subject:"Re\: Paper\+Exercises\+Naming Issue"



Le 04-janv.-06, à 19:30, Brent Meeker a écrit :


Bruno Marchal wrote:

Hi John,
I think you may have problems because you are not used neither 
trained in axiomatic thinking. The idea consists in NOT defining the 
objects we want to talk about, and keeping just some needed 
properties from which we prove other theorem.
Let me give an example with the idea of knowledge. Many philosophers 
agree that knowledge should verify the following law, and I take it 
as the best definition of knowledge we can have:

1) If I know some proposition then that proposition is true
2) If I know some proposition then I know that I know that proposition
3) If I know that some proposition a entails some proposition b, then 
if I know a, I will know b.


But that doesn't capture meaning of "know".



But nobody knows or agree on the *meaning* of "know", that's was my 
point. If *you* think it leaves something out, for a mathematician it 
means that you agree with the definition!

And then you propose a stronger theory by adding 4:


It leaves out 4) If I know some proposition then I have experience 
causally connected to the fact that makes it true.  See c.f. Gettier's 
paradox.



Now, that "4" *is* problematical because it refers to a undefined 
notion of causality, which itself can only be defined axiomatically.


Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



No, it is not. I have avoided the word "theism".  I am testing the word 
"theology" which has been defined well before some "sect" makes it own, 
and apparently linking it with very bad connotations. More on this in 
another reply.


Bruno


Le 04-janv.-06, à 19:21, Brent Meeker a écrit :

Theism is the belief that the world was created by a single 
omnipotent, superhuman agent who cares about human behavoir and 
intervenes in worldly events.


Is that your theory??

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 04-janv.-06, à 22:37, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :


Bruno Marchal wrote: 

...
Late James Higgo would have perhaps added that many trends in the

Buddhist traditions have much in common with Platonism and Plotinism.

Brent Meeker wrote:

Theism is the belief that the world was created by a single
omnipotent, superhuman agent who cares about human behavoir and 
intervenes in worldly events. 

 
Is that your theory?? 
 
Brent Meeker
Atheism is not a religion, just as a vacant lot is not a type of 
building, and health is not a form of sickness. Atheism is not a 
religion. 
  --- Jim Heldberg, San Francisco Atheist Coordinator 

 
The above quote from Heldberg would have made sense if, instead of 
"atheism", he used a word like "anti-religion-ism".  Religion should 
not be equated with theism or theology.  For instance Buddhism is not 
theistic, but it is a religion.



OK.





I do agree with you, Brent, that theism, or theology, is not a good 
word for Bruno's beliefs.


Careful, I don't remember having communicated any personal belief. I 
guess you meant "my theory", which I recall is just the sound lobian 
machine theory.




 (But I don't totally agree with your definition of theism, as it is 
closer to monotheism, since you included the word "single".)


Yes.



Back on Bruno's beliefs, perhaps a word like spirituality would be a 
step in the right direction, away from theology.


You mean "spiritualitylogy" then? I am seraching a general name for a 
field which studies fundamental type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc. 
The idea is that G is machine science, and then G* should be machine 
theology (which is only (meta)scientific for those willing to assume 
comp (or weaker).



It is also a step away from the word "psychology".  "Psychology" is 
often associated with trying to figure out what is wrong with the 
psyche, whereas "spirituality" opens it up to an exploration of the 
unknown.


I agree. "Psychology" does not address any spiritual question, except 
as some form of delusions. It could work for G but applying 
"psychology" to G* is akin to put G* in the machine science, and that 
does lead to a contradiction.






The word religion locks into the idea of a set of beliefs about 
reality, even beliefs that can't be proved, but also adds a set of 
beliefs that certain ways of living, traditions and/or rituals are 
required to live life properly.


The same with any "applied science". Except that science lacks 
"rituals" and "holiness", but perhaps for wrong reason.



Theists and atheists alike can ascribe to a religion, as I've already 
noted above (e.g. Buddhism).  But I would say the word religion is 
also too specific (in that it adds the ways-of-living) to refer to 
Bruno's beliefs, at least at this point, if I follow him correctly.


But the comp "science" adds way of living too, like saying "yes" to a 
doctor, using teleportation device, accepting having more than one 
body, accepting some "ancestor cults" consisting of handling the godel 
number of your parents, grandparents, etc. (at least for your 
comp-descendants).




Speaking of religion and beliefs, Bruno, I recall that Confucius said 
something like, "To know that we know what we know, and to know that 
we don't know what we don't know: that is true knowledge."
 If I am correct, interpreting Bp as "knowing p", could this be 
translated into the following two propositions?


Bp -> BBp
~Bq -> B~Bq  =  D~q -> BD~q  =  Dp -> BDp  (where p=~q)

I would say that these propositions take faith, which is in the realm 
of spirituality.  However, I would also say that we have to hold to 
these propositions to stay sane, and also to do science and explore 
the unknown.


Lao-tseu has already criticise many of Confucius' oversimplifying 
epistemological thesis.
Your formula "Dp -> BDp" is interesting, it means that we know what we 
don't know. It it sometimes used in the semantics of computer data 
bases, and then known as the closer-world assumption. Practically it is 
a tool for making all data queries stopping, making the system NON 
Turing universal. But, once a system is turing universal and 
self-referentially correct, then we get Dp -> ~BDp (Godel 
incompleteness), which contradicts your formula, and which makes 
machine prone to non-stopping behavior. And this remains true when we 
define knowledge from the logic G and G* through the Theaetetical 
variants.
To know what we don't know, well, this is just impossible for machines 
and even stronger (in provability abilities) entities.
But of course your point could be considered as a point against comp 
(or some weaker or stronger thesis).


Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 05-janv.-06, à 00:19, Russell Standish a écrit :




Also, I think "God" is just a chapter in theology,


again this seems to be using theology in a more expansive meaning than
it usually is. Theology to me is the study of belief in God, although
I note that the Oxford concise dictionary defines it thusly:

"a study of or system of religion; rational analysis of a religious
faith"



Yes it is exactly what I mean by theology: rational study of faith, and 
I recall that any practice of comp requires some sort of faith.






Indeed, however most people would not regard Pythagoranism, Platonism
et al as a topic of theology. If you insist on using the term, you
will be condemned to defining the word theology so as to include
Pythagoranism etc as part of its domain of study in every paper your 
write.



Actually neoplatonist like Plotinus or Proclus does that. Not only 
Pythagoranism has been conceived in a religious form, but like taoism 
in China, it has evolved into religious practice accompagnied by many 
form of superstition. Pyhtagoranism has even evloved into sectarian 
systems.






Psychology, on the other hand seems unproblematical, as psychology
normally covers belief as part of its remit.




But psychologist does not tackle the (certainly problematical) notion 
of truth, still less of unprovable truth ... It remains neutral, where 
comp *cannot* be.



Bruno




http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 05-janv.-06, à 03:57, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :


Brent Meeker writes:

Theism is the belief that the world was created by a single 
omnipotent, superhuman agent who cares about human behavoir and 
intervenes in worldly events.


Is that your theory??

Brent Meeker
Atheism is not a religion, just as a vacant lot is not a type of
building, and health is not a form of sickness.  Atheism is not a
religion.
--- Jim Heldberg, San Francisco Atheist Coordinator


Indeed! And the lack of belief in the Sun and the Moon as deities is 
not a religion, and the lack of belief in Santa Claus and the Grinch 
Who Stole Christmas is not a religion.



Here I disagree very much. With all my respect I think you are probably 
confusing agnosticism with atheism:


- the lack of belief in God is agnosticism (if g = "God exists", and B 
is belief, it corresponds to ~Bg. This is compatible with the lack of 
belief in the non existence of Gods: ~B~g)
-atheist are believer: they believes that God does not exist. This is 
B~g, and this is inconsistent with ~B~g.


Science should be agnostic, at least methodologically, even with g = 
"there is a universe or there is an observer moment". Comp science is 
provably agnostic: Dt -> ~BDt.


Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Le 05-janv.-06, à 04:10, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

Quentin Anciaux writes:

Le Mercredi 4 Janvier 2006 19:21, Brent Meeker a écrit :

> Theism is the belief that the world was created by a single 
omnipotent,
> superhuman agent who cares about human behavoir and intervenes in 
worldly

> events.
>
> Is that your theory??
>
> Brent Meeker
> Atheism is not a religion, just as a vacant lot is not a type of
> building, and health is not a form of sickness.  Atheism is not a
> religion.
>--- Jim Heldberg, San Francisco Atheist Coordinator

Atheïsm is a religion as I would say any metaphysical theories... 
(which are
only set of beliefs... if not they are falsifiable and enter the 
realm of

"physical" theories/science.

Atheism is not science in that it is not falsifiable... Atheïsm is 
composed of
dogma "negation of the existence of any god/suprem being" and is a 
set of

beliefs and as such fit well in the religion category.

Atheism means, from the Greek, "without God" or "without a belief in 
God".

I would like to insist, because it could be the root of the problem 
with the word "theology".
Atheism is the belief that God does not exist, and is always relative 
to some chosen notion of God. Agnosticism is the lack of belief in God. 
I believe atheism and belief in God have much more in common than is 
usually thought. Agnosticism is very different from both atheism and 
any sort of "religious"  belief.

It is like saying you don't believe in fairies, or Santa Claus. Of 
course, Santa Claus may well live at the North Pole, and hide whenever 
anyone goes there to look: no reasonable person could deny that, but 
no reasonable person would entertain it as a real possibility, either.

Sure.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 05-janv.-06, à 06:06, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :



It is worth repeating that "machine theology" would be a bad choice of 
words quite aside from the debate that has been generated on this 
thread about the meaning of atheism etc.



OK, this is another point.



This is because of the negative reaction the term "theology" would 
inspire in the (English-speaking, at least) scientific and 
philosophical community. I think even the savvier crackpots would 
avoid that word! It may not be fair, but that's the way it is.



I must think about that. I am not entirely convinced because it could 
be that the bad reaction is due to ... some basic theological error.


It is very nice that all of you try to convince me that the term 
"theology" should be avoided, although I am not yet sure that I can 
avoid it, and remaining at the same time a little bit honest if not 
just consistent.
Also, the fact that using "theology" makes you (all of you(*)) so 
nervous means perhaps that it is perhaps *urgent* we use it together 
with more serious connotations so that with some luck we will be able 
to finish the 3d millenium with the needed modesty to proceed.


Have you heard about Godel's proof of the existence of God? Godel did 
take the definition of God given by St-Anselm and formalised it in the 
S5 modal logic (actually the one proposed by Tom Caylor in its recent 
post!).
I don't take this, personally as  a proof of the existence of God. This 
is because I don't believe in St-Anselm definition of God (nor even 
that God is definable), nor do I "believe" in the S5 modal logic. But I 
*do* believe that Godel did prove that theology can be done in the 
scientific way, with definitions and proofs, etc.

See a sketch here:
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology.html

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-05 Thread Benjamin Udell

cognitive beliefs standing unconquered by, and outside of and sometimes opposed 
to, science. But it's not at all everything that religion, or theism, 
monotheism, polytheism, etc. are about. (There is a kind of philosophical 
"panpsychism" which tends to be more cognitive in aim, but that's the 
exception). And in fact the secularist-religious conflicts ongoing today are 
about all that further stuff, and not just about the particular factual issues 
which sometimes are made their arena.

So, again, I think that Bruno needs a name that carries the meaning of a kind 
of belief, and not one that just says "God."

One added note: "Agnosticism" originally meant holding that it can't be known 
whether God exists -- "un-knowledge-ism". It is still used, I think, by some in 
that sense. Anyway, earlier in philosophical and theological traditions it was 
used in that sense. Many also use it to mean that one is simply unsure -- I 
don't know whether God exists, but maybe you do, etc. There one simultanously 
suspects and doubts that God exists, i.e., neither believes nor disbelieves, 
but has some awareness of the question and treats it as suitable for 
belief-attitudes.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: 
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 10:50 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 05-janv.-06, à 06:06, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

>
> It is worth repeating that "machine theology" would be a bad choice of 
> words quite aside from the debate that has been generated on this 
> thread about the meaning of atheism etc.


OK, this is another point.



> This is because of the negative reaction the term "theology" would 
> inspire in the (English-speaking, at least) scientific and 
> philosophical community. I think even the savvier crackpots would 
> avoid that word! It may not be fair, but that's the way it is.


I must think about that. I am not entirely convinced because it could 
be that the bad reaction is due to ... some basic theological error.

It is very nice that all of you try to convince me that the term 
"theology" should be avoided, although I am not yet sure that I can 
avoid it, and remaining at the same time a little bit honest if not 
just consistent.
Also, the fact that using "theology" makes you (all of you(*)) so 
nervous means perhaps that it is perhaps *urgent* we use it together 
with more serious connotations so that with some luck we will be able 
to finish the 3d millenium with the needed modesty to proceed.

Have you heard about Godel's proof of the existence of God? Godel did 
take the definition of God given by St-Anselm and formalised it in the 
S5 modal logic (actually the one proposed by Tom Caylor in its recent 
post!).
I don't take this, personally as  a proof of the existence of God. This 
is because I don't believe in St-Anselm definition of God (nor even 
that God is definable), nor do I "believe" in the S5 modal logic. But I 
*do* believe that Godel did prove that theology can be done in the 
scientific way, with definitions and proofs, etc.
See a sketch here:
http://www.stats.uwaterloo.ca/~cgsmall/ontology.html

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-06 Thread Bruno Marchal

I don't think you can get a semantics (above syntax) by referring to 
some hypothetical external primitive world, which btw is what I would 
like to explain (away), unless you presuppose Physicalism/Materialism. 
In that case you should either abandon comp (and weaker theories) or 
perhaps tell me where the Universal Dovetailer Argument + 
movie-graph/Occam goes wrong, as it should in that situation.


Bruno



Le 05-janv.-06, à 19:04, Brent Meeker a écrit :


Bruno Marchal wrote:

Le 04-janv.-06, à 19:30, Brent Meeker a écrit :

Bruno Marchal wrote:


Hi John,
I think you may have problems because you are not used neither 
trained in axiomatic thinking. The idea consists in NOT defining 
the objects we want to talk about, and keeping just some needed 
properties from which we prove other theorem.
Let me give an example with the idea of knowledge. Many 
philosophers agree that knowledge should verify the following law, 
and I take it as the best definition of knowledge we can have:

1) If I know some proposition then that proposition is true
2) If I know some proposition then I know that I know that 
proposition
3) If I know that some proposition a entails some proposition b, 
then if I know a, I will know b.



But that doesn't capture meaning of "know".
But nobody knows or agree on the *meaning* of "know", that's was my 
point. If *you* think it leaves something out, for a mathematician it 
means that you agree with the definition!

And then you propose a stronger theory by adding 4:
It leaves out 4) If I know some proposition then I have experience 
causally connected to the fact that makes it true.  See c.f. 
Gettier's paradox.
Now, that "4" *is* problematical because it refers to a undefined 
notion of causality, which itself can only be defined axiomatically.

Bruno


It's undefined, and it's definition is problematic, but I don't see 
why it can *only* be defined axiomatically.  ISTM that some things 
must be defined empirically (i.e. ostensively) otherwise we have only 
syntax and no semantics.


Brent Meeker



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-06 Thread Bruno Marchal


Hi Brent,

The D is put for the modal Diamond "possibility". Dp is ~B~p (possible 
p = not necessary not p). With the provability logics (G and/or G*): 
the B represent formal provability and the D represents formal 
consistency. Dt is the same as ~Bf and represents (self)-consistency. 
Semantically it is equivalent with the existence of at least one 
model/world/situation/observer-moment. You can translate Dt -> ~BDt, by 
"if I am consistent then I cannot prove my consistency", or 
(semantically): "if there is an observer-moment then I cannot prove 
there is an observer-moment".
I was just saying that "there is a (next) observer-moment" is already 
faith-based (theological?) for the lobian machine (or any lobian 
entity, actually).


Bruno


Le 05-janv.-06, à 19:16, Brent Meeker a écrit :



Science should be agnostic, at least methodologically, even with g = 
"there is a universe or there is an observer moment". Comp science is 
provably agnostic: Dt -> ~BDt.


What's "D" mean?


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-06 Thread Bruno Marchal



Hi Benjamin,



Bruno, list,

I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though I don't understand 
much about Bruno's work or modal logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few 
general remarks.


If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a general name for a 
field which studies fundamental type of faith, hope, fear, bets, 
etc.," then there are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith, 
belief, confidence), _pistos_ (confident, faithful), _pisteuticos_ 
(deserving of faith or belief), etc. So he could call it Pistics 
(sounds awful in English, though, because of that to which it sound 
similar) or Pisteutics, etc. Or maybe there's some form of this word 
with a prefix which would make it sound less like, well, um, "piss" 
plus a suffix, and, having considered it, I do think that that's an 
issue. Ancient Greek is too unfamiliar to me, otherwise I'd try to 
come up with such a word myself, keeping in mind the next paragraph:




Well thanks. Pistology perhaps? I must say I like to use already 
existing terms, but I am still trying to understand why people seems so 
negative for the term "theology" ... I do think, perhaps unmodestly, 
that my approach belongs to the Classical Platonic Theology from 
Pythagoras to Proclus. (Of course Pythagoras comes before Plato but can 
be considered as its one of its main important precursor.)







What kind of belief? The focus in religion and theology on faith, 
belief, etc., seems (e.g., in "Credo quia absurdum") to arise from a 
stubbornness in the belief despite resultant seemingly contradictory 
or inadequate interpretations and understandings, and despite 
seemingly contradictory or inadequate confirmations, corroborations, 
knowledge ("knowledge" in the everyday sense).



Even just with the quantum hyp., or more deeply (I think) with just the 
comp hyp. I would say that we can say the same things about the notion 
of matter, or the notion of a primitive or primordial universe.
... Except that it is far more "easier" (cf UDA) to explain the 
epistemological contradictory nature of "matter" than of "God", which I 
take as being PERHAPS just a more general notion of reality, like our 
common (with comp) unnameable ignorance, or even the 
Platonico-Aristotelian notion of Self, etc.
Today's physics take for granted implicitly a major part of Aristotle 
theology: the religious idea of Nature, and the idea of linking souls 
to bodies in some one-one manner.





This is a special kind of belief, not the most general kind, and we 
tend to distinguish it in English by calling it "faith" though "faith" 
does have other meanings. It tends to be motivated by valuations not 
pertaining primarily to investigating and establishing the character 
of the world. For Bruno, the question is, does he mean a kind of 
belief which, howsoever motivated, is stubborn? (in the face of 
resultant contradictory or inadequate understandings and in the face 
of contradictory "knowledge" or inadequate knwledge). For what it's 
worth, I think that the name most suitable will have the meaning!

  of this kind of belief.



You don't need to be stubborn to belief (or hope) in God, especially if 
you are willing to take seriously pre-christian theology. Of course if 
you define God by a white male senior sitting on a cloud, it seems to 
me reasonable to suppose some level of stubbornness indeed.






Are religion and theism just about belief? Maybe I'm wrong, because 
there's a lot of background here on the everything-list threads that I 
don't understand, so maybe I'm interpreting things in the wrong light, 
but there seems to be a tendency here to regard religion as if it were 
fundamentally a cognitive discipline -- as if it consisted in a set of 
cognitive beliefs about facts.



Not at all. I would say the driving force is just truth, or even Truth. 
Then the theology of machine is entirely dependant of the gap between 
proof and truth, which you can seen as a gap between cognitive ability 
and the Truth.
Perhaps I am just talking in a premature way, and I should explain more 
on the Godel-Lob provability-truth gap (G* \ G).
Note that the "Truth About-a-Lobian-Machine" is an unnameable notion BY 
the lobian machine, and it verifies my favorite axiom of "..."  which 
is that it has no name.
Note that I am not identifying God with Truth or with the Self. But in 
the whole family of Platonic thought, such notion are frequently 
related.




Religion has been many things and in some societies has taken many 
forms in being involved in every aspect of life. But the core toward 
which it seems sometimes to retrench, seems to be affectivity and 
valuing with regard to decision-making, power, submission, governance 
and self-governance -- including valuing with regard to the greatest 
powers in one's life and in the universe.



