(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Desirable Properties for God's Will

God's will should be serially uncorrelated. That means that knowing God's will at any given time should not provide information on God's will at any other time. Otherwise it becomes possible to game God's will and acquire moral authority without moral quality.

God's will should not repeat within the lifespan of the universe. If God's will repeats sooner than that then everyone will point and laugh at God.

"That God," they will say. "So regressive!"

He will be separating the land from the waters, again, and smashing Jericho. The people of Jericho will say, "That was unnecessary."

Then God will make the sun stand still and the moon stay put.

Everybody will wonder why but in fact it is so that Joshua can kill the enemies of the children of Israel.

You can see how unfortunate that would be.

In the set of cases that are materially identical, God's will should be unbiased and statistically uniform. If this is not so then God's will is a material consideration intrinsic to the perceivable universe.

People won't say, "That's God's will!"

Instead, they'll say, "That's gravity. It's attracting atoms to one another in a biased fashion."

Or "that's not design. That's evolution!"

Or even "that's not God's will. That's the hypnotic sexual power of Elvis' gyrating hips!"

So that's why it is important for God's will to be uniform and unbiased.

The simplest mechanism for achieving serially uncorrelated, non-repeating, uniform mysterious ways in which God's will can move is for that will to be random.

However, genuinely random will, omniscience, and purpose cannot coexist. Combining them creates a contradiction. Contradictions give rise to woglies. Woglies are anathema to doctrine, with the arguable exception of certain nontraditional theories regarding Jesus' crown of thorns.

Since this is the case the most practical mechanism for God's will is a pseudorandom sequence generated through non-arithmetic methods. It is best to seed such a sequence with a comparatively unpredictable quantity such as the Holy Spirit. This provides an acceptable quantity of mystery under most traditional tests.
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Rebecca Hitherby: Insane in a good way.

Comments

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Is this somehow supposed to make us think of god as anything more than some capricious bogeyman or insane power mad being? If so, she failed horribly.

Not that I waste my believing in nonsense, but really John, why seek it out? It's just another irritant.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

I don't like believing in nonsense either ... which is why I reject classical logic.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

And yet, you're still incapable of showing *why* you don't like it without devolving into jargon of your own creation and ignoring the premises of what you're trying to argue against.

Sheesh. It's just like the people who try to use thermodynamics to disprove evolution.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

It isn't jargon on my own creation at all. It's technical academic philosophical terminology; philosophers in general and logicians in specific know what I'm talking about. I can define them for the layperson, but why should I write a long-assed definition more than once in a particular discussion?
Classical negation is unacceptable because it results in prelinearity; prelinearity is the following statement, ((p -> q) v (q -> p)), which reads as "either p implies q or q implies p", for any arbitrary p and q. So, either there being roads logically implies that the Sun is currently visible from my position on the Earth or the Sun's currently being visible from my position on the Earth logically implies that there are roads. No, actually, neither one is the case; neither of those two statements logically implies the other. We cannot consistently assert ~((p -> q) v (q -> p)) using a logic that has classical negation; therefore, classical negation is an unacceptable feature of a logic.
There are two other non-relevant results of classical logic (explosiveness and monotony) which require alterations to the structure of the logic (namely, by making it paraconsistent and defeasible), but that would probably be tl;dr at this point.
There's always wikipedia and plato.stanford.edu ... they've got great pages on classical and non-classical (intuitionistic, paraconsistent, defeasible and modal, specifically) logic.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Once you assume that for any two events, one must cause the other, of course, you've got bullshit.

This is because it's a bullshit assumption.

You can also prove absolutely anything by beginning with the assumption of X and ~X. That doesn't make logic *wrong*.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Prelinearity isn't a "presumption"; it's a theorem of classical logic that is provable using classical negation. It's absurdity and unacceptability imply the absurdity and unacceptability of classical negation.
Also, it isn't about causation; it's about implication.
Actually, I don't think that you can prove just anything beginning with the presumption of a true contradiction; I don't accept explosivness and there is no reason why I should other than "tradition", as far as I can currently tell, which is insufficient. One: explosiveness is based on the presumption that there are no true contradictions, which is why a true contradiction implies anything and everything; if you have a true contradiction, guess what? You're presuming your presumption to be false, so it isn't the case that anything and everything follows from a true contradiction. That argument is valid, but unnecessary, for higher-order logics (logics where the terms can range over predicates as well as objects) that have identity, since we can construct self-referentially inconsistent statements using them ... like, "This statement is false" or "This statement is unknown" ... or, to use Goedel's example, "This statement is unprovable".
Paraconsistency moves right into defeasibility. If you want a weaker form of paraconsistency, then you just hold that even if (p & ~p) is provable at some time (or in some world), then there's a time after that (or an accessible world) in which (p & ~p) is not provable and ~(p & ~p) is. According to the definition of conjunction, S |- (p & ~p) if and only if S |- p and S |- ~p ... so if S |- # at w, but not at w* (where w* is accessible from w), then S doesn't prove either p or ~p at w* ... that is, the logic being used is non-monotonic or defeasible.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

> Actually, I don't think that you can prove just anything beginning with the presumption of a true contradiction;

Incorrect.

