| Re: 2 parts |
Jul. 31st, 2007|10:57 pm |
>The fact that others may share my critique
But no, they don't. I think it's a misunderstanding,
you must simply confuse him with someone else
whom you have also read.
They cannot share your critique because
Dawkins never stated or implied the statements
your critique is aimed at.
>When I appear to dismiss whole branches of science, I
>dismiss their authoritarian claim to
>\u201cknowledge\u201d, which is being manipulated and
>concocted mostly for specific aims.
All right, but do I invite you to accept their
autoritarian claims? I think not. Sciences
provide a language. One can refuse to speak this
or that language, say, on the grounds of a religious
taboo. That is understandable. But in the absence
of taboos, one might speak freely, and formulate.
>But, how to make sense of the rampant, meaningless pain of
>the majority of people in this world?
If you make a machine that can suffer pain, say, when
deprived of a certain ressource, arrange it so
that there is a shortage of ressources and plenty
of machines, and leave the process to self-organising,
then a lot of machines will suffer. If the machines
are allowed to evolve in such a way that would minimise
their suffering, even more of the machines will suffer.
And if there is pleasure, associated with some other
machine's suffering (for instance, to signal to the
machine that is winning that winning it does, indeed),
then your machines can even evolve sadistic features.
All the while pain and suffering will be just
a shortcut to quickly signal to a machine that
something is dangerously wrong. Under the conditions
of the shortage of the vital ressource, the quicker
one will survive better (or get better chances to
reproduce).
The evolution may help the situation allowing the
machines feel pain when some of the other machines
are suffering. That would be the empathy which
Dawkins described in his "Selfish Gene". And,
in some species, it may reach the extent of feeling
pain whenever they know that another is suffering.
But too much stress is fatal by the design.
>In my humble
>experience, all institutional answers seem to lie and to
>justify it.
Can it be that you just read them in this way?
The three passages above appeal to the fusion of
the game theory with evolutional psychology; one
can construct a scenario following the scetch and
demonstrate the ways evolution will take. But this
is by no means a justification -- it's a scenario
to show how it works. And, which is far more
important, to lay one's fingers on the key points
which should be reprogrammed in order to get rid
of meaningless suffering. The good thing about
evolution is that its programming constantly gets
revised, and that is part of the programming.
>Probably, I was driven by the selfish desire to have you
>near -- not as an illusion or perhaps against the
>backdrop of illusion. Since I can't go to the Mountain, I
>asked the Mountain to come to me.
That is where I am trying hard not to wish something
HORRIBLE to happen to both American continents,
to force you emigrate to Russia with the family.
(A climate change, perhaps?) And we could settle
in Irkutsk and get things started.
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