Teresa de Ávila tinha "êxtases místicos". Eu descrevo isto como "virar os zóio"



Gian Lorenzo Bernini, O Êxtase de Santa Teresa, mármore e bronze, 1647-1652, Igreja de Santa Maria della Victoria, Roma.

Segundo ela própria descreve em sua autobiografia "Livro da vida":

"Um dia apareceu-me um anjo com uma beleza nunca antes vista. Eu vi na sua mão uma longa lança de ouro cuja ponta parecia ser uma ponta de fogo. Ela parecia penetrar várias vezes no meu coração e perfurar as minhas entranhas.

A dor era tão grande que me fez gemer, muitas vezes, em alta voz, ainda assim foi superando a doçura desta dor excessiva, eu não pude querer livrar-me dela. Nenhuma felicidade terrestre pode dar um prazer assim tão grande. Quando o anjo tirou a sua lança, senti um enorme amor por Deus."

O que acham dessa?

The Thought Experiment That Accidentally Disproved God

Searle’s “Chinese Room” shows why creationism, and a personal God, are nonsense

https://medium.com/illumination/the-thought-experiment-that-accidentally-disproved-god-fd1ad35c6d1e

In a paper titled “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” philosopher John Searle made a famous argument referred to now as the Chinese Room:

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a database) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program).

Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input).

And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output).

The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

Searle believed his argument refuted the philosophical position of Strong AI, that “the appropriately programmed computer with the right inputs and outputs would thereby have a mind in exactly the same sense human beings have minds.” At the very least, it seems to make a convincing argument that the Turing test could not be used to confirm machine intelligence.

In fact, I think what Searle has demonstrated is the impossibility of intelligence being something that could be imparted all-at-once by a conscious act of programming, no matter how complex the program.

Instead, intelligence is always the product of an evolutionary process. That’s because what we call “intelligence” and “understanding” are general terms that refer to a great variety of specific behaviors, each of which represents some accommodation of the organism to some feature of its environment.

The idea of programming intelligence into a computer, and then sitting back to watch it do its thing, is really no different from the idea of God creating various life forms and then setting them free to wander about the Earth. Both are ultimately nonsense, because being intelligent always presupposes a worldview — a way of carving up the world that makes it intelligible and allows one to pursue one’s interests within it. And an organism’s worldview cannot be understood by looking at the organism alone, but at how the organism and its environment have co-evolved.

In other words, intelligence is always a dynamic process that involves both the organism and its environment. The non-evolutionary AI that Searle criticized, just like the view of life espoused by creationists, ignores this dynamism.

The person inside the Chinese Room doesn’t understand Chinese because he never learned it. Here, “learning” means participating in a form of life in which all of one’s actions (not just speech) are subjected to all the selection pressures found in one’s physical and social environment.

By the same token, a bunch of animals that were specially created by God — including us — would be similarly handicapped. Any semblance of understanding or intelligence would be an illusion. All living things would be zombies.

And we can go further. The world has meaning for us, it is full of things that we can understand on physical, moral, and aesthetic terms, because that meaning is essential to motivating adaptive behavior.

Meaning is essential to us only because we are finite beings who must act on imperfect knowledge in an environment in which resources are limited. An omnipotent, omniscient being would have no such problems. Indeed, given the relationship between the sense and information processing organs and the problems they evolved to solve, it is hard to imagine how a being like God could perceive or conceive of anything at all.

What could count as a reason for perceiving or conceiving the world one way rather than another, for a being who has no need for reasons at all?

Agnoscetico
O que acham dessa?

What could count as a reason for perceiving or conceiving the world one way rather than another, for a being who has no need for reasons at all?

Eu acho que isto não prova nem refuta nada porque estamos falando de algo além de nosso alcance.

Somos seres finitos tentando entender uma parte infinitamente pequena da realidade.

Chegaremos a conclusões que nos são úteis no dia a dia e mais nada. Não podemos extrapolar para o todo.

Mas eu também me pergunto por que uma entidade infinita e, por definição, perfeita, teria necessidade de criar alguma coisa.

Se ela tem necessidades, então é incompleta e, se é incompleta, é imperfeita.