Posted by
Robert J. Cordingley on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Faith-tp7580633p7580711.html
But my point (regarding God) was an expectation of action by whatever I
have faith in and has nothing to do with action on my part. The
expected action can be provision of n virgins, not going to hell, relief
from pain, reincarnation as a higher being and all sorts of other forms
of divine intervention.
But then if atheists have a faith in a non-divine universe then they
also expect non-action, hmm.
Robert C
PS I may have missed it but please can you explain what a compressible
process is? (I know how it relates to things like gasses and some
liquids). R
On 9/24/12 5:16 PM, glen wrote:
> It does seem that we've come to some agreement on the meaning of the
> word. It seems basically centered around Nick's original usage: faith
> is a kind of short circuit for justification. Steve's "faith" only
> short circuits a little bit, whereas his "Faith" short circuits a lot.
> The same could be said of Russ'.
>
> We could think of this in terms of compressibility where faith is less
> compressible than Faith.
>
> But I think Robert's point is somehow crucial because it gets at what I
> want. The idea that faith implies something about acting in the face of
> uncertainty.
>
> When we take something on [F|f]aith, we're implying that the truth or
> falsity of the thing we're taking on [f|F]aith has an impact on the
> outcome, whereas a mere belief can have no impact on outcome. This
> includes ends justified indeterminates like "I'll kill you because I
> have faith that God wants me to kill you." Even though we may never
> determine the truth or falsity of their article of faith, if that person
> later came to believe the negation, guilt or repentance is the different
> consequence.
>
> This sounds like the beginning of a measure we might use to distinguish
> faith from other types of thoughts. Some thoughts might be "no-ops"
> whereas some have an effect. Even if we factor out all the
> subjectivity, intention, consciousness hoo-ha, we might be able to say
> something like: incompressible processes (all shortcuts that can be
> taken have been taken -- i.e. Faith) are less expressive (or flexible,
> or adaptable) than compressible processes. This might match up with
> other measures being used in neuroscience and/or psychology.
>
> We might also be able to apply some graph theory in the sense that some
> actions in a causal network will be more like cut points than others.
> If a graph has high connectivity, the uncertainty surrounding any given
> action matters much less than that surrounding something on the critical
> path. I know that, personally, I'd be much more likely to invoke and
> talk about "faith" when considering a cut-point action as opposed to one
> that had plenty of low-hanging fruit alternatives.
>
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