From: David Picon Alvarez (eleuteri@myrealbox.com)
Date: Thu Nov 04 2004 - 02:46:48 MST
> Coming at this business from the EP side, I think Collective Volition
might
> not even be a good idea, though it might be that I don't understand some
> special meaning beyond the obvious meaning of the words.
Collective Volition is a technical term, not just an aggregate of people's
will.
At the risk of getting it wrong, I'll write why I think you are.
> The problem is stressed humans. That includes those who think they see
> "looming privation" in the future and the ones who have been switched into
> a degraded mode of thinking (non-rational) by a physical attack. The
> "collective volition" of such people is scary.
Collective Volition is not about what humans want, right now. Doubtless if
implemented thus, we'd get a machine to print currency. The CV is about what
humans congruently want if they were more like the person they wish they
were, id est, knew more, had unbound time to think about it, and unbound
information about the issue. You may argue that there will be no congruence,
and I have no counter-argument for that.
So, even in the worst of times, people have an idealist desire not to wage
war, etc. This would be picked up by CV, and the extrapolated volition would
come from agents that would be less prone to war and to irrational thinking.
Likewise the virtues of tolerance, happiness and Western *Liberal Democracy
have been thoroughly established as desired by the powers that be, to the
point that claiming one agrees with them is condition sine qua non to hold
power, and so it is likely that CV would extrapolate from tolerant,
happiness-driven Liberal-Democratic individuals. I'm not sure myself this is
an entirely great thing, but the EP issues are pretty much non-existent for
CV, as CV considers what we wish we were, and not what we are, and one thing
we all wish we were is free from the evolutionary detritus of our past,
correct?
*1I mean here the traditional, early XX century meaning of Western Liberal
Democracy, nothing about political orientation itself.
--David.
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