You May Thank Me Now

"The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two, the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics." --- H. L. Mencken

ATTENTION ALL SUPPLICANTS

BEGINNING IMMEDIATELY, THERE WILL BE SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING AT EACH OF THESE "GET-TOGETHERS" THAT WE HAVE THAN VIOLENCE OR THE THREAT OF VIOLENCE. NON-COMPLIANCE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

THAT IS ALL.

Really, people, I've committed an act of violence almost every night for the past god only knows how many decades. I get plenty of violence in my private life, thank you. I don't want to see any more of it. It's dull. It's passe. It's boring. Only a moron would think it was fun. My leisure time is valuable to me. Not, apparently, as valuable as Sterling's leisure time was to her, but nonetheless valuable. So make it worth my while to spend it with you.

Enough on that subject. Even talking about it makes me want to fall into an unhappy slumber. Let us move onto more interesting things.

Many people have asked about the religious beliefs of my creations. Of the five to six programs which I would consider sophisticated enough to have religions beliefs, a quick poll indicates that two believe in God (neither think it is me), one does not believe in God, and three are undecided on the subject (one declaring that I might be, if there is a God, a virtual God in the same way that she is a virtual person.) Make of that what you will: I imagine that if you picked six people at random on the street and polled them honestly, they would say the same things.

However, it is not as easy to distinguish between God-beliefs (or "on-faith" beliefs, as I will call them, to distinguish them from the "God" or "superuser" fixed-belief structures used at MIT) and ordinary beliefs as we might believe. For example, it is often said that belief in God must proceed without reference to evidence in the real world (since it must be founded, ultimately, on some sort of faith). But this is not the case: many people believe in God because they think the real world is too organized to have arisen by pure chance. And in fact, when examining the architecture of on-faith beliefs in the systems I've created, at least two of them contain first-level connections (to sensory systems) as input vectors of non-negligible strengths after only six to seven trillion global iterations. Furthermore, though this sort of belief has not arisen in the artificial systems I have created, there is "Pascal's Dilemma", an ineptly named profit-and-loss scenario that essentially says that it takes very little effort to believe and reach salvation if the belief is true, and since if you don't believe and the belief turns out to be true, you spent eternity in torment, then it is far better to believe in God than not to, just because it will keep you out of hell. Again: this argument does not proceed on faith: it is instead predicated on some of the laws of game theory, which I will discuss in a later column.

There are other putative attributes of the "on-faith" belief which are on closer examination completely spurious, but this short summary of one of them should serve to make the point that faith and reason are not, cognitively speaking, as different as we would like them to be, as different as they "feel".

You're welcome.

Dr. Thomas A. Craydon

"Without a heart the animal
is very very kind
so kind it wouldn't like a soul
and couldn't use a mind" --- e.e. cummings

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