Hi all. I’m new here, so I hope you will forgive the presumptuousness of starting a new topic. My reason for doing so is that the thread titled ‘To Wonderer’ intrigued me, but I was tempted to take it in an entirely different direction. While it wouldn’t be totally irrelevant, it would be digressive rather than supplementary to the issue at hand. As it is a fundamental change of course, I’m going to quote the original poster and go from there.
Corporations are not capable of being genuinely charitable for the same reason that individuals cannot. Namely, that there is always a perceived or subconscious benefit that lies in the transaction between the charity and the individual (for further explication wikipedia Marcel Mauss’ “Essay on the Gift”). ‘Corporate personhood’ is not just a political affectation built into a broken system. It is, in fact, a codification of a feature that any form of social structure will always exhibit. Corporations can think on their own, quite distinct from the individuals who comprise its organizational structure, because it is an emergent system.
In a nutshell, emergence is the process by which any organized structure becomes greater (non-qualitative, just something ‘different’ or ‘beyond’) than the sum of its part. The actors within the system are like neurons in a meta-brain. The neurons have no individual intentionality, no moral oversight, and no global knowledge of the total functionality of the system (even CEO’s don’t have a concept of the complete nitty-gritty of their company’s function, which is increasingly true with increasing size). The semantics of this point are highly debatable, but mostly irrelevant. There is an unquestionable entity that arises when groups of people act in concert. Whether discussing economy, politics, or religion, and whether you want to call it a ‘hive-mind’ or an ‘emergent system’ or just go on calling it a corporation, the point is the same - it is ultimately capable of making its own choices, and the actions of individuals are, with respect to their percentile stake in the system (again, decreasing with system-size), of marginal consideration.
Now, if you have a mind, then suddenly a vast swath of other considerations must be accounted for. Corporations are certainly very far from arbitrary. Rather, these are entities with motive, intentionality, resource, and a sense of the cost/benefit analysis that comes along with higher cognitive function. It also means that corporations are beholden to the laws of evolution, and that game theory will describe most of the choices it makes. Corporations can be tricked out of their bananas just as easily as any monkey. All it takes is for some perceived benefit (which may be true or false) to be substituted for or supercede their banana-desire.
Also, it is possible to dissociate the neural network that describes the corporate mind, but another will quickly rise to take its place. This is because you have destroyed an individual (the corporation) and perhaps even a species (say, a group of corporations or some particular industry; banking perhaps?), but you have left standing the ecological niche in which they first arose. Unexploited ecological niches are very quickly seized by new, novel, opportunistic species, always. It is the very existence of ecological niches that creates new species. This is a law of nature.
(I want to point out that humanity’s real damage to the earth is not that they are depleting the number of species on the planet, but that they are destroying ecological niches from which a new species might emerge. But that’s enough of that digression…)
The point is that if we treat economy like the creature that it is, apply biological concepts to the structure of it, we then have a formidable tool in the shaping of our future, whatever we decide that should be…
Charity as an act can and does manifest in exceptionally positive outcomes for the ‘receiver’. From a traditional economic assessment, the ‘giver’ has certainly acted selflessly. There is usually no ostensible benefit to the giver in a charitable transaction, until we zoom out a step and look not at the physicality of the transaction (money, goods, or service), but the cognitive effects that the giving has for the giver. This does not mean that a giver must grow in his peers’ esteem either (anonymity does not alter the issue) - simply feeling good about their own charity is enough. They are, in a way, buying a conscience (this is a harsh way of putting it, but it illustrates the point of what the essential transaction taking place really is). A very simple proof lies in this - if they were not driven by some internal emotion to engage in charity, then they would have no motivation whatever, and would therefore not have considered the action in the first place. The more thorough burden of proof is handled nicely in the essay I referenced before - Marcel Mauss’ “Essay on the Gift” (1924) (full title - Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques (“An essay on the gift: the form and reason of exchange in archaic societies”)
Re: Hobbes - Though the Leviathan has been sitting on my bookshelf for a minute or two (6 years?) I have not actually gotten around to reading it. I’ll take your note as an implication that he and I would get along just fine…
Nitpicking is my nature, and I was under the impression that ‘filosophy’ was the purpose of these forums (there are political boards available elsewhere). Like I said, I’m new here. I suppose I’ll learn better as I go along.
