Galileo!

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Philip Thrift

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Oct 26, 2019, 5:08:05 PM10/26/19
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"[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)

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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 27, 2019, 6:02:14 AM10/27/19
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On 26 Oct 2019, at 23:08, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:


"[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)


Yes. Physical science was not designed to talk about (Plato’s) ideas, only Aristotle matter. That is why it has never got the vocation of a theory of everything, unlike metaphysics and theology.

But physicalist makes physics into a theology, which might make sense, but not if we assume that the brain is Turing emulable in a way relevant for getting a conscious person. That is not obvious, but result for the UDA. (Universal Dovetailer Argument or Paradox).

Bruno



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Philip Thrift

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Oct 27, 2019, 6:34:14 AM10/27/19
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On Sunday, October 27, 2019 at 5:02:14 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 26 Oct 2019, at 23:08, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:


"[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)


Yes. Physical science was not designed to talk about (Plato’s) ideas, only Aristotle matter. That is why it has never got the vocation of a theory of everything, unlike metaphysics and theology.

But physicalist makes physics into a theology, which might make sense, but not if we assume that the brain is Turing emulable in a way relevant for getting a conscious person. That is not obvious, but result for the UDA. (Universal Dovetailer Argument or Paradox).

Bruno



As I have suggested, it is not about Plato and Aristotle, but Epicurus and Thales:

Epicurus: An atomism of physical and psychical "atoms".
Thales: Aristotle got his "matter" idea from him.


@phioipthrift

John Clark

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Oct 27, 2019, 5:52:46 PM10/27/19
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On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 5:08 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> "[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)

If numbers don't work for describing the subjective qualities of consciousness there is no evidence words can do any better. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence". Maurice Switzer said it even better "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt of it".

 John K Clark
 

Philip Thrift

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Oct 28, 2019, 4:16:52 AM10/28/19
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The mathematical language that is currently used (like that in EFE and QFT) may only go so far. (We don't even know yet what gravity is.) Who knows what might be useful in the future (e.g. mereotoplogy*)?

But we could be leaving an age of analysis to enter an age of synthesis. We may be synthesizing things (materials science, synthetic biology, nanotechnology) that we cannot analyze (explain why they work).


* The basis for mereotopology is mereology which is a formal theory of parthood. It was first introduced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations; previously, it had received attention from those such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Kant. Specifically, it has proven helpful for disciplines such as natural-language analysis and artificial intelligence where more of an ontological motivation is desired. With the addition of topology, we derive mereotopology and become able to speak of partwhole relations. We, thus, become able to better understand the a priori nature of boundaries and holes, and we try to apply this to the questions philosophers and ontologists have been asking about these entities. Is a boundary an independent being? Do we view holes as immaterial particulars or spatiotemporal particulars?




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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 28, 2019, 7:16:43 AM10/28/19
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On 27 Oct 2019, at 11:34, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Sunday, October 27, 2019 at 5:02:14 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 26 Oct 2019, at 23:08, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:


"[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)


Yes. Physical science was not designed to talk about (Plato’s) ideas, only Aristotle matter. That is why it has never got the vocation of a theory of everything, unlike metaphysics and theology.

But physicalist makes physics into a theology, which might make sense, but not if we assume that the brain is Turing emulable in a way relevant for getting a conscious person. That is not obvious, but result for the UDA. (Universal Dovetailer Argument or Paradox).

The point is that such an idea of matter (panpsychic or not) is not valid when we assume that there is a is a relevant (for consciousness) level of description which is Turing emulable. If the brain is not Turing emulable, all options are open.

Bruno




Bruno



As I have suggested, it is not about Plato and Aristotle, but Epicurus and Thales:

Epicurus: An atomism of physical and psychical "atoms".
Thales: Aristotle got his "matter" idea from him.


@phioipthrift

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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 28, 2019, 7:22:25 AM10/28/19
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On 27 Oct 2019, at 22:52, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 5:08 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> "[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)

If numbers don't work for describing the subjective qualities of consciousness there is no evidence words can do any better.

Good!


As Ludwig Wittgenstein said "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence". Maurice Switzer said it even better "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt of it”.

And Lao-Ze said “the wise man remains silent, the fool does the talking”.

And the Löbian universal machine said <>t -> ~[]<>t (a Löbian machine is a universal machine which knows that she is Universal in the Turing-Church-Kleene sense).

People can read “<>t -> ~[]<>t” if I am consistent then I cannot prove/assert that I am consistent”.

Tarski theorem is somehow even more relevant here, as it shows that a machine cannot even define a notion of truth which encompasses all its assertable sentences. She feels as something bigger than herself exist, which is not even expressible in any third person manner.

Bruno




 John K Clark
 

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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 28, 2019, 7:26:19 AM10/28/19
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On 28 Oct 2019, at 09:16, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Sunday, October 27, 2019 at 4:52:46 PM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:


On Sat, Oct 26, 2019 at 5:08 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> "[Physical science] was designed to give mathematical models that can accurately predict the behavior of matter, and that's gone really well, but it was never designed to deal with the subjective qualities of consciousness." (@Philip_Goff)

If numbers don't work for describing the subjective qualities of consciousness there is no evidence words can do any better. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence". Maurice Switzer said it even better "It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt of it”.


After Gödel, Turing, Church we can be sure of one thing: we don’t know what universal machine are incapable of. Wen we build computer, we don’t know what we are doing. Of course, we rarely knows the long term of our actions, and that is normal given that we do know that we are ourselves Turing universal.

