<span class="q"></span>On 10/11/05, <b class="gmail_sendername">Brett
Paatsch</b> <<a href="mailto:bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">bpaatsch@bigpond.net.au</a>>
wrote:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;">
<span class="q"><div><span class="gmail_quote"></span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Jef
Allbright wrote:<br><br>> Why should politics be limited to issues of
scarcity?<br><br>Because we are built of biological stuff. Selfish genes
that<br>wanted to replicate.</blockquote>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div> </div></div></span></blockquote>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">By talking of selfish genes I'm probably going down
too far. </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">For </font><font face="Arial" size="2">present purposes
at least and indeed perhaps generally.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">My inclination is to try to understand human
behavior by</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">seeing it connectedness to social animal behaviour
which is </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">what politics must be at its most basic
level. The virtue </font><font face="Arial" size="2">of </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">this approach, if it can be successful, is that it
places the</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">political within the sphere of the scientific and
only one </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">meta-model is then necessary. </font></div></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
Yes, a single, more encompassing meta-model is our goal in this
discussion. But each level of organization has characteristics
not evident in the simpler levels below it. There is a meta-model
that encompasses your concept of politics being essentially related to
"competition over issues of scarcity." That particular concept is
only a part of the phase space of a broader concept of "effective
interaction of agents."<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><font face="Arial" size="2">You say "the dynamics of the larger socio-economic
</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">sytem". That is something that is made up of
individual</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">decision making agents.
Humans. Right? </font></div></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
Yes.<br>
<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><font face="Arial" size="2">Mortal, biological humans, with potentials they
want to</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">develop and selves they want to actualise.
All of which</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">most of them perceive they will have to do within
the context</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">of some life expectancy and development stereotype
that is</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">influenced by culture but is largely based on the
fact that</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">they people are biologically animals whose growth
and</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">development is conditional on getting the resources
they</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">need at each stage of their development in order to
proceed</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">on to the next. </font></div><span class="q">
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">>
Isn't it appropriately called political action when working <br>>
together to promote development toward increasing<br>>
abundance...<br><br>Maybe. The words are too general for me to
say.</blockquote><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2">
</font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><br>
My point was to generalize a
conception of politics, not mired in competitive zero-sum thinking related to
reducing scarcity or authority, but in functionally neutral terms, and open to
cooperative positive-sum thinking related to increasing growth and freedom.</div></blockquote></span><div><font face="Arial" size="2"> </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">Aren't you trying to sort of nice-up politics a
bit? To try to make it nicer</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">by defining away unpleasantness?</font></div></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
No, and that has been a point of frustration during this
discussion. There is ugliness in politics, and in the situations
that motivate politics. I am not trying to define away the
ugliness; I'm trying to show that thinking in terms of scarcity is
self-limiting because that is only one aspect of the system, and that
scarcity thinking is rapidly becoming less appropriate--less
effective--due to changes in the environment in which we
interact. The population bomb appears to have been defused,
efficiency of production continues to increase, and most
importantly--information technology allows us to increasingly (1) see
the bigger picture consequences of our actions and (2) see the
subjective values that drive our actions, and (3) implement
collaboration frameworks that apply #1 and #2 to produce more effective
social decision-making.<br>
<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><span class="q"><div style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;">
I suggested that we think of politics as "social
decision-making applied to groups, expecially with respect to methods of
influence within those processes."<br></div></span>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">I'm getting stuck with phrase "social
decision-making". </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">I'm wondering </font><font face="Arial" size="2">if it
is </font><font face="Arial" size="2">an oxymoron.</font></div></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
Ah, perhaps this is the crux of the matter.<br>
<br>
</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">One can plan a party, build a nest, put on fine
clothes, read</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">poetry, sing songs, or do whatever the heck one can
to *try* to</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">attract the interest and support of other persons
or people but</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">in the end there is only a finite amount of
other-concentration</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">to be had and one IS necessarily competing for
it whenever</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">others want it as well. And others do want
it. They do want</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">to grab some of that finite resource, that
attention. That attention</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">which is necessary for getting votes, funding,
or even returned</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">smiles. </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">That's politics (or part of it). There
is only so much attention</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">to go around and individuals that don't get enough
of it don't</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">survive and thrive. </font></div></blockquote><div><br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><span class="q"><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I
once thought that transhumanisms great offering and political promise
<br>might have been something along the lines of a bold offering to
the<br>haves (and have nots) of something they didn't have. More
time.</blockquote><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2">
</font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2"></font><font face="Arial" size="2">
</font><br><br>My own view is that the best we can do is decide and act
in the present such that we maximize the survival and growth of our subjective
interests. Since my interests include a vision of increasing
opportunities for growth, it follows that I am motivated to promote improved
frameworks of awareness and cooperation to facilitate this vision.