Science too, including affectivity, at least in practice.





(All the same, I fully admit that religion can get involved quite 
widely, in valuings with regard to

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-06 Thread Benjamin Udell

Bruno, list,

The most that I can say about responding so lengthily to Bruno's lengthy 
response to my lengthy comment, is that I've kept it in one post!

[Ben]>> Bruno, list,
>> I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though I don't understand much 
>> about Bruno's work or modal logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few general 
>> remarks.
>> If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a general name for a field 
>> which studies fundamental type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc.," then there 
>> are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith, belief, confidence), 
>> _pistos_ (confident, faithful), _pisteuticos_ (deserving of faith or 
>> belief), etc. So he could call it Pistics (sounds awful in English, though, 
>> because of that to which it sound similar) or Pisteutics, etc. Or maybe 
>> there's some form of this word with a prefix which would make it sound less 
>> like, well, um, "piss" plus a suffix, and, having considered it, I do think 
>> that that's an issue. Ancient Greek is too unfamiliar to me, otherwise I'd 
>> try to come up with such a word myself, keeping in mind the next paragraph:

[Bruno:]> Well thanks. Pistology perhaps? I must say I like to use already 
existing terms, but I am still trying to understand why people seems so 
negative for the term "theology" ... I do think, perhaps unmodestly, that my 
approach belongs to the Classical Platonic Theology from Pythagoras to Proclus. 
(Of course Pythagoras comes before Plato but can be considered as its one of 
its main important precursor.)

Pistology or some longer word. Actually I'm surprised that a word like this 
doesn't already exist. Searching on the 'Net, I find that the World Congress of 
Faiths has coined a word "fideology." (I'm not religious and I've never heard 
of them.) http://www.worldfaiths.org/fideology2004.htm . I'll bet they 
entertained the coinage "pistology" and rejected it in favor of "fideology" 
even though "fideology" is a Latin-Greek combo. Evidence that "pistology" might 
be better off with some euphonious prefix.

66~
Fideology is the study and practice of faith as trust.   There are many 
misleading arguments about faith.   Millions would say it is belief in God.  

FIDEOLOGY points out the difference between faith and belief.  (see FAITH AND 
BELIEF by W. Cantwell Smith).   Faith is trust.  While millions do not have a 
theology, to be human is to practice trust.  
~99

They're talking about trust among people, as trust, credit, etc. It's not alien 
to the subject of faith in God, though there is a certain tension there. See 
Melville's _The Confidence Man: His Masquerade_ 
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/atkins/cmmain.html.

One of the problems with using the word "theology" is that you don't seem to 
have been mentioning God or gods. So, unless you're planning to focus the 
subject ultimately on God or gods, I'd suggest that the field's name focus on 
that which you say it would be focused -- faith. It would be a study of faith 
just as epistemology is a study of knowledge. If you're interested in something 
more similar to an ontology, i.e., interested more in the subject matter of 
faith than in faith itself, then maybe "Pisteutics," a study of that which is 
worth believing in, having faith in.

[Ben]>> What kind of belief? The focus in religion and theology on faith, 
belief, etc., seems (e.g., in "Credo quia absurdum") to arise from a 
stubbornness in the belief despite resultant seemingly contradictory or 
inadequate interpretations and understandings, and despite seemingly 
contradictory or inadequate confirmations, corroborations, knowledge 
("knowledge" in the everyday sense).

[Bruno]> Even just with the quantum hyp., or more deeply (I think) with just 
the comp hyp. I would say that we can say the same things about the notion of 
matter, or the notion of a primitive or primordial universe.
> ... Except that it is far more "easier" (cf UDA) to explain the 
> epistemological contradictory nature of "matter" than of "God", which I take 
> as being PERHAPS just a more general notion of reality, like our common (with 
> comp) unnameable ignorance, or even the Platonico-Aristotelian notion of 
> Self, etc.
> Today's physics take for granted implicitly a major part of Aristotle 
> theology: the religious idea of Nature, and the idea of linking souls to 
> bodies in some one-one manner.

[Ben] >> This is a special kind of belief, not the most general kind, and we 
tend to distinguish it in English by calling it "faith" though "faith" does 
have other meanings. It tends to be motivated by valuations not pertaining 
primarily to investigating and establishing the character of the world. For 
Bruno, the question is, does he mean a kind of belief which, howsoever 
motivated, is stubborn? (in the face of resultant contradictory or inadequate 
understandings and in the face of contradictory "knowledge" or inadequate 
knwledge). For what it's worth, I think that the name most suitab

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-06 Thread Jesse Mazer

Benjamin Udell wrote:

Bruno, list,

The most that I can say about responding so lengthily to Bruno's lengthy 
response to my lengthy comment, is that I've kept it in one post!

[Ben]>> Bruno, list,
>> I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though I don't understand 
much about Bruno's work or modal logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few 
general remarks.
>> If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a general name for a field 
which studies fundamental type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc.," then 
there are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith, belief, 
confidence), _pistos_ (confident, faithful), _pisteuticos_ (deserving of 
faith or belief), etc. So he could call it Pistics (sounds awful in 
English, though, because of that to which it sound similar) or Pisteutics, 
etc. Or maybe there's some form of this word with a prefix which would make 
it sound less like, well, um, "piss" plus a suffix, and, having considered 
it, I do think that that's an issue. Ancient Greek is too unfamiliar to me, 
otherwise I'd try to come up with such a word myself, keeping in mind the 
next paragraph:

[Bruno:]> Well thanks. Pistology perhaps? I must say I like to use already 
existing terms, but I am still trying to understand why people seems so 
negative for the term "theology" ... I do think, perhaps unmodestly, that 
my approach belongs to the Classical Platonic Theology from Pythagoras to 
Proclus. (Of course Pythagoras comes before Plato but can be considered as 
its one of its main important precursor.)

Pistology or some longer word. Actually I'm surprised that a word like this 
doesn't already exist. Searching on the 'Net, I find that the World 
Congress of Faiths has coined a word "fideology." (I'm not religious and 
I've never heard of them.) http://www.worldfaiths.org/fideology2004.htm . 
I'll bet they entertained the coinage "pistology" and rejected it in favor 
of "fideology" even though "fideology" is a Latin-Greek combo. Evidence 
that "pistology" might be better off with some euphonious prefix.

Is "pistis" related to "episteme", the greek word for knowledge which is the 
root of "Epistemology"? Epistemology is the philosophical study of beliefs 
and whether they are justified--see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology . Would "machine epistemology" 
work for Bruno?

I found a page which seems to say the difference between "pistis" and 
"episteme" has something to do with practical vs. theoretical knowledge:

http://www.civsoc.com/reconphil/reconphil2.html

"Ethics and politics are fields of practical philosophy. A person who 
possesses knowledge in these fields is not someone who can construct proofs, 
but rather someone who deliberates well about particular cases -- i.e., 
someone whose deliberation leads to happy results. What can philosophy 
contribute to a development of the capacity to deliberate well?

 "While philosophy is master in the cognitive realm of pure theory, 
philosophy has a lesser contribution to make in the fields of ethics and 
politics. In these fields, experience and skills in deliberation are 
paramount. Philosophy can provide a vocabulary and a moral grammar that can 
make deliberation more effective. But knowledge in these fields is 
ultimately of the particular case and, of the particular case, there can be 
no certain, final, or complete knowledge.

 "The field of practical knowledge is a field in which pistis or 
true belief, as opposed to episteme, constitutes the maximum goal. At the 
conclusion of deliberation, i.e., at the moment of ethical and political 
decision, it is impossible to know with certainty whether the particular 
case has been judged rightly. Only time can tell that and never with 
finality. The final state reached in deliberation is thus a state of being 
persuaded. Ethical and political deliberation thus calls into play the 
cognitive categories proper to rhetoric.

...

"Thus, Aristotelian political philosophy, in identifying itself strictly as 
a form of practical reflection as opposed to theoretical cognition, i.e., as 
belonging to the cognitive domain of pistis as opposed to episteme, viewed 
itself more or less self-consciously as a component of what I would call 
Greek republican civic culture."

This page says something similar, that the distinction is about convincing 
others using rhetoric vs. justifying them in some absolute theoretical 
sense:

http://www.crvp.org/book/Series01/I-26/chapter_two.htm

"Thus, in 1985, although he himself didnt describe it in these terms (and, 
for that matter, no doubt still wouldnt), Rawls, in effect, reinterpreted 
his philosophical project as a project belonging to the cognitive realm of 
rhetoric. Traditionally, rhetorical reason defined its cognitive realm as 
the realm of pistis or belief, as opposed to the cognitive realm claimed by 
philosophy, the realm of episteme or science. Belief, or pistis, is the 
state of being persuaded. To the extent that any

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-06 Thread George Levy

I understand Bruno's stand on Machine Theology. After all we are really 
talking about the "soul in the machine." It is really controversial but 
so what? It will certainly drive the point home.


One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not a religion, then zero is 
not a number.



George

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-07 Thread Benjamin Udell

ative inductive reasoning on the basis of experience in 
general could suffice for belief in G*, even across variations in motivation. 
Since this kind of reasoning happens statistical theory, etc., and (I would 
argue) in philosophy, and is applied in physical, chemical, and biological 
sciences and in social and human studies (be they called "sciences" or not), I 
see no reason to confine one's attention to its use for practical ends (be it 
"practical" in the everyday sense or in the Kantian sense). We can be more 
general about it. Such reasoning might even suffice for a kind of "recognition" 
of G*'s truth as long as we don't use the words "recognize" or "know" in too 
absolute a sense but instead in a sense of "reasonably well corroborated/!
  confirmed" for whatever theoretical or practical purposes may be involved. 
Where it becomes an issue, then it ought to be shown very clearly, and the 
importance not minimized, that G* cannot be proven deductively like G.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Jesse Mazer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; 
Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 6:07 PM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Benjamin Udell wrote:

>
>Bruno, list,
>
>The most that I can say about responding so lengthily to Bruno's lengthy 
>response to my lengthy comment, is that I've kept it in one post!
>
>[Ben]>> Bruno, list,
> >> I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though I don't understand 
>much about Bruno's work or modal logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few 
>general remarks.
> >> If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a general name for a field 
>which studies fundamental type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc.," then 
>there are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith, belief, 
>confidence), _pistos_ (confident, faithful), _pisteuticos_ (deserving of 
>faith or belief), etc. So he could call it Pistics (sounds awful in 
>English, though, because of that to which it sound similar) or Pisteutics, 
>etc. Or maybe there's some form of this word with a prefix which would make 
>it sound less like, well, um, "piss" plus a suffix, and, having considered 
>it, I do think that that's an issue. Ancient Greek is too unfamiliar to me, 
>otherwise I'd try to come up with such a word myself, keeping in mind the 
>next paragraph:
>
>[Bruno:]> Well thanks. Pistology perhaps? I must say I like to use already 
>existing terms, but I am still trying to understand why people seems so 
>negative for the term "theology" ... I do think, perhaps unmodestly, that 
>my approach belongs to the Classical Platonic Theology from Pythagoras to 
>Proclus. (Of course Pythagoras comes before Plato but can be considered as 
>its one of its main important precursor.)
>
>Pistology or some longer word. Actually I'm surprised that a word like this 
>doesn't already exist. Searching on the 'Net, I find that the World 
>Congress of Faiths has coined a word "fideology." (I'm not religious and 
>I've never heard of them.) http://www.worldfaiths.org/fideology2004.htm . 
>I'll bet they entertained the coinage "pistology" and rejected it in favor 
>of "fideology" even though "fideology" is a Latin-Greek combo. Evidence 
>that "pistology" might be better off with some euphonious prefix.

Is "pistis" related to "episteme", the greek word for knowledge which is the 
root of "Epistemology"? Epistemology is the philosophical study of beliefs 
and whether they are justified--see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology . Would "machine epistemology" 
work for Bruno?

I found a page which seems to say the difference between "pistis" and 
"episteme" has something to do with practical vs. theoretical knowledge:

http://www.civsoc.com/reconphil/reconphil2.html

"Ethics and politics are fields of practical philosophy. A person who 
possesses knowledge in these fields is not someone who can construct proofs, 
but rather someone who deliberates well about particular cases -- i.e., 
someone whose deliberation leads to happy results. What can philosophy 
contribute to a development of the capacity to deliberate well?

  "While philosophy is master in the cognitive realm of pure theory, 
philosophy has a lesser contribution to make in the fields of ethics and 
politics. In these fields, experience and skills in deliberation are 
paramount. Philosophy can provide a vocabulary and a moral grammar that can 
make deliberation more effective. But knowledge in these fields is 
ultimately of the particular case and, of the particular case, there can be

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-08 Thread Stathis Papaioannou


George Levy writes:

I understand Bruno's stand on Machine Theology. After all we are really 
talking about the "soul in the machine." It is really controversial but so 
what? It will certainly drive the point home.


One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not a religion, then zero is not 
a number.


We can argue about the precise definition of words, but I think a 
fundamental point is missed if religion and atheism are put on a par. It is 
like the Christian fundamentalists' demand that "creation science" be taught 
in schools alongside evolutionary biology, because nobody can reasonably 
claim that evolutionary biology is *certainly* true and "creation science" 
*certainly* false.


There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x despite 
the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, not believing x 
because of the lack of any supporting evidence - especially if x is 
something inherently bizarre or incredible.


Stathis Papaioannou

_
realestate.com.au: the biggest address in property   
http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-08 Thread George Levy


Bruno
I am still thinking about the naming issue and I am not 100% satisfied 
with any suggestion. The field we are discussing is really at the 
intersection of three subjects: Theology, Physics and Psychology. This 
reminds me that about six years ago I wrote a book which was never 
published (I did not have the credentials and/or the book was too "far 
out" for the editors). I entitled the book "God, the World and I."  In 
terms of your theory "God, the World and I" may correspond to G*, G and 
the first person.


I am not sure how this could affect the naming issue. Trying to combine 
these three concepts we could get titles such as:


First person Theological Physics? First-person Theo-Mechanics? 
First-person Physical Theology? First-person Machine Theology?? 
Theological Physical Psychology?


Psychology is not really satisfying... I should really be the science of 
the "first-person, the "self" or the "observer" possibly the term 
for it is "relativistic" instead of "psychology")...so we get 
"Relativistic Theological Physics"  or  "Relativistic Theological 
Mechanics".h Upon hearing these words, people may decide to 
lock us up in an insane asilum. :-\


George

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-08 Thread Russell Standish

Except I think that identifying G* with God is unhelpful. God is at
best an incoherent concept, which is part of the reason why theology
is a problematic word. G* is basically Truth by another name.

Bruno wants to use theology in its original Hellenistic sense - fine,
except he will have his work cut out explaining that this is how he
intends to use the word. Of course if he picks a completely new word
then he will need to explain this as well.

Cheers

On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 12:16:29PM -0800, George Levy wrote:
> Bruno
> I am still thinking about the naming issue and I am not 100% satisfied 
> with any suggestion. The field we are discussing is really at the 
> intersection of three subjects: Theology, Physics and Psychology. This 
> reminds me that about six years ago I wrote a book which was never 
> published (I did not have the credentials and/or the book was too "far 
> out" for the editors). I entitled the book "God, the World and I."  In 
> terms of your theory "God, the World and I" may correspond to G*, G and 
> the first person.
> 

-- 
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.


A/Prof Russell Standish  Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
International prefix  +612, Interstate prefix 02



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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-08 Thread John M



> Bruno
it is you and only you who can decide about the title.


Just keep in mind that with theology libraries and
buyers will connotate a religious oeuvre, with
psychology a neurological or psychiatric one, wich
mewchanism an engineering treatise, with 
1st person a psychological babble, so people will
abstain from reading it. 
Did you identify a topic for the library systematic?
(I wonder)

I mentioned 'blickfang' and it is a real term. It
sells the text (not in money-terms, but in
readership). 
I would not suggest "Advanced thinking beyond the
misconceptions 
of conventional sciences" but I strongly advise
against words with
misleading baggage. (If my suggestion is any worth).
Maybe tuppence?

John M

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-08 Thread George Levy





Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
George Levy writes:
  
  One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not
a religion, then zero is not a number.

  
There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x
despite the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, not
believing x because of the lack of any supporting evidence 


As far as I know atheists believe in  no god ( B~G  or
equivalently B( G=f )  ) and agnostics do not commit themselves to
believing in god. (~BG) . In that sense atheists are true believers.
You are confusing the instance with the class. The fact that zero
represents a null value does not mean that its status as a number is
nil. The fact that atheists believe in zero god does not mean
they do not believe in anything.

George

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-08 Thread Jesse Mazer



George Levy  wrote:



Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


George Levy writes:

One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not a religion, then zero is 
not a number.


There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x despite 
the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, not believing 
x because of the lack of any supporting evidence



As far as I know atheists believe in  no god ( B~G  or equivalently B( G=f 
)  ) and agnostics do not commit themselves to believing in god. (~BG) . In 
that sense atheists are true believers. You are confusing the instance with 
the class. The fact that zero represents a null value does not mean that 
its status as a number is nil. The fact that atheists believe in zero god 
does not mean they do not believe in anything.


George



Atheists do not always define the term "atheism" as believing there is no 
God, they often define it simply as lacking any belief in God--see the 
quotes from various atheist writers at 
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/sn-definitions.html

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Jesse, George, Stathis, list,

A relevant variable here seems to be the degree to which one is aware of or 
cares about the question of whether there is a God (or gods). The kind and 
depth and commitment of the belief-attitude are a variable which makes terms 
belief, suspicion, disbelief, and doubt, whose collective structure is 
otherwise like that of logical quantification, take on sufficient variation of 
shades of connotation in order to generate disputes as to whether, for 
instance, somebody devoid of belief in God is a disbeliever in God. 

If we assume that all the persons in question have reasonably large and equal 
amounts of awareness and concern about the question, then the structure is like 
that of Aristotelian quantification. Non-belief (in the sense of non-100% 
belief, will be equivalent to doubt. Non-disbelief (in the sense of non-100% 
disbelief) will be equivalent to suspicion. A complete lack of belief, the lack 
of any significant suspicion, that God exists, will be equivalent to disbelief 
that God exists.

If we assume that each person either (a) has that same degree or (b) has no 
awareness at all of the question, then the structure will be like that of 
Boolean quantification. For instance, the belief that God exists will appear as 
a compound of suspicion that God exists and non-suspicion that God doesn't 
exist. Also, we won't need to restrict the range of the terms of belief, 
suspicion, etc., to persons, beings capable of belief-attitudes about God's 
existence. But having to regard belief as such a compound rather than as a 
simpler kind of tranformation ("~suspect that ~...") is, in terms of logical 
structure, perhaps somewhat inconvenient, and I suppose that that's the reason 
for the use of a structure more similar to that of Aristotelian logical 
quantification and for a restriction of range to persons aware of the question 
of whether God exists.

If we make no assumptions about degrees, motivations, justifications, etc., of 
the belief-attitudes, then the words terms belief, suspicion, disbelief, and 
doubt come into relief as a rather coarse-grained way to characterize 
belief-atttitudes toward God's existence. Clearly, in the absence of clarity 
and consensus about logical assumptions about the relevant terms, they occasion 
equivocation and ambiguity about the difference between disbelief and complete 
lack of belief. But, coarse-grained as they may be, they're still quite 
convenient. 

The word "religious" will certainly compound the ambiguities and vaguenesses. 
If questions of corroboration/discorrobration by evidence are relevant for 
characterizing belief, disbelief, etc., as religious, then, depending on how 
the evidence stands, and depending on how narrowly or widely one construes 
"religious," the theist, atheist, and agnostic might, each of them, be called 
religious or be called non-religious. 

