David Deutsch. I love that guy. I once went to a lecture by him on Quantum Computing, decades ago. Didn't understand much, but his books are wonderful. One sentence in a fairly recent one made my hair stand on end -- it was something about how if we had had the Enlightenment a couple of centuries earlier, by now we'd all be immortal.

I think what we're looking at here is apparently non-deterministic behavior.

That is, there are some systems whose behavior is deterministic, predictable: systems whose motions can be described using Newton's Laws of Motion, his theory of gravity, and a little mathematics. Extend that to electromagnetism, modify Newton by Einstein, and you've still get predictability.

Leave quantum indeterminacy and entanglement aside for the moment. (Or for the time when someone smarter than me can discuss it.)

We are left with (some?) living matter. At some point in the evolutionary change, we get to living matter whose behavior is not always predictable. It's at this point that I think the word 'consciousness' becomes useful -- or unavoidable -- and then the actual structure of consciousness needs to be talked about.

I would suggest that conscious systems have a store of information, and also some -- algorithms? heuristics? some word we don't have yet? -- for processing this information along with sense-data from the outside world, which guides their behavior.

I would also claim that robot vacuum cleaners mimic this, but that it's not necessarily the case that the .... don't have a word here .. 'objects?' with which they process their information -- their stored map of the area they are cleaning, the built-in rules for avoiding falling down stairs, what to do when they detect a large quantity of liquid on the floor -- are the same as ours. Our thinking is not mainly algorithmic.

I could be wrong here, and there are certainly people who claim there is no dividing line between the reflex-responses of a parameceum and the reflex-responses of Doug1943 trying to choose a word for this post. And there people who claim that there is no difference in principle between Doug1943 and a robot vacuum cleaner. In their view, parameceum, Doug, and the vacuum cleaner are just complexes of matter, following physical laws -- if there is any non-determinism, it's quantum randomness. There is no 'free will'.

But Dr Johnson and I say, "Sir, we know our will is free, and there's an end on't." and "All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it."

To sum up: the problems of 'information' and 'knowledge' are tied up with the problem of 'consciousness', and we don't really understand the latter.

I think it's always helpful in these sorts of discussions to try to avoid using the verb "to be". So we may get more clarity if, rather than saying, "What is knowledge?" "What is information?" "What is the difference between the two?" -- we said, "How is the word knowledge used?" (With the understanding that we may use it to mean different, even contradictory things, especially if more than one person is using the word.) Same for 'information'.
As for 'knowledge' and 'information' -- maybe the old distinction between 'knowing that' (which involves information) vs 'knowing how' (which may involve something else), will be useful.

As for the binary number system, I always thought that our current computing machines use binary for engineering reasons -- it's easier to design circuits that can detect whether a component is in one of two states, than to detect whether a circuit is in one of ten, or sixteen states. So it's purely for convenience. It's true that the formalization of information uses the binary concept, but that's just a coincidence.

Nature uses the base-one system. All else is the work of man.

I don't think the ocncept of information is useful when describing, say, planets in their orbits. There is no choice involved there. And at the sub-atomic level, things are just random

But at an intermediate level, we have things like a robot vacuum cleaner -- the sort that wanders around your home, avoiding falling down stairs, 'remembering' where obstacles are -- based on previously bumping into them and then storing this information -- where the obstacle was, based on some simple co ordinate system -- and choosing its path using this stored information. (All deterministic of course.)

Another thought: the distinction between 'information' and 'knowledge'. I think these words should apply to somewhat different concepts: 'information' is the reduction of uncertainty. One can have 'information ;which is not yet turned into 'knowledge'. I don't want to quibble about the meaning of words, which don't have inherent meaning anyway. But it seems that these words refer to different although overlapping concepts. Knowledge is brought into being when patterns are spotted in information, and generalizations are made on that basis.

Can we use the concept 'information' to describe the behavior of non-living matter?
Obviously we can, for machines built by us. But what about the objects of nature?

