[p2p-research] Building Alliances (basic income and entrepreneurship)

[J. Andrew Rogers]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> There *is* a fixed upper bound on true intelligence. Or at least there
>> better be; an awful lot of modern technology depends on that theorem.
>
> I'm ready to believe that, though I'm sceptical, any literature that's not
> full of math on this?


It makes sense if you think about it, a region of space has a finite
information capacity. The exact capacity is not important, only that
it is finite.  This strictly bounds the state of any dynamic in that
space.


> Yes indeed: emotion, myth, empathy, meditative witnessing ... Do you
> seriously think people didn't 'know" anything before the advent of math and
> science??


The human brain is an inductive computer, it does not learn anything
any other way no matter what labels you put on that learning. That is
the flexibility and power of it.

You don't need to understand the laws of thermodynamics and heat
engines to drive an automobile, but you are most certainly *following*
those laws even if you are ignorant of them.


> If you have a life partner, does she expect you to 'know' you love
> her/him by reference to math and science ???


In her case, she would dismiss any absolute claims about such things
as transparent nonsense, and she would be correct. She's satisfied
with the reality.


> No, human beings, both individual and as societies are 'intentional', and
> have subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and plain material redutionism, or
> subtle systemic reductionism, is poor science. We are not planes and dots.
> This is not to say that reductionism is not useful and productive, as long
> as it is recontextualized and part of interdisciplinary approaches that take
> into account human depth. Math and models can help explain human and social
> dynamics, but the map is never territory.


You grossly underestimate the susceptibility of these systems to
mathematical analysis and manipulation. Human societies are not as
complex and unpredictable as you think they are. No surprise there, it
was demonstrated in the 1950s(!) that computers can reliably
inductively reverse engineer human thought processes, practical
scaling limitations notwithstanding.  Our math and computers have only
gotten better.


>> Huh? Neither Wikipedia or Arduino are impossible in theory. It is
>> silly to assert as much. Indeed, they are *expected* in theory.
>
> Not the people I've read. Wikipedia was widely ridiculed in its early days,
> and still is in countries like France; and we had a long conversation on the
> list a few years back about the impossibility of doing open hardware circuit
> boards ..


You are confusing some random opinion on *practicality* with a
rigorous statement of *possibility*.

It is plainly obvious that there is no principle of the universe that
prevents open hardware circuit boards.


-- 
J. Andrew Rogers
realityminer.blogspot.com