On 04 Jan 2015, at 09:05, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com
] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2015 7:47 AM
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Democracy
On 03 Jan 2015, at 09:28, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
wrote:
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com
] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
From: everything-list@googlegroups.com [mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com
] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
On 30 Dec 2014, at 01:38, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
wrote:
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Alberto G. Corona <agocor...@gmail.com>
>>The Soviet union can be formally considered a "democracy". There
is nothing external or formal that may distinguish a democracy from
any other regime. Since every modern state has the same elements.
All of them use the momenclature of the age. The word democracy is
the most overused world in this century togeter with "scientific".
No word comes close to matching the overuse of the word "god" however.
Yes, ... and no.
For the greeks "God" was just a pointer to the truth we are
searching, through theories and observation. It led to math and
physics, + inquiry about which one is more fundamental, and what
might still be beyond math and physics. That use of God remains in
some language expression, like when we say "only God knows", which
means "I don't know".
But that is how the word was used in the Hellenistic period; I was
referring to modern usage that has associated it with a monotheistic
value system.
I think monotheism is only the "personal" view of the monism of the
parmenides one.
I think that the theology of the christians and jews reflect the
monism of those who believe in an unifying truth. The fairy tales is
a pedagogical popularization, who get wrong when the religion is
(too much) mixed with politics.
>>Which comes from the ONE of the greeks, mixed with the Jewish
legend. Well, if you forget the superstition, it has some important
relation. Monotheism is a reflexion of parmenides or Plotinus monism.
Perhaps you are referring to the Jewish mystic concept of the
sephiroth kether (kether means crown in Hebrew) it is that which is
manifest yet cannot be named; the first divine emanation out of pure
abstract space… that is without form or definition yet which fills
and animates all things…. The divine spark so to speak.
I think so.
A few examples “a God fearing” man (or woman) is upstanding, moral
and considered (by other god-fearers at least) to be superior to
those who do not fear god;
But this "fearing of God" is a mystery to me. God should be good.
Only the devil should be feared. (between us). Obviously that are
open problem in machine theology.
>>With some definition, fearing God is a nonsense.
I find those definitions of God far more palatable than I do the
Manichean dystopic vision, of a universe divided between the
opposing forces of good and evil.
In the theology of the machine, the devil is well played by the
notion of false. In a sense, like in Plotinus, it simply does not
exist, but its influence is incarnated in the []f, and [][]f, or
even []<>t, which implies logically f, at the star level (in G*),
which we cannot see, but can intuit. That makes the frontier between
good and bad into a fractal similar to the Mandelbrot set. But it
relates also the "bad" to the harm. The opposing force is nature
manicheism, needed to make us believe that eating is good and being
eaten is bad, which is locally useful to live and develop.
>>We should fear the devil, but not God.
Or as some spiritual traditions maintain the devil is merely a
manifestation of our own ignorance and impoverished state of being
cutoff form our spiritual being.
>>That follows from what I say aboven but not withot some technical
difficulties. Plotinus get similar difficulties. Pain and suffering
remains quite complex to analyse. there are still many difficulties.
Pain and suffering will never be easy to explain, especially the
pain and suffering of innocents.
In a sense, it is easier to explain the pain of the innocent than the
pain of the guilty, as it is easier to explain the pain of the guy
tortured than the pain of the torturer (if any).
What is vexing is that the bad qualia, or the qualia of bad, is very
easy to explain functionally: if we did not felt the bad that our
brain try to explain us when we are in a bad situation, we would find
ourself much more often in bad situation, which is not good for the
survival thing.
The devil is a paper tiger… not to say that evil does not exist, but
evil is ultimately a manifestation of profound spiritual ignorance –
at least amongst some spiritual traditions.
So perhaps if I could re-phrase the phrase above to say that we
should be mindful of our ignorance, for inner ignorance is what cuts
us off from the infinite eternal divine infusion of being.
I will think about this. I am not entirely sure. It is more the
ignorance of our ignorance which is evil, but that might correspond
to what you say, because it is the ignorance of ignorance which cut
of frm the "divine source". Our ignorance itself, when living on
the terrestrial plane, is our knowledge of God/Truth. To see God is
a sort of way to see the abyssal and intrinsic ignorance when we are
living in a (finite) body. That ignorance is a friend, and the evil
exploit the ignorance of that ignorance. Hope I make sense.