Bruno




 

The mathematical language that is currently used (like that in EFE and QFT) may only go so far. (We don't even know yet what gravity is.) Who knows what might be useful in the future (e.g. mereotoplogy*)?

But we could be leaving an age of analysis to enter an age of synthesis. We may be synthesizing things (materials science, synthetic biology, nanotechnology) that we cannot analyze (explain why they work).


* The basis for mereotopology is mereology which is a formal theory of parthood. It was first introduced in Husserl’s Logical Investigations; previously, it had received attention from those such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, and Kant. Specifically, it has proven helpful for disciplines such as natural-language analysis and artificial intelligence where more of an ontological motivation is desired. With the addition of topology, we derive mereotopology and become able to speak of partwhole relations. We, thus, become able to better understand the a priori nature of boundaries and holes, and we try to apply this to the questions philosophers and ontologists have been asking about these entities. Is a boundary an independent being? Do we view holes as immaterial particulars or spatiotemporal particulars?




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John Clark

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Oct 28, 2019, 7:35:05 AM10/28/19
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On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 4:16 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> We don't even know yet what gravity is.

I think General Relativity gives us a better fundamental understanding of what gravity is than we have for understanding what electromagnetism is, all Einstein starts with is the existence of movement, that is spacetime, and mass. Electromagnetism needs all that too but also needs to assume the existence of something called "electrical charge".  

> "we could be leaving an age of analysis to enter an age of synthesis. We may be synthesizing things (materials science, synthetic biology, nanotechnology) that we cannot analyze (explain why they work)."

Science can tell us how things work, but as for why...... logically the chain of why questions either goes on forever or it doesn't and ends in a brute fact, after that there is no why, that's just the way things are.

John K Clark

Brent Meeker

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Oct 28, 2019, 2:36:34 PM10/28/19
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The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to  interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a  mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal  interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of  such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is  expected to work.
    --—John von Neumann

spudb...@aol.com

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Oct 28, 2019, 7:29:18 PM10/28/19
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Speaking of GR and electric charge, does anyone consider that conscious might simply be a complex electro-magnetic field?? These dudes do in this interview, so this is emphatically something that I came up with, but find it...worth a look.

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Lawrence Crowell

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Oct 28, 2019, 8:22:52 PM10/28/19
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Thanks for writing that. It hits the nail on the head.

LC

Philip Thrift

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Oct 29, 2019, 4:46:20 AM10/29/19
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Of course the response to Wittgenstein is 

         If your world is limited by your language, make a new language.

@philipthift 

Bruno Marchal

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Oct 29, 2019, 6:32:34 AM10/29/19
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Digital Mechanism explains the why, at least in the sense that it justify that everything comes from (any) universal machinery, and that we cannot justify the existence of a universal machine or machinery without assuming one at the start. Then, in any universal machinery we can explain what is consciousness and where it comes from, and then it explains constructively how to derive the laws on the physical appearance (the observable) (by a first person (plural) statistics). Advantage: we get a theory of qualia, with the quanta as a subpart of it, and the quanta part can be verified experimentally, providing an indirect testing of the qualial theory. If the physics was Newtonian, that would be an argument against Mechanism, although if we keep up Mechanism, it would be an argument that we are in a designed simulation (which is a bit too much “conspiratorial” for me).

Bruno





John K Clark


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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 29, 2019, 6:36:50 AM10/29/19
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Science has stopped to seek the “why” since the “why” has been stolen by criminals. Be it through the stealing of theology, like 1500 years ago, or by the stealing of the health politics, like about 100 years ago. 

We can handle the why, once we accept o abandon the search of “certainty” (which, with mechanism, is close to insanity).

Bruno




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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 29, 2019, 6:39:48 AM10/29/19
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That will be quite useful to get a semantic for the first language, and this how we do it in practice (in everyday life and in mathematical logic), but the semantic of the second language will suffer the same drawback. 

One answer to Wittgenstein is “what are you talking about?”

Bruno





@philipthift 

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Brent Meeker

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Oct 29, 2019, 1:50:45 PM10/29/19
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On 10/29/2019 3:36 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 28 Oct 2019, at 19:36, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 10/28/2019 4:34 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Oct 28, 2019 at 4:16 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> We don't even know yet what gravity is.

I think General Relativity gives us a better fundamental understanding of what gravity is than we have for understanding what electromagnetism is, all Einstein starts with is the existence of movement, that is spacetime, and mass. Electromagnetism needs all that too but also needs to assume the existence of something called "electrical charge".  

> "we could be leaving an age of analysis to enter an age of synthesis. We may be synthesizing things (materials science, synthetic biology, nanotechnology) that we cannot analyze (explain why they work)."

Science can tell us how things work, but as for why...... logically the chain of why questions either goes on forever or it doesn't and ends in a brute fact, after that there is no why, that's just the way things are.

John K Clark

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to  interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a  mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal  interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of  such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is  expected to work.
    --—John von Neumann


Science has stopped to seek the “why” since the “why” has been stolen by criminals. Be it through the stealing of theology, like 1500 years ago, or by the stealing of the health politics, like about 100 years ago. 

We can handle the why, once we accept o abandon the search of “certainty” (which, with mechanism, is close to insanity).

Religion starts by telling us "why".  Lets see the making is work part first.

