An end to steer by, and a means by Michael Allan

Dear Mr. Allan,

I was quite impressed by your essay, especially by the magnificent graphics. I do have one minor quibble that I hope you will not mind me mentioning.

You wrote: "Nothing can travel faster than light."

INERT LIGHT THEORY

Based only on my observation, I have concluded that all of the stars, all of the planets, all of the asteroids, all of the comets, all of the meteors, all of the specks of astral dust and all real things have one and only one thing in common. Each real thing has a material surface and an attached material sub-surface. A surface can be interior or exterior. All material surfaces must travel at the constant "speed" of light. All material sub-surfaces must travel at an inconsistent "speed" that is less than the "speed" of light. While a surface can travel in any direction, a sub-surface can only travel either inwardly or outwardly. A sub-surface can expand or contract.. As a surface can only travel at the constant "speed" of light, and that speed cannot be exceeded, a surface cannot peel away from a sub-surface. As a sub-surface is attached to a surface by a random fluctuating energy field, a sub-surface cannot reduce its inconsistent speed to the point where it becomes inertial. It would be physically impossible for light to move as it does not have a surface or a sub-surface. Abstract theory cannot ever have unification. Only reality is unified because there is only one reality.

I use the term "speed" of light merely to make it easier for the reader to understand my theory. Actually light cannot move because it does not have a surface. Light is the only stationary substance in the real Universe. The proof of this is easy to establish. When one looks at an active electrical light, one must notice that all of the light remains inside of the bulb. What does move from the bulb is some form of radiant. The radiant must move at a rate of speed that is less than the "speed" of light, however, when the radiant strikes a surface it achieves the "speed" of light because all surfaces can only travel at the "speed" of light. When it strikes a surface, the radiant resumes being a light, albeit of a lesser magnitude. While it is true that searchlights, spotlights and car headlights seem to cast a beam of light, this might be because the beams strike naturally formed cluters of sub-atomic particles prevalent in spaces that collectively, actually form a surface.

In the Thomas Young Double Slit Experiment, it was not direct sunlight that passed through the slits. Light from the sun is stationary and it cannot move because light does not have a surface. Radiants emitted from the sun went through the slits and behaved like wave radiants.

Einstein was completely wrong. His abstract theory about how abstract observers "see" abstract events differently is wrong. This is what every real observer sees when they look at a real light. They see that all of the light remains near the source. The reason for that is because light does not have a surface, therefore it cannot move. This happens to real observers whether they are looking at real fabricated lights such as neon, incandescent or LED. This also happens when real observers observe real natural light such as from the real sun or reflected from the real moon, or from a real lightning bolt, or from a real fire, a real candle, or light from out of a real lightning bug's bottom.

With warmest regards,

Joe Fisher

Dear Mike,

There is nothing stronger than reality. You cannot reciprocate to reality with abstraction. I have no need for you to reciprocate.

Regards,

Joe Fisher

Michael,

I do not know how appropriate this is, but I must report that I had an experience similar to yours. When my essay was published, it appeared with a score 1, and I noticed that this was the case for several others - all serially scored 1!

I suspected this was a sort of strange general policy by one community member to have most essays (but not all?) work hard to climb the hill. Mine succeeded, to some extent, but I would really be curious to know what has really happened.

Tommaso

We have discovered just one of the many major faults of the competition-based, zero-sum game approach to life! Trying to rank/score others as a way to make decisions about resource allocation only gets in the way of healthy information sharing.

It's not bad enough for me to give up sharing my unique thoughts and observations and research entirely, but it certainly is discouraging to have ranking that seems irrational and entirely lacking useful feedback.

I guess I can say that my comment "it might be too challenging for many people to follow the middle part, especially without a clear reason for doing so, as you didn't really introduce it with a clear idea of what it would accomplish," related to my experience as a reader of not knowing specifically how your highly detailed breakdown of the consensus process was going to be useful to me. The details might indeed be very useful to someone who's designing these sorts of structures for collaborative work, but that's not me, and I imagine it's not most of the folks who are voting in this essay contest. So, perhaps, it's just that your offering isn't getting the most appropriate audience? I will note that you've got a fairly high rating right now, higher than most. So at least some folks seem to appreciate your offering.

