I hope that in the remainder of the century we can can transition to better forms of society where the health and happiness of the general population is more important than the efficiency of our economic structures.
> I hope that in the remainder of the century we can can transition to better forms of society where the health and happiness of the general population is more important than the efficiency of our economic structures.
And your proposal is? A lot of alternatives have been tried in the past several thousand years and almost all of them suck. Real hard.
Don't think in terms of The Alternative System, just think in terms of the small things that can make life better. Things like reduced working hours to have more time for family, or better economic freedoms for everyone.
Those things do not represent a change in The System. In particular, they are perfectly compatible with allowing private initiative in the market. In fact, they enhance private initiative overall, in areas outside of the market (having more time outside of work can translate to becoming engaged in local community organizations, to give just one example).
What makes you say that, mate?
Are intelligence and consciousness emergent phenomena?
They might have a post-hoc discernible function, but that's not the same as a predetermined purpose.
A semi-related question:
If no emergent systems have "objectives", then what things do have "objectives"?
Deliberately designed systems can absolutely have purposes and objectives.
If you want to be nitpicky there's a frothing sea of philosophers smashing endlessly against the little rowboat we're in here. Feel free to dive off and swim around, I'll stay here.
>>Emergent phenomena don't have "objectives", mate.
Society may or may not have some emergent qualities, but it definitely has "deliberately designed" qualities, so therefore according to you: society "can absolutely have purposes and objectives".
Examples of deliberately designed qualities: banking system, fiat currency, stock market, credit card infrastructure, etc. All engineered to streamline economic activities and to allow those who control them to wield power(among other purposes).
>>>The production of wealth, as measured by GDP, or by the stock markets, or consumer spending, is our yardstick of success.
What is success other than the ability to succeed at wielding power, control over your environment etc?
I objected to the idea that an emergent phenomenon can be assumed to have objectives. Society wasn't "designed", it simply is.
Teleology is the name for assigning human-like motives to things. For example, saying "the hamstring muscle is designed to flex the knee and extend the hip" is erroneous. There is no designer. It evolved; we discern these functions independently of the system.
While subsystems may have designed elements, generally these too go on to have complex, emergent properties. And they're subsumed within the larger system anyway. Laws, stock markets etc are all emergent from human interactions. Nobody sat down at the start of history and designed the system we are part of today. It happened without any one guiding intelligence.
It's meaningless to say "society's objectives" because there was nobody to assign such objectives and nobody can assign such objectives. Anybody who says "the objectives for society are X" is basically saying "my personal preference for the unfolding of the emergent system are X". It's a substitution error.
I agree that the definition of the concept of emergence is that there is no objective. No one even vaguely familiar with the concept could possibly disagree with that. My questions before were not disbelief, just making sure you had some passing familiarity with the concepts before I engaged you.
This is the heart of the matter: you still have not named me one deliberately designed system that has purposes and objectives, like you said you could here:
>>>Deliberately designed systems can absolutely have purposes and objectives.
Your inability to name one thing that is not emergent makes me think this:
1-You believe that everything is emergent. From the hamstring to society, banks and currency and economics and bartering, and everything in between. If everything is emergent then obviously nothing has objectives, since that is in the definition of the concept of emergence.
Human-designed systems have a purpose. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been designed in the first place (hello, circular reasoning).
But they can also be viewed as emergent phenomena within the larger System of Everything.
If you want an example, how about an Olympic weightlifting barbell?
Its purpose is to facilitate the sport of weightlifting. Such bars are designed to exhibit properties such as flexing under load while returning to true, robustness to being dropped from overhead and having a collar spin with the right amount of resistance.
Weightlifting itself seems to have emerged from status plays between ancient greek men. "Hey Themistocles, I bet you can't lift this big rock!"
Which in turn emerges from status play, which emerges ... well. You get the idea. From the POV of "society", none of this was ever planned. From the POV of the people working for Eleiko, the bar is a piece of lovingly engineered and carefully manufactured high-grade steel.
>>>Human-designed systems have a purpose ... But they can also be viewed as emergent phenomena within the larger System of Everything.
I think that banks and society and weightlifting are all are examples of human-designed systems. Therefore according to you they can "have a purpose ... But they can also be viewed as emergent phenomena..."