Brent

John Clark

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Oct 29, 2019, 4:25:38 PM10/29/19
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On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 1:50 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Religion starts by telling us "why". 

There is one why question religion can not answer and claims it would be wicked to even ask: Why is a religious answer better than no answer at all?

> Lets see the making is work part first.

Yes indeed! Until you know how something works you don't even know what why question to ask; for example medieval theologians were constantly asking why there were only 5 planets in the universe, 7 if you count the sun and the moon which they called planets. 

 John K Clark

Bruno Marchal

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Oct 30, 2019, 5:27:48 AM10/30/19
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I would say that religion starts from the semantic or the intuition, and then we make a theory trying to get that semantic, but it can never succeed completely, so science do exploration, and has to correct its view again and again.

Religion is the (only) goal.
Science is the (only) mean.

Both science and religion can become perverted when mixed with a tyranny or with other roots of argument by authority, and dogma.

Religion is the belief in (some) Truth.
(Fundamental) Science is the research of that Truth.

Mechanism + Tarski implies that such a fundamental truth cannot be defined, which is useful in the theory of consciousness (which cannot be defined either, except by reference toward such a Truth). 

Bruno





Brent

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Philip Thrift

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Oct 30, 2019, 5:36:43 AM10/30/19
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On Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 4:27:48 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 29 Oct 2019, at 18:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to  interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a  mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal  interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of  such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is  expected to work.
    --—John von Neumann


Science has stopped to seek the “why” since the “why” has been stolen by criminals. Be it through the stealing of theology, like 1500 years ago, or by the stealing of the health politics, like about 100 years ago. 

We can handle the why, once we accept o abandon the search of “certainty” (which, with mechanism, is close to insanity).

Religion starts by telling us "why".  Lets see the making is work part first.


I would say that religion starts from the semantic or the intuition, and then we make a theory trying to get that semantic, but it can never succeed completely, so science do exploration, and has to correct its view again and again.

Religion is the (only) goal.
Science is the (only) mean.

Both science and religion can become perverted when mixed with a tyranny or with other roots of argument by authority, and dogma.

Religion is the belief in (some) Truth.
(Fundamental) Science is the research of that Truth.

Mechanism + Tarski implies that such a fundamental truth cannot be defined, which is useful in the theory of consciousness (which cannot be defined either, except by reference toward such a Truth). 

Bruno




Pragmatism's first rule: Don't talk about truth. 


@philipthrift

Bruno Marchal

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Oct 30, 2019, 5:40:59 AM10/30/19
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On 29 Oct 2019, at 21:24, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 1:50 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Religion starts by telling us "why". 

There is one why question religion can not answer and claims it would be wicked to even ask: Why is a religious answer better than no answer at all?

If a religion answers, with an air of claiming it is a definitive answer; then it is not a religion, but a fraud.

The religion is just the faith that there is a rational, intelligible, answer, but it will never claim to have it, except under the form of a theory to be tested.

Of course, most institutionalised religions *are* fraud, since a long time. They are just tools to give power to a tyran by exploiting the childhood nostalgia of having a “Father”, and the fear of death, etc. They hide the scientific theology which brought doubts on all theories, and by this way, on all tyran’s pretensions.

Making theology back in science is just allowing doubts and critics in the fundamental science, but today, some scientists are (consciously? Unconsciously) religious by mocking those who doubt the last theology in fashion (materialism). The problem is that by mocking any science, it let the science in the hand of the charlatans of the intistutionalised religion, and no progress are possible, except secretly by the dissidents or the courageous people.

Religion is the assumption of meaning. Science is the mean top make it clearer and testable so that we can improve the fundamental research. Both Mechanism and Quantum Mechanics illustrates the difficulties of the Materialist Metaphysics/Religion.

Bruno





> Lets see the making is work part first.

Yes indeed! Until you know how something works you don't even know what why question to ask; for example medieval theologians were constantly asking why there were only 5 planets in the universe, 7 if you count the sun and the moon which they called planets. 

 John K Clark

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John Clark

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Oct 30, 2019, 6:43:12 AM10/30/19
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On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 5:40 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> There is one why question religion can not answer and claims it would be wicked to even ask: Why is a religious answer better than no answer at all?

> If a religion answers, with an air of claiming it is a definitive answer; then it is not a religion, but a fraud.

I agree of course but that wasn't what I was getting at. If there was some deep existential problem you wanted to know more about I can understand why you would want to discuss it with a mathematician or a scientist, but why would you ask a expert on religion? Why would you expect a theologian to give a better answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" than for example, an expert on gardening or an expert on plumbing?

 John K Clark 

Brent Meeker

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Oct 30, 2019, 5:42:44 PM10/30/19
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On 10/30/2019 2:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 29 Oct 2019, at 21:24, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 1:50 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Religion starts by telling us "why". 

There is one why question religion can not answer and claims it would be wicked to even ask: Why is a religious answer better than no answer at all?

If a religion answers, with an air of claiming it is a definitive answer; then it is not a religion, but a fraud.

So all recognized religions are frauds.   Only some personal philosophy that no philologist would call a religion is not a fraud.

Brent

Brent Meeker

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Oct 30, 2019, 5:49:08 PM10/30/19
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At least you could expect the plumber's theories to hold water.

Brent, with apologies to Bertrand Russell.

John Clark

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Oct 31, 2019, 6:27:56 AM10/31/19
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On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 5:49 PM 'Brent Meeker'  <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> If there was some deep existential problem you wanted to know more about I can understand why you would want to discuss it with a mathematician or a scientist, but why would you ask a expert on religion? Why would you expect a theologian to give a better answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" than for example, an expert on gardening or an expert on plumbing?

