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From: kovsky@netcom.com (Bob Kovsky)
Subject: Re: God
Message-ID: <kovskyD8C9HD.6un@netcom.com>
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Date: Wed, 10 May 1995 01:29:36 GMT
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HARRY R. ERWIN wrote:

>
>The standard Christian belief in an omnipresent/omnipotent personal God is
>vulnerable to physical experiment and has been falsified.

	I didn't know ANSI had promulgated a standard for Christian beliefs.


>The belief in a personal omnipotent God/Gods is thus an
>illusion. 
>

	And thus, a fortiori, all other beliefs in any power beyond computers.


>The standard belief in a separable soul is vulnerable to experiment and
>has been basically falsified by lesion studies. 

	Is the belief in a separable soul part of ANSI Christian beliefs?
	Is that "separable" a la "separable differential equation"?

>
>Recognition of meaningfulness appears to
>me to be an emotional state reflecting successful pattern classification.

	Philosophers worrying about "meaning" have been wasting their time!


>The afferent signal to a cortical area (which may be an association of
>signals generated elsewhere in the brain) falls into the basin of
>attraction of a neural cellular array (NCA) that emotionally colors the
>efferent signal with a 'truth' marker. (I use the term 'colors' here since
>the signal is not altered in detail, only reorganized in time.) This
>process is fast and efficient (some people think it is super-Turing) but
>not inerrant. To understand how faith works, one need only study how those
>basins of attraction were created, and that seems to involve a combination
>of random experiences, social instruction, and genetic predisposition,
>with NCA construction being triggered by reafferent signals involving
>nonspecific diffuse stimulation by neurons in the basal ganglia that use
>neuromodulatory neurotransmitters. 
>

	It's all so clear and so completely established, nobody could 
doubt it.


>
>To conclude--please go away. Don't go away mad, just go away. 
>Comp.ai.philosophy is for serious discussion of philosophical issues
>involving artificial intelligence, not a place for religious nuts to make
>fools of themselves

	Anyone who questions the Ptolemaic system is asserting that the
world is carried on the back of a giant turtle.  Religious nuts! 


>Internet: herwin@gmu.edu 
>..."Meaning is emotional"

	And emotions are meaningless...
-- 

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    Bob Kovsky          |  A Natural Science of Freedom 
    kovsky@netcom.com   |  Materials available by anonymous ftp
                        |  At ftp.netcom.com/pub/fr/freedom
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