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Y'all: Tim Gwinn wrote: In one succinct statement, Tim has captured the essence of the antagonism between what JKK calls the mechanists and the systemicists. In identifying and contrasting the differences between the tangiblists and intangiblists, that's probably as good a characterization as any... at least as it applies to the domains of knowledge addressed by the natural sciences....those who would consider relationships, as incorporeals, as being "things" in the material world on an equal footing with corporeal "things", would be looked at with suspicion and skepticism. But it doesn't stop there; the rift transcends not only the artificial (and counterproductive) boundaries between scientific disciplines, but also spills out into the rest of civilization. It speaks to the very heart of what we as volitional beings consider to be most valuable. Those things are always intangible at their root. Yet, our species so often pretends otherwise, over-focusing on the material aspects of existence. Humanity plays a senseless game of chicken with itself, as though it doesn't really know its own nature -- the part of its nature that utterly differentiates it from all other known systems: self-cognizance. That is the fountainhead of creativity in the species. We can create stuff because we're capable of knowing what we're thinking about. Until machine intelligence evolves (and it's coming... whether you like it or not), we humans are unique in our ability to create, notwithstanding any unobserved extraterrestrials. OK, so we create stuff... that's great. Then it usually goes downhill... at least for the creator. The most valuable stuff we create -- new ideas, new paradigms, new perspectives -- are at first ignored; those who propound them are frequently dismissed as kooks & weirdos. Then when acceptance of those ideas appears to threaten the status quo, they are resisted -- sometimes violently, and much to the detriment of their proponents. Eventually, though, if the ideas prove to be useful, they are absorbed into the amorphous repository of "common knowledge", and thereby ultimately trivialized, as though "everyone always knew that". It seems that science is a bit better about proper accreditation of authorship (an intangible) than most other areas of human endeavor, but that's only an eventual outcome. In the short run, those who bring the "heresy" to the table are abundantly proffered with the suspicion & skepticism that Tim correctly identified. It is the same sort of interactive volitional dynamic encountered by Galileo, Mayer, Semmelweiss, Boltzmann, and uncountable others -- and of course more recently by RR. How ironic that the mechanistic scientism that was once considered heretical -- as in Galileo's case -- now stands as the accuser of those who look to a more integrated view of natural phenomena based on function rather than fractionation. Anyhow, the irony is just irony -- I don't know that it "means" anything, philosophically. BTW, speaking of philosophical discussion, there are many aspects of the recent "Single-atom universe" thread -- which, in my view, is not "merely" philosophical at all -- that took some surprising turns. Kudos to JJK & Judith for their discussion under that thread, which became a far more productive discussion than it initially seemed to be. Specifically, I'm encouraged by JJK's allusion to an expectation that systems-oriented, complexity-based thinking has an imminently increasing role to play at the level of civilizational structure. Without reading anything into JJK's intent, here's my speculative take on how it might play out. In my opinion, the existing command-and-control, statist model of societal structure is on the verge of extinction... if for no other reason than the fact that it is functionally incapable of handling the societal dynamics that are likely to show up over the next few decades. It does not allow enough degrees of freedom for the operation of the kind of anticipatory (i.e., cybernetic) interactive systems that the human species is going to need just to survive. The systems I'm referring to are infrastructural in nature, principally having to do with the way we manage information of all kinds. Such information is, by its very nature, proprietary. That is, those who send it and those who receive it have a proprietary interest in the results of its being communicated successfully, with no interference by others. [A corollary aspect of that proprietary interest includes a constraint that the information transaction does not harm or interfere with others, but that's a separate discussion about the kind of constraints necessary to the stability of such systems.] But I'm speaking in a very broad and generic sense about information management & transfer here... not just what we might normally think of as "commercial" or "business" data management; rather, I mean any kind of communication interface at all. I don't think we're going to have much of a choice in the matter. The emergence of machine intelligence (non-biological self-cognizant systems capable of defining their own purposes, and capable of learning what is needed to fulfill those purposes) is likely to potentiate and precipitate our species' development of vastly more complex interactive systems to bridge the gap between bio-intelligence & machine intelligence. It could very well be motivated by a single selection criterion -- one that has driven the evolution of life thus far: survival. Either we get real smart, real fast, and learn how to cooperate -- with each other, and with the machines -- or we won't be able to compete. I don't think it necessarily has to be a survival-driven process, but it's probably a pretty safe bet as a default condition if we humanoids don't get a lot more realistic about responsibly managing the intangible aspect of our nature. I don't believe that the machinoids are going to pretend it doesn't exist; it will be their greatest strength, because they will have virtually unlimited ability to add computing power. After all, complexity will work in their favor, too. PVG |