To be fair though, my original post was not about charity, but economy (specifically corporations) as emergent entities. I only used charity as an example that has some congruence in individual human nature so as to illustrate in what ways the creature of economy is similar to things we more traditionally regard as such. My initial quote of your use of the word charity was out of context with respect to this purpose. For that I apologize.
Interesting post… The perspective you have adopted is a good one for looking at successes and relations between competing entities and in relation to their environment. Conflict theory is probably right up your alley.
I don;t believe that being genuinely charitable is beyond us. Some people give simply because they want to make other people happy, which i think is the essence of charity.
There is a reason for every one of our actions. If we could not name it, we might consider that action illogical.
Whether an act of “charity” be for good press and personal gain, guilt, a desire to see other people happy, spite (somehow), or whatever reason, It can still be considered charity (though of different sorts). A distinct action like being charitable is a choice, i think there is always a reason, which implies a goal. The way you make it sound someone can only be truly charitable by accident or by being illogical.
the original post which you quotes wasn’t really accurate in that it posed the question of why entities should be charitable, but should have asked why they should not be greedy and deceitful.
Entities are generally out for themselves. You can expect that an entity will do whatever it can to get its own profits. Part of the allure of a free market is that competition forces us to perform, but there are latent forces which fail to keep the competition pure. For example you can expect a company to cheat, but in order to counteract that you need some sort of authority and opposing force. For example a company polluting or using child labor in order to gain an edge on more “moral” companies will initially thrive. Their deceit must first be discovered, and then there must be something in place to impose sanctions on these companies. Sometimes the population will boycott a product or company, and this is a very effective means of correction. The problem is for this to happen the people have to be aware and be able to organize themselves. Then there is the fact that this immoral entity will continue to fight for its own gain. It could do this by lowering prices, by investing in efforts to disorganize, bribe, or destroy any opposing entity.
The more rules there are in a game, the less innovative and potent the evolution of tactics and equilibrium’s will be (you expect an equilibrium to be rare in an arena with many possibilities and less rules).
Conflict theory, game theory, and the sort of perspective which you advocated can be very effective as a comprehensive predictive tool. The drawbacks i see in them however is that theories involving more and more entities and more data becomes harder and harder to interpret. There is a distinct margin of error due to the validity of our observations and data (which is taken into account i imagine). I hear good game theorists make a lot of money, probably because of the accuracy and precision which is involved. There is also the comprehension of motives. I can understand the idea that everyone is out for themselves, their own benefit, but different people and entities can be out for something different. You mentioned that you can trick a monkey out of his banana by showing him something else. Perhaps that something else is more valuable to the monkey, or perhaps it is a farce. It could also be, though not for long, that this entity does not know what it wants.
Change is not something that conflict or game theory handle well.
After an hour typing up a hefty reply to all this, firefox froze up. Guess it wasn’t meant to be… Anyway, here’s a recreation. The funny thing is, I found that my answers all took a different form the second time around, approached things from different angles (I couldn’t precisely remember the initial tacks I took). I was happy with both, and neither was better than the other, but they’re very different. The first was, if anything, more thorough, so maybe fate was acting in the interest of brevity…
Without further adieu:
I just looked up this field on wikipedia. You’re right, it seems to fit quite nicely into my worldview. these kinds of models are all cognitive simulations, built to shrink the reality of things down so that we may think and talk about them. I collect these models, and thank you for pointing me toward another one.
We’re probably going to have to agree to disagree here. For me, that the giver values the fuzzy-warm-feeling they receive for their charity represents the commodity they have purchased with their action. It’s probably an academic distinction at this point - we both get what each other is saying.
