Comment?

In nature. there are neither rewards or punnishments.
There are consequences................[Robert Ingersoll]

How is it the natural world is not mirrored in religion.?
Because we have egos.

A religion based on REASON...Has no rewards or punnishments.
It has only consequences.

Occam

 

Here's my two comments.

A religion based in reason has no rewards or punishments, only consequences.

Our current religion based in emotion has no consequences, only rewards and punishments.

The key lies in a religion that is not weighted to either side.

My imagination deviates here and draws a parallel comparing atheistic and behavioural beliefs versus theistic and supernatural beliefs, and the synthesis of both doctines is as a spirituality.

 

To me, consequences can be either a reward or a punishment, and to say that they are neither is , imho, semantics. I climb mountains, and after many hours of sweat and legwork, my reward is a stunning view. Sure, you could say that it is just the consequence of my actions, but to me it is without question a reward. In my younger days there were times I drank too much in a night. The next morning, as I vomitted, or dealt with a splitting headache, it was hard to see that my hangover was not punishment for my excess.
Technically, maybe these things are not rewards or punishments, but for me, they may as well be, since I see very little difference.

"Morality is truth in full bloom." Victor Hugo
"In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds." Robert Ingersoll
"My religion is kindness." His Holiness, the Dalai Lama

 

Blackguard..
But that was self inflicted...We modify ourselves through experience...
Its called wisdom.

But do you really think occam will. say..go to the mormon hell?
For thats where they say he is going...
Or is it the baptist hell..oh dear..they all sound so boringly childish
that it is hard to remember which eternal punnishment is doled out by whom.:X

Occam

Occam

 

Certainly, the hangover was my own doing, but the view from the mountaintop... I did not make that view. Also, some mountaintops that I have attained were clouded in and I was rewarded with a cold, wet, sore body for my efforts. One such peak did not afford me a view until the third time up. In that case, I felt even more richly rewarded in the end.

 

Hikaru

Not weighted to any side...

Yes...this is why occam speaks of ballance.
What really is.. is probably a mix of science, metaphysics and the spiritual.

All see little bits of what IS...

Occam

 

Blackguard...

Occam will stick to motorbikes..The idea of hanging off a sheer cliff face..
well
As to reward and punnishment...Such is still all IN YOUR HEAD.
There is no 'state of reality called reward or punnishment.'

There are only consequences.
And the consequence may be that in the future. you pick mountains
with a high prob of a view whan you get there. [the top]
Besides being tougher and more experienced [also]

Occam

 

reward and punishment are simply subjective classes of consequences. any human mind will interpet a consequence as a reward or punishment but in the end they are just consequences.

religions should be based on the objectivity of their belief and not their subjectivity.

that is why an agnostic scientist who descovers all of the objectivity of the univverse will finally reveal whether there is a god or not. because in order for god to be real, theyu must be objectivly determinable. otherwise.. they are contained to the subjectrive realm. and that realm is the one contained within our mind.
since god is evidently not actively determinable through objectivity, the only way to find him is to uncover everything in the universe that is NOT god, and then you will be left with whats left: the spiritual form. when i say god i mean the spiritual form too.

 

A natural religion would preferably be based on our perceptions. Reason is too susceptable to errors.

 

Well I don't know about you, but ... I mishear what people are saying a lot more often than my computer crashes. Actually, my computer hasn't crashed in ... a very long time. And just last night I couldn't hear what my friend was saying, I had to ask him a few more times.

Reason is reason because it's NOT susceptable to errors. Our perceptions of reason are error-prone, but reason itself is not, and that is why we build machines that do not have perceptions and only act on reason.

 

Machines don't act on reason. They might act 'through' reason, but they act primarily on the impulses of man, who usually act on perception. Therefore, machines would act on perception as a logical link in the chain after man.

 

What I mean is, the data processed by a machine is not distorted because the machine has no perceptions. Machines don't act on "impulses of man," that's absurd. They act on electricity and process data. When we tell it to calculate something, it calculates it; it doesn't think it calculates it and then return an answer with a varying degree of precsion, like a human would; it returns the EXACTING result. Every instruction that is sent as an electrical pulse to the CPU is carried out with an exacting certainty and accuracy, so it is reliable. If it weren't so reliable, we wouldn't be using them.

