Posted on 01/23/2005 12:39:01 PM PST by traviskicks
A metaphysical exploration of Religion, Consciousness, Free Will, Randomness, and, ultimately, the nature of God. Neuroscience, networking (of man, God, and governments), and AI computing are all discussed.
A Theory of God
God has never been defined to the satisfaction of rational man. Indeed, even His very existence has never been universally acknowledged. From Thomas Aquinas's famous '5 proofs of God' (3) and the writings of other great philosophers of the catholic church, to the tautological hierarchical constructions of modern philosophers (1), there has never been a logical argument strong enough to force all the atheists and agnostics of the world to believe.
It has been said that men are only truly passionate about things that are not innately obvious to everyone. (2) The bitter and acrimonious debate over the curvature of the earth that took place in the 15th Century would today be met with laughter and derision because the fact that the earth is a sphere is so obvious to nearly everyone. Although any one religion, or even God Himself, is not universally accepted in the same way, a large majority of people across the world profess a belief in God (over 90% of Americans believe in God (68), (69) ).
However, we must also consider that the vague definitions of God may contribute to His apparent non-universal acknowledgement. If we can't define what something is then how can people communicate their belief in it? It is most interesting is that this lack of definition is present across nearly all the world's religions:
Christianity/Judaism: I am that I am. (Exodus 3, 14) You cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live. (Exodus 33:20)
(Excerpt) Read more at neoperspectives.com ...
ping
Greetings to you traviskicks!
I'm looking forward to reading your Theory via your website. I frequently read Kurzweilai's (Kurzweilai.net) work and therefore have the feeling there will be parallels.
Take care!
many things have vague or unagreed upon definitions. Try to give a concise definiton of what existence is, or what time is, or even what love is. No easy task. Yet we all know when something exists, we all understand the passage of time, and we all recognize the power of love. We can't define these things, but they are indispensible to our whole conception of reality. I don't see why God is any different.
Another intellectual lightweight exposes himself.
Kursweil's claims, although possible, are not supported by evidence and frequently rely on an oversimplification of intellience, consciousness, and human ability. I, too, once believed his claims for the future. Then I challenged his premises.
umm...is that comment referring to my post or the author of the article?
This concept is a human abstract thinking tool to deal with the unknown or unknowable, but truly random forces don't actually exist, and therefore neither does free will. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle refers to our inability to observe a subatomic particle without disturbing it. If we *could* observe without disturbing then we could understand and calculate everything that happens using math. The true definition of random is what is currently unknown, and possibly unknowable to humans.
There never will be. They make their own choice, despite all the evidence, both internal and external. Much of their search is simple rationalization to making and affirming their own idols.
This article comprises a lot of highfalutin arguments strung together here, assuming "nobody" has the truth but only a piece of it and therefore we can somehow search it out through our own intellect and understanding. We can't.
But, in a sense, you're right. Man cannot fully understand God, His purposes or his methods. However, the Bible (not the Koran, not other religious scriptures) does reveal what we need to know and we can therefore act by faith on that knowledge - both historical and spiritual. God has already revealed Himself to us in full measure through His Word and by His Son. God has already done all the work for us and doesn't require us to discover Him by our intellectual or moral efforts.
Most religions try to "find" God. So do rationalists, if they choose to attempt the effort rather than simply being cynical. Those on either avenues are wasting their time. God has done the work for us. He doesn't require us to do it. All this exercise is fuss and feathers. Interesting, maybe, but unnecessary to know all about God - or that part of Him we can understand and need to know. In fact, our vain minds probably throw us off His revealed Truth and onto false rabbit trails wherein we think we can intuit and somehow "discover" Him by our own efforts and reasoning. We needn't bother. The work has been done. By Him. It is freely available to the most simple or the most cerebral. It need not be "discovered" through our further efforts.
Nice try, but no cigar!
I tend to agree but is he doing so to explain the complexities in simplistic terms so the masses would "get it". Jesus the intellectual spoke in parables so the masses would understand. Confucius was no different. And let's not forget Albert's words of keeping it simple.......but not to simple.
