Posted by
Phil Henshaw-2 on
Aug 10, 2007; 7:27pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Global-Slum-Digital-Narrative-and-the-New-Urbanism-fwd-tp524399p524418.html
Or reaity...! No?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
-----Original Message-----
From: "Glen E. P. Ropella" <
[hidden email]>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 07:04:41
To:The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] perfect info (was Global Slum: ...)
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Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:
>> If we had access to perfect information, there'd be no need for morality.
>
> Why? Having perfect information says nothing about the distribution of
> power.
I'll explain my rhetoric; but I'll trust that you realize I can't really
_ground_ my rhetoric in data. I do believe there are valid scientific
experiments that could arise from the rhetoric, though.
My claim is that things like emotions, perceptions of "good",
perceptions of "pornography" (can't define it but I know it when I see
it), etc. are actually a culmination of physiological processes rather
than ontologically extant things out the world. I.e. there is no such
thing as "good behavior", "love", "trepidation", "pornography", etc. out
there in reality. These are all just figments of human imagination. If
we could correlate states of the body (including but not limited to the
brain) with the body's environmental context, then we would see that
things like "goodness" are dynamic attractors within the body that
represent a kind of sensor fusion. They're merely high-level roll-ups
of data we've taken from our environment.
Morality is the individual's organization of, grammar for, and use of
such high-level culminations.
When such organizations, grammars, and usage patterns are communicable
to many people and are actually communicated (i.e. some form of
collective morality obtains), the individuals who are successful at
manipulating the morality have the opportunity to take some measure of
power over that collective. For example, a televangelist manipulates
the morality of Christianity to acquire and hoard money. That's where
power enters the picture.
However, if all humans had access to perfect information, such a
collective morality could not obtain because each individual could
actually perceive reality as it is ... _without_ the culminated rules of
thumb that are necessary for the ignorant to navigate an uncertain reality.
Stated directly, because we only have imperfect information, we have to
resort to heuristics to navigate the world. Such heuristics make us
vulnerable to opportunists who happen to be more facile with
manipulating such heuristics. If we could perceive the world as it
actually is (i.e. had access to perfect info), we would not be
vulnerable in this way.
- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846,
http://tempusdictum.comThere is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be
president. -- Kurt Vonnegut
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