Re: [ox-en] Rivaly of non-rivalry
- From: Tere Vadén <tere gnu-darwin.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:30:46 +0200
I think that the the point Patrick Anderson makes is relevant in ways
which I will try to come back to later, but first, please allow me a
short detour.
I'm guessing many people remember the age old philosophical debate over
the existence of universals (concepts, ideas, types, etc.). One school
(platonists, universalists) think that, in the first place, what exists
are ideas and that material objects "take part" or "instantiate" or are
imperfect copies of the ideas. On the other extreme, the so-called
nominalists think that, in the fist place, what exists are individual
material objects, and universals (concepts, etc.) do not exist at all.
According to nominalists, there are individual horses, but no universal
or ideal "horse" or "horseness"; "horse" is just a name (nomen) for the
individual horses.
Now, some time ago I started half in jest playing around with the notion
of "digital nominalism". It goes like this. All of the arguments of the
copyright industry are based on the assumption that there exists an
original (somehow causally connected to an author) out of which near
perfect digital copies can be made. This is the power of digitalisation:
the copies are, at best, as good as the original (unlike in the case of
material objects). The original work, however, need not and often is not
itself digital. Moreover, in most copyright legislations what is
protected is the "work", not any particular physical copy of it. Now,
what if I were to claim that what exists on my computer are particular
physical things like electric currents, magnetic polarisations and what
not, and that there is, in fact nothing "digital" there. What happens in
computers is physics, and no black magic talk about "works" changes
that; there is no such thing as a "digital copy" because there is no
such thing as a "digital original" (like this horse is not a copy of
"horseness").
This is not completely as crazy as it sounds. "Digitality" is not a
natural kind. That is, it is not possible to construct a "digitality
meter" that starts ticking every time something "digital" is around
(because it might be optical, electric, magnetic, chemical,
mechanic...). It is possible to construct meters for electricity,
magnetism, etc. Unlike those, digitality is in the eye of the beholder.
(Proof: i) every digital device easily collapses back into
non-digitality with the slightest physical change which renders it
unusable without fundamentally changing any of the goings-on, ergo
digitality is a mode of operation, not a kind ii) a one-pixel copy of
Mona Lisa is equally much a "digital" copy of the painting as a
gazillion-pixel copy.) There is nothing in the world as such that forces
me to accept that anything like "digitality" exists. (If any depth
psychologists out there are willing to learn how far I have taken this
joke, there is some hard evidence in "Digital Nominalism. Notes on the
ethics of information society in view of the ontology of the digital"
Ethics and Information Technology 6, no. 4, pp. 223-231.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10676-005-0350-7)
Finally, to the relevance. Slowly. Because of the "multiple
realizability" of a digital "work", it seems like the (alleged)
existence of the digital world works as an argument for AI (which also
depends on the idea of multiple realizability). However, this sword has
two edges. It also means that (almost) every argument against multiple
realizability in AI works against "digitality". Which means that if
somebody, like me, does not buy multiple realizability, s/he does not
buy either AI or digitality. And here is the – admittedly not very sharp
but nevertheless decisive and potentially divisive – relevance: it seems
to me that most (all?) credible free software/p2p/digital utopias
(including, disquietingly, the GNU society) rely on the idea of
post-scarcity economics. Moreover, most (all?) credible post-scarcity
utopias seem to rely on AI or some other form of universalism (like the
idea that DNA is "information" or that human thinking is "information
processing").
So, in sum, to quote/paraphrase what Patrick wrote, while the time and
energy needed to make a grain of wheat appears to be much more than
downloading a copy of a program and running it, if we factor in all the
resources required to manufacture the hardware and supply the
electricity as compared to growing wheat, it may not be as much of a
difference as we imagine, especially if we are talking about the utopian
dimension including billions of people (and especially especially if we
are talking about it in a non-AI context).
Then again, this leaves Michel's point: in a particular context the
differentials between the qualities of "grain" and "movies" allow and
even necessitate different treatment.
And, I love the idea of pre-paying for software features/products. Some
musicians are doing it, already; like Marillion, who collected the money
for their next record by selling it to the fans before it is made (and
the fans get their names in the liner notes instead of a record company).
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s1[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]-7>
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