On 06 Mar 2012, at 18:59, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> You keep saying this, but non-comp has nothing to do with solipsism.
Baloney.
> Here is a simple logical counter-example. take any dualist theory
in which *all* humans have a non mechanical soul responsible for
their consciousness. This is logically conceivable
Yes that is logically conceivable, but there is not a human on this
planet who believes in that theory except when they are discussing
philosophy on the internet, because if they did and were consistent
they would also believe that other humans were conscious ALL the
time, including the times purely mechanical movements of other
human's arms and legs and tongues indicated they were not behaving
intelligently, such as when they were sleeping or under anesthesia
or dead. That's why non-comp fans are MASSIVELY self contradictory.
One counter-example is enough. It does not matter if it is on the net
or elsewhere. You betray that you don't argue, but promote an opinion.
A counter-example does not need to be true, nor plausible, to show
that an argument in not valid.
>> in addition to being untrue, has brought more misery to the
world than any other single thing
> You confuse religion/theology, with what some humans have done
with it.
Please don't give me that tired old line about how a very few have
corrupted the noble concept of religion, religious idiocy and
religious evil is the norm not the exception.
In which theory?
On the contrary, what you say only shows that power tend to steal the
idea in fundamental science, because it is handy to manipulate the
gullible men. This is exactly the reason why we have to come back to
seriousness, and tackle the question in those field with the
scientific attitude, and not promote "truth" in the same manner of
those who stole the field.
>> God needs to be a person.
> In some tradition, and it is a mystery why you stick on those
tradition, given that you criticize them so vigorously.
Because "God" is just a word
It is not *necessarily* just a word. There are common pattern in the
use of that word.
and morons fools and some of the most evil people who have ever
walked the Earth have mutilated that word far beyond any hope of
repair.
That's your opinion.
Language evolves and like biological Evolution it almost never goes
backwards and retraces it's steps, let me give a example: The word
"gay" means happy and until just a few decades ago that's all it
meant, but today if I use that word just to indicate that somebody
is happy I am issuing a invitation to be misunderstood. I have a
even better example, technically the word "pedophile" means a lover
of children, well there is nothing wrong with that in fact it's a
virtue, people should like children, but today it means more than
that and its far too late for the word to be rehabilitated, so I
would never dream of calling someone a "pedophile" unless I had rock
solid evidence they were a monster. In the same way the word "God"
has gone too far, it has much too much baggage to be rehabilitated
now. So use another word, there are lots to choose from.
I follow often Plotinus, which "already" avoided bot the term "God"
and the term "theology". I use "ONE" instead, and I have used the word
"biology" and "psychology". But atheists (from some club) were not
glad with the result, and critize the wholme field, so it motivated me
to do the same thing than the student of Plotinus, to use the word
that people use in the field. You make your point for everyday word
like "gay" and "pedophile", but not for the technical field "theology".
> some, like Richard Dawkins presents science as if it was a sort of
alternative, which makes science into pseudo-science
I have no idea what your complaint with Richard Dawkins is, I've
read all his books and think he's terrific.
My problem with people like Dawkins and Stenger, which I have read
more recently, is that they oppose science to theology, but by doing
that they avoid the theological question, which means that it is the
field, and not the word, which makes problem fro them. It shows also
that they have (unconscious, perhaps) theological interpretation of
their field. For example, they never say that they *assume* the
existence of a primary physical universe, they dismiss the mind-body
problem, they dismiss the mind problem, and the body problem. They
talk like if science as decided between Aristotle and Plato kind of
theology. This is just arrogant.
in fact, books like Stenger's and Dawkins' one, fuel not just the
pseudo-religion, but its naive and fundamentalist components.
They makes people believe that the debate is between atheism and
religion, but they agree on the theological main point, and hides the
more serious question of choosing between Plato's theology and
Aristotle one. Not only atheists do theology, but they defend the same
theology as their opponents, except on the superstition. Like a
catholic bishop said on such type of work: they make an excellent
advertising for us.
> if you agree with Gödel's formalization of Saint-Anselmus'
definition of God [...]
That was in Godel's later years
I don't think so.
when he went off the rails and thought he had a rock solid logical
proof for the existence of God,
He never took that proof seriously. He just wanted to show that we can
reason in the field, and defended the idea that we can do theology
seriously. He never asserted publicly his belief or disbelief, and he
did only advocate rigor.
fortunately even at his worst he retained enough sanity to know he
should not publish the thing. Godel was I think an even greater
logician than Aristotle; nevertheless he was always a very odd man
and he got odder as he got older. He sealed his windows shut because
he thought night air was deadly, he wore heavy woolen coats on even
the hottest days because he thought the cold was deadly too, and for
unknown reasons he insisted on putting cheap plastic flamingos on
his front lawn. He ended up starving himself to death, he refused to
eat because he thought unnamed sinister forces were trying to poison
him. The great logician weighed 65 pounds when he died in 1978 from
lack of food brought on by paranoia.
I have no evidence that he was sick when producing his theological
argument. But he was a very rigorous guy in all matter he approached.
Theology is just an example of this.
Aristotle invented modal logic to discuss those issues rigorously, and
this has lead to progress, more or less up to the eleventh century,
where the east begin to buy and take for granted the Aristotelian
metaphysical doctrine.
My work did annoy some fundamentalist atheists nearby, well before I
use the term "theology". It is more because I have problem with
atheists that I use that term than the contrary. many people who
believe they were atheists understood better they were not atheists
but agnostic. This helps a lot. To understand the mind-body problem it
is necessary to be agnostic on both the first and the third
Aristotelian Gods (the Initiator, and Matter).
Also, it is by reading good books in Theology, that I made sense of
what the ideally correct universal machine explains already about
itself, like the book by Jean Trouillard "L'Un et l'âme selon
Proclos" (the ONE and the Soul according to Proclos). I read Proclos'
treatise on theology before reading Plotinus.
In fact, almost all so called atheist, become agnostic, or realized
they were agnostic, when understanding that with comp the mind body
problem is a scientific problem. We just don't know the answer, and
atheists are often dishonest by pretending that science is on their
side. The atheists nearby believes that agnostics are atheists who are
coward and does not dare to make their opinion public, but this is a
rhetorical trick, based on the confusion between ~Bg and B~g (I don't
believe in God, and I believe there is no God).
You are throwing the baby with the bath water, and you are making
science into a pseudo-religion.
Before enlightenment, all the sciences were a matter of pseudo-
religious dogma. But the enlightenment brings them back into non
confessional academy, except one, which remains a taboo subject for
the atheists believers and the religious believer alike. What a
coincidence.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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