From: Phil Osborn (philosborn@altavista.com)
Date: Sun Nov 04 2001 - 17:30:26 MST
I will take a careful look at this material - from the "free world order." Back in '76 or '77, when I was doing some writing for Sam Konkin's "New Libertarian Notes," I recall having some discussions with Sam about this very concept, that perhaps "the state" was largely a hypostacization. On the other hand, it is easy to fall into the other kind of error, of rejecting concepts simply because there are no specific concretes one can point to as instantiations.
On a related note, Julian Jaynes work - "The Origins of Consciousness ...." speaks to this same sort of idea, I think, that consciousness itself is a mental construct. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, any more than a programming "object" doesn't exist. In fact, I suspect that Jaynes might have gotten a lot further down the road of concretizing his theoretical constructs and producing testable hypotheses if he had had a background or working familiarity with object-based programming, which seems a natural metaphor for what he was saying.
In fact, prior to reading Jaynes, I had never seen any reason to conclude that consciousness, as such, would evolve merely because of increased processing power. Certainly, one can imagine and project likely improvements in areas such as perception, visualization and recall. Capabilities that we possess normally only in dream states, such as the ability to internally model other people, both in terms of physical 3D solidity and motion, texture, etc., but also in terms of what often "appears" to be an independent personality could be greatly enhanced as we move toward SI. But I never saw any projection of NEW capabilities or radically different states of consciousness.
Jaynes work, however, appears to point at least in that direction, that perhaps the "metaphorical" structure of consciousness which he describes could in fact not only be radically different between different existing individuals today on this planet, but might also redefine itself in ways we literally cannot conceive of now, any more than his "bicameral" human of ancient times could conceive of what we regard as consciousness now.
Anyway, thanks for the pointer. Any other references along these lines would be appreciated.
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