Some theists like to lump agnostics in with atheists. I guess some atheists 
like to do so too. For my part, at least, as an agnostic, both suspecting and 
doubting God's existence, and venturing such suspicion and doubt in any case 
with only vague notions of what God would be or do, I prefer to be 
characterized neither as atheist nor as theist, but as agnostic.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Jesse Mazer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; 
Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 2:29 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue
George Levy  wrote:

>Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>>George Levy writes:
>>
>>>One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not a religion, then zero is 
>>>not a number.
>>
>>There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x despite 
>>the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, not believing 
>>x because of the lack of any supporting evidence
>
>
>As far as I know atheists believe in  no god ( B~G  or equivalently B( G=f 
>)  ) and agnostics do not commit themselves to believing in god. (~BG) . In 
>that sense atheists are true believers. You are confusing the instance with 
>the class. The fact that zero represents a null value does not mean that 
>its status as a number is nil. The fact that atheists believe in zero god 
>does not mean they do not believe in anything.
>
>George
>

Atheists do not always define the term "atheism" as believing there is no 
God, they often define it simply as lacking any belief in God--see the 
quotes from various atheist writers at 
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/sn-definitions.html

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 07-janv.-06, à 00:07, Jesse Mazer a écrit :

s "pistis" related to "episteme", the greek word for knowledge which 
is the root of "Epistemology"? Epistemology is the philosophical study 
of beliefs and whether they are justified--see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology . Would "machine 
epistemology" work for Bruno?


Actually, at some point I will defend that the term "machine 
epistemology" is indeed defensible for the logic G, and perhaps even 
more for its Theaetetical variant S4Grz.
But it cannot work for G*. But then I need to say more. Given the 
relatively high number of recent posts I will try to make a synthesis 
(if not I will confuse people I think).


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 07-janv.-06, à 01:17, George Levy a écrit :

I understand Bruno's stand on Machine Theology. After all we are 
really talking about the "soul in the machine."




That is already the case with the STRONG AI thesis, which, despite its 
name; is much weaker than the COMP hyp.


As the reader of the list know (or should know) I think that to make 
prematurely too much precise distinctions is a fallacy ( the 1004 
fallacy).
So I do believe that we can identify the soul and the first person (as 
you have also suggest somewhere else) until difficulties force us to 
add nuances. In that case the "strong AI" thesis can be defined by the 
assertion that machine can have a soul, and the whole AI enterprise has 
something "theological" in it.
But with comp, which is the doctrine that "I am a machine" (not simply 
that machine can think like with the STRONG AI, but that I am a machine 
(and I assume that humans can think of course)) the theological aspect 
seems to me obvious: it even entails some "ancestors cult" like doing 
the backup of parents, grandparents, etc.

I will come back on this in my answer to Benjamin's long post.




It is really controversial but so what? It will certainly drive the 
point home.



I do think so.


Bruno





One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not a religion, then zero is 
not a number.



George



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 08-janv.-06, à 12:22, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

We can argue about the precise definition of words, but I think a 
fundamental point is missed if religion and atheism are put on a par. 
It is like the Christian fundamentalists' demand that "creation 
science" be taught in schools alongside evolutionary biology, because 
nobody can reasonably claim that evolutionary biology is *certainly* 
true and "creation science" *certainly* false.


There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x 
despite the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, 
not believing x because of the lack of any supporting evidence - 
especially if x is something inherently bizarre or incredible.



Here you make a point. But this is because "creation science" is just 
not a science. Those who pretend it is a science are just doing 
rhetorical tricks.


Perhaps one day "creation science" will appear. This would be the case 
if "creation science" (the doctrine that the best explanation for the 
existence of the universe is that God has made it recently in less than 
7 days) is made enough precise to not only be tested but to provide a 
best overview of reality, etc. But of course today this is not the 
case, and "creation science", *as* a science is much more a like a 
fuzzy speculation predicting and actually explaining nothing. Their 
proponents just are no playing the game.


Now, most people who says "I don't believe in God", in general believe 
in a "physical or material" universe; and that is still a sort of 
religious belief. Atheist are not just believer because they believe in 
0 God, as George put it, but also because they replace God by something 
else, without really explaining what it is and how it helps us to 
figure what exist, etc.


In my state of ignorance I would even say that for me GOD and UNIVERSE 
are both enough fuzzy that distinguishing them at the start could be a 
1004 fallacy.
But, perhaps unlike some of you, I did not get any religious education, 
and all what I know in "theology" comes from study and experience, and 
all what I do appreciate in the Monism of the Jewish, Muslim and 
Christian theologies (but present also in some Chinese and Indian 
philosophical systems) seems to be the parts they have kept from the 
pre-Christian and pre-Muslim neo-Platonician theology. Today's catholic 
theologians who insist too much on the quality in rigour of that type 
of theology get trouble with the Roman Authority.



Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 09-janv.-06, à 00:26, John M a écrit :


Just keep in mind that with theology libraries and
buyers will connotate a religious oeuvre, with
psychology a neurological or psychiatric one, wich
mewchanism an engineering treatise, with
1st person a psychological babble, so people will
abstain from reading it.
Did you identify a topic for the library systematic?
(I wonder)


Let me anticipate on something which I will say to Benjamin.
I think we should separate two discussions:

1) is "theology" the correct wording (especially when comp is assumed)
2) is "theology" not too much undiplomatic (for historical reasons and 
uses)


I will come back on both issues. Let me say that one of the growing 
version of the english version of my thesis has the title "elementary 
*testable* theology", but I don't exclude at all I could change my mind 
about that title, either for diplomatic reasons and/or for "scientific" 
reasons (in case Ben succeed for example in explaining that G* has 
nothing to do with theology (even comp theologies), which I doubt.


Bruno




http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 09-janv.-06, à 08:29, Jesse Mazer a écrit :

Atheists do not always define the term "atheism" as believing there is 
no God, they often define it simply as lacking any belief in God--see 
the quotes from various atheist writers at 
http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/sn-definitions.html



Thanks. But it is normal. It is strategy of atheist to put the agnostic 
in their rank. In his "treatise of atheology" a Belgium atheist 
described agnostic as just a polite form of atheism.


I just discover that Raymond Smullyan in a little book on religion "Who 
knows?" says also that atheism and religious believer are much more 
alike compare with the agnostics.


With Ben I propose that we stick with (g = "God exists")
religious believer = Bg
atheism = B~g
agnosticism = ~Bg & ~B~g

Of course atheism will be relative to a notion of God.
Many people believe they are atheist, and then agree that they are just 
agnostic once the definition above is recalled or given. But I know 
personaly "real atheist" and even atheist "sects", and in general they 
hate much more the agnostics than the religious believer. atheist and 
religious believer have in common that they dislike doubts on that 
subjects. For them it cannot be a priori a matter of science (that is a 
matter of doubt).



Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Bruno, John, list,

Bruno wrote:

...I don't exclude at all I could change my mind about that title, either for 
diplomatic reasons and/or for "scientific" reasons (in case Ben succeed for 
example in explaining that G* has nothing to do with theology (even comp 
theologies), which I doubt.

That bar is set too high, I think. I've certainly never claimed that G* has 
nothing to do with theology. Like with any two things, in order to be called 
"theology," G* needs more than a significant relation with theology.

Best, Ben Udell

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-09 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

If you remain true to the Greek roots of the words, atheists lack a belief
in the existence of God, as agnostics lack knowledge of whether God exists:
"a-" = without, "theism" = belief in God (by later convention, a personal
God), "gnosis" = knowledge. It is not quite the same as saying that God
definitely does not exist, or that knowledge about the existence of God is
impossible, respectively, although a few atheists and rather more agnostics
would go on to make these stronger claims.

The fairest way to decide what a word applying to a group means is probably
to ask the members of that group. Most atheists would say that they are
reasonably sure that a personal God does not exist, just as they are
reasonable sure that Santa Claus dioes not exist and that the Sun will rise
tomorrow. They would not claim to be *absolutely* sure if they have even a
smattering of philosophical sophistication, since no empirical fact can be
absolutely certain (except perhaps the belief that I am having this thought
at this moment). An agnostic, on the other hand, can vary from someone who
has exactly the same view as that of the rational atheist just described, to
someone who tends to be a theist but rejects the requirement common in many
religions that he be absolutely certain even in the absence of any good
evidence. I expect that most professed agnostics would tend towards atheism
rather than theism, and could probably as easily describe themselves as
atheists without changing any of their beliefs.

Stathis Papaioannou

Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

George Levy writes:

One more point for Stathis: If atheism is not a religion, then zero is
not a number.

There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x despite
the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, not believing
x because of the lack of any supporting evidence

As far as I know atheists believe in no god ( B~G or equivalently B( G=f
) ) and agnostics do not commit themselves to believing in god. (~BG) . In
that sense atheists are true believers. You are confusing the instance with
the class. The fact that zero represents a null value does not mean that
its status as a number is nil. The fact that atheists believe in zero god
does not mean they do not believe in anything.

George

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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-10 Thread Bruno Marchal

Ben, here is a comment to Stathis's post which can serve as a 
preliminary for the synthesis I will try to do this week and which 
should answer some of your comments.


Le 10-janv.-06, à 01:46, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

If you remain true to the Greek roots of the words, atheists lack a 
belief in the existence of God, as agnostics lack knowledge of whether 
God exists: "a-" = without, "theism" = belief in God (by later 
convention, a personal God), "gnosis" = knowledge.  It is not quite 
the same as saying that God definitely does not exist, or that 
knowledge about the existence of God is impossible, respectively, 
although a few atheists and rather more agnostics would go on to make 
these stronger claims.



OK but this is perhaps too much etymological and it could be confusing 
to use "knowledge" already in tis setting, unless we give already some 
minimal theory of belief and knowledge right at the start. Even in that 
case we are at risk to mix a too much precise notion of knowledge with 
a too much imprecise notion of God.
And if you look at the page referred too by Jesse, it seems that the 
more common acceptation for the meaning of "agnostic" is:  "I don't 
know/believe if G exists or not", and for "atheist" it is: I 
think/belief that God does not exists. Nobody will say "I know that God 
does not exist", because it seems ridiculous or too much arrogant.
Also, the idea that "knowledge about the existence of God is 
impossible" can indeed be defended by some atheist and agnostic, but is 
also the favourite affirmation of many mystical theists, including some 
Neoplatonist, but also some Buddhist.


In any case, it will be useful to agree on some axioms for belief and 
knowledge:
I hope everyone will agree that both knowledge and belief makes the 
following formula true.
I assume a classical (platonist) background, and by "p -> q" I mean 
that either p is false or q is true. It is the IF ... THEN ... of the 
classical mathematicians.


B(p -> q) -> (Bp -> Bq) (named K, for Kripke)

In "French":  if I believe that (p -> q) then if I belief p then I will 
belief q
  if I know that (p -> q) then if I know p then I 
will know q.


Note that this axioms is already criticised in some AI approaches to 
knowledge, because it gives rise to a form of omniscience. This is not 
a problem given that I will extract the measure on the comp histories 
from the limitation of that omniscience, and Bp is really more "p is 
believable" or "p is knowable" instead of "believes" or "knows". Having 
said that, I hope people will agree with the following axioms, again 
both for *believability* and *knowability*:


Bp -> BBp  (named 4, by modal logicians, in honour of C.I. 
Lewis)


In "French":   if I believe p then I will believe that I believe p
 if I know p then I will know that I know p.

In the classical background all classical tautologies are accepted, and 
I will suppose, at least in the beginning that the theories are closed 
for the rule of modus ponens and the rule of necessitation, and some 
substitution rules. The first one means that if I have already prove p 
and (p -> q), I am entitled to derive q. The second one says that if I 
have already prove p then I am entitled to derive Bp.


What does, then, distinguish knowledge and belief (or better 
knowability and believability)?
By definition we just cannot know something false. Nobody will say "I 
knew that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but I was wrong". People say: "I 
believed that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + b^2, but I was wrong", and this is a 
symptom that the most basic distinction between knowledge and belief is 
that we just cannot know a falsity. Of course we can believe falsity 
(in dreams, in the state of error, or in trusting misfortunately some 
liar for example). So to get an (axiomatic) theory of knowledge it is 
enough to add the axioms Bp -> p (either you don't know p or p is 
true).


To sum up the (very standard) notions of believability and knowability 
are given by the theories K4 and KT4 respectively:



K4  (believability, or introspective belief):

K  B(p -> q) -> (Bp -> Bq)
4  Bp -> BBp
+ rules of modus ponens, necessitation and substitution



KT4 (better known as S4, it is the fourth modal system of C.I. Lewis, 
knowability or introspective knowledge):


K  B(p -> q) -> (Bp -> Bq)
T   Bp -> p
4   Bp -> BBp
+ rules of modus ponens, necessitation and substitution


Then I propose, if only for the sake of the discussion to define 
agnostic by the ~B~g & ~Bg clause, letting open the question if B if 
for belief or knowledge.



Exercises for those who want (I am so sorry, but it will be useful for 
a latter deepening):
1) What is your feeling about formal provability by a consistent or 
even correct (sound) machine: I mean does it follows K4, KT4. Is formal 
provability closer to knowledge or to belief?  (This is tricky!)
2) Remember and explain to your children or husband/wife or parents 
what is a Kri

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-10 Thread Benjamin Udell

owledge that the meaning of "know" as an 
achievement word is the primary sense in everyday language. This can happen 
even in deductive reasoning if the deducer does not adequately check and 
observe the structure of his/her reasoning. (Some may note that this all sounds 
Peircean, but I augment "object - representation - interpretation" with a 
fourth stage, one of recognition, confirmation, etc., correlated vaguely to the 
verificatory recipient in info theory. Certain four-fold processes and stru!
 ctures like that are why I'm interested in Tegmark's picture o!
 f a four
-level Multiverse.) As a practical matter, not only can intepretive results be 
interpreted in their turn, but substantiations can in turn be substantiated -- 
or overturned --, which happens almost naturally to at least some extent in 
science when science is healthy, building on firm (or firm-seeming) results. 
What's built on a supposedly firm basis should start to have problems if the 
building is valid but the basis is in fact infirm.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; 
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 8:24 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue


Ben, here is a comment to Stathis's post which can serve as a 
preliminary for the synthesis I will try to do this week and which 
should answer some of your comments.

Le 10-janv.-06, à 01:46, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

> If you remain true to the Greek roots of the words, atheists lack a 
> belief in the existence of God, as agnostics lack knowledge of whether 
> God exists: "a-" = without, "theism" = belief in God (by later 
> convention, a personal God), "gnosis" = knowledge.  It is not quite 
> the same as saying that God definitely does not exist, or that 
> knowledge about the existence of God is impossible, respectively, 
> although a few atheists and rather more agnostics would go on to make 
> these stronger claims.

OK but this is perhaps too much etymological and it could be confusing 
to use "knowledge" already in tis setting, unless we give already some 
minimal theory of belief and knowledge right at the start. Even in that 
case we are at risk to mix a too much precise notion of knowledge with 
a too much imprecise notion of God.
And if you look at the page referred too by Jesse, it seems that the 
more common acceptation for the meaning of "agnostic" is:  "I don't 
know/believe if G exists or not", and for "atheist" it is: I 
think/belief that God does not exists. Nobody will say "I know that God 
does not exist", because it seems ridiculous or too much arrogant.
Also, the idea that "knowledge about the existence of God is 
impossible" can indeed be defended by some atheist and agnostic, but is 
also the favourite affirmation of many mystical theists, including some 
Neoplatonist, but also some Buddhist.

In any case, it will be useful to agree on some axioms for belief and 
knowledge:
I hope everyone will agree that both knowledge and belief makes the 
following formula true.
I assume a classical (platonist) background, and by "p -> q" I mean 
that either p is false or q is true. It is the IF ... THEN ... of the 
classical mathematicians.

B(p -> q) -> (Bp -> Bq) (named K, for Kripke)

In "French":  if I believe that (p -> q) then if I belief p then I will 
belief q
   if I know that (p -> q) then if I know p then I 
will know q.

Note that this axioms is already criticised in some AI approaches to 
knowledge, because it gives rise to a form of omniscience. This is not 
a problem given that I will extract the measure on the comp histories 
from the limitation of that omniscience, and Bp is really more "p is 
believable" or "p is knowable" instead of "believes" or "knows". Having 
said that, I hope people will agree with the following axioms, again 
both for *believability* and *knowability*:

Bp -> BBp  (named 4, by modal logicians, in honour of C.I. 
Lewis)

In "French":   if I believe p then I will believe that I believe p
  if I know p then I will know that I know p.

In the classical background all classical tautologies are accepted, and 
I will suppose, at least in the beginning that the theories are closed 
for the rule of modus ponens and the rule of necessitation, and some 
substitution rules. The first one means that if I have already prove p 
and (p -> q), I am entitled to derive q. The second one says that if I 
have already prove p then I am entitled to derive Bp.

What does, then, distinguish knowledge and belief (or better 
knowability and believability)?
By definition we just cannot know some

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-10 Thread Stathis Papaioannou


Bruno Marchal writes:


Le 08-janv.-06, à 12:22, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

We can argue about the precise definition of words, but I think a 
fundamental point is missed if religion and atheism are put on a par. It 
is like the Christian fundamentalists' demand that "creation science" be 
taught in schools alongside evolutionary biology, because nobody can 
reasonably claim that evolutionary biology is *certainly* true and 
"creation science" *certainly* false.


There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x despite 
the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, not believing 
x because of the lack of any supporting evidence - especially if x is 
something inherently bizarre or incredible.



Here you make a point. But this is because "creation science" is just not a 
science. Those who pretend it is a science are just doing rhetorical 
tricks.


Perhaps one day "creation science" will appear. This would be the case if 
"creation science" (the doctrine that the best explanation for the 
existence of the universe is that God has made it recently in less than 7 
days) is made enough precise to not only be tested but to provide a best 
overview of reality, etc. But of course today this is not the case, and 
"creation science", *as* a science is much more a like a fuzzy speculation 
predicting and actually explaining nothing. Their proponents just are no 
playing the game.


Yes, but this is the problem with belief in a personal God versus 
non-belief. Theism would be an empirical, or equivalently scientific, belief 
if its proponents were consistent: if God intervenes in the world, then by 
definition he must leave some evidence of this intervention. (The 
alternative believers' position is deism, the idea that God made the world 
but then refrained from any further interventions in its affairs. Deism has 
never really inspired religious devotion like theism has.) The reality is, 
however, that there is less evidence for religious beliefs than there is for 
most bizarre secular beliefs, such as the belief that Elvis is alive, or 
that aliens regularly abduct humans to experiment on them.


It is worth stressing that what normally counts for religious belief (in the 
Western tradition) is *not* a vague deism, but very specific beliefs about a 
Personal God: for example, that he caused one third of himself to be born of 
a virgin so that he could live as a human and, though immortal and destined 
to rise again, die a horrible death in order to save  humans from being 
punished for Adam and Eve's original transgression against God in the Garden 
of Eden at the instigation of a snake which told Eve she and Adam would lose 
their ignorance if they ate the fruit of a certain forbidden (by God) tree; 
and that anyone who believes this and admits he is a miserable sinner will 
go to Heaven, while non-believers will suffer eternal torment in Hell. I 
mean, give me Elvis and aliens with anal probes any time...



Now, most people who says "I don't believe in God", in general believe in a 
"physical or material" universe; and that is still a sort of religious 
belief. Atheist are not just believer because they believe in 0 God, as 
George put it, but also because they replace God by something else, without 
really explaining what it is and how it helps us to figure what exist, etc.


In my state of ignorance I would even say that for me GOD and UNIVERSE are 
both enough fuzzy that distinguishing them at the start could be a 1004 
fallacy.
But, perhaps unlike some of you, I did not get any religious education, and 
all what I know in "theology" comes from study and experience, and all what 
I do appreciate in the Monism of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian 
theologies (but present also in some Chinese and Indian philosophical 
systems) seems to be the parts they have kept from the pre-Christian and 
pre-Muslim neo-Platonician theology. Today's catholic theologians who 
insist too much on the quality in rigour of that type of theology get 
trouble with the Roman Authority.


If GOD and UNIVERSE are fuzzy and difficult to distinguish, you're very far 
from talking about the God of people who are religious.



Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-10 Thread danny mayes

I haven't participated in the list in a while, but I try to keep up with 
the discussion here and there as time permits.  I personally was raised 
a fundamentalist Baptist, but lost most of my interest in that religion 
when I was taught at 9 years old that all the little kids in Africa that 
are never told about Jesus Christ go to Hell.  Even at 9, I knew that 
wasn't something I was going to be buying.  Who wants to believe in a 
God that cruel?  Even without the problematic cruel creator, I have 
always been to oriented toward logic and proof to just accept stuff on 
faith.


