Please send the men in white coats for this dude ..
You have lost the plot .
What the smartest man 100 years ago knew is nothing to what a 12 year old child knows now ..
SO GROW UP NUTTER  

We know that pre-rational people exist. Pre-rational people, as I’m defining it, are concrete operational or worse. (Worse would be preoperational/magical and sensorimotor/archaic).
...
The rational person can try to explain how things look to the pre-rational. They will not succeed. Either you can see the validity of a logical argument, or you cannot. If I say if p, then q, p, therefore q and you say ‘no it’s not,’ all I can do is stare at you.

This is why only technology is responsible for sustainable gains in the lives of the people. Note CoinCube and I have postulated that in the theory of contentionism (a new term we invented) the top-down order (with socialism being one form) plays a role in the organization necessary to spawn new entropy, e.g. decentralizing technology.

Contentionism posits that some top down control is needed to restrain anarchy. It also posits that all such top down control has a tendency to grow without restraint.
When top-down control becomes problematic (limits free discourse or prosperity) a counterforce is needed to circumvent the top down control.

It is the existence of the counterforce that is important.

So my task is thus to show that the math of optimal fitness requires anarchy to be contained and limited.
I accept your challenge.

When I referred to the harvesting of entropy what I meant was that life requires entropy to exist, but critically such entropy must be limited and contained. Entropy/mutation must not be allowed to exceed the error threshold. Error threshold was developed from Quasispecies Theory by Eigen and Schuster to describe the dynamics of replicating nucleic acid under the influence of mutation and selection.

If replication was without entropy no mutants would arise and evolution would cease. On the other hand, evolution would also be impossible if the entropy/error rate of replication were too high (only a few mutation produce an improvement, but most will lead to deterioration). Error threshold allows us to quantify the resulting minimal replication accuracy (ie maximal mutation/entropy rate) that still maintains adaptation.

This can be shown analytically at its clearest in an extreme form of a fitness landscape which contains a single peak of fitness x > 1 with all other variations having a fitness of 1. With an infinite population there is a phase transition at a particular error rate p (the mutation rate at each loci in a genetic sequence). In Eigen and Schuster (1979), this critical error rate is determined analytically to be p = ln(x)/L (where L is the chromosome length). When this mutation/entropy rate is exceeded the proportion of the infinite population on the fitness peak drops to chance levels.

The can be thought of intuitively as a balance between exploitation and exploration in genetic search. In the limit of zero entropy/mutation successive generations of selection remove all variety from the population and the population converges to a single point. If the entropy/mutation rates are too excessive the evolutionary process degenerates into random search with no exploitation of the information acquired in preceding generations.

Thus the optimum entropy rate should maximize the search done through mutation subject to the constraint of not losing information already gained.
Any optimal entropy rate must lie between the two extremes, but its precise position will depend on several factors especially the structure of the fitness landscape.

It is also worth noting that at least with genetic algorithms natural selection tends to reduce the mutation/entropy rates on rugged landscapes (but not on smooth ones) so as to avoid the production of harmful mutations, even though this short-term benefit limits adaptation over the long term.

I posit that your analysis undervalues the utility of socialism.

I agree that socialism currently has negative utility. As you stated the power vacuum is pushing us towards every greater socialism and setting us up for collapse. It is a system out of balance. However, some degree of socialism is needed to find optimal fitness.

Socialism and anarchism are in constant opposition. Anarchism is needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained socialism as you have convincingly demonstrated. However, socialism is likewise needed to combat the evils/suboptimal outcomes of unrestrained anarchism.

The informational value of socialism is that it smooth’s the fitness curve. Anarchy if left unchecked results in an ever steeper curve. This has been shown to reduce the rate of evolution/change as it forces convergence onto the nearest local valley or local optima.

http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000187

Thus unrestrained anarchism increases short term fitness at the cost of long term optimization/adaptation. To borrow from your corporation analogy the proper role of socialism is to help ensure trailblazers survive long enough to eliminate the economic friction. In a landscape with an extremely steep fitness curve those individuals may not survive or succeed (crossing those barriers involves significant cost). We can get stuck in a higher valley (of the N dimensional solution space).    

In its most extreme form anarchism can drive the entropy of society past the Error Threshold at which point information is destroyed rather than created.  A madmax outcome is indeed possible. It would arise from the death throes of excessive socialism. Like a spring pushed too far in one direction a system trying to find equilibrium is likely to overshoot in the opposite direction when the unstable order dissolves. In the industrial era the backlash lead to communism. The collapse of socialism may lead us to pure anarchy = madmax.


This is the key point. Unrestrained anarchism does not eliminate all necessary barriers. Instead it forces conformity to the nearest local optima effectively raising barriers to distant more global optima. I am an anarchist currently because the solutions of anarchy including anonymous cryptocurrency are what is needed to restore balance in our era. Had I been around at the dawn of the industrial revolution I would have been a socialist.

Who needs God? Morality is a social construction

If morality is a social construction, then morality does not exist. Just because we call some things ‘good’ and others ‘evil’ doesn’t mean that good and evil refer to anything.
...
If morality doesn’t exist for real, then neither can morality be a useful fiction. Something can only be useful (have extrinsic value) if the thing that it is useful for is actually valuable i.e., intrinsically valuable. If we say that the false belief in morality makes us happy and is therefore good, we are introducing a moral category again; the notion that anything that makes human beings happy is good and anything that makes us unhappy is bad. We arrive at the morally good and bad once again.