In your opinion, is it simultaneously both, or is there some means of deciding which one? I think you answer this question when you mention POV:
>>>From the POV of "society", none of this was ever planned. From the POV of the people working for Eleiko, the bar is a piece of lovingly engineered and carefully manufactured high-grade steel.
I think this is also not controversial and I completely agree with it. But I think it reveals why I disagree with your initial post.
'From the [point of view] of "society", none of this was ever planned'. Luckily we don't look at societal problems from the POV of society....we look at them from our own POV! Which explains my disagreement with your initial post:
>>>Emergent phenomena don't have "objectives", mate.
Using the things you said above, I now think that you meant:
>>>From the POV of the emergent phenomena known as society, society doesn't have objectives, mate.
I contend that we are humans assigning objectives to society from our own POV, and therefore your comment has nothing at all to do with what the OP posted.
Saying that emergent phenomena can't hold their own objectives is a truism and I can imagine it being useful. But the truism doesn't seem to add anything to the OP's discussion. I would love for you to prove me wrong and show me the usefulness of the truism to the OP's discussion.
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As a show of good faith, here is the usefulness of looking at society from our own human perspective:
If we are humans looking at society from our own perspective (as opposed to society looking at itself from its own perspective...?), then we can assign it purpose and objectives willy-nilly, based on the apparent actions and tendencies of the emergent phenomena.
The tragedy of the commons is an emergent phenomena. From its POV, there is no objective. From our POV, TOTC seems to say that SOMETIMES small collective sacrifices can prevent large collective sacrifices.
From the POV of a fire, there is no objective. From our POV, fire burns things and spreads from house to house so that one neighbor's irresponsible actions can cause a city-wide fire and hurt collective society very greatly(tragedy of the commons). So we should all make a small collective sacrifice and pay some firefighters to combat the selfish and irresponsible house-burning tendencies of our neighbors. Society++ because we have traded millions of dollars of damage and constant fear of burning to death for a small amount of money.
From the POV of toxic waste, there is no objective. From our POV toxic waste hurts the environment that we all share, so we try to take actions to mitigate or prevent the damage of toxic waste. Society++.
To address the OP directly, assigning society objectives seems very useful as it has resulted in firefighting and food stamps and police and healthcare and regulations against toxic waste dumping, all of which have seemed to reduce crime and disease and fear and pain and ignorance and economic uncertainty. Reducing these things allows for more efficiency and entrepreneurship and invention and time-saving and long term planning because we aren't so busy worrying about our next meal or our immediate safety. The OP hopes we can keep making progress.
And then you have people using those ideals to strike with unnecessary violence at what they define as their enemies... and then you get the PFLP saying they're fighting for the same ideals you're fighting. And then you get a bunch of people speaking about nationalism, antisemitism, racism, and then politics, politics, politics.
I'm probably reading too much into what this discussion is actually about (it's a bit early for me), but I just wanted to contribute that I think that our current regimes are probably unsustainable if we as a world population keep growing at such expeditious rates as we are right now. That being said, I have no proposal. Bigger people than me have tried to come up with such propositions, and I'm not planning on organizing another french revolution.
Either you are nitpicking (an economic system doesn't have goals ("objectives") in the same way you do), or you're making a pretty strong claim here. If you try to do the latter, I would say you're wrong. Marx has written a good primer on the topic, which shows that the primary objective of capitalist society is capital accumulation.
People (at least in this country) don't want to be happy and healthy. They want to be richer than everyone else because that is what success is.
The vast majority of the people in America and the rest of the world are not upper or middle class. They want both "distinguishment" AND health, because both could improve. Look at health problems and obesity and the poverty line and education rates. Look at what happens to the birth rate when you introduce economic stability and health care access that can more or less guarantee the survival of your children.
Then I read Brave new world. Happiness taken to extremes.
Now I'm not so sure.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/xy/the_fun_theory_sequence/
> Fun Theory is the field of knowledge that deals in questions such as "How much fun is there in the universe?", "Will we ever run out of fun?", "Are we having fun yet?" and "Could we be having more fun?"
If you force me to be happy, I will be very sad.