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From: pja1@rsvl.unisys.com
Subject: Re: Is there a spiritual force etc.?
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Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 19:03:36 GMT
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In article <19940919.101240.485@almaden.ibm.com> mpriestley@VNET.IBM.COM writes:
>From: mpriestley@VNET.IBM.COM
>Date: Mon, 19 Sep 94 12:50:49 EDT
>Subject: Re: Is there a spiritual force etc.?

>Ian Douglas writes:
>>mpriestley@VNET.IBM.COM wrote:
>>
>>> In scientific terms, I am a pawn in a very large game indeed.  "I" have no
>>> say in my actions.  I am completely reducible to a set of small particles
>>> whose random dice-rolling and interaction with other particles has the
>>> amusing effect of making "me" say "I" exist.
>>
>>This ignores consciousness...

>No it doesn't.  It explicitly claims that, since consciousness is not a
>scientifically verifiable phenomenon, it doesn't exist.  This is very similar
>to the argument used against the existence of God.  If you think it "misses
>the point" about consciousness, well, that's what religious people say
>to arguments against the existence of God, as well.  I agree.

>>> And, inasmuch as I believe in a God, he and she isn't "using" me, any more
>>> parents "used" me.
>>
>>He AND she? Oh, is God now also politically correct? :-)
>>Jesus must be turning in his grave...

>My comments about God have at all times been nondenomenational.  My apologies
>if the capital letter deceived you.  In any case, I believe the original
>Hebrew uses a gender-neutral pronoun (which English replaced with the default
>male pronoun), so even in the restrictive Christian sense, I am not making
>some drastic textual revision in the name of political correctness, merely
>restoring some of the sense of the original.

>As someone else has already pointed out, Jesus ain't spinning in his grave,
>assuming literal Biblical interpretation.  If he is in his grave, then,
>considering the state his religion is in, he's probably worn a groove by now.

>>> Did Einstein live a life of pointless hope and fear?  Was Kierkegaard a
>>> cowering slave?
>>
>>Don't think Einstein was a Christian...

>I frankly don't know.  He certainly believed in God (as evidenced most
>famously in his attack on quantum mechanics: "God does not play dice with the
>universe").

>>> I believe in God.  I don't cower.  I'm not a slave.  I don't "live in
>>> pointless hope or fear".  Perhaps my conception, of the God I believe in,
>>> is different from your conception, of the God you don't believe in.
>>
>>If you are not a slave, try and do something that God did not know 6 million
>>years ago that you WOULD do...

>I don't understand.  Does God _knowing_ what I will do make me his slave?
>If I correctly predict the way you will vote in the next election, does that
>make you my slave?  On a more parallel note, if I invented a time machine
>that showed me your future (paradoxes aside - assume I signed a contract
>that forbid me from acting on the knowledge), would that make you my slave?

>I don't see how the addition of an observing consciousness to a position
>of scientific determinism changes my status in any way.  Note that I don't
>particularly buy determinism, but I do think the problems of being a "pawn"
>or a "cowering slave" apply equally to religion and to scientific determinism.
>That is to say, they don't apply at all.


>Michael Priestley
>mpriestley@vnet.ibm.com
>Disclaimer: speaking on my own behalf not IBM's.

The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a 
judgement: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The 
question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, 
species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding; and our fundamental 
tendency is to asert that the falsest judgements (to which the synthetic 
judgements a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without 
granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the 
purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without 
falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live - that 
to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. 
To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist 
customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which 
ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.

                                                            - Nietzsche

        
                                                                               
  
