Quote from: CoinCube on October 02, 2018, 07:45:54 PM

Quote from: af_newbie on September 26, 2018, 02:10:32 AM

Quote from: CoinCube on September 26, 2018, 01:16:26 AM

Quote from: af_newbie on September 25, 2018, 09:15:27 PM

Nationalism, politics can unite people just as well, and unite them long-term.

No it can't not on non trivial time horizons. Nationalism and politics require a common cooperative foundation to sustain them. Inertia can only holds things together for a limited time.
...

And belief in an imaginary friend will hold the society forever? LOL. You base this on what? .

Ultimately on the logical necessity of maintaining the top-down control necessary to prevent freedom from becoming destructive and the simultaneous logical necessity to minimize such control as it limits knowledge formation and progress.

A complicated answer to be sure but it's not a trivial question.

Quote from: CoinCube on January 04, 2017, 06:54:18 AM

In the opening post of this thread I linked to The Rise of Knowledge where Anonymint discussed the the nature of knowledge and its relationship to entropy.

Immediately up-thread I discussed the prerequisites of freedom. What freedom is and what is necessary to achieve it.

This post will explore the relationship between freedom and knowledge.

Knowledge and Power by George Gilder
https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalism-Revolutionizing/dp/1621570274

Quote

The most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processesgovernments, monopolies, regulators, elite institutions, all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.

Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system but an information system. We continue with the recognition, explained by the most powerful science of the epoch, that information itself is best defined as surprise: by what we cannot predict rather than by what we can. The key to economic growth is not acquisition of things by the pursuit of monetary rewards but the expansion of wealth through learning and discovery. The economy grows not by manipulating greed and fear through bribes and punishments but by accumulating surprising knowledge through the conduct of the falsifiable experiments of free enterprises. Crucial to this learning process is the possibility of failure and bankruptcy. In this model, wealth is defined as knowledge, and growth is defined as learning.

Because the system is based more on ideas than on incentives, it is not a process changeable only over generations of Sisysphean effort. An economy is a noosphere (a mind-based system) and it can revive as fast as minds and policies can change.

That new economicsthe information theory of capitalismis already at work in disguise. Concealed behind an elaborate mathematical apparatus, sequestered by its creators in what is called information technology, the new theory drives the most powerful machines and networks of the era. Information theory treats human creations or communications as transmissions through a channel, whether a wire or the world, in the face of the power of noise, and gauges the outcomes by their news or surprise, defined as entropy and consummated as knowledge. Now it is ready to come out into the open and to transform economics as it has already transformed the world economy itself.

All information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. This is the fundamental axiom of information theory. Information is the change between what we knew before the transmission and what we know after it.

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as crucial elements of an environment for prosperity. Smith was right: An arena of disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise would drown the feats of creation that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed informative disorder.

Shannon defined information in terms of digital bits and measured it by the concept of information entropy: unexpected or surprising bits...Shannons entropy is governed by a logarithmic equation nearly identical to the thermodynamic equation of Rudolf Clausius that describes physical entropy. But the parallels between the two entropies conceal several pitfalls that have ensnared many. Physical entropy is maximized when all the molecules in a physical system are at an equal temperature (and thus cannot yield any more energy). Shannon entropy is maximized when all the bits in a message are equally improbable (and thus cannot be further compressed without loss of
information). These two identical equations point to a deeper affinity that MIT physicist Seth Lloyd identifies as the foundation of all material realityat the beginning was the entropic bit.
...
The accomplishment of Information Theory was to create a rigorous mathematical discipline for the definition and measurement of the information in the message sent down the channel. Shannon entropy or surprisal defines and quantifies the information in a message. In close similarity with physical entropy, information entropy is always a positive number measured by minus the base two logarithm of its probability. Information in Shannons scheme is quantified in terms of a probability because Shannon interpreted the message as a selection or choice from a limited alphabet. Entropy is thus a measure of freedom of choice. In the simplest case of maximum entropy of equally probable elements, the uncertainty is merely the inverse of the number of elements or symbols.
...
Linking innovation, surprise, and profit, learning and growth, Shannon entropy stands at the heart of the economics of information theory. Signaling the arrival of an invention or disruptive innovation is first its surprisal, then its yield beyond the interest rateits profit, a further form of Shannon entropy. As a new item is absorbed by the market, however, its entropy declines until its margins converge with prevailing risk adjusted interest rates. The entrepreneur must move on to new surprises. The economics of entropy depict the process by which the entrepreneur translates his idea into a practical form from the realms of imaginative creation. In those visionary realms, entropy is essentially infinite and unconstrained, and thus irrelevant to economic models. But to make the imagined practical, the entrepreneur must make specific choices among existing resources and strategic possibilities. Entropy here signifies his freedom of choice.

As Shannon understood, the creation process itself escapes every logical and mathematical system. It springs not from secure knowledge but from falsifiable tests of commercial hypotheses. It is not an expression of past knowledge but of the fertility of consciousness, will, discipline, imagination, and art.

Knowledge is created by the dynamic interaction of consciousness over time. This process results in surprise (new information) which is the foundation of new knowledge. Entropy in this context is a measure of freedom, it is the freedom of choice. An information system with higher entropy allows for greater dynamic interaction of consciousness and thus greater knowledge formation. Freedom must be subject to the constraint of convergence. Some top-down order must be maintained to prevent destructive chaos aka noise that would otherwise destroy rather than create knowledge.

The amount of top-down control needed increases in the presence of increased noise. A primitive population may require the iron fist of a dictator whereas an educated one may thrive in a republic. However, power always seeks centralization. Thus the tendency of both of the dictatorship and the republic will be towards ever increasing centralization restricting freedom beyond that what is necessary and hobbling knowledge formation.

I posit that that the only model of top-down control that facilitates knowledge formation without inevitable progressive centralization is Ethical Monotheism. Uniformly adopted and voluntary followed it may be the only restraint on freedom that is necessary.

Political or patriotic dogmas will hold longer than religious nonsense for one reason: it is easier to demonstrate that the details of the religious dogma are simply not true. Pick any scriptures, they are all complete BS. They make no sense scientifically and morally. Never mind some supernatural nonsense. You want to base society on that? We HAD to go through years of reformation and eventually HAD to abandon the religious ideas because the moral code was just not in line with the progress we've made in sociology and psychology.

If we stuck with the religious governments, women would never get their equal rights, gays would be either killed or held in mental hospitals.

If you take any religion, it is trivial to show that the fundamental tenets are simply not true. Therefore over time, as people become more educated, you will have less followers and the religious societal foundations will crumble. You would need to physically coerce people with fear, real or imaginary for people to stay in their religion. That is what Islam is doing as I type this post.

Political or patriotic dogmas are based on real, physical societal structures, cultures, national history etc. That is a lot harder to invalidate.

As for centralization of power, well, that will happen no matter what the underlying dogma is. At least in the western style democracies you can vote to elect your president. Try that with the Catholic church. When was the last time a church goer had a chance to elect the Pope?

I am telling you that the secular thought is far superior on many different levels from human rights to morality; and it agrees with science. I hope you'll admit this much that science is the best way we know to discover how the world works.

Science is the way to go, religion is not. Sorry religion, you had your day in the sun.