AlteredEgo
Is there any good ideas on a plausible way to manage power? The fundamental laws governing power, politics, wealth etc seem to always lead to negative outcomes.
Like state socialism led to the same complete concentration of economic power in the hands of the few as late stage capitalism is doing now. But I’ve never heard of any plan to address this.
One idea would be to randomly select representatives, bypassing filters that select for those who are best at accumulating power at the expense of anything else. Randocracy?
Or are we just out of good ideas?
My argument would go something like this: If you are the computer, then it is free will. If you could predict the computer, you could argue, but you can’t. You can’t even do this theoretically since you’d need more mass than the universe and can’t initialize your predictive model. So you can only say “that decision was made inside that brain”. That is at least one sensible definition of free will.
It’s like looking at a motor that breaks down and then saying that it’s not really the motor that breaks because the motor had no choice in it’s parts breaking. That’s just rhetoric.
The error I believe is that we don’t want to accept that sentience can arise from mechanical universe and it’s a matter of degree and that this can create meaning. People want to set the bar higher because they want the idea of some type of “pure mind”. But since we’re already discussing the meaning of all these things, arguing that what you are reading is just quantum physics is rhetoric.
Either what you are saying is supposed to be meaningful, or you concede that your words are meaningless. Then I anyone else wins the argument by default ;)
Basically the definition of free will can only be made by someone who claims that meaning exists, emerging from the material world. Therefor within that emergent layer of mind and meaning, a definition of free will other than basic physics is at least acceptable.
The emperor has new body paint
Personally I preferred punk in the “deliberately ugly” way
The US defines sanctions as acts of war, like economic warfare. So the US is at war with Venezuela. How can that fact not play a role in the evaluation of the claims? It’s like giving claims by Russia equal weight as claims from Ukraine about their own election.
And of course, how could you even expect free and fair elections while under siege?
Because of network effects the understanding of a monopoly has to grow with changing technology.
The fundamental problem is that it wouldn’t even be desireable to split up many of the new social media and internet technologies because that would reduce the quality for everyone, increase costs to support as a business and increase environmental damage from duplicating server storage and power consumption.
What we need is to turn them into public utilities that have significant democratic input by their own workforce (the experts and enthusiasts) and the users (the billions of people who actually create the value for the thing).
My dad fought the Nazi’s they lost
“Oh I’m sorry. How did they die?”
“Die? No, we lost them. And now we cannot find them”
“Oh there they are! Right there!”
Fascism is also on the rise because of improved technology for thought control / propaganda / public relations / advertising. Social media lets the worst of humanity band together and pool their energy.
But wealth inequality, both worse effective quality of life for the poor and increased economic power by the wealthy is I believe a main driver. Technology is just the tool. The ultra wealthy and their lackeys today have more power than ever and are more isolated and inundated with ideology that is basically insane.
I wonder if there are studies that show correlations between quality of life and fascism in different nations.
“I have all these materialist things and still not happy”