[ExI] How do we construct workable institutions and ethical behaviors?

[Darren Greer]

>
> Anders wrote:




> It could be that Didier Sornette is right about the singularity as an
> infinite sequence of ever faster stock market crashes and rallies
> converging to a single point...
>

I find it interesting that Marx and Engels predicated all of this in the
section on capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. The descriptions of it as
a revolutionary force creating periodic crisis within the system and
needing to create new markets or exploit old ones to right itself. And that
line about the executive of the state becoming servants to
the bourgeois class as a whole.

.As for your comment about the cybernetics of the system breaking down,
Anders, that is what I was trying to get at in my last e-mail about
informational systems and technology making up part of the human psyche in
ways it has never done before, though it was rather muddily expressed
compared to you. Your comments clarified it a bit for me. People as a rule
are still invested in the enlightenment view that we can solve these
problems by sheer human will and reason and ingenuity alone, that the
liberal march of human progress and technology will do it for us. Yet if
the problem is, as you say, cybernetic and the beast is becoming unsteady
due to poor feedback, badly defined goals and an unintelligible babble of
conversation, even a simple collective will to change it might not be
enough. We'll still keep feeding into the old teleological models expecting
them to work. I have a feeling this is because we haven't
fully acknowledged as a society that these systems are even there, that
they have grafted themselves onto our way of perceiving and dealing with
the world. So we sit here and wait for a hero or two to rescue us like we
are damsels in distress in some medieval tale published
by enlightenment age presses in 1895. In a way we are all a bit like Don
Quixotes, with our politicians and business leaders Sancho Panzas. Everyone
is deluded, but some are slightly more practical than others.
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