On Mar 21, 2014, at 12:14 AM, Tom Walker <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ron,
>
> I said nothing whatsoever about economic "progress." I specifically
> challenged the meaningfulness of the notion of economic "growth". Economic
> progress, by contrast, would require discarding the obsolete and discredited
> terminology from the mid-1950s.
>
==========
Yet we should cling to the discredited terminology of “economic progress”?
Accumulation isn’t progress; progress is progress? Labor displacing
technological change isn’t progress; progress is progress?
"This material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the
materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the
description of the changes of the external relations between portions of
matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as
good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change,
purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem doctrine is the
evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex
organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as
fundamental for nature. It also requires an underlying activity -- a
substantial activity -- expressing itself in achievements of organism."[3]
"I think recent work in computational complexity theory raises the
possibility that there may be another "critical mass" for a knowledge
representation, a maximum size threshold above which belief systems must in
effect disintegrate. For a representation to qualify as being understood by
an epistemic agent, the agent must be able to perceive an adequate
proportion of the interrelations among elements of a set. Otherwise, the
agent will not be a ble to identify and eliminate enough of the
inconsistencies that arise...The range of intractability results leads one
to wonder in turn whether knowledge systems of some finite size may be so
computationally unweildy in this way as to shatter...[Christopher Cherniak
"Minimal Rationality"]
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2000m09.4/msg00018.html
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