Machines are capable of analyzing the data that are above and beyond our human perception and processing limitations, and they don't suffer from lack of concentration or any of the problems that human beings do. Built by man, yes, but also designed to SURPASS the logical capabililties of man.

 

there are two types of reason. subjective and objective. objective reason is called logic. computers run on logic. humans can concieve logic but it is really a skill learnt to channel accurate subjective reasoning into the aquisition of logical deductions. human brain is subjective. human reasoning, and human perception are both flimsy. both can be affected by mood, drugs, context. they arent even two completely seperate things.

 

Built by man, yes, but also designed to SURPASS the logical capabililties of man.

__________________
-- Hikky Z

I would only suggest that logic is an absolute, like pregnancy, death, and truth. So imho, it is not possible to surpass it. My guess is that your intention was to convey that PC's are designed with the aim of enhancing and expanding our analytical and mathematical capabilities by allowing us to solve problems more quickly than the human brain is able to. Being a little bit logical, to me, is like being a little bit pregnant, or a little bit dead. One is either logical, or not. And regarding objectivity vs. subjectivity, I agree with Bill, true objectivity is not possible for our minds to attain. The observer is always going to be subjective, even if only because of his physical and temporal observation perspective, which is never going to be the same as anyone else's.

 

Is rationality a perception? "A rational perception", "a rational viewpoint". If humans are based entirely on perception and yet can come to logical understandings, that would mean to me that logic is in itself a perception. However, it would be much more like an 'acquired taste' or a perception requiring thinking and experience. If machines rest at the apex of the logical process that would only mean that their perception is absolute and unwavering. And perhaps, singular.

Do machines act of their own accordance? If so, it must mean that they also have free-will which would therefore render your argument of 'exact' results and the inability of free-thought, null. If not, they are still subservient to the will of man. In other words, the 'impulses of man'.

That would require a definition of a machine. I don't think all machines run on electricity and I don't think all machines strictly process data either. But then again, I might be wrong.

We don't tell a machine anything. Out of our interaction with a certain machine we expect a certain result. The result that we expect does not always come out the way we expected it. Sometimes machines lose. For example, the super-computer Big Blue lost against Kasparov (it might have been a different chess master) and that might shed some light on the infallibility of the machine you seem to hold so dear. Was it the fault of Big Blue itself? Or the fault of those who created and programmed it? Or maybe, it was just the superiority of a man who excells in a certain field? Machines are still subservient to the will of man.

Okay, fair enough. The reliability is transient but works for the moment. I still wouldn't place all my eggs in one basket, if you catch my drift.

The machines which I feel we are talking about merely compute, that is all. The real analytical work is done by humans. Analytical work requires a degree of 'big-small picture' work that puts events/objects, etc... in their place; that only humans possess, whereas machines do not have a clue of what they are computing because they have consciousness. They are subservient to the will and impulses of man.

The human is still capable of outstripping the machine by a million to one. A human can take giant leaps in a fraction of a second that would take a machine years if not never, to arrive at the same destination. If you gave a machine all the information that Einstein could have used to come to his General Theory of Relativity, do you really think a machine could come to the same 'analytic' conclusion as he?

Human beings are a product of their environment, their genes and their upbringing. Do not rule the path to perfection out. The most pressing problems of humanity will always be greater than humanity is, but this is the process of evolution and in my mind, perfection. Machines can not perfect themselves and are thus still at the mercy of mankind. Whereas generally, man is constantly elevating himself and attaining higher levels of consciousness. And consciousness, cannot be measured - much less by a machine.

 

Rationality is a perception that is accurate to the state of reality and logic. It is accurate, thus it is "rational," even though it is not purely logical because it is a perception.

Humans can come to logical understandings through rational perceptions.

Machines resting at the apex of the logical process ... having "absolute" and "unwavering" perceptions? Machines simply do not have perceptions; they have no sense organs capable of having sensations. They are the apex of the logical process BECAUSE the data they recieve and produce are not based on perceptions.

