A Failure To Convince Me That Any Gods Exist

My own definition of God would be, and this is also probably reductive, God is Information ! No beginning, no end, no creation no creator, forget the design, etc etc... Just sheer Unity ! ONE, and zero as a shadow...(not a true zero) Binary code...One true dimension, not eleven...(the other dimension are simulations...) Simplify, simplify simplify !...

Also information itself can not do anything

Fil Albuquerque wrote:

Its actually quite simple what I am saying...
A definition of God must n´t be the classical one...in fact it should be the most possibly open...

Most possibly open? What the does that even mean?

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Also information itself can not do anything

Curious how computers work as well as they do, then.

Not to mention DNA.

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Dreyfus' opinion was fairly accurate, but it was based on the 1960's view of reverse engineering the human mind to create AI. This approach has been long replaced by those making break-throughs in AI.

No way. Dreyfus was mocked and ridiculed when he first came out with his critique of AI, everyone thought his objections were preposterous. But it has been borne out by everything that happened subsequently, over the course of nearly four decades of research.

Artificial intelligence (and artificial life, for that matter) are scientific fantasies. There are plenty of vital and urgent things that science needs to work on other than such useless vanity projects. Like stopping the planet from cooking, for a start.

There is something that all of the people who treat science as a religion need to understand. The nature of the atom is still a mystery. Yet the atom is supposed to be the most fundamental and basic thing in the universe. We have had to build the most expensive apparatus in the history of the world to come up with a finalised description of the atom, and it is still an open question as to whether this will succeed.

So if it is so hard to describe the workings of an atom, why are you so confident that we can model the workings of the most complex single object in the known universe, namely, the human brain?

You speak as if you perfectly have addressed the issues at hand, and yet you simple failed to prove why the Universe itself cannot be regarded as a God...
So far, and to be back on track you haven´t presented a single logical argument for or against any Deity since you haven´t give any definition to what such entity should be like...When you say X is not possible, that you must define X is a quite simple straightforward reasoning that you still insist to avoid...so no extra credit to your babbling.

...on Information department I very much would like to see how you distinguish a 3 dimensional virtual reality from the "actual" world...what is to be found that is True ? ...is almost sad, to read it...

The problem with some of you is that you speak as if you know allot on every single issue that falls on the table, but hardly prove ever to in fact be the case...

Mediocrity often expresses itself without simplicity and always with no imagination.

Imagine that I am an Alien and never heard the word GOD before...

Fil Albuquerque wrote:

Imagine that I am an Alien and never heard the word GOD before...

In that situation, I'd have nothing I'd need to explain. The alien would not need me to explain why I don't believe in something they don't know what is.

An excellent thing to imagine though.
R
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Because we DO model these things, and our imperfect models allow for us to do important things. The idea that we must have absolute understanding of any of these things prior to modeling is idiotic.

The point about comparison with the atom is, not that knowledge of physics is imperfect, and there is no point trying to gain knowledge. The point is that 'artificial intelligence' is based on the illusion that intelligence is something we can understand well enough to model.

It SEEMS that we can model the 'rules of thought' and the principles of cognition, and I am sure there are many people far more learned than I with enormous amounts of information on these topics.

But what the critics of AI are saying is that even though the nature of intelligence might seem amenable to analysis and reproduction, there is something about it that is irreducible, that cannot be reproduced by artificial means.

So the point I was making about the atomic model is, not that it is hard to undestand it, let's give up, but that even something as fundamental and basic as the nature of matter is still fundamentally mysterious. So why should we believe that modelling intelligence is going to be possible, when we really don't yet have a comprehensible account of the nature of the atom.

By all means, investigate the brain, investigate matter, but I still think the idea of Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally a conceit.

A lot of the mechanistic paradigm, and the idea of machine intelligence, is based upon this conceit. But there is something very fundamental and basic that it will not allow itself to see.

Fiurther more, D'Espagnet's paper does not deal in mere opinion. I chose it because on the most basic level of science, it casts doubt on scientific objectivism, naturalism, or materialism, however you would like to describe it.

There are a number of other texts on physics and philosophy which demonstrate the same point, but most will simply choose to ignore them, because it unsettles their idea of what is real.

And it is intimately connected to the fundamental nature of reality itself and the point of the OP.

The human mind came to be by natural means, I encourage you to entertain the notion that intelligence is not only likely, but inevitable.

Ah yes. And if I could make gold out of lead, then I wouldn't have to go to work any more.

Why do you think AI, which started off with such enormous fanfare in the 60's, has been a complete failure?

You would think that the processes of thought might be able to be abstracted to a bunch of algorithms, but Roger Penrose and Hubert Dreyfus will differ.

In 1965 [it was] predicted that “machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do” (Simon 1965, p. 96). MIT computer scientist Marvin Minsky assured a Life magazine reporter in 1970 that “in from three to eight years we’ll have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being . . . a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare and grease a car.”

The story is well-told by now how the cocksure dreams of AI researchers crashed during the subsequent years — crashed above all against the solid rock of common sense. Computers could outstrip any philosopher or mathematician in marching mechanically through a programmed set of logical maneuvers, but this was only because philosophers and mathematicians — and the smallest child — were too smart for their intelligence to be invested in such maneuvers. The same goes for a dog. “It is much easier,” observed AI pioneer, Terry Winograd, “to write a program to carry out abstruse formal operations than to capture the common sense of a dog” (Winograd and Flores 1986, p. 98).

A dog knows, through whatever passes for its own sort of common sense, that it cannot leap over a house in order to reach its master. It presumably knows this as the directly given meaning of houses and leaps — a meaning it experiences all the way down into its muscles and bones. As for you and me, we know, perhaps without ever having thought about it, that a person cannot be in two places at once. We know (to extract a few examples from the literature of cognitive science) that there is no football stadium on the train to Seattle, that giraffes do not wear hats and underwear, and that a book can aid us in propping up a slide projector when the image is too low, whereas a sirloin steak probably isn’t appropriate.

I believe that Modern Man sees no room for God, because he has put himself in his place.

Hence the fascination with artificial mind, life, and so on - we want to be the creator now, and will insist that only understanding that we will seek will conform with what we ourselves can conceptualise, which is what the term 'natural' now appears to mean.

And I believe we are in for a rude awakening.

But again I do thank you for your very interesting and challenging response.

well for the record, I differ with both those statements. I think evolutionary theism is a perfectly defensible philosophical view, held by many educated persons. And I don't think evolution has been disproved. I would agree that it is, however, radically incomplete in its current form.