On 7/17/2012 12:32 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 16 Jul 2012, at 19:37, John Clark wrote:
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
>> Theology is about believing in something when there is absolutely
bsolutely no
reason for doing so, it is called "faith".
> Then the danger of cannabis belongs to faith,
Yes, absolutely.
OK.
> The definition you give of "theology" seems to me to be the definition
given by
the fear sellers and the bandits.
I don't know what that means.
For the greeks "theology" was the search of the truth, considered as unknown. It was by
definition the search of the fundamental theory of everything. The term "Gods" was close
to the notion of concepts, including natural phenomena. The term "God" was used for the
ultimate concept, and this was the base of dialog and research.
I think you are remaking the Greeks in your image. First, they had many gods, so "God"
could not have referred to a single fundamental. Second, their attitude toward the gods
was as political as it is now - they condemned Socrates to death for the impiety of being
a truth seeker.
They come up with mathematics and science. But, as we know, there is a temptation by the
political world to control what is considered as fundamental as a foundation for
controlling the people, and theology/religion has become the "opium of the people". To
oppose science and theology has been useful to save natural science from dogma, but we
have not yet succeeded to save theology for the dogma, but this is part of human
history. The fear sellers are those who use theology as argument from authority, by
building on legend involving temporal relation between the atemporal and
terrestrial power, which has prevent theology to remain done with the scientific
attitude. The problem is that it looks like science is serious and religion frivolous,
but that separation makes science into a new theology. Basically science has followed
the religious in making primitive matter like it was fact. But even Aristotle was aware
that is was a religious/metaphysical hypothesis, in need of being approached with
scientific skepticism.
>I am not sure why you credit them on anything.
Nor that.
I feel like you give credit to the definition of theology given by the Roman
Church,
And all other Christian churches, and Muslims, and Mormons, and Scientologists, and Jews.
My dictionary defines "theology" as the study of God and his relation to the world;
especially by analysis of the origin and teachings of an organized religious community.
Use of the word "his" is already incompatible with your idea of a fundamental theory of
the world.
instead of using the term in its more general sense, which is well illustrated by the
non necessary exclusively christian history.
> On the contrary, I would even defined God/Religion by what you still
believe in
once you succeed in abandoning *all* argument from authority.
So 2+2 = 4 is God/Religion.
We can doubt even that, but I appreciate you don't. Still, we have to assume it
explicitly (or other axioms) to progress, and we are already in the theoretical realm.
Face it, you throw around the words God, Religion and Theology all the time but without
any clear non-contradictory definition of any of them, nor can you come up with a
example that is not completly ridiculous.
Theology is the search of truth, but with the awareness that a part of it is not
rational, like the beliefs in a primary physical universe or a god.
What do you mean by 'not rational'? Does it mean without proof, or without
evidence?
I have used the term "biology" and "psychology" in place of theology, but then it
generates more confusion, especially in AUDA where we separate clearly what is provable
and what is not provable by self-observing machines.
Why not use "philosophy" or just "science".
The closest you have come is that when arguing with a atheist like me "theology" is a
convenient insult you can throw if the atheist says something you disagree with.
But I do not use it as an insult. Atheism is a respectable belief. But it is dishonest
to pretend that it is not a religious belief. Atheist accepts the definition of God
given by the Church, and makes the theological proposition that such a God does not exist.
But it does not make the assumptions to attribute to it below. Atheism is just a-theism,
the failure to believe in a personal god.
It makes also the theological (unprovable) proposition that primitive matter exists,
that physics is the fundamental science, etc.
Maybe physics is fundamental; it underlies chemistry and biology. But it is already
physicists like Wheeler and Tegmark who have speculated about why this physics instead of
that, and whether there is some more fundamental principle that determines physics.
Personally I don't care what you call it, except I don't think it should be misleading to
educated English speakers - and "theology" is definitely misleading; although it is
perfect if you want to apply for a Templeton.
many atheists believes that death is the end of personal life, etc.
And many believe in quantum immortality and many are agnostic on the point.
It is theology.
So is that why your ideas about what is fundamental science are "theology", because they
imply immortality?
Science here observes relation between observable/measurable numbers, and extrapolate on
mathematical relations between them, and possible interpretation, but remains cautious
in any definitive statements, especially when big problem, like the mind-body problem,
is still unsolved.
So why not just call what you do science? Tegmark obviously thinks of his proposals to
base all physics on computational mathematics as science and I don't think it has confused
anyone.
And calling someone that you know doesn't like religion religious is not exactly a new
putdown, I believe I first heard it around 1964.
Even before. Cantor's theory of the transfinite has been dismissed as theological, but
Cantor actually vindicated that it was theology indeed, and he discussed it with
important bishop of his time. When I use "religion" pejoratively I put quotes, or I use
the prefix pseudo. If materialists were religious, they would be less pseudo-religious,
and insists on the hypothetical nature of their conception of matter. They would not
qualify as crazy someone doubting that primitive matter exists. In my country it is no
secret that my work made angry atheists, and this only because it put a doubt on what
they defend as a dogma.
Probably what made them angry was your calling it "theology" and thus implying that it
supported organized Christianity.
Eliminating the word "theology", like I did in my thesis in France, has made this even
clearer. The problem is not in the words, but in the conception of reality.
> With comp, I can argue that the "inner God" (alias the first person, the
universal soul, Bp & p, S4GRz1) can play that role for the ideally correct
machine.
And in spite of your frequent use of the word, or more likely because of it, I am no
longer even clear about what exactly your homegrown term "comp" is supposed to mean.
Put shortly, it is the belief that you can survive with a digital brain. This can
already be seen as a belief in a form of reincarnation, and the math confirms that
ideally correct machine cannot prove such survival, so it respect the large definition I
give of theology.
All propositions about machines can be translated into proposition about numbers. You
can defined science, or terrestrial science, by the set of provable proposition, and
(proper) theology by the set of true arithmetical sentence (non provable by the
machine). Gödel's incompleteness makes that set non empty, and actually quite large and
quite complex. Despite not being provable, machines can indirectly bet on those
proposition and develop conceptions of reality.
But they are non-provable relative to some specific set of axioms and rules of inference.
Each one is provable relative to *some* set of axioms. Which raises a question I am
curious about: relative to Peano's axioms are there any known arithmetical propositions
that are undecidable?
Brent
You might take the time to read Aldous Huxley "philosophia perennis" which illustrates
well what is common in basically all human theologies. It is just striking how this
looks like the discourse of the ideally correct machine about what is true and partially
accessible,, on her and by her, but not provable by her. The ideally self-referentially
correct machine is mystical/theological at the start, for logical reason.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
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