All people who think that morality is a social construction and is good/useful, have reintroduced moral realism; the notion that good and evil actually exist. This is a contradiction and therefore cannot be true. You cannot believe that morality is merely a social construction and in moral realism.

If you claim to believe that morality is a social construction, then you are a moral nihilist. All us adults know that Father Christmas doesn’t really exist and you’re effectively claiming that morality doesn’t either.

The Argument from Religion - A Transcendental Argument

Morality can’t be found from a scientific examination of nature. So if morality is not in nature it must be beyond nature – the supernatural.

Where does value come from? It’s not found in the world reduced to scientific facts. Nonetheless, it’s found in the world as we actually experience it. We find value in all sorts of things. We value our friendships, and hopefully at least some of our family members. We value certain books, films, projects, beautiful days, ‘nature,’ and music. So value exists. We experience it. A transcendental argument asks – what must the world be like for this experience to be possible? There must be more to the world than scientific facts. The value of the world that we discover must have its basis in something else.
...
Morality is invisible to science because science cannot see value. Anything invisible to science must either not exist at all, or it must be nonphysical. Our name for the nonphysical aspects of reality is the spiritual, i.e., the divine, transcendent, God.
...
There is remarkable agreement among those at the higher reaches of many world religions. High level Buddhists, Catholic monks, Kabbalists, Sufis, all describe ultimate reality in similar terms and much of what they say can be summed up in the cliché, ‘all is one.’

If all is one, then my treating you badly is really treating myself badly.
...
God or Moral Nihilism

Your choices are God or moral nihilism. Social constructionism and Darwinian evolutionary theory can only allow you to say that we think and act like morality exists, not that morality does exist. Social construction and Darwinism certainly have nothing to say about the truth of morality. In fact, they suppose the opposite. In the first case, we just made it up, like Father Christmas. That’s called moral nihilism. The second case, Darwinians might try to say that morality is useful in promoting survival, but since they cannot establish that surviving has any intrinsic value, they cannot logically point to the extrinsic value of morality. Nothing has extrinsic value if nothing has intrinsic value and since the existence of intrinsic value is precisely what needs explaining in morality, Darwin and his followers have nothing interesting to say on the topic.

If you choose moral nihilism, just remember what you are choosing...If moral nihilism is true, then your life has no value and neither does anybody else’s.

The torturer will be right to start removing your fingers. Why? Because it’s fun and you can have nothing to say on the subject...The fact that you don’t want to die is only relevant if morality exists and morality requires another person to respect your wishes and desires. If you claim that your wishes and desires are nonetheless important, then you will be unable to say why my wishes and desires are not important too...we can go back to gassing the Jews, human sacrifice, and seeing how loud we can get torture victims to scream and any other psychotic things you can think of. If you must respect my wishes and desires, then you are behaving morally. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Who needs God? Morality is a social construction

If morality is a social construction, then morality does not exist. Just because we call some things ‘good’ and others ‘evil’ doesn’t mean that good and evil refer to anything.
...
If morality doesn’t exist for real, then neither can morality be a useful fiction. Something can only be useful (have extrinsic value) if the thing that it is useful for is actually valuable i.e., intrinsically valuable. If we say that the false belief in morality makes us happy and is therefore good, we are introducing a moral category again; the notion that anything that makes human beings happy is good and anything that makes us unhappy is bad. We arrive at the morally good and bad once again.

All people who think that morality is a social construction and is good/useful, have reintroduced moral realism; the notion that good and evil actually exist. This is a contradiction and therefore cannot be true. You cannot believe that morality is merely a social construction and in moral realism.

If you claim to believe that morality is a social construction, then you are a moral nihilist. All us adults know that Father Christmas doesn’t really exist and you’re effectively claiming that morality doesn’t either.

The Argument from Religion - A Transcendental Argument

Morality can’t be found from a scientific examination of nature. So if morality is not in nature it must be beyond nature – the supernatural.

Where does value come from? It’s not found in the world reduced to scientific facts. Nonetheless, it’s found in the world as we actually experience it. We find value in all sorts of things. We value our friendships, and hopefully at least some of our family members. We value certain books, films, projects, beautiful days, ‘nature,’ and music. So value exists. We experience it. A transcendental argument asks – what must the world be like for this experience to be possible? There must be more to the world than scientific facts. The value of the world that we discover must have its basis in something else.
...
Morality is invisible to science because science cannot see value. Anything invisible to science must either not exist at all, or it must be nonphysical. Our name for the nonphysical aspects of reality is the spiritual, i.e., the divine, transcendent, God.
...
There is remarkable agreement among those at the higher reaches of many world religions. High level Buddhists, Catholic monks, Kabbalists, Sufis, all describe ultimate reality in similar terms and much of what they say can be summed up in the cliché, ‘all is one.’

If all is one, then my treating you badly is really treating myself badly.
...
God or Moral Nihilism

Your choices are God or moral nihilism. Social constructionism and Darwinian evolutionary theory can only allow you to say that we think and act like morality exists, not that morality does exist. Social construction and Darwinism certainly have nothing to say about the truth of morality. In fact, they suppose the opposite. In the first case, we just made it up, like Father Christmas. That’s called moral nihilism. The second case, Darwinians might try to say that morality is useful in promoting survival, but since they cannot establish that surviving has any intrinsic value, they cannot logically point to the extrinsic value of morality. Nothing has extrinsic value if nothing has intrinsic value and since the existence of intrinsic value is precisely what needs explaining in morality, Darwin and his followers have nothing interesting to say on the topic.