I started redeveloping religious belief, ironically, when I picked up a 
book on quantum physics 6 or so years ago.  I was at a legal seminar and 
needed something to read during the boring  sessions, and the author ran 
through a number of experiments of QM and concluded that the MWI was the 
most logical interpretation of these experiments.  I had read all the 
Sci Fi strories of alternate realities and whatnot, but this was my 
first exposure to the concept that reality is created in such a way to 
allow all things to exist (that also actually appeared to be supported 
by some real science).  I still remember my excitement in  contemplating 
this explanation, in that it seems to explain so many questions. 

I guess I could go into a long explanation as to why I now believe 
intelligence plays a key role in understanding the nature of our reality 
and how it came to be, but I probably wouldn't be able to say much that 
almost anyone on this board has not already heard.  For me it boils down 
to this: I see absolutely no reason to believe our experiences are not 
emulable.  I strongly suspect it is possible to create a quantum 
computer.  I strongly suspect technology will continue to evolve and 
computer processing will get more and more powerful.  Finally, even if 
we are somehow precluded from creating new universes in the future (i.e. 
universes implented on the same level of reality as our universe, 
virtual universes are obviously possible), the one we are in will last 
for trillions of years.  Final conclusion?  Well, I'll let you do the 
math...


Danny Mayes  



Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


Bruno Marchal writes:


Le 08-janv.-06, à 12:22, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

We can argue about the precise definition of words, but I think a 
fundamental point is missed if religion and atheism are put on a 
par. It is like the Christian fundamentalists' demand that "creation 
science" be taught in schools alongside evolutionary biology, 
because nobody can reasonably claim that evolutionary biology is 
*certainly* true and "creation science" *certainly* false.


There is a clear difference between, on the one hand, believing x 
despite the lack of any supporting evidence and, on the other hand, 
not believing x because of the lack of any supporting evidence - 
especially if x is something inherently bizarre or incredible.




Here you make a point. But this is because "creation science" is just 
not a science. Those who pretend it is a science are just doing 
rhetorical tricks.


Perhaps one day "creation science" will appear. This would be the 
case if "creation science" (the doctrine that the best explanation 
for the existence of the universe is that God has made it recently in 
less than 7 days) is made enough precise to not only be tested but to 
provide a best overview of reality, etc. But of course today this is 
not the case, and "creation science", *as* a science is much more a 
like a fuzzy speculation predicting and actually explaining nothing. 
Their proponents just are no playing the game.



Yes, but this is the problem with belief in a personal God versus 
non-belief. Theism would be an empirical, or equivalently scientific, 
belief if its proponents were consistent: if God intervenes in the 
world, then by definition he must leave some evidence of this 
intervention. (The alternative believers' position is deism, the idea 
that God made the world but then refrained from any further 
interventions in its affairs. Deism has never really inspired 
religious devotion like theism has.) The reality is, however, that 
there is less evidence for religious beliefs than there is for most 
bizarre secular beliefs, such as the belief that Elvis is alive, or 
that aliens regularly abduct humans to experiment on them.


It is worth stressing that what normally counts for religious belief 
(in the Western tradition) is *not* a vague deism, but very specific 
beliefs about a Personal God: for example, that he caused one third of 
himself to be born of a virgin so that he could live as a human and, 
though immortal and destined to rise again, die a horrible death in 
order to save  humans from being punished for Adam and Eve's original 
transgression against God in the Garden of Eden at the instigation of 
a snake which told Eve she and Adam would lose their ignorance if they 
ate the fruit of a certain forbidden (by God) tree; a

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-11 Thread Bruno Marchal


Hi Benjamin, List,


I will comment your long post, taking into account some posts from its 
sequel (to avoid repetition).
But I will try to make a sort of synthesis so that people will be able 
to recast the present thread, concerned with the "theology"-naming 
issue, and the more general goal of the list which consists globally in 
the search of a TOE (Theory of Everything) and more particularly 
consists (at our present stage) to find a measure on the computational 
histories.
For this I need to summarise my own contribution in the list, which 
consists mainly in explaining results I got in the seventies, published 
in the eighties (in obscure journals or proceedings though) and 
eventually defended as a PhD thesis in France in 1998.
This includes many things from the necessity of distinguishing first 
and third person notions, the first person comp indeterminacy, the comp 
immortality and its "theoretical confirmation" through the quantum 
suicide and quantum immortality, but mainly all this can be sum up into 
the "reversal result". This is the result that IF we assume the 
computationalist hypothesis in the cognitive science then the physical 
science cannot be fundamental and are derivable from the "laws of 
mind". With the comp hyp. the laws of mind can be taken as the laws of 
computation and computability, although a precise formulation would 
lead, well, to our current naming issue. The reduction of physics 
appears to be both epistemological and ontological. That means that not 
only physics will appear to be a sub-branch of computer science, but 
that "Matter" is secondary to "Mind". All this in a very precise sense. 
So precise that the proof I gave is really constructive: it shows how 
to derive physics from computer science, and the whole technical parts 
of my thesis (the one which rely on the G-G* logics) consists in the 
beginning of such a derivation.
And then this entails that the comp hyp. (actually even a much weaker 
hyp.) is empirically testable: just compare the physics extracted from 
comp and the physics extracted from the usual observation/theory back 
and forth. And until now I got only confirmation (and not refutation) 
of comp because I can already shows that comp entails that the logic of 
the observable is quite  a quantum logic.
The proof of the reversal is mainly given by the Universal Dovetailer 
Argument together with either some Occam Razor (the easiest way) or the 
Movie-Graph Argument (or the latter Maudlin's Olympia).
Of course you are not asked to take for granted any of those results. 
You can either study the UDA (which you have perhaps already done on 
the list), or you can, just for the sake of the present discussion, 
keep the result in mind. I would withdraw anything I say in case 
someone would found an error in the argument.


Now why "theology"?
My answer in a nutshell: because that is the most correct wording, and 
then I tend to assume, perhaps with a big amount of naïveté, that it is 
always best to use the (most) correct wording. But I know you and 
others tend to disagree with this. So before I comment your post, let 
me explain why I do think "theology" is the correct wording. Note that 
I have use it in my preliminary long version of my PhD thesis 
"Conscience & Mécanisme" where I motivate directly the field of modal 
logic through "theology", seen as a theory of all possible accessible 
state of mind/consciousness. Those who knows the French or who want to 
see the drawings can download that pdf-chapter from my web page:

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/bxlthesis/Volume1CC/4z1_2sansp.pdf
I have been asked by the French not to use that word, and to use the 
word  "psychology" instead. There are many reasons I would like to use 
again the theological vocabulary for the writing of an English "long 
version" of the thesis, if only because the psychological wording seems 
to me less correct (or more faulty).
Let me enumerate and briefly describe the reason why "theology" seems 
suitable:


1) The main one is just to recall the admittedly subtle nature of the 
comp hyp. It is scientific in the sense of being falsifiable (cf result 
descibed above), and religious (because there is a sort of promise of 
"hell" in case you decide to take it for granted).


2) Then there is the one mentioned by George Levy: since the beginning 
we are talking about the soul, and comp can be sum up into the slogan: 
I can put my soul on a disc.


3) The notion of first person has as many thing in common with the 
notion of soul than the notion of soul is different from one theologian 
to another (so to distinguish "soul" from first-person *is* falling 
into the 1004-fallacy.


4) Comp-immortality and quantum-immortality. The "immortality" notion 
is traditionally put in the theological discourses. We talk about this 
since the beginning.


5) I have already criticise Tegmark for his naïve notion of *all math*. 
The first mathematician who has try to get a mathematical view

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-11 Thread Benjamin Udell

Bruno, list,

Well, on the basis of that which you say below (much of which I unfortunately 
only vaguely understand), where you don't focus it all decidedly on the 
particular issues of faith and belief, it actually does now sound more like 
some sort of theology. It has various elements of theology in the broader or 
more comprehensive sense. The thing that it seems to be missing is gods or God. 
Considered as theology, it seems like a wheel sorely missing its hub. At this 
point, in terms of descriptive accuracy, this hublessness seems the hub of the 
matter. So it sounds like a kind of psycho-cosmology, or -- well, not a 
psychophysics, but, in order to suggest your computationalist primacy of the 
soul -- a physiopsychics (in English, if the adjective is "physicopsychical," 
it's a little less suggestive of paranormalism, which is strongly associated 
nowadays with the adjective "psychic.")

(C.S. Peirce held that matter is "congealed mind." Though he thought that space 
would turn out to be curved, he was pre-Einstein and saw matter as a kind of 
spentness and barrenness rather than as a tight lockup of energy.)

Your theory may be empirically refutable but, if it survives such tests, what 
is there to support its affirmation? Is derivability of physical laws from 
"laws of mind" really enough? An information theorist, John Collier, said at 
the peirce email forum "peirce-l" that he had managed to derive each two among 
logic, information theory, and probability theory, from the third remaining, 
though I don't know whether he ever published these derivations. Have you shown 
that your "laws of mind" cannot be derived from physics in a way that shows 
that the nonderivability is not merely a result of our insufficent knowledge of 
physical law? You may also encounter some flak on your conception of mind. 

For what it's worth, for my part, I would hold that a key factor in 
intelligence, at least, which learns and grows, is an evolvability factor, a 
kind of sufficient un-boundness to its "codes" and its methods and systems of 
interpretation, in order to be able to test those codes, methods, systems and 
to do so not only by trial and error but more sophisticated kinds of learning 
and testing, such that memory and active recollection take on particular 
importance. Do your laws of mind take evolvability into account? Maybe they 
don't need to, though, depending on what you mean by "mind." I tend to think 
that the mind must involve the retention and evolvability factor in some 
radical way, but it's quite vague to me how that would work. Maybe there are 
things which could fairly be called "mind" though I would never have thought of 
them that way.

If I understood your theory I might also try to challenge the idea that the 
soul is both ontologically AND epistemologically primary. Actually I wouldn't 
use, for my views, the term "primary" in a strong foundationalist sense, I just 
mean that, for various reasons, I regard the (sequential) order of knowledge to 
be the opposite of the (sequential) order of being. Of course, in logic, some 
oppositions seems to reverse themselves across changes of level, so who knows, 
I'm not totally convinced about my own views either.

Best, Ben Udell


- Original Message - 
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: 
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2006 10:38 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue


Hi Benjamin, List,


I will comment your long post, taking into account some posts from its 
sequel (to avoid repetition).
But I will try to make a sort of synthesis so that people will be able 
to recast the present thread, concerned with the "theology"-naming 
issue, and the more general goal of the list which consists globally in 
the search of a TOE (Theory of Everything) and more particularly 
consists (at our present stage) to find a measure on the computational 
histories.
For this I need to summarise my own contribution in the list, which 
consists mainly in explaining results I got in the seventies, published 
in the eighties (in obscure journals or proceedings though) and 
eventually defended as a PhD thesis in France in 1998.
This includes many things from the necessity of distinguishing first 
and third person notions, the first person comp indeterminacy, the comp 
immortality and its "theoretical confirmation" through the quantum 
suicide and quantum immortality, but mainly all this can be sum up into 
the "reversal result". This is the result that IF we assume the 
computationalist hypothesis in the cognitive science then the physical 
science cannot be fundamental and are derivable from the "laws of 
mind". With the comp hyp. the laws of mind can be taken as the laws of 
computation an

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-12 Thread Bruno Marchal



Le 11-janv.-06, à 17:57, Benjamin Udell a écrit :



Bruno, list,

Well, on the basis of that which you say below (much of which I 
unfortunately only vaguely understand), where you don't focus it all 
decidedly on the particular issues of faith and belief, it actually 
does now sound more like some sort of theology. It has various 
elements of theology in the broader or more comprehensive sense.




Thanks for telling. Note that it is all normal you only vaguely 
understand my last post, because it is a very concise summary.






The thing that it seems to be missing is gods or God. Considered as 
theology, it seems like a wheel sorely missing its hub.



The neoplatonician use often the term "God" for "ultimate explanation", 
and also use often (but it is an idiosyncrasies) the names of the greek 
Gods for concept (EROS = love, THANATOS = death, etc.). Strictly 
speaking, it has nothing to do with the judeo-christian notion of God.
Still, I like to define axiomatically God by something so big that it 
escapes any attempt to define it, except perhaps in some negative way. 
In that sense I could argue that the "God" of comp theology can be 
identified either with either the "ultimate explanation", the "root of 
everything" or even with the unnameable SELF which caracterizes the 
comp first person.
Perhaps the chapter of "God" will be a necessary blank page in comp 
treatise.
Now, I think that "GOD" as a term has much more heavy connotation than 
theology, but I am probably underestimating the stealing of "rational 
theology" by the political power (this happened sometimes after 
Plotinus death).





At this point, in terms of descriptive accuracy, this hublessness 
seems the hub of the matter. So it sounds like a kind of 
psycho-cosmology, or -- well, not a psychophysics, but, in order to 
suggest your computationalist primacy of the soul -- a physiopsychics 
(in English, if the adjective is "physicopsychical," it's a little 
less suggestive of paranormalism, which is strongly associated 
nowadays with the adjective "psychic.")


(C.S. Peirce held that matter is "congealed mind." Though he thought 
that space would turn out to be curved, he was pre-Einstein and saw 
matter as a kind of spentness and barrenness rather than as a tight 
lockup of energy.)


Your theory may be empirically refutable but, if it survives such 
tests, what is there to support its affirmation?



The UDA+MOVIEgraph argument. I will simply say UDA. (Universal 
Dovetailer Argument).






 Is derivability of physical laws from "laws of mind" really enough?



Would be nice, but the UDA shows there is no choice. Please understand 
that the UDA argument explains only but completely that if the comp 
hyp. is true then necessarily matter emerges from mind. Because this 
sounds so weird I have begin a derivation, at first just in order to 
illustrate what that could mean.




An information theorist, John Collier, said at the peirce email forum 
"peirce-l" that he had managed to derive each two among logic, 
information theory, and probability theory, from the third remaining, 
though I don't know whether he ever published these derivations.



Could be interesting.



Have you shown that your "laws of mind" cannot be derived from physics 
in a way that shows that the nonderivability is not merely a result of 
our insufficent knowledge of physical law? You may also encounter some 
flak on your conception of mind.



The problem is that physics does never really address the mind-body 
problem, with some exception like Mario Bunge, but he dismisses it and 
explain it "away" in a manner similar to Dennett. Many people have try 
and generally the honest one (like Dennett) admit their failure. It 
*is* a tricky problem. my original goal of my research (and thesis) was 
*just* to explain that the mind body problem was not yet solved. That 
is how and why I eventually translate it into a measure (on 
computational histories) problem, quite in line with discussion on this 
list.






For what it's worth, for my part, I would hold that a key factor in 
intelligence, at least, which learns and grows, is an evolvability 
factor, a kind of sufficient un-boundness to its "codes" and its 
methods and systems of interpretation, in order to be able to test 
those codes, methods, systems and to do so not only by trial and error 
but more sophisticated kinds of learning and testing, such that memory 
and active recollection take on particular importance.



I do agree with you here.




Do your laws of mind take evolvability into account? Maybe they don't 
need to, though, depending on what you mean by "mind." I tend to think 
that the mind must involve the retention and evolvability factor in 
some radical way, but it's quite vague to me how that would work. 
Maybe there are things which could fairly be called "mind" though I 
would never have thought of them that way.



As far as you don't (re)introduce substances, there is a possibility of 
stayin

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Bruno, list,

It occurred to me that I ought not merely to "wing it" on the meaning of 
"theology" as a word. There are various places online to look it up, but this 
is an interesting one and, anyway, some may find this to be an introduction to 
a good resource.

>From the Century Dictionary http://www.global-language.com/century/ 
(About the really rather useful Century Dictionary: 
http://www.leoyan.com/century-dictionary.com/why.php )

(Requires installing software) Century Dictionary, Vol. VIII, Page 6274, 
Theologus to Theorbo (DjVu)
http://www.leoyan.com/century-dictionary.com/08/index08.djvu?djvuopts&page=66 ,
(DjVu Highlighted), (Java) (JPEG)

theology (the¯-ol' o¯-ji), n. [< ME. theologie, < OF. theologie, F. théologie = 
Pr. teologia = Sp. teología = Pg. theologia = It. teologia = D. G. theologie = 
Sw. Dan. teologi, < LL. theologia, < Gr. theología, a speaking concerning God, 
< theológos, speaking of God (see theologue), < theós, god, + légein, speak.] 
The science concerned with ascertaining, classifying, and systematizing all 
attainable truth concerning God and his relation to the universe; the science 
of religion; religious truth scientifically stated. 
The ancient Greeks used the word to designate the history of their gods; early 
Christian writers applied it to the doctrine of the nature of God; Peter 
Abelard, ill the twelfth century, first began to employ it to denote scientific 
instruction concerning God and the divine life. Theology differs from religion 
as the science of any subject differs from the subject matter itself. Religion 
in the broadest sense is a life of right affections and right conduct toward 
God; theology is a scientific knowledge of God and of the life which reverence 
and allegiance toward him require. Theology is divided, in reference to the 
sources whence the knowledge is derived, into natural theology, which treats of 
God and divine things in so far as their nature is disclosed through human 
consciousness, through the material creation, and through the moral order 
discernible in the course of history apart from specific revelation, and 
revealed theology, which treats of the same subject-matter as mad!
 e known in the scriptures of the 0ld and the New Testament. The former is 
theistic merely; the latter is Christian, and includes the doctrine of 
salvation by Christ, and of future rewards and punishments. In reference to the 
ends sought and the methods of treatment, theology is again divided into 
theoretical theology, which treats of the doctrines and principles of the 
divine life for the purpose of scientific and philosophical accuracy, and 
practical theology, which treats of the duties of the divine life for immediate 
practical ends. Theology is further divided, according to subject-matter and 
methods, into various branches, of which the principal are given below.
  Ac Theologie hath tened me ten score tymes, 
 The more I muse there-inne the mistier it seemeth. 
 Piers Plowman (B), x. 180. 
  Theology, what is it but the science of things divine? 
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, iii. 8. 
  Theology, properly and directly, deals with notional apprehension; religion 
with imaginative. 
 J. H. Newman, Gram. of Assent, p. 115. 
--Ascetical theology. See ascetical.
--Biblical theology, that branch of theology which has for its object to set 
forth the knowledge of God and the divine life as gathered from a large study 
of the Bible, as opposed to a merely minute study of particular texts on the 
one hand, and to a mere use of philosophical methods on the other.
--Dogmatic theology, that department of theology which has for its object a 
connected and scientific statement of theology as a complete and harmonious 
science as authoritatively held and taught by the church.
--Exegetical theology. See exegetical.
--Federal theology, a system of theology based upon the idea of two covenants 
between God and man--the covenant of nature, or of works, before the fall, by 
which eternal life was promised to man on condition of his perfect obedience to 
the moral law, and the covenant of grace, after the fall, by which salvation 
and eternal life are promised to man by the free grace of God. Kloppenburg, 
professor of theology at Franeker in the Netherlands (died 1652), originated 
the system, and it was perfected (1648) by John Koch (Cocceius), successor of 
Kloppenburg in the same chair. See Cocceian. 
--Fundamental theology, that branch of systematic theology which vindicates 
man's knowledge of God by the investigation of its grounds and sources in 
general, and of the trustworthiness of the Christian revelation in particular, 
and which therefore includes both natural theology and the evidences of 
Christianity.
--Genevan theology. See Genevan.
--Historical theology, the science of the history and growth of Christian 
doctrines.
--Homiletic theology. Same as homiletics.
--Liberal theology. See liberal Christianity, under liberal

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

upernatural," "metaphysics" would probably be the right word. "Metaphysics" 
has been used by many English-language philosophers as a pejorative, but it 
does not straightforwardly mean "supernatural studies" in English. Anyway, from 
what I understand, it's not used pejoratively as often as it used to be. It 
certainly would be less asking-for-trouble than "theology." On the other hand, 
if you have a certain appetite for trouble, then maybe "theology" is the way to 
go, assuming that you don't simply thereby drive away your desired audience. 
Also, some kinds of fame are always unexpected and often regretted. You don't 
want to win the wrong kind of lottery. Some popular columnist or pundit happens 
upon your theory, vituperates semi-literately against it for thousands or 
millions to read, and suddenly you're a Bad Guy to thousands or millions who 
know nothing about you. In more general form, it's one of the !
 oldest and most common stories: You'll be on unfamiliar turf and your habits 
and instincts on unfamiliar turf may end up mis-serving you. Anyway, the 
bad-celebrity problem can happen even within academe.

