"... and you can't decide for me..."

[alexr_rwx]

SMULLYAN: Is God a Taoist?

HOFSTADTER, DENNETT, RUDNICK: Probably.

RUDNICK: I expect that as he gets older, zip4096 will look more and more like Raymond Smullyan.

(really, you should go look at this paper-play-dialogue-text thing... it's lovely.)

Comments

[khrysta.livejournal.com]

Thank you kindly for the link.

It was one of my nice things of today.... you again and again prove your worth on my friends list... if only the same could be said of some one trick ponies. *knowing look*

[zip4096.livejournal.com]

Thanks Alex! :)

I've read some of it and have definitely enjoyed it.

[reality-calls.livejournal.com]

I believe the term for that sort of thing is "Socratic Dialogue", and I can't say I was ever too fond of the purist form, which is used in this argument.  It's essentially a straightforward argument converted to a dialog by using the philosopher(in this case, God, but traditionally Socrates) to guide an extremely dim foil through the steps of his argument.  I much prefer Descartes' method of essays, or a dialog of the sort that Hofstadter used in GEB; a kind-of Lewis Carroll absurdist version of the Socratic dialogue that involves characters with more than one dimension and an argument that is cleverly embedded in the situations and events they're put in.

Now that I've bored everyone with that useless tidbit, I'll take the time to mention that I nevertheless enjoyed the dialogue.  Or I could try passing suBconscious mEssages to the readers while theY're still in a state of MEntal stupor... ...

Seems to me like he could just have easily have said that God is a Philosopher/Scientist.  The only religious aspect of his conclusions was the whole "reincarnation" thing, which is still not strictly "religious" in that it doesn't presume the existence of some sort of deity.

I think the last quote at the end is a tad misleading.  It's not so much that there is no right or wrong but that an action should be judged right or wrong based on its effects on people and society, rather than some arbitrary moral code.  Of course, in order to make a correct judgment, you need quite a bit of knowledge and experience with the causes and effects of the action in question and actions in general on a society, which is certainly no mean feat.

      "Live from the People's Republic"