If you choose moral nihilism, just remember what you are choosing...If moral nihilism is true, then your life has no value and neither does anybody else’s.

The torturer will be right to start removing your fingers. Why? Because it’s fun and you can have nothing to say on the subject...The fact that you don’t want to die is only relevant if morality exists and morality requires another person to respect your wishes and desires. If you claim that your wishes and desires are nonetheless important, then you will be unable to say why my wishes and desires are not important too...we can go back to gassing the Jews, human sacrifice, and seeing how loud we can get torture victims to scream and any other psychotic things you can think of. If you must respect my wishes and desires, then you are behaving morally. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Your watching videos of a nutcase ..

So god give us the 10 commandments so why did he hurt Jesus his own son?..

Very short 2.33 minute video clip.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6NPq_kPSUM

21st century thinking..Learn something..https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph2qWXJ-Tk

Ethical monotheism means two things:

1. There is one God from whom emanates one morality for all humanity.
2. God's primary demand of people is that they act decently toward one another.

So how does god make you act decently toward one another..Does he tell you himself or a human?..
Remember it's your belief Ethical monotheism..

...

I used to believe in God (because my parents, my teachers told me to), then I turned 12.

You can believe whatever you want, it will not make it true.

Just don't tell me there is some wisdom in Bronze Age or 6th century "holy" books, or that the Earth is 6000 years old, and the universe was created in 6 days.  That should offend anyone with half a brain.

We all know why these books were written.

Do a test: ask your all powerful God to appear in front of you.  See what happens.

If that does not work, ask him to post in this thread. :-)

I did not understand the philosophy to mathematics? Philosophy is the science which teaches us to argue. A philosopher can be any. But mathematics is an exact science of numbers. There will not be able to go different ways. Any mistake leads to collapse.

So who is your god?..
The god we all read in the bible?..No1
Something made all this so must be a god?..I.E you made your own god up?..No2

What is it 1 or 2..

See the trouble is your reading olden day thinkers..
WHAT WE THINKS YESTERDAY IS NOT WHAT WE THINKS TODAY ..
No time in the history of mankind has faith in God been more reasonable, more logical, or more thoroughly supported by science and mathematics. YESTERDAY THINKING..

Without philosophy we cannot penetrate deeply into mathematics.
No need to philosophy it either adds up or it doesn't mathematics.

In 1931, the young mathematician Kurt Gödel made a landmark discovery, as powerful as anything Albert Einstein developed.

Gödel’s discovery not only applied to mathematics but literally all branches of science, logic and human knowledge. It has truly earth-shattering implications.

Oddly, few people know anything about it.

Allow me to tell you the story.

Mathematicians love proofs. They were hot and bothered for centuries, because they were unable to PROVE some of the things they knew were true.

So for example if you studied high school Geometry, you’ve done the exercises where you prove all kinds of things about triangles based on a list of theorems.

That high school geometry book is built on Euclid’s five postulates. Everyone knows the postulates are true, but in 2500 years nobody’s figured out a way to prove them.

Yes, it does seem perfectly reasonable that a line can be extended infinitely in both directions, but no one has been able to PROVE that. We can only demonstrate that they are a reasonable, and in fact necessary, set of 5 assumptions.

Towering mathematical geniuses were frustrated for 2000+ years because they couldn’t prove all their theorems. There were many things that were “obviously” true but nobody could figure out a way to prove them.

In the early 1900’s, however, a tremendous sense of optimism began to grow in mathematical circles. The most brilliant mathematicians in the world (like Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert and Ludwig Wittgenstein) were convinced that they were rapidly closing in on a final synthesis.

A unifying “Theory of Everything” that would finally nail down all the loose ends. Mathematics would be complete, bulletproof, airtight, triumphant.

In 1931 this young Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel, published a paper that once and for all PROVED that a single Theory Of Everything is actually impossible.

Gödel’s discovery was called “The Incompleteness Theorem.”

If you’ll give me just a few minutes, I’ll explain what it says, how Gödel discovered it, and what it means – in plain, simple English that anyone can understand.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says:


You can draw a circle around all of the concepts in your high school geometry book. But they’re all built on Euclid’s 5 postulates which are clearly true but cannot be proven. Those 5 postulates are outside the book, outside the circle.

You can draw a circle around a bicycle but the existence of that bicycle relies on a factory that is outside that circle. The bicycle cannot explain itself.

Gödel proved that there are ALWAYS more things that are true than you can prove. Any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies not just to math, but to everything that is subject to the laws of logic. Incompleteness is true in math; it’s equally true in science or language or philosophy.

And: If the universe is mathematical and logical, Incompleteness also applies to the universe.

Gödel created his proof by starting with “The Liar’s Paradox” — which is the statement


“I am lying” is self-contradictory, since if it’s true, I’m not a liar, and it’s false; and if it’s false, I am a liar, so it’s true.

So Gödel, in one of the most ingenious moves in the history of math, converted the Liar’s Paradox into a mathematical formula. He proved that any statement requires an external observer.

No statement alone can completely prove itself true.

His Incompleteness Theorem was a devastating blow to the “positivism” of the time. Gödel proved his theorem in black and white and nobody could argue with his logic.

Yet some of his fellow mathematicians went to their graves in denial, believing that somehow or another Gödel must surely be wrong.

He wasn’t wrong. It was really true. There are more things than are true than you can prove.