[Bruno]> the UDA argument explains only but completely that if the comp 
hyp. is true then necessarily matter emerges from mind. Because this 
sounds so weird I have begin a derivation, at first just in order to 
illustrate what that could mean.

It would be interesting to see such a clarification of the Universal Dovetailer 
Argument.

[Bruno]> The problem is that physics does never really address the mind-body 
problem 

Yes, but I was referring to the fact that, even aside from that issue, it seems 
fairly presumable that physical science is incomplete. Can you show that the 
UDA shows that the physical arises from the mental, no matter how incomplete 
our knowledge of physical principles and laws? Or can you at least show that 
the UDA shows that the physical arises from the mental under, let's say, "most" 
families of physical theories which we may come to hold?

[Bruno]> Well I already distinguish the mind from the soul. The mind is a very 
general notion comprehending all imaterial notion from the number PI to 
the game of bridge and anything not reasonnablu described by pieces of 
Stuff (even nations and person belongs to "mind"). 

Well, that clarifies. I've read Rucker's book _Mind Tools: The Five Levels of 
Mathematical Reality_, though not his book "Infinity and the Mind" which you 
mention further on. But I get the idea. 

A question arises for me here and elsewhere. To what extent do you hold with 
Tegmark's Four-Level Multiverse view and to what extent is your theory 
logically linked to it? I ask this because, for instance, in such a Four-Level 
world, I'd expect not just two salient views (bird's eye & frog's eye, 
3rd-person & 1st-person, etc.), but four. I'd expect not just mind-matter 
dichotomies but 4-chotomies. And so on. In some cases, one may argue that one 
distinction across the 4-chotomy is more important than the other, say in the 
case of inference, where arguably the truth-perservative versus 
truth-nonpreservative is a more important distinction, more like a chasm, than 
is the distinction between falsity-preservative and falsity-nonpreservative, 
but I'd still want to know about that the four-way distinction because its 
relevance should not be presumptively precluded, especially in a Tegmarkian 
four-level Multiverse. For me there it's partly a matter of some non-maximal 
degree of sur!
 eness on my part, and partly a matter of my motivation; I take an interest in 
patterns of four-way logical distinctions, though I do wander from that 
interest in an interesting place like this.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: 
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 10:52 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 11-janv.-06, à 17:57, Benjamin Udell a écrit :


> Bruno, list,
>
> Well, on the basis of that which you say below (much of which I 
> unfortunately only vaguely understand), where you don't focus it all 
> decidedly on the particular issues of faith and belief, it actually 
> does now sound more like some sort of theology. It has various 
> elements of theology in the broader or more comprehensive sense.

Thanks for telling. Note that it is all normal you only vaguely 
understand my last post, because it is a very concise summary.

> The thing that it seems to be missing is gods or God. Considered as 
> theology, it seems like a wheel sorely missing its hub.

The neoplatonician use often the term "God" for "ultimate explanation", 
and also use often (but it is an idiosyncrasies) the names o

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-12 Thread Russell Standish

Tegmark's 4 level "Multiverse" (actually the Multiverse is only one of
the levels) does not really have viewpoints at each level.

In my book, which largely follows the tradition of this list, there is
3 viewpoints identified: 1st person, 1st person plural and 3rd person.

The 3rd person corresponds to the bird viewpoint of the Multiverse, or
Tegmark Level 3 'verse. Calling it a viewpoint is a stretch of the
language since necessarily observers must be embedded in the Multiverse.

Both of the 1st person viewpoints correspond to the frog viewpoint,
the difference being the 1st person plural is an objective viewpoint -
all things in the 1pp vpt will be agreed upon by 2 or more observers,
whereas the 1p vpt is subjective, containing items such as quantum
immortality that are _necessarily_ subjective.

I have tried to identify 1pp with G and 1p with G*, but I'm really
unsure that the analogy is sound.

Cheers

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 01:18:21PM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> A question arises for me here and elsewhere. To what extent do you hold with 
> Tegmark's Four-Level Multiverse view and to what extent is your theory 
> logically linked to it? I ask this because, for instance, in such a 
> Four-Level world, I'd expect not just two salient views (bird's eye & frog's 
> eye, 3rd-person & 1st-person, etc.), but four. I'd expect not just 
> mind-matter dichotomies but 4-chotomies. And so on. In some cases, one may 
> argue that one distinction across the 4-chotomy is more important than the 
> other, say in the case of inference, where arguably the truth-perservative 
> versus truth-nonpreservative is a more important distinction, more like a 
> chasm, than is the distinction between falsity-preservative and 
> falsity-nonpreservative, but I'd still want to know about that the four-way 
> distinction because its relevance should not be presumptively precluded, 
> especially in a Tegmarkian four-level Multiverse. For me there it's partly a 
> matter of some non-maximal degree of sur!
>  eness on my part, and partly a matter of my motivation; I take an interest 
> in patterns of four-way logical distinctions, though I do wander from that 
> interest in an interesting place like this.
> 
> Best, Ben Udell
> 

-- 
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.

A/Prof Russell Standish  Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Russell, list,

> Tegmark's 4 level "Multiverse" (actually the Multiverse is only one of the 
> levels) does not really have viewpoints at each level.
> In my book, which largely follows the tradition of this list, there is 3 
> viewpoints identified: 1st person, 1st person plural and 3rd person.
> The 3rd person corresponds to the bird viewpoint of the Multiverse, or 
> Tegmark Level 3 'verse. Calling it a viewpoint is a stretch of the language 
> since necessarily observers must be embedded in the Multiverse.

Where does Tegmark say that the Multiverse is only one of the levels? Which one?

What is meant by "viewpoint"? Tegmark's elementary description of the four 
levels sounds like the outline of four viewpoints, with "frog" and "bird" 
marking the extremes of a four-step set of gradations. Level IV is associated 
with "pure" maths. Level III is associated with alternatives among cases, which 
marks it as associated with maths of logic, information, probability, etc., 
despite what Tegmark says about logic's being the most general and underlying 
thing in maths. Level III is more "abstract" than Level II and actualizes 
alternate outcomes across quantum branchings, while Level II actualizes 
alternate outcomes in various times and places along a single branch, so that 
the two levels come out the same in their features. Level II seems associable 
with statistical theory, some areas of information theory, and some other 
fields deal in a general way with gathering data from various actual places and 
times and drawing ampliatively-inductive conclusions from parts, samples!
 , etc., to totalities. Level I, with its possibly idiosyncratic constants, 
initial conditions, historical dependencies, seems associable with physical, 
chemical, life sciences and human & social studies. So those seem four 
viewpoints with distinctive content and associations, though not the kind of 
content which the idea of viewpoint seems to have received on the everything 
list, which is decidedly not to say that there's anything wrong with the kind 
of content given on the everything list to the idea of viewpoint.

Is it Tegmark's view, that the bird's eye view is associated particularly with 
Level III, or does it depend on ideas as developed on the everything list? Why 
wouldn't a view be associated with Level IV as well? (I thought that, at least 
in Tegmark's view, the bird's eye view _was_ Level IV).

> Both of the 1st person viewpoints correspond to the frog viewpoint, the 
> difference being the 1st person plural is an objective viewpoint - all things 
> in the 1pp vpt will be agreed upon by 2 or more observers, whereas the 1p vpt 
> is subjective, containing items such as quantum immortality that are 
> _necessarily_ subjective.

The idea of quantum immortality doesn't seem like something that you could call 
an "experience." If you found yourself alive even after what seemed an unlikely 
long period of time, after a series of periodic extraordinary escapes, any 
other observers would agree that you're still alive -- in other words, you'd 
still be alive from the 1pp vpt. Only in the case where _no records_ remain of 
your much earlier existence, nothing but your personal memory of it, would 
quantum immortality seem possibly like an experience, an "especially" 
subjective one. The quantum immortality idea seems like, not an experience, but 
an idea requiring one's intellectually adopting some sort of 3rd-person view.

Nevertheless, I've liked the idea of distinguishing an inclusive 1st-&-2nd 
person "we," both addressor and addressee, from an exclusive 1st person 
addressor-only, so I'm glad to see it pop up in this context.

Best, Ben Udell

> I have tried to identify 1pp with G and 1p with G*, but I'm really unsure 
> that the analogy is sound.
> Cheers

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 01:18:21PM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> A question arises for me here and elsewhere. To what extent do you hold with 
> Tegmark's Four-Level Multiverse view and to what extent is your theory 
> logically linked to it? I ask this because, for instance, in such a 
> Four-Level world, I'd expect not just two salient views (bird's eye & frog's 
> eye, 3rd-person & 1st-person, etc.), but four. I'd expect not just 
> mind-matter dichotomies but 4-chotomies. And so on. In some cases, one may 
> argue that one distinction across the 4-chotomy is more important than the 
> other, say in the case of inference, where arguably the truth-perservative 
> versus truth-nonpreservative is a more important distinction, more like a 
> chasm, than is the distinction between falsity-preservative and 
> falsity-nonpreservative, but I'd still want to know about that the four-way 
> distinction because its relevance should not be presumptively precluded, 
> especially in a Tegmarkian four-level Multiverse. For me there it's partly a 
> matter of some non-maximal degree of s!
 ur!
>  eness on my part, and partly a matter of my motivation; I take an interest 
> in p

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-12 Thread Stathis Papaioannou


Danny Mayes writes:

I haven't participated in the list in a while, but I try to keep up with 
the discussion here and there as time permits.  I personally was raised a 
fundamentalist Baptist, but lost most of my interest in that religion when 
I was taught at 9 years old that all the little kids in Africa that are 
never told about Jesus Christ go to Hell.  Even at 9, I knew that wasn't 
something I was going to be buying.  Who wants to believe in a God that 
cruel?  Even without the problematic cruel creator, I have always been to 
oriented toward logic and proof to just accept stuff on faith.


I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a 
philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like something to be 
true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether it is in fact true. I 
don't like what happened in Germany under the Nazis, but that doesn't mean I 
should believe the Nazis did not exist, so why should my revulsion at the 
thought of infidels burning in Hell lead me to believe that God and Hell do 
not exist? It might make me reluctant to worship such a God, but that is not 
the same as believing he does not exist.


I started redeveloping religious belief, ironically, when I picked up a 
book on quantum physics 6 or so years ago.  I was at a legal seminar and 
needed something to read during the boring  sessions, and the author ran 
through a number of experiments of QM and concluded that the MWI was the 
most logical interpretation of these experiments.  I had read all the Sci 
Fi strories of alternate realities and whatnot, but this was my first 
exposure to the concept that reality is created in such a way to allow all 
things to exist (that also actually appeared to be supported by some real 
science).  I still remember my excitement in  contemplating this 
explanation, in that it seems to explain so many questions.


I guess I could go into a long explanation as to why I now believe 
intelligence plays a key role in understanding the nature of our reality 
and how it came to be, but I probably wouldn't be able to say much that 
almost anyone on this board has not already heard.  For me it boils down to 
this: I see absolutely no reason to believe our experiences are not 
emulable.  I strongly suspect it is possible to create a quantum computer.  
I strongly suspect technology will continue to evolve and computer 
processing will get more and more powerful.  Finally, even if we are 
somehow precluded from creating new universes in the future (i.e. universes 
implented on the same level of reality as our universe, virtual universes 
are obviously possible), the one we are in will last for trillions of 
years.  Final conclusion?  Well, I'll let you do the math...


But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means believing 
something in the absence of sufficient evidence.


Stathis Papaioannou

_
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's FREE! 
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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-12 Thread Graeme Mcquilkin


Hi ,

Can someone please tell me how I unsubscrive from this mailing list >?

Thanks

Graeme


Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


Danny Mayes writes:

I haven't participated in the list in a while, but I try to keep up 
with the discussion here and there as time permits.  I personally was 
raised a fundamentalist Baptist, but lost most of my interest in that 
religion when I was taught at 9 years old that all the little kids in 
Africa that are never told about Jesus Christ go to Hell.  Even at 9, 
I knew that wasn't something I was going to be buying.  Who wants to 
believe in a God that cruel?  Even without the problematic cruel 
creator, I have always been to oriented toward logic and proof to 
just accept stuff on faith.



I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a 
philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like something 
to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether it is in fact 
true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the Nazis, but that 
doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not exist, so why should 
my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning in Hell lead me to 
believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might make me reluctant to 
worship such a God, but that is not the same as believing he does not 
exist.


I started redeveloping religious belief, ironically, when I picked up 
a book on quantum physics 6 or so years ago.  I was at a legal 
seminar and needed something to read during the boring  sessions, and 
the author ran through a number of experiments of QM and concluded 
that the MWI was the most logical interpretation of these 
experiments.  I had read all the Sci Fi strories of alternate 
realities and whatnot, but this was my first exposure to the concept 
that reality is created in such a way to allow all things to exist 
(that also actually appeared to be supported by some real science).  
I still remember my excitement in  contemplating this explanation, in 
that it seems to explain so many questions.


I guess I could go into a long explanation as to why I now believe 
intelligence plays a key role in understanding the nature of our 
reality and how it came to be, but I probably wouldn't be able to say 
much that almost anyone on this board has not already heard.  For me 
it boils down to this: I see absolutely no reason to believe our 
experiences are not emulable.  I strongly suspect it is possible to 
create a quantum computer.  I strongly suspect technology will 
continue to evolve and computer processing will get more and more 
powerful.  Finally, even if we are somehow precluded from creating 
new universes in the future (i.e. universes implented on the same 
level of reality as our universe, virtual universes are obviously 
possible), the one we are in will last for trillions of years.  Final 
conclusion?  Well, I'll let you do the math...



But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means 
believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence.


Stathis Papaioannou

_
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's 
FREE! http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-12 Thread Russell Standish

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 11:12:13PM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> Russell, list,
> 
> > Tegmark's 4 level "Multiverse" (actually the Multiverse is only one of the 
> > levels) does not really have viewpoints at each level.
> > In my book, which largely follows the tradition of this list, there is 3 
> > viewpoints identified: 1st person, 1st person plural and 3rd person.
> > The 3rd person corresponds to the bird viewpoint of the Multiverse, or 
> > Tegmark Level 3 'verse. Calling it a viewpoint is a stretch of the language 
> > since necessarily observers must be embedded in the Multiverse.
> 
> Where does Tegmark say that the Multiverse is only one of the levels? Which 
> one?

"Multiverse" was coined by David Deutsch to refer to the many worlds
of MWI. This corresponds to Tegmark's level 3 parallel universe. I
follow this terminology, as do many others on this list. We also tend
to use the terms "Plenitude" or "Platonia" to refer to his Level 4
parallel universe. The other levels have not been "christened" so to speak.

Tegmark uses multiverse to refer to any type of parallel universe -
which I think contradicts usual usage.

> 
> What is meant by "viewpoint"? Tegmark's elementary description of the four 
> levels sounds like the outline of four viewpoints, with "frog" and "bird" 
> marking the extremes of a four-step set of gradations. Level IV is associated 
> with "pure" maths. Level III is associated with alternatives among cases, 
> which marks it as associated with maths of logic, information, probability, 
> etc., despite what Tegmark says about logic's being the most general and 
> underlying thing in maths. Level III is more "abstract" than Level II and 
> actualizes alternate outcomes across quantum branchings, while Level II 
> actualizes alternate outcomes in various times and places along a single 
> branch, so that the two levels come out the same in their features. Level II 
> seems associable with statistical theory, some areas of information theory, 
> and some other fields deal in a general way with gathering data from various 
> actual places and times and drawing ampliatively-inductive conclusions from 
> parts, samples, etc., to totalities. Level I, with its possibly idiosyncratic 
> constants, initial conditions, historical dependencies, seems associable with 
> physical, chemical, life sciences and human & social studies. So those seem 
> four viewpoints with distinctive content and associations, though not the 
> kind of content which the idea of viewpoint seems to have received on the 
> everything list, which is decidedly not to say that there's anything wrong 
> with the kind of content given on the everything list to the idea of 
> viewpoint.
> 
> Is it Tegmark's view, that the bird's eye view is associated particularly 
> with Level III, or does it depend on ideas as developed on the everything 
> list? Why wouldn't a view be associated with Level IV as well? (I thought 
> that, at least in Tegmark's view, the bird's eye view _was_ Level IV).
> 

The term bird/frog viewpoint is Tegmark's, which he used in his 1998
paper. I can well imagine applying to his 2003 multilevel scheme.

The association of 3rd person viewpoint (not bird viewpoint) with the
Multiverse is mine, and is justified on the basis that all observers
must be embedded in quantum mechanical many worlds structure. This
result is derived by assuming a level 4 plenitude, and is given in my
2004 paper "Why Occams Razor". Bruno's work also seems to point to a
similar conclusion.

The particular Plenitude I assume (ensemble of all bitstrings) is
actually a completely uninteresting place to have a view of (it has
precisely zero informational complexity).

I do not see any particular arguments suggesting that observers must
be embedded in a universe described by string theory (which would move
the 3rd person viewpoint to level 2) or embedded in just this universe
(moved to level 1), but I would not rule it out a priori.

> > Both of the 1st person viewpoints correspond to the frog viewpoint, the 
> > difference being the 1st person plural is an objective viewpoint - all 
> > things in the 1pp vpt will be agreed upon by 2 or more observers, whereas 
> > the 1p vpt is subjective, containing items such as quantum immortality that 
> > are _necessarily_ subjective.
> 
> The idea of quantum immortality doesn't seem like something that you could 
> call an "experience." If you found yourself alive even after what seemed an 
> unlikely long period of time, after a series of periodic extraordinary 
> escapes, any other observers would agree that you're still alive -- in other 
> words, you'd still be alive from the 1pp vpt. Only in the case where _no 
> records_ remain of your much earlier existence, nothing but your personal 
> memory of it, would quantum immortality seem possibly like an experience, an 
> "especially" subjective one. The quantum immortality idea seems like, not an 
> experience, but an idea requiring one's i

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Thanks. The expression rational theology is quite nice and I have been  
tempted to use it but it is already used by Mormons in a too much a  
priori "christian" frame.

http://www.lds-mormon.com/widtsoe.shtml

But if a adjective should be added to "theology" I think I would use  
"lobian" perhaps. But not in a title. Machine theology is better,  
although superficially (pregodelian) contradictory.


Bruno



Le 12-janv.-06, à 20:22, Benjamin Udell a écrit :


Bruno, list,

It occurred to me that I ought not merely to "wing it" on the meaning  
of "theology" as a word. There are various places online to look it  
up, but this is an interesting one and, anyway, some may find this to  
be an introduction to a good resource.



From the Century Dictionary http://www.global-language.com/century/
(About the really rather useful Century Dictionary:  
http://www.leoyan.com/century-dictionary.com/why.php )


(Requires installing software) Century Dictionary, Vol. VIII, Page  
6274, Theologus to Theorbo (DjVu)
http://www.leoyan.com/century-dictionary.com/08/index08.djvu? 
djvuopts&page=66 ,

(DjVu Highlighted), (Java) (JPEG)

theology (the¯-ol' o¯-ji), n. [< ME. theologie, < OF. theologie, F.  
théologie = Pr. teologia = Sp. teología = Pg. theologia = It. teologia  
= D. G. theologie = Sw. Dan. teologi, < LL. theologia, < Gr.  
theología, a speaking concerning God, < theológos, speaking of God  
(see theologue), < theós, god, + légein, speak.] The science concerned  
with ascertaining, classifying, and systematizing all attainable truth  
concerning God and his relation to the universe; the science of  
religion; religious truth scientifically stated.
The ancient Greeks used the word to designate the history of their  
gods; early Christian writers applied it to the doctrine of the nature  
of God; Peter Abelard, ill the twelfth century, first began to employ  
it to denote scientific instruction concerning God and the divine  
life. Theology differs from religion as the science of any subject  
differs from the subject matter itself. Religion in the broadest sense  
is a life of right affections and right conduct toward God; theology  
is a scientific knowledge of God and of the life which reverence and  
allegiance toward him require. Theology is divided, in reference to  
the sources whence the knowledge is derived, into natural theology,  
which treats of God and divine things in so far as their nature is  
disclosed through human consciousness, through the material creation,  
and through the moral order discernible in the course of history apart  
from specific revelation, and revealed theology, which treats of the  
same subject-matter as mad!
 e known in the scriptures of the 0ld and the New Testament. The  
former is theistic merely; the latter is Christian, and includes the  
doctrine of salvation by Christ, and of future rewards and  
punishments. In reference to the ends sought and the methods of  
treatment, theology is again divided into theoretical theology, which  
treats of the doctrines and principles of the divine life for the  
purpose of scientific and philosophical accuracy, and practical  
theology, which treats of the duties of the divine life for immediate  
practical ends. Theology is further divided, according to  
subject-matter and methods, into various branches, of which the  
principal are given below.

