Sarbajit Roy wrote at 09/30/2012 10:28 AM: > The Gita, however, (as I'm fairly sure the Old Testament does too) > expresses that once a man's side is determined, he is obliged by DUTY > to do what is "right", even if it involves heinous killings on a > massive scale or even the killing of his close relatives. DUTY is one > of the core elements of Dharma (the way of righteousness). Of course > DUTY cannot be taken in isolation, because the essence of the Gita is > the continuous weighing of choices between the Dharmic Law (kill / > harm nobody) versus the inferior Niti (Penal) Law (slay all offenders > on sight). Gita 1:30, 2:31 etc. > > So DUTY would probably be compressible. I am an ant, so I'm duty bound > to pick up every speck of sugar I can find and convey it back to the > mother ship.
Yep. I'm totally ignorant of Gita. But this one clause suggests to me that duty is compressible, by (my) definition: "Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities ..." Incompressible (components of) systems are initiators of cause rather than passive transmitters of cause. If a duty is defined by removing one's _self_ from the situation, detachment, then it's definitely not prima causa. But I wonder, also, about the Dharmic Law, which sound like _rules_ to me ... rules have an input and an output, mindlessly transmitting cause from the former to the latter. Is there any inherent "be present", "pay attention", "be attached", "be the change you want to see", take responsibility for your actions element to Dharmic Law? If not, then it, too, is compressible. To promote an agent to an actor, we have to make it a prima causa, give it the ability to _start_ a causal chain ... or at least affect someone else's chain in a way that couldn't happen were it not present. Note that an actor's influence on the propagation of events need not be unique. I.e. 2 different actors could produce the same result. But in order for it to actually be an actor rather than an agent, the result cannot be "optimized out", so to speak. An actor can only be (perfectly) replaced by another actor ... though an agent can approximate/simulate an actor. -- glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