A “theory of everything” – whether in math, or physics, or philosophy – will never be found. Because it is impossible.

OK, so what does this really mean? Why is this super-important, and not just an interesting geek factoid?

Here’s what it means:

• Faith and Reason are not enemies. In fact, the exact opposite is true! One is absolutely necessary for the other to exist. All reasoning ultimately traces back to faith in something that you cannot prove.
• All closed systems depend on something outside the system.
• You can always draw a bigger circle but there will still be something outside the circle.

• Reasoning inward from a larger circle to a smaller circle is “deductive reasoning.”

Example of a deductive reasoning:
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore Socrates is mortal

• Reasoning outward from a smaller circle to a larger circle is “inductive reasoning.”

Examples of inductive reasoning:
1. All the men I know are mortal
2. Therefore all men are mortal

1. When I let go of objects, they fall
2. Therefore there is a law of gravity that governs falling objects

Notice than when you move from the smaller circle to the larger circle, you have to make assumptions that you cannot 100% prove.

For example you cannot PROVE gravity will always be consistent at all times. You can only observe that it’s consistently true every time. You cannot prove that the universe is rational. You can only observe that mathematical formulas like E=MC^2 do seem to perfectly describe what the universe does.

Nearly all scientific laws are based on inductive reasoning. These laws rest on an assumption that the universe is logical and based on fixed discoverable laws.

You cannot PROVE this. (You can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow morning either.) You literally have to take it on faith. In fact most people don’t know that outside the science circle is a philosophy circle. Science is based on philosophical assumptions that you cannot scientifically prove. Actually, the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer.

(Science originally came from the idea that God made an orderly universe which obeys fixed, discoverable laws.)

Now please consider what happens when we draw the biggest circle possibly can – around the whole universe. (If there are multiple universes, we’re drawing a circle around all of them too):

• There has to be something outside that circle. Something which we have to assume but cannot prove
• The universe as we know it is finite – finite matter, finite energy, finite space and 13.7 billion years time
• The universe is mathematical. Any physical system subjected to measurement performs arithmetic. (You don’t need to know math to do addition – you can use an abacus instead and it will give you the right answer every time.)
• The universe (all matter, energy, space and time) cannot explain itself
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is boundless. By definition it is not possible to draw a circle around it.
• If we draw a circle around all matter, energy, space and time and apply Gödel’s theorem, then we know what is outside that circle is not matter, is not energy, is not space and is not time. It’s immaterial.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is not a system – i.e. is not an assemblage of parts. Otherwise we could draw a circle around them. The thing outside the biggest circle is indivisible.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is an uncaused cause, because you can always draw a circle around an effect.

• In the history of the universe we also see the introduction of information, some 3.5 billion years ago. It came in the form of the Genetic code, which is symbolic and immaterial.
• The information appears to have come from the outside, since information is not known to be an inherent property of matter, energy, space or time
• All codes we know the origin of are designed by conscious beings.
• Therefore whatever is outside the largest circle is a conscious being.

My book Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design explores the Origin of Information question in depth.

When we add information to the equation, we conclude that not only is the thing outside the biggest circle infinite and immaterial, it is also conscious.

Isn’t it interesting how all these things sound suspiciously similar to how theologians have described God for thousands of years?

So it’s hardly surprising that 80-90% of the people in the world believe in some concept of God. Yes, it’s intuitive to most folks. But Gödel’s theorem indicates it’s also supremely logical. In fact it’s the only position one can take and stay in the realm of reason and logic.

The person who proudly proclaims, “You’re a man of faith, but I’m a man of science” doesn’t understand the roots of science or the nature of knowledge!

Interesting aside…

If you visit the world’s largest atheist website, Infidels, on the home page you will find the following statement:


If you know Gödel’s theorem, you know that all logical systems must rely on something outside the system. So according to Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, the Infidels cannot be correct. If the universe is logical, it has an outside cause.

Thus atheism violates the laws of reason and logic.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem definitively proves that science can never fill its own gaps. We have no choice but to look outside of science for answers.

The Incompleteness of the universe isn’t proof that God exists. But… it IS proof that in order to construct a rational, scientific model of the universe, belief in God is not just 100% logical… it’s necessary.

Euclid’s 5 postulates aren’t formally provable and God is not formally provable either. But… just as you cannot build a coherent system of geometry without Euclid’s 5 postulates, neither can you build a coherent description of the universe without a First Cause and a Source of order.

Thus faith and science are not enemies, but allies. It’s been true for hundreds of years, but in 1931 this skinny young Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved it.

No time in the history of mankind has faith in God been more reasonable, more logical, or more thoroughly supported by science and mathematics.

CoinCube, I am becoming very pessimistic about finding any fundamental, universal truth about choices we can make.
...

In 1931, the young mathematician Kurt Gödel made a landmark discovery, as powerful as anything Albert Einstein developed.

Gödel’s discovery not only applied to mathematics but literally all branches of science, logic and human knowledge. It has truly earth-shattering implications.

Oddly, few people know anything about it.

Allow me to tell you the story.

Mathematicians love proofs. They were hot and bothered for centuries, because they were unable to PROVE some of the things they knew were true.

So for example if you studied high school Geometry, you’ve done the exercises where you prove all kinds of things about triangles based on a list of theorems.

That high school geometry book is built on Euclid’s five postulates. Everyone knows the postulates are true, but in 2500 years nobody’s figured out a way to prove them.

