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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.”

-Calvin Bruce Ostrum, Feburary 1983

liyang.hu/church.xhtml

norvig.com/21-days.html

gperco.com/2014/10/single-pixel-camera.html
Some guy built a proof-of-concept single pixel camera with a mechanical hand randomly waving in front of it, instead of a lens.

(yes, lensless cameras with a single point detector are entirely possible, google "Radon transformation" and "compressive sampling single-pixel camera", there's a ton of research in computational imaging on that topic)

I read a good long article on virtualization becoming the next security paradigm a few years back and never bookmarked it. I always wish I could find it again.

That's interesting, but the result looks almost nothing like the reference.