> At least you could expect the plumber's theories to hold water.
Brent, with apologies to Bertrand Russell.

Good one!

John K Clark

 

Bruno Marchal

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Oct 31, 2019, 8:16:45 AM10/31/19
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Don’t invoke truth, yes, that is part of the machine theology. But we can talk about it in the frame of metaphysical hypothesis (not necessarily ontological commitment, note). With mechanism, we don’t need more than the sigma_1 truth, which definable in Peano arithmetic, but then we have to admit we cannot define the whole arithmetical truth, and indeed, we can’t, no more that we can define the difference between finite and finite in any completely satisfiable way. 

The “truth” that we cannot define is the God of Plato and of the neopythagorean and neoplatonist theologies. We can indeed never invoke it, but we can “meta-talk” about it from diverse possible hypothesis. Mechanism makes everything simple and transparent here, for those willing to study a few books in Mathematical Logic.

Bruno





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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 31, 2019, 8:45:49 AM10/31/19
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Because theology was at the start suppose to handle this subject and type of questioning, and in fact, it all begun with Pythagorus’ proposal that everything is explained by the natural numbers.

After that, theology has been a branch requiring a high level diploma in mathematics. Even in the years 1600, it was still normal for a (christian!) priest to be a good mathematician, like the bishop Nicolas Oresme, considered by some to be at the origin of “modern science” (a good book is 

Then Digital Mechanism (aka computationalism) comes back to explaining indeed everything with natural numbers . 
It provides furthermore an explanation why we cannot use less than natural numbers (with addition and multiplication, or Turing equivalent). For example it can be proved that all axioms of Robinson Arithmetic(*) (RA) are independent of each other. None can be proved from the remaining one, and only the full seven axioms are Turing emulable.

To be sure, we do have a much weaker theory than RA, usually called R, for Robinson again, but it has infinitely many axioms (which are all key theorems of RA to prove its Turing universality).

So the first answer given by the earliest theologians was the correct one, *when* we assume Mechanism. That is not a definitive answer, as we cannot publicly know if mechanism is correct, even after surviving a classical teleportation (which can still lead to a private certainty, but that one *can* be false, due to anosognosia).

Note that the metaphysical/theological (Aristotelian) materialist hypothesis also provides an answer, as it asserts that everything comes from some “physical reality”, which remains possible, but suffer from the hardness to define what physical means, and from having put the problem of mind under the rug for a very long period. The first test of digital mechanism (QM) sides much more for Mechanism than Materialism.

The idea that theology is not the fundamental science is an idea which came after theology became simply a tool for bandits to manipulate people and exploits the natural fear of death. But if you read Proclus’ very classical treatise of neoplatonist theology, you will not see any references to revelation, or to sacred text, only to mathematics. It proceeds only through definition (rather precise for that time) and reasoning, and is not a long way from the “modern” (still a bit ignored) explanation through computer science, arithmetic and mathematical logic.

Bruno

(*) RA axioms are the axioms and inference rules of classical logic + the axioms:

1) 0 ≠ s(x)                     
2) s(x) = s(y) -> x = y     
3) x = 0 v Ey(x = s(y))    
4) x+0 = x                      
5) x+s(y) = s(x+y) 
6) x*0=0                  
7) x*s(y)=(x*y)+x


Note that you can define and prove all of RA theorem and axioms in the simpler theory, not relying on classical logic, having the three inference rules:

1) If A = B and A = C, then B = C
2) If A = B then AC = BC
3) If A = B then CA = CB

And the two axioms:

4) KAB = A
5) SABC = AC(BC)

As I have shown, still this year. To avoid the trivial model, we add the axiom that S ≠ K, requiring then a bit of propositional logic (to handle the negation).

Bruno




 John K Clark 

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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 31, 2019, 9:00:32 AM10/31/19
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On 30 Oct 2019, at 22:42, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 10/30/2019 2:40 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 29 Oct 2019, at 21:24, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 1:50 PM 'Brent Meeker' <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Religion starts by telling us "why". 

There is one why question religion can not answer and claims it would be wicked to even ask: Why is a religious answer better than no answer at all?

If a religion answers, with an air of claiming it is a definitive answer; then it is not a religion, but a fraud.

So all recognized religions are frauds.  

Not at all. I have no evidence that christianity was a fraud before 529. The student of Hy^patia were mostly christian and neoplatonist. After that the whole science was a fraud, as you could be sent at the stake even just claiming that the Earth was going around the Sun, like biology, in more recent time, in the USSR, where you could be sent to the Goulag if you claim the existence of chromosome (a so bourgeoise idea!).

Islam seems to have been (clearly) a fraud only after 1148 or 1248 (I have different version of the history). I have gap for the history of early Islam.

I have no clue that judaism, has eve been a fraud, although some orthodox can get very near. I think Maimonides has prevented judaism to fall in that theological trap.
I have added sometimes the same for Taoism, but since then I have discovered that some Chinese emperor did institutionalised Taoism (despite Lao-Ze, Chuang-Ze and Lie-ze mocks in deep that very idea), and indeed sorry after this the Taoist Armies became the most feared armies in China. 

It is normal that the more a science is fundamental the more the tyran want to control it, and perveted out. We are living this right now in the domain of health and energy.



