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From: martin@ttd.teradyne.com (Michael Martin)
Subject: Re: Is there a spiritual force etc.?
Message-ID: <1994Sep29.145854.16970@ttd.teradyne.com>
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References: <19940922.181109.533@almaden.ibm.com> <1994Sep26.185332.28245@jarvis.cs.toronto.edu>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 94 14:58:54 GMT
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In article <1994Sep26.185332.28245@jarvis.cs.toronto.edu> billy@eecg.toronto.edu (Vi Chi Chan) writes:

>What is divine power?
>if it is everything about it you can rationalize, or bring it to the 
>level of understanding that you are currently in, would it be divine 
>anymore?

Why not?  If a tree falls in the forest and noone hears it, does it make a 
sound?  If anything such as a divine power were to exist, then it would have
to exist independently of our understanding of it.

>
>Of course, if there is nothing (absolutely nothing) that you can understand 
>AND touch/feel about a certain divine power, to claim of it's existence will
>be definitely meaningless. But what if what has happened to me makes complete
>sense that such a divine power exist? To me, such a belief shapes my thoughts
>and action as real as everything I can see with my eyes and hear with my
>ears. Of course, all is subjective to myself. I can tell you what's in my
>mind, but it will not be sufficient to convince you of the existence of such
>a power unless you too experience it.

Not really.  P.T. Barnum said, "There's a fool born every minute."  There are
pleanty of people who would be more than happy to believe in this power that 
you can't adequately describe.  Of course, there are us who need first hand 
experience or reproducable evidence to be convinced.

>in the same context, we can say about consciousness that so many people
>claim they experience. say if I tie a person on a chair, not allowing him/her
>to make response other than talking. The way I talk to him/her and get his/her
>response will be absolutely the same if I was interacting with a "very smart"
>ELIZA, how do I tell if such an object possesses consciousness?

First you have to define conciousness and intelegence.  If the subject can
meet all criteria you have defined, then it meets your definition of 
conciousness.

>
>another thing is that people making claims like 
>"knowing the future is meaningless, or contradict with the concept of free-will"
>"eternity is meaningless"
>do you realize that the very bases for such claims are the concept of time
>sequencing? if we stick with our time-space system, such claims may as well
>be stated without argument, however, could you imagine such a thing as 
>a dimension without time? where our sequential thinking process is no longer
>the way we perceive? could we, if in such a dimension, know both the past and
>future? 

You can think about such a place, you might be able to eat a piece of paper
and actualy believe you are in such a place.  Neither of these things means
that such a place exists.

>
>if any of these is reasonable to us, I don't understand why the existence of
>a divine will be unreasonable.

None of the arguments you have made have any causual link to the belief in a
devine being.  Just because you can think about eternity or a dimension without
linear time does not mean a devine power exists.  Of course it doesn't exclude
the possiblility that one does exist.  Then again, it doesn't disprove that
reality is just an illusion created by a sadistic super creature that plays
with our puny lives for fun.

>yes, many things we can draw contradictions and disprove them because we know
>well their behaviors and reasons behind (in many case, we, human, make them)
>but there are things that may well be in a dimension which our reasoning
>and knowledge does not apply, a simple contradiction in terms of human 
>understanding could not suffice a disprove.

It's possible that your hypothetical dimension doesn't exist at all.  If
it did, it would be meaningless and unintellegible to us since our reasoning
does not apply to it.

>In such a case, we resort to our own(very own) way of understanding.
>One can push the argument to another dimension and rely on his/her own 
>experiences and choose to draw a conclusion from there.
>or you may reject the argument and think that it's out of your domain.
>
>if we can rely on science axioms (which are products of human reasoning)
>and believe that a workstation can be built,
>why is that we cannot rely on experience with reasoning and believe that
>God exists?
>

Keep on dreaming Billy.  All this stuff would make a great fiction novel, 
but certainly isn't sufficient to wake up early on Sunday morings and believe
that Santa Clause is watching us from the sky.  You can believe in anything 
you want, that doesn't mean it's true, and it doesn't mean I have to believe it
too.

-mm
