Date: Thu 25 Aug 1988 22:53-EDT From: AIList Moderator Nick Papadakis Reply-To: AIList@mc.lcs.mit.edu Us-Mail: MIT LCS, 545 Tech Square, Rm# NE43-504, Cambridge MA 02139 Phone: (617) 253-6524 Subject: AIList Digest V8 #66 To: AIList@mc.lcs.mit.edu Status: R AIList Digest Friday, 26 Aug 1988 Volume 8 : Issue 66 Religion: The Godless Assumption The Ignorant assumption backward path and religions Why Bruno was burned Science vs. 'Religion' -- not all religions have a problem Linking Cogsci and Religion ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 09:23:43 HOE From: ALFONSEC%EMDCCI11.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Subject: The Godless Assumption In a previous article, John McCarthy says: > Burning Giordano Bruno presents problems for many religions that Hiroshima > doesn't present for science. Science doesn't claim that scientific > discoveries can't be used in war. Isaac Asimov (in "The sin of the scientist") contends that Science knew sin when the first product was developed that could be used ONLY in war. If I recall correctly, this product was mustard-gas (used in WWI). > A religion that claimed that the Catholic Church was protected > from doing evil by God, that the Catholic Church was responsible > for the killing of Bruno and that killing Bruno was a crime > have problems. The Catholic Church never claimed that its members (whatever their hyerarchy level) were protected from doing evil. The "infallibility of the pope" has nothing to do with that. It affects not deeds, but sayings, and only very special ones (only twice in the last 150 years). In a previous article, sas@BBN.COM says: > To my knowledge there is no scientific litmus test which can determine > the good or evil of a particular thought of action. True. From premises in the indicative mode ("this is so") you can never deduce a conclusion in the imperative ("you shall do so"). You need at least a premise in the imperative (i.e. a moral axiom). In a previous article, Surya M Mantha says: >In a previous article, ALFONSEC@EMDCCI11.BITNET writes: >> >>burned in Hiroshima in 1945. In actual fact, neither Religion nor Science >>are discredited because of that, only people who do things can be discredited >>by them. Theories are discredited by negative evidence or by reason. >> > Not surprising!! This line of reasoning I mean. It is one that is >mostly commonly used to defend institutions that are inherently unjust >undemocratic and intolerant. The blame always lies with "people". The >institution itself ( be it "organized religion", "socialism", "state >capitalism") is beyond reproach. Afterall, it does not owe its existence >to man does it? I was not defending institutions. Religion and Science are not institutions. A Church or a University are. Institutions are made out of people. If people can be blamed, obviously the institutions can, too. I was not even attacking people. Who am I to pass judgment on people who lived at a place, a time, an environment, and who had a background very different from mine? Finally, in a previous article, Thomas Grossi says: >In a previous article, ALFONSEC@EMDCCI11.BITNET writes: >> .... If Religion is discredited because Giordano Bruno was burnt at >> the stake in 1600, then Science is discredited because 120,000 people were >> burned in Hiroshima in 1945. >No, World Politics is discredited: the bomb was dropped for political reasons, >not scientific ones. Science provided the means, as it did (in a certain >sense) for Religion as well. Agreed. But it was also World Politics that was discredited when Bruno was burnt. There was a lots of politics involved in that. M. Alfonseca (Usual disclaimer) ------------------------------ Date: 23 Aug 88 09:51:04 GMT From: mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!gilbert@uunet.uu.net (Gilbert Cockton) Subject: Re: The Ignorant assumption In reply to two separate comments from Marvin Minsky in comp.ai.digest >Yes, enough to justify what those who "knew" that they were right did >to Bruno, Galileo, Joan, and countless other such victims. >More generally, let's see more learning from the past. Take care when there are trained historians on the net :-) It is not beliefs that kill, but the power to act on them. Where "scientists" have had power, notably in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, they have killed to suppress heresy, just as the religious leaders of pre-modern Europe killed the early scientists to put down particularly annoying heresies. Of course, you will say, these people in Germany and Russia were not scientists. As a trained historian, it is enough for me that they called themselves scientists, just as the Inquisition were undoubtedly Christian. But as a historian, I would exercise great caution in extending the facts of a previous time into the present. One thing one can learn from the past is that this went out of fashion years ago :-) The way to analyse what a scientist or Christian would do now, given the absolute power enjoyed by the Inquisition, is to examine their beliefs. Neither group are democrats, nor would they respect many existing freedoms. Note that I am talking of roles of science and religion. As these people live in democracies, the chances are that the values of the wider society will repress the totalitarian instincts of their role-specific formal belief systems. Do not take this analysis personally. The way to attack my argument is to demonstrate that scientific or christian AUTHORITY are compatible with a liberal democracy. Any scientist who believes in a society regulated by scientific reason (which would rule out the need for consultative subjective democracy) would, given the power, introduce gulags, mental hospitals and other devices for the control of the irrational and the heretical. If anyone finds this unreasonable, consider how scientists wield power when they do have it in academic organisations and funding bodies. Admittedly they only murder rival research rather than rival researchers. Stakes don't have to be made from wood :-< P.S. Sure, move this discussion somewhere else :-) -- Gilbert Cockton, Department of Computing Science, The University, Glasgow gilbert@uk.ac.glasgow.cs !ukc!glasgow!gilbert ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 23 Aug 88 14:23 N From: LEO%BGERUG51.