Hi ,
Can someone please tell me how I unsubscrive from this mailing list >?
Thanks
Graeme
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Danny Mayes writes:
>
>> I haven't participated in the list in a while, but I try to keep up
>> with the discussion here and there as time permits. I personally was
>> raised a fundamentalist Baptist, but lost most of my interest in that
>> religion when I was taught at 9 years old that all the little kids in
>> Africa that are never told about Jesus Christ go to Hell. Even at 9,
>> I knew that wasn't something I was going to be buying. Who wants to
>> believe in a God that cruel? Even without the problematic cruel
>> creator, I have always been to oriented toward logic and proof to
>> just accept stuff on faith.
>
>
> I sympathise with the conclusions of the young Danny, but there is a
> philosophical non sequitur here. The fact that I would like something
> to be true, or not to be true, has no bearing on whether it is in fact
> true. I don't like what happened in Germany under the Nazis, but that
> doesn't mean I should believe the Nazis did not exist, so why should
> my revulsion at the thought of infidels burning in Hell lead me to
> believe that God and Hell do not exist? It might make me reluctant to
> worship such a God, but that is not the same as believing he does not
> exist.
>
>> I started redeveloping religious belief, ironically, when I picked up
>> a book on quantum physics 6 or so years ago. I was at a legal
>> seminar and needed something to read during the boring sessions, and
>> the author ran through a number of experiments of QM and concluded
>> that the MWI was the most logical interpretation of these
>> experiments. I had read all the Sci Fi strories of alternate
>> realities and whatnot, but this was my first exposure to the concept
>> that reality is created in such a way to allow all things to exist
>> (that also actually appeared to be supported by some real science).
>> I still remember my excitement in contemplating this explanation, in
>> that it seems to explain so many questions.
>>
>> I guess I could go into a long explanation as to why I now believe
>> intelligence plays a key role in understanding the nature of our
>> reality and how it came to be, but I probably wouldn't be able to say
>> much that almost anyone on this board has not already heard. For me
>> it boils down to this: I see absolutely no reason to believe our
>> experiences are not emulable. I strongly suspect it is possible to
>> create a quantum computer. I strongly suspect technology will
>> continue to evolve and computer processing will get more and more
>> powerful. Finally, even if we are somehow precluded from creating
>> new universes in the future (i.e. universes implented on the same
>> level of reality as our universe, virtual universes are obviously
>> possible), the one we are in will last for trillions of years. Final
>> conclusion? Well, I'll let you do the math...
>
>
> But if it's scientific, it's not religion, is it? Religion means
> believing something in the absence of sufficient evidence.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
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Received on Thu Jan 12 2006 - 23:21:47 PST