Yes, it does seem perfectly reasonable that a line can be extended infinitely in both directions, but no one has been able to PROVE that. We can only demonstrate that they are a reasonable, and in fact necessary, set of 5 assumptions.

Towering mathematical geniuses were frustrated for 2000+ years because they couldn’t prove all their theorems. There were many things that were “obviously” true but nobody could figure out a way to prove them.

In the early 1900’s, however, a tremendous sense of optimism began to grow in mathematical circles. The most brilliant mathematicians in the world (like Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert and Ludwig Wittgenstein) were convinced that they were rapidly closing in on a final synthesis.

A unifying “Theory of Everything” that would finally nail down all the loose ends. Mathematics would be complete, bulletproof, airtight, triumphant.

In 1931 this young Austrian mathematician, Kurt Gödel, published a paper that once and for all PROVED that a single Theory Of Everything is actually impossible.

Gödel’s discovery was called “The Incompleteness Theorem.”

If you’ll give me just a few minutes, I’ll explain what it says, how Gödel discovered it, and what it means – in plain, simple English that anyone can understand.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem says:


You can draw a circle around all of the concepts in your high school geometry book. But they’re all built on Euclid’s 5 postulates which are clearly true but cannot be proven. Those 5 postulates are outside the book, outside the circle.

You can draw a circle around a bicycle but the existence of that bicycle relies on a factory that is outside that circle. The bicycle cannot explain itself.

Gödel proved that there are ALWAYS more things that are true than you can prove. Any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever came up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies not just to math, but to everything that is subject to the laws of logic. Incompleteness is true in math; it’s equally true in science or language or philosophy.

And: If the universe is mathematical and logical, Incompleteness also applies to the universe.

Gödel created his proof by starting with “The Liar’s Paradox” — which is the statement


“I am lying” is self-contradictory, since if it’s true, I’m not a liar, and it’s false; and if it’s false, I am a liar, so it’s true.

So Gödel, in one of the most ingenious moves in the history of math, converted the Liar’s Paradox into a mathematical formula. He proved that any statement requires an external observer.

No statement alone can completely prove itself true.

His Incompleteness Theorem was a devastating blow to the “positivism” of the time. Gödel proved his theorem in black and white and nobody could argue with his logic.

Yet some of his fellow mathematicians went to their graves in denial, believing that somehow or another Gödel must surely be wrong.

He wasn’t wrong. It was really true. There are more things than are true than you can prove.

A “theory of everything” – whether in math, or physics, or philosophy – will never be found. Because it is impossible.

OK, so what does this really mean? Why is this super-important, and not just an interesting geek factoid?

Here’s what it means:

• Faith and Reason are not enemies. In fact, the exact opposite is true! One is absolutely necessary for the other to exist. All reasoning ultimately traces back to faith in something that you cannot prove.
• All closed systems depend on something outside the system.
• You can always draw a bigger circle but there will still be something outside the circle.

• Reasoning inward from a larger circle to a smaller circle is “deductive reasoning.”

Example of a deductive reasoning:
1. All men are mortal
2. Socrates is a man
3. Therefore Socrates is mortal

• Reasoning outward from a smaller circle to a larger circle is “inductive reasoning.”

Examples of inductive reasoning:
1. All the men I know are mortal
2. Therefore all men are mortal

1. When I let go of objects, they fall
2. Therefore there is a law of gravity that governs falling objects

Notice than when you move from the smaller circle to the larger circle, you have to make assumptions that you cannot 100% prove.

For example you cannot PROVE gravity will always be consistent at all times. You can only observe that it’s consistently true every time. You cannot prove that the universe is rational. You can only observe that mathematical formulas like E=MC^2 do seem to perfectly describe what the universe does.

Nearly all scientific laws are based on inductive reasoning. These laws rest on an assumption that the universe is logical and based on fixed discoverable laws.

You cannot PROVE this. (You can’t prove that the sun will come up tomorrow morning either.) You literally have to take it on faith. In fact most people don’t know that outside the science circle is a philosophy circle. Science is based on philosophical assumptions that you cannot scientifically prove. Actually, the scientific method cannot prove, it can only infer.

(Science originally came from the idea that God made an orderly universe which obeys fixed, discoverable laws.)

Now please consider what happens when we draw the biggest circle possibly can – around the whole universe. (If there are multiple universes, we’re drawing a circle around all of them too):

• There has to be something outside that circle. Something which we have to assume but cannot prove
• The universe as we know it is finite – finite matter, finite energy, finite space and 13.7 billion years time
• The universe is mathematical. Any physical system subjected to measurement performs arithmetic. (You don’t need to know math to do addition – you can use an abacus instead and it will give you the right answer every time.)
• The universe (all matter, energy, space and time) cannot explain itself
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is boundless. By definition it is not possible to draw a circle around it.
• If we draw a circle around all matter, energy, space and time and apply Gödel’s theorem, then we know what is outside that circle is not matter, is not energy, is not space and is not time. It’s immaterial.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is not a system – i.e. is not an assemblage of parts. Otherwise we could draw a circle around them. The thing outside the biggest circle is indivisible.
• Whatever is outside the biggest circle is an uncaused cause, because you can always draw a circle around an effect.

• In the history of the universe we also see the introduction of information, some 3.5 billion years ago. It came in the form of the Genetic code, which is symbolic and immaterial.
• The information appears to have come from the outside, since information is not known to be an inherent property of matter, energy, space or time
• All codes we know the origin of are designed by conscious beings.
• Therefore whatever is outside the largest circle is a conscious being.

