Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

yes there are some Western philosophical foundations which treat organisation as bottom-up at certain levels of abstraction - Adam Smith on the economic level, Locke and Hobbes on the sociopolitical level, and so on. I think we have a good cultural understanding of human beings as existing in a network. But we don't consistently apply this perspective. For example:

- individualism treats individuals as good or bad, successful or unsuccessful based on their outcomes without regard for the structural incentives around that person.

- we still categorically divide between "life" and "not-life", treating life (and especially consciousness) as a conundrum and "not-life" as dead matter. We try our best not to look at the fuzzy edges between life and not-life. I would argue that this is a hang-over from Abrahamic dualism (the spiritual inhabiting the material), and that there is no distinction but instead a continuum from less-organised to more-organised. We do the same as the above with many other issues of category.

- Identity isn't concrete in bottom-up organisation. The Ship of Theseus, for example, is not a paradox when you take a bottom-up metaphysical approach. The illusion of identity is only propagation of a pattern.

TL;DR - yes, we do have some ideas around bottom-up organisation, but they're not applied consistently or across the board.

If you think all this sounds like woo, then you are at least in agreement that these ideas are not Western modernist canon.

I'm not sure we treat individuals as good/bad or successful/unsuccessful based on purely on outcomes. Criminal law, for example, depends upon intent in many cases.

The general biological view of viruses certainly demonstrate the absence of a categorical divide between "life" and "not life" as does the philosophy of the Turing Test. I'd argue that level of organization is less useful than the level of feedback loops in something, particularly if those loops are internal rather than external.

We daily operate with the idea of the Ship of Theseus as non-paradox in any number of ways. The City of Philadelphia retains its identity not because it is composed of the same people, geography, and structures established in its founding but rather because of the role it plays as an organizational concept, the Mississippi River retains its identity despite course changes over the centuries (let alone the constant replenishment of the individual water atoms within it).

I'd agree that we do not consistently apply bottom-up organization across the board, but that also necessarily means that we apply no consistent philosophy across the board. That leads to the question of how you're defining "Western modernist canon" given such an absence of a unified system.

> I'm not sure we treat individuals as good/bad or successful/unsuccessful based on purely on outcomes. Criminal law, for example, depends upon intent in many cases.

I mean the tendency to see someone who is for example a burglar and contrast them with a business owner and say that one is bad and the other is good. Which could be true if you removed all context, but usually when you add in context these kinds of absolutes dissolve. But my broader point is that we make value judgements based on the agent, minus the environment, which is IMO erroneous.

> The general biological view of viruses certainly demonstrate the absence of a categorical divide between "life" and "not life" as does the philosophy of the Turing Test. I'd argue that level of organization is less useful than the level of feedback loops in something, particularly if those loops are internal rather than external.

Feedback loops are the exact kind of organisational structure I was referring to, but I didn't know if you were cybernetically-oriented so left it vague. Loops are the mechanism of self-organisation.

> We daily operate with the idea of the Ship of Theseus as non-paradox in any number of ways. The City of Philadelphia retains its identity not because it is composed of the same people, geography, and structures established in its founding but rather because of the role it plays as an organizational concept, the Mississippi River retains its identity despite course changes over the centuries (let alone the constant replenishment of the individual water atoms within it).

I agree - we certainly act this way, but we culturally value reductionistic thinking; system-2-thinking is typically not oriented in this same way, and is more culturally valued. It's not necessarily how we act that I think is bad - it's how we think.

> I'd agree that we do not consistently apply bottom-up organization across the board, but that also necessarily means that we apply no consistent philosophy across the board. That leads to the question of how you're defining "Western modernist canon" given such an absence of a unified system.

It's our cultural institutions of thinking and understanding that are flawed, IMO. We generally act relatively well when we act on instinct, refusing to draw rigid boundaries and treating our environments teleologically. But in terms of the "right way" to solve problems, we go away from this and towards reductionism and mechanistic thinking (essentially ignoring the small or inconvenient relationships in the systems we examine, in classic "spherical chicken in a vacuum" style). We try to fix malignant systems by looking for the bad people who made it that way (the simplest, and usually most incorrect, approach possible), or by fixing proximal symptoms rather than following longer causality chains for root causes (think medicine - problems are addressed locally rather than systemically).

I'd agree that we tend to frame things in a reductionist way, but I don't think that's peculiar to Western thought so much as it is endemic to humans and their limitations. Given limited resources of time and knowledge the vast majority of people either attempt to limit the scope of the problem domain or opt for satisficing behaviors to achieve "good enough" results. It is rare that when confronted with a problem that a person has the luxury of time, creativity, and/or attention to derive first principles. It is doubly difficult when examining systems because the failings of most systems are not immediately obvious but instead the result of unintended consequences or the complexity of multiple conflicting behaviors resulting in perverse incentives... and if at the creation of the original system such problems were not foreseen what guarantees that the replacement system does not create worse results? Most people are cautious in proceeding when they are facing unknown (or unknowable) obstacles.

I believe that the toolset that we have created for ourselves for solving hard problems ossifies this limited approach, and that we need to make tools for improving complex systems more widely available/understood. We could even benefit if those in governance roles just knew about second order thinking and how to avoid unintended consequences from linear thinking, let alone any of the more advanced problem solving tools that systems theory provides.

Also I say that it's a Western thing, not because it's exclusive to the West, but because reductionism is part of our philosophical foundations since the Enlightenment. Compare to, say, SE Asian philosophical foundations - SEA religions are typically non-dual and metaphysically idealist.

> The Ship of Theseus, for example, is not a paradox when you take a bottom-up metaphysical approach.

What do you mean by, “bottom-up metaphysical approach.”

if all of reality is just emergent phenomena (excluding some presumed "bottom thing" that we haven't found yet), there is no such thing as an "object" as a coherent whole - just collections of collections of collections. The ship of theseus does not exist as a distinct entity with clear boundaries - it is just the thing that Theseus uses to sail. If you replace every piece, as long as Theseus considers the ship his own then it's still the ship of Theseus, or in other words, identity is perceptual and based on a continuous structure or pattern rather than the present constituent pieces being all together.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com