On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 7:34 AM, Olin Elliott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I suspect that the same thing is true of a lot of our idealistic ethical > systems -- and the systems I hold most precious, democracy, the open > society, etc. almost certainly fall into this category -- they do not come > naturally to us, and in a sense we must re-learn them over and over again, > and we must make a concious effort to translate from our "natural ethical > language" into these > systems, because on a basic level we may never really learn to think in > them. Maybe out descendents will, if these systems turn out to have > survival value. I believe, though I'm not sure I have a good reason for it, that the modern notion of freedom would have been incomprehensible to most people living in a feudal system. More generally, the notion of a self-regulating system, via feedback, would have been incomprehensible in the abstract. Mark Twain played with these ideas a bit in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." I think the incomprehensibility arises from an entirely different idea of how order arises in the universe. Medieval thinking was hierarchical; order flows down through the "Great Chain of Being." Enlightenment ideas -- democracy, evolution, open markets -- added self-regulation through feedback to our model, causing some to entirely reject hierarchical models. Ethics doesn't yield very well to self-regulating models. Although there are any number of evolutionary hypotheses for ethical behavior, they tend to have a bit of a square peg in a round hole feel to them, in my opinion. The reason is simple, I suspect -- our notion of self-regulation has been based almost exclusively on competition until the last few decades; pure competition doesn't leave much room for seemly altruistic behavior. When we try to explain ethics, especially social ethics, in a competitive framework, it has to emerge from the large-scale nature of social interactions, since it doesn't seem to be present on the small scale. Trouble is, when we analyze emergent properties of large-scale feedback networks, traditional competitive models stop working; our notion of how order arises breaks, as it did during the grand discoveries of democracy, evolution, open markets, etc. Instead, mathematics turns to game theory and other self-organizing paradigms. The complexity people (Santa Fe Institute and such) sometimes call self-organizing emergent properties "order for free." I suspect that for some people, the idea of order for free is threatening (TINSTAAFL, after all) or at least disturbing, for much the same reasons that self-regulation was threatening and disturbing some five centuries ago. At some point in all this, I find myself turning to the anthropic principle or many-universes. We're here because this universe somehow gave rise to life... we're still here because only a universe in which we survived to this point contains us to think about the fact that we're here. Both ideas are fairly wild to contemplate... that there is just one universe and its physics allow or even encourage order for free... or there are lots and lots of universes and we cannot be in one of the infinite dead ends. To tie this back around to ethics, this line of thinking brings me around to agree with those who see ethics as an emergent property of complex social and biological systems. Unfortunately, "emergent property" is just so much hand-waving until somebody figures out a way to describe and predict the behavior... and complex systems seem to have no trouble creating problems that are unsolvable in the lifetime of the universe. We get order for free, but not petaflops. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