Can we use the concept of information for non-human living creatures? It seems to me
we can ... certainly for higher animals. An animal that smells food and moves toward it ... can
we say that this animal is acting on stored information, which associates that particular smell, with
satisfying its hunger? Or should we say that all behavior except human behavior is just conditioned
reflexes? That seems wrong to me.

What about, say, insects? Are bees who do the 'waggle-dance' imparting 'information' about the location of food source to other bees? That seems correct to me.

How far down can we go, before we really are just dealing with conditioned reflexes? Or have I made some sort of category mistake here?

Yes, indeed. There needs to be compensation for good work, in order for the good work to continue. If I were a billionaire, I'd fund a few 'Open Source Villages' around the world, and provide an apartment, free meals, and a small stipend, for provenly-competent programmers to work on Open Source programs.

Sometimes these people make some money by proving support at a price -- that's how MySQL works, before they sold themselves to Oracle. And people like me, with, in retirement, more income than expenses, can indulge our sense of social responsbility for good things like Video Download Helper, Wikipedia, Calibre, Phet ... by regular somall donations or one-off larger donations.

I would love to see a system whereby after, say, ten years, an author's ebook could be put into a system making it downloadable for, say, a dollar. I suspect that they would get more income from that than from the high prices for eBooks Amazon charges, where they then have to compete with bit-torrents which make the books available for free. I'll bet a lot of people who use bit-torrents feel a bit guilty about the authors' getting nothing ... but not guilty enough to pay Amazon and others' high prices for a digital product.

An analogy, of course.

What's interesting are the differences.

Energy is conserved, knowledge isn't. I don't deplete my knowledge by using it, nor does my acquisition of it mean that someone else has less of it.

One way to look at the progress of humanity is to see it as the progressive substitution of personal energy by knowledge, which allows us to use other sources of energy than our own, or to accomplish our ends using less energy.

The non-conservation of knowledge has led to a kind of knowledge-communism, making the intellectual achievements of mankind available for very small cost to everyone, a step toward Marx's Kingdom of Freedom.

I wonder what systems you find lacking ethical standards — ssu

All organized human groups have standards of behavior. Primitive tribes who are perfectly happy torturing captives to death have rigid codes of behavior within the tribe. As I see it, modernity involves the slow expansion of who the average person considers 'we'. In some respects it has even begun to extend outside our species.

I'm arguing that what Soviet schoolchildren were taught about how to behave was by and large what the children of all advanced societies are taught. Surely this isn't controversial?

Isn't that part of his job? — ssu

Of course he was no doubt tasked to be pleasant to foreigners so that they would get a good impression of the Soviet Union ... and more than that. (We were casually asked by him, at the end of our stay there, if we would write reports on what was happening in the West. We advised him to tell his bosses to get a subscription to The Economist.)

All I can say is that I met a range of personality types among the Soviet officials we dealt with, some of them rather unpleasant -- sterotypical Russian bureaucrats, and people who were obviously dissemblers and deceivers. Our guy seemed like a very decent man, but of course my judgement could be completely lacking.

I believe it was the conventional wisdom in the West that the KGB, being actually aware of conditions in the West via the presence of their own agents there, was more 'liberal' -- or perhaps just more realistic about life in the West-- than the Soviet bureaucrats who read only their own propaganda. I believe something similar was said of the CIA as well. Both of these agencies also did pretty nasty things.

Could it be that a highly-cultured, 'liberal' person -- one able to at least pretend to see the other person's point of view, to make jokes about the shortcomings of his own system and its leaders -- in short, to advance the sort of persona that would make a 'target' likely to trust him ... could such a person also cold-bloodedly order or commit an assassination? I'm sure of it. People more well-read than me can probably suggest famous characters from history, or at least from literature, who meet this description. Wasn't Mussolini's son-in-law supposed to be a congenial fellow?