Only some personal philosophy that no philologist would call a religion is not a fraud.

All science becomes a fraud when perverted by special interest. They were all “fraud” in Occident, before the Renaissance. But after the renaissance, most have back to the academy, and theology just take a bit more of time, due to our tolerance of authoritarianism in that (admittedly hot) domain.

Bruno




Brent


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Bruno Marchal

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Oct 31, 2019, 9:04:02 AM10/31/19
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Lol. That’s a good one!

Now, I am not sure plumber really exist. In practice. Can’t find one. Have to hold the water all by myself …

Bruno



Brent, with apologies to Bertrand Russell.

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John Clark

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Oct 31, 2019, 9:36:51 AM10/31/19
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On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 8:45 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> If there was some deep existential problem you wanted to know more about I can understand why you would want to discuss it with a mathematician or a scientist, but why would you ask a expert on religion? Why would you expect a theologian to give a better answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" than for example, an expert on gardening or an expert on plumbing?

> Because theology was at the start suppose to handle this subject and type of questioning,

And in that theology failed spectacularly, not only did it fail to provide any answers it couldn't even find the right questions to ask. 

> and in fact, it all begun with Pythagorus’ proposal that everything is explained by the natural numbers.

And in that Pythagoras also failed, he couldn't even explain why the square root of 2 is irrational and thought one of the most important philosophical questions that needed answering is why there are only 7 planets in the universe, 5 if you don't count the sun and the moon.

> Then Digital Mechanism (aka computationalism) comes back to explaining indeed everything with natural numbers . 

And nothing can understand those explanations unless there is something that can process natural numbers, and for that you need a brain, and for that you need matter that obeys the laws of physics.  
 
>For example it can be proved that all axioms of Robinson Arithmetic(*) (RA) are independent of each other. None can be proved from the remaining one, and only the full seven axioms are Turing emulable.

Matter that is organized in such a way that it operates according to Robinson Arithmetic (and of course the laws of physics) is Turing emulable, but naked axioms of Robinson Arithmetic are not Turing emulable, they are not anything emulable because they can't *DO* anything. In the same way matter that has a correspondence with the blueprints of a 747 airliner can fly you across the Pacific Ocean, but you can't fly across anything on blueprints alone.  
  
>The idea that theology is not the fundamental science is an idea which [...]

Forget fundamental, the idea that theology is a science of any sort is idiotic .

John K Clark


John Clark

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Oct 31, 2019, 9:55:45 AM10/31/19
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On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 9:00 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
 
>  I have no evidence that christianity was a fraud before 529.

So you believe Jesus was the son of God, that God sent His only son to Earth so humans could torture him to death because that was the only way God could forgive them for eating an apple? You believe Jesus could turn water into wine and rose from the dead? I think Bigfoot and flying saucer men in New Mexico is far more likely.   

> I have no clue that judaism, has eve been a fraud,

So you believe in a talking snake, Noah's Ark, and God creating the universe in 4004 BC in just 6 days?

John K Clark



 

Philip Thrift

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Oct 31, 2019, 12:23:30 PM10/31/19
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What is written here:

So according to "material-intrinsic semantics" the 4 that a vacuum tube computer produces when it adds 2+2 is not the same 4 that a transistor computer produces when it adds 2+2 ... So how can a serious person consider anything as monumentally silly as a computational theory involving "material-intrinsic semantics"?

John K Clark


is just as anti-material (belief in immaterial things) as the stories above. So that's why you can't criticize Bruno's view.

@philipthrift
 

John Clark

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Oct 31, 2019, 4:09:21 PM10/31/19
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It's true, just like Bruno I also believe in the existence of immaterial things. I believe that adjectives exist and in fact I am one, I am the way atoms behave when they are organized in a Johnkclarkian way. I disagree with Bruno in that I maintain adjectives can not exist without nouns existing first, but Bruno claims they can.

I believe in other non-material things too. Adjectives describe what nouns are, verbs describe what nouns do, and adverbs describe verbs. All of those things exist, but it all starts with nouns, without them you've got nothing not even time because time needs change and without nouns that obey the laws of physics nothing would change.

 John K Clark

Philip Thrift

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Oct 31, 2019, 4:46:56 PM10/31/19
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I think these (adverbs, adjectives) are just inventions of language that we use to navigate and manipulate matter. We are bewitched by language into thinking linguistic things exist that don't exist. 


@philipthrift

John Clark

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Oct 31, 2019, 6:36:37 PM10/31/19
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On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 4:46 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's true, just like Bruno I also believe in the existence of immaterial things. I believe that adjectives exist and in fact I am one, I am the way atoms behave when they are organized in a Johnkclarkian way. I disagree with Bruno in that I maintain adjectives can not exist without nouns existing first, but Bruno claims they can. I believe in other non-material things too. Adjectives describe what nouns are, verbs describe what nouns do, and adverbs describe verbs. All of those things exist, but it all starts with nouns, without them you've got nothing not even time because time needs change and without nouns that obey the laws of physics nothing would change.

> I think these (adverbs, adjectives) are just inventions of language that we use to navigate and manipulate matter. We are bewitched by language into thinking linguistic things exist that don't exist. 

Well maybe so, but we think and communicate in language, words and numbers are all we have so imperfect or not they will just have to do.