  Ac Theologie hath tened me ten score tymes,
 The more I muse there-inne the mistier it seemeth.
 Piers Plowman (B), x. 180.
  Theology, what is it but the science of things divine?
 Hooker, Eccles. Polity, iii. 8.
  Theology, properly and directly, deals with notional apprehension;  
religion with imaginative.

 J. H. Newman, Gram. of Assent, p. 115.
--Ascetical theology. See ascetical.
--Biblical theology, that branch of theology which has for its object  
to set forth the knowledge of God and the divine life as gathered from  
a large study of the Bible, as opposed to a merely minute study of  
particular texts on the one hand, and to a mere use of philosophical  
methods on the other.
--Dogmatic theology, that department of theology which has for its  
object a connected and scientific statement of theology as a complete  
and harmonious science as authoritatively held and taught by the  
church.

--Exegetical theology. See exegetical.
--Federal theology, a system of theology based upon the idea of two  
covenants between God and man--the covenant of nature, or of works,  
before the fall, by which eternal life was promised to man on  
condition of his perfect obedience to the moral law, and the covenant  
of grace, after the fall, by which salvation and eternal life are  
promised to man by the free grace of God. Kloppenburg, professor of  
theology at Franeker in the Netherlands (died 1652), originated the  
system, and it was perfected (1648) by John Koch (Cocceius), successor  
of Kloppenburg in the same chair. See Cocceian.
--Fundamental th

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 13-janv.-06, à 04:56, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a 
philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like something 
to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether it is in fact 
true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the Nazis, but that 
doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not exist, so why should 
my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning in Hell lead me to 
believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might make me reluctant to 
worship such a God, but that is not the same as believing he does not 
exist.


Totally agree.

But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means 
believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence.


But here the word "evidence" is too large. Imagine two seconds that 
Christian religion is true and you face God after your earthly 
existence. In that case you would have evidence for the existence of 
God. Would it be a reason to stop believing in religion?
At the same time, operationally I do somehow agree with you, but then 
you should accept the idea that many scientist are religious in the 
sense that many scientist believe in the existence of a stuffy or 
substancial primitive physical reality, but obviously there are no 
evidence at all for this. No physicists does even postulate it in 
scientific paper.
(People confuse often the belief in a reality and a belief in a 
physical reality).


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-13 Thread Benjamin Udell

cious. I don't know that you are conscious, but nevertheless
assume it. Conciousness is therefore 1st person, but not 1st person plural.

Observation is often regarded as a kind of experience, where one cognizes 
(especially perceptually) something (the thing seems to impress itself on one's 
cognitive awareness), and one notes it, makes at least mental notice of it, 
especially in a scientific manner. Seeing and noting. Consciousness itself is 
also in a sense an experience, insofar as it involves a cognitive/affective 
subjectedness to things beyond one's entire control. In some way, with the talk 
of observers, I was thinking of experiencers. Perhaps you're taking 
"experience" in the sense of the experience sharable among members of a 
community, such that my personal, unsharable "experience" doesn't count as 
empirical. I sometimes trip over differences in meaning across traditions.

Anyway, how would I know of (or believe in) my quantum immortality except by 
inference from abstractions? What sort of personal, non-sharable knowledge 
would one have of quantum immortality such that the knowledge of it is 
comparable with the knowledge of consciousness? Is it a subjective sense that 
it's somehow possible for oneself not to exist? -- i.e., not a consciousness of 
immortality, but a consciousness of an underlying impossibility of mortality? 
Something like that?

[Ben]>> Nevertheless, I've liked the idea of distinguishing an inclusive 
1st-&-2nd person "we," both addressor and addressee, from an exclusive 1st 
person addressor-only, so I'm glad to see it pop up in this context.
[Russell]> I think we can credit Bruno with this distinction :)

I'll count that credit as established.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Russell Standish" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: 
Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 12:13 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 11:12:13PM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> Russell, list,
> 
> > Tegmark's 4 level "Multiverse" (actually the Multiverse is only one of the 
> > levels) does not really have viewpoints at each level.
> > In my book, which largely follows the tradition of this list, there is 3 
> > viewpoints identified: 1st person, 1st person plural and 3rd person.
> > The 3rd person corresponds to the bird viewpoint of the Multiverse, or 
> > Tegmark Level 3 'verse. Calling it a viewpoint is a stretch of the language 
> > since necessarily observers must be embedded in the Multiverse.
> 
> Where does Tegmark say that the Multiverse is only one of the levels? Which 
> one?

"Multiverse" was coined by David Deutsch to refer to the many worlds
of MWI. This corresponds to Tegmark's level 3 parallel universe. I
follow this terminology, as do many others on this list. We also tend
to use the terms "Plenitude" or "Platonia" to refer to his Level 4
parallel universe. The other levels have not been "christened" so to speak.

Tegmark uses multiverse to refer to any type of parallel universe -
which I think contradicts usual usage.

> What is meant by "viewpoint"? Tegmark's elementary description of the four 
> levels sounds like the outline of four viewpoints, with "frog" and "bird" 
> marking the extremes of a four-step set of gradations. Level IV is associated 
> with "pure" maths. Level III is associated with alternatives among cases, 
> which marks it as associated with maths of logic, information, probability, 
> etc., despite what Tegmark says about logic's being the most general and 
> underlying thing in maths. Level III is more "abstract" than Level II and 
> actualizes alternate outcomes across quantum branchings, while Level II 
> actualizes alternate outcomes in various times and places along a single 
> branch, so that the two levels come out the same in their features. Level II 
> seems associable with statistical theory, some areas of information theory, 
> and some other fields deal in a general way with gathering data from various 
> actual places and times and drawing ampliatively-inductive conclusions from 
> parts, sampl!
 es, etc., to totalities. Level I, with its possibly idiosyncratic constants, 
initial conditions, historical dependencies, seems associable with physical, 
chemical, life sciences and human & social studies. So those seem four 
viewpoints with distinctive content and associations, though not the kind of 
content which the idea of viewpoint seems to have received on the everything 
list, which is decidedly not to say that there's anything wrong with the kind 
of content given on the everything list to the idea of viewpoint.
>

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue



Le 13-janv.-06, à 02:24, Russell Standish a écrit :


I have tried to identify 1pp with G and 1p with G*, but I'm really
unsure that the analogy is sound.



It is tempting to classify the self-reference logics (G, G*) in the 
first person discourses, and I have been stuck in that idea for a 
while.
But it can't be. The godelian provability predicate is definable in 
arithmetic only thanks to the fact that it is just asked to Peano 
Aritmetic (a "famous" lobian or self-referentially correct machine) to 
talk about a third person description of itself, through Godel numbers 
usually. So G is more like the discourse you could do on your 
doppelganger or on your brain, seen in some high level third person 
description. It is a purely scientific (and even purely deductive) 
third person talk a machine can do about itself, except that she did 
already bet on some level of substitution, so that in a sense it is 
just serendipitously correct.


Now if the lobian machine we talk with is sufficiently elementary, like 
Peano Arithmetic, and most probably Zermelo Fraenkel Set Theory, we can 
believe in their consistency (~Bf) and even in their soundness (Bp -> 
p): PA (resp. ZF) does not tell us falsities (~Bf), and PA communicates 
only true sentences of Arithmetic (Bp -> p)(resp. set theory).


Exercise: find a lobian machine which is unsound, but still consistent.
By "exercise" I mean I have not the time to explain, but I want draw 
the attention on that important fact. It is a rather simple consequence 
of the second incompleteness theorem: Dt -> ~BDt.


Amazingly enough perhaps, G* gives still a pure third person discourse. 
Note in passing that I insist on the fact that G and G* gives thrid 
persons discourses in my last three english paper.
G* is a proper extension of G, which is complete, at the propositional 
level, for the description of the true provability and consistency 
sentences. As applied to us, we cannot take it for granted because we 
cannot know our correct level of description, and then, if we are lucky 
enough to bet on the correct level, we still cannot know if comp is 
true; and then, even if comp is true, if we are lobian machines, we 
cannot know we are consistent, still less sound.
And this is actually what G* says. And so G* is an amazing sort of 
"scientific theology" which ask you not to take it as granted in its 
roots. Practically it means theotechnologies are private matters, 
somehow, and it makes obligatory the right of saying no, to the doctor.


All the first persons notion are obtained by variant of the 
Theaetetical  definition of knowledge. This is possible exactly thanks 
to the gap between provability (G) and truth (G*).


Although the following

Bp
Bp & p(pure first person, the knower)
Bp & Dp  (first person plural, betting machines)
Bp & Dp & p

are shown equivalent by G*, and so defined strictly speaking the same 
machine, none of those equivalencies can be shown by G, i.e. the 
machine itself. So, although they define the same machine, from the 
machine stance they defines different logics.
And both G and G* can derive completely (at the propositional level) 
those logics. And of course here too G* knows more(*), so that the 
theaetetical variants are lifted to the corona G* \ G.
That's the beginning of the story, it is the framework for translating 
the UDA thought experiment in the language of the machine, and extract 
the logics of "probability one" on the near 2^aleph_0 
"observer-moments/states/worlds...".


Bruno



(*) with the notable and fundamental exception of the pure first person 
knower.


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-14 Thread Bruno Marchal



Le 13-janv.-06, à 18:51, Brent Meeker a écrit :


Bruno Marchal wrote:

Le 13-janv.-06, à 04:56, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a 
philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like 
something to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether 
it is in fact true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the 
Nazis, but that doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not 
exist, so why should my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning 
in Hell lead me to believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might 
make me reluctant to worship such a God, but that is not the same as 
believing he does not exist.

Totally agree.
But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means 
believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence.
But here the word "evidence" is too large. Imagine two seconds that 
Christian religion is true and you face God after your earthly 
existence. In that case you would have evidence for the existence of 
God. Would it be a reason to stop believing in religion?
At the same time, operationally I do somehow agree with you, but then 
you should accept the idea that many scientist are religious in the 
sense that many scientist believe in the existence of a stuffy or 
substancial primitive physical reality, but obviously there are no 
evidence at all for this.


Surely you don't mean there's no evidence for tables, chairs, atoms, 
etc...? Are you using "primitive" in some special philosophical sense?



You are right. we have evidence for chairs, galaxies, bosons and 
fermions and even anyons, and all that. But we have no evidence that 
this is eventually made up of substances capable of closing the 
"physical worlds". Like Plato guessed it could be the "shadow" or "the 
border" of something bigger. Like the sharable and unsharable part of 
the machine "ignorance" as I hope to show we get into, once we take 
some comp hyp. or weaker seriously enough.







No physicists does even postulate it in scientific paper.


Sure they do - the most commonly postulated primitive stuff is a 
quantum field.


This is a wonderful mathematical construct, but I don't think wise to 
believe no one really knows how to interpret it really, despite Everett 
MWI which I think is a key progress, but not necessarily towards 
physical primitivity (giving that Everett postulated a mechanical 
observer trigging the UDA "paradoxe").





(People confuse often the belief in a reality and a belief in a 
physical reality).


What's your definition of "reality"?


It is whatever it is.
It should be the roots of our knowledge and beliefs. It is what makes 
us bet on the physical realities, on the psychological realities, on 
the arithmetical realities and many other related realities, ...


Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-15 Thread Russell Standish

On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 11:12:15AM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> [Russell]> The particular Plenitude I assume (ensemble of all bitstrings) is
> actually a completely uninteresting place to have a view of (it has
> precisely zero informational complexity).
> 
> Is this kind of Plenitude (ensemble of all bitstrings) more or less
Tegmark's Level IV of all mathematical structures? (I.e., if it's
different, does the difference involve a restriction to discrete or
finitistic structures or some such? 

It does correspond to Tegmark's level 4, but Tegmark's proposal "All
mathematical structures" is rather vague. I have interpreted his
proposal as "all finite axiomatic systems". This is in fact a subset
of my ensemble (well basically Schmidhuber's ensemble) of all
descriptions (since an FAS is a description), yet one can also
describe the entire ensemble of descriptions by a finite method (the
"dovetailer"), hence one can find the ensemble of all descriptions
contained within Tegmark's.

Note, however that the relationships going both ways do _not_ imply
equivalence between the two ensembles. This is described in my paper
"Why Occam's Razor", as well as talked about on the everything list.

> 
> IV. possibility waves (variational principles)
> III. probabilities for various outcomes 
> II. information, news, outcomes, events, interactions, phenomena
> I. evidence of causes/dependencies (dependencies, e.g., emission --> open 
> slit --> hit)

I'm somewhat sceptical of your associations here, but it is possibly
because I don't understand what you're getting at. You may need to
develop this some more.

-- 
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.

A/Prof Russell Standish  Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
International prefix  +612, Interstate prefix 02

pgpq6N7Uhq0iC.pgp
Description: PGP signature

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-15 Thread Benjamin Udell

Russell, list,

[Russell]>>> The particular Plenitude I assume (ensemble of all bitstrings) is 
actually a completely uninteresting place to have a view of (it has precisely 
zero informational complexity).
[Ben]>> Is this kind of Plenitude (ensemble of all bitstrings) more or less 
Tegmark's Level IV of all mathematical structures? (I.e., if it's different, 
does the difference involve a restriction to discrete or finitistic structures 
or some such? 
[Russell]> It does correspond to Tegmark's level 4, but Tegmark's proposal "All 
mathematical structures" is rather vague. I have interpreted his proposal as 
"all finite axiomatic systems". This is in fact a subset of my ensemble (well 
basically Schmidhuber's ensemble) of all descriptions (since an FAS is a 
description), yet one can also describe the entire ensemble of descriptions by 
a finite method (the "dovetailer"), hence one can find the ensemble of all 
descriptions contained within Tegmark's.

The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember that it has 
often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick up a sense of what it 
was really about. Was there a message to the Everything-List in which it was 
explained so that non-experts can understand it? I'm not asking you to track 
that message (or series of messages) down, but if you or somebody remembers 
around which month it was, that should be enough for me to find it. Or is there 
a link to a Webpage with such an exposition?

[Russell]> Note, however that the relationships going both ways do _not_ imply 
equivalence between the two ensembles. This is described in my paper "Why 
Occam's Razor", as well as talked about on the everything list.

[Ben]>> 
>> IV. possibility waves (variational principles)
>> III. probabilities for various outcomes 
>> II. information, news, outcomes, events, interactions, phenomena
>> I. evidence of causes/dependencies (dependencies, e.g., emission --> open 
>> slit --> hit)

[Russell]> I'm somewhat sceptical of your associations here, but it is possibly 
because I don't understand what you're getting at. You may need to develop this 
some more.

I think I may have made it sound more like my own idea than what it actually 
seems to me. First, here's the part where I haven't thought that I was going 
out on a limb:

Level III varies across quantum branchings. Level II varies across times and 
places along a single quantum branch in such a way that its features come out 
the same as Level III's features.
Where the experimental setup remains the same, successive particles emitted 
make, collectively, a pattern of hits such that the pattern corresponds to the 
probability distribution for particle hits. The pattern consists of variations 
of hit times and locations along a single quantum branch, such that the pattern 
reflects the variations across quantum branchings. So there you see Level III & 
Level II aspects.

At Level I, individual histories are especially important and that which 
happens is partly attributable to "idiosyncrasies" of one's Level I universe, 
such that one must study its individual history and explain things by 
historical causes. I'm not sure whether I've said enough there, so if the 
following is redundant, I apologize. If there's something arbitrary about a 
Level I universe's constants and initial conditions, then there is variation, 
across Level II, among Level I universes or inflationary bubbles (I'm saying 
"Level I universe" instead of "Level I multiverse" because you've said that 
Tegmark's use of the word "multiverse" isn't standard; but if "universe" has a 
technical sense here that confuses the issue, then I don't mean it in that 
technical sense). But whether it's an issue of constants and initial conditions 
or of something else if anything at all (Tegmark seems unsure), a variation 
across inflationary bubbles in a Level II universe means that there are aspec!
 ts of our Level I universe which are part of a pattern of variation such that 
our Level I universe is not a representative sample of instances (like the 
pattern of accumulated particle hits) but instead a single instance (a single 
particle hit). To establish what are these "arbitrary" aspects, we vary the 
experimental setup and seek the constants and infer relationships between 
patterns of outcomes and the variations among initial conditions of various 
experiments. Now we're establishing the significance of variations across 
various evolutions of the possibility waves into which the various experimental 
setups were factored and finding that some relationships (or aspects of 
relationships, the particular quantities involved, etc.) seem arbitrarily to 
impose themselves -- seemiingly arbitrarily set constants of nature etc. 
(Again, if the fundamental constants and initial conditions of our Level I 
universe turn out not to be somewhat arbitrary and turn out not to mark a 
variat!
 ion across Level II, then there would be to seek out other

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-15 Thread Benjamin Udell

Russell, list,

When I said:
"But I haven't noticed anybody here talking about variational principles or 
optimizational equations in any connection, much less in relation to Level IV."
I meant that as being part of why I feel out on a limb (rather than in the 
sense of some sort of chiding toward people here for not discussing those 
subjects enough.)

Best, Ben Udell
 
- Original Message - 
From: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "EverythingList" 
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2006 1:04 PM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-16 Thread Bruno Marchal



Le 15-janv.-06, à 19:04, Benjamin Udell a écrit :

The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember 
that it has often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick up 
a sense of what it was really about.



The Universal Dovetailer is a program which generates and executes all 
programs.
Its existence is a non trivial consequence of Church thesis. Please 
recall me to explain this in detail in one or two weeks.
The necessity to dovetail (that is to run successiveley on the initial 
segement of the execution never waiting any programs stop is due to the 
fact that the always defined programs cannot be generated mechanically 
(this can be done in the case of all programs).
Actually I have already explain this on the list (in 2001) but the 
escribe archive seems no more working again, and the new archive seems 
not go enough backward in time.
The first published paper where I define it, is "Mechanism ans Personal 
Identity" paper:

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/M&PI_15-MAI-91.pdf
Russell Standish attributes it (wrongly) to Schmidhuber in his book. My 
fault, perhaps, because I have (charitably) compare  Schmidhuber "great 
programmer" with the Universal Dovetailer in some message to James 
Higgo. You can google on "universal dovetailer".
I have also introduced the distinction between the first person, plural 
and non plural, and third person view, although this has been done by 
some philosophers of mind in different context before. I introduce it 
in the self-multiplication and UD context. This is explained in most of 
my papers (recent or not).
Schmidhuber never accepted that distinction (or took it as unscientific 
like may "scientist", but that is a category error). Actually he leaves 
the list at the time most people acknowledge the idea. Schmidhuber's 
work is more akin to a constructive physics based on Universal 
effective prior than an attempt toward a TOE capable of treating the 
mind-body relation problems. Here too with some imagination we can see 
the shadow of that  1-3 distinction appearing in Tegmark through the 
frog and bird view.
In the Quantum Mechanics setting the 1-3 distinction appears in Everett 
fundamental paper under the term "subjective" and "objective".
The full conceptual power of the UD arises from the 1-3 distinction 
applied to it. This leads easily  to the mind/matter  reversal (except 
for the remaining "movie-graph/Occam difficulty).
Of course "dovetailing algorithm" are well known by computer scientists 
as a way to simulate parallelism on a sequential computer.





