| Oliver Wong 2005-12-15, 6:55 pm |
|
"charles hottel" <jghottel@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:26faa$43a0db18$4f9c602$23726@DIALUP
USA.NET...
> Well it seems that finite men can understand something about infinite
> sets and Georg Cantor even discovered a hierarchy of infinities. Donald
> Knuth in his book "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About"
> discusses finiteness and clearly shows that just being finite is not much
> of a restriction. He states that the word "infinite" occurs only three
> times in the KJV of the Bible and only one of those is about God (God's
> understanding is said to be infinite). Quoting from page 172:
>
> "But now I realize that infinity is not necessarily even one of God's
> attributes. I'm quite willing to grant God might indeed be infinite, and
> God might have the power to examine infinitely many possibilities in an
> instant. But even the ability to deal with finite numbers, on the order of
> Super K, is more than enough to inspire awe.
>
> Moreover I don't think theologians can legitimately disagree with me on
> this. To say that God's abilities are not infinite, but limited by
> quantities like Super K, is not a realistic limitation at all. Such a
> limitation cannot contradict the Bible or any other sacred text, because
> natural language has no words to distinguish meaningfully between such
> unimaginable large magnitudes."
>
> Well there is a lot of interesting material in this book. He discusses a
> sampling technique that you can use to gain insight into a complicated
> subject. For those who do not trust any Bible translation other that their
> own, he discusses how to translate Bible verses without knowing Hebrew or
> Gr . This is the method he used in writing his book "3:16 Bible Texts
> Illuminated". He also discusses aesthetics and calligraphy, what he
> learned about God and theology and the difference between the two. Finally
> there is a section on God and computer science. Computer programmers as
> creators of new universes, computational complexity as a way to approach
> the questions of free will and omnipotence and other concepts of computer
> science that may give insights about divinity.
>
> Well there may be as many interpretations of what the Bible says as there
> are human beings that have read it. Anyway it seems that those with an
> interest and or belief in the Bible are unfairly characterized when
> described as "uneducated myth believers". If Donald Knuth is uneducated
> then we all are.
I'll probably check out this book (the title alone is intriguing, and it
is by a respect author in the comp-sci circles). Out of curiosity, what is
this "Super K" value that is being referred to in a few places in these
quotes?
As part of my philosophy, I have a pragmatic interpretation of the
Turing Test (i.e. Something is intelligent if we believe it is intelligent),
and this has ethical implications about AI (which I suspect what the
"programmers as Gods of their computer-simulated universe" is getting at)
that I have yet to be able to resolve.
- Oliver
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