Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Sep 25, 2012; 2:55am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Faith-tp7580633p7580716.html
Robert,
For a pragmatist, the meaning of faith is in what it gets you do, not in its
content in the ordinary sense. So, under this understanding, Faith would
apply to behavior of people within institutions and faith would apply to
less public acts. I guess.
N
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of Robert J. Cordingley
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2012 7:39 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] faith
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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