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Re: [ox-en] Rivaly of non-rivalry

Stefan Meretz wrote:
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").
I would turn that around: There is no copy, because (assuming digital form exists;-)) all so called "copies" are in fact originals. You can't differenciate original and copy when only looking at the instances, you only can differentiate between them by looking at the actions when producing them: Instance A is the original, and when I create a identical instance B by copying, then B is the copy. 

Agreed.

This is not completely as crazy as it sounds. "Digitality" is not a
natural kind.


Ack. Is any person out there saying that? (serious Q)
Well, there is surprisingly little theoretical literature that would, in general, be in the vicinity of mentioning "natural kind" and "digitality" on the same page. But if somebody says that the laws of the analog world do not apply to the digital world, the s/he is essentially treating digitality as a natural kind, and I think that that kind of theories are a legion (starting from Castells, Negroponte, etc.).
There is nothing in the world as such that forces me to accept that anything like "digitality" exists.
Well, by participating in the ox-en debate, you accept it. Thus, digitality works, thus exists, even for you.
Would you say that in participating in a discussion on religion, I accept the existence of God? ;)
What works, most of the time, are some very sophisticated machines manipulating electricity, magnetism, light, etc. 
Digitality is a concept created by humans. Would you agree with that?
Yes, yes! Even more than that: it is a concept like "beauty"; it can not be measured in an intersubjective/objective way. (Maybe nothing can be measured in an objective way, but I'm just saying that if we accept, for the sake of the argument, normal science, then digitality is not an objective property of nature.) 
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".
You can't conclude this from the observation that AI uses digitality. AI is a concept and does not depend on digitality (however pushed by).
Hmm. I'm not so sure. There is a conceptual jungle, here, but I would be willing to argue that the ideas of "multiple realizability", "cognition as information processing" and "digitality" are so intimately intertwined that if you take one out, the whole edifice of strong AI falls.
Of course, we could have AI by building brains that are not conceived as information-processing; is that what you mean? 
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").
Of course not! Although the "information processing" assumption is worth to be crititzed, IMHO it is not useful to mix digitality (a representational form) with information processing (a concept).
Again, what would be the utopia that relies on information processing (and AI), but does not think of information processing as digital? Are we talking quantum computation here? 
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).
I agree at this point: From the standpoint of producing our lives -- and this is, what we are doing as humans -- the difference is only gradual. I think, the reason of constructing a big gap between material and immaterial world (as Michel often does) is the _form_ of how we do this: producing our lives. This societal form is that of commodities, which have to be scarce -- not by nature but by form: If they are not scarce, they loose their social property of being a commodity to be sold on markets.
if you assume the social form (producing commodities) being natural, then material and immaterial things seem to be completely different. It looks like immaterial things are non-scarce by nature while material things are scarce by nature. This is wrong. Both are neither nor. They are produced, so they are nothing "by nature", all they are, is social. 

Agreed.

Remember, what Patrick wrote which is completely true:

On 2008-01-23 21:36, Patrick Anderson wrote:

In summary, even though different TYPES of things require different
AMOUNTS of physical resources for their production, the fact remains
that all things have infinite potential, and all things are
realistically constrained by space, time, mass and energy.
This (valid) general view prescinds from any social form. Taking the social form into account, the things produced fall into two categories: Those who absorb some relevant amount of resources for each single piece being produced, and those whose effort reproducing them is marginal because they use an infrastructure which is already there. Now, in a commodity society it is very easy to make the first scarce, because production needs means and resources which are not easily available, and the latter is hard to make scarce, because on an unlimited infrastructure limitations are difficult to implement (neverless tried).
However: "all things have infinite potential, and all things are ... constrained". The question is now, how we organize a societal form, where the infinite potential can be released while the constraints can be minimized. This can only be a society where scarcity being a social form (and not a natural property) plays no longer a role in producing and distributing things. 

Agreed.
The only thing I would like to add is the gnawing suspicion that those constraints include natural ones (oil, labour, etc.) that clip the wings of most utopias. But inside those contsraints, yes, let's! 
Ciao,
Stefan




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