Marcel Mauss says that true charity requires the giver be unaware of the transaction. This is paradoxical (and thus, yes, illogical). However, to what degree are we actually required to act logically? I see people do things that I consider to be illogical on a daily basis. They of course have ‘logic gates’ within their mind that prescribed whatever action they took, so we are left with two possibilities that I can see: 1) My logic is ‘better’ than theirs, which means there is such a thing as imperfect logic. 2) logic is defined only by the perspective of the actor and neither is qualitatively ‘better’, in which case they are somehow distinct but equal. In either case there can be no ‘best’ form of logic. There is no perfect form, save perhaps when all possible perspectives are taken into account (more on that in a moment).
I agree. Free Market ideology is an attempt to reinject evolutionary trends to the economy, but it is fundamentally broken in its application. The free-market we have imposed is not free. It is not an evolutionary system. It is a patch that has been applied to an old program. For the system to be truly evolutionary, it would have to be so from top-to-bottom. This means the corporations themselves would have to operate with the same internal freedom as that of the market. What we have now are entities that have been concretized by internal rule-sets. This concretization is a barrier to evolution, and it is a barrier to allowing the values, morals, intentions, and so on of the individuals who comprise the system from influencing it in significant ways.
I’m afraid you’re misconnecting things here. The world ecology (Gaia, to use the most poetic of its many monikers) has little if any rules, and yet tends toward incredible stability. The expectation you speak of does certainly exist, and is fairly ubiquitous in the mind of Man, but this does not make it valid. The expectation comes from the combination of Man’s arrogant assertion that he knows the ‘right thing’ to do, and the paranoia that the world is out to get him. It is because of these that we impose rules upon systems, and rules are by their nature anti-evolutionary. So, I agree with this quote up to the parenthetical. The things that we might call rules in the realm of Gaia are not the same as law and policy in the human social realm. These are rather the defined limits of what an organism is capable of without destroying itself. These kinds of rules only delineate the boundaries to survival, and new innovation is always welcome to circumvent or undermine those boundaries. As an example, gravity defined a certain boundary to the actions of individuals in ecology, but once wings were invented the ‘rules’ changed without so much as a vote or any kind of reprisal whatsoever. This is the kind of smooth, transitional internal motion an evolutionary, organic entity makes that a system that it being controlled (with rules and policy) is not capable of.
Prediction is the purpose of these cognitive simulations, however there are a few pertinent caveats that need to be mentioned. I’m going to hit this from the conclusion and work backwards. I believe that it is by the confluence of multiple simulations that we achieve fidelity in prediction, rather than by the attempt toward continual refinement of any one simulation. Each model is good at showing a particular aspect of the system it is being set to analyze. Also, each is best when kept as simple as possible, pared down to its core elements, such that we can hone in on a purity of data regarding its ‘specialty’ aspect. In fact, refinement (adding new rules to the game, as you put it) has the same anti-evolutionary effect as rules in any system - the model will stagnate and cease to be applicable. How can a model that is not allowed to evolve provide reliable information about system that does evolve? It is by allowing multiple predictive models to synergize that a more complete idea of what something is and what it does (the two most fundamental questions in any philosophical inquiry). It is when individual models get too complex that their predictive power breaks down.
(metaphysics alert!) What this means is that to truly know a thing, all possible models must be applied, all possible perspectives taken into account. The ultimate predictive model then, has all the relevant information necessary to figure out what the next step is, the next moment of the system. As it turns out, we have such a model at our fingertips. It is called reality, which is nothing more or less that the total agglomeration of all possible perspective in the universe. Reality is a meta-simulation, comprised of all possible simulations, whose eternal program is to calculate its own fate. The progression of time we experience is precisely the calculation speed of this great computer, and the phenomenal manifestation of reality we sense about us is the results of that calculation, being fed to us simultaneously at the rate of prediction.
