From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jason Resch
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 5:28 PM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
_____
From: Jason Resch <[email protected]>
To: Everything List <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2015 1:05 PM
Subject: Re: The TPP
People worry that one day machines will take over, and we will become
subservient slaves to their ends, that they will set the rules, control the
government, and be above the law.
>>We no longer need to fear that day because it already happened, quite some
>>time ago. These machines are corporations: self-sustaining, evolving (in a
>>Darwinian sense), hyper-intelligent, extremely-knowledgeable, immortal,
>>transnational, entities which see and utilize humans as mere cogs in their
>>own machinery. They are independently intelligent entities which we humans
>>think we control, but we no more control them than any cell in our body
>>controls our own personal actions.
But in practice corporations often do not behave intelligently by even the most
forgiving definition of intelligent behavior
No human has anywhere near the knowledge, experience, expertise or competence
to create an ipod. It takes an entity with the collective knowledge of many
thousands, if not millions of years of experience, with the cumulative
intelligence of all its individual employees subject-specific field expertise.
They may operate more slowly than individual humans, and thus appear stupid,
but a human would also appeared stupid when its behavior is analyzed on the
timescales of its individual neurons.
That is true of a plethora of cultural entities besides corporations as well. I
broadly agree that culture is itself external to any given individual within a
culture; it is an emergent social phenomena. There is nothing magical or
unique about a corporation; it is similar in many ways to other cultural
entities, which also emerge in social species, such as humans, or termites, or
bees for that matter. In a broader sense the emergent patterns that also shape
an environment, exist independently of the individual animals and plants, even
if caused by them. They shape the existence of the individual living entities
within the environment. A tree like network of animal paths that emerges, being
shaped by a Darwinian type processes (such as network effect) itself becomes
part of the locales individual organisms memory and habit, which in turn leads
to more importance for that route, and guarantees the paths survival; the path
channels and routes animals in 4-D spacetime, even though the path may have
emerged from many animals hooves and paws.
There is nothing particularly novel about a corporation vis a vis other large
institutions.
-- corporations may have been accorded a pseudo eternal existence as legal
entities (in some countries such as the US), but in practice they act as
amplification engines for the edicts, desires and whims of the corporate
officers.
Should any of those corporate officers substantially deviate as to threaten the
survival of the corporation, the corporation will either removal that officer
as a surgeon would remove a cancerous tumor, or it will die and leave more
strongly self-preserving corporations to inherit its business.
You are aware of just how many corporations have been driven into bankruptcy by
incompetent arrogant executive management? Management that WAS NOT removed in
those cases, and modern history is littered with the carcasses of failed
corporations, most driven under by competitors, but many destroyed by
incompetent and even criminal executive leadership.
I fail to see any real evidence that the ideal you paint is actually the
prevailing present practice in the global oligopoly where too big to fail is
the principle guarantor of survival.
We humans -- or most of us at least -- may have been demoted to being
considered and treated as fungible "resources", but the corporation does not
exist independently of the humans (e.g. the officers, the boards, the
shareholders) controlling it.
Neither does the brain exist independently of its component neurons, but my
point is that the will of the corporation is something greater than the sum of
the parts of the will of its individual employees and owners. It has its own
will, goals, desires, survival instinct, motivations, etc. which are distinct
from those of any one of its officers. Could Segey Brin and Larray Page wake up
one day and decide to shutdown Google and succeed in doing so? I would find
such a scenario unlikely to succeed in practice even if they were in their
legal rights to do so. Even if they did succeed in closing the doors, a
Google2, composed of Google's former employees, would quickly spring up.
Culture – which corporations are an example of – emerges in social animal and I
suspect plant and microorganism species as well. Not saying all cultures are
equal, certainly the rich culture of any number of societies throughout the
written cultural history of this world is not the same as the emergent social
behavior patterns that can be seen and are studied in slime mold. However in
some ways there do exist parallels; i.e. the behavior of slime mold in a petri
dish and human societies produces some similar patterns that show an emergent
parallelism.
Broadly I agree that by now in humans, recorded culture has transcended the
brain/mind capacity of any individual, and that culture exists outside of any
individual – even though it is an emergent phenomena, which could not exist
without the individual living people who in their interactions, shared memories
and customs cause it to exist.
-Chris
Jason
-Chris
Jason
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 11:44 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List
<[email protected]> wrote:
Transnational corporate globalism, has not turned out to be all that good for
freedom, quality of human life or the environment; it has however been great
for the quarterly bottom line… and profit is the only value that seems valued
these days.
-Chris
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of LizR
https://action.sumofus.org/a/tpp-final-talks/?akid=9154.7664677.NhaQ0s
<https://action.sumofus.org/a/tpp-final-talks/?akid=9154.7664677.NhaQ0s&ask=1&rd=1&sub=fwd&t=2>
&ask=1&rd=1&sub=fwd&t=2
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