What is the issue between the cybercosm and the Faustians - as they are called?
Venator, speaking for the cybercosm, reflects:
"('We've decided the motto and guiding principle of our government shall be "Absit prudentia nil rei publicae profitur,"' Guthrie had communicated once. 'Gracias to the database for fancying it up into Latin. What it means is "Without common sense you ain't gonna have nothing." The insult to every concept of a guided society stood brutally plain.)" (p. 414)
Hold on there, Guthrie. Most people's "common sense" is just their unexamined prejudices. Hold on, Venator. Human beings are capable of individual and collective self-determination which is the antithesis of "guidance" as practiced by Venator and his cohorts, i.e., manipulation. Genuine guidance, i.e., scientific information and advice, is indeed essential.
Venator hopes that Demeter Mother, the AI that sustains an extraterrestrial ecology, will soon perish "...with her planet." (p. 418) An appalling hope but why should Venator think like this? Surely the universe is big enough to contain both the cybercosm's aspiration "...to transcend the material universe..." (p. 419) and the Centaurian project to fill the universe with organic life.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But you are missing an important point: merely "...scientific information and advice" offered by the cybercosm was not what Venator and the cybercosm meant. His desire was for the cybercosm to actually RULE, and in ways many humans would not like and find frustrating. No matter how gentle the cybercosm was, the policies it chose would, in the end, if not disrupted, reduce the human race to being only powerless, pampered pets at best.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I thought that that was what I said. Venator and his cohorts manipulate the population whereas a self-governing population would make its own decisions and set its own policies on the basis of expert advice.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Then, yet again, I misunderstood what you meant. Also, if human beings are going to make the real decisions, that has to include as well the likelihood of making blunders. And since I want real people, not AIs, making the decisions, I accept that risk.
Ad astra! Sean
Common sense is a facility that's often very useful -- a subconscious system of analysis which accomplishes quickly things that would otherwise take extended cogitation.
The problem is that common sense only works well in the environment you acquired it in.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
In this context, politics, "common sense" is most applicable to those leaders and politicians who have an almost intuitive understanding of what needs to be done AND what CAN be done. And avoid stubbornly pursuing disastrous policies.
Easier defined than actually done, I know!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the Buddha said desire -- attachment -- is the source of suffering.
It's also the source of self-deception. If you want something to be possible very badly, it's disastrously each to persuade yourself that it is, and very hard to evaluate the evidence objectively.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! We are seeing a LOT of that kind of self deception from "Josip" and the people around him as everything they do fails and backfires on these fools.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
This problem is far more widespread than just among your own (or my) immediate political opponents!
Paul.
Paul and Sean: It's a universal human phenomenon.
Everyone does it to a certain extent at least -- and it's far more easy to detect with someone you dislike/disagree with than it is closer to home.
I flatter myself that my personal philosophical worldview (ethical nihilism, short form) makes it easier to self-correct.
Ethical nihilism doesn't mean you don't have moral opinions. It just means you don't delude yourself that they're anything -but- opinions, subjective electrochemical events in your head. Opinions, in other words.
This makes a certain degree of emotional detachment about your own beliefs much easier. You're not thinking about the Decrees of God or the Nature of the Universe, just stuff in your own head.
I think murder should be punished, for instance, and I'm perfectly willing to do so with axe and noose.
But I don't fool myself that this is any different, or more "true" or "right" than some people's desire to burn heretics who deny the Real Presence in the Host.
True and right mean, from my p.o.v., simply "what I like/want".
The difference between my opinion and the heretic-burners' is just that mine is a more popular and powerful opinion... here and now, for the present, for a while. This too shall pass.
(Ethical nihilism also renders a lot of human quarrels and disputes sort of humorous to observe: effectively people shouting MY TOOTH FAIRY BEATS YOUR TOOTH FAIRY at each other, or various equivalents of SHNURGLE FLUGA WUG-WUG!.)
Note: arguments about the -social utility- of certain beliefs may be accurate, but that says nothing about their -objective truth-.
As the philosopher's saying goes, there is not connection between "is" and "ought".
I can easily talk about Trump denying an election result but I also have to "examine my conscience," to use a Catholic phrase, or to "sit with whatever comes up in meditation," to use a Buddhist phrase.
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