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A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young
Song lyrics by Donald Fagen - I.G.Y. (International Geophysical Year)
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The human body is the most efficient input output device known to man (and the only one capable of knowing human emotion).
-D.A.R.Y.L
The Machine in the Garden
It shouldn't be suprizing, given my engineering and programming background, that technology metaphors have influenced both my experiences and beliefs. For example, when I think of the emotional energies, both positive and negative, of church services flowing thru individuals, and collectively gathering in the church space itself, and I wonder what then happens to those collective emotions, I'm thinking "sort/merge/summarize". And when I realize that similar groupings of collective emotions, shaped by common liturgy and symbol, are being generated in hundreds of thousands of church spaces, I'm thinking "data feeds". The spoken Catholic litergy is explicit in it's desire to gather and group the collective emotions of all it's churchs into a larger whole.
Here is some partial content from the last thread I was involved in at AOL.
Subj: Re: Mutually exclusive.
Date: 8/29/96 8:36:31 PM
From: Joe Uhrig
>>Here we go again. Another ton of rhetoric and no example to justify the simple statement "They Aren't".<<
You can prove or disprove almost any economic or political theory based on which data you exclude. So let me just say it again. The "commons" against which your question applies is much much larger than your question allows. Sorry if that isn't proof of anything. And just an aside, I don't stay awake at night worrying about whether someone's nonviolent resistance to clear and obvious oppression is impinging on the rights of the oppressor. You can't own what doesn't belong to you.
>>I therefore presume that you cannot come up with an example where the satisfaction of one person's DEMAND for equality DID NOT result in another person's freedom being impinged.<<
Well I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it. I would probably approach it in terms of the issues raised by the civil war.
>>Thanks for your confirmation.<<
You're welcome... I think :)
Subj: Re: Mutually exclusive.
Date: 8/29/96 8:45:33 PM
From: Joe Uhrig
>>While perhaps ABSOLUTE equality and ABSOLUTE freedom are "mutually exclusive,"<<
I'm not sure that I would even concede this. ABSOLUTE is one of those approaching infinity words and I think the presence of an infinite "commons" would make the issue simply something to be mutually determined by freely conscenting individuals.
Subj: Re:Responding to a response.
Date: 9/3/96 8:57:05 PM
From: Joe Uhrig
>>Well, I was referring to such things as gravity. And I should have said that absolute freedom can't exist, not absolute equality.<<
I would consider gravity to be one of the "local" constraints. The word universe sounds like it's related to "One verse" which has always seemed to me to be a more poetic description than "The Word" or "Thus Spake Zarathrustra". My own beliefs are that our universe was "created" which means that it isn't absolute.
I'm would tend to agree with you about absolute freedom, but only within the "commons", which tends to have less freedom in direct relationship to the availability of resources (though you got to be careful when discussing the relationships of things that could conceivably be infinite). It may for example be that absolute freedom can be realized within other domains irregardless of any limitations that might necessarily need to exist in a shared commons (traffic laws).
Organizing icons on a computer desktop is a good way to think about these kinds of abstractions using symbols. I actually have this particular problem represented on my desktop. One of my hard drives is partitioned into three equal partitions with appropriate images as follows: Outer Space (collective), Inner Space (collective), and Free Space (whatever you want it to be). Somewhat simplistic perhaps, but there is a rich body of human metaphor that points us outwards and beyond what we normally think of as absolute limits. For example:
"And so I say to every man and woman, let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes." - Walt Whitman
There is a lot of religious metaphor that directs us in the same way.
Subj: Re:Responding to a response.
Date: 9/4/96 8:28:41 PM
From: Joe Uhrig
Worley1>>Simplistic? Simplistic?? Simplistic??!!<<
It is simplistic, though very obscure. But you and PetSki are right, I can't even believe myself that I was so abstract in that post. At the risk of sounding even more obscure, the reason I called my Inner Space, Outer Space, Free Space model simplistic is that I didn't want to say that their weren't many other possibilities. I guess I got here by going from the real world conflicts of equality and freedom, to the exploration of equality and freedom as "ideals". Ideals by their very nature tend to suggest "without limits" which is why precise language becomes so difficult and metaphors become more effective.
>>Gravity isn't universal? as far as terms of humanity, it sure seems pretty universal to me...could you reword your explaination for this only some-what literate artist?<<
Sorry again. This universe was created with physical laws which certaintly are relevant to our lives. If Whitman's quote is correct though, there is no reason to believe that gravity is even a part of any other possible universe. Of course it could be that I read too much science fiction as a kid :)