Re: Mysticism (WAS) E.S.P. in the Turing Test

From: CYMM (cymm@trinidad.net)
Date: Thu Aug 31 2000 - 11:25:19 MDT


Ken,

Before I go any further... I almost sure that we have slightly different
concepts of the term "mysticism".

I use the term to describe any epistemological framework that allows
inclusion of intuitive or meditative insight that can be incorporated into
an empirical model of experiential reality without prior Turing Computable
empirical justification.

Notice, I haven't precluded screening out whole classes of insight.... just
that such a mystical framework does not reject outright all knowledge that
happens to be derived solely or largely from intuition, introspection
etc...

The mystical knowledge may well be justified by empirical hindsight.

That being said... there's lotsa grounds for mysticism in Quantum
Mechanics... the fact that you can't easily shake the observer out of the
paradigm... the fact that a deterministic Quantum Wave function still has to
be mapped to physical reality via a totally probabilistic Born criterion...
and the fact that quantum computers seem to exist.

As Henry Stapp points out; the Von Neumann formulation frankly allows a
spiritual (ie non-material and perhaps Turing Incomputable...) side of
things.

The Nineteeth century is over. My gosh, the Twentieth is almost washed up
too.

We no longer exist in a Turing Computable Universe... It is possible - and
some people like Stapp; like Sarfatti, hope to show that it is this
component of the Universe that accounts in part for some of the computation
that our minds perform.

Their approach is theoretico-empirical.

An empirical approach can lead to the demonstration that mystiocal knowledge
(ie, knowledge obtained via turing incomputable processes) might exist.

But certainly, the current theoretical formulation of both QM &
Conmputational Theory encourages, rather than discourages such an outlook.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ken Clements <Ken@Innovation-On-Demand.com>
To: extropians@extropy.org <extropians@extropy.org>
Date: Thursday, August 31, 2000 1:07 PM
Subject: Re: Mysticism (WAS) E.S.P. in the Turing Test

>CYMM wrote:
>
>> Hi extropians,
>>
>> A lot of "scientific" sorts base their outlook on a nineteenth century
>> conceptual Universe.
>>
>> By the late '20s, of this century, Quantum Theory had introduced serious
>> grounds for the legitimization of mysticism in physics - and by the time
Von
>> Neumann & Wigner finished with it, even frank spirituality.
>>
>
>Early in the century experiments showed that events at a sufficiently small
>scale could not be modeled by classical Newtonian mechanics. Quantum
Theory was
>developed to present a predictive model of these repeatable, but seemingly
>strange results. There is no grounds for mysticism here, although
throughout
>history, lack of knowledge has been used to justify belief in the
supernatural.
>Lack of knowledge provides neither support nor refutation. Thomas
Jefferson
>wrote, "Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is closer to the truth who
>believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong."
>
>>
>> Parallel with that, Church; Godel; Post & Turing certainly formulated
>> rigorous ideas on computability that allowed (...even encouraged, some
>> say...) mysticism in our logic & epistemology.
>
>They showed that non provable truths exist *outside* our logic &
epistemology,
>not inside. The fact that some non provable proposition *could* be true,
does
>you no good in trying to break the symmetry among all non-falsifiable
beliefs.
>(A symmetry which is generally broken simply by the existing beliefs of the
>family one is born into.)
>
>>
>> It is perhaps unscientific (...in a 21st century sense...) to dismiss all
>> mystics as Know Nothings.
>
>Certainly some of these folks know a great deal about their beliefs, and
it is
>scientific to try to use our reasoning to discover why they have these
beliefs.
>I read the following two paragraphs from _The Meme Machine_ by Susan
Blackmore,
>to a group discussing this topic at the last Foresight Senior Associates
>gathering:
>
>- Like it or not, we are surrounded by religions. The 'Great Faiths' of
the
>- world have lasted thousands of years and affect our calendars and
>- holidays, our education and upbringing, our beliefs and our morality.
>- All over the world people spend vast amounts of time and money
>- worshipping their gods and building glorious monuments in which to
>- do it. We cannot get away from religions, but using memetics we can
>- understand how and why they have such power.
>- All the great religions of the world began as small-scale cults,
usually
>- with a charismatic leader, and over the years a few of them spread to
take
>- in billions of people all across the planet. Imagine just how many small
>- cults there must have been in the history of the world. The question is
>- why did these few survive to become the great faiths, while the vast
>- majority simply died out with the death of their leader or the dispersal
of
>- their few adherents?
>
>>
>> I've known of mystical rabbis with Ph. Ds in theoretical physics and I've
>> met vedantic philosophers whose grasp of modern physics was breathtaking.
>
>Good!!
>
>>
>> There's a lot of "feel-good" non-reasoning behind some New Age stuff -
but
>> you can't dismiss the lot unless you've read them or engaged them in
>> meaningful dialogue.
>>
>> I have. Not enough, I'm sure.
>
>Bring it on, we will dialogue meaningfully.
>
>>
>> But there's a hell of a lot of orthodox scientific bigotry going on here.
>> Natural, to be sure, in a Kuhnian sense... but to be kept in rein - if we
>> want to be good extropians.
>
>Scientific skepticism can look like bigotry to those not used to it. That
is
>not to deny any exists. The way you find out is to present your ideas and
>counter the objections with facts and reason.
>
>-Ken
>



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