@CortAmmon: Hey, what's your background out of curiosity? Very interesting arguments you've presented so far.

I'm an engineer by trade, but I dabble enoguh with philosophy to get me in trouble

Cool, what kind of engineering?

Computer. I make programs follow strict rules of logic, and then watch as they find spectacular ways to make a fool of me =p

lol, I know what you mean. I've been digging into programming over the last few years ( brute force style ) and am considering leveling up by working through something like OSSU.

I may have to looka t that. They have a UX course, and I desperately need to get better at the user experience

Much of what I do is simulations, where my users don't care how bad the UI is. I have enough trouble convincing them of the very true (and applicable to the topic at hand) maxim: "All models are wrong, some are useful"

I had some more [ points, arguments ] for you continuing from the comments in your answer, but I keep self-refuting to the point of "at the end of the day, we could all just go out into the woods & fend for ourselves" basal philosophy lol

This is actually the best place for it. The main site really isn't designed for back and forth conversations, and this is the kind of topic that really benefits from back and forths

So one model I have found very useful for these sorts of things is Rational Actor Theory

In RAT, you assume that every individual acts according to some set of goals that they have. (Irrationality has to be handled separately)

So it would be useful to explore what goals you believe the wealthy would have, then see how they might react to the goals

As an example, bacertia appear to have a goal of proliferating as fast as possible at first glance. However, that's just a means to an end. A deeper goal for bacteria is the proliferation of their particular DNA. Thus, you can assume bacteria will proliferate like mad, until such proliferation actually gets int he way of spreading their DNA

(In hind sight, I shoud have chosen yeast, not bacteria). If you look at the lifecycle of yeast, you see that it proliferates until it runs low on resources. Then it changes, proliferates less, but changes into a form which is better at letting its DNA spread

If you look at compoudns designed to stop yeast infections, you find that they are careful to not shift the yeast into the latter form, which is much harder to control

Humans share the same imperative. I'd go as far as to argue that it's a primary cause of many issues which cause failure in governance systems ( actual & hypothetical )

Can you describe that imperitive in words? Or is it better to leave it unworded?

(I think the true human imperitive has no words that fully capture it, but there's lots of good approximations. You may have a good approximation that we can use to tackle the question of wealth and government)

After all, all models are wrong

The lines we call nations are entirely arbitrary and have no absolute meaning in relation to human life, the Earth itself, and the universe at large. However, early people (tribes) had an instinctual imperative to survive, so they claimed & developed land to provide themselves with resources, optimal rates of survival & population growth.

That happened in multiple instances, each with generative growth, and we are now at a point where each claim of land spans thousands of miles and comes with a guiding set of ideologies. Those ideologies generally conflict, and the tribes are not willing ( or able ) to break the divides. These tribes have become monolithic, to the point where each individual no longer identifies with the original tribe on a biological level and has developed a has a sub-tribe of their own (bloodline).

The biological imperative is now exhibited in acquisition & maintenance of resources within the bloodline. As a result of macro & micro tribalism, the world is in a state of perpetual war and suffers from exponential inequality in terms of resources & quality of life.

What about the underlying imperitive? It is shared between all of those fractured groups. What does it do in response to such conflict?

An imperitive which cannot exist in its own presence would certainly be subject to weeding out, would it not?

The imperative can be examined on multiple levels [ individual, bloodline, city|state, nation, worldwide ], as the modular organism composed of humans can be observed on each of those levels, perhaps similar to a [ cell, tissue, organ, regulatory network, body ]. I'd say that all aspects of the organism ( and each of their imperatives ) suffer from dissonance not typically experienced in the natural world, caused by the introduction of a radical variable (the human mind).

Do you see the mind as a physical phenomena, or one which cannot be described by physical means?

(I agree with the approach of seeing similar patterns at different scales. I'm just digging a little at whether "the mind" is a special priviledged level, or if its just one of many)

Most of my fun suggestions at the brighter side of our imperitives center around things that must be true for a pattern to be truly self-similar and avoid contradiction

or at least wind the argument up into a halting problem argument, which is fun too =)

Taking into account collective consciousness ( particularly in its raw forms, exhibited in lesser developed species ), and personal experiments with alteration of neuro-chemistry - I believe that the brain is a sort of receptor for thought (mind).

It has local storage, the ability to tap into collective storage ( although I believe that humans are greatly hindered in this regard compared to animals, due to mass neuroses & inter-organism dissonance ), and its ability to interpret information from either is directly affected by its developmental composition & present chemical balance.

That chemically balance is naturally in a state of flux ( and can be manipulated directly with the use of thought, food, & drugs ) and thus the perceptual & cognitive experiences are infinitely expansive.

In that case, where does the imperitive come from? Does it come from that collective conciousness?