Was there a message to the Everything-List in which it was explained 
so that non-experts can understand it? I'm not asking you to track 
that message (or series of messages) down, but if you or somebody 
remembers around which month it was, that should be enough for me to 
find it. Or is there a link to a Webpage with such an exposition?



I have a lot in my web pages but the Everything Archive does not 
function properly. I will try to find my own backup, once I have more 
time.


But now, Ben, it could be an opportunity and a pleasure for me to 
explain the UD and  the UDA, again. (Those who have already understand 
are not obliged to reread the explanations but actually not many people 
have acknowledge a complete understanding of it).
After all, the interview with the lobian machine will bear on the UDA. 
The UDA explains why physics is reduce to a measure on computations 
"seen from some 1-point-of-view", and the lobian machine will be able 
to extract the logic of probability one. This is enough to make the 
comparison with quantum logic (the logic of probability one in 
physics).


Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-16 Thread Russell Standish

On Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 01:04:02PM -0500, Benjamin Udell wrote:
> 
> The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember that it 
> has often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick up a sense of 
> what it was really about. Was there a message to the Everything-List in which 
> it was explained so that non-experts can understand it? I'm not asking you to 
> track that message (or series of messages) down, but if you or somebody 
> remembers around which month it was, that should be enough for me to find it. 
> Or is there a link to a Webpage with such an exposition?

Do a Google search, or a search on the everything list archives eg
Google "everything list dovetailer".

> 
> Level III varies across quantum branchings. Level II varies across times and 
> places along a single quantum branch in such a way that its features come out 
> the same as Level III's features.

This is not my reading. Level II universes vary their fundamental
physical constants, eg G, alpha and so on.

Level I universes merely vary in time and space, but sufficiently
separated as to be causally independent.

... 

> 
> But I haven't noticed anybody here talking about variational principles or 
> optimizational equations in any connection, much less in relation to Level 
> IV. (While there is an obvious echo of optimization in applying Occam's Razor 
> to Level IV's mathematical structures, this doesn't seem to involve any 
> application of mathematical extremization, variations, Morse Theory, etc., so 
> it seems not really the same thing. It's certainly not the only echo between 
> a mode of inference (present instance: surmise, simplest explanation) and a 
> mathematical formalism (extremization, shortest paths, etc.).)
> 

Extremum principles come up mostly in Roy Frieden's work. No-one has
managed to integrate Frieden's stuff into the usual framework of this
list, so little mention has been made of it, but I do mention it in my
book. The hope is that some connection can be forged.


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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-17 Thread Benjamin Udell

Russell, list,

[Ben]>> The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember 
that it has often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick up a sense 
of what it was really about. Was there a message to the Everything-List in 
which it was explained so that non-experts can understand it? I'm not asking 
you to track that message (or series of messages) down, but if you or somebody 
remembers around which month it was, that should be enough for me to find it. 
Or is there a link to a Webpage with such an exposition?

[Russell]> Do a Google search, or a search on the everything list archives eg 
Google "everything list dovetailer".

I know that the phrase has been used in very many posts, I thought it might 
take me a long time. Anyway, Bruno has narrowed it down.

[Ben]>> Level III varies across quantum branchings. Level II varies across 
times and places along a single quantum branch in such a way that its features 
come out the same as Level III's features.

[Russell]> This is not my reading. Level II universes vary their fundamental 
physical constants, eg G, alpha and so on.
[Russell]> Level I universes merely vary in time and space, but sufficiently 
separated as to be causally independent.

That's exactly what I meant. I think the terminology has gotten me into trouble 
here. G, alpha, etc. vary across Level II, across its various inflationary 
bubbles. Level II's features are the same as Level III's features. Level III 
embodies a variation-across-quantum-branchings of constants, initial 
conditions, etc., variations which Level II has across the various Level I 
universes or Level I multiverses (I did think that my using the word "universe" 
instead would get me into trouble!) which Level II "contains" along a single 
quantum branch. Or maybe talking about "different Level I multiverses" still 
implies that I'm speaking only of Level I variation, not Level II variation. 
Anyway, I mean variation of constants, etc. With regard to quantum branching, 
this kind of variation is quite like the kind of variation exhibited by hits in 
a repeated experiment within a single Level I multiverse, with one big 
difference: the pattern of a sufficiently repeated experiment's hits is s!
 ufficient to tell us the probability distribution for the particle in that 
experiment in that Level I multiverse, but is not an adequate sample of 
variation across a Level II multiverse, since it does not reflect variation of 
fundamental constants, initial conditions insofar as these might affect the 
constants, etc. A pattern of "hits" representing only Level II variation is 
just the pattern which we can't observe -- it's the pattern made across various 
inflationary bubbles -- they are such "hits."  Anyway, given a mathematical 
structure distinguishable topologically or perhaps 
infinite-graph-theoretically, there are still variations of constants, initial 
conditions insofar as these might affect the constants, etc., which are 
reflected in variations of probability distribution for a given experiment's 
result across a Level III multiverse's quantum branchings of the genesis of an 
inflationary bubble and across a Level II multiverse's various inflationary 
bubbles along a sing!
 le quantum branch. Maybe we could approximate some such variat!
 ion by v
arying the experimental conditions, I'm unsure how to think about that. 

Would it be bad for Tegmark if there were no probability distribution for a 
multiverse's having one mathematical structure instead of another? Maybe that's 
where variational or optimizational principles would come in.

[Ben>> But I haven't noticed anybody here talking about variational principles 
or optimizational equations in any connection, much less in relation to Level 
IV. (While there is an obvious echo of optimization in applying Occam's Razor 
to Level IV's mathematical structures, this doesn't seem to involve any 
application of mathematical extremization, variations, Morse Theory, etc., so 
it seems not really the same thing. It's certainly not the only echo between a 
mode of inference (present instance: surmise, simplest explanation) and a 
mathematical formalism (extremization, shortest paths, etc.).)

[Russell]> Extremum principles come up mostly in Roy Frieden's work. No-one has 
managed to integrate Frieden's stuff into the usual framework of this list, so 
little mention has been made of it, but I do mention it in my book. The hope is 
that some connection can be forged.

I'll try looking into him.

Best, Ben Udell

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-17 Thread Benjamin Udell

Russell, list,

Thanks for pointing out Roy Frieden and EPI. 

At first skim, it reminds me vaguely of the argument by C.S. Peirce (there's 
that name again) that space was curved. The idea was that it would take 
infinite precision of measurement to establish that space were perfectly 
Euclidean "all the way down," and that, given all the scales and ways in which 
it could be curved, and the single and unique way for it to be Euclidean, it 
was overwhelmingly likely to be curved.

I'm not sure how such an argument holds up in consideration of things like the 
Planck radius, or in Frieden's or EPI's terms, but the general notion is that 
of inferring physical laws or spatial geometries from measurement issues. In 
Peirce's case, the idea seems to have involved considering what would be 
established by research indefinitely prolonged, which ultimate or indefinitely 
far destination Peirce equated with truth, though in most cases Peirce 
considered it to be findable mainly only by actually doing the research.

[Russell]>> Extremum principles come up mostly in Roy Frieden's work. No-one 
has managed to integrate Frieden's stuff into the usual framework of this list, 
so little mention has been made of it, but I do mention it in my book. The hope 
is that some connection can be forged.

[Ben]> I'll try looking into him.

Best, Ben Udell

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-18 Thread danny mayes


Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


Danny Mayes writes:

I haven't participated in the list in a while, but I try to keep up 
with the discussion here and there as time permits.  I personally was 
raised a fundamentalist Baptist, but lost most of my interest in that 
religion when I was taught at 9 years old that all the little kids in 
Africa that are never told about Jesus Christ go to Hell.  Even at 9, 
I knew that wasn't something I was going to be buying.  Who wants to 
believe in a God that cruel?  Even without the problematic cruel 
creator, I have always been to oriented toward logic and proof to 
just accept stuff on faith.



I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a 
philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like something 
to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether it is in fact 
true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the Nazis, but that 
doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not exist, so why should 
my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning in Hell lead me to 
believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might make me reluctant to 
worship such a God, but that is not the same as believing he does not 
exist.


 Religion means believing something in the absence of sufficient 
evidence.


Stathis Papaioannou

_
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today - it's 
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My belief is that in matters of faith, you can choose to believe or not 
believe based on whether it suits your personal preferences.  Your 
example of the Nazis  would not apply because there is overwhelming 
evidence that the Nazis existed.  Perhaps it can be argued that there is 
meaningful evidence that the God described in Sunday school class exists 
as well, however I don't think anyone would argue that the evidence for 
that God is nearly as strong as evidence of the Nazis.  As you say, 
religion, by necessity, is based on faith and therefore little to no 
objective evidence.  I guess your point was that if you already have the 
faith in something without evidence, the fact that you are then taught 
as part of the belief system that there are some aspects not very 
appealing should not have any bearing on whether you still have your 
faith?  I would disagree with that in that you can have faith in 
something because the concept is attractive to you, but then lose your 
faith when the concept is shown to be less attractive. (this was not 
really my situation as a child- I was never really presented the 
opportunity to examine the faith until presented with the teachings 
described in the original post).  This is not entirely unrelated to the 
sciences.  Science has pushed into many areas into realms that can only 
tangentially, at best, be proven with objective evidence.  The MWI is a 
good example.  I believe in it, because I think it provides the most 
explanatory power over competing ideas. However, it would be difficult 
to fault someone for demanding more in the way of direct evidence.  In a 
sense, there is an element of faith in such theories.  String theory is 
another example.  I'm not saying these things are not science, just that 
they are theories beyond our reach to prove or disprove at the present 
time.  Many scientists are quoted as endorsing string theory in part due 
to the elegance of the theory.  This goes with what I was saying above 
about accepting something on faith as long as it appears to be the most 
attractive idea, even if it is not supported by much objective evidence.


I doubt the beliefs of fundementalist Christianity will ever be 
absolutely proven or disproven, and as a faith belief I reserve the 
right to discard it at my choosing!


Danny

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-18 Thread Russell Standish

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 04:32:15PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> 
> Le 15-janv.-06, ? 19:04, Benjamin Udell a ?crit :
> 
> >The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember 
> >that it has often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick up 
> >a sense of what it was really about.
> 
> 
> The Universal Dovetailer is a program which generates and executes all 
> programs.
> Its existence is a non trivial consequence of Church thesis. Please 
> recall me to explain this in detail in one or two weeks.
> The necessity to dovetail (that is to run successiveley on the initial 
> segement of the execution never waiting any programs stop is due to the 
> fact that the always defined programs cannot be generated mechanically 
> (this can be done in the case of all programs).
> Actually I have already explain this on the list (in 2001) but the 
> escribe archive seems no more working again, and the new archive seems 
> not go enough backward in time.
> The first published paper where I define it, is "Mechanism ans Personal 
> Identity" paper:
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/M&PI_15-MAI-91.pdf
> Russell Standish attributes it (wrongly) to Schmidhuber in his book. My 

To be precise I do not attribute it to Schmidhuber, but I can see why
you came to that conclusion. I will be revising this section to make
this point clear in the final version of my book. The dovetailer algorithm is
certainly well known, and not apparently attributable to anyone, and
at the time when I wrote that part of ToN, I was unaware that the
specific application of the dovetailer to computing all possible
programs is your idea. My mistake actually is using the qualified name
"universal dovetailer" to describe a dovetailer generating all
possible strings (Schmidhuber's work), when the universal dovetailer
actually runs the programs too. I do not use the qualified name in
"Why Occam's razor".


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Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-19 Thread Bruno Marchal





Le 19-janv.-06, à 02:45, Russell Standish a écrit :


On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 04:32:15PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:


Le 15-janv.-06, ? 19:04, Benjamin Udell a ?crit :


The "dovetailer" keeps sounding like a powerful idea. I do remember
that it has often been mentioned here, but somehow I failed to pick 
up

a sense of what it was really about.



The Universal Dovetailer is a program which generates and executes all
programs.
Its existence is a non trivial consequence of Church thesis. Please
recall me to explain this in detail in one or two weeks.
The necessity to dovetail (that is to run successiveley on the initial
segement of the execution never waiting any programs stop is due to 
the

fact that the always defined programs cannot be generated mechanically
(this can be done in the case of all programs).
Actually I have already explain this on the list (in 2001) but the
escribe archive seems no more working again, and the new archive seems
not go enough backward in time.
The first published paper where I define it, is "Mechanism ans 
Personal

Identity" paper:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/M&PI_15-MAI-91.pdf
Russell Standish attributes it (wrongly) to Schmidhuber in his book. 
My


To be precise I do not attribute it to Schmidhuber, but I can see why
you came to that conclusion. I will be revising this section to make
this point clear in the final version of my book. The dovetailer 
algorithm is

certainly well known, and not apparently attributable to anyone, and
at the time when I wrote that part of ToN, I was unaware that the
specific application of the dovetailer to computing all possible
programs is your idea.




Yes, the key was to realize that church's thesis allows *universal* 
dovetailing, and forces the "dovetailing" part: i.e. there is no 
universal machine capable of running all programs without dovetailing. 
For exemple, there are no universal dovetailer for the total computable 
functions. See the diagonalization posts (when available).








My mistake actually is using the qualified name
"universal dovetailer" to describe a dovetailer generating all
possible strings (Schmidhuber's work), when the universal dovetailer
actually runs the programs too. I do not use the qualified name in
"Why Occam's razor".




But a program generating all the strings does not need to dovetail at 
all. The expression "dovetailing on all strings" is quite confusing. I 
think it would be preferable to keep Schmidhuber terminology when you 
describe his work, which I have already described as interesting 
"constructive physics", but not entirely relevant when searching a  
TOE, as the philosophical remarks ending his first everything paper 
illustrated, and as it has been confirmed when he dismissed the 1/3 
distinction.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-19 Thread Bruno Marchal



Le 18-janv.-06, à 20:35, danny mayes a écrit :

I doubt the beliefs of fundementalist Christianity will ever be 
absolutely proven or disproven, and as a faith belief I reserve the 
right to discard it at my choosing!



And what if you make the personal experience of God afterlife or 
before, or to take a less hot example, what if you wake up in the 
morning with the belief that you exist, as a first person (with private 
subjective life and all that). In both case you get something that 
science will never been able to prove or disperove. But does it need an 
act of faith?
One problem is that the word "faith" has already (like "theology") big 
"social" connotations, but many "reasonable things", especially in 
science, needs some amount of faith in the sense "belief beyond 
proof"..
What I mean is that those questions are difficult, and there is no 
clear-cut frontier between many sort of beliefs. I have given reasons 
(often in this list) that the belief in a primitive material 
universe/realm is already a sort of religious belief. Actually the 
belief in any application of a theory is beyond provability. But as I 
said, also the belief in a personal pain, like headache, is beyond 
proof, although we don't need a proof to understand we have headache. 
In any case I am not sure it is a question of choice, although that, 
concerning religious belief, perhaps some form of open-minded education 
could help young people to be less influenced by the their parent's 
beliefs (which are not chosen by the children of course). But then that 
"choice" question could lead us to the "will" or "free-will" question 
which is not simple too.
I am not sure I am clear: to sum up I think we have many beliefs on 
things with no proofs nor disproofs, but I would'n say it is a matter 
of choice.
We always need evidences of some kind, I think, but for some just a 
lovely sunshine could be taken as an evidence for God or Gods, and for 
others just the existence of Nazis will be taken of evidence for Evil, 
Evils, if not devil(s). That leads to the question of what is an 
evidence and how does evidences add up (and here many interesting 
models and theory are developped in Artifical Intelligence (and alike), 
and the evidences add up toward the idea that that stuff is not obvious 
at all.


Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-20 Thread "Hal Finney"

Here is a link to an article I wrote in 2001 explaining what the
Universal Dovetailer is:

http://www.mail-archive.com/everything-list@eskimo.com/msg01526.html

Hal Finney

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue

2006-01-23 Thread Bruno Marchal



Le 20-janv.-06, à 16:04, John M wrote (in part):


thanks for your approval to my post on 'belief'. To
this one, however, I think you mix up "evidence" with
"assumption". The beautiful sunshine is "assumed" to
be God's gift for us, it is a 1st person idea if we
like it, or find it burning, to assign it as a gift or
a curse. It is our "perception of reality" anyway.
I stand with my Popperian example - which you did not
address in my post - about 'proof and falsification'.



I did elsewhere. Also I think we could have perhaps some vocabulary 
problems.
I agree that some believer in God does assume that a beautiful sunshine 
is a God's gift to us. Here I was more alluding to Plato's view of God 
as "the Good", and I was talking about someone who makes such a 
personal experience of beauty, in front of that sunshine, that he takes 
it as a, personal or first person for sure, experience of the 
Good/God/whatever (sort of mystical experience if you want).
Of course it is not a proof (as in pure math), nor an evidence in the 
Popper sense of confirmation. Nor can a reconstitution of oneself 
during a teleportation be a proof of comp, nor can quantum suicide 
provides any proof that QM, or Everett, or comp are true. First Person 
Knowledge is just incorrigible and unfalsifiable, and as such 
unscientific. Science is concerned only with third person discourses, 
or, arguably, with first person plural discourses (the one which I 
defined explicitly through duplication of populations of individuals).


Now I don't think it is really important to be so precise in the 
beginning. At some point I will be obliged to say many 
counter-intuitive propositions and explain how in some important cases 
first person truth can indirectly lead to 100% falsifiable third person 
propositions, but it is not easy to explain. Well, I wouldn' t have 
believe myself a large part of what I want to explain if that wouldn't 
have been confirmed by the Lobian interview. Nevertheless, I am 
realizing now  that many "rational mystics" (including the Neoplatonist 
pagan theologians) are closer to the lobian machine than I would have 
thought before reading Plotinus. I am still searching more confirmation 
because if this is confirmed (I have some criteria) it would put some 
new light on the discussion.


I will try to sum up this in a new thread on Plotinus (and 
neoplatonism, more generally).
At some point I will explain how I am getting (apparently) an 
arithmetical interpretation of Plotinus, and on some part of Plato's 
Parmenides. My work would make Plotinus theory of matter 100% 
experimentally testable.


Of course there is nothing miraculous that honest introspector converge 
toward the lobian discourse, given that this is the discourse of the 
self-referential correct machine.


I don't know if that relation with Plotinus will help me selling my 
stuff, but this is another problem (for a future different thread). 
What some Christian theologians dismissed in Plato, they will dismiss 
it in any TOE.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

2006-01-05 Thread John M

Dear Ben U, 
What a post! 
It is a joy to read it, however let me pick one little
phrase with a question attached to it:

>"...The focus in religion and theology on faith,
belief, etc., seems (e.g., in "Credo quia absurdum")
to arise from a stubbornness in the belief despite
resultant seemingly contradictory or inadequate
interpretations and understandings, and despite
seemingly contradictory or inadequate confirmations,
corroborations, knowledge ("knowledge" in the everyday
sense)...<" 

Does not the Latin phrase express that "Since I cannot
KNOW so (in all what you added) the only way left for
me is TO BELIEVE? Does it not express the idea in the
back of the mind that it should be rejected, unless
(by the stubbornness you mentioned) you WANT to uphold
it and the only way is faith?
I know it is not the customary explanation, but I try
it.

