[Darwyn43]

Future, great points. Sorry for the length everyone; being conscious of the vast potential for differences of underlying assumptions makes it hard for me to see how everyone can be comfortable with such brevity!

Originally Posted by futrethink

Darwin43.
---I’m just curious as to whom you include in the ‘all of us’ in the ‘winners’ group?

---The human beings that will inherit the system. Though as groups of people, our underlying assumptions and ideologies drive us apart, a holistic scientific framework showing us how we are apart of a greater whole could replace the functions of existing cultures and bring us together around a new narrative and identity. (P.S. it's not my fault if this comes off sounding all peace-and-love, that's just an unfortunate side-effect )

---Since as you so, in a limited way, but succinctly put it, “For one person to get out of a relationship to find a better one, one person must have their heart crushed. It's a fundamental organization of the universe.” For one individual to ‘win/have a positive’, in one way, there is a ‘loss/negative’, in another aspect, for another or the same individual.

Yes, but it's balanced by the potential for "win-win" scenarios which increase as systems evolve. The whole premise of society (or even a human being) is that in certain areas we (or cells) can cooperate rather than compete (obviously cells were able to cooperate on almost everything, which could be a parallel to our own future).

In many respects, the win-loss games we currently play (republicans v. democrats, men v. women, rich v. poor) are games we haven't found way to cooperate in. Even so, however, you can already see how those win-loss games are balanced by win-win games - republicans v. democrats are still somewhat cooperating within the same social system, which is why it rarely comes to blows; men and women still pair-bond when they can cooperate over sex, security and support (not to forget homosexual relationships, here); rich v. poor is a product of currently needing a division of labor where all jobs aren't created equally, I think, but being a part of the same system does benefit them both differentially (as soon as everything is computerized, every person would benefit from an education, and social forces would shrink stratification, I think). So over the course of social evolution, political, technological, and social innovations create new ways to cooperate, which shrinks the amount of win-loss games played and makes the remaining ones easier to deal with with all of the support.

Oh, if I were sticking to Bloom's account, here, I'd have to mention that social hierarchies or pecking orders factor into this, but that's for another time, I suppose.

---You don’t see the loss/negative/limits in an organized co-operative? To have such a system, usually means that only certain paths are allowed to be chosen. To go outside those walls will cause, what is believed to be, unnecessary and unpredictable disorder or ‘evil’.

I agree, yet I think usually what drives people down alternate paths and feel they need to buck the system is not merely an inborn need for more freedom than the rest, whatever that would look like, but a developmental trajectory that is A) somehow different from the cultural norm and thus engendering of a different perspective, and B) a reaction to seeing some inadequacy of the system (like the inability to incorporate said perspective). I think that the future system would be based on the barrier-less communication of billions of minds, and would thus have enormous creative potential, eliminating the need for "B," and will thus be able to standardize the development of children coming into the system without compromising potentially new perspectives. This may sound big-brother, but again, it would never be top-down implemented because we would get it wrong - I think nature will take us to the balance. Finally, I think if you grow up in such a system, it would be the norm, so our own level of discomfort with the idea isn't necessarily a good gauge of it's potential.

---I do understand that such a Federated system is a peaceful and mostly predictable way of existence. I even push for it in other discussions. There is just something about it that I believe/know is wrong/bad/evil in pertaining to an entirety of existence context.

I agree completely - I don't think there should be some premature, top-down institution of such a system. I think it will come about naturally as cultural evolution exhausts possibilities and finds a worldview with the flexibility to apply to all permutations of experience and will be able to both maintain a structure and generate new creative perspectives.

---Evil is done, at a single point in time, so that as time passes good might arise from it at another point. The reverse is true as well; from doing good, at certain point in time, evil might arise from it as time passes.

I would only add that sometime they overlap - the criminal who is sentenced to life has an act of evil done onto them even as society does what it considers an act of good by doing so. In the sense that the criminal mind is created by the society which failed to shape it or persuade it, the criminal is also a victim - they were doomed to parasitism by the society that punishes them for it.