On 06 Feb 2017, at 20:22, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 2/6/2017 2:39 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 9:21 PM, Brent Meeker <meeke...@verizon.net>
wrote:
On 2/5/2017 3:14 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
Inconsistent? Would you have people who oppose fascism not have a
definition of fascism - so that they were just opposing some
undefined,
amorphous ideology?
It is interesting that you bring this up. Are you familiar with the
essay "Ur-fascism" by Umberto Eco? He discusses precisely how
hard it
is to define fascism:
http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
Yet he defines "Ur-fascism", the eternal fascism, and is critical
of it. So
are you saying I should talk of ur-theism when I mean belief in
the God of
the Bible, Quran, and Torah? And leave "theism" to be used to
mean the
truths of arithmetic; So Bruno and I will both be misunderstood?
My point was simply that certain things are (perhaps) surprisingly
hard to define. You mentioned fascism, and it turns out this is one
of
them. Pointing this out is not the same as muddying definitions.
Further, I argue that basing an ideology or belief system on opposing
an ill-defined concept can lead to terrible things.
Which is exactly why I'm explicit in defining what the theism is
that I consider preposterous and what other god ideas I'm merely
agnostic about. Then Bruno criticizes me for "supporting" the
former; rather than help him muddy the meaning of "God" so he can
call the truths of arithmetic "God".
Let us try to agree on some definition of God. Most people, after and
before Christ agrees on this: it is the origin of everything, it is
what everything proceeds of, unnameable and transcendent, that is
beyond us.
Are you OK, with it. Don't hesitate to improve it.
In that case, some have already argued, and develop a tradition were
God is played by the concept of truth, because they got the intuition
that truth is beyond us, and of course, most people agree also that
truth has to encompass God if only to makes sense of a proposition
like God exists, or like God does not exists (cf St-Thomas, to name
one in the common tradition, but you will find similar statement in
all religions).
Then with mechanism, the critics might be that using the set of $all*
arithmetical true sentences is a bit too much, and indeed, as some
point, we can argue that the sigma_1 truth is enough, but this will
later be a typical G* - G statements, and so can easily be confused
with a machine blasphem (and it is one if asserted without conditional
by a machine).
Arithmetical truth, or reality is working, because we assume
Mechanism, and so the arithmetical truth enacted all dreams, from
which the physical appearances are explained (as a non computable sum
on all those computations).
Now, in serious theology, we cannot invoke God, or revelations, or
anything like that in the explanations. That is an error, and when you
refer to a world, my feeling is that you do that error. You are using
an answer to prevent a question. Nobody can see a world. It is a
metaphysical notion, which might make sense, but actually does not
when we assume computationalism, as I have explained.
Terrible things
have been done in the name of god and religion, and in the name of
fascist ideologies. It is also true that terrible thing have been
done
in the name of anti-religion and anti-fascism.
I was born in the aftermath of the carnations revolution in
Portugal,
and was raised in a society that considered itself to be almost
religiously anti-fascist, but without a clear definition of what
fascism is. Some of these "anti-" people were as vicious, if not
more,
than what they claimed to oppose. My mother received a letter
from the
communist party saying that she should abandon her job, since my
father also had one. She was also told to denounce anyone speaking
against the communist party. She refused to do both, and was then
included in a list of people that were to be hanged in public. All
this was done under the label of "anti-fascism". Fortunately
there was
a counter-revolution before it came to that. I am grateful to the
US
for helping at that stage -- although this is an historic period
that
is still not openly discussed.
And so do you think of yourself as agnostic about the value of
fascism?...or
communism?
Yes, I reject simplistic views of History where one side is 100% good
and the other 100% evil.
But you seem to hold an extremist view of epistemology. You are
agnostic and can't judge anything because the only alternative is
absolute certainty. I don't believe you really think that way. Are
there not a large class of ideas that you evaluate as very likely
true and which you would certainly act on and another large class
that you reject and would not act on - in other words some you
believe and some you fail to believe.
Absolute belief leads to terrible ideas, such
as trying to bomb countries into democracy.
They did. For example, the rejection of Mendelian genetics and the
insistence on Lamarkism for purely ideological reasons in the
USSR.
Marxism-Leninism was based on a belief in a specific type of
social
engineering, the idea that you could gradually improve society by
changing the way people act and then wait for these behaviour to
be
transmitted and accumulated across generations. Scientific
theories
that implied that you cannot transmit characteristics that you
acquired after birth through purely biological processes was
verboten,
and overwhelming scientific evidence resisted (just like the
creationists do).
You make my point. They had scientific rational reasons they
put forth
for
their policies. It was wrong science and it was enforced by
violence (as
other religions have done) - but it wasn't an appeal to
supernatural
revelation and faith.
That was true in the beginning, but once you put your beliefs above
empirical evidence, like they did, I don't see where the
difference to
an appeal to supernatural revelation is.
It's only a difference of degree. Theists also try to make
scientific
arguments (e.g. first-cause, fine-tuning,...), but they also
explicitly
appeal to revelation and faith.
If you go far enough down authoritarian rabbit holes you eventually
get to "revelation". Example: North Korea and the Kim dynasty.
