[QUOTE]Originally posted by dents:
[B]* free will vs. original sin
hmm if you don't mind i would like to refine my answer a bit ..... i think that the free will could be stated either as
A1) "we are free do choose our deeds from number of possibilities and sinless life IS among them"
or
A2) "we are free do choose our deeds from number of possibilities and sinless life IS NOT among them"
further the original sin could be stated as
B) "it is not possible for us to choose sinless life"
looking at the statements the A1) and B) are clearly contradicting ... A2) together with B) is possible but it means there is no sinless path in our decission tree ... which means that there is no way for us to avoid sinning at least once and that it's not our fault ... perhaps we should be sorry only for that excess sin between our actual path and the best possible path
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Sin is a complex enough subject, and Original Sin makes it even more so!
It is hard to find a rational basis for defining sin - many ethical philosophers have worked on this subject. It can be defined very vaguely - as a kind of guilty intention, or very precisely, as in various religious bans. All of us are sinning according to some measure - I don't think we can avoid it!
I think Original Sin is a meaningless concept, invented to provide an answer to the 'problem of pain'. You may know this point, often stated as 'How can a god who is all-powerful and all-good preside over a world with so much pain in it?' Some answers say that individuals sin and are punished - this leads to the argument that cripples must have done something very bad, even if nothing obvious is known.
If you reject this fairly circular argument, you are left with the other idea - that we are punished for a sin which our forefathers committed. Again, this sounds like nonsense, but at least it gets round the problem a priest has when something bad happens to him!
[Quote][B]
* QM vs deterministic world
if i'm getting it right then under QM things are described by probability functions .. e.g. there is chance C that particle P is currently residing in the space S ... then the fictional supercomputer would be calculating these probability functions ... e.g. probability function showing position of a rubber ball thrown against the wall .. 99.9999% would be in the "bounced back" area and 0.0001% in the "tunnelled through" area ... but it would be a real computational difficulty/impossibility as you stated before
what seems to be the possible disagreement here is that how much of the world is deterministic and how much is random ... hmm ... i think that vast majority is deterministic because that QM randomness usually gets aggregated and somehow cancels out ... the exception i could think of are the quantum physicists making bets on outcomes of their experiments ... but these are not the kind of events influencing our daily lives ... if we take our bodies then there don't seem to be any 1 atom small structures influencing what we do (maybe there are?) .. it rather seems that we are kind of deterministic biological computers with all that networks of neurons ... but back to QM ... i think that if the QM randomness is the only way in which god influences our lives then he influences them very little, almost not at all
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You may be interested in a recent experiment which seems to show atomic-level effects at a macro level:
Page not found | American Institute of Physics
Those who study quantum mechanics seem to believe that events at this level are truly random, but I am not sure this is so - I think there is something fundamentally wrong with the theory. But I have little chance of working in this field, let alone proving anything! I do not know of much work being done in the shadowy area where quantum becomes classical, which should be very interesting.
quote:
* AI
i know about this more from sci-fi than elsewhere but i suspect there is no objective test to tell human from a very smart computer ... turing test takes a human interviewer to make the decision so it's not objective ... if there was such closed test then the computers would be taught how to respond and it wouldn't work anymore .....
i was rather trying to imply that it's not such a mad idea that humans are only kind of very smart computers
I cannot remember the name of an AI researcher who, when asked if he knew of any practical thinking machine, replied 'Yes, me.'. I certainly think that we are a 'kind of smart computer', and further, that if we create and program a machine in a similar complex manner to the brain (possibly using a neural net?), it has a good chance of developing consciousness. The HAL 9000 is still a favourite character of mine!