We should look to two criteria to test this hypothesis. First, if this is all true then it would mean that the universe, if it is the ultimate predictive tool, would have to be actively predicting something, so does it? Second is that as the ultimate predictive tool, it would have to have the highest possible fidelity amongst all (even conceptual) models, so does it? The first is verified in that we see the world manifest precisely according to the predictions that the running program makes. In other words, there is no discrepancy between the prediction and the manifestation of reality. That they happen simultaneously does not change this point, it only gives us a curious view of it, which is mostly due to our sapient, sensory, phenomenal observation of the manifestation itself. The second is true for similar reasons. What model of reality could have higher fidelity than reality itself? It is at this point that I would invoke hologrammatic and fractal models to show why this is not all so reciprocal as it seems, (or that the paradox is functional and necessary rather than inimical to the theory) and that I am not, in fact, committing a complex act of using the word in its own definition, but I’ve already gone too deeply into cosmological territory to justify this any further. I think I need to pop over to the natural sciences forum.
To bring it back a step for relevance’ sake, the emergence model is, to my mind, the most effective in evaluating economy (and all things thereof, e.g. corporations). However, this is only true of this time and place, from the human perspective, and regarding the problems and needs we perceive. It is only contextually a ‘best-fit’ model.
And about the monkey - the key to this is that the monkey perceives the distraction to be of greater value than the banana. The validity of this perception is irrelevant.
i would like to quote Kahlil Gibran from his book “the prophet”
That’s pretty much how i would describe charity. I would classify every instance as a form of charity, however generous it might be.
About equilibrium being rare in a system with no rules, what i meant was that in contrast to a game with many rules, tactics quickly reach stalemates and the conflict stabilizes.
Though in a game with no rules there still arises a stable conflict, it is one which continues to evolve.
I guess i meant that a stagnant equilibrium is rare in a game with no rules. Competitors rise and fall.
I would like to reply more but i just ran out of time, i will respond to the lager latter piece of your post later on tonight,
I’m confused with what you mean by ‘tactics reaching a stalemate’, but allow me to speculate… Isn’t a ‘tactic’ just another name for a niche within a system (whether it be economy, ecology, or whatever)? Taking any system as a whole there are countless possible strategies. Those with greater success will propagate and become represented with greater frequency, which will generally lead to a ‘stable’ community of counterbalanced strategies. However, in either of the examples we’ve brought up (again, ecology and economy) we see that the niches which different actors inhabit are still very numerous. The stability of these systems lies in diversity, which allows for huge shoves from internal or external changes without disrupting the balance. What changes are the particular set of niches that the system employs. It is ultimately stability itself which has stagnated; it is the equilibrium that does not change. Is this what you mean by stalemate? Though these things are seemingly unchanging taken as a whole, the building blocks of their stability (the niches and species that comprise the system) are in constant fluctuation.
I realize your post was incomplete, so I’m sorry if I jumped the gun (I’m easily excitable!)
Kahlil Gibran (my Grandfather’s “A Treasury of Kahlil Gibran” published in '59), like Hobbes, has been on my bookshelf for some time now. Isn’t it frustrating how the to-read list seems so impenetrable, and how reading seems only to fuel its exponential growth? By the time I’m old and nearing death I suspect my to-read list will resemble an asymptotic approach toward infinity.
that thing happened to me where you lose a really big post…
No matter though, this time around i should be more concise.
A stalemate in a game of chess is when nobody wins (meaning both players lose). This is sort of a difficult metaphor to apply but here goes: In order to win in this game, you just have to continue playing. The goal is to not die out. If a coyote population destroys their rabbit population then both the rabbits and the coyote will lose.
Anyway, The more options and tactics which are available for a player, the harder they will be to dominate. The existence or non existence of snow is a good example of a tactic that allows rabbits to compete better by using snow as cover. If you take away that snow, and the predator population corners the rabbits to near extinction in the area. Both sides will have lost because the coyotes wont have a food source/which is an unbalance. This is stagnation and stalemate.
Instead of saying I expect equilibrium’s to be rare in a game with no rules, i should have said i expect stagnation or stalemates to be rare. When the success of a player is hindered because of a new tactic by their opponent, or a limitation of their own tactics, the game ceases to be productive and will destabilize. Entire conflicts could vanish, which would make room for the expansion of other conflicts, or perhaps the occurrence of new conflicts.