Then they built monuments to science and progress, made to
inspire awe
and fear, just like cathedrals. An example is the Fernsehturm in
Berlin, made to resemble the Sputnik and the be seen from afar.
It was
also a powerful TV signal transmitter, in an attempt to silence
the
dangerous transmissions from the west. People who like facts and
reason are not afraid of debate. They don't try to silence the
opposition.
They also don't use words to obfuscate meaning.
I don't think any of us is doing that. We are debating definitions,
which is arguably 90% of philosophy.
Then why do people feel the need to crate the word "agnostic"?
I think it's a cop out to avoid the question of whether the God
of theism
exists. Agnostics were originally people who were not just
uncertain
about
God, they held that the question was impossible to know anything
about,
a-gnostic. So it was not a "nuanced" position -
epistemologically is
was
an extreme position and so deserved a name.
Yes, I tend to agree with this epistemological extreme, because I
think it is a necessary implication of Gödel's theorems.
?? Godel's theorems are about what is entailed by axioms in a
formal
logical system. As such it has nothing to do with facts in the
world.
Couldn't you make the same argument about differential equations?
Yes. The relation of mathematics to facts in the world is one of
description. That a dx/dt = -x has a decaying exponential as a
solution is not a fact about the world. As any engineer will tell
you, it means that if the differential equation is a good
description of something about the world then the decaying
exponential will be a good description of something about the
world. The analogy with Godel's theorem is that if we create an AI
system to prove theorems, no matter how fast or long it runs it will
not be able to prove all true theorems.
That's better!
In fact, by Gödel's completeness theorem, a first order (or effective
second order) logical theory is consistent if and only if it has a
model (in the logician sense of structure satisfying the belief of the
system). The anolog for the ideally correct machine is that a machine
cannot prove that there is a reality satisfying all its (even
potential) beliefs. That makes the general notion of "reality" into a
god, as everything should proceed from it, and the machine cannot
prove its existence,--- by the completeness theorem, that would be the
same as proving its own consistency, which no machine (even with
oracles) cannot do.
Do
you suppose juries should always vote "Innocent" because there are
truths
that are unprovable from the prosecutions evidence? Do you avoid
sailing
west from Portugal because we can't be sure the Earth isn't flat
and has an
edge you could fall off of?
No. I do what I can with imperfect information like everyone else.
Sometimes I'm wrong. So far I've survived.
What does have to do with avoiding absolute belief?
It has a lot to do opposing nonsense. If someone says, "We should
kill all the Jews." are you going to say, "Well I must avoid an
absolute belief that you're wrong - so maybe we should."
When Dawkins, who is often castigated as
a radical atheist, was asked, on a scale of 1 to 7 how certain
was he
that
there is no God, he said "6". And since you like to credence
original
usage
of words over current usage you should know that agnosticism was
originally
just considered a form of atheism - since it implies not
believing in
God.
I don't have such a preference. I am trying to apply reductio ad
absurdum to your argument. You accuse me of obfuscating meaning by
going against the current use of a word. If that is not
permissible,
anyone who did it before me should also be denounced, so let's
retreat
to the original definition.
Why does it follow that someone should be criticized for using a
word to be
understood in his time and place. I'm only criticizing using in a
way to be
misunderstood in the time and place it is used.
But how does usage evolve?
By a kind of Darwinian selection in usage. I highly recommend the
slim book by Craig A. James "The Religion Virus" which outlines the
development of religion from this standpoint.
And even deists, like Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, were
considered
atheists because they didn't believe in the god of theism.
I get that. I wouldn't be particularly offended to be labeled
"atheist
agnostic", in the sense that I do not believe in any of the gods
described in abrahamic religious texts. But I know nothing about
god
in general.
Because "god in general" includes animist, deist, polytheist, and
other
supernatural entities. But even such a broad category has its
boundaries.
They are all agents having wills and acting unpredictably as do
people.
They are all inconsistent with the idea of ubiquitous, impersonal
deterministic laws; the Laplacian worldview.
Ok, and for me the keyword here is "will". We don't know what that
is,
so why not admit some ignorance?
I have an open mind on some of those things - but not so open my
brains fall out on mention of the god of theism.
I really suggest you to read the book by Wallis on Neoplatonism. I
have an handbook on Neoplatonism, and they use the word god, and the
word "theology" at all pages, but it is nothing to do with revelation
or with the christ, except that before the romanisation of
christianism, many christian were neoplatonist, and did not consider
that the legend of the christ was anything than an attempt to help the
people to dig on the spiritual. It is only when the radical christians
of the 3, 4, 5th centuries get more and more power, that religion
will, in occident, becomes a tool against the religion and the
spiritual personal research. yet, Neoplatonism will still survive and
have a good 5i would say) influence. But here, we look for a theory of
everything, and an explanation of where the physical laws come from,
in the frame of some assumed axiom, like mechanism. The canonical
machine's theology can then be used to compare the religions and the
sciences. Theology is just the study of the souls fate, before birth
during and after life, and it includes many non provable truth, by the
machines, yet provable indirectly and conditionally using that very
hypothesis.
Then, the only way to find against religious fundamentalism is to come
back to reason in the field, not to oppose another religion, like
materialism is, at least if you agree with the definition above.
Bruno
Brent
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