Re: ​Re: Odifreddi: Goedel's proof of the existence of God

[martdowd at aol.com]

 Vaugn Pratt writes

the material part of a Chu space is just its covariant part.  The contravariant part constitutes the space's ideas,
 
 This raises the question of where "life" fits in this categorization.  It is a property of material existence, and is a notion perceived by living creatures.
Martin Dowd
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt at cs.stanford.edu>
To: fom at cs.nyu.edu
Sent: Mon, Nov 7, 2022 5:55 pm
Subject: ​Re: Odifreddi: Goedel's proof of the existence of God

Many thanks to Jean-Yves Beziau for that link to Piergiorgio Odifreddi's slides, which covered many other ontological proofs besides Goedel's, along with some objections.

It was pretty clear that essentially all proofs had two essential components: a definition of God, and an argument based on that definition implicitly or explicitly based on proposed axioms and inference rules.
What's striking about the objections is that they almost invariably attack the argument rather than the definition.

Which is very strange, because which religions would recognize a countably complete ultrafilter as being their God?
Each definition could be considered the basis for a religion in its own right.
There is however one religion that has existed for centuries if not millennia that is based on a clear definition of God, namely the version of pantheism that defines God to be the universe.
I don't know any variant of it that limits "the universe" to "the observable universe".  Rather it seems to take God to be everything that exists.
And with that definition, not only is God's existence an immediate consequence but also God's uniqueness.
For if anything further exists then it too falls under that definition.
Moreover it does not limit "everything" to "everything that is material", which would please Goedel who was no fan of materialism.
And as a proponent of Chu spaces, neither am I, since the material part of a Chu space is just its covariant part.  The contravariant part constitutes the space's ideas, just as bras (the material) and kets (the ideas) form the basis of quantum mechanics.

Vaughan Pratt
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