My book Evolution 2.0: Breaking the Deadlock Between Darwin and Design explores the Origin of Information question in depth.

When we add information to the equation, we conclude that not only is the thing outside the biggest circle infinite and immaterial, it is also conscious.

Isn’t it interesting how all these things sound suspiciously similar to how theologians have described God for thousands of years?

So it’s hardly surprising that 80-90% of the people in the world believe in some concept of God. Yes, it’s intuitive to most folks. But Gödel’s theorem indicates it’s also supremely logical. In fact it’s the only position one can take and stay in the realm of reason and logic.

The person who proudly proclaims, “You’re a man of faith, but I’m a man of science” doesn’t understand the roots of science or the nature of knowledge!

Interesting aside…

If you visit the world’s largest atheist website, Infidels, on the home page you will find the following statement:


If you know Gödel’s theorem, you know that all logical systems must rely on something outside the system. So according to Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, the Infidels cannot be correct. If the universe is logical, it has an outside cause.

Thus atheism violates the laws of reason and logic.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem definitively proves that science can never fill its own gaps. We have no choice but to look outside of science for answers.

The Incompleteness of the universe isn’t proof that God exists. But… it IS proof that in order to construct a rational, scientific model of the universe, belief in God is not just 100% logical… it’s necessary.

Euclid’s 5 postulates aren’t formally provable and God is not formally provable either. But… just as you cannot build a coherent system of geometry without Euclid’s 5 postulates, neither can you build a coherent description of the universe without a First Cause and a Source of order.

Thus faith and science are not enemies, but allies. It’s been true for hundreds of years, but in 1931 this skinny young Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel proved it.

No time in the history of mankind has faith in God been more reasonable, more logical, or more thoroughly supported by science and mathematics.

As if those who have a religion have any choice in the matter (and that includes yourself and myself). Sigh.

The inertia of society is not something that can be impacted with any activism or top-down organized education. Flies are attracted to honey. The natural economic opportunity costs determine which attitudes and ideas proliferate.

Meaning I think religion is just another artifact of the epoch, not a driver of the epoch. The Invisible Hand is in control.

The inertia of opportunity costs decides for us. Leftists can't convert because the opportunity cost is too high.

We can conclude that the governance system we get is fit to the technological and demographic economic realities.

It is really a mix of technology knowledge and the friction in the state transitions that is in the driver's seat.

Because mankind required collectivism to advance during those epochs, e.g. they primarily needed roads and roads require massive pooled capital. We simply did not have the technology knowledge for mankind to evolve decentralized at that time. Technology Knowledge is the driver.

Centralization exists because the technology for knowledge of individual empowerment and maximization of production is insufficient to overpower the benefits of the centralization.

Many more revolutions have been silent technology knowledge ones. We are experiencing one now with social media the victory of Durterte in Philippines and Trump in the USA in defiance of the elite's mass media.

Seriously CoinCube, how can you with a straight face tell me these leftists don't want to be culled:

Changes in the ideas/attitudes in the noosphere could not overcome the physical realities regardless, and were instead caused by the natural realities.

It is just the entropic force, nothing religious or metaphysical is required.

You are trying to misblame centralization when it is just an artifact of this natural development process that mankind is undergoing.

That centralization overshoots is irrelevant. Yes it does. So what.

You have your causality incorrectly transposed.

The economics of entropy depict the process by which the entrepreneur translates his idea into a practical form from the realms of imaginative creation. In those visionary realms, entropy is essentially infinite and unconstrained, and thus irrelevant to economic models. But to make the imagined practical, the entrepreneur must make specific choices among existing resources and strategic possibilities. Entropy here signifies his freedom of choice.

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron-5.html
The leftism and socialism we have now is because most people are not ready for the Knowledge Age and thus they must first cull themselves, to make way for those of us who are ready to move forward to greater freedom and maximization of the division-of-labor.

I don't have free time to fully expound on this at this time.
…
We don't need a God to tell us murder is wrong. When every human becomes unsubstitutable, we will all know that killing a productive member of society is a loss. There will be outrage and payback for those who murder.
God and moralism seems to be an outdated tool to keep the uneducated masses hypnotized and enslaved into a set of rules which retained cohesiveness for the family unit which was required during these prior epochs.
I think you have noted that soon reproduction can become entirely artificial.
I fear the moralism, God, and family are becoming antiquated.
I have more thinking and writing to do on this when I have more time to really dig in deep.

Nature knows nothing of good and evil. In nature there is one rule—survival of the fittest. There is no right, only might. If a creature is weak, kill it. Only human beings could have moral rules such as, "If it is weak, protect it." Only human beings can feel themselves ethically obligated to strangers.

Thus, nature worship is very dangerous. When people idolize nature, they can easily arrive at the ethics of Nazism. It was the law of nature that Adolf Hitler sought to emulate—the strong shall conquer the weak. Nazism and other ideologies that are hostile to ethical monotheism and venerate nature are very tempting. Nature allows you to act naturally, i.e., do only what you want you to do, without moral restraints; God does not. Nature lets you act naturally - and it is as natural to kill, rape, and enslave as it is to love.

In light of all this, it is alarming that many people today virtually venerate nature. It can only have terrible moral ramifications.
One of the vital elements in the ethical monotheist revolution was its repudiation of nature as god. The evolution of civilization and morality have depended in large part on desanctifying nature.

