2003-06-07 Real, virtual and on making divisions new age is synthesis of antithesis and hypothesis (real and virtual worlds). the hypo and anti get decided on from the future. so it makes sense to talk about these things because they have primacy in the system, a useful division. not true in all case, but enough. it's difficult to talk about important things in a meshwork: surely all nodes, all divisions are true-enough? but the atmosphere is a good model here: there aren't really layers, but there are. the atmosphere *is* an interconnected meshwork of particles, but we have weather. not just useful, and not just true, but a blend of the both. (I wrote the above, then wrote the following trying to explain it.) Okay, so if society/the-human-isness is evolving somehow, what's it evolving against? How is it being measured? It doesn't seem like a bag of competing reproducers (although the relationship between the individuals and the group and their properties is important here: is a healthy group necessarily reflected in healthy individuals?). One option is that there's the is and there's the possibility. Which is fair, I think: for something to have a height, there has to be the possibility of other heights. So a system with a structure (I can't really say "with parts" or "comprising X") may have the inherent possibility of doing a certain amount of stuff. And it wriggles to make what's already done easier, and that frees up possibility for more complexification. What I'm getting at is: Why should a new way-of-thinking/ model-of-systems emerge? Is this progress? Or is this just a dynamic? Two points: I don't like the idea of "progress". Just some interacting things. If we can divide into system and environment, then what we see is the interactions between the two. The system rewrites the environment constantly, the interactions therefore change. But the rules of interaction are the same: where's the progress? I like dynamics because they generalise things. Why should things be statics? If things are constantly changing from state A to state B, then how unlikely is it that state B doesn't itself have a naturally following state? There is no stable utopia, no loops, just time series of various lengths. But why should a dynamic feel like progress? As uncomfortable as I am with ideas like progress, evolution of singleton systems, dividing interconnected things into blocks, I have one defence, and one analogy. Defence: We can't dispute our humanity. Happiness is as real as a chair, and more real than electrons. If I see progress, there is progress. Just because it can't be reduced or built up from theory doesn't mean we can pretend something doesn't exist: take apparent things at face value. Analogy: It makes sense to talk about certain things that have primacy in a system, useful divisions. They're not true in all cases, but enough. It's difficult to talk about important things in a meshwork: surely all nodes, all divisions are true-enough? But the atmosphere is a good model here: there aren't really layers, but there are. The atmosphere is an interconnected meshwork of particles, but still we have weather. Not just useful, and not just true, but a blend of the both. So that's why I'm happy (and going to, at some point) make a distinction between the real and virtual worlds, which although I'm calling worlds are actually clusters of thinking, each cluster more tightly bound to itself than to the other. The real world is the world we're born in, and the world we take for granted. In it exist things like distance, levels, people, time. The virtual world I believe is more or less apparent throughout history (otherwise: why now?), but in this particular manifestation (I choose that word carefully) it is strongly tied to computers and the internet. In a sense I think the virtual world was produced by a system of thinking coherant with what we now call the virtual world. Everything is caused by everything else, however, although there's a matter of weighting to take into account there.