Agreed.. and an important distinction as well.
OK.
The ignorance (or perhaps willful ignoring) of our ignorance is
maybe the tap root of evil within and by willfully choosing to
ignore that something is rooted in ignorance is the inception of the
overlaying layered sedimentary superstructure of evil.
OK. Well said.
A similar double level statement can and famously has been said
about fear… it is the fear of fear that is a negative harmful soul
sickness.
I agree.
Fear itself is often good and can sometimes be a real life saver.
But when the mind constructs an edifice of *fear about some fear* it
is a mental trap and will tend to drag the individual down with it
to the extent that this fear of fear plays out within that persons
psychology/mind.
It can even go as far as making you into a philosopher, even a
theologian!
>>But of course this aspect of the thing is not yet retrieved from
arithmetic. I hipe it will, but I am not 100% sure. Open problem.
How much can e say that god is good, like Plato thought? We don't
know yet.
Perhaps God evolved..
Not sure. Keep in mind that I have machine's god in mind, which is
not distinguishable by us (the finite machine) with the arithmetical
truth/reality.
If by god we intend a potential lying outside of emergent existence
then getting it to “evolve” seems problematic.
If God is a kind of dynamic summation of all equations and math
manifesting and consciousness in the multiverse then it could be
possible for this dynamic entity to also be evolving – like a kind
of moving average of everything – according to the emergent
evolution of all being. But that it seems is a different kind of god
from the one you are describing.
I tend to follow the greeks and the Hindus, and perhaps the christians
if we agree with some of Augustin analysis, but there are one god,
already differentiated into three Gods, at least when the first one is
seen from inside:
- the ONE, or Outer-God. That one is static, permanent, out of time,
out of space. With comp, you can represent it by the set of all true
arithmetical propositions. It contains the proposition that Chris de
Morsella read the present post, including all the local reason he does
that (some include the Milky Way, some include the cluster of
galaxies, etc.).
-The Noùs, or the intelligible reality. That one introduce already a
dynamic, or infinities of dynamic, as it contains the many
computations, which are static, but admit embedding in discrete-time-
like structures like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, ... (it is the arithmetical truth
structured by a machine-believer)
-The Universal Soul, or Inner God, which is technically a sort of
intersection of the ONE and the Noùs, and technically this describes a
subjective time: it is the internal time of self-extendible knowledge.
It is also the first person,, the non definable one, which happens to
be able to refute all precise mechanist thesis, making It needing
quite an amount of courage to say "yes" to a doctor. Typically, he
cannot believe in computationalism, yet it can know that if
computationalism is true, it is normal that it cannot believe in it,
and so, still hope it can survive the digital substitution. That God
is the one who create all the observable dynamics.
perhaps the version of reality we exist in evolved from earlier
renditions and over infinite recursion into previous renditions in
this hypothesized behind the scenes reality configuration space the
holistic principle gradually evolved. Why not a Darwinian type
process perfecting God itself so that our God is the result of a
long line of preceding Godheads.
I can make sense of the this for the inner God, but you still need an
independent of time reality to get the fixed lever on which the souls
can move themselves.
>>God is out of time, simple, and the roots of everything. It is the
truth we search, but can never assert we know. We are the evolving
gods. If God itself evolves, we will need another invariant God to
make sense of this, I think.
I agree with this kind of view of the concept God -- sans, the
baggage of dogma – as an ineffable essence that can be subtly sensed
perhaps though not defined and which also maybe animates emergent
reality in some way. This god would exist outside of all that
emerges and exists, including arguably time/causality itself.
However notwithstanding being outside of spacetime, it sometimes
seems to me, that perhaps this hypothetical god may somehow itself
be continuously re-created in some way as a result of every inter-
action and dream dreamt in the multiverse.. that though outside of
time and temporality g-d itself is in some way the result of that
which we experience. I am not all that sure about this or how it
could be made to work… or if there is any closed loop at all.
I am not sure about this or any God, but can see your POV that it is
a useful concept to describe the ineffable nothingness and the un-
name-able first emergence from nothing.