Civilizations that equated gods with nature—a characteristic of all primitive societies—or that worshipped nature did not evolve.
…
One of ethical monotheism's greatest battles today is against the increasing deification of nature, movements that are generally led (as were most radical ideologies) by well educated, secularized individuals.

Society has organized as required by the economics and level of technology of the epoch. Moralism appears to be just one of the ways society has coped with a lack of degrees-of-freedom between the actors in the system (i.e. the people in the society). Moralism doesn't appear to be a end all solution, but rather just another an ephemeral bandaid akin to monarchy or other forms of social organization that were fit to the era.

I want you to think very deeply about how the (maximization of the) division-of-labor plays into this equation.
For example, in the Middle Ages there was an over supply of substitutable labor. Thus we required a Dark feudal age, because humans were worth less (in labor) than the value of the food they needed to consume. It required a plague to wipeout more than half of the population and advances in agricultural technology which lead to abundances which enabled the division-of-labor to progress so that humans could be worth more than the value of the food they consumed.

Before that epoch, the Romans financed with conquest the advance of a road network and other basic technological advances. This facilitated trade of goods and services which lead to greater prosperity. But then model was lacking of sufficient diversification away from the conquest financing model, so then the armies turned back and ransacked Rome in order to get paid the pensions and salaries promised to them.

Both agriculture and industry compete on massive economies-of-scale which drive down profit margins and so thus require insurance against bad seasons and changing consumer demand. These inflexible paradigms had very low degrees-of-freedom and thus required societies to organize in very rigid structures which could charge the risk of loss to the collective and keep labor consistent, substitutable, and cheap. You see the system of economics was in direct conflict with human freedom.

Power always seeks centralization. Thus the tendency of both of the dictatorship and the republic will be towards ever increasing centralization restricting freedom beyond that what is necessary and hobbling knowledge formation.

The crisis was caused by the widespread expansion of slavery undermining the ability of the middle class to productively work small farms or find gainful employment essentially forcing them into the ancient equivalent of welfare. This led to the first instance of violence over compromise in Roman politics.

peasants were the very bottom rung of medieval society, they were under the harsh authority of just about every other rung of society.  They had to work the land of the Lord who owned it and then pay rent for working and living on that land as well.  Peasants were required to swear an oath of allegiance to their Lord and to violate that Lord would bring harsh if not fatal punishments.  To fulfill that oath, peasants had to do just about every kind if difficult manual labor imaginable including plowing the fields, planting and caring for crops, harvesting corn and other produce, storing it in barns and cutting and storing wood for the winter for themselves and the Lords who owned the land they lived on.

The level that those in power exploited the peasant class during medieval times was truly appalling.  In addition to coping with staggering poverty, peasants had to pay stiff taxes to their Lord and to the church in the form of the “tithe”.  Often peasants had no money for their tithes so they paid them in the form of the produce they grew on the land they rented from their Lords.  The Catholic Church realized such huge returns on the tithes from the peasant class that they had to build massive barns to hold all of the product that the peasants paid in. Daily life for peasants was a constant struggle for the basics of health, water and comfort.  

What country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted.  (Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Paris, 13 Nov. 1787)

The most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes—governments, monopolies, regulators, elite institutions, all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.

Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise: by what we cannot predict rather than by what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. The economy grows not by manipulating greed and fear through bribes and punishments but by accumulating surprising knowledge through the conduct of the falsifiable experiments of free enterprises. Crucial to this learning process is the possibility of failure and bankruptcy. In this model, wealth is defined as knowledge, and growth is defined as learning.

Because the system is based more on ideas than on incentives, it is not a process changeable only over generations of Sisysphean effort. An economy is a noosphere (a mind-based system) and it can revive as fast as minds and policies can change.

That new economics—the information theory of capitalism—is already at work in disguise. Concealed behind an elaborate mathematical apparatus, sequestered by its creators in what is called information technology, the new theory drives the most powerful machines and networks of the era. Information theory treats human creations or communications as transmissions through a channel, whether a wire or the world, in the face of the power of noise, and gauges the outcomes by their news or surprise, defined as “entropy” and consummated as knowledge. Now it is ready to come out into the open and to transform economics as it has already transformed the world economy itself.

All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. This is the fundamental axiom of information theory. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. 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.”

Shannon defined information in terms of digital bits and measured it by the concept of information entropy: unexpected or surprising bits...Shannon’s entropy is governed by a logarithmic equation nearly identical to the thermodynamic equation of Rudolf Clausius that describes physical entropy. But the parallels between the two entropies conceal several pitfalls that have ensnared many. Physical entropy is maximized when all the molecules in a physical system are at an equal temperature (and thus cannot yield any more energy). Shannon entropy is maximized when all the bits in a message are equally improbable (and thus cannot be further compressed without loss of
information). These two identical equations point to a deeper affinity that MIT physicist Seth Lloyd identifies as the foundation of all material reality—at the beginning was the entropic bit.
...
The accomplishment of Information Theory was to create a rigorous mathematical discipline for the definition and measurement of the information in the message sent down the channel. Shannon entropy or surprisal defines and quantifies the information in a message. In close similarity with physical entropy, information entropy is always a positive number measured by minus the base two logarithm of its probability. Information in Shannon’s scheme is quantified in terms of a probability because Shannon interpreted the message as a selection or choice from a limited alphabet. Entropy is thus a measure of freedom of choice. In the simplest case of maximum entropy of equally probable elements, the uncertainty is merely the inverse of the number of elements or symbols.
...
Linking innovation, surprise, and profit, learning and growth, Shannon entropy stands at the heart of the economics of information theory. Signaling the arrival of an invention or disruptive innovation is first its surprisal, then its yield beyond the interest rate—its profit, a further form of Shannon entropy. As a new item is absorbed by the market, however, its entropy declines until its margins converge with prevailing risk adjusted interest rates. The entrepreneur must move on to new surprises. The economics of entropy depict the process by which the entrepreneur translates his idea into a practical form from the realms of imaginative creation. In those visionary realms, entropy is essentially infinite and unconstrained, and thus irrelevant to economic models. But to make the imagined practical, the entrepreneur must make specific choices among existing resources and strategic possibilities. Entropy here signifies his freedom of choice.

