[sudo-discuss] Kapital & ideas (long posts), was Re: Sudo! Wanna co-host this surveillance event?

Yo David and anyone else who is up for a long read or three- (Apologies for the delay writing back, I had a pile of work to clear.) Agreed, there are times when one has to choose one's fights, and not everyone chooses the same fights at the same times. Looks like we agree about fair use, anonymity, mesh, and the movement for self-ownership of personal data. Fighting back with ideas: Majorly agreed re. "fight back ...with ideas." And "...all the tech in the world won't help if people don't give a hoot because they're too exhausted by the Spectacle-induced trance of capital etc. to care, or don't see why its necessary or in their self-interest." This point is HUGE, and it's rare to find others in the tech universe who get it. Too often we confuse the tools with which we build, and the things we build, with the purposes for which we build. Martin Luther King had a dial phone and a typewriter. He changed the world with the power of his ideas. Today each of us has a supercomputer on our desk and/or in our pocket, and can reach an audience of millions in the time it takes to blow our noses. What we lack is an idea: but not just "an" idea, rather a set of ideas, an ecosystem of ideas that, taken together, open a new view of the world and ourselves in it, and inspire people to think deeply and act courageously. We've inherited a fortune in ideas from all of history, and yet it appears that something is missing, something that could form a bridge over which we can walk from the past and present into the future. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that happiness is not identical with meaning. The Spectacle and the circuses can produce happiness, but what they don't produce is a sense of meaning. Instead we're told, often by our peers, that the most rational view is that life is meaningless, that the universe has no purpose, and that only a religious or romantic fool would believe otherwise. But two NOTs don't make an AND: so what we're left with is a proverbial hole in our soul and nothing to fill it. "The universe is DEAD!" is hardly a rallying cry for sustainability, much less for revolution. I'm willing to take a chance on an idea, and call BS on the "life is meaningless" meme. In point of fact the best available science shows us that the sense of deeply felt meaning in relation to something greater than self, is hardwired in our very brains, over the course of Darwinian time. It has been one of the necessities for passing the tests of natural selection throughout human history, and will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. With that bit of empiricism under our belts, we can use what nature has given us and seek out the objectives of our sense of meaning and purpose in this new world of ours. Life is as inherently, intrinsically, and un-commodifiably meaningful as we can see, hear, reach out for, and act on. Seeking the objectives of meaning is how we'll discover the ideas we so badly need. Money, information, and essence: Money can be represented in ordered bits, and the vast majority of the world's money today is just that. As no configuration of bits is thermodynamically privileged over any other, configurations are orthogonal to thermodynamics (I have a couple of thought-experiments to support that assertion). It would be an impressive magic trick to convert something physical and impermanent, into a Platonic "form" that is eternal. Yet this is exactly what Kapital does with human labor: feed a human some calories, extract the converted energy of labor as a commodity, and exchange it for configurations of bits that are immune to entropy. "...massive informationalization of our lives and in our language, of experience and of concepts..." You make an excellent point here. First I should say that I'm using the term "information" in a broader sense than "data," including the "stuff" that makes up the entire set of contents of conscious minds. But you're making a really important distinction here, and I think we should start using it and trying to make it go viral. What you're getting at with "language... experience... and concepts..." is that there is something qualitative about us that does not readily reduce to "information" as "data." David Chalmers and others have lately started getting rather bold about bringing back an oldschool term for this, that I think we should adopt: qualia. Here we run into a kind of dualistic problem roughly analogous with the physics of light as particles and waves. Language is clearly transmissible in binary bits (and in analog waveforms), and experience and concepts can be described in language. To that extent, these things have an objective or quantitative existence. But concepts and experience are only describable, and not truly reducible in any sense. As with your example about roses (and noses): Even if we understood all of the chemicals produced by the rose, and everything that occurs in the nose and the brain to perceive the smell of roses, that knowledge is entirely distinct from the direct experience of smelling roses. That knowledge does not enable us to predict what the subjective sensation of smelling roses will be like. (Thankfully we don't have to worry about the internet monetization of smells yet: we don't have smelleos, much less YouSniff, and puritans trying to legislate against "pornolfactory" by saying "it's hard to define but you know it when you smell it!") Qualia are different to