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The Technology of Law and The Law of Technology - Part VII

Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. - 5/3/2006

Dear Sam,

It is always my intention to offer our readers not only speculative ideas but also "pragmatic" lessons. But before descending to terrestrial considerations, I would like to briefly comment on some of your, as usual, interesting opinions.

I will maintain your order:

Alphabet and ideograms:

You talk about elites losing power, this is, to me, a prejudice. whether with ideograms, or with alphabet there will always be elites.

Machines and secret alphabet:

This is the nightmare of post modern man. The machine as dictator. To me machines are nothing more than scenery, man has built them and can dismantle them. In my opinion, the problem is much like the Wizard's Apprentice, or Aladdin. It seems that men created the machine without knowing exactly his destiny, and now he cannot stop it. The machine is not the enemy - Man is. The problem is, and always was: what do we "actually" want? But, who knows? Could dreams (and nightmares) come true?

Technology vs. Science:

The two are great myths, one of functionality and the other of purity.

Matter and energy:

These distinctions were preciously introduced by scientists themselves (re-mixing old dualistic beliefs).
As you have well noted fractals and the mathematics of complexity have gone far beyond that.
I don´t know exactly what a fractal is, but is it matter or energy, information or reality?

De-centralization and power:

Your opinion regarding the future victory of the informal, networked systems is, to my mind, correct.
The Technician knows no classes and no secrets. Another question is the distribution of power.
Certainly, horizontality induces, at first view, some egalitarian version of the world. But this is to me a prejudice.
Horizontality has its own versions of power, it is the field of VIRUSES and CONTAGION.
We should study these mechanisms before making any assertions.
For the few, who, like me, put emphasis on the individual instead of on the masses, horizontality means "open doors".

Robots and laws:

Your extensive study of the laws of robotics laws demonstrates that there is no possibility of control.
When one wants to play with hazard one should know what is being gambled and what is the game.
Technicians, extremely focused as they are on pure functionality, always fail to consider these questions.

Quantum Mechanics:

The paradoxes and fallacies of quantum mechanics can be summarized through the life and thoughts of Richard Feynman, who was at the same time, one of the best mathematicians of QM and one of its fiercest critics. Listening to Murray Gell-Man talking about chromatism makes one lose the little trust in scientists that still remains. Quantum mechanics has finally ended in metaphysics, and not of the best class - better go back to Lucretius.

Loops and recursive learning:

It is quite curios that recursive learning, originally created for the military-industrial complex (for the purposes of rocket navigation) was founded on the observation of the fights of animals. N. Wiener writes about some of them, like the well known fight between the snake (cobra) and the mongoose. This sampling is nothing new. Most martial arts were founded on this kind of observation of nature. Tai-chi is founded on the fight between the crane and the snake, Ba Gua Zhang is founded on ten animal forms, and so on. On these matters, such old fables as the Japanese "the fencer and the cat" provides us with analyses superior to Wiener's.

Finally, this leads us to the crucial point. In your analysis of the Prigogine-type social systems, you include one philosophically-dubious term: identity-preserving. Which identity? human race? life? nature? Isn't it precisely horizontality, the net-work, the idoneus systems which are built for mutations, for the auto-propagation of "micro-changes" into "macro-effects"? The real question is: what does it mean, and what do we understand by the words SURPASSING, OVER-COMING? Oh, divine, immortal Zarathustra! How little did you suspect the form in which your strange prophecies would come to be! Ah, if you would have known....! but the oracle is always ambiguous.

Well, we shall leave the pragmatic lessons to the next letter:-)

I promise our readers some (martial arts) techniques for personal consumption:-)

best regards
roberto

PS: Just an aesthetic note. Your intensive use of the word "fuzzier" is revealing for FUZZ is the SOUND OF THE TIMES.

From the sound of bells, the "tic-tac" of mechanical clocks to the hum of atomic clocks and computers. It is the sound of speed, of electrification, intensification, movement, anxiety, desperation... the sound of the last velocity, of metamorphosis. Where did we hear that noise before? Is it, perhaps, the sound of a nest of white ants?

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