Le 09-févr.-06, à 07:22, Kim Jones a écrit :
> I was just about to ask what an angel was! You must have read my mind,
> Bruno.
> Non-machine-emulable is angel. OK.
>
>
>
> Why do they(?) have to be called "angel"? Can one liken them(?) to the
> theological description of an angel or is there some other reason?
Actually Plotinus never use that word. Instead, he seems to use "gods"
or in some partiicular case "daemon". I use it because it is shorter
than "non-machine" and less disturbing than Plotinus' "Gods". I am open
that they could be liken to any "celestial" object sincere theologian
can discuss,. Sincere = they can discuss it in the open-to-doubt
scientist way to talk about things.
The advantage of "angel" is that it reminds us that they are not
effective constructible objects. They exist in the "intelligible world"
only (Plato's Heaven, Cantor Paradise, Plotinus Divine Intellect).
Terrestrial angel could exist though, but this is an open problem (both
for theoreticians using comp or weaker, and empiricists).
I hope people are not too much disturbed by my vocabulary. For those
who knows a bit about recursion theory, simple angels can be classified
by being more or less canonically associated to the Turing degrees of
insolubility. Most angels are just "machine" having added to them some
divine ability (under the form of Turing's oracles, or being capable to
do omega proofs in one strike, etc.). The interesting thing, for
mathematician, is that they existence shows that the incompleteness
results are extremely solid, all those angels are still under the
Godel-Lob "dicto", and, if I am correct, I mean if ma derivation of
physics is correct (which remains to be seen I recall) they are under
the quantum "dicto" too.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Thu Feb 09 2006 - 09:48:02 PST