Have any of you clicked on the link and looked over the entire article? Look at all that gibberish! Whoever wrote this is is need of a long vacation. His brain is scrambled from excessive intellectualism.
- The notion of "free will" is well-defined to the satisfaction of just about every rigorous theorist. We can prove mathematically that every algorithmically finite system will perceive itself to have something exactly analogous to "free will", it is a simple consequence of mathematics. The internal uncertainty is mathematically required in any context, but a context always exists in which there is no uncertainty for the same system.
- The human mind is algorithmically finite by every mathematical test for such things. These tests work on "black box" systems; their efficacy does not rely on having any knowledge of the system internals. There is no test for the opposite -- the best one can assert is that the nature of a system is inconclusive -- but this inconclusivity does not seem to be a necessary assertion in this case.
- The brain is computationally inferior to modern silicon in every aspect except one: memory reference rates, which the human brain outstrips silicon by about three orders of magnitude for conventional hardware. The mathematical definitions of general intelligence (see Hutter et al) that have been proven in the last few years and are generally accepted proscribe an implementation that is bound by effective reference rates. We can reengineer silicon to address this, but until very recently not much effort has gone toward this outside of narrow supercomputing domains; a lot of this is the result of basic architectural differences between the human brain and silicon process technologies.
- Among rigorous theorists (i.e. not philosophers playing semantic games and waxing eloquent), consciousness is generally agreed to be a necessary emergent property of all large-scale systems capable of algorithmic induction (the generally proven architectural model of intelligence in mathematics). This is not the "big question" that it used to be, but you dismiss it out of hand and assert that it is something extra and mysterious. Since the architecture of the human brain is a very good match for algorithmic induction (its structures and behaviors map very well into what is expected in that model), it should not be surprising then that the human brain expresses consciousness. Note that quantum mechanics is orthogonal to intelligence and therefore consciousness; QM is purely time-domain, intelligence is purely space-domain, and you cannot translate time-complexity into space-complexity (though you can go the other direction).
Those are my off-the-cuff technical remarks without having read the entire article yet. We now have a fundamental understanding of intelligence and intelligent systems in mathematics that we have never had even five or six years ago. What is interesting is that our understanding now makes it patently obvious why everything we came up with previously was incorrect. The truth is far more elegant and slightly stranger mathematically than what has long been imagined. It surprises most people to discover that we never had a general mathematical basis for intelligence in the 20th century to work from.
You will be hearing a lot more about this in the next three years or so. It still has not filtered out of the hardcore research circles, though it IS moving into development phases.
um... I have a feeling that you all read the excerpt and not the full paper.
This is 'A Theory of God', not 'a theory of no God'. One cannot deny the difficulty in defining God. That is merely where this paper starts.
I suggest you all read the whole thing before making assumptions.
Gritty, I largely concur with what you wrote. I don't think it is in any way contradictory to the excerpt.
Kurzweil is respected as a person in the AI community, but most core research theorists find his grasp of some fairly fundamental issues to be lacking. He makes a good pop-sci figurehead for more mundane aspects, but his understanding of the fundamental theoretical nature of the problem is quite poor. His theory is stuck in a 1980s era model, which we know is broken.
These models are like religion for many researchers, and once they latch on they never let go. Part of the problem is that there are many theoretical paths to intelligent implementations, but very few tractable paths. Yet once a path is proved to be intractable, many researchers continue on that path, neither addressing the intractability nor switching to a better model. Human nature I guess.
Look at all that gibberish! Whoever wrote this is is need of a long vacation. His brain is scrambled from excessive intellectualism.
---
LOL thnx. Yea, I think your right in that if you over analyze some things you can end up worse than if you don't analyze it at all. Hopefully that is not the case here.... :)
I tend to agree but how do we know God is a he, she or something we can't understand?
It doesn't. It only depends on subjective uncertainty (limits on predictive accuracy in some context), which looks similar to "randomness" but is not.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.