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: backward path and religions In Pattern Recognition, an intelligent system with a backward path in his reasoning, can be used to try to find the appearance of a certain known pattern in an input-signal. The system will probably always see this required pattern if it tries hard enough, even if it is not there. On the other hand, the Backward Path is a very usefull tool in the recognition of patterns, in the presence of noise and defects. After forward-backward resonance, eliminating the noise and correcting the defects, the system can recall the complete pattern. When using this system in a real-world environment, how and/or when can we know that the pattern recognition is false? How are human or animal brains dealing with this problem? (This is almost a discussion like subjective versus objective.) Secondly, consider a self-learning, self-organizing neural netwerk. Furthermore, suppose this system is searching for answers to questions in a field from which it has almost no knowledge. In this case, the system might ask for things that it can never find. But, because of the self-learning, self-organizing character, it will build answers, imaginary ones, if it keeps asking long enough. To my opinion, this is the essence of religions and superstitions. I presume that the number of layers or the 'distance' between the sense perception and the abstract thinking level is to big. Hence, when we have to deal with an extensive neural network, like the human brain, that is working far beneath its capabilities, it will be able to create imaginary 'objects' and speculations. I think that we can also put this feature in an other perspective. Animals with small brains are able to make a distinction between good and bad circumstances. A lot of animals with greater brains are able to make a distinction within the good circumstances, and chose a leader : the best. Humans can go further : they are able to create a leader or leaders, only excisting in there thoughts. If we would be able to build large neural networks, with these self- learning and self-organizing features, what is then the influence of the structure of this system to these problems? How can we avoid or use them? Building models or making suppositions is a very important part of intelligence, but how can we control an AI-system in this, when we are only able to control the dimensions of the system and the features of the basic parts, the neurons? I don't want to insult religious people, or being the cause of a discussion about religion or believing. I should only appreciate it, if somebody, having a more clear vieuw or some good idea's about these subjects, should reply... L. Vercauteren AI-section Automatic Control Laboratory State University of Ghent, Belgium e-mail LEO@BGERUG51.BITNET ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 24 Aug 88 17:17 PST From: HEARNE%wwu.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Subject: Why Bruno was burned For heaven's sake, Bruno was burned for butting up against established authority. Jim Hearne, Computer Science Department, Western Washington University, Bellingham Washington ------------------------------ Date: 25 Aug 88 03:33:56 GMT From: voder!pyramid!cbmvax!snark!eric@bloom-beacon.mit.edu (Eric S. Raymond) Subject: Science vs. 'Religion' -- not all religions have a problem Perhaps Dr. Minsky's remarks were intemperate. But the responses of his opponents make the error of identifying 'religion' with one particular *style* of religion, the monotheist-dualist-antimaterialist kind that happens to dominate Western culture. Within the context of the Judaism and the two most important Zoroastrian- influenced religions (Christianity and Islam) it is essentially correct to describe 'religion' as either a) opposed to science, or b) self-consciously about things held to be metaphysically 'beyond' scientific inquiry. These religions depend for critical parts of their belief systems on the historicity of various 'miraculous' occurences, and so must respond in one of the above two ways to science's claims to the even *potential* of universal explanatory power through the notion of unbreachable 'natural law'. However, there are other kinds of 'religion' (underrepresented in this culture at present) for which none of this is an issue. Some non-theistic varieties of Buddhism, for example, are nearly pure psychological schemata with little or nothing to say about cosmology (Zen is perhaps the best-known of these). There are many other forms (collectively called 'mystery religions') in which the religion is not at all concerned with what is 'true' in a physical- confirmation sense, only what is mythopoetically effective for inducing certain useful states of consciousness. To people involved in the shared *experience* of a mystery religion or Zen-like transformative mysticism, the whole science-vs.-'religion' controversy can seem just plain irrelevant to what they're doing. Someone operating from this stance might say: "The gods (or the Vedanta, or the Logos, or whatever) are powerful in human minds -- who cares if they 'exist' in a material sense or not?" At least one great Western thinker -- Carl Jung -- would have agreed. Religions come and go, but the archetypes are with us always. I bring all this up to point out that the 'religion-vs.-science' debate is a good deal more parochial and culture-bound than either of the traditional sides in it recognizes -- that scientists who get drawn into it often implicitly accept the (usually Christian-inculcated) premise that the validity of a religion hangs on its cosmological, historical and eschatological claims. It doesn't have to be that way. I, for example, can testify from ten years of experience that it is sanely possible to be both a hard-headed materialist and an ecstatic mystic; both a philosophical atheist and an experiential polytheist. Further discussion (if any), however, should take place in talk.religion.misc, and I have directed followups there. -- Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) UUCP: ..!{uunet,att,rutgers!vu-vlsi}!snark!eric @nets: eric@snark.UUCP Post: 22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Aug 88 07:33 EST From: Thomson Kuhn Subject: Linking Cogsci and Religion Fo an incredibly tight linking of cognitive science and religion see a book by Julian Jaynes called, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Thomson Kuhn The Wharton School ------------------------------ End of AIList Digest ********************