Liyang on the intartubes

Church of the Least Fixed Po­int

“Well, personally, I belong to the Church of the Least Fixed Point. Amongst others, we worship the logician Alonzo Church. Whereas ‘Christ is our Church’ is metaphysical rubbish, (along with similar claims, like ‘God is Love’, ‘The Absolute is Perfect’, &c.) ‘Alonzo is our Church’ is merely hard, simple fact.

A major problem to be solved by a religion is ‘What is the Self?’ This is essentially a problem of Self-Realisation: A Self is an X that thinks of itself. Thus, where Think X is the operation of thinking of X, we want an item Self, such that:

Self = Think Self

The Church provides an answer to this question using His Paradoxical Combinator, Why:

Why = λf. (λx. f (x x)) (λx. f (x x))

With this, it is easy to show that:

Self = Why Think = Think (Why Think)

yielding a fixed point as required.

We believe that there is great signifigance in these Results, although there remain some details (such as the exact nature of the Think functional) to be worked out.”