Le 25-déc.-06, à 01:13, Tom Caylor a écrit :


It looks like I might have timed out.  Hopefully this doesn't appear
two times.

On Dec 24, 8:55 am, Bruno Marchal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Le 24-déc.-06, à 09:48, Tom Caylor a écrit :

> Bruno,
> ...
> I believe the answer to the question, "What is Truth?" which Pilate asked
> Jesus, was standing right in front of Pilate: Jesus himself.

Hmmm.... Perhaps in some symbolical way.

The "crux" is that he is not symbolic...



I respect your belief or faith, but I want to be frank, I have no evidences for the idea that "Jesus" is "truth", nor can I be sure of any clear meaning such an assertion could have, or how such an assertion could be made scientific, even dropping Popper falsification criteria. I must say I have evidences on the contrary, if only the fact that humans succumb often to wishful thinking, and still more often to their parents wishful thinking.




> The Christian definition of truth goes back to the core of everything, who
> is personal.  As I've said before, without a personal core, the word
> "personal" has lost its meaning.  In the context nowadays of
> impersonal-based philosophy, "personal" has come to "mean" something
> like "without rational basis".

Of course that *is* a pity. It is bad, for human, to develop such
"self-eliminating" belief.  It is not rational either.

I agree.  cf my examples (Skinner...) in response to Stathis.  But how
do *you* define rationality and persons?


A richer lobian machine (like ZF) can define those notions with respect to a simpler lobian machine (like PA), and then lift the "theology" of the simpler machine to themselves (a third lobian machine or entity, richer than ZF, can justified such induction. Then rationality can be defined by relative provability or representability in some shared theories. This leaves open the interpretations of those theories which ask for us implicit faith in our own consistency or relative correctness. The notion of persons are defined by each hypostases (third person = Bp, first person = Bp & p, etc.).




You also seem to reduce it,
to numbers.


It is a reduction only if you already defend a reductionist conception of numbers, and this can be considered as doubtful from the study of numbers, especially from the "things" that can emerge from their "collective behaviors" (arithmetical relations).




I think the sophistication of incompleteness simply hides
the fact that it is still a "castle in the sky".


Like any falsifiable but not yet falsified theory.



By the "direction" of replacement I didn't mean chronologically, like
Plato replaces Aristotle.


... in Plotinus, ok.




I meant that the impersonal core replaced
the real personal core, independent of Aristotle's views.
You have said before that the Christians emphasize matter more than
mind, as opposed to the Platonists and neo-Platonists.  There may have
been a few Christians who reclaimed a belief in nature, like Thomas
Aquinas, when the mind/grace was being emphasized too much.  But, as
can be seen in the Christian "interpretation" of the Greek hypostases,
the core of Christianity, being rooted in the Hebrew God who is the
source of all things/persons, is really first of all a downward
emanation, like the neo-Platonists thought.   There can be no upward
emanation unless/until a sufficient downward emanation is provided.  In
Christianity, the downward emanation is "God loves us", and then the
upward emanation is "We love God".


Plotinus insists a lot on the two ways: downward emanation and upward emanation. The lobian machine theology is coherent with this, even if negatively. It is coherent with Jef idea that pure "theological imperatives" can only be addressed by adapted "story telling" and examples, like jurisprudence in the application of laws. But then there is a proviso: none of the stories should be taken literally.




> He (the Holy Spirit) fills in
> the gaps when we cannot find words to talk to him.

Like G* minus G does for any self-referentially classical machine. (The
lobian machine).

Yes. By the way, you said to Brent that "you" know that you are lobian.
How do you know?


OK, sorry, I was assuming (weaker-)comp. Any machine or even larger non godlike entity believing in a sufficient amount of arithmetical truth is lobian. Actually a lobian machine, as I have define it, is just a universal machines knowing that she is universal (more precisely such a machine/entity can prove that if p is "accessible by its own local provability ability, then she can prove that fact.




I can take this as a poetical description of the relation between the
internal modalities or the hypostases.

This is not poetry.  Heidegger said to listen to the poet, not to the
content, but just to the fact that there is a poet, which gives us hope
that there is meaning.  However, unfulfilled hope does not provide
meaning.