As for the Scots -- I reckon they'll be gone within a decade. [As for the English, my favorite saying about them is supposedly an Arab one: "Why is better to have the English as your enemy, than as your friend? Because if you are their enemy, they will try to buy you. But if you are their friend, they will try to sell you."]

And look for resurgent nationalism all over the place -- India, Canada, Spain of course ... and in the Russian Federation. Loyalty to the tribe will, in some of these places, erode that general ethical advance we've seen over the last century -- Yugoslavia is the terrible example. But the country to really worry about the revival of tribal-nationalism in, is the US, if the current mad craze for 'identity politics' spreads into the white population.

I think in the long run this resurgence of tribalism will prove to be a passing phase, and will burn out after a few decades, and the logic of globalized economics will reassert itself.

In any case, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.

I think the most interesting socialists are those who have tried to grapple with 'the Socialist Calculation Question' put by the 'Austrian' economists, and who have advanced models of socialism that supposedly deal with it.

I would urge all serious socialists ( who would like to see socialism in the sense used above, ie. collective ownership of the means of production, under democratic control) to read Francis Spufford's Red Plenty and then to think about how the problems described there would be dealt with in a democratic regime.

'Found a way to join the modern world' sounds condescending. The cause is simply the low numbers of these groups and the lack of a sovereign nation state. Once when you do have a sovereign state, then other people will treat you as a citizen of that state, even if you have no love for it. It truly changes how you are treated.

I'm sorry if it sounds condesending. I believe people are a product of their material circumstances, including their past circumstance, ie. their history, not the result of some inner unchangeable essence, and certainly not blame-worthy for being born into such circumstances.

In the case of Native Americans, we can see that some were well on the way to high civilization -- the Incas, the Aztecs, (and the Mayas before some environmental catastrophe cut their progress short ) -- and then the Europeans arrived, and disease and gunpowder reduced them to the state they're in today.

I happen to agree that state sovereignty would be a useful experiment to try. It hasn't worked out very well in Africa, but it might among Native Americans. In any case, the right of peoples to self-determination is generally a good principle, and ought to apply to Native Americans, should they choose it. Of course, this would mean a multiplicity of states -- you're not going to get the Hopi and the Navajo into a single state, or not for long. Maybe this will come about in the future, in which, I believe, there is a very good chance that we shall see the break up of the American state.

I don't know if just being a citizen of a state earns you respect. You have to be the citizen of a state seen to be successful in one or more respects. When I was little -- a long time ago -- the Chinese were an object of derision. A few years after the Chinese Revolution, they became an object of fear. Twisting Machiavelli, I think we can affirm that it is better to be feared than derided.

And it's hard to become a successful state without having a high degree of education among your population. This is the delicious contradiction that will eventually undermine the mullahs and the Chinese Communists. Educated people want, for example, to be able to argue about free will and determinism, or the existence of God, or the errors or otherwise of dialectical materialism on forums like this.

I agree with you about welfare being a way to stupefy potentially-troublesome groups, although i doubt this was done consciously. Good intentions, road to hell, etc.

Well, the Soviet Union did lead the space-race and was close even to getting a man to the moon first, if it wasn't for an enthusiastic German called Werner von Braun. So higher ethical standards of the Soviet Union?

With respect to the Soviet Union: it actually did have pretty advanced ethical standards -- in some ways superior to those of free (capitalist) countries. But the official standards were in contradiction to actual practice. The Soviets paid lip-service to things like international brotherhood, racial equality, even sexual equality, while in practice being Russian nationalists and male chauvinists. (When I lived there, I heard some hair-raising expressions of opinions about Africans, for example.)
The standard of personal behavior taught to Soviet children was admirable. It was just that the whole edifice was sustained by hypocrisy: everyone knew that the near-unanimous support for the ruling party was maintained by force, and the claim that socialism could outdo capitalism in provision of material wealth -- the only 'rational' justification for its restrictions on freedom -- was eventualy also undermined. And when this happened, it didn't take long for the system to collapse.

