From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sun Nov 10 2002 - 15:01:14 MST
On Saturday, November 09, 2002 9:53 AM Eugen Leitl eugen@leitl.org
wrote:
> As long as you can't change the properties of the
> average human agent the resulting change in
> society structure will remain unstable.
>
> It requires a vastly different kind of human animal
> for even a libertarian society (not talking about
> cryptoanarchy) to be stable.
This is all relative, I believe. If by "stability" here you mean a
social system that never ever decays, then I don't think you'll get that
even if you do change the nature of the agents -- unless you do
something trivial like make them all noninteracting or nonindividual or
so impoverished in traits that all their interactions are boring and
unlike real world agents, human or otherwise.
Also, I think most libertarian social theory is based on trying to work
from human nature as is to a better society and not from some extreme
example of human nature or some oversimplification of it to a utopia.
(Of course, there are counterexamples, but I wouldn't use a simplistic
or utopian transhumanist as a strong argument against transhumanism.:)
Notably, here, if you change human nature, that will not remove all
barriers to everything. I'm all for such change, but I think what we'll
wind up with is a new set of limits -- not the absence of limits -- and
some of these will apply in the social realm. This will be an
interesting experiment because it will allow us to see how much social
dynamics of dependent on the specific nature of the social agents and
how much is structural -- above the nature of the compositional agents.
(This is not without precedent. After all, Realist and neo-Realist
international relations theory is based on the assumption that the
international system imposes constraints on international actors (i.e.,
nation-states) regardless of their composition. Thus similar phenomena
happen whether the actors are democracies, totalitarian states,
monarchies, or what have you. see the work of Kenneth Waltz, Stephen M.
Walt, and John Mearsheimer here.)
Does this mean libertarianism -- any variety -- is the best social
system possible? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't dismiss all of it just
because of a few "nutjobs.":)
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
Film recommendation: "All or Nothing" by Mike Leigh. Now in theaters.
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