It seems that the modern litmus test is to ask each other, do you believe in God? And I get my share.
So I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything. I study, I observe, I analyze, and finally I theorize and other types of scientists, applied scientists, conduct experiments, to falsify the predictions of the theory.
This is known as a scientific method.
Belief is another way of relating to the world altogether.
I find it manifestly inferior because it often culminates in delusionality. It often yields delusions.
And where I come from, delusions are mental health disorders. They are a form of mental illness. Pretty severe actually.
So do I believe in God? That is the question.
Today I would like to try to answer this by discussing undecidable propositions and unknowable statements.
Every ontological statement, every statement about existence has a truth value in other words it's either true or false it's a binary way of looking at things.
There are situations in creation where something can be both true and false. I'm not going to it right now.
In our daily existence, ontological statements are either true or false, and there's an algorithm to help us to decide which are they, true or false. And these kind of statements are decidable statements.
So if I say Sam Vaknin exists, it's a decidable statement because I can show you several possible algorithms to determine whether this unfortunate statement is true or false.
So this ontological statement about Sam Vaknin is decidable, but some ontological statements are undecidable. It cannot be decided.
In my world, it is a waste of time to discuss these ontological or pseudo-ontological statements and that's why science doesn't deal with them.
One such statement is God exists.
But there are other statements. For example, the mind exists or consciousness exists. All these ontological or pseudoontological statements are undecidable for a variety of reasons which are not going to right now.
But suffice it to point to three major problems.
Number one, a lack of consensual terminology.
Whenever we discuss something, if we want to reach a kind of agreement, a consensus to settle upon a resolution somehow, we need to use, we need to be using the same words, or at least we need to agree on the lexical and semantic meanings and definitions of the words we're using.
So if I'm using the word mug, happens to be mini, then we all agree on what a mug is.
Now we could have many shapes of mugs, many colors of mugs, many substances that mugs are made of, etc. But we all agree on the mugness of m the essence of mugs this mini is definitely a mug.
It is impossible to agree on what god is it's even even more difficult to agree on what the mind is, on what consciousness is.
Not only there isn't a satisfactory lexical definition for each and every one of these words, there is a substantial disagreement of the essence of these words on the referent on what they are referring to.
So in a lack of consensual terminology, a lack of a dictionary, a lack of vocabulary, how can we have any meaningful discourse?
And the end result is that we begin to confuse language with reality.
We say the mind is real because here we are discussing it.
But mind is a word. It's a language element. So is consciousness.
At the best we could say that the mind and consciousness are organizing principles of reality, hermeneutic principles, principles that allow us to make some sense of reality and to some extent to imbue it with meaning.
That pertains doubly so to God.
But that doesn't mean that we know what they are.
We don't know what is God. We don't know what is the mind. We have nowhat is consciousness, and yet we discuss these topics.
As if we are, we have full access to all relevant information, it's entirely at our fingertips and disposal.
That is not science, that is not even good philosophy, that is non rigorous, it's a sham and that's why this is pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-ontology, and pseudo-science.
The situation prevails, especially in the social sciences and the humanities.
So that's the first problem. We can't agree on the meaning of the words we are using. Therefore, there's no meaningful discourse.
Number two, there is exclusive reliance on what I call reverse engineering, from effects to causes.
We observe the effects and we say, oh well, the effects prove the cause. So creation is proof that God exists, that I'm talking to you proves that I have a mind, that I am not meandering right now, hallucinating on camera, proves that I'm conscious.
In other words, we make observations of reality, of existence. We make ontological judgments or judgments about ontological objects.
An object doesn't have to be material. An object could be a concept or an idea or a behavior or a pattern.
So we observe on-tos, we observe elements of existence, and then we reverse engineer.
You say, well, we have a preponderance of evidence. We have an overwhelming file folder containing so many corroborating facts and there are facts, none is disputing this, that putting all these facts together gives us the cause.
It's probable cause, but the probability is like 99.999999. And so, you know, this is what we humans, with our limited minds, this is as close to certainty as we can get.
There's only one problem with that.
The effects, many of these effects, not one problem, several problems.
First of all, many of these effects rely on self-reporting.