I actually lived in the Soviet Union for a few months -- my then-wife was a Fulbright Exchange scholar and I accompanied her. Most people I tell the following to assume I am mad but ... the KGB fellow who was the 'minder' for all foreigners in the city we were in was actually, personally, a very decent fellow.

I think a better counter-example to my assertion is Nazi Germany. Even Nazi Germany in many respects had modern ethical standards, it just reserved them for able-bodied patriotic Germans. Even there, there were contradictions which revealed the tension between Nazi-ism and the modern concept of fair play for all: Iron Crosses awarded to known Jews, the US savagely lampooned for lynching Blacks.

But as I think I said, the Nazis were the extreme example of the uneven development of the cultural superstructure, really a historical aberration. But any theory which has too many ad hoc exceptions to its rule is not a good one, so if we see more repetitions of the Nazi case -- technologically-advanced societies which consistently and openly practice barbarism -- then my theory will have been disproved. )

Surely all decent people can agree that it's wrong to needlessly cause pain to others. So if some group is genuinely made unhappy by thoughtless references to them, don't do it. If Native Americans now do not appreciate being called "redskins", then don't do it.

But ... it doesn't help anyone to nurture the idea that they are victims. If there is a current injustice inflicted on a group -- and there have been plenty of such injustices in every nation on earth -- then correct it, and move on.

The real problems of, say, Native Americans and similar groups are located in the fact that many of them have not yet found a way to join the modern world, while retaining such of their customs as are comfortable to them and not in conflict with modern values. Sometimes well-meaning arrangements for them actually help cement them into a backward way of life.

The Jews provide us all with an example of how to succeed in the modern world, while retaining aspects of traditional culture, and, in a different way, so do the Choctaws. (Declaration of interest: I'm a descendant of Mosholatubee, the chief of the Choctaws who had to sign the grossly unjust Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Hill, by which they were forced to give up their fertile land in the Southern states and were put on the 'Trail of Tears'. Those who survived ended up in Oklahoma, thought by the whites to be not worth stealing, especially because of the nasty stinky black tarry stuff that oozed up from the ground in various places around the state. You can honor their memory by spitting into the ugly harsh face of Andrew Jackson whenever you handle a twenty-dollar bill.)

To the extent that the dominant culture puts obstacles in their path, let's remove those obstacles. More than that, let's take positive steps to make joining modernity possible. I don't know enough about conditions on Native American reservations to be concrete, but I would look first at educational opportunities there, and whether the legal arrangements in tribal areas make it easy to open a business.

I believe a good example of the right approach can be found in Australia, in the work of Noel Pearson on behalf of his fellow aboriginals.

In short, gesture politics is cheap. Real redress for peoples who were overrun by more advanced cultures might actually cost something.

No, I wouldn't think so. But there may be people who are naive about the reality of life among aboriginals, where the sensibilities of advanced societies with respect to children are not so common. The same problem is found in Australia, by the way.

Another example of white imperialists disrespecting Native American customs and trying to impose their standards on Native Americans can be found here.

You are right that the words 'socialism' and 'communism' have been pretty much drained of all content. There are various reasons for this: some people, especially in the US, use 'sociaiism' to mean anything that might result in some redistribution of their income, unless it's for funding the Military or Israel. And since the first successful seizure of power by explicit Marxists, in Russia over a century ago, resulted in societies that were pretty unpleasant, many socialists want to sever the use of the word 'socialism' from any reference to those societies, by insisting that some form of democracy is part of the central core definition of socialism.

So what about this as a definition of 'genuine' socialism: the means of production are owned/controlled collectively, and the collective body that owns/controls them is subject to democratic control by the working class.

That would rule out both capitalist welfare states, however pleasant, and the current and former Communist societies.