Hope is something purely first-personal, if I can say. So I have no clue how hope does not provide meaning. Even little (and fortunately locally fulfillable hope) like hope in a cup of coffee, can provide meaning. Bigger (and hard to express) hopes can provide genuine bigger meaning, it seems to me. I am not opposed to some idea of ultimate meaning although both personal reasons and reflection on lobianity make me doubt that communicating such hopes can make any sense (worse, the communication would most probably betrays the possible meaning of what is attempted to be communicated, and could even lead to the contrary).




The content of these words speak of the *actual* fulfillment
of the hopes of the Greeks expressed in their hypostases.


? Are you talking about mystical enlightening experiences. Like losing any remaining doubts about immortality because you have already seen the whole of the eternal tergiversations all at once ?




> We have seen his
> glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of > grace and truth." (John 3:1,2,3,14) So the particular finite form that
> we have, God somehow took on that same form.

This, on the other way, could be a comp sort of blasphemes. Comp
"ethic" could even makes God eliminating any creature so arrogant that
they take they their realities and images of God for granted. With
comp, if we are divine, we can only be divine *hypotheses*. We can hope
being God last word, but this is really something which depends on our
work and can never be taken for granted.

It is the ultimate irony that Jesus was taken to be blaspheming when he
said he was "one with the Father" and "before Abraham was, I AM", for
"no one can say that they are God"..... the mistake is the missing
phrase at the end: "...except God".


OK. I mean, here, that we can agree on an important disagreement, making both of us quite coherent with respect to my "faith" in comp and your faith in non-comp. Here the comp theology is simpler: "no one can say that they are God". The comp would add (inferring on G*): "even, if not especially, (a) God". No God can assert "I am (a) God", I mean, not in public.






> In this way God showed us
> (who are in his image) true truth about himself in a way which we can
> understand (just as a father tells truth to his children), without
> having to tell us infinite exhaustive truth.

Again this can have Plotinian sense. But there is a danger (for us
human) to take those assertions too much literally.

Yes it is a mistake to say that we understand God fully, but it would
also be a mistake (would it not?), if God were to tell us something
true (but of course not exhaustive), for us to say that we do not know
the thing that he told us.


But expressions and statements are always is need of interpretations, be it God's or Nature's or Colleagues' statements.

As you know I am already skeptical about a "physical universe" if only because of lack of evidences (that is besides its lack of explanation power with comp), but then I am a realist so I do have faith in some accessible reality, by observation, introspection, dialog ... But term like "God" or "Universe" or "Reality" or "Truth" cannot been used in any sense presupposing that the utterer has some special connection with them (and this despite the most obviously probable existence of such connections).



 It is like (in fact IT IS) the relationship
between a father and a child.  (In fact, the earthly father/mother and
child relationship is a shadow/projection of the heavenly, rather than
the other way around.)


How do you know? Are you willing to assume this clearly and build some axiomatization?




I agree that it is dangerous for a child to
keep taking a father too literally when the father tells him/her
something.  At first, the child should take the father/mother's words
at face value, trusting that the parent is saying the right words for
the child to understand what the parent wants them to know.  But to
keep living with only those words, and not continue to try to learn a
deeper understanding and grow through more communication and exchange
of love,


I feel uneasy to be loved by someone because that someone has been asked to love me. "Love" is essentially a "second" person construct. Again "telling stories" will go here beyond the ten thousand "treatises" . Love stories ok, love theories, why not. But normative love = end of love.




would be to deny the true nature of what it means to be a
person.


I recognize many important idea though, but I'm afraid that a too literal interpretation of many terms here could harm the principle.




Any time we stop because we think we have attained all of the
knowledge we need, that is when start to die.  I know you are saying a
similar thing.

Thanks for granting this.



But I am saying that as a person, we are always able to
look at any description or approximation, for instance described by G,
and say, "I am more than that".


Exactly!  This is the root of the inference of Dt.



We are always able to change our
paradigm to a higher understanding.


Exactly. Like any lobian entity. Provably so.



This is the sense that I mean when
I say that, "I am not a machine."


But this is the sense in which the machine itself says: "I am not a machine".




And this can be done only on the
basis of the ultimate infinite Person.


Again I agree. I would say the arithmetical hypostases describes such a person. In a precise theoretical frame where any one can verify the statements following from the axioms. Actually your "ultimate inifinite Person" is still very vague so that there are still many arithmetical candidates for the "ultimate infinite person" related to a simpler machine like Peano Arithmetic.






