From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Sep 24 2002 - 00:21:35 MDT
Spike writes
> I am another one who has been totally baffled
> most of my life by the human emotional operating
> system.
Well, I would be willing to bet that everyone
who knows you would prefer the following
restatement: Spike has been intellectually
baffled by human emotions, (just as have all
other keen observers), while himself negotiating
the e-currents like a pro.
> A very complicated thing is this, but
> let me propose an idea. One can clearly state
> without being condescending, that one is going
> meta, which is to say, one wishes to have the
> readers of an idea temporarily turn off their
> emotions, and look at an idea the way a human
> level AI would see it.
That's an idea, but, actually, an old idea.
Wasn't it Leibnitz who supposed that we might
develop a calculus of logic so powerful that
we could reduce affairs of state as well as
affairs of the heart to it?
If it's possible at all, I'll claim, it would
take superhuman intelligence to do it. I don't
think that anyone *can* turn off their emotions.
I and the other three who've either posted or sent
stuff off-line would disagree with your meaning of
the term "meta". We don't mean at all to re-evaluate
*issues* dispassionately. In fact, the "going meta" that
I have tried to do is what, perhaps, a psychiatrist
called in by the divorce court would be trying to do.
It's hardly his place to take sides, or even to examine
particular issues of dispute, but rather to understand
and explain how each party got into their position.
Now, while trying to carry on *that* analysis, I intend
at the same time---but probably not in the same posts
---to resume my other character as one of the disputants.
Why is this so hard to understand? Will I get blasted
for having said that? At one moment you're
down in the trenches fighting away, and then---say when
you're taking a break---you try to imagine what the whole
trench-works looks like from above. Rising above (in
imagination) you see here the British lines, and over
here the German lines, and then you do more: you try
very, very hard to study English civilization and German
civilization---realizing that they're really all human,
and eventually fall in love with both cultures, and
attain true understanding of how each sees itself as
the only right.
Now of course, it's only a dream that I or probably
anyone could really get so far, but it's an ideal.
Moreover, and importantly, it seems to me that this
*need* not interfere when you get up to fight again;
from your British (say) point of view, the Germans
really are killing a lot of people, and unnecessarily
so, in Belgium, or whatever.
Is it such an insane goal for me to be able to laugh
and joke with my opposite numbers, each of us from
time to time replacing implacable animosity with an
almost cooperative exploration? I hasten to point out,
however, that this "cooperation" has its limits, and
one will still every so often say out of sheer
desperation, "but HOW can anyone believe *that*
without being deranged!?" All that is asked
is that that be a rhetorical question, and everyone
understand that their adversaries are neither stupid,
nor criminal, nor more blind, nor of lower morality,
nor less educated than one. Is that really so much
to ask?
Well, in accord with what I have written, I say it's
impossible for an *issue* to go meta, at least among
us non-professionals. Each sub-issue on each side
of a Bell-Curve type debate has so many huge semantic
links and emotional links to other values, concepts,
and ideals that I have hardly met anyone whose
emotional circuitry is so turned off, or who is so
innocent of all the tangential issues, that they could
be entirely unbiased about The Bell Curve.
Lee
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