>From: Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
>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 !
What do you mean by that?
> >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 did mention that they were also "advocates of suicide".
>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.
Bruno, you have an amazing ability to misunderstand what I say. I used
to think that the problem was that many of the posts on this list concern
arcane philosophical and technical points, so that misunderstanding was
understandable. By now I know better.
I could say "Coke is better than Pepsi", and you would interpret that to
mean that I don't know they are both colas. Further, you would believe that
the only way to illustrate the relationship between the two drinks is by
analogy to G and G*.
>The sound machine is maximaly humble, she is agnostic on both
>her own consistency and her own inconsistency.
Does that imply it is agnostic on any question? One of these days, I'll
have to check out what kind of analogy you are making between Godel's
theorem and belief systems. Right now I doubt there's much to it.
A couple more points. When I say "X is true" you can assume I mean "I
believe X is very likely to be true, so my Bayesian probability of (not X)
is so low it is best to neglect it." If I say for example "This is a chair"
that is what I mean.
Also, if humans have properties that are not shared by your "consistent
machine" model, then it is not the humans' fault. It is not their job to
describe your model. It means your model is faulty.
>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.
Why not? Even if I'm not sure of X, I might still want you to believe
X. Or, equivalently, I might want your Bayesian probability for X to be
high even if mine is not. (Not that I'm that sort though, but some people
are.)
>Today I guess we have still the choice between a war between
>moderates and fanatics and a war between fanatics and fanatics.
It's going to be a war between ordinary people vs. evil. Personally I
am not too concerned right now with the philosophical differences among the
ordinary people, be they religious or intelligent. This will be serious, I
fear.
>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?
I'm an atheist, and have no doubts of any significance about it. I do
believe that other people should be atheists too, and that on the whole
religion is an evil. Of the major religions I would say that Islam and
Christianity are the worst, but the main factor is how seriously the
believers take it and how radical they are in interpretation. But again,
for now I am putting disagreements among non-evil people on the back burner.
- - - - - - -
Jacques Mallah (jackmallah.domain.name.hidden)
Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
"I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
My URL:
http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at
http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
Received on Thu Sep 20 2001 - 13:19:32 PDT