> This bridges the gap
> between the celestial/divine and the terrestial/human. Christ is the > fixed-point between heaven and earth, the axis of the universe for us. > In Christ, we all see in third-person the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Again if "Christ" denotes a symbolic value I can make sense of what you
are saying, but in my opinion the relation between Christians and the
Christ are extremely fuzzy. There has been a lasting confusion of power
which makes me skeptical. Too much propositions has been deformed by
their authoritative institutionalization. Still today "theology" tends
to be separated from science (i.e. from accepting doubts and the
infinite number of attempts of clarity and rigor). This separation
resulted into the abandon of the fundamental questions to the fanatics
(who mocks clarity, rigor, and doubts).
Now I am aware of the last century "repentance" of the Catholic Church,
including the necessity of restricting faith with rationality, like
many open minded school of Muslims already warned us in the eleven
century, but not for a very long time).

This has been very unfortunate.  This is a result of Christians
thinking that they understand everything about God.


OK.



 This ironically
results in the Church turning into a (pre-Godelian in your opinion)
machine.  When you think you understand everything about God, then your
God turns into a machine and strangles you to death.


OK. This is almost my favorite axiom for "love", "heat" "God" "Universe" : When you think you understand everything about X, then X turns into a (pregodelian, total) machine and strangles you to death.
(with X = "love", "heat" "God" "Universe"  ...)


But on the other hand, I think that our post-Godelian ignorance results
in our being even more lost that before!


I can perhaps imagine, at least at first sight.



The fact that now we CANNOT
know, if we are a machine, which machine we are, makes us even more
lost in a sea of meaninglessness than before.


I am not sure, because we can bet. We can make act of faith. We can learn from our mistakes, we can change our minds and still keeping faith, faith corrected by reason and experiences can only grow. Only "bad or wrong faith" (generally based on wishful or fearful thinking) can fear to be "corrected". A bit like it is more easy for a parent to "punish" his child when the parent "truly" loves it.




Our hope has become even
more hopeless, not that the reductionist hope was well-founded either.


Why should our hope become more hopeless? On the contrary, knowing that we know less, we can expect more. With comp we can hope for more (and fear for more too, to be precise).



As you say, "We can hope being God last word, but this is really
something which depends on our work and can never be taken for
granted."  I agree that we will never get God's last word (they are
infinite), and as above it is deadly to assume we have.


OK.



But you are
saying that we have not received ANY words from God.



I have never said that. (Unless by God you mean this one, or this one, or this one, ...).




 In this case, we
have absolutely NO downward emanation, it is ALL upward.


As far as the arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus hypostases are Plotinian, I reassure you that comp makes the "emanation" working in the two ways: up and down (or left/right in the map of the 8 hypostases).




If
"Arithmetic Truth" is our God,


Actually it can't be! It is the God of "simpler lobian machine" than us, like PA.



 there remains an *infinite* gap to
fulfill our aspirations, which will always remain unbridged.


It depends on what you mean by "fulfill". Comp could be consistent with some complete fulfilment in some limit. It is hard to work out, and indeed it could be related with unpersonhood. (But the point is to take our theory seriously and see where we are led)



By
working from nothing, one step at a time, we will never get there.
"Forever Unfulfilled", there can be no true fulfillment, only through
deceiving ourselves, which also leads to death...


I am not sure your "pessimist" derivation is valid. One of the arithmetical comp hypostase (Bp & p) is both divine and personal. We could agree on everything except for the idea that "sacred text" should not be taken literally. And we could differ on that just for the contingent reason we have been educated differently. Note that I am not saying that Jesus is not the son of God, just that I have less evidence for that than for the *primitive* physical universe, in which I still don't believe either.
I know I am demanding, concerning evidence and conviction.




Tom

P.S.  I am about to read Smullyan's "Who Knows?" about "religious
consciousness".


I find it quite interesting.




Sorry I am not yet committed to reading Forever
Undecided,


I think that Church thesis gives a bridge from "Forever Undecided" and all its technical "diagonalisation/self-reference" stuff to "Who knows" or "Tao is silent".



 but I am halfway through Cutland's book on recursive
functions.


So the best remains, I envy you ;)

Bruno


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