Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
There is no argument for faith, you have it or you don't, you have to ask yourself why you have it.
True. One either has faith, or is agnostic.
I know why I have mine, though, and have elaborated on that elsewhere here.
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[...]the Christian god is supposed to be benigh(excuse me while I laugh)[...]
You are excused. 
Benign? Possibly, depending on the definition of "benign" and a lot of stuff we don't know (reasons).
I'm pretty sure I'd be reluctant to go with "good", though. Not that "good" means anything to me.
Regardless of faith, life ain't fair. And who cares?
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The only common factor in all faith is the belief in superstition.
No, as I've said, atheism is a faith that does not involve superstition.
Similarly, some religions, like certain kinds of buddhism, do not involve superstition.
One could say the same is the case for Spinoza's pantheism.
And the abstraction model I first posted here does not rely on superstition.
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It is pointless to bring philosophy into it because as the philosopher Gustav Borgmann commented on much philosophy, I would stake my life on the sun rising tomorrow but I wouldn't stake my professional reputation on saying it. Philosophy ends up as speculation and word play without any objective input that can be shared.
The fact that some people make a career out of philosophy as a stand-alone field is irrelevant. So Borgmann doesn't have the integrity to submit his own axioms; that needn't be the case for the rest of us. And there is an, admittedly thin, line between philosophy and epistemology. Some make that distinction, as I do.
In any approach to life, there will be axioms- whether invented by ourselves, or by someone else- and these axioms, coupled with rational thought and epistemology, give us a foundation from which to embrace life. One cannot debate the axioms very much, as they are arbitrary, but one can certainly debate what is done with them.
Or, rather, one cannot logically debate the axioms a whole lot, though rhetoric can be applied.
One of the things that distinguish me from an Objectivist, is that I think epistemology is an important and valid field. In this, I am not alone. Albert Einstein, for instance, was highly concerned with it, and noted that it appeared to him that a lack of concern for epistemology predicted a poor prognosis for the quality of the scientific work made by that person. As a side-note, he also noted that he rejected atheism, on the same basis I do: it's a faith.
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As for human freedom of choice, it is theory not born out by the facts. Our behaviour is modeled on our biology, environment and upbringing.
As a highly advanced "amateur" in psychiatry, and a dabbler in artificial intelligence and artificial life, I would say that you are partially correct, as I admitted. But not entirely.
Which brings us back to Wolfram's analysis, which is keen and very far from the empty philosophy of whether the sun will rise or not, being instead concerned with modelling complex systems accurately. His thinking is neither ambigous, nor vacuous, nor meaningless. Complexity theory and so forth are fields he has a solid mastery of.
A mind can be modelled as a process.
The mind has a state, inputs, outputs, and an algorithm, just as any other process.
Wolfram's analysis has covered a lot of properties about such a process, and argues that there are several simpler processes, so-called "cellular automata", whose interactions give the emergent property of complexity for the system (mind) as a whole. He further covered the fact that the only simulation that will yield a completely accurate representation of such a process, is that process itself. In this regard, the mind is an entity which cannot be replicated without a loss of information, and one that is, for all practical purposes, making decisions that entail "free will", for any useful definition thereof.
And as long as the algorithm isn't an unambigously bidirectional transform, this property holds, along with the ability to produce outputs that are not in direct causal relation with the current inputs, which constitutes independant thought and true decision-making capacity.
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[...]in reality there are very real limiting factors.
Of course, and that's a great thing.
Because limits are those constraints by which substance is carved from chaos.
And to anyone thinking ancient cultures primitive, that is a great opportunity to have a closer look at the Yin/Yang concept. Chaos, differentiated into contrasts, solidified along a defining line. At any level of analysis, that is found to be the case, though smaller scales yield a more fuzzy defining line by the Heisenberg uncertainty relation (which is part of the reason why a complex system cannot be simulated with complete accuracy by anything but itself).
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: the nature of God; does it matter? - 
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