[PLUG-TALK] Re: [PLUG] Mad SCO Disease

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 gepr at tempusdictum.com wrote:
> Equilibrium is death in biology.  (And though Jeme might be able to
> invoke the mythical Cartesian partition w.r.t. humans and, say, racoons,
> he _cannot_ convince me that we're not biological. [grin])

Going back to that for a moment (and I'm not arguing on any level that we
are not biological, silly)...  I'm not arguing for some Cartesian
mind/body dichotomy.  (Indeed, I'm fairly convinced that the mind/body
problem can't be expressed rationally in the modern philosophy.  There is
no basis for this whole "body" thing.  We tried to get the ghost out of
the machine and ended up exorcising the machine.)  I'm simply trying to
express that civilization, the written word, and our complex
emotional/intellectual development have led us (humans) to a point where
mere survival is valued less than quality of life and our compassion and
understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of our lives (the
civilization part) has removed the need for individual struggle against
the world to maintain survival.  We can simply HAVE the means of survival
and concentrate on improving quality of life by improving the system as a
whole.

> The same is true of Utopian systems of government or "equal rights for
> all".  If you make it uniform, you make it global.  If you make it
> global, you kill the system.

I don't think that is anything like a valid syllogism.

> Now, if you had many different Utopias, all with different rules that
> were incommensurate and had them compete for resources, then perhaps
> this wouldn't be a problem.

No reason to do that.  We should be able to devise ways to distribute
resources as they are needed.  We're quite ingenious little animals.  We
can make a whole lot out of very little.  And, as Russell wrote, the
number of people we need to please will go down and as the level of
pleasing goes up.

Homogenization isn't a real threat.  People will always vary almost
arbitrarily.  We just need to let the individuals decide what their own
needs are and just use society as a means for channelling desire into
constructive paths.

J.
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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