 John K Clark

Bruno Marchal

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Nov 1, 2019, 6:09:04 AM11/1/19
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On 31 Oct 2019, at 14:36, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 8:45 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> If there was some deep existential problem you wanted to know more about I can understand why you would want to discuss it with a mathematician or a scientist, but why would you ask a expert on religion? Why would you expect a theologian to give a better answer to the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" than for example, an expert on gardening or an expert on plumbing?

> Because theology was at the start suppose to handle this subject and type of questioning,

And in that theology failed spectacularly, not only did it fail to provide any answers it couldn't even find the right questions to ask. 

It provided science. Science is born from religion and the belief that there is a reality independent of us, which was the initial impetus of theology. You need perhaps to study a bit of history of science, but you have to keep in mind the fact that we are in the materialist era to get things right.





> and in fact, it all begun with Pythagorus’ proposal that everything is explained by the natural numbers.

And in that Pythagoras also failed, he couldn't even explain why the square root of 2 is irrational

He could explain this. Actually, the Babylonian already notice this, and Pythagorus re-discovered that important truth. It explains it by proving it. I am not sure what sort of explanation you ask for. A simple reasoning shows that if sqrt(2) was rational, it would consist in an irreducible fraction with an even numerator and an even denominator, which is of course impossible.



and thought one of the most important philosophical questions that needed answering is why there are only 7 planets in the universe, 5 if you don't count the sun and the moon.

> Then Digital Mechanism (aka computationalism) comes back to explaining indeed everything with natural numbers . 

And nothing can understand those explanations unless there is something that can process natural numbers,

The definition of process in computer science is “implementation in a Turing universal environment”.

Then it has been shown that the arithmetical reality, or even tiny fragment of it, are Turing universal.

Here you invoke without saying your “god” Primary Matter. 

I am agnostic on this, but can explain why such God is incompatible with the assumption of digital Mechanism.




and for that you need a brain, and for that you need matter that obeys the laws of physics.  

And so, this could follow only in a non mechanist theory of mind.



 
>For example it can be proved that all axioms of Robinson Arithmetic(*) (RA) are independent of each other. None can be proved from the remaining one, and only the full seven axioms are Turing emulable.

Matter that is organized in such a way that it operates according to Robinson Arithmetic

I don’t believe in Matter. I don’t do that assumption, as my goal is to explain Matter, in a non circular way.




(and of course the laws of physics) is Turing emulable, but naked axioms of Robinson Arithmetic are not Turing emulable,


Robinson arithmetic is Turing emulable.

All Turing universal system can emulate any Turing universal system.




they are not anything emulable because they can't *DO* anything. In the same way matter that has a correspondence with the blueprints of a 747 airliner can fly you across the Pacific Ocean, but you can't fly across anything on blueprints alone.  
  
>The idea that theology is not the fundamental science is an idea which [...]

Forget fundamental, the idea that theology is a science of any sort is idiotic .

With statement like that, the charlatans in that domain will continue to win.

Bruno





John K Clark



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Bruno Marchal

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On 31 Oct 2019, at 14:55, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 9:00 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
 
>  I have no evidence that christianity was a fraud before 529.

So you believe Jesus was the son of God, that God sent His only son to Earth so humans could torture him to death because that was the only way God could forgive them for eating an apple? You believe Jesus could turn water into wine and rose from the dead? I think Bigfoot and flying saucer men in New Mexico is far more likely.   

Amazingly, I have not found any evidence that the early christians, among the educated one, ever believe in such fairy tales.




> I have no clue that judaism, has eve been a fraud,

So you believe in a talking snake, Noah's Ark, and God creating the universe in 4004 BC in just 6 days?

Nope. 

I think that the early educated christians were neoplatonist, and they were quickly fighting against the radicals who claimed that the legend of Jesus should be taken literally. The legend of Jesus seems to come from Egypt, and was used as a parabola by Jesus (jewish and Israelite) probably to convey a bit of judaism and greek theology to the people. It is hard to be sure of anything, by lack of documents, and also because we are still in the era of the institutionalised religion, which are basically all fraudulent, with diverse degree of fraud.

A similar problem appeared clearly with Islam, when Al ghazals win his debate with Averroes in 1148/1248.

Institutionliased religion is to theology what astrology is to astronomy. Yet, wiithout astrology, astronomy would not have appeared, or more slowly, as the astrological were the first to observe the planet. They were just interpreting the data a bit naively, but so we are, like with the naive idea of a some real matter out there, for example (assuming mechanism, this is about as naïve than astrology).

Bruno




John K Clark



 


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Bruno Marchal

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Nov 1, 2019, 6:29:51 AM11/1/19
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On 31 Oct 2019, at 21:08, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 12:23 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thursday, October 31, 2019 at 8:55:45 AM UTC-5, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 9:00 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
 
>>>  I have no evidence that christianity was a fraud before 529.

>> So you believe Jesus was the son of God, that God sent His only son to Earth so humans could torture him to death because that was the only way God could forgive them for eating an apple? You believe Jesus could turn water into wine and rose from the dead? I think Bigfoot and flying saucer men in New Mexico is far more likely.   

>>> I have no clue that judaism, has eve been a fraud,

>>So you believe in a talking snake, Noah's Ark, and God creating the universe in 4004 BC in just 6 days?
John K Clark

> What is written here:

"So according to "material-intrinsic semantics" the 4 that a vacuum tube computer produces when it adds 2+2 is not the same 4 that a transistor computer produces when it adds 2+2 ... So how can a serious person consider anything as monumentally silly as a computational theory involving "material-intrinsic semantics"?"
John K Clark

> is just as anti-material (belief in immaterial things) as the stories above. So that's why you can't criticize Bruno's view.