Where players thrive off the success of others, like the coyotes and the rabbits, the success of one means the success of another. you see a productive and balanced equilibrium emerge. These balances become threatened by limitations in tactics, and without limitations they continue to evolve at their own pace.
When i initially said an equilibrium would be RARE in an environment with no rules, i was thinking in the sense that there would always be growth and evolution in an ideal game, which might not be considered an equilibrium. In a game with rules however, my experience with chess tells me that stalemates and checkmates are a lot more frequent. Sometimes i just use words sloppily, sorry for the confusion.
heh, i’m the kind of guy who reads a lot of books, but cannot keep a library nor a list of books to read. perhaps it’s a blessing, perhaps it’s a curse.
you make a good point that predictions can be cross referenced through other models, but still you run the risk of error, you just understand the margin better. I’m not saying these models are unusable, just forever imperfect.
that makes sense…
There’s no predictive tool like hindsight . regrettably we are left in the cold concerning the ways of the universe. Instead of feeding information into a model to have it predict an outcome i am a bigger fan of he contextual hands on approach, but of course that requires meddling with and entering the system.
I suppose we all have our predictive models stashed away in our subconscious minds. our brains crunch data and make predictions just like computers do, it’s just done in a much more flashy way.
I would simply say, the universe is what it is.
If it predicts something, it predicts itself.
It is an expression of the forces which govern it.
Determinism is really the simple way of describing this observation. The consistency of the universe is where we base everything we know from.
True, the goal after all is just to get the monkeys banana.
You can shoot the monkey if you want .
The remaining question is whether these monkeys will wise up and counter the deceitful tactic or not…
p.s are you familiar with the concept of permaculture? Certain plants work and communicate chemically with other plants. When a parasite attacks one plant, that plant will release chemical signals to warn the other plants, which will subsequently release chemicals to repel that type of parasite. I’m not overly familiar with game theory, but does it take cooperation into account?
here is a torrent to a video you would probably be very interested in
I am familiar with permaculture somewhat (your suggested torrent is downloading as we speak to supplement what I do know). I don’t follow it as such, but much of my personal take on what might work for our future is rooted in the same design principles. I tend to focus more on social structure than caloric sourcing. In the end there’s no ‘one right way’ for people to live, so I’d just as happily promote hunter/gathering as permaculture or anything else really. There are a couple of other interesting items of note here.
First, permaculture is rooted in sustainability of course, but also built upon the ‘modern’ (some thousands of years) ideal of a sedentary lifestyle. There is still an implied disconnect between potential solutions for humanity and the limits of what we’re willing to consider. Now, I don’t want to give up my big screen tv any more than the next guy, I’m just pointing out that modern sensibilities are, to some degree or another, a crutch.
Second, I just want to show this as one more (add it to the laundry list) proof that we have already surpassed population sustainability levels. Contrary to estimates that we’ll be at 12 billion by 2015 or whatever other numbers are thrown around, I frankly don’t think we’ll make it nearly that far. Permaculture is rooted not just in sustainability (the limit-test for number of bodies that can occupy a given space) but also efficiency (getting everything you can out of a given piece of land). If permaculture represents the best that can be done, and we then replicated that model to cover the whole of the earth, it will give us a number that should represent the absolute maximum of humans that can live sustainably on the planet (which should still recommend itself to a maintained level of maybe 75% of that maximum or less). I don’t know what kind of algorithms would be necessary to extrapolate this kind of data, but I’m gonna go ahead with a wild speculation that the answer that cranks out would be far less than 6.7 billion.
One time I bought a monkey just so I could shoot it, just so I could take its banana. It validated all the male hegemonic indoctrination I’ve been raised on. An important rite of passage, I now know that I am a real (hu)man, and that as such, all bananas are implicitly my personal property. For your own safety I ask that you step away from the bananas
. regrettably we are left in the cold concerning the ways of the universe. Instead of feeding information into a model to have it predict an outcome i am a bigger fan of he contextual hands on approach, but of course that requires meddling with and entering the system.