On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Ian Kelly wrote: > On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 4:36 PM, Kerim Aydin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> I think you're missing the point, which is that the executor of a >>> message *cannot be* a collective. Per R2170, it has to be a single >>> first-class person, i.e. a single biological organism. >> >> Um, I thought that was the point I was making but it was comex who wasn't? >> I'm royally confused now. -Goethe > > Unless I misunderstood you, you said there was "nothing tortuous" > about determining the executor of a message composed by committee and > sent by Googlebot. If that's true, then who is it?
You're talking about assigning responsibility which is getting off track from the original point (or I've gone off the rails already). I just got off 5 tortuous 10-hour days of being on a decision-making committee that works by consensus. The meeting minutes read "The Committee has decided A, but caution that if B is true, the effects of A might be limited." What that meant was that 8 people thought A was okay because it was status quo, 2 people were asleep or checking email the whole time, and 1 person was loudly arguing "you idiots! B! B! It means A will be disastrous!" But the committee decision was in the minutes (not even written by one person, it was a circulated edit) and was "the committee's decision" for which "the committee" was responsible. Add to this that members of the committee were representatives of multiple institutions with institutional viewpoints. No computer programming necessary here. NONE of this removes the fact that you can point to a SPECIFIC GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS WITH FREE WILL and say that these were the entities "behind" the committee for real purposes. But we're getting off-track. Mainly I wanted to vent against my committee. I take comex's point that this is not a discussion of "human" versus "nonhuman" entities but rather a question of whether ratification can spring a formerly non-existent entity (be it a fake human, partnership, or whatever) into some kind of being. I dunno, maybe you can use the humanness argument to extrapolate back to its basis to get to my causality argument. It's also a trivial point though in a practical sense; ehird could have easily found some random nonplaying person that *does* exist and claim to be that person so the whole scam works without the "spring into being" issue. -Goethe