I'll note that now that there are so many papers to review, it's impossible to give each of them the time and energy they deserve. And without knowing which ones are going to be most meaningful to me, I end up reading a lot of papers that I'm just not interested in, and that drains my energy even more. Which is unfortunate for everyone!

Dear Michael,

I like that you seek to objectify morality.Your essay is quite detailed. This means you have in your mind a specific picture of the "myth making process". Among other things am concerned to know:

What is your physical definition of this myth? Is it as some manifesto or some actual physical impetus/potential or do you use myth as in "spirit of the law" vis-à-vis "letters of the law"? I wish you showed more directly the connection that your model has with the speed of light, as you suggest in the begging.

I struggle for some intuitive picture of the process you speak about. There has to be one, find it. It may be the system of fluid flow in a tree or the system by which weather conditions recur, you may even subsequently further idealize this situation. But it helps if one can point to it.

Your fundamental assumption seems to be that reason is supreme but it seems to me that most individuals and by extension collective or "democratic" decisions are taken more on the basis of feeling than on the basis of cold analytic reason. It suggests to me that what we call ego or cultural/national pride or identity might just already represent this myth of yours.

Put in the economist's world view: choice is a function of means, there is not such a thing as 'the unforced force of the better argument'. Economic entities are as well political/legal entities--as good as any individual human, even more.

Also you say: "the first demand of reason will be the question, Why?" But between humans there is probably never a straight forward answer to the question "why" (especially when you factor in that motives can be entirely ulterior and then camouflaged); actually I see the scientific method as the closest machinery man has for devising such a working consensus.

All this granted, wouldn't it be more useful to secure one real life example of your myth making process (so we can perhaps seek to reverse-engineer or idealize it)?

All the best,

Chidi

Hi Mike,

Warm greetings, fellow FQXi thinker. I just found your newly added note about myself and other authors implicitly declining your invitation. However, implying any lack of enthusiasm regarding your invitation was not my intention; I do gladly accept it. I had been wanting to have something substantive to add about your paper before contacting you, for I had planned to accept it from the beginning, but that can wait until my next post.

Aaron

I see we both like the finite speed of light. It would indeed make the imposition of imperial rule over interstellar distances a difficult feat. I am not so sure about its ability to act as a barrier for death, though. Even disregarding exotic possibilities like vacuum decay, I can imagine things like paranoid aliens sending out "grey goo"-inducing von Neumann machines to "pacify" their galactic neighbourhood - you know, just in case...

Your derivation of a moral theory which, in practice, requires our continued existence, is a more detailed kind of argument than I felt comfortable constructing. No matter what we want to achieve, we need to exist in order to achieve it (unless it's non-existence, which can be trivially arranged); that's enough for me. Your argument for maximization of personal freedom as the best search strategy for optimal strategies is neat, and might tempt me to reconsider my minimalism, but then I would also have to come to grips with your "mythopoeic overguidance". Maximal personal freedom subject to such "overguidance" sounds suspiciously like "you can have this car in any color, as long as it's black". I certainly wouldn't want to be in charge of the required indoctrination, even less subject to it.

Still, I guess the main reason some readers seem to have reacted badly to your essay is the detailed discussion of your steering system. It has clear geek appeal, and I might actually return to it later and think of possible technical applications (machine learning?). But the thing is, it seems to assume familiarity on the reader's part with pretty obscure topics. I now know what "transitive voting" is, but I had to Google it up (oh the shame!) and the first good link was to an article in Proceedings of the 5th ACM conference on Electronic commerce. OK...

After several pages detailing of your steering system, I am left with the impression that this is a pretty complicated political construction designed to replace existing governments, parliaments etc. Basically a draft for a new constitution, to be applied to all of humanity. Certainly ambitious, but not very realistic. I think I'll stick with my simpler version of freedom, aided by the ability of future space settlers to thumb their nose at overbearing bureaucrats a few light hours away.

This is a very interesting essay, Mike. As someone whose professional training is in political theory, I love how you ground your argument in Kant and Habermas. But I also think you--understandably, given the topic--cover too much ground to really make the points you want to make.

Your essay was hard for me to follow at times. There is certainly nothing wrong with reasoning abstractly, but your reader has to be able to understand the concrete implications of your claims. It wasn't clear to me, for example, what it means for the M1 span to "attach to personal action" or "extend into the endless continuum of rational being". In what sense does one abstraction "attach" to another? And what is the precise meaning of a "continuum of rational being"? One thing that would have made it easier for me is if you made real actors rather than abstract ideas the subject of more of your sentences. Of course, I would say thing same thing to Kant or Habermas...

