Quote from: iamnotback on January 17, 2017, 02:34:09 PM

CoinCube is positing that Ethical Monotheism is the absolute truth that maximizes freedom and knowledge formation consistent with driving humanity to higher entropy levels. As I understand it, the essence of Ethical Monotheism is that morality must be absolute, thus it requires a supranatural (i.e. external to the bounds of our existence) basis, i.e. a God.

Unfortunately I can't (yet) find any rational support for this thesis.

The key is morality. For example, the argument is made that we would not value humanity if we did not have an absolute God telling us to. I find this to be ludicrous and I don't understand how any smart person could come such a conclusion. Even if entirely self-interested, we value humanity because our existence would be irrelevant and unsuccessful without humanity. Man is nothing without a society. The maximum division-of-labor dictates that our production and achievements can only increase (and be meaningful existing outside of our own perception) by being a member of a society.

The righteous points in the Bible are simply what smart men would realize are necessarily to have well functioning society. It doesn't require any God. The "judgments" against our sins are simply natural outcomes of not understanding the principles of a well functioning society.

The God part is necessary to get the people to follow who would otherwise defect from the principles of a well functioning society. But dumb people following blindly is top-down mind control and thus is not maximizing freedom and knowledge formation. I am leaning towards Ethical Monotheism is counter-productive.

However, there is a theory that women are naturally prone to hypergamy and would naturally choose a False Life Plan (<-- click the link) if they were not mind controlled:

Quote from: http://acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-4-number-2/freedom-welfare-dependency

R&L: What are the differences between the genders as articulated in your book Men and Marriage and what impact does this have on the social order?

Gilder: The key difference is that the woman holds in her very body a link to the long term future of the race. Her sexuality determines her long term goals. As a very physiological consciousness, she knows she can bear and nurture children. She has a central role in the very perpetuation of the species. The man is estranged from this process; his sexuality arises merely as a compulsive drive to pleasure. Its short term by nature. Its predatory and quickly gratified. The Womens Movement tragically reduces female sexuality to the terms of male sexuality. When this happens, she reduces herself to the male level of recreational sex. Paradoxically, when that happens the woman loses all her power over men and the reverence and respect toward the procreative potential of woman is lost. And that really destroys the family. But if the power of choice is given up, the woman actually ascends to a higher level of sexuality and her body attains an almost mystical power over men.

Note a man should realize that he has a role in a well functioning society and also can't just view sex as for pleasure. By well functioning society, I obviously don't mean the leftist insanity.

There is also the issue of an undersupplied public good, in that every person may perceive it is in their self-interest to defect from the principles of a well functioning society because they assume others won't. A little cheating here and there won't hurt, except everyone is doing it. The fear of a God may be necessary to defeat this Tragedy of the Commons. Yet this seems to be part of diversity of nature than an absolute truth, for even the R selection strategy is necessary to advance the entropy of the human race.

Quote from: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/mono.html

It means that suttee, the now rare but once widespread Hindu practice of burning widows with their husband's body, is wrong. It means the killing of a daughter or sister who lost her virginity prior to marriage, practiced to this day in parts of the Arab world, is immoral.

And their societies are languishing in extreme suffering because of their inability to comprehend how disrespecting their fellow humans is destroying themselves. They reaped what they sowed. We don't need a God to tell us that.

Quote from: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/mono.html

First, nature is finite and God is infinite.

Incorrect. Nature is unbounded.

Nothing can be infinite, by definition. Fairy-tales may help though to keep the pagans locked in an unfalsifiable fear/superstition?

Quote from: CoinCube on January 09, 2017, 07:10:54 PM

It further argues that information (degrees-of-freedom) cannot be infinite or it would not converge to become knowledge.

The conflation of infinite and unbounded is a fundamental error.

Quote from: CoinCube on January 04, 2017, 06:54:18 AM

Knowledge and Power by George Gilder

Quote from: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalism-Revolutionizing/dp/1621570274

...Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as crucial elements of an environment for prosperity. Smith was right: An arena of disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise would drown the feats of creation that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed informative disorder....

...Freedom must be subject to the constraint of convergence. Some top-down order must be maintained to prevent destructive chaos aka noise that would otherwise destroy rather than create knowledge.

The amount of top-down control needed increases in the presence of increased noise...

Information is distinguished from noise by the mutual information (what I had sometimes informally referred to as "resonance"). If every outcome is independent (i.e. maximum entropy/disorder/equiprobable randomness), then there is no mutual information. Thus, information requires some order. Entropy is unbounded, but it can't be infinite else existence would not be perceived because every outcome would be entirely independent sharing no mutual information with each other.