@Enteleform I need to head to bed, but I'll pick this up in the morning. If you're not familiar with the chat rooms, you can say something with my name (like I just did with yours), and it will give me a notice when I visit StackExchange. It's actually a pretty well thoguht out syste

system*

Cool. Writing up a response now, so you'll probably wake up to some drawn out nonsense lol. Very interested to see where this is heading and what your input will be at the conclusion of this prompting session. I'll catch you tomorrow (^ _ ^)/

That's where you've stumped me, as I have no personal experience or knowledge to draw from. But I'll continue for the sake of conjecture ₍ ◝(　ﾟ∀ ﾟ )◟ ⁾

Maybe its something ingrained in our very programming (DNA), which is then inherently manifested throughout the different levels of an organism's collective (un)conscious.

Perhaps it starts off in DNA as a generative script; which allows for hard-coded functions ( unconscious_behavior[ singular, collective ] ) to be manifested on different levels, as well as dynamic functions ( conscious_behavior[ singular, collective ] ) ( which can, of course, contain more [ dynamic, generative ] functions ).

For example, if we update our array to [ dna, cell, tissue, organ, human.body, human.tribe, human.species ], each member would have its own variant of a do_life() function, which was generated by the do_life() function of its parent.

Expanding upon that concept, who's to say that DNA is the true starting point? Maybe we should update the array to:

abridged_existence = […,universe[…,galaxy[…,solar_system[…,planet[…,species[…, cell[ …, molecule[ …, atom[ …, sub_atomic_particles[ …, ETC[…] ]]]]]]]]]]

Where each "…" represents sub-networks within each level of existence ( for example, in the abridged array - we jumped straight from cell to species; omitting things like tissues, organs, regulatory systems, etc. However, all existing instances are present in the unabridged array )

I don't think human beings have enough [ perceptual ability, collective knowledge, technology ] to really figure out things at that level. So I can't think of anything else to say lol.

/nonsense

So I don't think that's nonsense at all, other than I will push on the division between hard-coded functions and dynamic functions, because I think there's a wide range of dynamic functions, some of which behave close enough to hard-coded that its just possible that nothing is hardcoded at all.

I think an important thing you hit on is that how a cell does life is dependent on how the dna does life, and how human bodies do life dpeends on how organs, tissues, cells, etc. do life. I find this to be a very useful approach because it shows that the things we care about (war, greed, etc.) are derived behaviors. They are products that arise from the underlying behaviors. However, they aren't always 100% defined by the underlying behaviors of any individual cell.

There's a beautiful theory of psychology that came out around the turn of the 1900s in Germany called Gestalt Theory.

In Gestalt Theory one says "The whole is different from the sum of its parts" (frequently misquoted as "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," which is not always strictly true)

I find it best described by the pictures they used to demonstrate its effects in psychology, because gestalt thinking is so fundamental to how we operate that the pictures are really universal. If you look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology and just skim the pictures, you can see countless examples of cases where what we see is dependent on more than just a boring sum of the parts.

Thus, by gestalt theory, if I had tissue made up of 10 cells, I should not try to predict its behavior by taking cellA, cellB, cellC ... cellJ in isolation, observe what they do, and then sum up behaviorA+behaviorB+behaviorC+...+behaviorJ. If I were to do so, by Gestalt Theory I would get the behavior of the tissue wrong.

Now this is all fine and dandy. Gestalt theory does a good job of showing us examples of how our thinking works, but it's designed as a descriptive theory. It explains what we already see. It's not a very proscriptive theory, which we could use to explain what we think we might see in different scenarios (such as your SE question about distributing wealth)

We need a proscriptive theory. I'm sure there's many, but I find one of them to be particularly useful in my explorations, so I use it a lot.

I find it effective to explore a spherical shell shaped region of space. This doesn't have to be a perfect sphere, but the general shape that I find effective is one which divides all of space into three regions, the inside, the body, and the environment, such that the inside and environment don't touch (you have to go through the body), and the environment [informally] stretches out to infiity, or as far out as you please

You can build such structures trivially on many of the boundaries you mentioned. A cell divides the environment from the body of the cell (along the cell wall). It also has some concept of an inside (the nucleus, or the DNA, depending on how you feel like playing with it that day).

What I find valuable about this is that we can explore emergent behaviors related to nesting of all of those body layers without really having to 100% understand what is going on in the inner layers. This is helpful to avoid needing to answer the question of whether nucleotides.do_life() or quark.do_life(). We can instead explore what happens in that middle body layer, based on simplified charactarizations of what is on the inside.

As an example, we can construct a system very similar to a Daoist one using this basic building block, by focusing on the flow of a conserved substance across the boundaries. An enclosed region is balanced towards yin when it is allowing more flow in than out, and balanced towards yang when it allows more flow out than in.

Each boundary then maintains record of a balance of yin - yang, which is basically the storage rate of this conserved substance. The Chinese focus greatly on the balanced case, where the storage is very low compared to the flow. you have flow in, you have flow out. If the storage rate is very high, where you have a lot of flow in for a long period before the flow out starts, Western engineering models of manufacturing plants start to be really useful.