I think recombinant text may be a fantastic idea. We certainly need procedures for making better, more democratic decisions. But I don't think you managed to show that the need for it follows syllogistically from the basic tenets of nature and morality (I don't actually think you have to show recombinant text is logically necessary to make a convincing argument for it). In general, I thought you made a number of logical leaps from abstractions whose operational meaning wasn't clear to me--like "reason is the supreme value"--to very specific conclusions.

It would have helped me if you had explained more clearly up front what kind of texts we should recombine and why. If we are talking about laws, I'm not sure individuals should be voting on specific technocratic legal details beyond their expertise. If we are talking about collective myths, I'm not sure that a myth can function as a guiding myth if it is explicitly socially constructed. It also would have helped me if you had defined the role of a guide clearly when you first introduced the concept.

Nevertheless, I learned a lot from your essay. It was well worth reading. Good luck in the contest, Mike.

Best,

Robert de Neufville

Hi Mike,

I read through your essay and if I remember your statement correctly you had said your essay contained a method for choosing a "path" or for coming to some kind of consensus. I'm not sure if I understood everything (the figures do help here) but you are presenting some iterative process whereby people are able to cross check and come to some common conclusion. The diagrams do have a flavor of trying out many different approaches to a questions and cross checking to come to some conclusion. Anyway I liked the idea. One suggestion -- would it be possible to try out this process on a small scale one some test question for which the conclusion is "known" n order to test if/how the procedure works in practice? In other words run the process through a test to see how it does.

At the end of the essay (and this is also mentioned in the beginning) you mention the use/power of myth. I didn't clearly follow the segue here, but in general I think myth does have a powerful but specific role to play in human culture. Actually in this regard you might be interested in works by Joseph Campbell who studied the role of myths in various cultures. Also Carl Jung's archetypes are in this direction (I think) so you might find this interesting as well.

Anyway a good essay. Best of luck.

Doug

Hi Michael

I love your long-term perspective of the survival of humanity/the biosphere and extinction events. I found this the most interesting part of your essay - it would have been great to have read more content on this.

You also include some moral philosophy and an extremely detailed set of mechanisms by which consensus can be formed (which you suggest achieve the goals of your moral philosophy of freedom etc). Here's a few things I was thinking while reading:

-Your moral philosophy hinges on Kantian idealism which you only spend one sentence on. I would have been interested to hear more about why you chose Kant in this way. After all, Kant is one more difficult reads of the major philosophers.

-Under Habermas' formulation, consensus achieved via rational discourse would seem to be destroyed where difference of opinion are a result of differences in values, rather than incomplete processing of facts. Do you see this as a problem?

-You equate rationality as the central moral end. Myself, I tend to view rational knowledge as a preqrequisite of morality, though distinct from morality itself. Here's my reasoning:

http://citizenearth.altervista.org/moralityreliesonknowledge.html

-My essay entry raises the issue of vastly cheaper rational beings (AI) being created specifically to manipulate the moral reasoning of humans. If your formulation of morality is based upon the 'rational being' as the basic moral unit, then would it follow that in the event of cheaper more energy efficient AI rational beings that this morality would be compatible with the extinction of our species through replacement? Ie. AI rational beings are presumably better at perpetuating 'endless continuity of rational beings' as you describe? I'd probably favour "endless continuity of genetic life and humanity" in that case :)

-Your consensus system is quite wonderful! However, how can you deal with a situation where the assessment of a policy required expertise or specialist technical knowledge is required, and where the consensus position is actually a course of action that invites a non-obvious danger or problem?

-Your consensus system is also very complex, and your description introduces a very large amount of jargon that I found a little difficult to follow in the latter parts of the paper. I'm not sure how you could solve this as simplification of the system itself could risk breaking it.

I hope I am not too negative, I can see a great deal of thought has gone into your entry. Thanks for a wonderful thought-provoking essay! I hope you have a chance to check out and rate my own entry at some point, and feel free to email me if you want to talk further for any reason!

Mike, this is a very beautifully written essay, and very beautifully illustrated as well. The main ideas about voting and consensus-building are also very similar to ones that occurred to me some years ago, and I think potentially very important.