Premises:
1. A
2. ~A
Proof:
3. A v B (1)
4. B (2 & 3)

A and B are arbitrary binary statements. By assuming a contradiction, you can logically prove or disprove absolutely any statement.

This does not make the logic bad. It makes your presumptions bad, just like how it's not your computer's fault if you ask it thw wrong question.

> it's a theorem of classical logic that is provable using classical negation.
And yet you never bother to explain what makes "classical" negation any different from normal negation, nor do you ever actually PROVE that for all statements A and B, either A must imply B or B must imply A.

You state this as a presumption of your argument.

It is bullshit[1].

Therefore, your entire argument, since it precedes from a bullshit presumption, is bullshit, just like my proof for B where B is anything, above.

[1]: Yes, this is a technical term. I'm an engineer, trust me.

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Only in a classically explosive logic is that argument valid. The more general way of formalizing the elimination rule for disjunction is: (p v q), (p -> r), (q -> r) |- r; explosiveness comes in which you have (p v q) and ~p as premises. Then you get:
1) ~p assumption
2) (p v q) assumption
3) p v-elimination, first-horn
4) # # from 1 and 3
5) q explosive result from 4
6) q v-elimination, second-horn
7) q v-elimination
The thing is that why should I accept that (p v q) is proven without a proof of either p or a proof of q from which to derive it? There is no reason, so the above proof simplifies to q |- q ... trivial.
I state prelinearity primarily because it's the logical consequence of classical negation and it's what I'm arguing against; I guess I could start with classical negation, show the derivation of prelinearity, then argue that prelinearity is absurd and unacceptable ... and, consequently, so is classical negation. My argument is a reductio; it presumes something as true in order to show that this presumption leads to a contradiction or an absurdity ... and then concludes that the offending presumption is false. This is distinct from a classical reductio where something is presumed to be logically false, this is shown to lead to a contradiction, so that thing is inferred to be logically true.
BTW, the real presumption is a second-order, metalogical assertion that for all statements p and q, it is provably the case that either p implies q or q implies p; so, the negation of this is a negative existential, namely, that there is at least one pair of statements, p and q, such that neither p implies q nor q implies p. I don't want ~((p -> q) v (q -> p)) as a theorem (for any arbitrary p and q), since that would also be inconsistent if there was at least one p and q such that (p -> q); a trivial counterexample is where q = p ... (p -> p) trivially.

[zenten.livejournal.com]

John: What you're doing here is the equivalent of trying to prove quantum physics wrong by using neutonian physics.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

If that's the case, then Chris' argument is that he doesn't believe in Newton's laws at all, because they stop working when your speed approaches C and your mass approaches 0.

What I'm saying is that
1. what he states as fact is not correct, and
2. that his presumption that "for any P and Q, either P implies Q or Q implies P" is bullshit and hence makes his argument basing from it also bullshit.

Chris objects to digital logic on the grounds that he doesn't believe in it, and he doesn't believe in it because with bullshit in, you get nothing but bullshit out.

This is a problem.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

...is it just me, or is he saying that because prelinearity[1] can give GIGO results if you abuse it, any logical system (like algebra) which supports prelinearity is inherently unworkable?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

She's not serious. Hitherby Dragons is a source of all kinds of amusing writings - it's been less good lately, but classics like the ones that starts

"Rubber ducky", said Morpheus, "You are The One".

never fail to make me laugh.

Bah. I think she's funny, anyway.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Probably not. Hitherby tends to find something to talk about--the conditions of living on earth, God, phone calls, Cerebus[1], voting, seeking hell--and then rambles about it from a quirky yet superficially scientific/logical POV.

I like her daily writing stuff, actually. It's what I'd expect if someone who thought like Dave McKean draws were asked to explain a fact of life.

(Oddly enough, I'm not a real big fan of Dave McKean.)
---
[1] The puppy is sad.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Cerberus.

Cerebus is the misogynistic aardvark Mary Sue Conan-wannabe.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I go to hell now.

[rexar.livejournal.com]

*snickers*

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by "materially identical"? Is that "material" in the logical sense (material implication) or material in some stricter definition?

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd say "materially identical" is "identical in all regards except that of God's will, which is being hypothesized to be non-intrinsic and distinct from the physical universe".

But he did put in a link to the writer's daily blog, so you can go ask her.