It's true, just like Bruno I also believe in the existence of immaterial things. I believe that adjectives exist and in fact I am one, I am the way atoms behave when they are organized in a Johnkclarkian way. I disagree with Bruno in that I maintain adjectives can not exist without nouns existing first, but Bruno claims they can.


Nope. 

I need nouns too.

Here are the nouns I use: K, S, (K K), (K S), etc.

Or, 0, s(0), s(s(0)), …

You can chose. I need nouns and predicate, that is why I use first order logic, which gives the means to handle noun, properties, predicates, etc.




I believe in other non-material things too. Adjectives describe what nouns are, verbs describe what nouns do, and adverbs describe verbs. All of those things exist, but it all starts with nouns, without them you've got nothing not even time because time needs change and without nouns that obey the laws of physics nothing would change.

With arithmetic, all changes can be obtained from the successor relation (the physical changes are harder, but comes in some of the self-referential modes, as I explained in the papers or sometimes here).

With the combinators, change is provided by the K and S axioms.

No need to invoke an ontological commitment in some magical stuff which would be responsible for all the rest, as such magical stuff would need to be able to make some computations more real than other, when what is needed is that some computations get a bigger relative measure, which is provided by the self-reference,tial “observable modes”.

Bruno





 John K Clark

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Nov 1, 2019, 1:05:54 PM11/1/19
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On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 6:22 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>>>  I have no evidence that christianity was a fraud before 529.
>> So you believe Jesus was the son of God, that God sent His only son to Earth so humans could torture him to death because that was the only way God could forgive them for eating an apple? You believe Jesus could turn water into wine and rose from the dead? I think Bigfoot and flying saucer men in New Mexico is far more likely.   

> Amazingly, I have not found any evidence that the early christians, among the educated one, ever believe in such fairy tales.

The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written decades after the death of Jesus but centuries before 529, and although they often contradict each other they do have one thing in common, all 4 contain wall to wall miracles. And those gospels, silly as they are, contain the core of Christianity. Do you honestly think christianity would have grown as fast as it did if it didn't make sensational claims? It became popular for the same reason supermarket tabloids became popular a few thousand years later.    

>>> I have no clue that judaism, has eve been a fraud,
>> So you believe in a talking snake, Noah's Ark, and God creating the universe in 4004 BC in just 6 days?

> Nope. I think that the early educated christians were neoplatonist,

I don't think early christians were educated, I don't think they could even spell "Plato" much less knew what neoplatonism was. And in the above I was talking about judaism and so were you.

 John K Clark

John Clark

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Nov 1, 2019, 1:28:44 PM11/1/19
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On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 6:09 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> theology failed spectacularly, not only did it fail to provide any answers it couldn't even find the right questions to ask. 

> It provided science. Science is born from religion

In the same way knowledge is born from ignorance perhaps. As the bible says: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things".

> You need perhaps to study a bit of history of science,

I would bet money I could beat you on a quiz on the history of science.

> He could explain this.

Pythagoras could prove the square root of 2 was irrational but he wasn't happy about it because although he knew it was true he felt he didn't understand  why it was true, and he made his followers vow to keep the scandelius truth secret; there is even a story, perhaps apocryphal, that he murdered one of them for breaking this vow and telling a outsider that the square root of 2 could not be expressed as a fraction. 
 
> The definition of process in computer science is “implementation in a Turing universal environment”.

Mathematicians are free to make any sort of definition they want, but few of them are as silly as you and think that after they have proved something about the thing they have just arbitrarily defined that must mean they have proven that thing they defined physically exists. 
 
> I don’t believe in Matter.

Who cares? Belief doesn't matter, Plato who you love so much didn't believe the Earth orbited the sun but that didn't make it untrue.
 
> Robinson arithmetic is Turing emulable.

Yes, but you've forgotten what that means. You think that by proving a system is Turing emulable that means the axioms alone can make calculations, and that is ridiculous. Why do you suppose Turing himself spent so much time building actual physical machines?

> Here you invoke without saying your “god” Primary Matter [...] 

And that is my cue to say goodbye because nothing intelligent ever follows.

John K Clark  

Brent Meeker

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Nov 1, 2019, 3:44:02 PM11/1/19
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On 11/1/2019 3:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> I think that the early educated christians were neoplatonist, and they
> were quickly fighting against the radicals who claimed that the legend
> of Jesus should be taken literally.

In others words religion doesn't mean what the dictionary says. Theology
isn't what theologians write about.  And Christians aren't those people
who claim to believe in the Christian bible.  And Bruno agrees with
Humpty Dumpty.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

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Nov 3, 2019, 6:23:52 AM11/3/19
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On 1 Nov 2019, at 18:28, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Nov 1, 2019 at 6:09 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

>> theology failed spectacularly, not only did it fail to provide any answers it couldn't even find the right questions to ask. 

> It provided science. Science is born from religion

In the same way knowledge is born from ignorance perhaps.

Exactly. People used Zeus for Thunder, because they were ignorant of what could be Thunder. And the first use of gods was to mean “concept (that we don’t grasp)” by the earlier researchers. 



As the bible says: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things”.

Which all educated person did. The christians following the course of Hypatia in Alexandra where still knowing that the fundamental question is not about the existence of God (the ultimate reality that we search, the reason of why “here and now”, which exists by definition or assumption for any researcher in the fundamental domain), but on the question of the existence of nature (real or appearance from a deeper reality perspective, which would be mathematical or perhaps musical (wavy), etc.).