When we discuss the mind, we discuss consciousness, we rely on the self-reporting of people, assuming they are people and not robots sent from the future.
We have no way of proving that. We have no way of telling apartpeople and sufficiently sophisticated robots sent back via time travel. There's no way to tell them apart. It's a kind of Turing test that will never be passed or resolved.
And so we have to rely on self-reporting. People tell us that they have a mind. They inform us that they are conscious. They describe their emotions and cognitions. We have to believe them.
First of all, there's a question of trust. They're not lying. They're not falsifying. They're not exaggerate. They're not mentally ill. They're not delusional. They're not hallucinating. They're not psychotic, etc.
There are many hidden assumptions here.
And then once we have passed this test of trust, we have to rely on the self-reporting as factual, as accurate.
And the only factual thing about self-reporting is that self-reporting is taking place.
The content of the self-reporting can never be proven because we can never gain access to another person's mind. Our only portal and gateway to another person's mind is the self-reporting. The Bible is a form of self-reporting because allegedly it's been authored, written by God. So the Bible is God's self-reporting.
And so this is the first problem. Self-reporting is not exactly a part of the scientific method.
But there are other problems when we observe the panoply of effects, when we make an inventory of the effects, for example, we describe creation, we use sciences like biology and physics and so on, and we describe creation.
And then those of us so inclined, we say, okay, now that we are intimately acquainted with creation, or so we think, now we know there's God. There's no way for creation to have advanced so much and to have progressed to this extent without a creator.
But you see, there's a problem with that.
Because given any finite set of effects, there's always a corresponding finite set of causes. Every group of effects can be explained via multiple causes.
So you see the mini mug in my head.
Cause number one, I made myself coffee and brought it over here. Cause number two. My wife made the coffee and she gave it to me. Cause number three. It materialized in my hand mysteriously, etc.
You see what I mean? Every fact could have multiple causes. And the causes multiply. The more facts and effects we consider.
There's no parsimony here. There's not Occam's Razor.
On the very contrary, there's a multiplication of entities.
If we were to consider a single fact then we might have been able to come up with three reasons but if you were to consider a million facts you are likely to be able to come up with billions of reasons, billions of possible, plausible reasons.
Multiple effects, multiple observations, multiple facts always lead to multiple possible causes.
And the problem is that many of these causes are mutually exclusive. They contradict each other.
In other words, when I observe creation, one possible cause is God. Another possible cause is randomness. A third possible cause is alien intervention, intervention by aliens.
I mean, there's no end to the number of causes, and they're all mutually exclusive. They exclude each other.
So when I observe creation, if I were to obtain, for example, a total unmitigated set of data about creation, if I were to become omniscient or knowing about creation, it would still not lead to God as the inevitable cause. God as the sufficient and necessary condition.
No, it could lead to God, of course, but it could lead to other explanations, equally potent, equally convincing, and equally subject to belief.
So there's a problem here. You can't say that by studying reality, by observing creation, by analyzing, by collecting data, by organizing it in some taxonomy or nosology, you can't claim that this leads inexorably to some kind of proof of God's existence.
It leads to the possibility that God exists, but it leads to dozens of other equipotent, equally reasoned or reasonable propositions, causes.
And we don't have any algorithm. In principle, we can never have any algorithm to inform us which of these possible causes is the one and only right one.
That's why the sentence God exists is undecidable. To decide in advance which of these causes is the correct and only one is a tautology. It a logical fallacy if you say in advance I'm gonna prove to you that God exists let's observe creation as you observe creation as they see God exists but you started with the assumption that God exists if you were to observe creation if you were to study reality without any prejudices, hidden assumptions, prior boundary conditions, you may be able to reach a conclusion that God exists, but you may equally reach a conclusion that he does not exist. That there's some other explanation, randomness for example.
So when religious people study creation in order to prove that God exists, they engage in a logical policy known as tautology.
Another problem is that we tend to generalize from personal experience of qualia.
We experience qualia. We experience phenomena.
And we tend to mistake them for norman. We generalize, we experience ourselves somehow.
That's also a very unclear question, very difficult, but we somehow claim to experience ourselves, and then we generalize it.
