Dowd on life

[Vaughan Pratt]

Martin Dowd asks, "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."

Yes, exactly.  Life is a property of material existence.  The covariant
part of a Chu space is its matter and its covariant part expresses the
properties of that matter, for example whether it is alive or dead.

Properties can be changed.  A white block can be painted black.  And one
can take the life of any living thing, whether animal or vegetable, and all
its matter still remains even though its life has gone.  Taking life tends
to be more permanent than changing color though: life can only be restored
in certain circumstances, as one of the difficulties of defining life in
both law and medicine.

(This would presumably be within the scope of FOAM, Foundations of Applied
Mathematics.)

Vaughan Pratt

On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 2:35 PM <fom-request at cs.nyu.edu> wrote:

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>    1. Re: Odifreddi: G?del's proof of the existence of God
>       (Alexander M Lemberg)
>    2. ?Re: Odifreddi: Goedel's proof of the existence of God
>       (Vaughan Pratt)
>    3. Re: ?Re: Odifreddi: Goedel's proof of the existence of God
>       (martdowd at aol.com)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2022 19:24:46 -0700
> From: Alexander M Lemberg <sandylemberg at juno.com>
> To: beziau100 at gmail.com
> Cc: fom at cs.nyu.edu
> Subject: Re: Odifreddi: G?del's proof of the existence of God
> Message-ID: <20221106.192446.8088.38.sandylemberg at juno.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain
>
> It must be wrong, since there is no God.
>
> On Sun, 6 Nov 2022 12:48:35 +0100 jean-yves beziau <beziau100 at gmail.com>
> writes:
> > Piergiorgio Odifreddi
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piergiorgio_Odifreddi
> > "Gödel's proof of the existence of God"
> > Talk at the Workshop Mathematics and Religion
> > organized by Stanislaw Krajewski, University of Warsaw, Poland
> > and Fábio Bertato, University of Campinas, Brazil
> > within the 3rd World Congress on Logic and Religion, Varanasi,
> > India, Nov
> > 4-8, 2022
> > Slides available here:
> > https://sites.google.com/view/wocolor3/mathematics-and-religion
> > JYB
> > Vice-President of LARA
> > https://www.logicandreligion.com/lara
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2022 17:55:44 -0800
> From: Vaughan Pratt <pratt at cs.stanford.edu>
> To: fom at cs.nyu.edu
> Subject: ?Re: Odifreddi: Goedel's proof of the existence of God
> Message-ID:
>         <CAL7kZqA9M6AN=
> GqXBXoVf+0+xuuY7+8p9BNB-UOt_w9_8QQM5Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2022 18:17:34 +0000 (UTC)
> From: martdowd at aol.com
> To: "fom at cs.nyu.edu" <fom at cs.nyu.edu>
> Subject: Re: ?Re: Odifreddi: Goedel's proof of the existence of God
> Message-ID: <593633602.1773470.1667931454664 at mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
>  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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