into numberless trillions of forms
So that it might
Find
Itself
Innumerably (Aurobindo)
Roger Clough, rclo...@verizon.net
9/12/2012
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: 2012-09-11, 14:55:35
Subject: Re: If I ever doubt that there is a God,
On 11 Sep 2012, at 15:29, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 10:40 PM, Roger Clough
> wrote:
>
>> Intelligence is by (my) definition an autonomous function,
>> so over-layers are not only forbidden, they are not needed.
>>
>> But God does have to follow laws he already created.
>> If you jump off of a building you will fall to your death.
>>
>> I'm missing a possible problem there.
>
> You say that order in the universe is evidence of an intelligent
> designer but you don't say that order in the intelligent designer is
> evidence of a super-intelligent designer who designed him. If you say
> the designer was not himself designed then why not also say the
> universe was not itself designed?
>
It is a good point. Craig made a similar one. You need God being
conceptually simpler than its creation, to get something looking like
an explanation.
I think this is what has motivated Plotinus to put the ONE (described
mainly as the SIMPLE by Plotinus) above the NOUS, which is already the
MANY, very rich intelligible worlds of the ideas.
With comp this is captured by the difference between the factual
simple truth, like Ex( s(0)+x = s(s(s(0))) ), and the intelligible
truth, which in arithmetic will concerned provability predicate by
machine, using G?el's arithmetical predicate beweisbar(x). The simple
"cause" is the number together with their additive and multiplicative
laws, the many is the complex digital machine appearing from those
laws, and their possible histories and coupling with other universal
machines.
Bruno
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
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