We say this is not Qualia, this is not a subjective, idiosyncratic experience, this is a general experience.
Because I experience consciousness because I experience what I call a mind that means that everyone who looks like me has a mind and consciousness.
That is a fallacy, an extreme fallacy, because we cannot generalize from qualia to noumena. We cannot generalize from qualia to ontos. We cannot transition from subjective to objective.
Phenomena is allegedly the bridge. Phenomena is what is sensory input.
So it is the nomena activating the qualia. The qualia are there. They are triggered by the nomena via phenomena.
So presumably phenomena are proof that qualia are universal and that they are objective, but that's of course completely untrue, or cannot be proven to be true because there's no way to prove that the way I experience phenomena is the way you experience phenomena and there's no way to prove that you do experience phenomena. There's no way to prove that you experience qualia.
The only thing we know is that there is noomenal. There is something out there.
But everything else is wild speculation.
In computability theory, in computational complexity theory, we have this concept of a decision problem.
Problems which are undecidable, it's impossible to construct an algorithm that would always lead to the correct yes or no answer, a binary algorithm.
The truth value of these propositions cannot be established.
For example, any sentence pertaining to the future cannot, by definition, have a truth value.
Okay, but this problem is much deeper, much more profound and much bigger.
The truth value of some epistemological statements, the truth value of an epistemological statement is its meaning.
The truth value of an ontological statement is nomenal, nomenal in the sense that it refers to reality, it refers to existence.
Yes or no, when we say yes or no, regarding an ontological statement, the referent, it refers to reality.
So I say mini mini mag exists, that's an ontological statement, the truth value is yes, it's true because it refers to our reality, listening and clicking on poor meaning.
In epistemology, the truth value of epistemological statements is their meaning.
So the truth value, the meaning of some epistemological statements is in principle unknowable.
It is a waste of time to discuss these epistemological statements.
And the most famous epistemological statement ever, the Descartesian statement, Cogito Ergosum, I think, therefore I am, is an example of an epistemological statement which cannot have a truth value.
The truth value of this statement can never be established.
We can never construct an algorithm to prove that the epistemological statement, I think, is either true or false.
Another example, this can be known.
It's an epistemological statement that can never be proven as right or wrong, as yes or no.
There's no algorithm that can prove that I'm thinking and there's no algorithm that can prove that this thing can be known or cannot be known in principle.
In philosophy, unknowability is the possibility of inherently inaccessible knowledge.
It's the epistemology of that which we cannot know.
Now, of course, this is a fascinating issue because we know that we cannot know, as opposed or as distinct from ontology where there's only one layer, minima exists or she doesn't or it doesn't exist.
In epistemology, there are always two layers, self-referential layers, self-recursive layers.
Even when I say, I don't know, I know that I don't know.
There's always a truth value about meta-epistemology, not about an epistemological statement, but about the meta-statement that relates to the epistemological statement.
And so there's questions of unknownknowns, unknown unknowns, chaos theory, and city complex.
The most recent contribution has been by Nicholas Rescher.
Nicholas Rescher wrote the amazing book, Unknowability: An Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge, and he said that there are three high-level categories.
Logical unknowability, which arises from abstract considerations of epistemic logic.
Conceptual unknowability, analytically demonstrable, of unknowability based on the concepts involved, that's reminiscent of the terminology problem in ontological statements.
And in principle unknowability based on fundamental principles.
In principle unknowability could be the outcome of computation, the problem with computability or computational power when we need much more energy and matter than then exists in the universe in order to answer, in order to ascertain the truth value, the meaning of an epistemological statement, we may need more than the resources available in the entire universe.
This is connected intimately with issues in relativity theory, in quantum mechanics, but I will not go into all these right now.
I wanted to give you just a taste of the problem in asking someone, do you believe in God?
Because when you said, do you believe in God, there are two words in this sentence, which are immediately extremely problematic and lead to logical fallacies.
The first word is you, do you believe in God?
There's a world of assumptions here, that you are the same like me, that we both share the same attributes, like mind, consciousness, and so on, logic.
And God, which is an ontological statement, which could never be decided or proven or falsified, in any way, shape or form.
Okay, I hope this was sufficiently thought-provoking for an introductory lecture.