who here has checked this site out? i just discovered it awhile back and it has opened my mind up to some great new ideas. i highly recommend spending some time investigating!
enjoy.
My friend have you found an online buddy!!! I have read the P. Cibernetica. I have also read Much Much else. have you read greg bateson? start there. also read Manuel Delanda as an easy intro to Giles Deleuze.
What ideas did the P. C spark?
H3M
i have not read or heard of any of those individuals! iām excited to find out more. do you know of any online texts by any of them? what āactual booksā would you recommend?
iāll probably have more to say on this later, but right off the top of my headā¦ the idea of āsingularitiesā in terms of technology or social trends is really interesting to me. (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SINGULAR.html) that there is some sort of intrinsic ālimitā to extrapolations of data (and consequently predictions concerning future events/states of affairs).
so the part that says āfor all practical purposes may be called āinfiniteāāā¦ thatās interesting to me because i donāt really think the word āinfiniteā makes sense if its taken literally (and i know the passage doesnāt really suggest that). i think its more like an expression of a limit to knowledge on our partā¦ leading to the idea of a āfundamental transitionā taking place.
(this is worded strangely, butā¦) do you think there are certain natural āpoints of tensionā that demand some sort of resolution as time goes on? is that idea of āmetasystem transitionā just a fundamental aspect of any ācomplex systemā?
you could make it a more realistic exampleā¦ again, just busting this out off the top of my head:
take the system of āamerican capitalismāā¦ not concerning yourself with the details but just looking at it as an outside observer, from the moon or some sort of impartial standpointā¦ and you consider elements like āgross national productā (anything that looks like this when you graph it out):
maybe the national debt has a similar pattern, i donāt know. anyway, youāre getting the idea.
so ultimately it looks like any of those types of trends i mentioned just CANāT go on forever and everā¦ they demand a moment of resolution which iām thinking is something like this āsocio technological singularityā. what do you think?
and this is a whole other can of worms (which iāll have to come back to later), but the term āsingularityā sounds a lot like terms you might throw around if you were talking about black holes. the article only briefly mentions the connection. what do you think?
what are you trying to say? i havenāt read that.
Socio economic singularityā¦wow.
Thereāsā¦actually ā¦ validity to that argument. I never thought of it like that. Fantastic!
Thanks DM.
yeah iāve always wondered about it, but i have no clue where to look for info on the subjectā¦ i bet you could put together at least some āpredictionsā if you looked at any kind of thing like this (i guess the point is to see a finite āthingā increasing steadily over time):
the consumption just keeps increasing over time, with some random shifts up and down but for the most part, over a large period of timeā¦ its steadily increasing. so you could compare that with the number for the (estimated) total million barrels of oil found on/in the earth and see what you get. i canāt find any graphs at the moment, maybe someone can help me out.
that kind of comparison would probably apply to a whole bunch of possible āsingularitiesā ā¦and iām sure eventually there are bound to be some interesting results as far as economics goes.
that would be just one bit of data that you could use to āpredictā some kind of socio-economic singularity (thanks for the term!). you could compare all kinds of things ā¦any other suggestions?
iām hung over and in no condition to really think this throughā¦ !
Well, thereās lots of studies about the logic behind constant and expoential progress.
I, personally, feel that nothing can become a singluarity because that would mean that A) chances are, thereās already a god, and god is a self-defeating conceptā¦B) that you can become god, which is really not ā¦ reasonableā¦ C) a new idea which Iāve never thought of, that the universe itself (remember, on some level, the universe is a socio economic system) is approaching singularity statusā¦ but since if mass is actually decreasing, that would mean that perfection is nothingness; if mass is actually increasing, perfection would be the lack of nothingness; if mass is constant, then perfection is a perfect balance between space and matter such that it is dispersed evenly over an infinite direction in all directions.
Since I feel that the concept of singularities are fallacious concepts, then there will be a sinusoidal pattern to all developmentā¦of mankind and the universe itselfā¦ going from more order to more chaosā¦constantlyā¦ never coming to any sort of standstill or consistent tangent slope.
In other wordsā¦if things are good, theyāre going to get bad. If things are bad, theyāre going to get good.
Apply this to microsocio economic scale, and America is approaching itās fall and every third world country is approaching an incline in productivity/prosperity.
Itās like Murphyās Law, but in a provable and more wholistic way.
All right, a couple of things.
You should read
Complexity by Waldron a very good And entertaining intro and grounding to the sciences of complexity.
A thousand years of nonlinear complexity by Manuel Delanda The application of complexity theory to the social sciences, a post braudelian, neo marxian approach to history, ie a materialist history (meaning you donāt need any transcendent crap, like God or Race, to explain history)
guns Germs and Steel is very similar.
If you have a math background you can read Weinerās Cybernetics.
also check out the book Butterfly Economics by an author Who I can no longer remember.
this is a fairly large field of inquiry, but those texts should start you off
I donāt quite understand your economics here. I do have some objections to Rastaās pro-Third World āMarxismā The economy isnāt A zero sum game, first off. Just because the US sucks in resources like a big dicked sailor in a whore house doesnāt necessarily mean that everybody else has to starve. We also produce an enormous amount of goods and services. Secondly, Iām not Sure if in your singularity and economics overlap you mean to say that production is directly tied to energy consumption I would whole-heartedly agree. However, if youāre stating that capitalist economies will eventually flounder because they consume an excess of fossil fuels, Iām gonna have to disagree. To say so completely ignores that role of efficiency and productivity in an economy.
ok iād like to make some corrections/clarifications regarding my earlier posts. the example about oil consumption is probably a bad one for this particular topic because (refering to the material i quoted MYSELF ā¦duhhh) the idea of the singularity concerns āabstract, non-material variablesā. iāll be the first to admit that i havenāt done enough hardcore reading on the topic. i was just spouting off my initial thoughts.
but i still think thereās something to say about a thing like the consumption of oil ā¦the consumption being the only thing of concern hereā¦ not the oil itself, which would obviously be a material variable (that probably has some definite, known limits). on the consumption of oil, if it is increasing at some steady rate over time, will eventually get to a point where the material variables (amount of oil in the world, accesibility, etc) restrict that consumption. i guess that could be a sort of āsingularityā (sketchy to even call it that i guess) in that we couldnāt tell what would happen after that pointā¦ there would have to be some fundamental change in the specifics of energy resources and its relation to humans.
and as far as the GNP goes ā¦well thatās a prime example i think! production goes up and up and up ā¦there must be a limit to this non-material variable, since it depends on all kinds of material variables! is this madness? in a world of finite resources, my intuition is that its implausible to suggest that production could go on increasing forever.
enter the concepts of the āprediction wallā (āthe growing inability of human minds to credibly imagine our onrushing futureā) ā¦and the āmeta-system transitionā (in cybernetics) ā¦ a fundamental change in the way things āoperateā.
basically i think that this can be applied to ALL KINDS OF THINGS ā¦i have no specific preference for the topics of OIL or the GNP. they were just (i thought) easy examples. iām looking for the common thread in an example like (best one iāve come up with) the GNP. please add your thoughts! help me out!
ps: (this is not meant to be offensive in any way) rafa, thanks but axiomatic arguments concerning god and perfection arenāt helping out my cause.