Regards

John Mikes  


--- Benjamin Udell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Bruno, list,
> 
> I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though
> I don't understand much about Bruno's work or modal
> logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few general
> remarks.
> 
> If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a
> general name for a field which studies fundamental
> type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc.," then there
> are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith,
> belief, confidence), _pistos_ (confident, faithful),
> _pisteuticos_ (deserving of faith or belief), etc.
> So he could call it Pistics (sounds awful in
> English, though, because of that to which it sound
> similar) or Pisteutics, etc. Or maybe there's some
> form of this word with a prefix which would make it
> sound less like, well, um, "piss" plus a suffix,
> and, having considered it, I do think that that's an
> issue. Ancient Greek is too unfamiliar to me,
> otherwise I'd try to come up with such a word
> myself, keeping in mind the next paragraph:
> 
> What kind of belief? The focus in religion and
> theology on faith, belief, etc., seems (e.g., in
> "Credo quia absurdum") to arise from a stubbornness
> in the belief despite resultant seemingly
> contradictory or inadequate interpretations and
> understandings, and despite seemingly contradictory
> or inadequate confirmations, corroborations,
> knowledge ("knowledge" in the everyday sense). This
> is a special kind of belief, not the most general
> kind, and we tend to distinguish it in English by
> calling it "faith" though "faith" does have other
> meanings. It tends to be motivated by valuations not
> pertaining primarily to investigating and
> establishing the character of the world. For Bruno,
> the question is, does he mean a kind of belief
> which, howsoever motivated, is stubborn? (in the
> face of resultant contradictory or inadequate
> understandings and in the face of contradictory
> "knowledge" or inadequate knwledge). For what it's
> worth, I think that the name most suitable will have
> the meaning!
>   of this kind of belief.
> 
> Are religion and theism just about belief? Maybe I'm
> wrong, because there's a lot of background here on
> the everything-list threads that I don't understand,
> so maybe I'm interpreting things in the wrong light,
> but there seems to be a tendency here to regard
> religion as if it were fundamentally a cognitive
> discipline -- as if it consisted in a set of
> cognitive beliefs about facts. Religion has been
> many things and in some societies has taken many
> forms in being involved in every aspect of life. But
> the core toward which it seems sometimes to
> retrench, seems to be affectivity and valuing with
> regard to decision-making, power, submission,
> governance and self-governance -- including valuing
> with regard to the greatest powers in one's life and
> in the universe. 
> 
> (All the same, I fully admit that religion can get
> involved quite widely, in valuings with regard to
> competence and work, and with regard to feelings and
> gratifications, and with regard to cognition and
> knowledge -- and, also, it can get involved in a
> variety of cognitively based disciplines with regard
> to those just-listed subjects, so as to influence,
> e.g., education and community planning, productive
> arts, affective arts {painting, literature, music,
> drama, cinema, etc., etc.} and, among the maths and
> sciences, cosmology, as well; and religion can get
> involved in the arenas -- political, economic,
> cultural, discussional, and in non-conflictual
> practices of corresponding kinds.) 
> 
> Why do we associate religion especially with
> stubborn beliefs and certain disputed issues of
> fact? At the core of most of those things which we'd
> call religion in the strict sense, the sense in
> which the word "religion" is usually meant when the
> context is vague, are claims of miracles, miraculous
> powers in impassioned settings. Civilization tends
> to ask of religion that it renounce compulsion,
> tampering and interference, and provocation, but has
> tended in some cases to leave the improbable
> unsupp

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

2006-01-05 Thread Benjamin Udell

The usual translation, to which you alluded, of "Credo quia absurdum" is "I 
believe [it] because [it's] absurd."

But you're right either way in that, either way, it represents a stubbornness 
of belief, maybe even a use of habitual stubbornness as a method of solidifying 
one's belief, which is, despite that which I said in my earlier post, is not 
really what Bruno is getting at -- at least so it seems to me now. Maybe I'm 
wrong this time rather than last time. I'm feeling quite uncertain now!

Believing math to be consistent, is that really stubbornness? I mentioned 
"contradictory or inadequate" understandings and confirmations, but really it's 
a question of Goedel-unprovability and that sort of thing. And if you didn't 
fully believe math to be consistent, what then? Well, which math? Before an 
apparent consistency is uncovered, or afterward, when maybe it's been remedied 
through revision? Having said that I may have overstated the kind of 
stubbornness involved in the kind of belief which interests Bruno, I still 
hesitate to go down the path of revealing ever more of my ignorance. 
Nevertheless...

I don't know a whole lot about math, and I tend to be fallibilist, so I wonder 
whether anybody really does "know," like Penrose claims, that those maths are 
in fact really and truly are consistent, which are consistent _provably_ only 
on the unprovable assumption of arithmetic's consistency. I think of seeming 
inconsistencies that get patched up, 0 divided by 0 equals "any number" you 
want -- so, more carefully define equality to exclude that problem. 
Denominators seemingly turning to 0 in calculus got remedied. And so on.

I guess I'll stop there. Thanks for your response, and for liking my previous 
post.

Best,
Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "John M" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "everythinglist" 

Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 3:10 PM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

Dear Ben U, 
What a post! 
It is a joy to read it, however let me pick one little
phrase with a question attached to it:

>"...The focus in religion and theology on faith, belief, etc., seems (e.g., in 
>"Credo quia absurdum") to arise from a stubbornness in the belief despite 
>resultant seemingly contradictory or inadequate interpretations and 
>understandings, and despite seemingly contradictory or inadequate 
>confirmations, corroborations, knowledge ("knowledge" in the everyday
sense)...<" 

Does not the Latin phrase express that "Since I cannot KNOW so (in all what you 
added) the only way left for me is TO BELIEVE? Does it not express the idea in 
the back of the mind that it should be rejected, unless (by the stubbornness 
you mentioned) you WANT to uphold it and the only way is faith?
I know it is not the customary explanation, but I try it.

Regards

John Mikes  

--- Benjamin Udell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Bruno, list,
> 
> I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though
> I don't understand much about Bruno's work or modal
> logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few general
> remarks.
> 
> If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a
> general name for a field which studies fundamental
> type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc.," then there
> are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith,
> belief, confidence), _pistos_ (confident, faithful),
> _pisteuticos_ (deserving of faith or belief), etc.
> So he could call it Pistics (sounds awful in
> English, though, because of that to which it sound
> similar) or Pisteutics, etc. Or maybe there's some
> form of this word with a prefix which would make it
> sound less like, well, um, "piss" plus a suffix,
> and, having considered it, I do think that that's an
> issue. Ancient Greek is too unfamiliar to me,
> otherwise I'd try to come up with such a word
> myself, keeping in mind the next paragraph:
> 
> What kind of belief? The focus in religion and
> theology on faith, belief, etc., seems (e.g., in
> "Credo quia absurdum") to arise from a stubbornness
> in the belief despite resultant seemingly
> contradictory or inadequate interpretations and
> understandings, and despite seemingly contradictory
> or inadequate confirmations, corroborations,
> knowledge ("knowledge" in the everyday sense). This
> is a special kind of belief, not the most general
> kind, and we tend to distinguish it in English by
> calling it "faith" though "faith" does have other
> meanings. It tends to be motivated by valuations not
> pertaining primarily to investigating and
> establishing the character of the world. F

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

2006-01-05 Thread Benjamin Udell

John, list,

Maybe (or maybe not) I should add, that Goedel's work seems to be about 
mathematical systems' "representations" as actually developed by mathematicians 
in their finitude, not about "math in itself" such as would be embodied in the 
grand Multiverse.
I can see a mathematicians' reasonable "faith," based on accumulated and 
historical experience in mathematical research, that whatever inconsistencies 
turn up in mathematicians' systems can be remedied without surrendering in any 
permanent way the kind of power which we associate with mathematics. But the 
inexhaustible mathematical realities themselves in their surreal infinitude? 
I'm not sure how to think of consistency in those terms. (For my part, I 
associate deductive logic, deductive mathematical theories of information and 
probability, etc., with Tegmark's Level III, not with his Level IV.)

With a heightened sensation of fallibility,

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "everythinglist" 
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 8:40 PM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

The usual translation, to which you alluded, of "Credo quia absurdum" is "I 
believe [it] because [it's] absurd."

But you're right either way in that, either way, it represents a stubbornness 
of belief, maybe even a use of habitual stubbornness as a method of solidifying 
one's belief, which is, despite that which I said in my earlier post, is not 
really what Bruno is getting at -- at least so it seems to me now. Maybe I'm 
wrong this time rather than last time. I'm feeling quite uncertain now!

Believing math to be consistent, is that really stubbornness? I mentioned 
"contradictory or inadequate" understandings and confirmations, but really it's 
a question of Goedel-unprovability and that sort of thing. And if you didn't 
fully believe math to be consistent, what then? Well, which math? Before an 
apparent consistency is uncovered, or afterward, when maybe it's been remedied 
through revision? Having said that I may have overstated the kind of 
stubbornness involved in the kind of belief which interests Bruno, I still 
hesitate to go down the path of revealing ever more of my ignorance. 
Nevertheless...

I don't know a whole lot about math, and I tend to be fallibilist, so I wonder 
whether anybody really does "know," like Penrose claims, that those maths are 
in fact really and truly are consistent, which are consistent _provably_ only 
on the unprovable assumption of arithmetic's consistency. I think of seeming 
inconsistencies that get patched up, 0 divided by 0 equals "any number" you 
want -- so, more carefully define equality to exclude that problem. 
Denominators seemingly turning to 0 in calculus got remedied. And so on.

I guess I'll stop there. Thanks for your response, and for liking my previous 
post.

Best,
Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "John M" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "everythinglist" 

Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2006 3:10 PM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

Dear Ben U, 
What a post! 
It is a joy to read it, however let me pick one little
phrase with a question attached to it:

>"...The focus in religion and theology on faith, belief, etc., seems (e.g., in 
>"Credo quia absurdum") to arise from a stubbornness in the belief despite 
>resultant seemingly contradictory or inadequate interpretations and 
>understandings, and despite seemingly contradictory or inadequate 
>confirmations, corroborations, knowledge ("knowledge" in the everyday
sense)...<" 

Does not the Latin phrase express that "Since I cannot KNOW so (in all what you 
added) the only way left for me is TO BELIEVE? Does it not express the idea in 
the back of the mind that it should be rejected, unless (by the stubbornness 
you mentioned) you WANT to uphold it and the only way is faith?
I know it is not the customary explanation, but I try it.

Regards

John Mikes  

--- Benjamin Udell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Bruno, list,
> 
> I've looked over Bruno's recent replies and, though
> I don't understand much about Bruno's work or modal
> logic, etc., I wish to attempt a few general
> remarks.
> 
> If Bruno is, as he puts it, "[searching for] a
> general name for a field which studies fundamental
> type of faith, hope, fear, bets, etc.," then there
> are set of Ancient Greek words like _pistis_ (faith,
> belief, confidence), _pistos_ (confident, faithful),
> _pisteuticos_ (deserving of faith or belief), etc.
> So he could call it Pistics (sounds awful in

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith



Le 06-janv.-06, à 02:40, Benjamin Udell a écrit :


I don't know a whole lot about math, and I tend to be fallibilist, so 
I wonder whether anybody really does "know," like Penrose claims, that 
those maths are in fact really and truly are consistent, which are 
consistent _provably_ only on the unprovable assumption of 
arithmetic's consistency. I think of seeming inconsistencies that get 
patched up, 0 divided by 0 equals "any number" you want -- so, more 
carefully define equality to exclude that problem. Denominators 
seemingly turning to 0 in calculus got remedied. And so on.




I think that all mathematicians (99,999...%) believes correctly in the 
consistency of Peano Arithmetic (PA). Note that PA is a "simple" 
example of a lobian theory or machine).


Few mathematician doubt about the consistency of Zermelo-Fraenkel Set 
Theory (ZF), although George Boolos makes a case that ZF could be 
inconsistent.


Famous results by Godel and Cohen have shown the relative consistency 
of many "doubtful" math assertion: precisely it has been shown that IF 
ZF is consistency THEN ZF + the axiom of choice is consistent. The same 
for the continuum hypothesis, etc.


Note that (a theorem prover for) ZF is also a Lobian machine.

Much more difficult is the question of the consistency of (rather 
exotic) set theories like Quine's New Foundation (NF).


There is no sense to ask about the consistency of the whole math, 
because the whole math cannot be presented in a formal theory or 
theorem proving machine (if only by Godel incompleteness result). It is 
a reason to doubt about Penrose' use of the notion of consistency in 
his "godelian" argument against Mechanism/Comp. All what such types of 
reasoning show is that: IF I am a sound Lobian Machine THEN I cannot 
know which machine I am (and then I cannot know which computational 
history extends me, and that is what I use eventually for solving the 
OM measure problem).



Bruno

PS  I will answer your long "naming-issue" post, Ben, and some others 
to, asap.




http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

Bruno, list

[Ben]>> I don't know a whole lot about math, and I tend to be fallibilist, so I 
wonder whether anybody really does "know," like Penrose claims, that those 
maths are in fact really and truly are consistent, which are consistent 
_provably_ only on the unprovable assumption of arithmetic's consistency. I 
think of seeming inconsistencies that get patched up, 0 divided by 0 equals 
"any number" you want -- so, more carefully define equality to exclude that 
problem. Denominators seemingly turning to 0 in calculus got remedied. And so 
on.
 
[Bruno]> I think that all mathematicians (99,999...%) believes correctly in the 
consistency of Peano Arithmetic (PA). Note that PA is a "simple" example of a 
lobian theory or machine).
 
Then I think the main reason not to call this sort of thing "knowledge" is the 
context of epistemology as a discipline which has focused often on hyperbolic 
doubts and an idea of knowledge or episteme rather like that of Aristotle's 
idea, where knowledge is reached deductively from firm principles. I wish that 
it were not so, accustomed as I am to the English word "knowledge" with its 
vagueness on such distinctions as between _scire_ and _cognovisse_, and between 
_savoir_ and _connai^tre, etc.
 
If mathematicians "believe correctly" or know that Peano Arithmetic is 
consistent, then I think that the simplest explanation is that they have -- not 
formally, but nevertheless -- drawn this as an ampliative inductive conclusion 
from general corroboratory experience with Peano Arithmetic and with 
mathematics generally. Generalizations and surmises, the latter of which 
arguably include perceptual judgments, can be quite compelling though 
non-deductive.
 
A problem here may be an inevitable reliance on small number of words for a 
less small number of ideas. Something sufficiently corroborated or confirmed 
for a given theoretical or practical purpose can be called "knowledge" in one 
sense, but, according to another standard, that, for instance, of Aristotle, is 
merely belief.
 
[Bruno]> Few mathematician doubt about the consistency of Zermelo-Fraenkel Set 
Theory (ZF), although George Boolos makes a case that ZF could be inconsistent.
[Bruno]> Famous results by Godel and Cohen have shown the relative consistency 
of many "doubtful" math assertion: precisely it has been shown that IF ZF is 
consistency THEN ZF + the axiom of choice is consistent. The same for the 
continuum hypothesis, etc.
[Bruno]> Note that (a theorem prover for) ZF is also a Lobian machine.
[Bruno]> Much more difficult is the question of the consistency of (rather 
exotic) set theories like Quine's New Foundation (NF).
[Bruno]> There is no sense to ask about the consistency of the whole math, 
because the whole math cannot be presented in a formal theory or theorem 
proving machine (if only by Godel incompleteness result). It is a reason to 
doubt about Penrose' use of the notion of consistency in his "godelian" 
argument against Mechanism/Comp. All what such types of reasoning show is that: 
IF I am a sound Lobian Machine THEN I cannot know which machine I am (and then 
I cannot know which computational history extends me, and that is what I use 
eventually for solving the OM measure problem).
 
You've outline a whole range of degrees of cognitive assurance from firm to 
uncertain, and I continue to doubt that it can all be fitted under the notion 
"faith" or "belief" at all. Now, if it is agreed (and maybe it isn't) that some 
sort of ampliative induction is involved in all these cases, then it's worth 
pointing out that the Greek word is _epagögé_ (in case the extended characters 
don't survive the server, that's epago"ge'), and the field of interest is a 
kind of "epagogics." But this seems too general, because we use this kind of 
inference in order to infer about many more things than the consistency of an 
arithmetic or the overall sanity of oneself. I dislike pointing to all these 
problems without offering a solution. If only I had formally studied Greek! 
Besides, I'm not aware (and am not the kind of person who would be likely to 
know) that anybody has done work outlining the character of "informal inductive 
inferences about arithmetic consistency" etc., and I'm kin!
 d "winging it" with regard to the character of G*, I don't have the background 
to understand it well. 
 
[Bruno]> PS  I will answer your long "naming-issue" post, Ben, and some others 
to, asap.
 
Thanks, I'll be quite interested in it.
 
Best, Ben Udell

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith



Le 09-janv.-06, à 17:43, Benjamin Udell a écrit :

You've outline a whole range of degrees of cognitive assurance from 
firm to uncertain, and I continue to doubt that it can all be fitted 
under the notion "faith" or "belief" at all.



Not at all. It was not my goal. More explanation soon.

Ben, before I (try) to anwer your long post, could you explain briefly 
what you mean by "ampliative induction"? Thanks.
I will try to make a synthetical answer to your long post tomorrow or 
the day after.


Best,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

Bruno, list,

By "ampliative induction" I mean, not mathematical induction.

I also use the term to suggest that I mean inference that is not only 
ampliative (a technical term meaning that the inference adds info in its 
conclusion) but also "retentive" (not a technical term, so far as I know). In 
saying "induction," usually I mean not simple induction (premise about a sample 
group to a conclusion about another individual) or statistical syllogism, etc., 
but instead inference that is both ampliative and retentive (in terms of formal 
implication relations, both non-preservative of truth and preservative of 
falsity), such that all information in the premisses is retained (still of 
interest) in the conclusion and the conclusion contains further information. 
I.e., some kind of generalization to the extent of a distribution, tendency, 
trend, etc. across a larger population or set of items. (I need a more general 
word than "population" since I've also talked (though somewhat vaguely) about 
the use of induction in for the kind of ideas studied by philosophy.)

This is all especially in distinction from "surmise," by which I usually mean 
inference that, in terms of formal implication relations, is neither 
truth-preservative nor falsity-preservative. In other words, if my premiss is 
that the sun has risen every day for a thousand years, and my conclusion is 
that the sun will rise tomorrow, I call that a surmise (to an instance or 
individual) and if my conclusion is that there will never have been a day when 
the sun doesn't rise, I call that a surmise (to a law, though a weak surmise, 
since, among other things, it is not at all luminously explanatory with its 
law; and surmise is of more distinctive interest when, for instance, it is not 
clear which among various patterns should be used as premisses). The dropping 
out of premissed information from the conclusion reflects the focus of 
interest, just as a "strict" or non-reversible deduction drops some info in 
order to highlight other info.

Best, Ben Udell

Le 09-janv.-06, à 17:43, Benjamin Udell a écrit :

> You've outline a whole range of degrees of cognitive assurance from 
> firm to uncertain, and I continue to doubt that it can all be fitted 
> under the notion "faith" or "belief" at all.


Not at all. It was not my goal. More explanation soon.

Ben, before I (try) to anwer your long post, could you explain briefly 
what you mean by "ampliative induction"? Thanks.
I will try to make a synthetical answer to your long post tomorrow or 
the day after.

Best,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

2006-01-12 Thread Bruno Marchal



Le 09-janv.-06, à 18:30, Benjamin Udell a écrit :


By "ampliative induction" I mean, not mathematical induction.


Nice!  I hope you will be patient enough to see that this is a good 
description of G* \ G.
G characterises the self-referential discourse of the lobian machine, 
which is fundamentally a machine capable of using mathematical 
induction(+).
G* \ G will correspond to anything true that the machine can guess 
without using mathematical induction.


Bruno

(+) IF a property is such that 1) it is true for 0, and 2) if true for 
n it is true for n+1; THEN it will be true for all numbers.
More compactly:   {P(0) & [for all n:  P(n) -> P(n+1)]} -> for all n 
P(n).



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

Bruno, list,

If I understand you correctly, then you mean, more generally:

G* \ G will correspond to any true conclusion that the machine can draw by 
other than deductive (= truth-preservative)inference.

Best, Ben Udell

- Original Message - 
From: "Bruno Marchal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Benjamin Udell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Everything-List List" 
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith

Le 09-janv.-06, à 18:30, Benjamin Udell a écrit :

> By "ampliative induction" I mean, not mathematical induction.

Nice!  I hope you will be patient enough to see that this is a good 
description of G* \ G.
G characterises the self-referential discourse of the lobian machine, 
which is fundamentally a machine capable of using mathematical 
induction(+).
G* \ G will correspond to anything true that the machine can guess 
without using mathematical induction.

Bruno

(+) IF a property is such that 1) it is true for 0, and 2) if true for 
n it is true for n+1; THEN it will be true for all numbers.
More compactly:   {P(0) & [for all n:  P(n) -> P(n+1)]} -> for all n 
P(n).

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Re: Paper+Exercises+Naming Issue-faith