Ahh, I missed a part before going to the Dao. If I may back up, because the inside cannot directly interact with the environment, but rather must go through the body, all of the building blocks for the observed behaviors we are interested in are found in the body. Thus, there is a Symbiotic relationship between the body and the inner region. The inner region cannot express itself without the body, but the body is often an easy to understand constructed shell... its the inner layers

that have the great mysteries we care about, such as biological imperitives.

The body would be easily modeled, predicted, and consumed, without interacting with the inner layer to build some unified presence according to the inner layer's master plan

@Enteleform (Not quite done yet, but many of these can be played iwth on their own. Once I get back home, I'll keep playing, exploring why it might be valid to assume Gestalt behavior, not only in psychology, but in social constructs as well)

Oh, and to provide some validity to the Daoist model, physics suggests that there must be at least one interesting conserved substance to form the basis of yin and yang: energy. Energy is conserved, according to western physics

Back.

So with this model, I can start suggesting shapes that an "imperative" can take. The end goal is to force any unchangeable imperative out of the world of modern physics and into a metaphysical world. Once its there, the only thing keeping the imperitive stationary is the belief that the metaphysical "laws" should make it stationary.

The limit on such immutable laws is entropy

Let us assume, for a moment that the inner structures which generate these imperatives are subject to thermodynamics. Everything in known physics is subject to thermodynamics, and thus entropy, so the only known way to avoid entropy is to step outside the known laws of physics (into metaphysics of mind, or something to that sense)

That inner structure is constantly degrading. Due to random interactions that the inner structure has no control over, its information content must go down, its energy must be turned to heat.

If entropy always wins (which is the current theory in science), then this inner structure is not truly static. It must be able to change, or else it is not part of this world.

However, we have some control over how it changes. It doesn't always have to change fluidly.

The inner structure can contain discrete information, which can be protected in ways similar to how we protect data on our computers. There's gobs of techniques we have to use redundant information and a constant supply of energy to double check our data, and make sure it hasn't changed. The probability of that being successful can be made arbitrarially large (but not infinite) by having more redundant data, or expending more energy checking it.

However, it needs to get that energy from somewhere. The only place it can get it is from the body, because it does not have direct access to the environment.

This means the body must feed the inner structure energy, or the inner structure will die.

The natural result: the inner structure shapes the way the body behaves to ensure it continues to get fed (this is in line with your imperative)

However, a catch arises when these bodies meet. In an "ideal" world for the inner structure, it would have complete control over the body. However, in a real situation, it doesn't, due to the speed of information transfer.

If another body contacts with yours, your body's state is changed before any signals can take place to transmit this information to the inner structure for processing.

This is very visible in physical combat, where much of how our body reacts to a blow is based on the physics of the body. Only a few hundred milliseconds later does the brain get to have any say in what happens.

So this shows a key requirement for the body/inner structure relationship: The state of the body cannot be 100% defined by the inner structure, unless the outside edge of the body is perfectly hard, so that nothing gets in.

However, if nothing gets in, the body cannot continue to acquire energy(from the sun), and the inner structure starves. Thus the inner structure must admit that the body it controls is not 100% in its control. The environment must have some say on the state of the body.

So now we can explore an ineraction between two parties, each with their own inner structure, and a body.

Consider the case of a selfish inner structure (as is suggested by the imperitives we have been talking about). It is seeking to maximize its goals. There are two ways to do this. One is to try to control more of a "body," to collect more resources. This leads to the greedy solution. The other is to realize that they don't need complete control over their environment, they just need to make sure their environment is condusive to their goals.

This inner structure likely cannot see into the inner structure of other person (just as no man can ever know the mind of another man). So all it has to work with is itself, its body, and the other individual's body (with its behaviors). If it can convince the other side to do something to help it, it can prosper.

And thus we entered game theory. Based on what you perceive others will do, you act. If both parties can find a way to act such that it is in both of their interests, there's no reason for each to try to dominate the other.

@Enteleform And at this point, it would be good to stop and pause for feedback. The next steps could go through drama theory, analog differential equations, or metaphysics, depending on how you approach these particular models, and depending on your background. Or they may go in a completely different direction, if you think of something I haven't!

Awesome response! I read through it but I

Awesome response! I read through it but I'll have to respond after the weekend ( sister is visiting from PR, & gotta catch up on a programming project ). Definitely will be processing until then & looking into some of the topics you mentioned.

Hi folks. I just moved the comments on the question into this other room. I can move them from that room into this one if they should all be together; I don't want to read through everything in this room to try to figure that out. So you tell me -- should it all be together or not? Thanks. Pinging @CortAmmon and @Enteleform.

@MonicaCellio: The two rooms should stay separate. The conversation here has diverged from the scope of the original subject pretty substantially.

@Enteleform ok, thanks. Enjoy your conversation, and thank you both for proactively taking it to chat.

@MonicaCellio: 👍