reply to post by crimvelvet
You spell it out real well. I've spent some time thinking about free market ideas and how government fits into all of it. I've come to a similar
semi-conclusion that humans concentrate power because of self-preservation. Inevitably, a company wants to survive and will gobble up its competitors.
Eventually, you will end up with only a few of them running the show. It would be logical to say that this must mean that this one company is the most
evolved and fittest company so how would it be bad for it to run everything? Well, it's bad because now the market is only owned by one company.
Companies are set in their ways just like people. Some people excel, like bill gates, while others don't. If you want a society that represents
everyone then you need to prevent monopolies from forming and you need a government that can represent everyone, not just a portion of them. Who would
want to live in a society where they cannot be what they want to be because somebody else far more powerful owns the market? This will lead to a
decline in innovation. Even the best person gets old. Similarly, even the best company gets old. We need to break up companies every once in a while
to breed new competition so that we have a new generation of conflict to weed out the ineffective producers.
I think that greed expresses itself through self-preservation. We have to realize that even the best members of society, the smartest and most
confident among us, even they cannot exist alone. Their behavior and genetics depended on all of the others who failed to produce. Without all of the
failures, there would be no successes. Out future needs diversity and innovation just as much as it needs our best and brightest. We cannot have a
world where only the mediocre rule, nor can we have a world run by the most powerful. We need a changing, understanding world.
By letting the most able lead, we're exercising eugenics. By letting the weak lead, we're crippling ourselves. I don't see balance on either end. I
see it in the middle; mutual agreement.
This is a grand evolutionary experiment, as I see it. This universe is like a giant brute force computational unit. Intelligence is derived from trial
and error. Essentially, everything is tried over and over and from the mess of computation an answer starts to emerge. The multiverse pumps out these
individual universes. Some succeed and produce life and some don't. And each universe produces different kinds of life. Some of the life is successful
and some isn't. In the grand scheme of things, we're like individual sensors that sense light or do not sense light. If we survive, then we sensed
appropriately. If not, then we failed to sense correctly. That's really all we are. Not a pretty thought, but as long as we don't ever notice it's not
a problem.
That's why they say the smartest people have made the most mistakes. You have to find what works then store it away for future use. Then you can pass
it on to your children and they will use it or lose it dependong on what happens. I believe this is the key to how intelligence formed and how our
universe appears to have precise conditions for life. These things happeend through a grand computational evolution of sorts. It's beyond imagining.
We can get a grasp of it by looking at lifeforms on our own planet and seeing how they change states and survive conditions on earth. The amount of
memory and processing involved here is mind /boggling. We have nothing to compare it to. Our memory and processor systems are astronomically
insufficient.
Another words, the Matrix (the movie) is a long, long ways off. If we model it after the lessons learned here on earth then we might have an
approximation. After all, you do not need to compute the whole universe, you only need to trick the human mind into believing false things - which is
easy to do. But if we intend on repeating the successes and failures that brought us here to this present time, in total, for an accurate replication
of all that is, we would need many universe(s) of available memory and computation to arrive at the desired outcome.
Personally, I think the most successful people might also have the most innate confidence. Think about it. The more things you try, the more mistakes
you make. From that pool of knowledge, you start to find answers. The least confident by nature will stick to what is familiar and will inevitably
decline and fall from the ladder. The most successful will keep going up the ladder until their rate of trial and error falls short. If you were a
super being, you would eventually even overcome death, if that was your only hurdle. I don't think there's a hard a limit. I think it's a soft
limit.
A successful man who makes a mistake, doesn't give up, he proclaims, rather loudly:
"I'm just gettin' started."
edit on 19-8-2011 by jonnywhite because: (no reason given)