Sunday, March 23, 2008

Faith in truth

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind... Underlying the effort of science is the religious belief in truth and understanding. These were kind of responses from Einstein when he was repeatedly asked about his religious beliefs.

Having a religious belief is like having faith. There's no objective reason for chosing a faith in something except for interest in survival in a group. Life seems to be liking regularities, patterns which constitute provable truths. The apparent reason for this liking is efficiency because of finiteness. Imagine, if were no regularities then the "program of evolution" has no chance of exploiting structures in the problems of life. This would mean the evolution would be very slow, unimaginably slow! Even the central question in computer science is about limits of efficient computation in the physical world! Scott's thesis and other major theoretical works in CS show lot of evidence that it is very hard to compute efficiently without exploiting structures of problems. Hence provable truths which are about regularites and repeatability atleast in statistical sense is a proper thing to have faith in, in the interest of efficient survival.

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