As Shannon understood, the creation process itself escapes every logical and mathematical system. It springs not from secure knowledge but from falsifiable tests of commercial hypotheses. It is not an expression of past knowledge but of the fertility of consciousness, will, discipline, imagination, and art.

The error in your thinking is stated in your first sentence.  You are making the same mistake as Muslims (or any other religious people) make.
Muslims advocating Sharia Law use the same erroneous argument.

If it was higher power responsible for the delivery of the message, all books revealed by that power would just appear instantaneously, translated into 120 languages, all in one instance, at the time of creation.  And all other 'fake message' books would be torn apart by the same power, all at once.

Instead, you have a Bible, written by 40+ authors, over the course of 2500 years.  Same goes for Quran, written decades after the fact.

If it was higher power responsible for it, it would not need people to write it, edit it, and translate it.

Literary works are done by people.  

Not my interpretation CoinCube.... your bible says so.

It was commented that because it says to pray in the Bible, then you should pray.  I'm just highlighting the inconsistencies in the book by showing how there are many situations in the bible which tell people to do things which people ignore.

The earth is for all intents and purposes a ship floating in space.  If there is no captain running the ship, or sections of the ship all operating independently run by their own captains, it turns into a fatal tragedy of the commons scenario and it ends.  There is no way out of the "rulers" paradigm, only a question of if there will be one ruler or lots of rulers.  That's as much decentralization you're getting in a closed ecosystem and why libertarianism is generally a joke in practice.  The idea of libertarianism is that you can do anything you want as long as it doesn't negatively effect your neighbor, but that idea is null and void in a closed ecosystem.

If you try to create a system where every piece of land and atom of "things" on earth is owned by someone and they are in charge of it to try and avoid tragedy of the commons, it just turns right back into rulers governing the ruled when the Pareto principle plays out.

Imagine for a moment a world in which there was no murder or theft. In such a world, there would be no need for armies, or police, or weapons. Men and women and children could walk anywhere, at any time of day or night, without any fear of being killed or robbed. Imagine further a world in which no one coveted what belonged to their neighbor; a world in which children honored their mother and father and the family unit thrived; a world in which people obeyed the injunction not to lie. The recipe for a good world is all there—in these ten sublime commandments.

But there is a catch. The Ten Commandments are predicated on the belief that they were given by an Authority higher than any man, any king, or any government. That’s why the sentence preceding the Ten Commandments asserts the following: “God spoke all these words.”

You see, if the Ten Commandments, as great as they are, were given by any human authority, then any person could say: “Who is this man Moses, who is this king or queen, who is this government to tell me how I should behave? Okay, so why is God indispensable to the Ten Commandments? Because, to put it as directly as possible, if it isn’t God who declares murder wrong, murder isn’t wrong. Yes, this strikes many people today as incomprehensible, even absurd. Many of you are thinking, “Is this guy saying you can’t be a good person if you don’t believe in God?”

Let me respond as clearly as possible: I am not saying that. Of course there are good people who don’t believe in God, just as there are bad people who do. And many of you are also thinking, “I believe murder is wrong. I don’t need God to tell me.” Now that response is only half true. I have no doubt that if you’re an atheist and you say you believe murder is wrong, you believe murder is wrong. But, forgive me, you do need God to tell you. We all need God to tell us. You see, even if you figured out murder is wrong on your own, without God and the Ten Commandments, how do you know it’s wrong? Not believe it’s wrong, I mean know it’s wrong? The fact is that you can’t.

Because without God, right and wrong are just personal beliefs. Personal opinions. I think shoplifting is okay, you don’t. Unless there is a God, all morality is just opinion and belief. And virtually every atheist philosopher has acknowledged this.

Another problem with the view that you don’t need God to believe that murder is wrong is that a lot of people haven’t shared your view. And you don’t have to go back very far in history to prove this. In the twentieth century millions of people in Communist societies and under Nazism killed about one hundred million people—and that doesn’t count a single soldier killed in war.

So, don’t get too confident about people’s ability to figure out right from wrong without a Higher Authority. It’s all too easy to be swayed by a government or a demagogue or an ideology or to rationalize that the wrong you are doing isn’t really wrong. And even if you do figure out what is right and wrong, God is still necessary. People who know the difference between right and wrong do the wrong thing all the time. You know why? Because they can. They can because they think no one is watching. But if you recognize that God is the source of moral law, you believe that He is always watching.

So, even if you’re an atheist, you would want people to live by the moral laws of the Ten Commandments. And even an atheist has to admit that the more people who believe God gave them—and therefore they are not just opinion—the better the world would be.

In three thousand years no one has ever come up with a better system than the God-based Ten Commandments for making a better world. And no one ever will.