[extropy-chat] Systems design - Improving on nature's way of telling you [Was: Desirability of Happiness, Etc.]

[Jef Allbright]

On 5/29/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
> Jef writes
> > possibly some comparison between the use of positive gradients
> > and the idea of positive-sum social decision-making contrasted
> > with the idea of politics as competition over scarcity;
>
> Gee, sorry to be such a simpleton, but is it necessary to
> write in such a complicated way. Well, yes, I understand
> that you are just outlining what you'd like to talk about;
> but *communication* is so difficult, that it really pays
> to KISS.

Yeah, I write some dense stuff, and that was a blatant example.

Let me try again.

We recently approached the topic of a system of motivation based
exclusively on a gradient of pleasurable feedback, rather than the
bipolar pain/pleasure system endowed by nature.  Earlier I
scare-quoted the term "positive" because it seems to me that with a
unipolar feedback signal, the set-point would still move to some level
and we would still be left with relative positive and relative
negative.  [Ultimately can't avoid the negative, often expressed as
"suffering".]

A crucial point here is that we are trying to avoid the debilitating
side-effects that often accompany nature's way of telling us
something's wrong.  What is most interesting to me about this is not
the avoidance of unpleasantness, but the increased efficiency of the
system this implies.

To respond to another of your points, it seems to me that "good" is
what works.  And what works over increasing scope is necessarily
better.  Whether or not some activity produces feelings of pleasure is
not a direct or reliable indication of "good" but is often correlated
for reasons both obvious and profound and of an evolutionary nature.

Now, I had suggested I would like to compare this kind of systems
thinking with the workings of politics.  Some people claim that
politics is fundamentally about conflict over issues of scarcity. My
question is whether we could effectively reframe this conception of
politics in such a way that we avoid the debilitating conflict and
instead deal with the same existing challenges in terms of
positive-sum social decision-making?  Inherent in this concept is that
people would be taking a broader view rather than narrowly focusing on
their competing interests.

Is this a valid comparison?  Does it appear that efficiency would be
improved?  Would this increasingly be seen as good as it is
increasingly understood?

- Jef