And everyone already believe in it. I have never heard about parents
complaining about the truth of the law of addition and multiplication,
and the idea that this obeys classical logic. The God, with
computationalism, is conceptually simple, even if technically we know
since Gödel, that it is not describable by a sound and complete finite
or mechanical logic.
Everything I see both outside myself and when I look within is an
evolving maelstrom of barely ordered chaos, balancing on that
creative knife edge between static order and total incoherent chaos.
The galaxies, the stars in them, the sponge-like riverine mega
structures of dark matter upon which galaxies ride. The quantum
leaps of electrons between electron shells but never between.
Everything seems a swirl of evolving forms. And so it is within our
own selves; we are far from static beings (even the dullest amongst
us)
>>Everything ... physical. But that is an illusory aspect, when
considered from the absolute. I think you might be talking of the
third Plotinian God: the soul or inner God. Then what you make
sense. but it is not the outer god (the ONE), nor the second God
(the Noùs, or worlds of ideas, computations, arithmetical
relations, ...).
When speaking of things so very abstract it is hard to know exactly
what one is trying to describe as the levels of abstraction grow
ever deeper. I sometimes feel that external form and patterns are a
manifestation of internal forms and patterns. To go back to that
Jewish mysticism well once again, as is so with the tenth sephiroth,
malkuth – the end physically manifested realm of matter. Ultimately
it remains a manifestation of the divine spark the ultimate
condensed material end result perhaps but yet still influenced and
in a sense determined by the vibrations filtering through (if I can
use such a metaphor) the other nine sephirah.
Taking this view isn’t the physical the emergent end result of some
original divine inception, and so though outside and material also
itself a manifestation of the same original ineffable spark.
That is indeed very "plotinian". The one (god) leads (already by a
sort of weakness of God) the intelligible reality, which leads to the
souls, which generates matter as a ground to try to come back to God.
You have the emanation:
god ==> noùs ==> soul ==> matter,
and simulatneously (in the logical platonia), you have the conversion:
matter ==> soul ==> noùs ==> god.
>>I can make sense. No one is Godless. Godless people confuse God
and some hero of fairy tale.
God is used possessively by most people who use the word to describe
some special supernatural entity that they know about and will be
good to them but whom is going to damn everyone else (all those who
does not believe as they do) to eternal damnation and torture…
sadistically punishing them in often shockingly rendered and
detailed accounts of these divine torture chambers (sub-contracted
out to the devil… or as they say Mr. D)
>>OK, we are back here to the concept in their most misused form. I
saw a movie (on youtube) made for young christians, on hell, by
south Corean catholics, which looks exactly like very hard porn!
I can believe that J My neighborhood has a fair number of
evangelical Koreans living here and those Korean evangelical
churches are surprisingly hard core fundamentalist.
I think they have also some hard core fundamentalist buddhists.
>>Like the star were Gods, but we know better, and adapt the
vocabulary. If not we sustain the dogma in the field, and, as we can
see in my case, we stop the progress.
It is hard to change the common usage of a word as deeply embedded
in a given matrix of meaning as the word God (with a capital ‘G’)
has become in the three Abrahamic monotheistic cultures.
Wouldn’t it be better to invent a new word – unsaddled by all that
Abrahamic baggage – to describe that which ancient Greek
philosophers were describing when they used this word?
It does not work, and gave the feeling that the name is important.
"God" is simpler, and is already the best term in comparative
theology. But call it the ONE, if you prefer. But then people will
tought that you defend only the Neoplatonists.
I am probably less annoyed than you about the current monotheism,
which I take as a progress, despite the abuse and dead alleys. The
problem is that after a platonic staring impetus, they came back to
Aristotle metaphysics. That is the problem, for a theologian
scientist.
Not sure I follow what you mean by “platonic staring impetus”;
I meant perhaps "Platonist starting impetus". I got evidence that the
early pre-roman christians knew very well and discussed a lot on
Plato, Plotinus, up to the roman.
I don't think monotheism is the problem. Only the decision to make it
into a state religion.
Do agree that the Aristotelian dogma certainly was oppressive when
wed to the power of the Church.
>>Why?
Because of the endless useless and most often moronic arguments the
word causes amongst people who use it.
OK. But that is the reason to use the word. If you change, you will
miss those reactions, and people will not learn.
It has become loaded with Judeo-Christian-Islamic overtones that
have polluted its meaning and poisoned its usage to be a word of
hatred, death, punishment, damnation and all manner of intensely
negative emotions and experiences.