I looked into the genius Freeman Dyson's view on religion and he seems to be approaching from the position of wanting to feel he is connected to whole of society:

Quote from: http://eastamant.com/article.php?articleid=67

Freeman Dyson thinks science and religion arent at odds: I think its only a small fraction of people who think that. Perhaps they have louder voices than the others . . . I think Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of damage. I disagree very strongly with the way hes going about it. I dont deny his right to be an atheist, but I think he does a great deal of harm when he publicly says that in order to be a scientist, you have to be an atheist. That simply turns young people away from science. Hes convinced a lot of young people not to be scientists . . . they dont want to be atheists. Im strongly against him on that question. Its simply not true what hes saying, and its not only not true but also harmful. The fact is that many of my friends are much more religious than I am and are first-rate scientists. Theres absolutely nothing that stops you from being both . . . Dawkins has the arrogance to say that anyone who does not share his views is infected with a virus. No wonder he cannot coexist peacefully with them.

For me, Dyson says, (much as Santayana had observed before him), religion is much more about a community of people than about belief. Its fine literature and music. As far as I can tell, people who belong to my church dont necessarily believe anything. Certainly we dont talk about that much. I suppose Im a better Jew than I am a Christian. Jewish religion is much more a matter of community than it is of belief, and I think thats true of us Christians to a great extent, too . . . they [my parents] were practicing Christians, but not believing Christians . . . a practicing Christian is somebody who lives a Christian life and likes to worship in common with a lot of other people and considers the church as a community to which to belong, but you dont inquire closely as to what the others believe. Of course, some people take belief very seriously, and others dont. My conception of God is not weakened by my not knowing whether the physical universe is open or closed, finite or infinite, simple or multiple. God for me is a mystery, and will remain a mystery after we know the answers to these questions . . . I cannot imagine that he is greatly impressed by our juvenile efforts to read his mind . . . I dont remember the context out of which this remark arose. Maybe I was thinking of the fight between Galileo and the Aristotelian philosophers of his day. The Aristoteleans wanted to keep the heavens separate from the earth so there would be room for God in the sky. Galileo said the moon was a world like the earth with mountains and seas. Translated into modern language, Galileo was saying that the size and shape of the universe are not telling us anything about God.

Cosmology and the Divinity Blankie

It [biology, physics and quantum mechanics] impacts upon our understanding of theology, Dyson has said, What I was pointing out is that human theology is based on our own value system above all our knowledge of good and evil as we experience it. Take an autistic child. I took the case of Jessica Park, who is a friend of mine who happens to be autistic. If she had a theology, it would be quite different because she cannot understand other people suffering. She has no conception of other peoples existence in the way we have. Its a radically different world that she lives in. You can tell by the fact that she cant understand the difference between I and you. She uses the words indiscriminately. So the idea of a suffering savior would have no meaning for her at all. If she had a theology, it wouldnt involve sin. One thing that is characteristic of autistic people is that they cannot tell a lie. Jessica never tells a lie because to tell a deliberate lie, you have to have the idea of deceiving somebody. Thats something she couldnt imagine. Since there is no sin, there can be no fall from grace and no redemption. The example of Jessica shows us how our own view of the world might be equally skewed. There may be many essential features of the world to which we are blind, just as she is blind to other peoples thoughts and feelings. So our theology also reflects our possibly skewed view of the world.

I think I am disagreeing with Dyson on the following point, because the discussion I've been having with CoinCube is employing the science of entropy (which I think is fundamental) to theorize about human nature and society (and its relationship to knowledge formation and the Second Law of Thermodynamics):

Quote

What Dyson has said is that its impossible to observe both the scientific and the religious aspects of human nature at the same time. For me, he says, science is just a box of tricks, and I enjoy playing with them. Its a form of exercise. It has nothing to do with philosophy, certainly even less to do with religion. Its essentially just a skill that I happen to have learned. Some people think about science much more solemnly. For me, science has nothing much to do with deep thoughts.

I found this quote of Dyson which based on my writings and the work I aiming to do with crypto-currency appears to be incorrect:

Quote from: https://www.amazon.com/review/R36TR5EA6FORW5/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1590172167&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books

*Technological progress does more harm than good unless accompanied by ethical progress. The free market by itself will not produce technologies access-friendly to the poor.

That is a very good note. This is actually the first time i heard of this "Tragedy of Commons". But if you think about it, there is actually truth behind the thought. Only by holding onto something special, something great, is how you can only try and live life to the fullest.