A la Node

I haven’t posted in a while due mostly to school and its harsh demands on my time and creative energy. There have been a few things on my mind, though. Little things, liberty, government, morality.

It seems to me that government, by its nature, walks a very fine line between legitimate communal necessity on the one side and all the worst possible human failings on the other.

In any group beyond a certain size, (and I tend to think this size is defined by the number of people you can know on a first-name basis) some form of collective organization eventually becomes necessary. Some form of conflict mediation between members of the group, and some form of collective decision-making in issues that affect the community as a whole, are both needed for any kind of cohesiveness and stability. The problem seems to be that it is very hard to build a governing structure that does not put individual humans in positions of power. Once the position of power exists, the certainty of corruption exists. Perhaps more insidious than corruption is the tendency of people to do what they think is right. This is great on an individual basis, but when someone’s moral sense can become law, this is bad news.

A few sociological/psychological theories have been floating around in my head lately. I am sure you brain scientists will correct me on my thinking, but the article on light (see below) got me thinking about the structure of inhibitions that make us tick.

If you follow your own mind down the rabbit hole far enough, you run out of logic. At some point, one step fails to follow the next in an orderly and obvious pattern - you come to a gap, and there is no right or wrong answer, just a belief you can’t justify or corroborate via deduction or synthesis. Do you believe path A is right, or path B? No right, no wrong, despite your urge to believe the path you desire is inherently correct and the other quite horrible. Just a place where you have to believe one or the other, because everything you do ever after will be determined by which path you take.

I see a lot of thought in the speculative/futurist arena about how we will create machines that will make the next generation of humans obsolete (or the one after that, or somewhere down the line). There is much said in genetics and evolutionary biology about the percieved necessity (or lack thereof) of the “male species”, and of the essential selfish nature of the gene, to which we are all merely a method of reproducing. There is a lot of talk about the future where we are all useless, and machines run the world, as if running the world is the only use we have. There is fear of post-scarcity economics, as if capitolism is a warm maternal protection we cannot survive without.

All these ideas strike me as not only silly, but characteristic of a particular kind of social nhilism. We seem to have no sense of the meaning or purpose of ourselves as a species or society. We all have our individual causes, but we seem afraid to consider what it means to be human, and have a human purpose. I suppose these things seem the realm of religion - those atheists among us see no greater purpose, the religious see only God’s purpose.