Causality is a difficult issue and it's not easy to know what and how causality truly operates. We try to trace an effect backwards to find the initial necessary and sufficient cause but often there are outlying circumstances that may or may not be a part of either the necessary or the sufficient. It's tough enough to do that in science, dealing with the "out there" world, but tougher still, and perhaps of dubious importance, to do that with mental constructs, mixed with emotional and who knows what else influences. Boris can't reasonably claim that all competition can be reduced to natural selection and survival of the fittest. While that may be true in dealing with physical reality and it may indeed be true that there is nothing but physical reality -- all that is measurable -- it remains reasonably evident that subtle and immeasurable conditions -- like consciousness -- interfere with Darwinian logic and even cognitive science. Now I am certainly a Darwinian (I believe it more than I understand it) but I am also intrigued by the notion of belief and how it affects perceptions and measures of the world and our place in it.
wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Boris Shoshensky <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, October 14, 2010 8:19:46 PM Subject: Re: "If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the [art s? ] to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have be en in vented than the market economy." Progress is a development. Any development is adaptation to a constantly changing environment. 'Competition' is a fight for existence of opposites and one of the main laws of dialectics, which it seems you don't accept or refuse to understand. I don't have to prove this law. Every event shows its mechanism to the willing to analyze. >From physics to biology to politics. Boris Shoshensky To: [email protected] Subject: Re: "If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the [arts? ] to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been in vented than the market economy." Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2010 11:25:25 -0700 (PDT) Why does "progress" require competition? What is progress? What is competition? Your comment is a tangle of implications without coherence. To start, it presumes that progress is good and inherent to change when in fact change is nothing but change and progress is a judgment of it and not intrinsic to it, as is goodness. And what outside ideal or condition prescribes that progress is good or good is inherent to change? And why is competition integral to change except in the sense that anything at all is integral to change, even non-competition? Once again, you give a summative statement that presumes a formative logic it does not have. Upon the simplest analysis your blunt and judgmental summations unravel as nothing but disconnected strings of words. Boris, with respect, I challenge you to provide the reasoning that supports your comments. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Boris Shoshensky <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, October 10, 2010 11:34:59 AM Subject: Re: "If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the [arts? ] to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been in vented than the market economy." There is no progress without competition. The problem in the excesses. Boris Shoshensky ---------- Original Message ---------- From: joseph berg <[email protected]> To: aesthetics-l <[email protected]> Subject: "If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the [arts?] to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market economy." Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2010 21:52:05 -1000 (Actual quote): - If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the planet to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market economy. Jeremy Seabrook