> You need perhaps to study a bit of history of science,

I would bet money I could beat you on a quiz on the history of science.

> He could explain this.

Pythagoras could prove the square root of 2 was irrational but he wasn't happy about it because although he knew it was true he felt he didn't understand  why it was true,

That, according to some recent studies is a myth. He knew perfectly well why sqrt(2) has to be different from any ratio, and there are no proof that Pythagorus taught this could refute his all-number philosophy, despite lacking Church’s thesis which somehow rehabilitate that position in the fundamental domain. Once you grasp that all you need to run a program is a universal machine/number, it is up to believer in a physical reality to explain what that could be, and how it could interfere with the computations realised in arithmetic. But for this you need to understand well the difference between a theory and a model, that is mainly the difference between proof and truth (as well illustrated by the incompleteness phenomenon).




and he made his followers vow to keep the scandelius truth secret; there is even a story, perhaps apocryphal, that he murdered one of them for breaking this vow and telling a outsider that the square root of 2 could not be expressed as a fraction. 

Yes, it is probably apocryphal. We lack sources on this. According to some, a branch of Pythagorianism was rather sectary, and the guy would her been killed for telling a secret, not that secret in particular.



 
> The definition of process in computer science is “implementation in a Turing universal environment”.

Mathematicians are free to make any sort of definition they want, but few of them are as silly as you and think that after they have proved something about the thing they have just arbitrarily defined that must mean they have proven that thing they defined physically exists. 

But it is up to those committing themselves ontologically to provide at least some evidence. Computation have been discovered in mathematics, and then in arithmetic (despite Gödel did the hard work before). This has been discovered independently by Emil Post (10 years before all the others, but he did not publish), Gödel (he missed the machine, though), and then explicitly (and published) by Church 1936, Turing 1936, Kleene 1936, etc.).



 
> I don’t believe in Matter.

Who cares? Belief doesn't matter, Plato who you love so

It is not a question of loving, but of reasoning.



much didn't believe the Earth orbited the sun but that didn't make it untrue.

That’s true, but then I do not defend their astronomy, so that is not relevant. Perhaps you believe that if someone said something wrong, all what he said is wrong, but that does not follow.



 
> Robinson arithmetic is Turing emulable.

Yes, but you've forgotten what that means. You think that by proving a system is Turing emulable that means the axioms alone can make calculations, and that is ridiculous.

That does not follow from the fact that Robinson arithmetic provability iOS Turing emulable (which is rather trivial) but from the fact that Robinson Arithmetic is Turing Universal, which is not obvious at all.



Why do you suppose Turing himself spent so much time building actual physical machines?

By curiosity on the Riemann Zeta function, at first, and then as a tool to decode the encrypted message of the Nazis.

Bruno



> Here you invoke without saying your “god” Primary Matter [...] 

And that is my cue to say goodbye because nothing intelligent ever follows.

John K Clark  

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Bruno Marchal

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Nov 3, 2019, 6:42:58 AM11/3/19
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> On 1 Nov 2019, at 20:43, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 11/1/2019 3:22 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>> I think that the early educated christians were neoplatonist, and they were quickly fighting against the radicals who claimed that the legend of Jesus should be taken literally.
>
> In others words religion doesn't mean what the dictionary says. Theology isn't what theologians write about.

Of course theology is what theologian wrote above, but since 529, theology has been mixed to “politics” by force and violence, so we need to translate what they are saying, as they could easily been burned alive if talking to freely. The same happened with genetics in the USSR or on shorter time scale. The communist would have succeeded in making the whole planet communist, geneticians would claim that chromosome does not exist, and that would still be “genetics”, and the dictionary would say that Lyssenko is the great genetician who debuted the so bourgeois theory of chromosome and genus.

When you abstract form the institutionalised religion, but even with them if you look closely, theology is the right term in Proclus' theology, and the arabs have translated "Plotinus theology" by “Aristotle theology” and knew the difference between fake political theology and the theology done by the thinker in Greece and India, and that one is very close to the theology of the universal machine (the unknown truth about a machine, including what they cannot prove, but intuit, guess, etc.).



> And Christians aren't those people who claim to believe in the Christian bible.

I was talking of the early neoplatonist christians, those who were following the course on Hypatia, at a time when theology was still a science. Jesus and all that was just a popular fairy tales account, but for the intellectual, it was like “theology at the maternal level”, and most were reasoning when considering the fundamental questions.

Why do atheists keeps defending the idea that theology is only the naïve account made into politics fr obvious tyrannic reason.



> And Bruno agrees with Humpty Dumpty.

All scientists do. When I was asked to use “psychology” instead of “theology”, I made no problem. Eventually I calme back with the term “theology” because I was obliged to distinguish between three level of reality (biological, psychological and theological) with the usual common sense definition of those words.

If you prefer, we can define theology by the study of the afterlife, but this will seem even more crackpot, like new things always look like.

Forget the vocabulary, and let us come back on the substance (pun included).

I really suggest people to study “Proclus’ theology” or “Plotinus (who avoid that term). And the best books on this are written usually by christians. If you can find an English version of Jean Troiullard’s book “L’un et l'âme selon Proclos” I recommend it a lot. That is book where the similarity between computer science (and the logic of self-reference) and the greek-indian theology strikes the eyes.

Bruno



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