Who is the enemy?

From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed Sep 19 08:27:14 2001

Jacques Mallah wrote:
 

>(I'm currently in North Dakota, but have lived in NYC most of my life. I
>did not know anyone who was in the WTC.)


I told you my relief, but I begin to doubt ! Look at what you write:


>Recently, of course, I have been more concerned with the destruction
>caused in NYC by the advocates of suicide and believers in immortality.


I understand your concern with NYC. I share with you the concern
of those terrible and crual 11 sept. events.

Now a pecularity of this war consists in figuring out who
is the enemy, exactly.

It looks like you have solved that problem too. The enemy are the
believers in immortality, the religious people !?!

I am fearing amalgamations, like the amalgamations between Muslims and
terrorists (to name one which has been done by some). But you are the
champion: the enemy are all religious people. The war between atheism
and religion !?!

Perhaps I should tell you what are, according to G*, the canonical
"enemies" of the sound universal machine.

 [ ... and here a very long reasoning with lot of thought experiments,
  or a shorter formal reasoning where the main point consists in
  distinguishing what G and G* say ... I don't want to bore you and
  give you at once the "result" ...]:

And it looks like you were almost right.

The universal sound machines "war" is between the agnostic and the
*imposed* religion (whatever that religion is, atheism included).

The sound machine is maximaly humble, she is agnostic on both
her own consistency and her own inconsistency. This entails two sort
of dangerous consistent extensions: 1) meeting a machine (perhaps
itself) which feels superior, and 2) meeting a machine (perhaps itself)
which feels inferior. (Meeting or becoming herself).

That reminds me a "theory of intelligence" I developped years ago
(still from G*):
 a machine is intelligent iff it is not stupid. And a machine is stupid
iff either the machine believes itself intelligent or the
machine believes itself stupid.

  [with "consistent (resp. inconsistent)" in place of
  "intelligent (resp. stupid)" those sentences are just rephrasing of
  particular instantiation of Godel second incompleteness theorem].

The universal sound machine is forever undecided about any
of its possible ultimate worldview and, by doubting, never imposes
its religion or worldview on different machines. This should not prevent
her to react against those imposing-view machines. That's just
self-defense. We can respect only those who respect ourselves, and
... reciprocaly.

With comp any sound machine is condemned to doubt, forever.
A sound machine can neither be a believer in immortality nor be a
believer in mortality. The sound machine is forever agnostic on that
question. That is forever undecided. (and by consequence forever
undecided about comp of course: they can bet, fear or hope for comp
and/or for self-soundness, but that's personal). The sound machines
can also make reasoning with comp *as an hypothesis*.

This is what I find very humanistic about comp: we are necessarily
more modest and ignorant about fundamental questions, and thus more
open and prudent with other's opinions. At the
same time we get tools for studying the geometry of that ignorance
and see precisely where "matters" come from, through the comp "act of
faith".

Precisely but uncertainly. Like any scientific approaches.
The consistent computationalist cannot *not* be moderate, like
the honnest scientific, which is also a professional doubter.

Some people believe that doubting is a sign of lacking confidence
in oneself, or even lacking faith. Apparently (with G*) it is
the contrary. This is coherent with the apparent lack of doubt
of the fanatics, which above all does not even tolerate sign of doubts.

Today I guess we have still the choice between a war between
moderates and fanatics and a war between fanatics and fanatics.
In the second case we loose the war at the start, isn't it?

Do you agree with this last statement? Or are you really, Mister the
Devil's Advocate, a fanatical atheist?


Bruno
Received on Wed Sep 19 2001 - 08:27:14 PDT