 Whatta Hero! |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world
of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete
truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously
two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing
in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying
claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was
the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then
to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then
promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the
process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: Consciously to induce
unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of
hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink'
involved the use of doublethink." "Most of our intuitive responses have been developed in the context of what are technically called first-order, negative-feedback loops. Such a simple loop is goal-seeking and has only one important state variable. For example, warming one's hands beside a stove can be approximated as a first-order, negative-feedback loop in which the purpose of the process is to obtain warmth without burning one's hands. The principal state variable of the loop is the distance from the stove. If one is too close he burns his hands, if too far away he receives little heat. The intuitive lesson is that cause and effect are closely related in time and space. Temperature depends on the distance from the stove. Too much or too little heat is clearly related to the position of the hands. The relation of cause and effect is immediate and clear. Similarly, the simple feedback loops that govern walking, driving a car, or picking things up all train us to find cause and effect occurring at approximately the same moment and location. "But in complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system." THE NATURE OF RATIONALITY; Nozick, 1993. UNDERWEIGHTING OF BASE-RATE INFORMATION REFLECTS IMPORTANT
DIFFICULTIES PEOPLE HAVE WITH PROBABILISTIC INFERENCE; THE EVOLUTION OF CONCIOUSNESS; Ornstein, 1991. THE MORAL ANIMAL; Wright, 1994. ENERGY AND THE ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS OF SUSTAINABILITY; Peet,
1992 . |
|
Jay Hanson
If you are intimidated, bored or angered by Plato, Aristotle, Cousteau, Malthus, Mill or Ehrlich, don't bother pointing your browser to Brain Food. It is interesting to consider that, "ehrlich" is an indication of Paul Ehrlich's truthfulness, for his very name means "honest, sincere and fair," in the German language.
Buddycom note: Have you ever noticed that some of the most insightful and eloquent on the subject of ecology aren't ecologists, nor are they biologists, but rather physicists? Why is that? |