objective knowledge. Neither is "better" than the other; and we as humans live at once in both of those worlds. The attempt to reduce experience to bits is not the fault of science, but the fault of those whose goal is to relentlessly monetise everything in existence without limit. Again, it's all about trading in configurations of bits. This configuration of bits that convey someone's emotions on their Facebook page, for that configuration of bits that convey an advertiser's payment into Facebook's bank account. This configuration of bits that convey your thoughts and mine in email, for that configuration of bits that convey a data broker's payment into Google's bank account. It's the most efficient form of human energy-conversion possible, even "better" than slave labor because it's "voluntary" and humans do it constantly. Perhaps Google's NSA-like AIs that scrape Gmail for every microgram of commodity value, will read what you and I are saying, and achieve something like Buddhist enlightenment. More likely, we'll get red-flagged as philosophical subversives who might disobey their consumption quotas. "...its a real mythology that needs unpacking." We're doing that right here. All we need to do is put our ideas together, yours and mine and anyone else who wants to jump into this, and find a way to get them out to a wider public than this obscure mailing list. Math, markets: Your critique of math converges with the point about qualia. But in this, we can differentiate between math as Platonic forms that describe certain aspects of nature, and math as an instrumentality for extracting energy-conversion (surplus value) from organisms. Markets aren't rational: agreed. Someone got a Nobel in economics for saying that in a bunch of peer-reviewed papers and/or a book. Though, game theory isn't a "total fail." In fact it predicts why globalization is bad. Experiments run with humans playing Prisoner's Dilemma discovered something interesting: if you only play one round, your self-interest advantage is to "defect" on the other player to gain your freedom at the expense of his/her incarceration, rather than "cooperate" with him/her to obtain freedom for you both. Thus it became the conventional wisdom that self-interest always entails screwing-over the other person. But then someone ran the game in "multiple iteration" mode, where the same two players go through it multiple times. Under that condition it turned out that the self-interest advantage is to "cooperate" with the other player rather than "defect" on her/him. The result is: single-iteration rewards defection; multiple-iteration rewards cooperation. OK, so how does that apply to globalism? In a localized economy, you encounter the same people over and over again: your economic transactions with others are multiple-iteration play, and this rewards cooperation, not screwing the other guy/gal. In a globalized economy, one can engage in single-iteration play again and again and again, all around the world. One can screw-over the locals and then move on, finding someone else to screw-over before the bad reputation catches up. Globalism rewards those whose self-interest strategy is "repeat defection," in other words, rewards sociopaths. And, lo & behold, since globalism has become the dominant paradigm, we see the emergence of a whole new class of economic sociopaths, as exemplified in the film _The Wolf Of Wall Street_. The lead character in that film was if anything a bumbling oaf compared to the master fraudsters who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008 and then demanded and got gazillion-dollar "retention bonuses" paid for by taxpayer bailout money. Game theory tells us something important about how this happened, and gives us a powerful tool to oppose it: economic localization, which rewards cooperation. "Scientific rationalism is in a way a beautiful dream, like a wonderful, utopian idea, and a nice way to organize a representation of the world... [but] we don't operate, for even one millisecond, as rational creatures." Sometimes we do operate as rational creatures, but I agree that for the most part we don't. For the most part, emotions determine behavior, and reason comes along after-the-fact with an explanation. I can explain some of the neuroscience behind that statement, but the main thing is, we agree about the importance of emotions and qualia as factors in human experience and the choices people make (or don't make, as the case may be). or two that may be liberating: that qualia really matter, that we are not reducible to bits, that our lives are not to be monetized, and that our minds (our souls, if one prefers that language) are not to be bought and sold. We are persons, not objects, and it is evil to treat a person as an object. Each person has an entire universe within them. Each person has an intrinsic and irreducible value. Cooperation, rather than competition alone, is an essential in society, and people working together can build something meaningful. Etc. etc. All of this has been said many times before in other language, but it's time to update the language to meet our present circumstances. The core message is about the worth of each person, and the right of each person to be self-determining, subject only to the limit of not harming others. Dude, you are awesome. -G. ====== On 14-02-03-Mon 6:43 AM, David Keenan wrote: [I have to break up your long paragraphs into shorter ones for legibility; I'm dyslexic and my eyes have trouble tracking lines in large blocks of text.]