Smyslov_Fan wrote on 08/03/10 at 13:40:09:


A distinguishing characteristic of life is that it is fundamentally anti-entropic i.e. as the physical world is driven by entropy, life seems to be driven by another process, extropy(?), that tends towards higher levels of order.

I tried to organize this into the principle that, "Whenever a body has more energy than it can expel along a path of least resistance, it must expel that energy along a path of greater resistance."

When I ran this by a chemistry professor his response floored me. He said, "Any time a system has more energy than it can expel along a path of least resistance, it must expel that energy along a path of less than least resistance." 

Maybe life, which appears to be tending towards greater order, has just found a way to expel energy along a path of less than least resistance.

Is there a more fundamental equation than E=mc^2? Is a simplified version of the more fundamental equation: E^p + E^s = C?

Physical energy + Spiritual Energy = Constant

Within this equation it is believed that spiritual energy results from the conversion of the physical world into the spiritual world. Perhaps the one thing that both Satan and God found desirable was a physical world. 

God, a true scientitist, decided to put good and evil to the test. God, doubting its omniscience---

"One thing prophets never say is, 'Always challenge my teachings'. This is a fail safe mechanism so that the followers (joiners is less pejorative) don't commit mayhem. 

Christ handed Christianity a loaded gun without a safety mechanism and that gun has gone off throughout history e.g. the Crusades, the slaughter of the Hugonauts, the European Inquisition, the rise of Hitler."

---decided to accept Satan's challenge that sentient life was too stupid to know good and evil, and given half  a chance, would pursue evil, thereby inverting good and evil (the spiritual negaverse becomes the spiritual universe).

If the universe was dominated by evil e.g. Hitler at the end of eternity, then Satan wins. If the universe is dominated by good at the end of eternity, then God wins.

It is left up to sentient life to decide what good and evil are and to make a conscious choice to pursue good and foresake evil. That is the true point of sentient life.

At the end of eternity the entire physical world will have been converted into the spiritual world. 

God sleeps in nothingness. When it wakes up,the cycle starts anew. We are in the middle of one cycle. That cycle is essentially a distillation process steadily increasing good over evil at the end of each completed series of cycles until evil is no more, Satan faces death, the loss of ego, screams for forgiveness, the cycles are over and heaven lasts eternally. 

Then the process begins anew, only this time Christ isn't crucified (neither is anyone else) and the lion, indeed, lies down with the lamb.

Eternal vigilance is not eternal paranoia.

Smyslov_Fan wrote on 08/03/10 at 13:40:09:


That is rather far-fetched, it seems to me.  We have a natural curiosity about how things work (no doubt an adaptive trait) that requires no belief in the divine to sustain itself.  I would argue that the gods themselves are but early, mistaken answers to necessary speculations. 

Further I would say that it is more precise to say that you believe that the Cosmos has a purpose than to say that you accept that it does.

"The unimaginable level of fine tuning to get this universe" is a specious notion because we have no idea why the various particle masses and properties, and so on and so forth, are what they are.  And because no process is known by which these constants (if indeed they are constants) came about, there is no valid notion of a "degree of difficulty" in setting them.  It is the same with the related idea of the supposedly low probability with which they take on their given values.  To get a probability you need a statistical model of the formation of these parameters, and since nothing is known about the conditions of this formation, any such model can only be a fantasy.

This is really a tired re-visitation of the argument that used to be made that this planet being perfectly suited for ourselves is evidence of the supposed god's benignity.  It is now known that ages of evolution have carved us into beings suitable for this planet.  But if, of course, the Earth were not a planet where water appeared in liquid form, life would not exist here at all.  Life does not appear to exist on Mercury, for instance.  Is that evidence of the supposed god's malignity?

Still, life exists on this planet.  That's a fact.  Probably it exists on at least several other planets in this galaxy.  But it's patently anthropomorphic to assert that the purpose of the Cosmos is to provide us with our existence.  For that matter, it's anthropomorphic to assert that the Cosmos has a purpose.  

Further there appears to have been a striking waste of time and material if the purpose of all of this is to produce life.  Tut, so many stars with no inhabitable planets; so many moons and planets with no possibility of life.

Finally, if you read my post above about the set of all existing things, this set, whatever it is, must forever remain unexplained.  That is to say, it is not the sort of thing that can have an explanation, or a purpose.  If this set includes your god and he himself is no supergod's creation, he certainly is unable to explain his purpose; and so are we.  So since the proposed spiritual being does nothing to solve the riddle of existence and never seems to have any manifestations, why interpose him?  Simplest and soundest is to take the Cosmos itself, which has the merit of being known to exist, as That Which Cannot Be Explained?

Finally with respect to your spiritual experience, I can readily believe that you had an inward experience that somehow convinced you of a god's existence; what I find incredible is that this experience was the product of an actual god.  That's the thing about the gods, you see?  They never show up and they never do anything, other than confer mystical, unverifiable experiences upon people who profess belief in them.  They have grown so weak in modern times.  In former days they used to do miracles all the time!

TN wrote on 08/03/10 at 08:48:53:


In equivalent positions where there are subtle, definable differences for human players that look "equivalent" to the computer, humans will consistently make the right choices and computers will make consistently wrong choices. Thus one minute second best move done repeatedly will allow humans to beat computers 100 years from now, but only in consultation matches.