All words leads to that, when they point on the notion. It is part
of the process. Changing a word will add cinfusion only, and deprive
the believer to evolve. It will give rise to another pseudo-
religion. Imo.
Okay, that is a valid argument. But then to do this one must be very
clear what is intended by the use of the symbolic entity God (or if
you prefer G*d)
That is why i limit myself to machine theology where God is played by
the arithmetical truth. The reality is that artithmetical truth, for a
machine, is a so complex notion that it cannot distinguish it from a
most powerful God, yet can easily point to it (but that is not so easy
to prove).
With computationalism, we could in principle even identify God, with
the quite simpler" sigma_1 truth, making the universal machine into
God, but this can lead to confusion, because that identification must
be done at a star level (in G*, non provable, even non axiomatizable)
so I avoid this.
>>They use it before, and the main attribute of God is that it has
no name,
Sounds a lot like the descriptions given for kether (the crown or
godhead perhaps) it is formless potential, nameless and without
definable attributes
Yes.
so it is good to use the substantive instead. Creating a new name
automatically will make us believe that the name is important, and
so would be gravely misleading. It would make more complex the
comparison. During a period, I use "One" in the place of "God". This
led people to believe that I was advertising for Plotinus in a
misleading way. God is the very general term. Just look at "God" in
the wikis, you will see that the same term "god" is used in quite
different meaning, which is useful when doing science, as we must be
neutral since the start.
I understand your hesitance to use an inferior word that describes
one facet of what the word God describes – such a say the word
“One”, but God is not neutral for by far most people who use it and
therein is the rub.
The rub and the meaning. It is just because the subject is hot and
very fundamental. But it is abnormally hot also due to the sad
historical contingencies that we have forbid the use of reason in the
field, since the mixing of religion and politics, and then the
idolatries, on people and books, that does not help.
>>When I presented my thesis in France, I suppress all "religious"
name, but the atheists were still saying the same bs on it.
Dogmatists will be dogmatic whatever the colors they may be wearing.
Yes, that's my point. And that is why I have came back with the most
usual terms in the domain. Then only the dogmatic are shocked. The
others can appreciate (and then be shocked by the technical aspects
of it, like the many worlds, the loss of personal identity, the
idealist or immaterialist aspects, ...)
I respect your journey and the reasons you give for why you have
returned to using this word/symbol – as highly loaded with other
connotations and meanings as it has – over the ages – become. Hard
materialists can be as dogmatic about material reality being made of
real particles, as medieval monks wearing hair shirts.
Yes. For a platonist, atheism and christianism are variant of
Aristotle materialism, and they see it simply as a simplifying
methodological hypothesis. taken it too much seriously eliminates
consciousness, souls, persons, programs, and numbers.
Let us just keep the scientific attitude, and let us try to go
beyond the vocabulary issue. The monotheistic theologians are, in
general, less wrong than the atheists on even the God of the
machine. (That is what makes some strong-atheists nervous, but it is
just because they cannot say "I was wrong").
I agree with that… with a scientific attitude towards theology;
after all – at least IMO -- exploring the mind of God is the most
interesting pursuit in the universe…
yes, even outside the universe :)
Nice J
if by God, we understand a deep mystic re-binding thread of some
unfathomable un-nameable essential something (or other).
Religion (truth sharing) is the only goal.
Science (modesty sharing) is the only tool.
I like that statement; there is a nice symmetry to it and sentiment/
meaning contained within it.
Thanks, best,
Bruno
-Chris
Bruno
-Chris
Bruno
-Chris
Then, when the science "theology" has been recuperated by politics,
and when religion get institutionalized, the term God has become the
name of some hero in some fairy tale, and the science behind has
been put under the rug, and is still taboo today (which I can
understand for the Church's employee, but not for the atheists,
which should on the contrary be open to the coming back to reason in
that field. Eventually I conclude that atheism is *really* the
religious mirror of christianity. They have the same notion of God
(even if it is used only to be denied) and they have the same notion
of primary matter (modulo some details).
So God is both not enough used (it means the unknown fundamental
reality, simply) and overused (idolatry, blasphems, argument by
terror (like with hell), etc.).
Bruno
-Chris
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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