I personally would add that the collective ownership/control of the means of production precludes competition among the collectively-owned enterprises: the workers in one steel plant don't try to win contracts away from another steel plant, and don't compete with them to produce a better product at a lower price. No one is made unemployed, no factory can go out of business, any difference in wages is directly due to differences in skills or responsibilities: so a skilled worker might make more than an unskilled one, but two equally-skilled workers in two different plants will have the same wage for the same work. Production is centrally planned, albeit by a body subject to democratic control. I believe this is how socialism has always been conceived of by most socialists.

I say that "I personally" would include this in the description of genuine socialism, but I know there are thoughtful socialists who envision a socialist society where the market is still in play -- workers would compete against each other, and prices and production would be set by blind market forces rather than by conscious planning. This seems to contradict the spirit of socialism, however, which envisions production for human need -- as determined by the democratically-elected central planning body -- rather than for profit. But since some socialists claim that central planning is not necessary, I just add it as an appendix.

Yes, it is. With respect to the Yamomani, I've read a plausible argument that it was whites, giving them steel axes and even shotguns, that really caused their problems. But everything you read nowadays about primitive cultures is so politically charged that you've got to take it all with a grain of salt. (You're probably familiar with the Darkness in El Dorado controversy.)

Obviously, in a forum where what we post is limited, not just by the technology but by others' patience in reading, a complicated argument can't be made in much detail.

That's why I referred to gas chambers and nuclear weapons, things which are products of advanced cultures, and used the phrase 'loosely coupled' to suggest that the connection between advanced technology and advanced morality is not some rigid, linear one.

So, for example, slavery is almost a human universal -- when tribes get advanced enough so that enslaving a defeated enemy makes more sense than just killing him. But as societies advance technologically -- and get the technology to put their enslavement on an industrial scale, as the Europeans did -- advanced morality comes creeping up behind. And eventually those Europeans abolish slavery.

Please note: I am NOT making a 'Europeans are superior' argument, and not even making the 'technologically advanced people are superior' argument, if by 'superior' we're talking about some innate essence. I think that the question of which peoples advance, and which stagnate, is largely due to historical accidents -- the English behind their channel don't need a monarch with a large standing army, and thus can develop the concepts of limited government. And as I said, even a minimal knowledge of history shows that advanced civilizations took root in several places outside Europe, while Europe stagnated.

Another point to note is that there are virtues cultivated in more primitive societies which are recognized as virtues by advanced societies, which themselves have them only in diminshed degree. I think these are mainly the group-above-self virtues, which individualistic capitalist society tends to undermine.

But then, as the industrial revolution progresses, illiterate peasants, or their children, become urban factory workers. Their children get sent to public schools. They absorb the idea that the world around them is understandable, not just an unchanging mysterious product of sky-gods. Such people are harder to treat like sheep, as witness Hong Kong and Sudan at the moment.

Of course all of this development is contradictory and uneven. But it seems to me that the trend is clear, even though, as someone put it, even among advanced peoples, "in the 21st Century lives the 13th".

I'm really making a quasi-Marxist argument, as you will probably recognize -- base and superstructure and all that . The question of the loose coupling of advanced social institutions and advanced economies, and the existence of contradictory tendencies alongside technical advance, was argued out by people much more clever than me back in the first part of the 20th Century, when some Marxists tried to apply the insights of Marx/Engels in a very mechanical way.

Yes, you're right. Thanks. Just learning the customs here.

Of course, with the important qualifications I mentioned. (And having a standard does not mean always adhering to that standard.)

So there is a strong positive correlation between cultures which can build, say, nuclear power stations and the principle that deformed babies shouldn't be killed. (If there are any anti-abortion people here, please don't divert the thread. We're all aware of the formal irony.)

Cultures which cannot build nuclear power stations, or even smelt metal, don't have such a strong correlation.

So there are people in the world who bury deformed babies alive. But they're still in the stone age

Doing the same thing in an advanced culture is something that has to be hidden, done indirectly. Hypocrisy, vice and virtue, etc.

To advance materially is to provide the basis for advancing morally. We can take care of deformed children ... a primitive tribe may not be able to .. such a child may be a burden in a world where everyone lives on the margin. So they're killed.