Human teams don't have the same blind spots.

My choice of the best team---Garry Kasparov, Judit Polgar, and Joel Benjamin. Garry and Judit have similar styles but Garry is stronger positionally, we need a woman to sell this to a viewing audience and Joel to step into the mind of the programmer to dissect the programming.

Quote:


Both Firebird and Robbolito correctly note that White is winning after 10.d5. Even Crafty 22 and Fritz 5.32 are begging White to play 10.d5. 

Hence the above example adds no weight to your argument. What was your argument again? 

Markovich wrote on 08/03/10 at 01:53:03:


"Facts" change; true faith, not to a given religion, but to a higher power is immutable. Thus to suggest that intelligent design should be taught as a substitute for evolution is wrong. Evolution is the greatest predictive tool of any of the sciences and is the hardest of all hard sciences; reject it, and you reject science.

Physicists' "facts" are in a state of flux and the present thinking is that the incredible "coincidence" of the universe is unimaginably improbable; it is consistent with intelligent design to account for it thereby making evolution the "tool" of a higher power and "intelligent design" the cause of evolution.

What would the atheists have us do?  Preach the gospel of "chance"? Would it be acceptable to teach the unimaginable level of fine tuning to get this universe and allow physicists to have the final say that it is just one of an "infinite" number of universes that do not support life? Or would it be permissible to teach that the extraordinary set of circumstances that led to our universe are also compatible with intelligent design?

Why is a universe coming into existence by chance acceptable, but a universe coming into existence by intelligent design unacceptable? Should these two possibilites get equal coverage?

Both have merit and should be given equal billing.

God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. As for omnipotent; if God could have prevented the holocaust, it/he/she would have done so. God would never commit an Evil act or even give the appearance of an Evil act. 

In the Old Testament, God said it was the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end; it did not say it was the middle. 

This is the middle; we are on a long majestic pathway to eternity. If we are walking on a circular path, then the arrow of time is going forward and backward but not with our concept of "time". 

Think of time as observable change. According to my definition, in a universe lacking life, time does not exist hence that universe cannot exist. 

In this scenario, think of the "Big Bang" as a large sparkler retreating away from us and consuming alll the universes that do not support life and bringing them into existence. 

As we go down this circular path, it appears to be a straight line; thus the arrow of time seems straight. In actuality I theorize a "wall" of time, one that is 3 dimensional, the past, present and future. That occurs in heaven. 

As for omniscient there is no better discipline than chess to demonstrate God's lack of omniscience. If we eliminate the 50 move rule, the median length of any game would be about 1 trillion moves. That is, let us call every conceivable legal combination of pieces and pawns and every move as "permissible" 

One such position would be eight pawns on the fourth and eight pawns on the fifth (Sloughter chess as opposed to Fischer Random chess!). Those of you bored with positional chess might want to give it a try. 

Another legal position would be with Kings on opposite sides of the board and 31 pawns to each side, or a board with 1 King apiece, 8 pawns and 27 Bishops to a side. Now, simply create every single combination of pieces and pawns to fill the board in every legal way. I predict that Rybka 4 couldn't even do this in under a year i.e. it would take Rybka 4 a year just to determine the total number of starting conditions.

The kicker is that if we eliminate the fifty move rule, then the total number of positions that can arise either checkmate, insufficient mating material, or a three-fold repetition is finite (or what I like to call exfinite). I would "guess" that the total number is somewhere between 1 X 10^1000 to 1 x 10^10,000 positions. This will generally be regarded as the largest finite number that can occur. Can you imagine the level of complexity that could arise on a chess board the size of the universe?

This is based on intuition not calculation. How long will it take a computer to arrive at the same conclusion?

Why would God want to know every position in chess?

A test of human intelligence versus computer intelligence is this: When I gave a 1700 computer and Fritz 8, a 2700 computer, the same starting position i.e. 1.e4 Nf6 2.d4 Ng8 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 Ng8 5.Bc4 Nf6 6.Bf4 Ng8 7.Qd2 Nf6 8.O-O-O Ng8 9.Rhe1, a position I call Magic, after 9...e6, both computers replied, 10.Kb1, the 1700 computer at 1 hour/move and Fritz 8 at 120'40. The computers could see no way to improve their position, so they both tried to increase the scope of their Rooks.

Most human professionals would play either 10.e5 or 10.d5 to fix the pawns.

Computers will always suffer from the "sieve" problem i.e. at first the holes were big enough to allow boulders through. As each hole was plugged, ten smaller holes appeared. As each smaller hole was plugged, ten smaller holes appeared. 

Now imagine the computer when faced with equivalent positions where it has to make a choice, it will "flip" a programming coin and will consistently guess wrong whereas a human professional will consistently guess right.

Now imagine computer weaknesses 100 years from now as a drop of fluid .01 micron wide. It joins another tiny speck downstream. The drops get bigger and bigger and eventually become a trickle, the trickle becomes a stream, the stream a torrent and then a flood.

Think of the flood as the computer "hanging" a pawn during a "flood". Go beyond that, 1000 moves, and you arrive at checkmate. This scenario is based on faith and intuition in the supremacy of human imagination, intuition and calculation compared to computer logic.

There's an interesting piece in today's NY Times that addresses this topic nicely: 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/philosophy-and-faith/

I look forward to the next article in the series!