[ExI] The entropy of Extropy-Chat

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Wed Mar 3 01:46:55 UTC 2010


On 3 March 2010 05:03, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 1 March 2010 22:21, Ben Zaiboc <bbenzai at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> No.  You have been repeatedly criticised for repeatedly contradicting yourself, making circular arguments and simply ignoring valid challenges to your ideas.
>
> I would not criticise too much Gordon for the circularity of the
> threads concerned.
>
> He has done nothing else than reiterating forever with different words
> statements as to what is "obvious" for him, in particular regarding
> some ineffable, ill-defined property of some organic brains, the
> existence of which should be an article of faith. This is hardly
> original or heretic, since it has been a widespread meme in the
> western culture for some 500 or 1000 years by now.
>
> What I found surprising and made the debate mostly pointless is that
> many people has taken this stance as pertaining to a factual issue,
> engaging in the impossible task of "demonstrating" that such property
> could be replicated, something which is impossible by definition, and
> shows if anything how the dualistic mentality has still deep roots
> even in our ranks - and not just in Gordon.

Incredible as it may seem, you can make logical deductions about
magical or non-existent things. If I have four unicorns and acquire
another two unicorns, then I will have six unicorns. If the unicorns
have the quality of instantiating three distinct magical persons in
one, then with my six unicorns I will have eighteen magical persons.
But if the maximum number of such magical persons in the Universe is
three, then with my six unicorns I will still have only three magical
persons. If the Holy Book says that that a unicorn can only generate
two magical persons, then either the Holy Book is wrong or the
premises in the thought experiment just described are wrong. If it is
claimed that logical consistency is not something God need follow,
then at that point we have to throw up our hands and end the
discussion.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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