On Community

Why do we need context? Determine that and you have the SRH.

===============

Heraclitus says “Only the waking share a common cosmos; each sleeps alone.” Indeed Human existence is one of community, from which extends the whole issue of being-in-a-community and so therefore being-an-individual and then the fear of being-outside-a-community.

Humans mediate their being-in-a-community in many ways from socialising, to having a family, to talking, to working. The latter is of particular interest to me as I prepare to write a book because it forms the basis for economics while the others do not. Work I will argue is simply a social phenomenon; unrecognisable from the activity of survival animals are engaged in (in particular the impact of work by machines, and productivity arising from ethnotechnological efficiency will be examined).

Just listening to Kick-Ass sound track and reminded of the long discussion on Facebook (ironically a community website) about the riots. I was arguing for social inclusion of the rioters; everyone else arguing for social exclusion. Why do some people like Kick-Ass exercise their freedom by fighting for social justice, while others do so by becoming the criminals? (Essentially the problem of evil). Briefly if some people just “are” evil then they have no choice in what they do, so technically they are not evil. If they chose to do evil then in some way they don’t see it as evil. Viewing from a social perspective I suggest that they do evil because they believe it will lead to social inclusion in their peer group, or they are dreaming not realising that social inclusion was their goal.

Last night I dreamed I was a mass-murderer; today am I a mass-murderer dreaming I am sane? After reading Raymond Tallis’ discussion of Zhuangzi And That Bloody Butterfly it is clear that the answer is “No”. It also reveals the problem with the mass-murderer because he might be fooled by this puzzle! If I am a mass-murderer who is dreaming then who today am I talking to, or writing for here? If I am simply dreaming all these words, then the mass-murderer will awake and remember all this and then who is he remembering it all for; the people he wants to kill? Thus whichever way I turn I recognise that the desire to remember my dream and its words are inspired by an audience (an unspecified audience, implicit in the existence of language) and so the murdered finds himself in a community, one that he wishes to annihilate or at least alienate himself from. Why would he do this? I suspect, as with all crime and violence, it is ironic. It is because his desire to be in-the-community is so great that he ends up being-outside-the community, just as people whose desire for peace is too great end up creating wars, and people whose desire for non-crime end up committing crimes as do Kick-Ass and his partners.

Been having a discussion with friends upon the whole nature of private and public funding, that is between Capitalism and Socialism. Read Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” and then started Jim Collins - Books - Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Hayek argues that putting power in the hands of all powerful people leads to abuses of freedom both by implication of giving up freedom, but also because powerful people have to get used to hurting a minority in every choice and so lose compassion. Big planning he says is thus anathema to freedom and so free-markets and individual competition is the best of a bad world. Collins argues that business thinking revolves around money as both input and output, while social services has money as an input but needs other measures of its output than money. The Cleveland Orchestra is used as one example of how other measures than profit were used to chart its progress to the #3 orchestra in the world. Collins’ articulation of the point that there are other measures of success than profit cuts to the root of the debate about Capitalism for me. A profitable organisation may have unmeasured costs on the community and the welfare of people, even amounting to more cost than profit when viewed against other baseline measures; something which a purely monetary economics can’t stop. Private funding ignores the impact on the public; public funding ignores the impact on the private. Thatcher, and other post-Hayekians, would say there are only individuals and on the level of man to man they cannot be wrong (in Kant’s terms each man is an end in himself), but like the dreamer they ignore the a priori necessity of a community that ought—if they awake—to inform their individual choices as leaders. Clearly there is room for a dialectic, as indeed we have!

Death implies Other

Further to the post on 25th Sept 2007 "Notes as I read..."...

The chicken egg problem means that a system can never be the "exclusive cause of itself" (XCI) because if it was then how was it created in the first place.

Thus a system is either Eternal and XCI or it is not Eternal (mortal) and not XCI.

To be not XCI a system must be caused by something other than itself (even if it can also be caused by itself). Thus no mortal system can exist independent of other systems. Death implies Other.

Now the SRH (which states that referring to oneself is impossible) is based on similar logic. To refer to oneself we must also be in existence, for if we were not existing then how could we be referring. Equally if the statement is a self-referring statement, then it must be referring in order to exist (as a self-referring statement). So we have the chicken and the egg again, albeit rather loosely:

If the statement fails to refer to itself it is still an existing statement so we can say that the existence of the statement is prior. The fact of whether it is self-referential or not, is built upon the statement existence. So the SRH is complaining that the reference is apparently to something which somehow embodies "itself", as though failure to refer would destroy the "self". The reference to a statement is thus not strictly self-referential:

"This statement has five words." could refer to the existence of a statement alone which is independent of the further judgement that the statement referred to is itself. This wouldn't raise the chicken egg problem. Yes, there is a statement here which has five words, it happens to be itself, it could have been any statement on the page, it just happens to be the same one as we are reading. Very boring.

However to be self-referential it would have to be taken to mean that "This statement has five words." is really the statement we are reading. This exciting possibility is why these statements are so alluring. This is the feeling we have of ourselves, it is more than one person amongst billions who just happens to be us. This means that "this statement" is only true when there exists this statement which also refers to itself. This raises the chicken and egg problem. There is only a statement with 5 words, if there is a statement with five words.

Put another way if the statement is "really" and "essentially" and "necessarily" self-referential (EN-SR) then it must refer to a self-referential statement. It is not good enough to set up reference to any old statement and then notice that this statement is itself. That is only partial, secondary and non-essential, non-necessary self-reference. This point has been made before in this blog.

To further illustrate. Suppose this page forms an ordered set of statements, P. We now have a statement "Statement x of P" where x is a free variable. Now I could list on this page random versions of this general formula with random natural numbers substituted. Eventually one of these statement must be numbered with the same number as its position in the page P. Alternatively I'll just cut to the chase with the next statement. "Statement 37 of P." Now this happens to we statement 37 on the page because I just counted all the current statements and added 1. Now I added one because I knew that once the statement was formed it would be a new statement but I did this before it was formed, before there were 37 statements, done in anticipation of it being the 37th statement. Before I typed it out and put the full stop at the end it wasn't true. Thus I built a system by other means whose self-reference only became "switched on" when the full stop was put in place. Thus it was built without self-reference being in place. As above if self-reference was needed to build the statement then it would have to be immortal. But because it is created, there must be other ways to create the statement other than itself. So we know that the real nature of a self-referential statement is actually just a statement and this is what is referred to. The statement does not refer to a self-referential statement, so it is not really self-referential! This is the SRH.