Well, OK. But the question still stands: Necessary for what objective?
The Siebert & Rees paper talks about shared values like "socially just ecological sustainability",
"salvage civilization", "one-earth living", etc. And each one of their criticisms in section
3 also assume some values. So, I'm guessing it's something like their objective that we're assuming as our
objective. And anything that does not target that objective isn't put into the kitty of things we'll evaluate as
possible or impossible. (E.g. the second-earth idea where we abandon this earth as a husk is not part of the
conversation.)
I don't see how we can prune the combinatorial explosion of [im]possible
outcomes without deciding some kind of objective at the start, even if it's
super vague like a Gaia-ish homeostatic health of the biosphere.
On 1/25/22 06:39, David Eric Smith wrote:
To say this is a value question is fair, glen, given my shorthands of language.
However, I would like to split apart questions of “who wants what” from
questions of “what can or cannot happen under what conditions, irrespective of
what anybody wants”. In principle we have ways to get at the latter question;
we often do worse in getting any resolution out of the former. Maybe there is
something basic in this? Our notion of truth is that on any properly-posed
question, there should only be one durable answer. Whereas in the area of
desires, we think it is either inescapable, or for many also desirable (a
self-referential value judgment) that different answers coexist indefinitely.
Eric
On Jan 25, 2022, at 8:02 AM, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote:
Necessary for what, though? We need the shared value(s) before we can ask what response
we'd get from the convergence on something that might be necessary to adhere to that
value. Is the shared value that biology on this planet should be preserved and the thing
we need to do is impossible? Or perhaps the shared value that all "lower forms of
life" were simply stepping stones to the human organism, but to preserve the human
organism is impossible? Etc.
As Jon likes to ask: What are we optimizing? If we can't agree on that, then
the responses to impossibilities will be as diverse as the values that underlie
those impossibilities. And, if that's the case, then we're back to the
clustering/homogenizing we see in any aspect of pop culture.
On 1/24/22 17:21, David Eric Smith wrote:
In a real situation where we decided something was necessary that we believed
there was no way to do, somehow I feel like the same movie doesn’t become the
response. Something else does. What is that?
On 1/24/22 17:34, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Before I launch into a diatribe about why the hell we can't agree to basic,
never mind interesting things:
--
glen
Theorem 3. There exists a double master function.
.-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
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