[Darwyn43]

Originally Posted by futrethink Darwin43. ---It all depends on what nature believes should happen in the future. ---I wasn’t asking what the entirety of nature thought; I was asking what you thought. ---Everything deserves to lives, nothing deserves to lives, it is both at the same time, it is neither of them and it is all of the previous at the same time. It depends on both of the context/objectivity and the perception/subjectivity. Look at someone you love or the home (that you live in and have worked hard to create) and tell me if they or it deserves to have their lives or its existence ended by a drunk driver? ---You do know and remember that; you are a part of nature and, as such, an integral part of the cooperative decision making process that will create what will happen in the future. Since you have stated as such. ---Whether a person believes they will not cause change for the better or not; they do have a positive effect. It is just the perception of the context that you have to change to find it.

---I would agree with this, but by my TOE method, systematically removing the subjective is an integral part of the method to hope to attain any kind of feasability and agreement, because subjectivity is the ultimate communication barrier. As long as we are defining things by what they mean to us, our self-interest will always blind us to the natural laws of the universe. However, to use some deductive logic, it is the ultimate self-interest to align our understanding of the world as close as possible to the natural organization of the universe in order to harness that power and truth. Besides, actual rewards and punishments will be paid out based on the realities of the universe, not what we think we want subjectively. Thus, yeah, I hear what you are saying about drunk drivers - I want those I care about to live and thrive, I want to succeed, and so forth, but at the same time, I don't confuse that with my picture of myself in the universe. I think this creates some cognitive dissonance, but ultimately that is pretty unavoidable and worth it.

---Which part is causing the confusion?

I think I've got this now, and we've moved past it.

---Actually, on the scale of argument that you continue to go on about, it already has happened in the past and is happening even now. ---Another couple of ways of looking at/defining those two concepts is as: conformity=order=predictability=fate and individual thinking=free will=unpredictability=chance.

I completely agree that it has happened and is happening, otherwise I couldn't boast of the frustration I spoke of of living in a society in blinders. Probably a better way I could have said that is that the compromise used to be absolute, it's progressed to be probably far better than it was even a hundred years ago, and in the relatively near future, it will be much better to the eventual point of intellectual freedom co-existing with intellectual cooperation.

---As I stated, the Borg are an extreme version. They might actually be a part of our objective future in this intersubjective reality. It all depends on if the predictable happens or not.

I believe the subjective has come to define our vision of the future in relation to our ideals for the present, and as such, the Borg is a dichotomous fear that arises when use that subjective vision as the starting point in considering how it could go wrong. But I've abandoned traditional cultural views of what things should look like, so in my mind at least, the Borg are not one of the paths I'm worried about.

---Balance is already what existence is. Nature does not always have balance due to human beings (being a part of nature) not exactly living their lives by balance. For an exact balance to happen for an individual’s life, they would have to exist in a point of stasis that has no connection to outside time or space.

Well, there you have it - nature is not perfectly balanced. Nature is more or less balanced, but as it feels forward and experiments with new forms that can take it upward and onward by experimenting with ideas in a trial-and-error fashion where some of them will lead to larger balanced structures and others will become imbalanced and become eclipsed. Even social systems are experiments which, when they don't work, affect everything within them down to the imbalance of the people within them and their respective cellular metabolisms. But then that system is brought down in competition by a more stable system. Either way, in the process, imbalance can exist on the planet for short periods.

---The thing is; what is considered to be conforming is left up to the majority of that society. What makes you so sure that you can get a complete group of people to agree, when there are times you can’t even get intelligent people to agree on what to put on a pizza. Sometimes you can, but there are often arising circumstances of reality that don’t allow for such.

---To me it is a self-interest equation. Ultimately, as I said above, the most self-interested thing we can do is to understand the objective context of experience so that we can see how it creates each of our subjectively-perceived experiences. Then we can see where our subjectively-organized knowledge structures are failing to align. By agreeing, though, that your experience and my experience both could have been shaped by a particular set of interconnected forces, we can see where my knowledge might be organized differently than yours and still agree on a superseeding set of facts that dictated both of our understandings. That superseeding set of facts, laws, rules, etc., will be the thing we can absolutely agree on, and use to forecast some future goal based on it's extrapolations. That goal, in turn, can be the endpoint we use to organize all future knowledge in order to facilitate cooperation even among initially differing perspectives.
---In my mind, we find that experience context only by connecting knowledge and information into a tapestry of the real world through synthesizing all of the sciences (which for my money is best organized by cybernetics, global brain theory, superorganism theory, multi-level selection theory, metasystem transition theory, or whatever you want to call it - they all more or less agree).

---I don’t know of Bloom and I didn’t bother doing a Google (for my limited, library computer time’s sake).

You should - he is one of the best, if not the best, TOE author's I've ever read. I'm hoping to work with him in the near future. (Also great is Francis Heylighen and Robert Wright, among others)