SRH – A proof of God – 11/12/2002

In complete Mr Harris style what about this precocious little number...definitely sending this to Mr Dawkins what a dangerous cock he his http://www.bee.net/debrien/archives/2002_10_01_TParchives.html

Assumptions

1.0 Human knowledge must be expressible in symbols or words to be considered knowledge, and must therefore be storable on a computer.

2.0 For a body of knowledge to be complete there must be no factors external to it that are not at least codified and represented within it.

3.0 God I am defining as an entity that is necessarily external to knowledge, but is not irrelevant to knowledge as knowledge depends on it.

Assertion

A complete body of knowledge must codify God.

The proof.

If we have two objects represented by symbols {a, b} we need 2 bytes of memory to store them.

Thus the original "separation of the symbols", has not been codified "within" memory it has just been replaced by "separate bytes."

If we combine the memory into a single 2 byte word, we then need a second memory location to hold the expression that enables us to split the 2 byte word and retrieve the original symbols.

Thus any n symbols in computer memory require at least n+1 memory locations to be completely represented (where n>1 since a single byte represents itself perfectly)

A complete system can only be achieved if the last expression uniting the symbols describes its own extraction.

So here we might have a 3byte word 000001000110000101100010 (In ascii with an 8bit boundary this is 8ab.)

However there is more to codify now. We need an expression to represent the fact that 00000100 must be interpreted at the boundary, and 0110000101100010 as the data.

At root the proble arising is that Data and Code are fundamentally different types in computer systems because the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) is hardwired to treat data from the instruction register differently from that of the data register. There is the clock cycle which is external to the whole system.

To summarise: in any symbolic information system

(i)Simple representation of knowledge does not codify the separation of that knowledge.

(ii)Any system which seeks to store data as one undifferentiated unit, and then self extract runs into the problem of the distinction between data and code. Self-Extraction cannot be coded as just data, because then we are back at situation (i)

Conclusion.

Any symbolic information system must codify factors that are external to it in order to be complete, i.e. God.

To assert that God does not exist is to also reject that human knowledge is a symbolic information system. But if human knowledge is not a symbolic information system, then it is also not expressible, not fixed and so not objective.

Note

also that the goal of information is to seek One undifferentiated unit, that codes its own differentiation. This is exactly the nature of God given by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, it also fits God of the New Testament who is in all things, but is still the One and only God. (This is my gripe with Christians and Muslims that they fail to understand their own God). It is also Buddha who transcends all distinctions in Zen.