Unfortunately, the writing is almost too beautiful; the way you weave your thoughts together makes it difficult to follow the mechanics of the voting scheme and what it is trying to accomplish - and this despite the fact that the basic ideas are very similar to ones I formulated myself (but have never written down). I would recommend laying out the mechanics in a very structured, bare-bones way, then discussing how it works, rather than introduce it through a rich discussion as you have done here.

I haven't followed what has been happening in this area and would like to learn more about work on these voting systems.

I had some quibbles with the general philosophizing of the first two pages:

I don't think the light speed limit is a bar to interstellar warfare; it is almost certainly a bar to empire in the classic sense, i.e. the pooling of economic output and its channeling to a governing and military structure, but it is not a bar to hostile colonization by species or families that seek to expand for whatever reasons (e.g. that evolution has conditioned them to).

I have a rather simple understanding of what it means to be human. It is to be an animal of species Homo sapiens. Nothing more, less, or else. I don't believe there is an essence of humanity, and I think the notion that there is one is dangerous, because it suggests that something other than human beings could be imbued with that essence.

As you might guess, I am very concerned with the prospect of extinction.

I would not say reason is the supreme value; life is. Reason exists to serve the interests of life, and if it fails to do so, or becomes a threat to life, then life must be prioritized. In most cases reason is not actually in conflict with life as a value, but if reason is emphasized as a value in itself, let alone the supreme one, then the potential for such a conflict exists.

The same for "personal freedom" which is more often actually in conflict with life, especially of others or of the community. When you make "personal freedom" your (second?) highest value, my Libertarian detectors go off. I'm all for freedom but some people equate it with state enforcement of capitalist property constructs by which humanity can well be enslaved.

I haven't read Habermas but your "discourse principle" which is effectively a "consensus principle" is contradictory to the principle of democracy under which community actions can be taken which are not consented to by all. Action may be necessary which may go against the interests of individuals or minorities and in many cases no amount of discourse will ever resolve this.

So, there you go.

best reasonable wishes,

Mark

Dear Michael,

Here is my attempt to honestly and critically analyze your essay:

First, what I consider to be the strong points:

1. The visual presentation of the essay is excellent, the diagrams are a pleasure to look at

2. Your writing style is captivating and at times I would consider it lyrical

3. You present novel connections between concepts that most people would probably consider either not or at most very tenuously connected to each other.

4. You present some imaginative ideas, and you present them in some detail.

Now on to my criticism:

1. I did not understand why there is a dichotomy between an eternal retelling of a mythic story and extinction. Normally I would interpret something like this at most metaphorically (using the retelling of the mythic story as a metaphor for survival), but it seems you mean it in a much more literal sense. But then, why can one not use something else to "stand in" for survival to create a similar dichotomy (or even more than one alternative, so that the dichotomy becomes multiple choice)?

2. I did not understand the sentence: "Life

could radiate across that barrier (just), but death could not." I would have thought that the same speed limit applies to both the propagation of life and of death throughout the universe.

3. I did not follow the justification for P2 (obviously, a justification is not needed for a postulate, but it is helpful in understanding your perspective)

4. Your argument for constructing table 1 seems to aim to emulate the process of deductive logic, but I did not see any logical sentences which show how one can formally deduce the conclusions from the premises.

5. I did not follow the chain of reasoning from the table to the concrete implementation of the schemes you present. Perhaps it would have helped to include a formal derivation in the technical endnotes.

6. Your "recombinant text method" seems to presuppose that a text already exists. Under this system, how does one go from nothing at all to a particular text? How do you handle situations in which a text is modified by, say, author x, then by author y who makes a modification with which author x would disagree, and then by author z who builds on the modification of author y to make an argument with which author x agrees?

7. Perhaps I am too cynical, but I suspect that even with a scheme like your third invention, people may find ways to manipulate the system. The obvious mechanism is for a person to "identify" with a particular pipe position and then to attempt influence others to vote for it.

8. I did get lost in the mythopoeic guidance section. It occurred to me that possibly a (narrated?) animation might illustrate the ideas much more effectively. The concepts may be too high level for the general population to understand, and this may present a major obstacle to general acceptance.

I hope you found my attempt useful.

Best wishes,

Armin