[extropy-chat] Economic consensus on immigration

[Anders Sandberg]

Lee Corbin wrote:
> Of course not. The cultural values of most Swedes, including this form
> of xenophobia, arose though evolution. Cultures that did not have such
> values did not last very long. (Burden of proof: just where, historically,
> did one see a long lasting culture or society not jealous of its own
> identity?)

The idea that a society should have its own identity is fairly
historically recent. Nationalism as an ideology was invented mid 1800's.
Before that it was more a matter of who was the ruler or who had
inhereited the land, although there have been a few exceptions like the
romans, who had an originally ethnicity-based citizenship concept. I can't
recall any suggestion that (say) Egyptians had a need to assert their
identity.

On a purely psychological levels people always tend to assert the identity
of their in-group, but for much of history this was far smaller than iron
age states. Village identity, guild identity, religious identity, yes, but
not so much a social identity encompassing a particular nation. The
nationalism movement did its best to grow a nationalism identity out of
many of these traditional identities. Hence the interest of the Brothers
Grimm in collecting German folk tales.

> There are two reasons why your ideas don't have time enough. One, of
> course, is the singularity (even if in its mildest and gentlest form).

Why wouldn't nation states survive the singularity? If we assume that
people do socially cluster according to some form of identity, even if
this identity is based on highly archaic and traditional notions, then the
postsingularity entities might still have kept such mental properties and
contine preferential clustering based on the same notions. And if states
actually make sense from a practical point of view they will remain, while
their merging may be limited by economies of scale or the emergence of
useful sub-superstate clusters (e.g. like in Nozick's utopia model). So
barring radical shifts in vulnerability to *all* threats, extreme autonomy
and the need to network selectively, state-like entities are not
implausible post singularity.

Of course, if postsingularity Sweden is still debating taxes I'm going to
(postsingularity-) cry.

> A second reason is that of evolution itself: the Swedish population
> that entertains such ideas will indeed be overwhelmed by "other ideas".
> To wit, if/when the majority in Sweden becomes, say, Moslem, then
> nature will revert to form, and the injunctions in the Koran that say
> to conquer the world in the name of Islam, and adopt an extremely
> hostile stance towards freethinking, will have proven their vitality.
> And memetic fitness.

Hmm, this assumes some memes become stably dominant for long. If you look
at history you will see that even the concept of Islam and what islamic
society is has evolved tremendously across time and different countries
(and it is still one of the most homogeneous and new religions around -
just look at all the weirdness that passes for Christianity or Buddhism!).
If meme X becomes a monoculture at time T and remains so forever, maybe it
has proven its fitness and stability. But what if it remains dominant just
between T1 and T2? In most evolution fitness peaks are transitory and
highly dependent on coevolving genes or memes.

Given the cultural diversity we see within cultures - even within cultures
with strong communications - monocultures seem unlikely. Although western
culture (the metaculture encompassing the others, highly informed by
humanistic, enlightenment and later notions) seems to be the only major
culture that is actively concerned with maintaining cultural diversity.
But even within repressive nonwestern cultures homogenity doesn't seem to
be too stable.

If one favors cultural diversity it is not clear that isolating "pure"
cultures is the way to go, since most cultural diversity emerges from the
mixing and resynthesis of cultures rather than memetic drift. If one
thinks that culture is just an ongoing evolutionary struggle, then it
doesn't matter much which culture wins. In either case there is no reason
to keep borders. I think it becomes a case (from a culture standpoint) if
one thinks particular cultures have something valuable that may not be
lost (essentially a kind of cultural racism) or one thinks that melting
pots would eventually lead to a low-value homogenization.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University