</div></blockquote></span>
<div>You mean "of our subjective interests" collectively?</div></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
Yes, in the sense of an expanding sphere of interests in common based
on increasing awareness of who we are and what works. Note that
this does not mean that eventually we all become identical, because the
process of evolutionary growth entails increasing diversity.<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><span class="q"><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;">
<div>I think it is misguided to hope for more time, given the
environment in which we find ourselves.</div></blockquote></span>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">I agree. But I think that the attention grabbing
thing that transhumanism had going for it for a while was</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">the possibility of giving people including powerful
people that already have a lot of things, more time. </font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">It lost those things and lost the attention
grabbing thing when the wheels came off the Drexlerian</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">nanotech applecart, which is needed to make the
cryonics promise credible. </font></div><span class="q">
<blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 0); padding-right: 0px; padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;">
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div> With the promise and peril of nanotechnology upon us, most likely
followed by recursively improving AI, but not necessarily in that order, it
appears that we have only a brief window within which to promote the growth of
those human values which work, and thus perhaps improve the odds of living in
a future more of our choosing--before the rules of the game change
drastically.<br></div></blockquote></span>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">This is away from the issue either of what
politics is, or what you want to define it to be and get agreement on.</font></div></blockquote><div><br>
<br>
Promoting our values and effectively influencing choices for our future is very close to the point of this discussion.<br>
<br>
</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div><font face="Arial" size="2">The promises and perils you percieve mark you out
as a particular sort of person. A transhuman subcultural insider. But the
subcultures best claims for the attention of the mainstream have not born
sufficient fruit to continue to be credible or particularly attention demanding
of the mainstream. Both the promise and peril of nanotech that you talk of
are intended to be attention grabbers. And for a while they were attention
grabbers. But their attention grabbing power has been lost relative to other
promises and threats that the mainstream feels it is facing. </font></div></blockquote><div><br>
<span class="sg">Brett, I think I clearly understand your position, and
disappointment, that transhumanism seems to be failing to grab
sufficient popular attention. I think this "failure" is quite
understandable, not least because of the very counter-productive label
"transhumanism" and because most of what seems obvious to insiders seems threatening and out of touch to most outsiders.<br>
<br>
<br>
Rather than trying to grab attention and spotlight some key issues, I'm
saying that a general framework of collaboration is emerging, and that
it will increase the effective intelligence of our social
decision-making. It's already happening, with google increasing
our accessability to knowledge, blogster, flickr, various collaborative
filtering systems for music and video, the rise of blogging to make
worldwide news and opinion more immediate and less central...<br>
<br>
<br>
All of these trends are seductively leading to increasing awareness of
ourselves (our values) and our world (what works) and providing a more
effective framework for social decision-making applied to groups.<br>
<br>
<br>
It's happening, but it's not at all clear that it's happening fast
enough and effectively enough to deal with the approaching threats of
ubiquitous nanotech and recursively improving AI.<br>
<br>
<br>
- Jef<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.jefallbright.net">http://www.jefallbright.net</a><br>
<br>
</span> <br>
</div><br></div><br>