Saying what everyone knows to be true, but everyone is afraid, or too polite, to say, is a cheap way of getting reactions. But I just couldn't resist it.

Mankind advances, but unevenly. Some cultures put men on the moon, others remain in the stone age.
The people in both cultures believe that the stone age culture is inferior to the man-on-the-moon culture.

Which cultures advance and which stagnate is largely a matter of historical accident. For centuries, the smelly barbarians on the little peninsula of Asia called 'Europe' were far behind the peoples of the Middle East and Asia. Then things changed. Now they're changing again. All that is solid melts into air.

The 'cultural-appropriation' hoo-ha is the only way that people who believe that their culture is inferior can inflict some pain on those who have passed them in cultural development.

Man-on-the-moon cultures generally develop a higher ethical standard, as well as developing better engineering techniques. These advanced cultures extend their intellectual horizons beyond the limits of the tribe. ("Generally" higher -- there is only a loose coupling here between material and ethical advancement, and superior cultures are also superior in their ability to deal out death to those they see as their enemies. Africans have to hack each other to death with machetes, Europeans use Zyklon-B and fission bombs.)

So advanced cultures with advanced ethics are vulnerable to the emotional blackmail of those from less advanced cultures: they don't want to hurt the latter's feelings, so they pretend that "all cultures should be respected" etc.

No one really believes this, but the advanced culture people tend to respond the way you'd respond to a six-year-old who shows you his latest scrawled drawing --"Ohhh... that's VERY good."

It's just kindness., and to the credit of the person doing the pretending.

Those tankers were obviously attacked by torpedo boats from the Gulf of Tonkin.

Up until some point in the 1970s, the idea of a centralized planned economy -- with 'production for need, not for profit' -- appeared to many people to be the next step forward for the human race. The shortcomings of capitalism were obvious, and, for many years, the advantages of the planned economy appeared obvious. Even those who disapproved of the Communist countries lack of political freedoms aknowledged their apparent dramatic economic progress.

If you studied economics in the 1960s, one of your textbooks on the Soviet economy would have, on its cover, a graph showing GNP growth of the US vs the USSR. The latter started far behind the US, but the gradient of its growth curve was far steeper than the American one: the Soviets seemed to be growing at about 7% a year, vs the Americans' 3%. The curves, if extrapolated, crossed some time near the end of the century.

Then ... Well, the story is best told by a remarkable novel by Francis Spufford,Red Plenty. There, you can see the living human reality of what certain economists had much earlier determined as the central flaw of a non-market economy: the inability to set rational prices. (This is called 'the economic calculation problem', or 'the socialist calculation problem'.)

The wise Chinese rapidly abandoned Central Planning, while retaining Party control. The Soviets followed fifteen years later. Now only Cuba and North Korea still retain this model. A visit to Cuba is an eye-opener in terms of the realities of the planned economy. Watching queues of people waiting patiently to receive their food rations should tell you all you need to know about socialism.

Today no one argues that 'socialism is more efficient than capitalism' (which was a central premise of Marx, who himself praised capitalism for liberating the productive forces, the growth of which he rightly understood to be the key which would allow us to leave the kingdom of necessity and enter the kingdom of freedom).

Instead, socialism is redefined to mean some form of social-democracy: a kinder, gentler capitalism, where someone else pays your college tuition. Or it's motivated in terms that ignore the economic question.

A few brave souls have tried to rescue socialism by proposing some form of quasi-market for a socialist economy, or indeed 'market socialism', but since the main appeal of socialism is emotional and ethical, few take much interest in their ideas. In particular, the working class, even in countries in which it used to be socialist, has abandoned this ideology. It's now held -- or rather the word is used -- by privileged young college students, on their way to a cushy job with a global corporation.

It's sort of like secular Christianity: lip-service is paid to it, but no one actually expects its Coming, or orders their own personal life according to its ideals.