Machines do not act of their own accordance. And they do not have free will. And *neither do humans* if you believe in determinism and understand the idea of LaPlace's Demon.

I don't believe humans have "free will." Maybe multiple choices, but the choices that a person makes is ALWAYS based on the information they have, and what they desire. And what a human desires is not under their control; if it were, we would not have "unclean" people or "heathens" or people who are considered "dirtier" than other people. Humans cannot choose what desires they have, they can only choose whether or not to suppress them. So they have free choice, but not free will, because their "will" may be to do something dirty, even though they do not.

You are not likely to go run away and drown yourself in an ocean, unless someone expresses the idea to you. You only do what occurs to you to do. That is not "free will."

As the formal argument goes: (P1) No action is free if it must occur. (P2) All actions have antecedent conditions which ensure their occurrance. (C1) Therefore, no action is free.

If you want to define "acting on man's impulse" as "doing what man wants," then machines are NOT acting on man's impulse. I certainly do not want my computer to crash, nor do I want to get spyware and viruses, nor do I want the data on my hard drive to be corrupted because of a power surge. Machines act in electrical impulses, not "man's" impulses. Man has relative control over those electrical impulses, but they are not the same.

A suitable definition:

"A system or device for doing work, as an automobile or a jackhammer, together with its power source and auxiliary equipment." - Dictionary.com (2)

Machines do work. Which requires that they process data. And while they don't all run on electricity, they do all have power sources.

 

look i dunno if its been said.. but ALL a computer is, and that means ALL it is, is a machine that can compute calculations thousands of tiems faster than the human brain can. the calculations it makes are defined by humans. the computer cant do anything that is impossible for a human to do, it just does things incredibly faster, and many many calculations at a time.

a computer is commanded to do a calculation because of human impulse. however the process of calculation is not affected by any impulse of the user, but purely by the logic gates set down by the creator of the computing system.

the computer takes what is true and false from humans and then uses that as the basis of its logic. through binary mathematics. it has no impulse and no reasoning capabilities. unless a human tries to imitate their own reasoning capabilities by writing a code. but that code will not actually be a reasoning code, it will be a logic code created with the purpose of mimicing a reasoning calculation.


sorry if i repeated anyone

but yeh i think that some here dont actually understand what computers do and what the mind does. well no one really know what the mind does exactly but some here have less of an idea than others.

 

For one to be 'wise' he must see some value beyond consequence. He directs the consequences of his actions with aspiration. He chooses his way to be over another, because of the relative value between the two. He sees the 'reward' to growth, and the 'punishment' of reversion. Though he may not use such explicit terms, the concept is the same.

I think that, fundamentally, the problem is human self-consciousness.

 

Technically ... human brains work faster, but for us to accurately do simple calculations, our brain has to go through countless steps to unravel perception and all kinds of crazy things. Our brains literally take things that are simple and make them complex, so that the brain can do something with them.

Kind of like the same idea of a "Wrapper class" in Java programming. Allow me to explain: You can have an "int" variable (an integer), and an "Integer" variable (also an integer). The difference is that "int" variables are JUST integers, nothing else, so they are computed faster. But "Integer" variables come with all kinds of neat ways to manipulate that integer value. That makes it slower to compute, but you can also do more with it.

Same principal as the brain.

Humans don't decide what is true or false. We decide what is accurate and inaccurate. True and false values existed way before humans or animals ever did. Binary mathematics is just a label we use to describe the relationships between quantities. Computers don't have "binary mathematics," they have "do this to this here and do that to that here." They operate entirely on fact, regardless of what humans percieve fact to be.

 

MNS

Yes.. The value is continued existance.

If you wish to call the effects of reality on our actions.
Reward and punnishment...
That is your choice.

Personally..occam can NEVER be PUNNiSHED by reality for planting his foot in a gopher hole.
He suffers BECAUSE OF HIS LACK OF PERCEPTION.
Occam does NOT PUNNISH HIMSELF. for mistakes...Or call his errors ..
punnishment...he is NOT rewarded for correct action.

He either adjusts or falls by the wayside.
This is evolution.

Human Wisdom is taking the least destructive path to others and our world that fits with ones code of morals...

Occam