From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 02:45:16 MDT
Forrest writes
> The selection of a number of different humans to form into a
> collection is an arbitrary parameter imposed by the individual
> theoretician.
This is a lot of crap displaying simultaneously an ignorance
of semantics, the abstracting process, and issues in philosophy
involving universals and particulars, as well as a complete
abandonment of common sense. Since it's clear that you've
brainwashed yourself to deny the existence of what practically
everyone else on the planet takes for granted, your path must
be lonely indeed.
So you think that collections are arbitrary, eh, totally
imposed by an individual's "theories" or perceptions or
beliefs, and has no objective existence? I suppose that
to you a star doesn't exist either, it being only a
collection of atoms and plasma. Well, a nation or baseball
team has precisely the same kind of existence that a star
has.
But since your focus is on groups of people, I can just
imagine you in Dalmatia in 118 BC telling everyone that
Roman Legions do not exist. All that exists are
individuals, you would explain with a gleam in your eye.
A Legion (I imagine you continuing to explain) is merely
an insidious rumor promulgated by a few evil Romans to
terrify those not yet under the rule of certain men
in Rome.
But where you are dead wrong is that Legions had objective
existence; one was not just a gang of men. Anyone who
could not (like you evidently) perceive the difference
got annihilated in short order. The Legion had its own
tactics, and had to be dealt with on its own terms, if
any hope of victory over the Romans could be hoped for.
Crippling your own thought processes in certain realms
the way that you are doing is not just going to be lonely,
it will prevent you from understanding higher order
relationships between higher order objective entities.
Again, for example, no motley collection of warriors
should ever be confused with a Roman Legion, because of
its peculiar strengths and flexibility. The use of the
singular in the preceding sentence is key.
I'm quite certain that in other walks of life you haven't
paralyzed your thought processes, nor deprived them of
their ability to abstract. Doubtless you're quite agreeable
to thinking of certain collections of molecules as "things",
but evidently only because there you haven't systematically
developed the long-term blindness that you have in the political
arena, and linked it to deep centers of emotion. A band of
robbers, or the Gestapo, or the IRS---you're going to keep
telling yourself---aren't anything and do not exist. "They're
only a collection of individual men and women."
Other parts of your prose testify to your willingness to
believe conspiracy theories. Thank goodness your fine
intelligence is not so handicapped in your daily productive
activities.
> Consider a planet with a single human being, "Party A", on it-
> there are no groups of humans real or imagined. Add one
> other person, "Party B", that is able to communicate, or engage in
> transactions, with the first; this forms an intermittent dyad-
> the fundamental economic unit. A series of imagined contracts
> and exchanges of material ensues that need not be the result of
> self-aware cognition. Each person evolves an internal model of
> reality different from the other, based on their own experiences
> and physical viewpoint.
You sound as though this is some special revelation.
> A physically identifiable group consists of the two persons on a
> planet
what makes it a planet? Why don't you think of it as merely
individual atoms orbiting some gas molecules over where it's
hot?
> for a duration starting when the second one shows up and ending
> when one of them leaves. The group so identified does not have
> a plan of its own independent of the plans of the individual
> human beings.
Correct.
> It is not able to cogitate independently of its putative members.
> The group does not make war, throw parties, suffer attacks, or
> have any other behavior aside from the formation and dissolution
> process.
Oh yes it does! Or at least it does when A, B, C, D, ... are enough
to be recognized by any eight year old as a group, or a mob, and it
begins to act in concert to the extent that a normal human's
abstracting processes render it as a "thing".
> That process itself is a whimsical imposition of the observer's.
No, it *can* have objective existence, e.g., a football team is not
just a set of random individuals.
The language of thousands of generations of human beings has
evolved to deal with abstractions and universals. How do you
explain this happening from the earliest times, for example,
from the first time that there was a "crew" or a "regiment"?
Some peculiar aberration of thought engineered by sinister
manipulators?
> Add a third person, "Party C",...
> The procedure can be continued indefinitely, adding more
> persons to the system and restricting the groupings to arbitrary
> spacetime intervals without loss of generality. A similar
> procedure of decomposition by arbitrary groups in arbitrary
> intervals achieves the same result.
> This demonstrates the non-existence of the State.
It demonstrates your clinging to a slogan in the face of reality.
> > "Despotic"? Don't you find the distinction between the regimes
> > in the old U.S.S.R., Castro's Cuba, Hitler's Germany, or China
> > and the US, UK, today's Germany worth anything?
>
> Comparing and contrasting is a valuable analytic tool. The contrasts
> are often noted, less often we see the comparisons between current
> US and Nazi Germany, the USSR, 1930's US, or the Roman Empire. Each of
> those examples provide valuable insights.
Yes, they do. But on the one hand, I'm surprised you believe
that such nations exist or existed. Weren't they in reality
just random collections of individuals you are arbitrarily
imposing as a single theoretician? Why would you be right
to refer to "Nazi Germany" and I would be wrong to refer to
the Klepps (which, in case you don't know, is the collection
of all German girls between 5'6" and 5'8" who had freckles
and brown eyes between 1936 and 1938). Why shouldn't I get
to explain history with my concepts like the Klepps as well
as you do with "Nazi Germany" and the rest of the arbitrarily
imposed subjective parameters you referred to above?
> > Or is your reading of history completely different from mine?
>
> Of course it is! No two internal model-building entities can
> have identical interpretations of events.
Your nit-picking tendencies---overreacting to certain words and
phrases, with little effort to perceive intended meaning---is
alas fairly common for what sometimes passes for deep thought
on this list. It's a serious disorder. Most efforts to avoid
setting you off on the part of people who communicate with you---
like I did with my word "completely"---will have no effect. You
*wanted* to lecture me on the rather stupid and mundane observation
that no two people employ *EXACTLY* the same concepts, or look at
things precisely the same way, and it didn't matter that I added
the word "completely".
Lee
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